Make next year’s reservations now.

… not to use their hands.

But the beauty of it is that she has both. Capulet, Montague, Smith, and Wesson – they’re all there now at the University of Kansas:

It’s [now legal] to walk down the middle of Kansas’ serene Midwestern campus with a hidden firearm. The carrier will need neither a permit nor training.

Coaches are being real wussy about it.

“It is a deal that I will be very adamant about in a way of banning [guns],” [a] Kansas third-year coach said. “I don’t want weapons around for our team. I know it’s a bad, bad deal for us. I understand the politics involved in it. I get that. But we’re talking about kids with lives and kids getting pissed with each other and kids that are highly competitive with each other. I fear what it could blow into.”

You can’t ban guns for the team, dummy! That would be illegal.

“It’s a little scary,” said Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor.

Ooh, little Genie’s scared…

So is Oklahoma State’s coach:

“I was in college, been to a bunch of parties, been around a lot of football players,” the coach said. “Moderation that should have been part of what we did, wasn’t. It was college, we were dumb. If you throw a gun in the mix, it’s not good. You make poor decisions. When you have a gun there, you have a chance to make a decision you can never make up for.”

And back in Kansas:

Kansas basketball coach Bill Self called the law “unbelievable.” He did not elaborate.

Who needs to elaborate? You bring a bunch of big macho guys to a college campus. You pump them up to be even more macho, more violent, on the field. If you’re the University of Oregon, you put up signs in their cafeteria that say EAT YOUR ENEMIES. You and everyone else treat the guys like kings, giving them free muscle cars, willing “hostesses” among the coeds, tutors to write their papers for them. The local cops look the other way when the guys do bad stuff. The guys learn that they can get away with anything because they play the game really violently.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that giving them a concealed weapon can only be for the best?

When you’re an Ivy League professor who writes a sloppy, error-ridden, yet prize-winning book, you don’t expect a bunch of nonentities to crawl out of the woodwork and call you on it. It won a prize, after all.

Thus, Charles Armstrong, author of Tyranny of the Weak (a book about North Korea) was clearly caught off guard when some dude with some weird Hungarian name who teaches at Korea University complained that Armstrong seemed to have made up some of his sources and plagiarized parts of his text and other stuff like that. Armstrong went right on the attack:

I have, as far as I know, never offended him. I’ve known him for years, and appreciate the work he’s done. His book appears in my bibliography. I don’t understand why he would come after me this way.

Must be professional jealousy.

Plus it’s all the nonentity’s fault because he didn’t follow proper academic protocol:

Dr. Szalontai never communicated his concerns or criticisms directly to me prior to these various posts on different blogs. Why direct communication, a common professional courtesy and practice in academia, was not the preferred form of expression remains a mystery.

Another scholar, commenting on this response, noted:

The Columbia professor attributes improper academic conduct to Szalontai. That tells you all you need to know. … [N]o honest scholar who had accidentally lifted dozens of items from a colleague would dream of scolding him for not complaining courteously enough.

But Armstrong is not through transferring blame to others. He also – like so many haughties before him – blames the servants.

The book’s narrative was constructed through multiple transfers of notes, some made by my research assistants and others done by myself. This too, in retrospect, may have resulted in some inaccuracies.

You just can’t get good help these days!

Armstrong tried most of the traditional techniques people try when they get themselves into his position: He painted himself as a victim of mysteriously malign forces; he attacked the messenger; he attacked his research assistants. The only (very popular) move he didn’t try was the bit where you reveal that while writing the book your wife died, your cat died, you suffered recurrent bouts of impotence, and you developed a drug addiction. He didn’t go for that one.

Anyhoo. He just gave back the prize.

Some commentary from one of his colleagues at Columbia.

Norway’s state-funded Islamic Council

used state funds intended for “bridge-building and enhanced communication” to hire an office administrator who uses a niqab that covers everything but her eyes.

Home from Ireland for a brief visit.

Lexus-on-Lexus violence.

His comments are here.

The reporter reminds us that in a presidential debate Perry famously could not remember the third federal agency he planned to shut down. (“The third agency of government I would do away with — the education, uh, the, uh, commerce and let’s see… I can’t — the third one. Sorry. Oops.”)

Here’s the tweet:

Andrew Hess‏
@AndrewHess77

The third agency he was going to shut down was the Department of Basic Fucking Economics.

… days.

The chair of the board of trustees at Baylor University who wrote a now nationally notorious email calling women students who drink alcohol “perverted little tarts” has done his bit to help Baylor know when to fold ’em. Why bother resisting the zillion sex discrimination lawsuits from women students with which that school is now dealing, when every day another high-ranking sexist asshole on campus gets, er, exposed?

People like good ol’ boy Buddy Jones are making these women’s arguments for them, and ain’t nothin Baylor can do but cough up the cash. Again and again and again. There are many of these lawsuits, and Baylor’s almost certainly going to have to settle every one of them.

Why?

Because the claims in them are jaw-droppingly legitimate. And because even if they’re not, Baylor University can’t afford the optics of going to court.

… a Michigan attorney fiercely devoted to the welfare of abused children. She has been “appointed to represent the daughter of Dr. Fakhruddin and Dr. Farida Attar, the Farmington Hills couple accused of conspiring to mutilate the genitals of prepubescent girls.”

In a filing arguing for the removal of parental rights from the girl’s father and mother, Gullberg Cook reasonably enough alluded to Josef Mengele. Mengele was a doctor who instead of healing mutilated significant numbers of people; the Attars’ co-conspirator, Jumana Nagarwala, is a doctor who instead of healing has allegedly mutilated significant numbers of people.

“Whether perpetrated by a Nazi or a member of a Muslim sect, a religious practice that condones the serious physical abuse of a child by mutilating her genitals is unacceptable in the United States of America (or) in any country.”

Nagarwala is not an iconic embodiment of evil, of course, and Gullberg Cook doesn’t say she is. But it is certainly true that both Nagarwala (allegedly) and Mengele are examples of doctors who betrayed their profession and basic human ethics by mutilating bodies.

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

And in this corner, we have an attorney fiercely devoted to the defense of Claus von Bulow, OJ Simpson, Jeffrey Epstein, Mike Tyson, Michael Milken, etc. etc. etc. Alan Dershowitz has now leapt to the defense of alleged mutilators of children’s genitals.

Dershowitz has drawn himself up to his highest moral height and raged against the Mengele/genital mutilator analogy. Outrageous, demeaning, how dare she, lalalalala…

He has even condemned Gullberg Cook as a holocaust denier. Because talking about what Josef Mengele did in the holocaust is denying the holocaust.

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

Anyway. Looks like we’ve got a bit of a fight on our hands, because Gullberg Cook has responded to the anguish and outrage and incredulity of Dershowitz.

“Mr. Dershowitz needs to butt out. I really don’t give a darn what he thinks,” she said. “If [his legal team is] feeling guilty that they’re representing people that maim little girls for life, that’s their issue, not mine. Religion does not give you a license to abuse or maim children.

“I am not a Holocaust denier,” Gullberg Cook added. “I have grandchildren who are part Jewish. (Dershowitz) can go to hell.”

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

Update: After Dershowitz has had his cry, he can get himself all worked up again at the word “genocide” in this opinion piece.

Oh goody. Here’s an opportunity to see which American university decides to recruit a high school football player who has just been arrested for armed robbery.

Cincinnati, Georgia Southern, Georgia State, Memphis, USF… hm… hm… Who will be the winner?

UD says: MEMPHIS!

“Perverted little tarts” revisited.

[O]ther emails by [Baylor University regent Buddy] Jones … show him calling the fiercely independent Baylor Alumni Association “terrorists” and enlisting BU administrators in devious schemes to break the BAA… [One wonders] if fellow regents … were aware of such [comments] in closed-door meetings — whether about “tarts” or “terrorists” — and why some might have chosen to tolerate such behavior, given [that] it strikes us as less than Christian, which is what Baylor is supposed to be all about. Indeed, the [Jones] emails attached to [a current] Title IX lawsuit [against Baylor] are from 2009 — and BU regents nonetheless elevated Jones to board chair in 2011.

-VALT.

… [Last year,] 15 year-old Istar [was] married off to a 70 year-old man in Eastern Somalia… Istar had been subjected to infibulation. [Her “labia [were] stitched together following excision of the clitoris. This makes urinating and menstruating almost impossible as a girl is forced to do so through a hole the size of a matchstick.”]

As happens with many girls who have undergone this type of FGM, her new husband was unable to penetrate her during sex. He used a traditional dagger to cut her open. But he did it with so much force that the dagger went deep, affecting the vagina walls and cutting into her cervix.

Istar started bleeding profusely, forcing her family to seek medical help and counseling. Although she is now out of immediate danger, Istar is deeply traumatised and, unsurprisingly, she does not want to go back to her husband.