Sea and sky merge after a tremendous storm roars through Rehoboth Beach this evening.

Rolling Stone examines a trend we’ve covered more and more on this blog: The remarkable suicide-by-gun epidemic of middle aged men in the American west.

The genius behind Football Leaks “describe[s] the evolution of European soccer from a varied and distinctive game to a corrupt playground for the international élite, in which only the richest, least scrupulous clubs can thrive.”

Makes our college and professional football look pure as the driven snow.

‘On this day, presiding over [an ISIS fighter’s] trial, [Judge] Amina is wearing a white shirt and jeans with embroidered butterflies — clothing ISIS would have whipped women for wearing in public. She is seated behind a wood and faux-leather desk, which hides her platform heels. The public prosecutor is wearing a short-sleeved shirt.

In the future, Amina says, perhaps they will have judge’s gowns and proper courtrooms where journalists and the public can come all the time.

It’s a shock to some ISIS fighters to be sentenced by a woman. In the self-declared caliphate, women had very restricted roles, requiring them to stay at home unless they were accompanied by a close male relative. According to ISIS ideology, men are not allowed to look at women who are not direct relatives.

“Some of them, when they hear the voice of a woman, they look at the ground,” says Amina. “I tell them, ‘I am talking to you — raise your head and look at the committee.'”

Amina says a female colleague jokes that ISIS fighters thought that, as the Quran promises men who are faithful, they would end up in paradise with dozens of beautiful women to accompany them. “Instead, they look up and see us” in the courtroom, Amina says with a laugh.’

… (all adjectives taken from news headlines) comes roaring back to professional football, which explains to us in an official statement that not all players can be “boy scouts.” University Diaries has followed this mentally ill man from his violent nutso college days to his violent fully ripe grossly insane professional stint, and has always predicted that despite his dangerous madness he will repeatedly (until age and yet more brain disorder make him a throwaway) be taken back by football teams.

As ever, Deadspin has the best take, starting with its headline:

RAIDERS GIVE RICHIE INCOGNITO HIS, WHAT, 50TH CHANCE

*************

UD thanks John.

… in UD’s back garden. Photo: Frances Eby.

… whether you like it or not, at the 40 x 80 American flag out on Interstate 77! It’s there to sell RVs at Gander RVs in Statesville NC and it’s WAYYY beyond that town’s limits on stuff you can fly to attract attention to yourself.

Like all hucksters appealing to patriotism with grotesque flags or to piety with ten ton crosses, Mr RV says shit no the entryway to Statesville will remain a mega-kitsch Betsy Ross and anyone who says boo hates this country. I’m a big fat patriot taking up a lot of space to sell big fat gas guzzlers and y’all just try to shut me down.

Bout time Mr RV got introduced to the concept of law, huh?

… aren’t maybe AS exciting as walking directly into a seal (see an earlier post for that amazing moment in UD’s life), but I’ll take them. After dinner in Rehoboth with friends last night, the return trip along the boardwalk featured an electric sky – constant, blazing, chutes and ladders!

Foreground: Silver clouds that turned to gold with each bolt.

I’ll be back to regular blogging soon – need time to adjust to a new computer, etc., etc. As I feel more proficient with this thing (new keyboard too!), I’ll be back to my old self. Ne quittez pas.

… she practically walked into a seal on a completely empty beach.

Today she leaves for two weeks in Rehoboth. She doubts she’ll see any seals.

Of course she’ll blog from there.

Jane Buckingham built a career as a parenting and lifestyle guru, giving advice to young people and women about raising a family, building a career and even how to survive “sticky situations.”

But on Friday afternoon, Buckingham, author and CEO of the youth marketing company Trendera, became one of three new parents to plead guilty in the nation’s largest-ever college admissions scandal. 

Listen up, cuz I’m gonna be brief:

Who wrote the thing, Sontag or Rieff?

Conservative; Sorelist —
Who wrote Mind of Moralist?

Was someone around here a thief?

Make it TWICE as big, man.

It does no good to state the obvious to some people – quoting here from Christopher Hitchens –

[W]e have no assurance that Muslim women put on the burqa or don the veil as a matter of their own choice. A huge amount of evidence goes the other way. Mothers, wives, and daughters have been threatened with acid in the face, or honor-killing, or vicious beating, if they do not adopt the humiliating outer clothing that is mandated by their menfolk. This is why, in many Muslim societies, such as Tunisia and Turkey, the shrouded look is illegal in government buildings, schools, and universities. Why should Europeans and Americans, seeking perhaps to accommodate Muslim immigrants, adopt the standard only of the most backward and primitive Muslim states? The burqa and the veil, surely, are the most aggressive sign of a refusal to integrate or accommodate. Even in Iran there is only a requirement for the covering of hair, and I defy anybody to find any authority in the Quran for the concealment of the face.

Some people will still enjoin us to “listen to women’s voices,” as if annihilating yourself as a presence in the world by wearing a burqa or niqab is a page out of Our Bodies Ourselves. They will assure us that banning the burqa makes the state into an “active instrument of patriarchy” – as if the burqa itself is not, for millions of people, the globe’s most eloquent expression of the most repressive patriarchy imaginable.

At least this writer is honest enough to note the huge, and growing, number of full or partial burqa/niqab bans, especially across Europe; but she’s not honest enough to note the absence in those countries of significant social problems arising from the bans. Or to note the enormous majorities – including, in many cases, among Muslims – for the bans.