Jordan, the University of Edinburgh's Library Cat, Disappears into Thin Air but No One Either Cares, Knows or Is Willing to Say What Has Happened to Him

The Handsome and Dynamic Jordan

"I do miss him. He was a constant and it was very sad to lose both a lovely animal and this character that had developed. There are other cats but none with quite his character."
-- author and student Alex Howard

(This story was originally published on October 3, 2017 but Google, every bit as cheap as the day is long, removed it from the cache on the right in order to conserve space so it is being republished today.)

 
Fame and fortune are said to be fleeting but their transitoriness is nothing compared to the life and times of a cat and that is especially the case with those that are cruelly and irresponsibly turned loose by their derelict owners in order to eke out meager, rough and tumble, existences in the street. For the latter, their tenures upon this earth often can be measured in terms of days and months, if not indeed by a stopwatch.

Thus was it the case with a handsome ten-year-old tuxedo named Jordan from Edinburgh. Absolutely nothing has been publicly disclosed about his birth but if his good looks and exemplary health are any guide he most likely came from good genetic stock as well as a domestic setting.

As far as the public record is concerned, his life began sometime in 2006 when he was adopted as a kitten by Father Dermot Morrin of St. Albert's Catholic Chaplaincy at 23-24 George Square. The Dominican friar in turn named him in honor of Jordan of Saxony who died at age forty-seven in 1237 in a shipwreck near Syria on a return trip from Palestine. Later in 1825, he was beautified by Pope Leo XII.

As far as it is known, nothing out of the ordinary occurred during the first eight years of Jordan's life but all of that abruptly changed in 2014 when he wandered across the square to the University of Edinburgh's main library where he ventured inside. The specifics of how that came about never have been divulged but the most obvious explanation would be that he was helped inside by an obliging student.

From that moment on it did not take him long to become a permanent fixture at the library which was founded in 1580 and boasts a collection of two and one-half million volumes. The institution's siren call seems to have been its comfortable sleeping chairs and the attentions lavished on him by the students.

"He is really popular. He has been coming in for at least a year," thirty-seven-year-old Caroline Stirling of the library's Help Desk told the Edinburgh Evening News on December 11, 2014. (See "Edinburgh University Give (sic) Library Card to Cat.") "He just tends to come in and sleep on the chairs near the door. I think everyone quite likes him."

That certainly was the case with twenty-two-year-old student Heidi Karjalainen. "Everyone knows Jordan. It's lovely how he is always in those seats inside the library," she testified to the Edinburgh Evening News. "It's like stress relief. He's like the substitute for my cat at home in Finland."

Morrin wholeheartedly concurred. "You have a lot of international students here and the appeal of the cat is domestic. It makes them feel more at home," he told the Edinburgh Evening News. "The students say its (sic) stress relieving because he's in the library when they study."

One thing led to another and eventually staffers took it upon themselves to issue him his very own library card. "External users can use the library -- he has his own reference card," Stirling explained to the Edinburgh Evening News. "Someone at the Help Desk made up the card with the photo. He doesn't have to have it with him when he comes in."

After the local media had gotten wind of that unusual and perhaps novel development the story went viral on the Internet and that magically transformed Jordan into an international star. A Facebook page established by twenty-seven-year-old graduate student Alex Howard entitled "Library Cat" soon attracted six-thousand-one-hundred followers and that cemented Jordan's acclaim.

His newfound fame did not do him one iota of good, however, and it even could be argued in hindsight that it only served to grease the skids for his eventual downfall. The first nail to be driven into his awaiting coffin came in early 2015 when an unidentified individual posted a notice on social media claiming that he had been run down and killed by a hit-and-run motorist.

Jordan's Library Card

"Library Cat better not be dead," one student protested to The Mirror of London on February 12, 2015. (See "Edinburgh University Library Cat: Jordan's Owner Tweets to Scotch Rumor That 'Cult Hero' Library Moggie Has Died.") "I don't think I could cope with that."

"These rumors that the Library Cat is dead are too much for me right now," another unidentified student declared.

Mercifully, that rumor turned out to have been unfounded. "There was a rumor started somewhere but it's completely untrue," Morrin informed The Mirror. "Jordan is absolutely fine."

That unnerving experience should have served as a wake-up call for Morrin, staffers at the library, and the student body in general but none of them were concerned enough about Jordan's personal safety to have taken any proactive measures and that in itself stands as a staggering indictment of all of those allegedly holy and intellectual individuals. First of all, they should have immediately introduced concrete measures designed to have ensured his safety, including the assigning of minders to have watched over him whenever he was outside either the friary or the library.

Secondly, the hoaxer should have been tracked down and identified. Considering that a place like the University of Edinburgh attracts all sorts of computer geeks and hackers that task should have been a piece of cake.

The incident was soon forgotten and as far as it is known the remainder of 2015 passed without further incidents of that sort. On Sunday, March 13th of the following year, however, Jordan vanished for good without leaving behind so much as a trace.

It is difficult to say with any certainty, but apparently no one initially even so much as cared one whit that he had disappeared. Most reprehensibly of all, it was not until nine days later on March 22nd that the university's press office was able to screw up enough concern to even send out a notice on Twitter informing the campus community that he was missing and to request its assistance in locating him.

By that time it was way too late and, as far as it is known, the only response that the press office received came a day later from student Sean Sweeney who claimed that there had been several sightings of Jordan in the Sciences and Causewayside area. Those reports, like the earlier hoax, almost certainly were erroneous because it is highly unlikely that Jordan would have stayed away from both the monastery and the library for that length of time, especially if he were still footloose and on the street. It could have been an entirely different matter, however, if someone had been providing him with food and shelter.

"Come back, Library Cat!" student Louise Krüger told the BBC on March 23rd. (See "Edinburgh University's Famous Library Cat 'Missing'.") "There's no way I can get through these final essays without you and your sassy face."

"I hope you've just found a girlfriend, Library Cat, or hanging out with your mates," student Natalia Sokolova wistfully mused to the BBC. "Do let us know you are okay. The last thing we need is to lose you."

In his role as Jordan's owner, the responsibility for his care and personal safety fell squarely upon the shoulders of Morrin but all indications are that he abdicated that solemn duty as soon as his cat took up at the library. "He ignores us when he sees us in the square," he confessed to the Edinburgh Evening News in the article cited supra. "He ignores us indoors as well unless he wants feeding."

Jordan Is Helped Inside the Library by a Student

That admission alone speaks volumes for Morrin and the three other friars who live with him at the monastery but it is anything but flattering reading. Most obviously, cats that are valued, loved, and treated well want to spend time at home with their doting owners instead of wandering the godforsaken and perilous streets.

It has not been divulged if Jordan returned home nights in order to sleep and to escape the elements and the dreadful eighteen hours of darkness that envelope the city during the winter months. He also likely frequented other shops and residences in the area but none of them have been publicly identified.

It accordingly is fair to surmise that there was something sorely amiss with the way that Morrin and his brethren treated Jordan. Whether intentional or not, they are responsible for his disappearance and, in all likelihood, premature death. The mere fact that he disappeared on Sunday when the monastery is packed with worshipers but attendance is light at the library could be significant.

The clergymen's abject neglect of Jordan is certainly nothing new in that the Catholic Church has a long and checkered history of abusing and defaming cats. For example, in 1233 Pope Gregory IX declared black cats to be satanic in his papal bull entitled Vox in Rama.

Later in the fifteenth century, Pope Innocent VIII issued his infamous witch bull wherein he declared that all cat worshipers and, by implication, cats themselves should be disposed of via the auto-da-fé. Ieper to this very day still glories in those atrocities. (See Cat Defender posts of May 22, 2006 and August 6, 2009 entitled, respectively, "Belgian Ritual of Tossing Stuffed Cats from the Belfry Makes a Jest of the Hideous Crimes of Capitalists and Catholics" and "Unrepentant and Totally Shameless, Ieper Once Again Makes a Mockery of Its Past Crimes Against Cats by Staging Kattenstoet.")

The Catholics certainly do not stand alone in their crimes against the species in that their Protestant allies have been, and continue to be, almost as criminal and ruthless in their mistreatment of them. (See Cat Defender posts of July 30, 2009, May 1, 2010, August 8, 2012, and January 10, 2014 entitled, respectively, "Ferals Living at a Baltimore Church Find Out the Hard Way That Hatred of Cats Is Every Bit as Christian as Unleavened Bread and Cheap Wine," "When It Comes to Cats, Acts of Faith Count for Absolutely Nothing with the Good Christians of Northside Baptist," "Polygamists Condemn Thomas to a Long and Excruciatingly Painful Death by Burying Him Up to His Tiny Neck Inside a Steel Post Filled with Wet Concrete," and "A Texas Judge Idiotically Allows Pastor Rick Bartlett to Get Away with Stealing and Killing Moody but a Civil Court May Yet Hold Him Accountable.")

All of the Christians' naked abuse and exploitation of cats and other animals originally was sanctioned by the Jews in Genesis I:26, 28, Acts X:13, and elsewhere in the  Bible. Tant pis, the latter still think and behave that way today as is evidenced by the tens of thousands of defenseless chickens that they sacrifice each Yom Kippur in a ceremony known as Kaparot.

In his May 24, 2015 encyclical on climate change entitled "Laudato Si. On Our Care of Our Common Home," Jorge Mario Bergoglio signaled the Catholic Church's readiness to move away from the Dominion Mandate of Genesis. So far, however, the only action that he has taken has been to open a McDonald's at St. Peter's Basilica. (See the Chicago Tribune, January 3, 2017, "McDonald's Heads to the Vatican, but Not Everyone's Lovin' It.")

In return for that dastardly sellout of the animals, Bergoglio and the Vatican are receiving US$31,000 a month in rent. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

What, if anything, was done in order to locate Jordan is a subject that, inexplicably, has not been broached by either local or social media. First of all, it would be good to know if Morrin even so much as bothered to file a lost cat report with either the Security Section on campus or the Gayfield Square office of Police Scotland. If so, how long did it take him to get around to doing so?

Secondly, since both the campus and the monastery undoubtedly are ringed by multiple surveillance cameras, the footage recorded by them on March 13th the days immediately thereafter should have been meticulously gone over with a fine-tooth comb. Thirdly, the Edinburgh Dog and Cat Home at 26 Seafield Road East, the Edinburgh Cat Protection League at 3 Casselbank Street, and the Scottish SPCA and the Edinburgh and Lothians Animal Rescue and Rehoming Center, both located on Mansfield Road in the Balerno section of town, should have been immediately contacted and alerted to Jordan's disappearance.

Jordan and Father Dermot Morrin

Fourthly, both Morrin and the library should have blanketed the entire campus and surrounding areas with Lost Cat posters that showcased Jordan's handsome face. Fifthly, Morrin, the university, and Howard should have offered substantial rewards for his safe return.

For his part, Howard claims to have attempted to locate him but he does not specify either how much time, effort, or expense that he put into that effort. "I was going all around the places where he had been sighted, holding out treats to try and find him," he told STV-News of Edinburgh on July 3, 2016. (See "The Mysterious Disappearance of Edinburgh University's Library Cat.") "I was worried he was trapped in a shed or something and couldn't get out or I had the horrible thought that someone had been cruel to him."

His first concern is a very distinct possibility in that a ten-year-old tuxedo named Emmy from Torquay in Devon barely survived being trapped inside a storage shed for nine weeks back in 2007. (See Cat Defender post of January 23, 2008 entitled "Emmy Survives Being Locked in an Outdoor Storage Shed for Nine Weeks Without Either Food or Water.")

He likewise could have become trapped inside either a vehicle or a shipping container and therefore either starved to death en route or wound up halfway across the world. (See Cat Defender post of December 12, 2005 entitled "An Adventurous Wisconsin Cat Named Emily Makes an Unscheduled Trip to France in the Hold of a Cargo Ship.")

He also could have been killed by a dog or some other animal, met with foul play, or been poisoned. Although he was not all that old and seemed to be in excellent health, it nonetheless is always possible that he could have become suddenly ill and crawled off somewhere and died.

The single greatest threat that footloose cats everywhere face comes from motorists, however, and he therefore easily could have been mowed down by one of them. The petit fait that such a violent end had been envisioned for him a year earlier constitutes proof that disposing of Jordan in such a hideous fashion had at the very least crossed someone's diseased gourd.

Jordan's killer then could have surreptitiously disposed of his body and no one would have been any the wiser. It happens all the time and even the police sometimes engage in such abhorrent conduct. (See Cat Defender post of June 18, 2015 entitled "Harry Is Run Down and Killed by a Pair of Derbyshire Police Officers Who Then Steal and Dispose of His Body in an Amateurish Attempt to Cover Up Their Heinous Crime.")

The strongest of all possibilities is that he was stolen. Under such a scenario, he still could be either living in Edinburgh but is either being denied access to the great outdoors or he could have been spirited out of the city to parts unknown.

No one therefore ever will know what has happened to him unless he either risks his life by somehow escaping or he turns up at either a shelter or a veterinarian's office. (See Cat Defender posts of February 8, 2017 and August 26, 2015 entitled, respectively, "The Long and Hopelessly Frustrating Search for the Kidnapped Mr. Cheeky Ends Tragically Underneath the Wheels of a Hit-and-Run Motorist" and "A Myriad of Cruel and Unforgivable Abandonments, a Chinese Puzzle, and Finally the Handing Down and Carrying Out of a Death Sentence Spell the End for Long-Suffering and Peripatetic Tigger.")

The last possibility would only come into play if Morrin had previously had him microchipped. He does not appear to be wearing a collar in photographs but even if he had been outfitted with one anyone bold enough to have stolen him certainly would possess the prerequisite bon sens to remove it.

"...the unfortunate feline species seemed to be fair game for every kind of cruelty and neglect," Scottish veterinarian and author James Herriot opined in his 1994 volume, Cat Stories. "They shot cats, threw things at them and set their dogs on them for fun."

Jordan and Alex Howard in Happier Days

Almost any mischief therefore could have befallen Jordan. It is just a hunch and nothing more but based upon the observation that most homicide victims knew their killers, it would seem likely that someone connected to either the monastery or the library is responsible for Jordan's disappearance.

One of the queerest aspects of this entire matter has been how that almost everyone connected to Jordan in either one way or the other has all but forgotten about him. For example, almost nothing has been written concerning his disappearance on Howard's Facebook page. The campus rag, The Student, likewise has been mum on the subject and the BBC devoted only seven slim paragraphs to his demise.

Furthermore, no ads calling for his safe return have appeared on either local television or radio. It almost seems as if even so much as mentioning his name has become verboten with a complete media blackout added in for good measure.

One possible explanation very well could be that simply no one cares that he is gone. Another reason could be that since he is gone he is no longer of any public relations and economic value to anyone and therefore he has been unceremoniously consigned to the dust bin of history. A far more sinister conclusion would be that someone is hiding something.

The one notable exception to that epidemic of collective amnesia has been Howard. "I do miss him. He was a constant and it was very sad to lose both a lovely animal and this character that had developed," he told STV-News. "There are other cats but none with quite his character."

Unlike seemingly everyone else, he at last report had not yet thrown in the towel on Jordan. "It's been over three months but I still hope he'll return," he averred to STV-News.

Although there is not any obvious reason to question his sincerity, he nevertheless could have both professional as well as economic motivations for remaining steadfast. In addition to his very successful Facebook page, in April of 2016 Black and White Publishing of Edinburgh printed his new tome about Jordan entitled Library Cat: The Observations of a Thinking Cat.

He is even contemplating additional books along that same line. "I have thoughts about follow-up Library Cat books," he acknowledged to STV-News. "I love the thought of Library Cat's nine lives and where be might be now."

If so, he certainly will not suffer from any shortage of material in that a new cat has shown up on campus. It is white in color with splotches of brown and is believed to be a female.

The first known mention of her occurred on October 24th of last year on Howard's Facebook page. "Apparently, there appears to be a 'new' library cat," an unidentified user wrote. "Anyone know anything about him-her? Appeared last Friday (October 21st)."

She is known around campus as Library Cat 2.0 and, unlike Jordan, she also attends classes. Neither her real name nor where she resides have been divulged.

Howard's New Tome

Most disturbing of all, it is not known who, if anyone, is responsible for her care and personal safety. The college collectively failed Jordan and that in all likelihood cost him his life and now it is all set to commit the same unpardonable transgression against Library Cat 2.0.

The mere fact that a sleazy degree mill like the University of Edinburgh is allowed by the authorities to get away with its abject exploitation, neglect, and abuse of cats like Jordan and Library Cat 2.0 is all the more reprehensible given that a growing body of damning evidence already exists that college campuses are extremely unhealthy, and often lethal, environments for them. For instance, students at the University of St. Andrews, eighty-five kilometers north of Edinburgh, allowed Hamish McHamish to sleep in the street for fourteen years without doing anything in order to relieve his desperate plight other than to occasionally provide him with a bed for the night.

The high-strutting professors and stingy administrators at the school were too cheap and uncaring to even have done that much for him. (See Cat Defender posts of June 20, 2014 and October 18, 2014 entitled, respectively, "St. Andrews Honors Hamish McHamish with a Bronze Statue but Does Not Have the Decency, Love, and Compassion in Order to Provide Him with a Warm, Secure, and Permanent Home" and "Hamish McHamish's Derelict Owner Reenters His Life after Fourteen Years of Abject Neglect only to Have Him Killed Off after He Contracts a Preeminently Treatable Common Cold.")

At Plymouth College of Art in Devon, students, teachers, and staffers took everything that the truly beautiful PCAT had to give for more than a decade without returning anything to her other than the notable exception of an unheated kennel where she could sleep. Most outrageous of all, these miserable slimeballs allowed a hit-and-run motorist to snuff out her life in October of 2012. (See Cat Defender post of November 21, 2012 entitled "Officials at Plymouth College of Art Should Be Charged with Gross Negligence and Animal Cruelty in the Tragic Death of the School's Longtime Resident Feline, PCAT.")

At Texas A&M University in College Station, an elderly ten to thirteen year old cat named Bisbee was not treated all that much better. Most notably, he was allowed to wander off and die all alone in a crawl space at the Biological Sciences Building East.

The Aggie Feral Cat Alliance of Texas, made up of students, professors, and administrators, did at least have the decency to build him a maroon-colored shelter and to feed, water, and medicate him. (See Cat Defender post of October 15, 2012 entitled "Texas A&M Ushers In a New Academic Year but Things Are Just Not Quite the Same Without Its Beloved Bisbee.")

When a wealthy alumnus died and left Juniata College in Huntingdon millions, the school's grasping administrators quickly gobbled up the loot but they wanted no part of his cat, Princess. (See Cat Defender post of June 9, 2008 entitled "Pennsylvania College Greedily Snatches Up Alumnus' Multimillion Dollar Bequest but Turns Away His Cat, Princess.")

Only recently at Rheinisch Westfälische Technische Hochschule in Aachen, students, faculty, and administrators willingly colluded with Nadine Biewer as she knowingly exposed her cat, King Loui I, to all sorts of dangers so that she, like Howard, could author a book as well as establish a popular Facebook page about him. (See Cat Defender posts of July 12, 2017 and September 15, 2017 entitled, respectively, "A Death Watch Has Begun for King Loui I Who Has Been Abandoned to Wander the Dangerous Streets of Aachen by His Derelict Owner and the Ingrates at RWTH" and "King Loui I's Days of Roaming the Perilous Streets of Aachen Come to a Sad End Shortly after He Is Diagnosed with Inoperable Throat Cancer.")

In all of those cases, no moral and legal ties ever were established between the schools and their pet cats. The former merely took what they wanted from them without any regard whatsoever for the latter's well-being and personal safety. Like morality, even sentimentality is the exclusive preserve of the few; most people in this world are only in it for what they can get.

As abominable as they mistreat pet cats, universities are even crueler to those that are truly homeless. (See Cat Defender posts of September 11, 2006, February 12, 2007, and July 31, 2008 entitled, respectively, "Selfish and Brutal Eggheads at Central Michigan University Target a Colony of Feral Cats for Defamation and Eradication," "God-Fearing Baptists at Eastern University Kill Off Their Feral Cats on the Sly while Students Are Away on Christmas Break," and " Cal State Long Beach Is Using the Presence of Coyotes as a Pretext in Order to Get Rid of Its Feral Cats.")

Most of them hate cats with such a vengeance that they simply cannot abide the presence of anyone who shows them even the tiniest bit of kindness. That in turn is why that Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, axed John Beck. (See Cat Defender post of June 14, 2006 entitled "Kindhearted Dairyman, Sacked for Feeding Feral Cats, Files a $20 Million Lawsuit Against Cornell University.")

The Newcomer, Library Cat 2.0

Many of these reprehensible, scumbag degree mills employ armies of vivisectors who torture and kill millions of defenseless cats and other animals each year in the course of their worthless and totally bogus research. In the United Kingdom, for example, forty-three per cent of all laboratory testing done on animals is conducted at its universities.

Specifically, during 2013 vivisectors at the University of Edinburgh cut up two-hundred-forty-one-thousand animals and that equates to a staggering six-hundred-sixty of them each day of the year. (See the BBC, March 9, 2015, "Edinburgh University Tops Animal Testing League Table.")

Included in that total were sans doute dozens if not indeed hundreds of cats. For example in 2006, the school's Danielle Gunn-Moore killed and cut up at least nineteen of them while studying Alzheimer's. (See Cat Defender post of December 12, 2006 entitled "A New Breakthrough in Feline Dementia Research May Actually End Up Killing More Cats Than It Saves.")

More recently, researchers at the University of Edinburgh have been busy suturing shut the eyelids of newborn kittens, performing brain surgeries on them, and then anesthetizing and paralyzing them with drugs in order to prevent them from moving and breathing as part of their investigations into amblyopia. (See the Daily Mail, June 2, 2014, "Kittens' Skulls Cracked Open and Electrodes Inserted into Their Brains in Shocking Series of Experiments at Nine United Kingdom Universities Including Cambridge.")

The vivisectors' devilry raises the specter that Jordan very easily could have been snatched off the street by one of them. After all, such monstrous crimes have been perpetrated countless times before.

For example, when former Senate Majority Leader William Harrison Frist Sr., a Republican from Tennessee, was studying medicine at Harvard University he routinely adopted cats from local shelters under the pretext of providing them with good homes only to take them back to his laboratory where he subsequently tortured them to death. "It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do," he later admitted to the Boston Globe Magazine on October 27, 2002. (See "First Responder.") "I was going a little crazy."

Yet, in spite of that candid admission he was allowed to get away scot-free with his diabolical crimes. If by any chance either Morrin, Howard, or anyone else in Edinburgh should still be interested in finding out what happened to Jordan, an inquiry into the comings and goings of the school's vivisectors would not be a bad place to start.

When the schoolmen are not actually torturing and killing cats in their laboratories, they usually can be found developing extermination methodologies to be used against them in the field. (See Cat Defender post of November 18, 2016 entitled "A Clever Devil at the University of Adelaide Boasts That He Has Discovered the Achilles' Heel of Cats with His Invention of Robotic Grooming Traps as the Thoroughly Evil Australians' All-Out War Against the Species Enters Its Final Stages.")

Even though their veterinary schools are the beneficiaries of millions of dollars in welfare money each year, none of them will lift so much as a finger in order to save the life of a cat without funds. (See Cat Defender post of March 19, 2014 entitled "Cheap and Greedy Moral Degenerates at PennVet Extend Their Warmest Christmas Greetings to an Impecunious, but Preeminently Treatable, Cat Via a Jab of Sodium Pentobarbital.")

At the Danish School of Journalism in Aarhus, students even go so far as to eat them. (See Cat Defender post of August 25, 2008 entitled "Danish Journalism Students Procure the Corpse of a Murdered Cat and Then Skin, Cook, and Eat It in Order to Promote Their Careers.")

Gone but Not Totally Forgotten, Jordan's Image Is Flashed on a Screen

When the professors are not actively engaged in killing cats in one fashion or another they are busily devoting the lion's share of their time and energy paving the way for ornithologists, wildlife biologists, and other ailurophobes to do so by churning out volume after volume of defamatory lies against the species. (See Cat Defender posts of July 18, 2011 and March 3, 2006 entitled, respectively, "Evil Professors Have Transformed College Campuses into Hotbeds of Hatred Where Cats Routinely Are Vilified, Horribly Abused, and Systematically Killed" and "A Cat Hating Professor at UC-Davis and the BBC Call for the Extermination of Seventy-Eight-Million Feral Felines.")

The long and the short of the matter is that cats cannot take care of themselves, especially in a world that is so antagonistic toward them. The average cat possesses the intellectual development of a four-year-old child and absolutely no one would turn one of them loose in the world to fend for itself.

Yet, researchers at the University of Lincoln stubbornly maintain that cats can take care of themselves. (See Cat Defender post of October 9, 2015 entitled "A Lynch Mob Comprised of Dishonest Eggheads from the University of Lincoln Issues Another Scurrilous Broadside Against Cats by Declaring That They Do Not Need Guardians in Order to Safeguard Their Fragile Lives.")

What lies at the bottom of such thinking and behavior is the intellectuals' fervent, but nonetheless erroneous, belief that the lives of cats are markedly inferior to their own and therefore patently unworthy of both respect and safeguarding. Even so much as a cursory examination of how that the former behaves reveals the fallacy of their thinking.

First of all, they cheat students and the government out of trillions of dollars each year. Secondly, instead of dispensing the accumulated knowledge of the millenniums, they substitute self-serving indoctrination and propaganda.

Thirdly, they are thoroughly incapable of producing any moral improvement in their acolytes. Socrates once asked the Sophists whose lives that they had improved and that question is every bit as relevant today as it was back then.

Fourthly, they pimp and whore for precisely those groups and individuals that are hellbent upon extinguishing life on this planet, such as the militarists, animal killers, and the despisers of Mother Earth. Fifthly, their corrupt athletic programs are nothing short of an absolute disgrace. (See Mike McIntire, "Champions Way: Football, Florida, and the Lost Soul of College Sports," published by Norton on September 5th and The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2017, The Informant Behind Basketball Bust.")

In conclusion, this world likely not only has seen the last of Jordan but no one is ever going to know, barring a coup du ciel, what actually happened to him. So, like their colleagues all over the world, the big brains at the University of Edinburgh have gotten away with another outrageous offense against a cat.

Believing themselves to be beyond all moral and legal constraints, the eggheads are too self-satisfied with their positions and power to ever endeavor to tap their gnarled toes to a new beat and as a consequence they never will change their thinking and behavior. The only remaining consideration is how long that humanity is going to be willing to suffer the impudence of these colossal charlatans and fraudsters.

In his much celebrated Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce defines a lecturer as "one with his hand in your pocket, his tongue in your ear and his faith in your patience." The only glimmer of hope therefore lies in the realization that, in at least some quarters, patience with these puffed-up buffoons has all but run out.

Photos: Carbonated TV (Jordan), the Edinburgh Evening News (library card), STV-News (Jordan entering the library), The Mirror (Jordan and Morrin), Alex Howard (Jordan and him), Amazon (book jacket), and Facebook (Library Cat 2.0 and Jordan's image on a screen at the library).