Where UD learned her manners.

You know UD‘s obsession with oreo cows; you know that, bizarrely, oreo cows now live right next door to our upstate NY house. They’re part of this elegant new outfit down the street.

Now UD‘s sister-in-law, currently in residence, sends her photos of the cows having wandered out of their enclosures and DIRECTLY ONTO our front field. She has AWAKENED to a herd of oreo cows at her door.

I’m so fucking jealous.

Vinod Khosla’s Wikipedia page still says he’s a trustee of a very high-profile outfit committed to fighting global poverty; but in fact his name disappeared from this page not long ago; and UD‘s thinking it’s maybe cuz a filthy rich stinker who goes all the way to the Supreme Court to keep people off a public beach is … not a good look for the Blum Center…

I’m seeing public presentations to the globally poor in which representatives from the Blum Center say Our trustees include a billionaire who has never spent a night at his colossal coastal property in California and in fact doesn’t like the beach but decided he wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars clearing out the place, posting armed guards, and pressing his case to keep doing that up to the Supreme Court. We feel your pain.

Well, good luck with that; your Grievance Studies hoax (aka Daughter of Sokal), just now disclosed, will get plenty of attention, etc.

It might even help people understand how scandals like Avital Ronell happen.

But although the hoaxes keep coming, and although America’s best minds – Richard Rorty, for one – have for decades warned us about the deadly combination of hypertheory and political correctness —

When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’

Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.

— no one seems able to find their way out of the fog.

[T]he burqa has already been banned in some form or another in several countries of Western Europe, such as France, Belgium and Austria. The Netherlands and Denmark are the two latest countries to place a ban on the burqa. Bans in various forms, such as bans on burqas in schools and colleges, or other public places or in certain jurisdictions, are also in place in Germany and Norway.

All of these are democratic and technologically advanced countries as well as free societies with high levels of gender equality. The … Freedom House report ranks Norway as the freest country in the whole world, with a perfect score of 100/100. The Netherlands, with a score of 99/100, comes second.

Ban it in India.

… a bar in the shower.

SING IT.

Welcome to my world
Won’t you come on in?
Ivies and Nobels
Are there for me to win

Step into my heart
Leave your cares behind
Welcome to my world
Built with me in mind

Knock and all doors will open
Seek and I will find
Ask and I’ll be given
The key to this world of mine

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

Seething all the same
A hedgie lives next door
See how they rig the game
He makes ten million more

Krugman’s in the Times
Every week or two
I am far behind
In the Chronicle‘s The View

Ivy? Sure. Cornell.
But it’s rated last.
Life’s a living hell
My rage is unsurpassed

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

Related:

[T]he eliter-than-elite kids [at Ivy League schools] themselves help create a provisional inside-the-Ivy hierarchy that lets all the other privileged kids, the ones who are merely upper-upper middle class, feel the spur of resentment and ambition that keeps us running, keeps us competing, keeps us sharp and awful in all the ways that meritocracy requires.

… en vie??

*********

She.

Kafka.

And Rooney Mara.

On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.

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

My title comes from this poem.

… nothing. University of Maryland football killed a guy.

McCarrick, Wuerl, and … just… wow… So at least the Catholic church in DC has decided that one of its university’s deans shouldn’t get a pass when he writes this:

[Julie] Swetnick is 55 y/o. Kavanaugh is 52 y/o. Since when do senior girls hang with freshmen boys? If it happened when Kavanaugh was a senior, Swetnick was an adult drinking with&by her admission, having sex with underage boys. In another universe, he would be victim & she the perp!

In another universe, Chilean priests and monks wouldn’t “[create] their own sick sign language to command the deaf and mute boys to perform oral sex and be sodomized.” Maybe CU’s social justice dean should direct his attention to that.

… for Montgomery County Executive.

When Nancy was merely the mayor of Garrett Park, Maryland, UD wrote about her for the town’s paper, The Bugle.

Latest GP news, by the way:

Eileen [Kelly’s] very large Japanese Zelkova tree … has now been certified as the largest one in the country.

… What’ll they think of next?