Not long ago, wild and wacky Keith Ablow was on their faculty. They dislodged him just in time.

Hoda Muthana to US gov’t: Off with your head!

This articulation reeks of the kind of stereotypical depiction of Muslim women that has too often permeated Western societies: one of submission, obedience and lack of personal agency.

…. ISIS offered these young women something that recognized their agency. Not just homemakers and housewives, but combatants and propagandists, ISIS recognized that women had a role to play in their state-building project. The journey to jihadism for these women was not about coercion, but rather about participation.

There remains a great urgency to help debunk the myths surrounding how and why women become involved in terrorist activities. From combat roles to suicide bombers, policymakers must recognize women’s agency in terrorist organizations and how gender roles function within groups.

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Details.

I was wrong.

Jussie Smollett, Upset Over Salary, Staged Assault, Police Say

And lo for that he hath made fruitful his Von Hügel Institute speech

And hath scattered abroad the word of Allen Jr, Winfield, Thavis, and Wooten

Yea and also the word of Kakutani and Dionne

Upon the beatification of John Paul II he hath made abundant the word of Wooden and Safranski

Verily Rosica so loved the word that likewise he blessed Bustros, McElroy, Reese, Di Noia, Baldisseri, Christiansen, and also Lev, the last a mere woman but even so worthy of his love

[W]hy are we so reticent about the clitoris? Why is … mention of it … deemed too sordid for BBC news?

The big difference here seems to be that while the vagina has an obvious functional utility, the clitoris exists entirely for female pleasure. It seems that the issue stems, not from the provocative nature of a word, but our continued societal taboo regarding women daring to enjoy sex. Sure, we can see depictions of women shrieking with pleasure plastered all over any porn site. But that is exactly the point. Female sexual enjoyment remains exclusively in the realm of the forbidden.

Lucy McCormick, The Guardian

ISIS girl doesn’t find chopping off everyone’s head or burning everyone alive shocking, but she does find shocking England revoking her citizenship. Maybe she’ll have better luck in Holland, hubby’s home.

Most of the meetings took place in Esformes’ swimming pool (you need to register for access to the linked site) – he was worried Delgado might be wearing a wire – but this bit of personal counseling went on in one of the defendant’s many Medicare/Medicaid money extraction locations…

Man, I told you this trial would be fun! I told you! The biggest health care fraud in the history of this country is the culmination of generations of effort by the pious, illustrious Esformes family,  whose patriarch’s name adorns a chair at the University of Miami medical school, and whose scion played basketball so well for the University of Pennsylvania that his coach is going to prison.

The end of an affair.

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This is our last book together

This printing will soon be long ago

And in our moment of parting

This is all I want you to know

There will be many more romances like this

I’ll be stealing plots from someone new

There will be other words to copy

But there will never be another you

There will be other paragraphs to lift

But they won’t thrill me

Like yours used to do

I’ll plagiarize a million scenes

A million characters too

But there will never, ever be another you.

Humor means we’re getting over it. Good.

This excellent question about the Smollett hoax right away reminded UD of another overdetermined hoax – a university one. And maybe in this overdetermined business there’s one small clue for us as we go about defending ourselves from hoaxers.

Seeking to destroy the faculty member who discovered his fraudulent credentials and research, West Virginia University epidemiology professor Anoop Shankar had an Indian friend go to this colleague’s office and …

“You Indians have nice brown skin,” [the colleague] allegedly said [to the student]. “But you smell weird with the spices that you use for cooking.”

Right about then the grey-haired professor supposedly pulled his chair closer and snatched at the young man’s penis.

[A second friend of Shankar’s, standing just outside the office,] claimed that from the hallway, he could then hear [the professor] rise from his chair and say loudly to [the young man], “Here, taste my white c–k.”

[The young man] said he fled rather than reciprocate and that [the professor] flew into a rage, his words echoing into the corridor: “I will destroy you!”

Allow UD to quote herself, starting with her post’s title:

PILING ON: THE SOCIOPATH’S UNDOING

When scripting these scenarios (one of the friends later confessed that Shankar had written and directed this drama), you need to be selective. Minimalism is more plausible than maximalism to most audiences. Deciding to throw in not merely an ethnic slur, but sexual harassment, and not merely sexual harassment but sexual assault, and not merely sexual assault but violent threat of retaliation, is just the sort of excess you’d expect from a sociopath.

Another example of piling on: The chief of staff at Upstate Medical College claimed

that he narrowly escaped a car bombing in Afghanistan… [that] he was hired by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to work in the State Department, that he was in the White House when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred in September 2001 and is close friends with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

America’s rapeabilliest campus, Baylor University (scroll down), conducts its life of the mind business in Waco Texas, famous for murderous cults, biker boy shootouts, and breastaurants. To be kind, Waco is probably as close to the creation of an atmosphere for serious learning and respect for women Texas can manage, so let’s not be judgmental. Let’s instead update ourselves on the various ongoing Waco trials of various biker boys.

The 2015 shootout, a routine druggie-gunnie turf war that spilled beyond the confines of a breastaurant onto streets where Baylor families were celebrating graduation, killed a lot of people and kinda left a bloody mess all over Waco but I mean bikers go to Waco cuz Waco loves guns so much. Gunnies feel genuinely welcome there.

475 weapons were seized following the incident. The number includes 151 firearms, 12 of which were long guns. Other weapons recovered included knives, brass knuckles, batons, tomahawks, a hatchet, stun guns, bats, clubs, a machete, a pipe, an ax, pepper spray and a chain.

It can get a little noisy trying to study at Baylor, but that’s the sound of freedom.

Now here’s one trial we can take a look at. Headline:

Bandido biker yells at Waco judge in court: “Three years and nothing!”

This guy, seen standing over the dead body of a rival biker at the shootout, is pissed because it’s taking a long time to hear his case and meanwhile he can’t carry his AR-57 or talk to gunmates. But the mean judge seems to think the guy still shouldn’t have access to firearms….

But haha you and I know the guy still carries guns; he just wants to do so and not risk arrest.

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UPDATE: But UD doesn’t want you to think that her very own neighborhood hasn’t been stockpiling too!

Show me the way to go home
I’m ISIS and I want to go to bed
And after all Islamic-ally you know
It’s wonderful to cut off people’s heads

I’m a Brit and she’s from Alabam
We find ourselves in something of a jam
So listen while we sing our little song
Show me the way to go home.

The English narrator of ISIS

Now finds himself somewhat in crisis:

‘I chopped no one’s head!

I made not one man dead!

Get to know me – I’m really the nicest.’

I mean, it’s better than the cake. The developing story of the latest fake hate assault has much more drama than the mere addition of some anti-gay icing.  Yet it’s the same contemptible attention- and money-seeking behavior (the cake guy sued Whole Foods; once WF proved he homophobed himself, it countersued), and UD has learned over the course of this blog that the business of staging things is sickeningly common. And of course incredibly destructive to efforts to take seriously actual hate crimes.

All the way back in 2004, UD covered the Professor Kerri Dunn business, when she spray-painted her car with swastikas etc. and everyone at Claremont McKenna rallied on her behalf and worried about incipient fascism until the guys who happened to be taking a walk nearby at the time she did it told the police about watching her paint her car. An education professor at Columbia University, under threat of dismissal for plagiarism (of her students!) hung a noose on her office door and claimed to be the victim of a hate crime. A conservative student at Princeton wrote himself some really nasty, anti-conservative letters and enjoyed right-wing martyrdom until he had to admit the truth…. Croyez-moi, I could go on! And on!

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UPDATE: Now this I really don’t get. Washington Post, headline:

I DOUBTED JUSSIE SMOLLET. IT BREAKS MY HEART THAT I MIGHT BE RIGHT

Heartbreak is ridiculous. Anger’s the ticket. The Post editor continues:

I tried telling myself that it is possible that two assailants were walking around downtown Chicago at 2 a.m. in January in 10-degree weather, waiting for a black victim. In addition to that, they were stalking around with a bottle of bleach and a rope. And ultimately, the prey they selected was an actor on a show that they must’ve been somewhat familiar with, because they were able to not only name the show but also know that he played a gay character. Never mind the fact that he was likely bundled up because again: Chicago, January, 10 degrees. Also, after he fought to get away, he left the rope around his neck until he got to the hospital.

This ain’t doubt; it’s close to certain knowledge he was bullshitting. And he wasn’t new to bullshitting. Mature political actors – people like newspaper editors – don’t go into denial when people do bad, illegal, and destructive things; nor do they enter into heartbreak when what seemed obviously the case turns out to have been the case. When weirdly flagrant and flagrantly weird events occur, serious people respond with skepticism.

This is more like it:

Commentator Kmele Foster put it this way on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday: “Two in the morning, almost the coldest night of the year, you were attacked and someone conveniently had a rope? My heart goes out to anyone who gets attacked, but it’s totally appropriate to exercise a bit of skepticism and to exercise a bit of patience in waiting for the facts to develop around this story.”

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As for the legal implications:

Attorney and CBS2/KCAL9 Legal Analyst Steve Meister says every state penalizes fabricating a crime and the trouble this case has caused is serious.

“That’s felony conduct because you caused a lot of people a lot of problems and you cost the city a lot of money and you took time away from what cops could have been doing to solve real crimes.” Meister says.

He says every state’s laws vary as do the penalties. In California a felony conviction for lying to a police officer is punishable by up to three years in prison.

UPDATE:

This case is an object lesson in what happens when people in positions of political and cultural authority abandon critical thinking and pressure those who don’t abandon their circumspection under pain of being smeared as bigots.