December 18th, 2022
‘A Belgian judicial source told Agence France-Presse that €150,000 was found in Ms Kaili’s flat, €600,000 in her partner’s home, and €750,000 in her father’s hotel room.’

(The partner’s already confessed.)

Finally some hard numbers. So how did the distributive reasoning go?

Mes petites. Men are powerfully compelled to be the protectors of women. They all sat there, gazing at 1.5 mill gleaming from suitcases on the coffee table in front of them, and her father said Give me most of it. I’ll hop a train asap for Athens. Her partner said You’re the public facing heavyweight my love; give me the rest of it. And she said I’ll just take a pinch for expenses.

December 18th, 2022
Beware of Greeks Bearing the Slightest Proximity to Gifts

Another one. Now that the Euro Parliament’s Greek VP has been arrested, expect all the other shady Greek MEPs to come rattling out of the can.

December 18th, 2022
Ick

On top of salary, MEPs can claim €9,500 a month in expenses and allowances without providing receipts. They may hold other paid jobs and need not publicly register contacts with agents of foreign states.

Parliament has resisted stronger accountability rules while built-in protections for internal whistleblowers are lacking...

[S]ome British MPS… say they followed UK parliamentary rules in accepting a total of £251,208 worth of gifts from Qatar in the year to October, including luxury hotels and business-class flights, while participating in “fact-finding” missions. Several spoke up for Qatar in subsequent debates. This may be legal. But how do they think it looks?

December 18th, 2022
‘Too many House Republicans are too dimwitted to understand the uses of power and how to wield it.’

The Wall Street Journal (!) editorial board goes there. Of course if you’ve been reading University Diaries you already know that a profound resurgence of American anti-intellectualism, coupled with violent infantilism — see our most recent ex-president’s fantasy-super-powers playing cards, or the fixation with loaded, openly carried guns among several congressional Republican nitwits/coup plotters — accounts for much of the cultural degradation the WSJ‘s been noticing.

The establishment Republicans at the paper are dismayed, to be sure; but lurking just below dismay is fear: Not only are the gunny dumdums ungoverning and ungovernable. Quite a few of them are barking mad.

Stupid, crazy, and fully armed.

*****************************
PS: Too meshugah even for the Vatican. Trumpies who pose fetuses on church altars lose their collars.

December 17th, 2022
Straight Outta Flannery O’Connor

Momma told me to give her the gun, so I gave her the gun. Momma shot the cops and momma was shot. Her eyes are open and she is breathing a little bit. Are you going to hurt me? Momma told me people are trying to kill us. Is momma going to be OK?’

December 17th, 2022
Mrs Jensen and the kids have been entered into…

… a witness protection program.

December 17th, 2022
Too bad about all those dead people.

But my psychotic nineteen year old deserved a bunch of massive guns.

December 17th, 2022
The Meaning of Hijab

The hijab for me exemplifies fear and humiliation. It symbolizes a system based on misogynist ideology trying to eliminate women from society. 

As an Iranian woman, I’ve worn a piece of cloth on my head for years, which served not only to cover my hair and body. I viewed it as a tool to suppress, control and turn women into second class citizens. 

December 16th, 2022
‘[Richie] Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s [former] leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.’

And that’s just the beginning. Ain’t no viler football program than U Nebraska’s, and today it’s busy gilding the lily again with … the coach himself!

 [Mickey Joseph is] accused of putting his hands around a woman’s throat, pulling her hair and punching her during a domestic dispute Nov. 30, according to a police affidavit. He was charged on Dec. 1 with assault by strangulation or suffocation.

For decades of Nebraska football, go here.

December 16th, 2022
Sometimes you hit the sweet spot.

After a fully dreary day yesterday, the sun was out in force today; and UD’s sister, who scans maps for interesting green spots in Montgomery County, found the Tridelphia Reservoir. We got there exactly at noon, and as we walked the path along the water, the sun warmed our backs. The air was chilly enough to keep people away (we were alone), but actually, in the event, very pleasant. Dry, fresh, clear. The clarity of the entire setting was astounding.

The feel of the place was… eerie. Aesthetic abandonment: no birds, nothing but twigs in the muddy lake, disused canoes on the banks. For a few moments we heard a jet pass, but it barely registered.

We spoke some words, mainly about the wind, which was also high and very much part of the eerie sweetness. It was easy to hear the wind, shaking the dry leaves that still, in mid-December, hung on elms that overlooked the water. The sun cast a shadow of their branches on the lake surface.

The phrase ‘perfect moment’ has been hijacked by advertising; but everything really was in breathtaking, mystical, alignment.

December 15th, 2022
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: Now that Israel’s a Theocracy…

… go ahead and say FAAAAACK you to America, with its absurd independent judiciary and disgraceful separation of church and state … Get thee to Jerusalem, where no one’s going to get between you and queer-hating orthodoxy.

I mean, you can waste your time and money appealing, but I’m gonna guess that even our pious Supreme Court’s gonna disappoint you. Realistically speaking, your options are Israel, Hungary, Iran, Afghanistan, and Vatican City, and I’m thinking Israel is your best option.

December 15th, 2022
The Return of the Repressed

[E]veryone thought that shifting the battle on abortion to the states would help anti-abortion groups. But in fact, what we’re seeing is that abortion rights groups are starting to rack up victories ...

[B]allot initiatives are turning out to be a real point of success for abortion rights groups...

[I]n Vermont and California, voters approved ballot initiatives that would explicitly establish a right to abortion in those state constitutions...

[Michigan] voters overwhelmingly said we want our state constitution to protect a right to abortion...

[T]here were three red states — Montana, Kansas, and Kentucky – [where] anti-abortion groups thought that voters of those red states would come out and say absolutely not. We do not want abortion. And in fact, in all three of those states those [anti-abortion] measures failed...

[B]ecause of the abortion issue, Democrats are actually making some gains in state legislatures…

Democrats now control the Pennsylvania legislature. That’s enormously important for access [to abortion], not just for Pennsylvania, but for women in West Virginia and in Ohio, where abortion is banned, because women from Ohio and West Virginia have been flooding into Pennsylvania to seek abortions...

In another example, look at Minnesota. There, the state Senate flipped the Democrats. They have control of both chambers of the legislature, plus the governor’s office, for the first time since 2013. And Democrats are really taking that as a mandate to achieve their legislative priorities. And that means they could do a mini Roe, essentially putting the protections of Roe into the state constitution...

[In Utah,] language written to defend polygamy is now language that is being used to defend abortion, and it’s working…

… I don’t think it’s what anyone expected when they wrote that constitution…

Republican legislatures may want to oppose abortion, but Republican voters, as in Wyoming, often have sort of a libertarian streak and think like, you know what? A decision to have an abortion is really up to the woman. I don’t want to interfere with that...

[W]hat we’ve seen in the last six months is that when you take abortion away or threaten to take it away, voters are going to come out to protect access to it…

[B]e careful what you wish for when you overturn Roe because [advocates] actually have something that might be even stronger up [their] sleeves...

[W]hen you put the right [to an abortion] into a state constitution, in most cases, it’s less contorted because when that right goes into the state constitution, it’s generally much more explicit than in the federal constitution. And when you put it in the constitution, you can make it much more expansive...

So take Michigan for an example. The right to abortion that was established by that ballot initiative that passed is far more expansive than anything that was in the US Constitution, far more expansive than Roe. It gives women control over the entire spectrum of choices in their reproductive health. That’s huge...

That’s not just sort of inserting the language of Roe into a state constitution. It’s not some sort of mini Roe. This is like maxi Roe. This is Roe on steroids..

December 15th, 2022
Once again, a mentally ill American works out her issues…

… in that most-American way.

Grieve for the two police who had not yet gotten the memo: Every American, including fragile little middle-aged ladies, is likely to be packing heat. And be highly trained in killing multiple people.

And it’s Mississippi. Of course. Might could be it’s time to change police training down there.

December 15th, 2022
St. John Fisher University, Loyola University Maryland, The Citadel in South Carolina, and Georgetown University …

… all stand steadfastly with their much-admired Rudy Giuliani, a man so fine as to have been given honorary degrees from them.

Three of these schools are Catholic, and Catholics tend to be YUGE Trump supporters, so don’t hold your breath waiting for them to revoke the honor, even after he’s disbarred in total disgrace, imprisoned, etc., etc.

Middlebury College in Vermont, Drexel University in Pennsylvania, and the University of Rhode Island have all revoked honorary degrees that each school, in a moment of madness, conferred upon America’s close-to-highest-profile anti-semitic (Look ye to Soros, oh Blind Ones!) insurrectionist. These are godless public or private schools, lacking the spiritual perspicacity to see the Christlike miracle that is America’s Mayor.

And then there’s godless Syracuse, which is as we speak attempting to work RG out of its system. That school, too, fails to perceive the way in which Rudy acts as a vessel of the lord. The three Catholic schools sure as hell do, though, and when Rudy’s carted off to jail they will speak of his having been burned at the stake just like Saint Joan.

Figure it this way: If, for decades and decades, the most laureled person on your campus was Theodore McCarrick, ol’ Rudy don’t look too bad.

December 14th, 2022
‘[S]ome tired, lonely turf grass dystopia…’

Just down the street from UD (well, 23 miles away) live the stubborn couple who changed state law so that if you want to keep a pollinator garden in front of your house around here, you can.

A [2021] bill was drafted that forbade homeowner associations from banning pollinator plants or rain gardens, or from requiring property owners to plant turf grass.

They had a long hard tussle with a neighbor, but they made such a fuss it went all the way to Annapolis.

One of their neighbor’s bitterest complaints involved the deer their natural garden attracted.

Welcome to UD‘s garden.

(The post’s headline is taken from the thousands of comments the article has received, most of them agreeing with the statement’s strong anti-lawnism.)

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