A Time magazine columnist agrees with UD that sadistic male cults should be restricted to heavily policed ‘ultras’ football arenas and trailer parks for bikers. Not a good fit with universities.

Becoming kinder, safer places would do such violence to their legacy that it would mean altering their organizations beyond recognition.

And that in itself would be a cruelty.

… featured a very exciting performance of Fille du Regiment at the Met, with Javier Camarena hitting all those high C’s, and even giving us an encore of the famous aria. The audience went absolutely wild.

To add to the thrill, our performance went out live to theaters . And this was a first for ol’ UD – at the end of the performance confetti machines up in the rafters rained the stuff down on us.

This one taken from this brief article.

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Mosul Museum

Assyrian bulls with human faces:

Recall, or imagine. In their places

Drilled stone is the most famous absence

From halls of lesser absence.

Imagine Warsaw a museum,

The city leveled to a mausoleum

By arms steadfast and methodical.

That is the museum at Mosul,

Architecture and aesthetic rubbled.

A vast image out of Yeats. Sight troubled.

And yet the millennia-old city

Advertises a new exhibit.

The air inside the arena was thick with smoke from cigarettes and flares, and the stands were packed with frothing fans. Almost none of them were women. There were even fewer children. In the front row, one man wearing white-and-green face paint shook a giant inflatable penis at the Olympiacos bench. Not far from him, another man, also in face paint, was shirtless and played a bongo he’d somehow smuggled into the arena. Basket teams in Greece have firms, just like European soccer clubs. Each part of the main fan area was divided into subsections with signs for identification: Victoria, Skyros, the Hooligans, Gate 13, Kavala, and, the hardest to miss, West Block, which unfurled a giant banner from the upper deck with a menacing gas mask emblem. When the Olympiacos players came out for warm-ups, the fans made the Greek fuck-you gesture and chanted in unison. I asked [my Greek companion] what they were saying, and he smiled: “Olympiacos, motherfuckers.”

Coach of Panathinaikos, the rival team? The University of Louisville’s most famous, most celebrated, most highly compensated (but not compensated enough: he’s currently suing the school for forty million dollars) personality: Rick Pitino. Read the whole article and you’ll see that Rick has finally found his level.

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And on the domestic front…

YEEHAW!!!! RIDE EM COWBOY!!!!

Report: Southern Miss Coach Who Wanted To Hire Art Briles Also Tried To Add A Player Accused Of Two Knifepoint Rapes

Whether it’s an inability to follow Medicare/Medicaid rules, landing him in court for this country’s largest healthcare fraud trial, or an inability to follow the rules of the court that’s trying him (behavior that angered the judge and got his mother and one of his lawyers banned from the room and indeed from the building), it’s amazing to watch the weird ways of incorrigibly sociopathic Philip Esformes. The man who bribed U Penn’s basketball coach (who goes to prison soon) to get his son on the team appears actually incapable of licit activity; whatever is it, it’s got to be illicit.

Doesn’t matter how petty it is, either. From Law 360:

Miami nursing home mogul Philip Esformes’ mother, who previously had been warned by the judge about communicating with her son during his $1 billion health care fraud trial, was thrown out of the courtroom Tuesday after she was caught receiving a note from her son.

Just after a mid-morning break in testimony and before the jurors were let back into the Florida federal courtroom, U.S. District Judge Robert N. Scola Jr. said someone had seen an attorney pass along a note from Esformes to his mother despite a warning earlier in the trial that this would not be allowed.

“We’ve already had problems from this,” the judge said. “Mrs. Esformes is excluded from the courtroom and the courthouse.”

The stunned woman, who has sat in the audience for most of the trial, was then escorted by the bailiff out of the courtroom.

Stunned. You can see where Phil gets his ideas about rules.

… The President of the United States.

When I say conman, I’m talking about a man who declares himself brilliant but directed me to threaten his high school, his colleges, and the College Board to never release his grades or SAT scores.

As I mentioned, I’m giving the Committee today copies of a letter I sent at Mr. Trump’s direction threatening these schools with civil and criminal actions if Mr. Trump’s grades or SAT scores were ever disclosed without his permission.

The irony wasn’t lost on me at the time that Mr. Trump in 2011 had strongly criticized President Obama for not releasing his grades. As you can see in Exhibit 7, Mr. Trump declared “Let him show his records” after calling President Obama “a terrible student.”

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It’s fine to be embarrassed or just want to be private about your grades; other presidents have refused to release theirs. Our current president has threatened legal action.

… does it have to be this dumb?

Charles Swift, Muthana’s lawyer … [said the withdrawal of her citizenship is] “incredibly terrifying. .. If they can do this to Hoda, they can do it to anyone.”

Yes! Beware! For any of us could fall in love with these men and their cause:

Research centres such as the one I lead at King’s College London (the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation) archived millions of pieces of output from foreign fighters who cheered attacks in the West. When one occurred, they agitated for more. They celebrated the beheadings of Western hostages such as the American journalist James Foley. His death followed months of agonising torture, which included beatings and waterboarding. Foreign fighters mocked and belittled the sexual slavery of Yazidi women, the detention of their children, and murder of their menfolk.

Hoda Is Us!

… who, as the debate on rematriation and repatriation rages, go by so many different names…

One otherwise sophisticated writer makes the kind of weird atavistic argument about both male and female ISIS you’d expect from Mussolini.

[Their] indelible marks of national origin tell us that the foreign fighters are, in the end, products of our own societies, and no more capable of being disowned than any other villains we produce, either for domestic mayhem or for export. They are Japanese and American and British. We inflicted them on the world. They are our responsibility, and we have to punish them …

Two problems here: The writer seems to have missed the last eighty years of thought about nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and postmodernism, and settled back comfortably into the most reactionary notions of … well, add ‘German’ to his curiously selective list of countries of origin and see how that feels…

And second – even if we could agree with the absurd proposition that breathing this or that air uncontrollably infuses one with originary territorial belonging, nothing in this position precludes disownership. Parents disown children; nations disown citizens. All those ISIS self-inductees who as their first revolutionary gesture burnt their passports disowned their countries. It’s hardly common, but it happens and isn’t that shattering a scandal. It merely means that free people realize they retain the right to expel others or to expel themselves from familial or political collectivities.

As Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli write:

[Those] who have engaged in [certain extreme] forms of political violence … have themselves strongly communicated their disassociation from [any particular political] community through their actions. And if they are prepared to carry out such acts of serious political violence then they have no grounds for complaints if the community chooses to banish them. They have already, in effect, self-excluded.

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Come back! All will eventually be forgiven. is neither a rational nor dignified stance for a self-respecting country to take in regard to people who act assiduously to destroy not only it but the entire world. To hold that cultists who regard every manifestation of culture as a Semtex site should be acknowledged as our own is bizarre. If the legal and moral act of disownership means anything, it means we disown these people. And keep in mind that provisions for appeal exist: “U.S. law provides [Hoda] Muthana a mechanism to challenge the secretary of state’s conclusion that she is not a citizen, even from outside the United States.”

I think best practice would be our establishing, with other countries, in-place international tribunals to try these people, whose crimes after all are against humanity, not particular countries. As to where they’d serve their sentences: Some people argue that international prisons radicalize their prisoners yet more; but when we house these people in our own prisons, we make ourselves vulnerable to radicalization. “Even if convicted, they would threaten to radicalise others in prison.” “Convicted IS fighters will occupy a laudatory position within the prison estate, particularly among those convicted for domestic terrorism offences. They will also have an opportunity to use their experiences to radicalise those from the general inmate population and to educate them in any firearms or explosives proficiencies they may have acquired.”

And as to where these people would go once they served their sentence: I’m sure some version of ISIS will still be in place for them to join up with; or, if they want to assume citizenship of a country, they can make a case for their rehabilitation and therefore possibly be able to return to their erstwhile home country; or they can apply for citizenship elsewhere. (Hello, Macedonia!)

… which describes quite precisely the relationship between strong Pell and weak altar boys during his high-flying clerical career. UD wonders what Richard Dawkins, on the receiving end of Pell’s sermonizing, thinks now of his debate opponent.

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Pell [years ago said]: “Abortion is a worse moral scandal than priests sexually abusing young people.”

… When asked to clarify his position, Pell dug in saying: “Because (abortion) is always a destruction of human life.”

Whereas I’ve always found forcing my cock into the mouths of 13-year-old choir boys quite life-enhancing.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Yikes. Yale?

… the very best.

Sounds better in German.

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UD thanks Mondo.

BBC

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Let the cat fights begin!

It’s a little tricky.

And you can hear it directly from a priest.

[I] relied on material prepared by interns.

[I did it] under the pressure of urgent media deadlines.

[I] often have many articles open on my computer at one time, and make notes by copying work between files, but I have not maliciously stolen others’ work as my own.

I’m glad someone brought it to my attention.

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Hey lookee there look what I’ve been doing for the last thirty years. What a thing to have happened! Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Yours truly, a high-ranking advisor to the pope.