… Lelow.

Sing it.

Clang, clang, clang went the clapper
Ding an sich went the bell
Heil heil heil went my heart strings
From the moment I saw him I fell

Buzz, buzz, buzz went the buzzer
Plop, plop, plop went the wheels
Stop, stop, stop went my heart strings
As he started to go then I started to know how it feels
When the universe reels

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

UD thanks her sister for the link.

Am I the only person to have come up with this brilliant pun? I Googled the phrase and got nowhere.

…(that’s Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) on “Measuring Development in the 21st Century.”

La Kid will also be in Paris, on business, so they will meet up there.

UD is the only non-jet-setting member of the family.

Life of the mind, USA, 2018: An empty basketball court and a fan who argues that if it still worked…

… in that country. She has been interviewing large numbers of women who fully veiled their face and body and now, under pressure of the new law, have stopped doing that. Details of motivation from the two women she features here are sad – even pathetic – and confirm my belief that many full-veilers, far from the principled, autonomous people we’re invited to imagine, turn out to be troubled and confused and acting under various forms of male Salafist pressure.

Once ardent defenders of the right to wear the niqab, both women have now completely abandoned it. But the transition took place gradually and was accompanied by a growing distance from extreme Salafist ideology.

Despite the law, by the way, they could have continued wearing the niqab/burqa – a local businessman has been paying the fines of any woman who wants to continue wearing in France. Or of course they could have buried themselves in their houses, given their professed belief that any woman who ventures outside not fully covered is an infidel.

A woman who wore the niqab for five years and “was one of the most radical women I’d ever met,” is now into tight jeans and “living again … after years of being locked up.”

After repeated rapes by her father-in-law, says the other woman, she veiled herself to “escape from the trauma of rape. … The niqab protected me, I liked hiding from men.” She was loosely affiliated with a terrorist group.

One of the women, Alexia, “has even become a fierce opponent of the Islamic veil and Salafism.” Yet after being under the thumb of extremist men, she needed another man – also an extremist, but not a niqabist – to tell her to take off the thing.

When he saw my physical condition, he asked me to remove the niqab – he feared for my health. I had worn it to please Allah, but because of the lack of sunlight I wasn’t synthesising vitamin D any more – my health was failing.

Interesting that the vitamin D deficiency argument against the burqa/niqab – typically ridiculed by freedom to fully veil enthusiasts – looks to be (obviously – if you get no sunlight, you get all kinds of physical and mental problems… Sunlight being pretty basic to land-based animals… ) correct.

This also goes to the masochism – the niqab/burqa as equivalent to the Christian hairshirt – UD has also long noted in the wearing of a garment that tortures and sickens. My rickets will please Allah.

Shockingly, this woman says: “When I took the niqab off, I felt like I was getting out of jail.” Who da thunk it.

With high-profile calls for university students to boycott the state of Florida for this year’s upcoming Spring Break, a fascinating situation is developing, which we will follow here on University Diaries.

Panama City is by far the most popular Florida spring break destination, boasting open-air gang rapes, up to seven shootings a night, and so massive and sudden an influx of drug dealers that from March 10 – 18 the earth is knocked off its axis.

PCB’s sheriff sets up a spring break jail on the beach. Panama City Beach wears its perennial Trashiest Place in the World crown proudly.

So assume the Panama City Beach boycott – a protest against legislative inaction on guns in that state – succeeds. The gunniest NRA gunnies are going to stage a backlash (they’re already striking back at commercial boycotts of the NRA) which will certainly involve many of them choosing desperately gun-friendly Panama City Beach for their spring break.

This will mean that despite PCB’s post-2015 (year of the biggest atrocities) efforts to sanitize itself (no liquor on the beach; closing hours for bars), and despite confident statements that “Panama City Beach will never be what it was during those times,” that city now faces a kind of ethnic cleansing situation: Everyone who doesn’t conceal carry has been purged, and everyone who does carry is on their way to PCB as we speak. Given all the post-Parkland unpleasantness, the carriers are in a foul mood, and they plan to drink their sorrows away.

All in all, a fraught moment for Panama City Beach. Expect the National Guard to be out in force.

We’ll keep an eye on it.

… but the woman does have balls. She was courageously reality-based in her remarks to the baying CPAC crowd.

“I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women, and because he happens to have an ‘R’ by his name, we look the other way, we don’t complain,” said Charen, a senior fellow for the Ethics & Public Policy Center.

… “The Republican Party endorsed Roy Moore for the Senate in the state of Alabama, even though he was a credibly accused child molester,” she said. “You cannot claim that you stand for women and put up with that.”

At that point, boos erupted from the crowd. “Not true! Not true! Not true!” one person yelled. “Prove it!” shouted another person in the crowd.

But Charen wasn’t done. She took aim at CPAC for inviting Marion Marechal-Le Pen, a French politician and the latest member of a far-right French political dynasty to come to prominence. Le Pen was well-received in her speech on Thursday praising Trump’s “America First” agenda.

“The only reason she was here is she’s named Le Pen, and the Le Pen name is a disgrace. Her grandfather is a racist and Nazi. She claims she stands for him,” Charen said.

The crowd then broke out into loud boos, but Charen wasn’t fazed. “The fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace,” she said.

If Charen plans to hang around the conference, UD recommends this innovative ballistic package.

The tattered old apologies by the way of hunting and target shooting and even self-defense are absent. Guns now are the symbol of a license to hate the other: the liberals and the media and the rest who are part of a “socialist wave.”

… To an astonishing degree, [this] argument has become bald and brutal: you are the gun that you own.

… [O]ne can read in Friday’s New York Post that a desire to own an AR-15, in its cultural context, is “no different from wanting a Louboutin or a Birkin bag.”

… A lethal weapon designed solely to devastate a human body and explode the organs inside is, as a matter of inarguable fact, nothing in the world like a Birkin bag. It is odd that the same people who are usually so ready to condemn any form of moral relativism are so eager to embrace this kind. It’s wrong, they often tell us, to say that this or that element of Islamic practice is just “their culture”; but we should tip-toe around people who keep military weapons of mass killing…

… Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man of infinite patience, committed to peaceful change. This meant that he was opposed to acts of violence against bigots. It did not mean that he thought that there was a respectable case to be made for violent bigotry. If you do not want to be thought complicit in the mass murder of children, the best way is to cease to be complicit in the mass murder of children.

… at a Dublin ball.
Last night.

“He just can’t defend guilty people. He’ll meet with a client, they’ll explain their problem, and he’ll say, ‘Well it sounds like you should go to jail then.'”

… reminds ol’ UD to talk about a trend among prospective students and faculty at our country’s universities.

Krugman points out that

our madness over guns [is] just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

There are larger and larger areas of this country where

[people regard any] public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.

This paranoia strikes both deep and wide. Does anyone remember George Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport, but because they serve the “goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”? And it goes along with basically infantile fantasies about individual action — the “good guy with a gun” — taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing.

Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — [including] security from crazed gunmen…

We’re beginning to see evidence of some faculty leaving, and some students not applying, to universities in these frontier settings. Bullets, rapists, and riots, oh my…

Many such locations are already cultural wastelands; some are also beginning to look like shooting galleries.

Why, for instance, would anyone with a choice want to live – even for a few years – in Waco, Texas, home of armed cults, armed motorcycle gangs, and Baylor University? Why would a non-Hobbesian want to work there, live there, go to school there, teach there? It’s not as if there’s any cultural compensation to living in the Wild West. It’s guns and strip malls and megachurches where you beg divine protection.

Why would you go to Hammond, Louisiana and attend Southeastern Louisiana University, famous for being the last school in America willing to take Jonathan Taylor? Can anyone be surprised that at 3 AM yesterday a fight broke out on campus and a bunch of people got shot?

These schools are part of America’s Hobbesian wastelands, where you grabs your AR-15 and you takes your chances. The idea that a university could thrive under these conditions is hilarious.

Trying to teach or learn in these settings is like deciding to take your family vacation in Beach Blanket Bloodbath Myrtle Beach. Why? Unless you’re a Hobbesian and you enjoy that sort of thing?

UD anticipates a militarization of certain campuses – having been abandoned by civilization, they will become weedy tracts patrolled by open-carry paranoids offering Active Shooter Response seminars.

If you’re in the wasteland, and you can leave, you should. Get out while the getting’s good.

One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

… The bullet from an AR-15 passes through the body like a cigarette boat travelling at maximum speed through a tiny canal. The tissue next to the bullet is elastic — moving away from the bullet like waves of water displaced by the boat — and then returns and settles back. This process is called cavitation; it leaves the displaced tissue damaged or killed. The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path. It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange…

… my snubnose.”

And shame on anyone who suggests that bringing a loaded Glock to a school where you have “grievances” against certain classmates hints at anything having to do with intent to harm!

As Chen himself told police, “he… brought the gun to school for possible protection because students at the school had been harassing him and bullying him.”

Totally understandable! He just planned to show them the loaded Glock, in a totally un-harm-intending way.