Kris Kobach, whose official portrait in the state capitol reflects his love of mounting guns, said in an interview today that “Mounting guns is something I do and have done since Pops and I mounted guns together when I was a boy of six.”

Asked to respond to the town of Shawnee’s public apology for having allowed Kobach to take part in its Memorial Day parade mounting a huge gun, Kobach commented: “Guns call out to me to mount them. Mount me… mount me now.”

Good opinion piece about how information-mongering and welfare statism generate mediocrity in India’s universities.

[W]e need to exorcise ourselves of our subliminal fear that the spread of liberal education — especially the liberating and egalitarian ideals embedded in it — could nudge the country into unrest.

… along with good food and drink.

Although so much older than all other
patrons that they expect at any moment
to be asked to leave, Les UDs really
like the place.

… UD‘s hometown, Garrett Park.

“Something old, something very new,” an otherwise respectful report on the royal wedding, said, “Bespoke, cut and sewn by hand, Harry was wearing his aviator wings and a medal honoring his service.” Describing a prince as bespoke is appealing, but cut and sewn is unseemly for the occasion even if true. And it sounds awfully painful.

Matt Gillman, Garrett Park

Succession, early on, is more interested in mocking the ridiculous excesses of the monstrously privileged than probing the monsters they’ve become. In the first episode, a family dinner turns into a makeshift softball game outside, as many do — only this one involves multiple helicopters ferrying the [family] to a field on Long Island. Later, [a family member] offers a Latino employee’s son a million dollars if he can score a home run, only to tear the check up in front of him when the kid just gets to third base. In one outrageous (and Veep-like) scene, [a daughter’s] fiancé … encourages [a young family member] to eat a whole roasted songbird. “This is like a rare privilege, and it’s also kind of illegal,” [he] crows.

UD does not suffer from generalized fear of paintings, only fear of several paintings that, until last week, hung in her own wee ‘thesdan house. She acquired them in 2005, on the death of her father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, who had himself acquired them in the form of gifts from his old friend Wojciech Fangor.

By virtue of being Poles who lived through most of the twentieth century, Soltan and Fangor got served up absurd, atrocious, obscene, ridiculous sorts of early lives – picaresque farces where they were always leaping about trying to survive the latest global disaster. It’s a bit of luck that either man survived to mid-century, and even more amazing that both eventually returned to the very privileged lives into which they were born.

The early ‘seventies saw Soltan a Harvard professor and Fangor the subject of a one-man show at the Guggenheim.

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

Yet not much happened for Fangor after that show; he remained obscure, and during the subsequent years I knew him in upstate New York, was simply one more struggling artist, working hard in his studio, getting occasional teaching/lecturing gigs, trying to sell canvases.

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

So when Les UDs sat on the floor of Jerzy’s Cambridge studio sifting through his art collection and dividing things up with Mr UD’s sister, they treated the Fangors the way they treated all of the other mildly significant artworks Jerzy, who knew many Polish artists, had gathered. Mr UD put one of Fangor’s circles on his office wall at the University of Maryland, and the other circles went in La Kid’s room.

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

When did UD start idly checking the prices of Fangor’s circles online? Aucune idée. But it gradually occurred to me that the numbers were going up and up and up, and that articles about his hotness were proliferating. “Take that Fangor off your office wall and bring it home!” UD screeched at Mr UD one day. “And while we’re on the subject, we need to put all of these behind glass and insure them or something…”

Les UDs both became more and more uneasy as they realized they were holding onto, and not taking particularly good care of, paintings that had suddenly become insanely valuable. It was time to sell.

UD sent exploratory emails to Sothebys, Christies, and Bonhams. The first two sent polite form letters asking to see some pictures of her Fangors. A Fangor specialist from Bonhams almost immediately got on a train from New York City to DC and visited our pictures. She spent hours in the house, scrutinizing, taking notes, taking pictures, chatting to me about Fangor and the paintings, and of course offering us a contract.

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More to come.

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Photos Tamara Trocki.

Around 2 a.m. on May 14, 2017, [16-year-old] Michael T. Dennis shot himself with a .44-caliber Taurus Magnum Raging Bull revolver in the basement of his family home at 9515 N. River Road in Tittabawassee Township, [Michigan]. The property had been the site of a bonfire involving minors and alcohol in the hours preceding Michael’s death.

Police were summoned to the house on receiving reports of a shooting. They found Michael on the basement floor, bleeding from a head wound and with the revolver between his legs. Police found a second gun, a .44-caliber Pietta Colt Army revolver, in a different part of the basement.

The teen’s parents were home at the time of the shooting.

… Four others also faced adult criminal charges, while several minors who were present faced juvenile petitions. David Hubbard, 62, was charged with and later pleaded guilty to furnishing alcohol to minors, receiving a $500 fine.

… Two 17-year-olds faced the same charge as well as counts of minor in possession of alcohol. Connor Brunett, 18, was charged with aiming a firearm at a person without malice and lying to police.

So much fun and no harm done. They’re all drawing itty-bitty misdemeanor charges.

… presiding over vile and violent world soccer, gets desperate enough to go the girl route.

What a sexist, ethnocentric, headline.

Denmark’s burqa ban will affect one hundred percent of the women there.

Obviously the salafist enthusiasts who wear it will have to take it off. That is the very least of it.

The reason huge majorities of people of all faiths and genders all over Europe tell pollsters they want the burqa off their streets is that it affects all modern egalitarian civic-minded human beings. It is most damaging to girls and young women, who grow up witnessing the most graphic exposure of — not the inferiority, but the nothingness of women, every day of their lives as they walk the streets of their cities. It is only slightly less corrosive to everyone else, as they suffer basic ongoing offense to their basic democratic instincts. Do I really live in a country where men can blind, deafen, and mute their women? For most rational people, the answer to this question has got to be no. And that is why, one after another, the countries of Europe are banning it.

I’m not sure how saying someone looks like a child of “Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes” is racist. I thought “Muslim Brotherhood” was supposed to be a “good” thing and Liberals say we are descended from apes?

Bill Mitchell; quoted by Conor Friedersdorf

Attorney Peter Osinoff also argued that [Carmen Puliafito] suffers from a mental illness that makes him brilliant and leaves him with “immense energy,” but instills an “ugly side” in Puliafito that drove him to be infatuated with a young prostitute.

Denmark, arguably Europe’s most humane and progressive country, has understood where human rights lie in the burqa debate, and has acted on this understanding. As is virtually always the case, the vote in favor of the ban wasn’t even close. And as to popular sentiment!!

Indeed, UD begins to think that the battle for the hearts and minds of compassionate democrats has clearly already been won; it is the benighted elites, who can always, on these occasions, be counted on to tut-tut about religion (the burqa has nothing to do with religion) and freedom (if you can keep your eye trained on a woman in a burqa and keep whistling about freedom, your next stop is corrective surgery) who need help. As one democracy after another bans the burqa, it’s pretty clear which position is on the side of history.

Rather than passively responding to every ban with the same boilerplate about how great it is that women can freely express their right to full shrouding, Amnesty International should join that cadre of international businessmen (where are the women?) who pledge to pay the fines women are racking up all over Europe for continuing illegally to entomb themselves.

… interviewed UD in a hotel room during a New York City MLA convention; they then invited her to spend three days in LA – she gave a paper, walked around the cool campus, got taken out to cool LA restaurants, and left the city feeling extremely good about USC.

She was thrilled to get a job offer a few days later, but ultimately decided she was more of an east coaster.

UD recalled all of this when reading an opinion piece by Braudy about the resignation of USC’s benighted president, Max Nikias. He left under the impossible pressure of multiple very big sex and drug scandals, and he really had to leave. But Leo makes the important point that despite the awful scandals on his watch, Nikias did a huge amount of good for the school.

When Nikias became provost in 2005, one of his first acts was to institute Visions and Voices, an arts and humanities program that is free to all students, bringing writers, actors, dancers and other prominent artists to campus to create a vibrant nighttime activity rather than the commuter wasteland that had existed before.

… More than 100 endowed faculty chairs and 20 new research centers were established under Nikias’ leadership and with the funds he raised. The number of residential colleges, where students can fruitfully interact with faculty, graduate students and each other, increased from one to 15. Older campus buildings were renovated and new ones added, including the Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, the Michelson Center for Convergent Bioscience, and the Iovine and Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation. The campus itself has been beautified with more than a thousand new trees as well as numerous places for students and faculty to sit, have coffee and converse.

And if you are in search of an ethical as well as a bricks-and-mortar legacy, consider his enormous expansion of the diversity of USC’s community of scholars, and especially his strong support of first-generation students, students from foster families and DACA students.

The USC student body now is drawn from all 50 states and 129 countries. Sixteen percent of the incoming freshman class will be the first in their families to attend college; about a quarter are underrepresented minorities. Two-thirds of all USC students receive financial aid, which has increased almost 80% under Nikias, from $187 million to $325 million — the biggest financial aid pool in America. Very few “spoiled children” here.

Nor is USC any longer the University of Second Choice. The university is rated 15th nationally by the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education College Rankings, and USC this year had 63,000 freshman applications.

Fabricating a fascinating heroic you is American as apple pie among all occupations, but this is University Diaries, so we follow in particular academics who make themselves out to be far, far more than they are.

Always overcoming appalling upbringings, ever duking it out on the world’s dirtiest battlefields, ceaselessly being summoned to the offices of the great for advice, these inspirational disrupters are pleased to deliver pep talks to the rest of us as we model our paltrier lives on theirs.

But – and you know UD has been saying this for years – you will only successfully forge a longterm career as a total fraud if you follow a few simple rules.

#1: Do not fly too high. The mistake Sergio Garcia, bigshot chief of staff and senior vp at SUNY Upstate Medical University, made was becoming bigshot chief of etc. The higher your profile, the more likely the local press is going to want to get to know you. Certainly Garcia’s bet that a university which hired David Smith as president would blindly hire a sociopathic liar was completely correct; he overlooked the local press, however.

#2: Choose a really cheesy school. As a product of the local culture of Albany politics, SUNY could hardly be called non-cheesy. It remains however a mildly respectable sort of location – the sort of school where, once the fraudulence of high-ranking administrators is revealed, someone on campus will actually care. Place yourself instead in a school (Southern University; Chicago State University; almost any university in Saudi Arabia) where no one cares.

#3: If you must join a non-cheesy school, make sure you are besties with the school’s president. James Ramsey protected generations of fellow scammers at the University of Louisville; and though this is hardly a guarantee of serious longevity for you (since presidents like Ramsey may themselves have rather short shelf-lives), it’s your only hope. Like the protagonist of Black Widow, you are going to have to find out what the president loves – handball, hockey, humpback whale watching, whoring – and do that thing with him so as to create an unbreakable bond.

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UD thanks Eric.