Some good writing from an Alabama scribe. ‘Course it’s about ol’ Roy.

Roy Moore’s campaign song.

[When comic Kathy Griffin, in her show in Dublin,] referred to “being in the United Kingdom,” she was startled by the reaction of the Dublin audience. The packed crowd of die-hard fans turned on her, hissing and booing. She seemed thrown off-balance, and had trouble returning to her story.

College football’s got all that stuff, plus it bashes your brains out.

The United States of America fraternity system.

You be the judge.

As it turns out, we can. Perhaps we can. Consider this headline, about one of America’s most Islamophobic politicians:

So! It turns out that Roy Moore has something very fundamental in common with more than a few Moslem men: They all believe fourteen year old girls are fair game.

Some Muslims who follow a conservative interpretation of sharia argue that Islam permits child marriage…

Once you find a common ground like this one, you have a chance to build on it toward greater and greater mutual understanding. And that’s how you make the world a better place.

… let’s consider a comment from an Arizona State University observer. Why is its stadium empty?

I grew up an ASU fan and will always be, but what has happened is sickening. $305 million dollar upgrade to a tax-funded stadium that has at best 9 games per year, partially empty, ludicrous. I wish we could go back to educating rather than allowing our teachers [to] try to become businessmen. There is a reason they teach and are not in private business. No private business would spend $300 million to upgrade a venue with only 9 games possible a year even if sold out. Bring back sanity!

So the insanity has made him too sick to attend games.

Other perennial excuses include high ticket prices, a losing record, and, well, it’s so much more pleasant to watch in your quiet home, with its absence of threatening drunks and ear-splitting non-stop ads from the Adzillatron.

Plus lately there’s something kinda… squirmy… about watching college football. “The reality,” notes Bob Costas, “is that this game destroys people’s brains.” Now maybe it doesn’t bother you to watch college students get their brains bashed in. I mean, yeah, probably it doesn’t. But Costas says that in a few years, as more posthumous CTE scans come in, even you might start feeling a little uncomfortable shrieking with glee when an opposing player is stretchered off the field, his hands shaking ever so strangely.

The song is ended, but the melody lingers on.

Senate candidate Roy Moore’s poem warns us that the end is nigh because of our indulged lusts and aimlessly wandering children.

He knows whereof he speaks.

… Thunderbird School of Global Mismanagement, this Duke lecturer brings her … intriguing … training to those few lucky high-collared non-journalists able to enter the mystic precincts of her class on the hush-hush subject of the hedge fund.

From her syllabus:

Please come to class with a polished appearance – I will not ask you to come in business attire, but collared shirts are appreciated, THANK YOU!

(UD, an old hippie, has a similar template on her syllabi:

Please come to class with a disheveled appearance – I will not ask you to come in freak attire, but FREE THE WEED t-shirts are appreciated, THANK YOU!)

Audio recordings of the course are verboten and students are instructed that they may not under any circumstances spill the top secret shit the guest speakers (the class is almost all guest speakers and other forms of student and visitor presentation) are willing to share with its carefully vetted enrollees.

Oh, and:

Anyone who is on the staff of [the Duke newspaper, The Chronicle,] is not permitted to take this class.

What UD loves about the institutional response to this final directive is that the school apologizes for the instructor’s “poorly worded” approach, which might give the unwary student the “perception that any student group is being excluded.” It’s like, when Donald Trump said “Grab ’em by the pussy,” his poor phrasing might have given some the perception that he was talking about grabbing pussies.

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A walk down memory lane.

When everybody’s got a gun
Every day is lots of fun!

If you can read this – real headline, Scenes from Postmodern America – without laughing, you have no soul.

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Professor Paul takes mid-semester sick leave.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (R) will teach a course [titled “Dystopian Visions”] at the George Washington University during the fall 2017 semester, offering students a rare opportunity to engage with a sitting U.S. senator.

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His scholarly credentials are impeccable!

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By the beginning of the 1300s, wealthy people in Southampton, England, were playing lawn games on the manicured expanse of Old Bowling Green — which coincidentally is the name of the Kentucky town where Sen. Paul was beaten beside his lawn mower 700 years later.

Read the whole thing.

… to suspend the notorious Tariq Ramadan.

We now know the answer to the question What does it take for Oxford University to suspend a professor facing many well-grounded lawsuits alleging sexual violence, some of it against minors?

It takes weeks of complaints, petitions, global press coverage, and incredibly bad publicity for the school. That’s all it takes.

The high court judgement also condemned some books found by Ofsted inspectors in the library [of a Muslim school in Birmingham], despite a previous inspection and ruling that the books should be removed.

The judges opined, the books were “derogatory towards women,” nonetheless “clearly some members of staff were in agreement with the teachings of the book – hence why they remained.”

Haroon Rashid, a parent at the meeting said that the … books should have been placed away, out of sight from the inspectors.

This, he believed, was incompetence on behalf of the teachers. Additionally, “inspectors did not understand the context in which the rules [about beating and imprisoning your wives and daughters] were allowed in Islam.”