Now that Tariq Ramadan is in police custody over alleged multiple, strikingly violent, rapes, let’s cut right to the chase, and recall Mona Eltahawy’s brilliant Foreign Policy essay on the widespread hatred of women by men in the Middle East.

Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse. Even after these “revolutions,” all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian’s blessing — or divorce either.

How can anyone be surprised that, according to several women who have now spoken out, a man who refuses to condemn stoning female adulterers, a man who wrote the preface to “a book that cites the Qur’anic passage enjoining husbands to beat their wives under certain circumstances,” allegedly carried out particularly thorough and vicious assaults against women? And these were women who approached him to tell him how much his work meant to them.

French journalist Caroline Fourest (catch her film, Red Snake, about women soldiers fighting ISIS, when it comes out) began hearing from victims years and years ago (she wrote a high-profile book attacking Ramadan for other reasons). Rumors have abounded for years and years. And yet this country tried in 2004 to recruit him to a professorship at – of all places – the University of Notre Dame, and only evil Homeland Security’s refusal to let him come here kept Notre Dame from offering the same hearty defenses of him that Oxford University ultimately offered.

Ya, so a nineteen year old Virginia Tech freshman was arrested for possession of an AR-15; he was also looking to buy 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and had already bought “a former police vehicle outfitted with special bumpers.” Plus he was “researching bulletproof vests.” But the university is fine with it, fine! No need to alert the campus. Let’s all calm down, people. The guy represents absolutely no threat. And it’s not as if VT has any particular cause to worry about this sort of thing…

… we might feel a little disgusted by his greed and ostentation, but if the free market, plus a little, you know, is going to reward Steve Cohen with a $13 billion dollar personal fortune, there’s really not much we can say.

University presidents aren’t rapacious free market capitalists; they’re people who run non-profits. When they act like Steve Cohen, it attracts attention. Negative attention.

So for the many years Shirley Ann Jackson has been Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s president, her unstoppably greedy ways have attracted consistently negative attention. To put the matter as bluntly as possible: She. Loves. Money. Indeed one might conjure images of her in her office counting her many-millioned compensation, but she’s on so many corporate boards (lotsa funny money there) she’s rarely around.

Years and years of grandiose, autocratic, institution-destroying behavior on Jackson’s part have certainly generated high-profile anger among faculty and students, and each protest and no-confidence vote duly gets covered in the local press; but nothing happens, and Jackson keeps raking it in. Her compensation four years ago was at least seven million; UD’s figuring with raises and continued multiple board ass-coolings, she’s up around ten mill by now.

RPI’s financial picture is now so bleak that everyone’s again up in arms; but this time they are informed that they are sexists and racists for complaining, so that will shut them up.

Jackson’s no spring chicken, by the way; at 71, she’s got to be ready for retirement soon. UD assumes RPI is bracing itself for one last, long, hard pull at the money tap before she goes away.

A chatty student, with a hearing guide dog, stood next to me. As we both left the elevator and went outside, I got a good look at her.

Sara Soltani! Her video for the Hillary Clinton campaign was spectacular – I watched it a bunch of times.

“You’re famous!” I said. “I really liked what you did for the campaign.”

She thanked me.

The vice-chair of the scandal-plagued University of Louisville’s board of trustees takes note of the fact that when your university has devolved to what whatshisface would call a shithole, it breeds a bit of animosity on the faculty when $55 million is found to make your stadium bigger.

… it staggers us, it makes the papers, it’s a big deal.

Sometimes, as in the 2016 case of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, it’s not a mystery: Macho, covering up concussions that are starting to produce symptoms, easy access to a gun, a fight with a girlfriend, a history of depression. What one remembers of Karageorge is not the mystery; it is the unbearable pathos of his having placed himself inside of a dumpster before pulling the trigger.

More typically, the suicides of intense and gifted student athletes – like, most recently, Washington State University quarterback Tyler Hilinski – are indeed mysterious. Most exhibit few to no overt signs of serious mental disturbance; up until the moment of death, they seem genial, social, active in their sport. Indeed, intensely active – and this is something Karageorge shares with many more enigmatic student athlete suicides: All of these people seem too intense about training and winning.

“He was really hard on himself,” a Yale friend said of Cameron Dabaghi, who jumped off the Empire State Building eight years ago. “If he lost a tennis match, it wasn’t because of a blister or a bad line call … He believed in fairness, he believed he had to be better.”

“Madison [Holleran] was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly,” writes Kate Fagan about a University of Pennsylvania runner who jumped off a parking garage. Another woman, an intensely competitive track star at Wesleyan, set herself on fire on one of the school’s playing fields.

Hilinski took (without telling him) a friend’s AR-15-style rifle – a much more physically destructive form of suicide than the pistol Karageorge used. Certainly any discussion of young, often impulsive, student suicides needs to note the wide availability of profoundly destructive firepower in the United States.

Hilsinki’s predecessor as WSU quarterback tells Yahoo Sports:

“I feel like at times we feel like we can’t express our emotions because we’re in a masculine sport and him being a quarterback, people look up to you as a leader. He felt like he really probably couldn’t talk to anybody. We’ve got to change some of that stuff. We have to have resources and not have a stigma of people going to that.”

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A former Clemson player:

“Especially a male athlete, and a football player in such a physical rough sport, you never want to be the guy that’s having to admit that something’s wrong. You get that mindset of always pushing through. Nothing’s wrong. I’m good to go.”

… two!

This is the overcast expanse Amazon
has chosen as one of the finalists
for the site of its second headquarters.

It’s in Montgomery County, Maryland,
just down the street from UD‘s Garrett Park.

… went after fascist Robert Spencer when she caught sight of him in her local gym. I kind of thought that was cool, the way she just went up to him while he was stretching his biceps and called him a nazi and all. I even celebrated her in song.

I was less enthralled when I found out Fair had gone hammer and tongs at a woman who wrote in an opinion piece that she had decided to vote for Trump. The woman has filed a complaint about her with the university.

With this latest incident, in the Frankfurt Airport, Ms Fair has shifted altogether from refreshingly confrontational to Diary of a Mad Housewife. The story just broke, and there aren’t any good sources yet, but let’s go with the Daily Mail anyway…. Oh, Kansas City Star just picked it up… That’s better…

So what seems likeliest to have happened (police say they have witnesses, and I’d think they’d also have security footage, but whatever) is that they told her her deodorant was basically a liquid and she couldn’t carry it on the plane. She freaked and called them nazis, which as you may know in Germany is not at all, legally speaking, a good idea. After she was hit up with a fine, she wrote an essay blaming it on sexism (German police do this to so many women at airports!), or on a young man with a nazi haircut nearby who upset her, or some such bullshit. I mean, writing that way in her own defense was as stupid as shouting nazi to security police at a German airport. In kindness to her, I won’t link you to the essay, but I’m sure you can find it.

Christine Fair is now, how you say, a woman with a past. Not much, however, Georgetown University can do about her. Beyond awaiting her next bimbo explosion.

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Update: The German authorities do not intend to play nice.

And yet and yet and yet. After following this professor’s behaviors (chronicled above) for some time, UD offers the following theory: She’s not really out of control. She’s an attention-whore. And she’s getting what she wants.

One night, in the winter of 2013, crowds of Michigan State University students ripped trees out of the landscape, burned them in the streets, and jumped over the flames. Here’s the Nazi-book-burning-fun image. Close to sixty similar bonfires went up all over East Lansing in response to MSU having beaten Ohio State — another perennially torching and rioting school — in a football game.

You want links? You want links to decades of torching-the-town and scorching-the-earth and torturing-police-horses Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan State? Sorry. Too fucking depressing. Look them up yourself.

It’s a long tradition: After football games, or after the firing of child-rapist-enabling coaches, or in celebration of holidays, hundreds of drunken shits gather at America’s football factories and attempt to incinerate their neighborhoods.

As if places like East Lansing weren’t bleak enough. Let’s establish a university where we admit hundreds of people who, as one, yank out of the ground all of the saplings planted in an effort to bring some life to our cold terrain.

A university! Maybe East Lansing harbors some gangs we might expect to do something like kill trees and set the town on fire. These are university students. Michigan State University is a university.

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

But, as all of America’s media is madly noting today, MSU has a specific culture. (I’ve just linked you to today’s Michigan State University Google News page. Scroll down. Endlessly.) It’s the same culture Penn State and Ohio State and plenty of other NCAA-favorites (the NCAA’s getting excoriated everywhere too – like – hey – turns out it’s corrupt) exhibit, and it’s a deep culture – the work of decades of abjection in the face of athletics.

At this point, schools like these are basically distilleries. Rape and pillage are what you get when you’re a big ol’ distillery packed with twenty year olds.

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

So the depraved people at MSU let a depraved doctor systematically rape hundreds of children. Same thing with a coach-rapist at Penn State. The president of MSU and the athletic director just resigned. And now we’re breathlessly told that this is just the beginning of the massive numbers of sports-related crimes about to be exposed at MSU.

Funny thing: It played out almost exactly the same way at Penn State! And Auburn! I could go on!

The trouble at Michigan State appears to go beyond Dr. Nassar, who was a university employee for decades and the physician to two women’s varsity teams. An ESPN investigation Friday described a pattern in which sexual assault complaints involving prominent athletes, including more than a dozen on the football team and a few in the celebrated men’s basketball program, were handled by the athletic department rather than through regular university channels.

Michigan State insufficiently complied with federal officials monitoring the university under Title IX, the gender-equity law, the report found.

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

MSU … will not face criminal charges for [its] part in Nassar’s actions, though [it is] facing multiple civil law suits from over 100 victims of his abuse.

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It’s a culture, see? You don’t dump the prez, bring in a deer-in-the-headlights replacement, and create a new culture.

It is, as they say, what it is. The sadistic, greedy, amoral coaches who, once finally fired, dedicate the rest of their lives to suing the school for four hundred million dollars. The deities on the money teams who sack quarterbacks and women. The brain-damaged ex-football-hero trustees. The student body seething with alcoholic bullies. When they tire of watching pledges die from booze forced down their gullets, they head out to the town saplings.

The school’s too busy dealing with five ongoing high-profile athletic and academic and fraternity scandals to notice the creepy little team doctor or the elderly has-been coach off raping children somewhere. And all the decent people on the faculty, in the administration, and in the student body keep their heads down and do their work and pretend their school’s not a saloon.

Syphilis-ridden 18th Century Mummy Dug Up in
Swiss Church is Relative of Boris Johnson

Pharmacy professor Richard Morrisett will remain at [the University of Texas], despite pleading guilty to a felony charge after strangling his girlfriend until “she saw stars”…

… dismounts.

Interesting to discover that the education and welfare of England’s children has been in such good, uh, hands.

Whee.

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

“We combine rural, urban and suburban lifestyles,” County Executive Ike Leggett said after the finalists were announced Thursday.

What Leggett doesn’t say is that you can get all three lifestyles in the same house. Chez UD sits eight miles from a city, so I guess that makes it suburban. But the immediate world around UD‘s house has itself been urbanizing for years, and in fact it feels quite city-like almost the moment you step outside the barriers (dead end streets everywhere) and trees (GP is an arboretum) her town has created between it and urbanism.

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

Rural? Last night, while Les UDs were eating dinner, they heard one of their red foxes (there’s long been a den at the top of the hill behind our house) barking and screaming only a few feet away from them.

“Prepare yourself,” UD said to Mr UD. “I think you’re about to hear the squeals of a dying rabbit.”

And right away, there they were, the lurid last moments of a trapped animal. Les UD‘s looked at one another, mildly shocked and distressed, as the killing went on inches from their own Takeout Taxi meal. UD took the occasion to explain to Mr UD that while they can press three buttons and summon great feasts, the fox must find and kill her meal.

Anyway. Rural enough for you?