Can’t be a judge in Germany if you won’t take off your hijab. Reasons here.

I began thinking over this list of the six ingredients Professor Van Ghent felt it necessary for a novel to contain in order for it to provide “contiguity” – a nice euphemism for “relevance”- “with modern interests”: death, sex, hunger, war, guilt, God. When I cast around in my memory for a modern novel that would eminently qualify, the first that came to my mind was, for some reason, James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, now so thoroughly forgotten, though it was only a little over twenty years ago that it was the great bestseller of the time and the great movie a little later. It had death; it had sadism; it had hunger – at least it contained great chunks of “social consciousness,” which I suppose is what is meant. It had sex – how thrilled we all were at the daring of the famous copulation scene on the Hawaiian beach! It had war – the attack on Pearl Harbor, no less. Indeed, it combined the last two ingredients in a short sentence of priceless felicity, to which Jane Austen could never have hoped to aspire: “Pearl Harbor made a queasiness in the testicles.”

Donald Greene

Wisconsin Gun Deer Season Over, Other Opportunities Still Available

Wow! Fatal shooting (a second student was injured) on a university campus in Frankfort KY! Just wow! Second such incident on that campus in four months! “Kentucky’s gun laws are among the worst in the country, and the state has one of the higher rates of gun violence in the nation,” but wow Guv says it’s an isolated incident! SOOOOOOO shocking! In Kentucky of all places. School is so shocked they’ve cancelled classes for the rest of the semester cuz man things like that just don’t happen around here.

This harsh attack on Quebec’s evolving secularism laws chastises that province for failure to love diversity, but nowhere makes an effort to figure out why, in certain parts of the world (see France), large majorities vote decisively in favor of a secular public realm. Nowhere does the writer note that burqas are banned in countless countries, many of them middle eastern. Nowhere does she wonder why people find the sight of three year old girls in hijabs and thick black robes disturbing. She appears to find comments like this one, from a Canadian day care owner about her staff, convincing:

“I have had [college] students [who work in the day care center] that have been wearing burqas and hijabs. And it did not affect the way they interacted with the children. Actually, it was a very good thing because the children were curious and they were asking a lot of questions and they wanted to know why were they different, why were they wearing that. And, you know, so again, it gives them the opportunity to understand and to learn something that they may not have been exposed to otherwise.”

Indeed, very young female children spending all day with women whose very mouths are covered up (along with everything else except their eyes) are going to find that curious for sure and are going to want to know why they can’t see their teacher. What a wonderful early lesson in diversity for them to know that certain cultures insist women be totally hidden from the world. No doubt they are learning inspiring truths about their gender and how it is valued.

Anyone who thinks there’s the slightest difficulty interacting with someone who won’t let you see their face, or the mere contours of their body, or even their hands, is a party pooper.

Which is to say – if you’re to go all-out against any form of public secularity, you’re going to have to take seriously the grounds of majority opposition to some forms of public religiosity.

Pennsylvania State University [will close] seven campuses due to financial constraints, while Louisiana State University [has] implemented a hiring freeze and other cost-cutting measures.

[B]oth institutions [recently] fired their head football coaches. Penn State [paid] more than $45 million to make head coach James Franklin go away … LSU fired Brian Kelly [and] gave him a buyout of $54 million.

Organizers of a marathon where participants said fuck you to a hijab/black winding sheet as their running outfit have been arrested for“violating public decency.”

… warm up around a fire pit that says BETHESDA.

Gun Recovered Friday during Northwood High Lockdown, No Threat to School Community, Police Say

At a high school minutes away from UD‘s house, two students get in a fight and one pulls out a gun. But it’s certainly no threat to the school community that this little fucker plus plenty of others carry weapons on campus. Relax!

Friday was the second time this school year that Northwood High has been placed on lockdown. In September, administrators ordered a lockdown and secure status after reports of a weapon on campus. During that incident, a gun magazine, BB gun and a live 9 mm round were recovered from students. 

No metal detectors? Why not? And why nothing about expulsion of arms-bearing assholes? Waiting for them to kill someone before you ask them to leave?

… I stumble, at the Waldorf Astoria, on the global meeting where FIFA bigwigs divide the final World Cup teams into groups.

Faithful readers of this blog know how disgustingly corrupt FIFA is.

Palm Beach has hit billionaire financier Nelson Peltz and his wife, Claudia, with a daily fine [of $250] because officials say the couple built a padel court on their expansive estate without the town’s approval.

Very common billionaire behavior, as this blog has noted. When a culture produces billionaires, it produces people for whom rules and regulations mean jackshit. They’re perfectly happy to pay $250 daily for the rest of their lives in order to protect their belligerence.

UD‘s learning new words and phrases from this angry denunciation of a building that just went up in Manhattan.

Shades of New York‘s ultraorthodox cults! In both the well-established, ongoing theft of tax dollars by ultraorthodox groups in NY, and the more recently uncovered theft of tax dollars by Somali groups in Minnesota, fear of racism/religious bigotry-based lawsuits, and fear that being called out as racist will destroy one’s political career, has stayed the hand of governments in the face of staggeringly obvious crime.

‘Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.’ True, true, so the thing to do is continue stealing in the country that rescued you from that. Stealing from one of our least corrupt states, Minnesota.

The Stockton Look.