… spreads mulch in UD‘s backyard. It’s a fundraising thing. UD graduated from WJ.

How do you get a decade-long suspension?
Michigan State is not inclined to say.
What did you do to get that long a sanction?
A murder or two?  Fraternity rape?  Gun play?

Maybe you hazed your freshmen til you killed them.
Made them drink gin until they passed away.
Maybe you bashed their heads in til concussion.
With hazing there's just so very many ways!

Like the therapist/rapist, this one involves sexual crimes; but here there seems to have been a concerted effort to hide the fact that a principal stands charged with multiple rapes of a minor — one of the students in her school!

Not a peep out of anyone in the system for years; but then a reporter found

… a thin manila folder in the basement of the New Castle County Courthouse.

[Inside was] a 19-count felony indictment that charges Tasha Purnell — OIiver’s former name — with multiple rape and other sex crimes from 2010 through 2014 against a girl who was a minor.

Like pick up the phone and call the school?

But if you’d done that, you’d have missed your chance to hire a rapist of children as a School District therapist for K-5 students.

Swasticar tanking in Germany.

Quebec is considering expanding Bill 21, which already keeps public sector employees from wearing religious clothing/objects while on the job. Not only teachers, for instance, but also students, would, in this proposed expansion, not be permitted to wear hijabs.

Of course the Muslim community spokesman in my headline reveals the problem: Secular legislation is wildly popular in secular Quebec. Banning religious garb is indeed a surefire way to bolster your poll numbers. So the question at issue is whose “fundamental rights”? UD, for instance, considers it a fundamental right of secular countries, states, and provinces to protect their secularity in certain restricted realms (government schools being one of them). Further, she fully admits that her support for restricted secular laws has to do not only with respect for the strongly expressed will of people in some localities that the secular nature of their sense of themselves as a culture be enshrined in law, but also with her belief that schoolgirls too young to have any say in the matter should not be draped head to toe. This obviously repressive form of fundamentalist religious expression offends her liberal sensibilities; it degrades the promise of equality at the heart of democratic regimes. I don’t think parents have a fundamental right to wrap their eight year old daughters in head and body sheeting before they can go outside.

Altogether odd and beautiful weather this spring, back and forth from sunny and warm and calm to gray and cool and windy. I’ve tossed Magical Flames and Firestart onto the grate, and on top I’ve piled old woody grapevines that sheared off a tree in one of the windstorms. Mr UD got the black statues when he worked for the UN in East Timor. The tan camels we brought back from India, and to the right is a Corbu-themed quilt that students of Jerzy Soltan made for him.

UD reflects, looking at this fire and also at people/dogs walking on Rokeby Avenue, that though she’s done quite a lot of traveling (as you know if you read this blog), she likes best to be at her peaceful home, whose last owner was Munro Leaf. Ferdinand the Bull’s spirit remains here, decades after the death of the man who conjured him.

Yeah, that’s why a house full of loaded guns was just the ticket.

 Lee Grodzins, MIT professor, lived one of the great lives. Read the whole thing.

He got his favorite student evaluation … for a course, billed as offering a “superficial overview” of nuclear physics. The comment read: “This physics course was not superficial enough for me.”

… Early on, he joined several Manhattan Project alums at MIT in their concern about the consequences of nuclear bombs. In Vietnam-era 1969, Grodzins co-founded the Union of Concerned Scientists, which calls for scientific research to be directed away from military technologies and toward solving pressing environmental and social problems. 

… In 1999, Grodzins founded the nonprofit Cornerstones in Science, a public library initiative to improve public engagement with science. Based originally at the Curtis Memorial Library in Brunswick, Maine, Cornerstones now partners with libraries in Maine, Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and California. Among their initiatives was one that has helped supply telescopes to libraries and astronomy clubs around the country.

… an important GOP fundraising event, with Steve Bannon giving the keynote salute.

A Manhattan art advisor explains that she tries to make clients feel comfortable and not taken advantage of in the intimidating, arcane, art market. Then she steals all their money.

Fuck man I got four others.

BIG guns!

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZK35yCTD

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And a reminder of his tragic homeland:

‘[Under Trump,]  they see an opportunity in their proximity to power. They’re not lonely figures, lonely prophets shouting at the margins, but they’re very close to the halls of power, and some are perhaps working within those halls of power right now, as we speak… Vermeule talks about using the bureaucracy, using the administrative state to nudge people in the right direction.’

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Wink wink nudge nudge is your administrative state a goer? Does it… you know… go? Mwoohohohohoo, ay? Hohohohohoho, ay?