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.”

… the wonderful new statue of George Orwell at the BBC.

In lieu of a pilgrimage to it, she will read for the hundredth time, laughing again all the way through, “Down and Out in Paris and London.”

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It seems to be an open question whether that very weight — the strain and tedium and approximation of everyday existence — was a hindrance to Orwell or an assistance. He himself seems to have thought that the exigencies of poverty, ill health, and overwork were degrading him from being the serious writer he might have been and had reduced him to the status of a drudge and pamphleteer. Reading through these meticulous and occasionally laborious jottings, however, one cannot help but be struck by the degree to which he became, in Henry James’s words, one of those upon whom nothing was lost. By declining to lie, even as far as possible to himself, and by his determination to seek elusive but verifiable truth, he showed how much can be accomplished by an individual who unites the qualities of intellectual honesty and moral courage. And, permanently tempted though he was by cynicism and despair, Orwell also believed in the latent possession of these faculties by those we sometimes have the nerve to call “ordinary people.” Here, then, is some of the unpromising bedrock — hardscrabble soil in Scotland, gritty coal mines in Yorkshire, desert landscapes in Africa, soul-less slums and bureaucratic offices — combined with the richer soil and loam of ever renewing nature, and that tiny, irreducible core of the human personality that somehow manages to put up a resistance to deceit and coercion. Out of the endless attrition between them can come such hope as we may reasonably claim to possess.

Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to Orwell’s diaries.

It’s not the sort of headline any university wants; but Oxford’s baffling refusal to do anything about — even, for a longish time, to say anything about — Professor Tariq Ramadan and his growing legal problems means that this theme, with variations, is playing in newspapers all over the world.

Director of the Middle East Centre Eugene Rogan repeatedly apologised to students for taking ten days to respond to the allegations [and only responding because of student inquiries and complaints], blaming the delay on the fact that the controversy was happening in another country with a different legal system.

Ah yes, another country. Another legal system. Wouldn’t want to weigh in on that. We’re here. They’re there.

Oxford has of course not suspended Ramadan while investigations proceed; that would mean talking about the situation. It’s just basically doing absolutely nothing.

If that seems odd to you, you can add your name to this petition.

So that’s a pretty amazing percentage, even by US massacre standards.

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“[T]oo many moments of silences.”

In a time of insanity and disgrace, this is what principle looks like.

La Kid, right now,
hiking the Bray to
Greystones Coastal Trail
on one of those incomparable
Irish afternoons.

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The names of seashore towns run out to sea…

The photo makes me think of Elizabeth Bishop’s
also incomparable poem, “The Map.”

Nah.

A section of the document entitled “King’s Personal Conduct” contains a series of claims about [Martin Luther] King’s extramarital affairs, including a relationship with folk singer Joan Baez.

Now, now. You think the fun’s going to be over, don’t you? You won’t be able to give your coach five million dollars a year and each of your assistant coaches 2.5 million dollars a year; and there’s also that thing, in the proposed tax bill, about no more humongous tax deduction on that humongous donation you give a university for the right to purchase humongously overpriced season tickets.

[I]n 1988, Congress added subsection 170(l) to the IRS code that specifically allowed for an 80 percent deduction on donations to “institutions of higher education” that granted “the right to purchase tickets for seating at an athletic event.”

“Every time I think about it, I want to throw up,” [says tax law expert John D. Colombo]. “The effect of this exemption in the tax code is that my money, as a taxpayer, is going to help some guy be able to sit on the 50-yard line.”

These tax experts have jumpy stomachs. Most of us instinctively understand the educational and charitable urgency of tax-exempt bonds to subsidize new football stadiums (the new tax bill’s gunning for that one too), tax-free multimillion dollar compensation for coaches, and 80 percent deductions for 50-yard line sitting…

I mean, sure, everyone knows that “These [university athletic] programs are not consistent with underlying theories of exemption, and in fact are perfect examples of why commercial revenues of charities should be subject to taxation.” But boys will be boys, and boys write rolling around in the dirt concussing your head legislation; and no one is more surprised than ol’ UD that a bunch of Republican boys are actually sounding semi-serious about doing away with the fun…

But seriously – as opposed to semi-seriously – if you think any of these proposals will go anywhere, you also thought the University of North Carolina would be punished for twenty years of fake courses.

The answer to a British judge’s question about a co-ed school in England that systematically and humiliatingly discriminates against female students is obvious: It’s crucial to communicate to girls as early as possible in life that they are worth a bucket of spit.

The other question is whether British taxpayers should pay for daily lessons in female servitude and worthlessness.

Apparently, after some thought, the courts of that country think not.

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And then there’s the school’s library:

[Library books] contained comments such as: “The wife is not allowed to refuse sex to her husband.” Another book said that a wife “cannot go out of her husband’s house without his permission and without a genuine excuse”.

It stated that a man can beat his wife “without causing any mark”. One book, called Islamic Family Guidelines, said that the husband is in “the position of leadership over the family” and that “women have thus been commanded to obey their husbands and fulfil their domestic duties”.

But at least it makes the trains run on time.

… is in great company.

Right now [a Michigan attorney’s] short list of clients includes Dr. Larry Nassar, the ex-Michigan State University doctor facing charges related to his alleged sexual assault of nine young women; Josh King, the ex-MSU football player facing sexual assault charges stemming from a Jan. 16 incident at a campus party; and Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, the Detroit-area doctor accused of female genital mutilation.

JHU: Educating America’s most highly-skilled clitoris-slashers.

Twenty years of Julius Nyang’oro’s multifarious fake courses for athletes was fine by the University of North Carolina; one measly authentic course offered by Jay Smith made top administrators, as one, leap to the top of their desks screaming EEK. I mean, we can’t just approve every proposed course, and this one lacked clear and effective methods of keeping athletes eligible to play…

Oh but okay. I mean, if you must introduce meaningful content into the curriculum, I don’t suppose we’re in any position to stop you…