A response to all the prayers.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
This tyke’s AR-15
Is aimed right at you

Dublin’s Trinity College has not yet fired the female genital mutilation enthusiast on its faculty. So far, all it has done is hire another person to teach the same material at the same time, so if you, say, would rather not learn from a depraved person, you don’t have to.

On the other hand, for those female students who enjoy sitting in a room for hours, looking at an adult male, and finding it impossible to avoid imagining him slicing off their clitoris, you’re good to go. He’s still on the faculty, and you can enjoy his company for the rest of the semester.

The president of the Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union – quoted in my headline – thinks he should be fired right away, but… well… you know. Some people think it’s culturally insensitive to respond strongly to rituals that to be sure might be alien to us but no doubt have some good in them… I mean, it’s his religion and all.

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

The obvious upside: People in Ireland are really stirred up. The fact that Trinity – Ireland’s most important university – harbors a barbarian has galvanized millions of people. The more attention female genital mutilation gets, the better.

Dear Lord forgive us our buyout and our fraud
And all else we do unworthy of our God;
Show mercy, in thy holy name!
For nothing matters more than football games.

N.V.N.

Those who try to come near it are insane
and those who reach it are shaken by grief,
So now you know exactly why
my heart beats no faster under your hand.

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

[From Twenty Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by Jane Kenyon with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham (1985)]

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

One does feel this –
That everything from paper hearts to fervid verse
Only faintly approaches the insane grief-shaken
Love the free soul can conceive.

We are therefore kindest to ourselves
When we close our mind-forg’d manacles
Somewhat
Around our too-fast-beating hearts.

UD.

UD has long said that in a few years schools like Rutgers – run by jokesters and jocksters – will begin phasing out their economics departments, or at the very least introducing litmus tests for new hires.

Econ professors are among the very few on any campus who can actually run the numbers on athletics programs. The loudest among these professors often have access to the local newspaper’s opinion columns, and they can stir up outrage against massive sports deficits. The cleanest thing to do will be to shut them, and their departments, down. You could, short of that, hire only economists who have demonstrated that no amount of sports-related deficit is too great to outweigh their adoration of athletics.

Meanwhile, Rutgers has the curse of Mark Killingsworth, an econ prof who relentlessly, in opinion piece after opinion piece, chronicles what he describes as the brainlessness and insanity of that school’s president and board of trustees as they drive the place into incredible debt.

[The] real [athletics] deficit for 2016-17 can now stand up and be counted: it comes to a total of $35.4 million plus $11.9 million, or $47.3 million — the largest deficit in the history of Rutgers athletics. Despite [President Robert] Barchi’s oft-expressed pious hopes for athletics self-sufficiency, the program has now blown through a grand total of $193.1 million in deficit spending since he arrived in New Brunswick.

If you think this is bad … there’s worse. From the university’s response to another OPRA request, I learned that Rutgers currently has an outstanding total of $33.13 million in “internal debt” — the last of which won’t be paid off until 2030.

… The members of Rutgers’ Board of Governors have shown that, collectively, they are either too ignorant or too timid to do anything to restore even the most modest degree of fiscal sanity to Rutgers athletics: for them, anything goes. Apparently, they don’t understand, or don’t care, that athletics deficits take money that could have been spent on academics, and shamelessly raise fees and costs for students.

The only way to shut this guy up is to dump his entire department – call it a fiscal emergency, brought on by a temporarily high athletics deficit.

Yes, we’ve learned our lesson: More ex-MSU football and basketball players on the board of trustees!

… this is the best account of his remarkable rise I’ve read.

Former MLB pitcher Esteban Loaiza was arrested in San Diego on Friday on three drug-related felony charges, including possession of more than 44 pounds of cocaine and/or heroin.

… According to Baseball Reference, Loaiza made more than $43.7 million over his career.

UD has always believed that if men could work out their differences verbally, rather than physically, the world would be a better place. Make speech acts, not war, is the rallying cry. Utterance; not ordinance. Phatics; not automatics.

You may recall the principle from the more homely Use your words, not your fists that you heard growing up.

UD envisions military institutes in this country staffed by people like Bannon and you know who, training generations of young men to think linguistically.

Lindsay Shepherd’s Song

(Sing it.)

There is a school in north Ontario
Witch hunt, Orwellian, despair
Urgently I need a different place to go
All its faculty’s bizaire

Open windows to my students’ souls
Higher thought on the rise
Then came the commissar patrols
Throwing shadows in their eyes

It’s just hopeless hopeless hopeless
Hopeless hopeless they lie to me now
Hopeless hopeless hopeless
Have to get out of here somehow

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

(Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!
Sorry you recorded what we said!
Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!
Can’t believe where this has led)

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

[T]hough social-justice ideology isn’t leading to the gulag, its worst forms have an obvious family relation to communism, complete with internal purges and hostility to dissent.

… nicked.

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

Some are calling for more than a wholesome nick. More even than a kindly little circumcision. Some are calling for full removal.

That way, Trinity College Dublin won’t have to put up with daily headlines like Trinity Professor Calls for Female Genital Mutilation.

Keep the barbarians outside the gates.

Sing it.

SENIOR CLERIC REGRETS

Why ah why ah why ah
Why did I let them drop abaya?
Why did I wander
To find what lies yonder
When life was so cozy in Al-Uyun?

Wondering while I wander
Why did I fly
Why did I roam?
Ah why ah why ah
Did I let them leave abaya?
Maybe I’d better go home

A Yale student admires the new safety features Yale’s frats have voluntarily introduced. No one has forced them to add bottled water to their beverages. They’ve done it themselves, out of an abundance of caution.

I’m just thinking how they might save money/be more efficient here…

I’m seeing female bartender/bouncers rather than separate third-party bouncers and female bartenders. And I’m seeing the same women with novelty lights and water bottles attached to their clothing.

Assuming the use of Cumby’s Spring Water rather than Acqua di Cristallo Tributo a Modigliani, UD is thinking you could really make this work, and save money at the same time.

As UD has said time and time again: Most online courses suck.