As in I did an amycooper/I amycoopered, when we perform such extensive wrongness in the course of one brief continuous action that we actually manage to ruin our lives. This New York City business executive decided she was entitled to be (in the precisely correct word of her victim) an obnoxious “scofflaw.” Why should she leash her dog in a part of Central Park where leashing is the law? Let lesser people obey rules. And here comes this nobody to ask her to leash her dog. Begone, nowhere man!
This man, in fact a rather famous birder, wanted to bird-watch unimpeded by a loose animal, and he did not back down.
Mr. Cooper, 57, [no relation to Amy Cooper,] a Harvard graduate who worksin communications, has long been a prominent birder in the city, and is on the board of the New York City Audubon Society.
Words were exchanged, and rather than demonstrating the simple civic understanding that would entail her apologizing and leashing her dog, Cooper became hysterical, called the police, and said a black man was threatening her. Although she is intelligent enough to have graduated from the University of Chicago, she behaved in this way knowing full well that her adversary was filming her.
“I am pretty adamant about not being a participant in my own dehumanization,” [he later explained in an interview].
There’s an interesting footnote. Christian Cooper, clearly a deeply decent person, is unhappy that the woman’s life has been destroyed.
“It’s a little bit of a frenzy, and I am uncomfortable with that,” he said. “If our goal is to change the underlying factors, I am not sure that this young woman having her life completely torn apart serves that goal.”
He is absolutely right; and though it’s hokey as hell, one way out of her total destruction would be for the two of them to meet again and shake hands. For him to accept her personal apology.
Pressure psychiatrists to lie about the mental health of a fellow ultraorthodox sect member in order to keep her from being extradited to Australia on 74 counts of sexual assault against children. Protect bunches of other sect members also accused of sexual abuse:
[Yaakov]Litzman allegedly intervened improperly to aid at least 10 sex offenders from Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community.
Pass out bribes.
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Litzman has now resigned. Who will take his place?
Well, he wouldn’t, would he. His total mismanagement (we’re being kind: it’s just as likely it was total deliberate rule-breaking) of his school’s sports programs has fucked Stephen F Austin University over but good. The school has rewarded him by putting him back in the classroom, where he can share with generations of students his … innovative sports management techniques.
Stephen F. Austin faces a series of penalties, including the vacating of games, for a lack of institutional control violation (Level I) involving the “erroneous certification” of 82 student-athletes in nine sports over the past decade, the NCAA announced Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the NCAA announced an eventual postseason ban for the school’s baseball, men’s basketball and football programs, all of which were included in Wednesday’s release, due to an insufficient Academic Progress Rate.
With the latest reprimand, the school must return 50% of revenue (more than $60,000) from the 2016 NCAA tournament, when the basketball program was led by current Illinois coach Brad Underwood, and vacate any games that included ineligible athletes. Other penalties include a 2.5% reduction in football scholarships and a 5% reduction in baseball scholarships — which can be assessed this season or next season — plus three years’ probation.
Such trivial stuff: You wouldn’t want any heads to fall because of it… No one’s fault, really, and McDermand doesn’t want to talk, so let it go…
… (to paraphrase Yeats), as I looked around for language about tea in order to honor the first International Tea Day,
I finally remembered “Lament” by Thom Gunn. One of the most beautiful AIDS-era poems, it recalls the long sad death of a friend, and among its lines are these:
… Your cough grew thick and rich, its strength increased. Four nights, and on the fifth we drove you down To the Emergency Room. That frown, that frown: I’d never seen such rage in you before As when they wheeled you through the swinging door. For you knew, rightly, they conveyed you from Those normal pleasures of the sun’s kingdom The hedonistic body basks within And takes for granted—summer on the skin, Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea In a dry mouth.
The poorest town in America, where living conditions are so crowded and squalid that in 1992 seventy percent of their children got hepatitis A, thanks this country for its willingness to let it live a welfare-dependent, scofflaw existence by breaking virus-containment laws and endangering hundreds of children, as well as the people of neighboring communities.
I wonder. If local and state authorities had ever, over the course of the last fifty years, taken the endemic law-breaking of this locality with real seriousness, I wonder if it might have stopped spreading epidemic illnesses among its children. (Don’t even talk to me about measles! Or vaccinations!)
… classrooms, Texas motivational speaker Eric Hogue steps up to ban not books but women. In his capacity as mayor of a small city, Hogue has decreed that women may not lead prayers at city council meetings onaccounta the Bible done said they caint.
Now ah don’t know much bout Christian invocations afore civic meetings, ahm a big ol’ blue stater, and round these parts the idea of praying together afore a town council meeting is pretty fucking weird, and, you know, making sure the prayer always happens to be Christian is even fucking weirder. But you caint quarrel with Mayor Hogue’s Bibleology – the Good Book do indeed go on bout how stupid and pointless women are, and how they better shut up ifn they know what’s good for them.
And I for one am ready to bow down to the superiority of men like Mr. Hogue to the female race. Just look at the guy and ask yourself if you could ever (I mean, ifn you’re a woman ask yourself) hope to accomplish all that he has accomplished. Start with his picture. (Scroll down.) The man is a Clown for Christ, bringing the Good News About Women, in a chock-full of chuckles format, to young people all over America. He has even self-published a clown book – Clinky The Clown (not to be confused with the very similar-sounding, very famous, Blinky The Clown) – which you can purchase. And he’s a magician!
What woman could hope to compete, invocation-wise, with a clown-magician who takes every single word in the Bible literally? Mayor Hogue, the stage is yours.
From the outset, these two Varsity Blues parents passing their daughters off as rowers not only denied they did anything wrong; they truly believed… they knew… they did nothing wrong. That’s why they felt confident demanding that a judge throw out all the charges against them: How could anyone sustain charges when they did. nothing. wrong?
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UD likes to point out instances of true moral degeneracy when they occur. For these two people, being rich means you use your money to hurt less wealthy people, corrupt systems, and gain advantages. Everyone knows that, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s reality. While serving their jail terms, and then throughout their subsequent lives, these two will continue to believe this, though they are now willing to acknowledge that stinking legal systems exist under which this activity may actually be prosecuted.
Why not? When you don’t know what science is, quarantines seem silly.
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A growing number of schools and synagogues have reopened in recent days, defying city and state restrictions.
Are parents on board? Who cares?
According to a recent report in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, some Borough Park schools have ended phone instruction, forcing parents to choose between sending their children to illegal in-person classes or risk falling behind.
The echt, iconic American scene playing itself out in Glendale Arizona – an insane idiot barely out of his teens trying to kill us all with his enormous rifle – tells you that we were only temporarily out of commission. Now we’re back, all guns blazing.
Duh. Any idiot knows that online instruction, while sometimes okay, is never great, never anything like face to face real time real world classroom education.
Not that UD didn’t constantly hear, at campus meetings (long before the virus) devoted to onlining more and more of her university’s offerings, that online was “exactly the same quality as in-class.” People actually said this. They said it confidently. They said it as if prefacing it Everyone knows that… As if anyone who might be thinking about demurring might want to keep their trap shut.
The drama, spontaneity, and challenge of other smart human beings sitting around you discussing an issue? The intensity-packed emotional/intellectual presence of a flesh and blood professor in love with her subject and excited by her students’ responsiveness to it? That cherished moment after class when some of her students come up to her and want to keep talking into the hallways and into her office? Meh. Meh! Feh. Feh! Who needs it!
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The university told a whopper. It made a Whopper.
Eh alors. Universities tried to keep the Online Whopper fresh and sizzling, tried to make it a tenderly expertly fashioned Beef Wellington rather than a … Whopper… But all it took was some scrutiny by a few people uncynical and serious about their education to reveal the sesame bun under the puff pastry.
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And lo! Behold the lawsuits all over this land as people realize that $30,000 a semester for techno-fumbling, anonymity, and emotional disengagement is on the high side.
When you’re a theocracy, you reward the theos for their covid-amplifying ignorance/civic indifference (see many recent posts on this blog about ultra-orthodox criminal negligence in the matter of the virus in Israel). “They put everything in the hands of the ultra-Orthodox, they capitulated on everything,” laments one of Israel’s vanishingly few enlightened voices about the new government.
Yet what more capable hands than the corrupt and benighted rabbis who have impoverished and infected their own constituency?
