London’s mayor put out some rainbow flags and BOY IS HE IN TROUBLE.

“The [flags] will be ‘rolled back’ whether you like it or not, Mr. [Khan],” [wrote Joshua Charles]. “The options are: 1. Repentance now; or 2. Eternal punishment later.”

The latest on this smokin hot monk is that the University of Innsbruck has had a change of mind, and has decided that it does not want to host his habilitation thesis.

Apparently the school lacks faculty expertise in carbonizing flesh.

Perhaps Waldstein should pursue his interests here, for instance, rather than at Innsbruck.

Thou shalt, however, remain America’s by far worst state.

In a column written just before it passed, Polly Toynbee writes:

The assisted dying bill’s final Commons vote today is no abstract debate about slippery slopes or what God wants: to do nothing is to inflict torture on many… Only God [some say] ordains the time of our entrances and exits. [But] his word cuts very little mustard in a country where 53% have no religion…

[The assertion that my position is a] ‘cult of death’? That sounds more applicable to those willing to let others die in painful agony…

[P]olling of those with disabilities shows 78% in favour [of] assisted dying, in line with the rest of the population…

No, as some hope, morphine is not a kindly drug wafting you away – it can’t remove all pain. Enough people have witnessed bad deaths that public opinion is strongly behind the right to die…

If it passes, it goes to the Lords, where 26 bishops will do their damnedest to stop it, reminding us why they should be removed along with the hereditaries.

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Well, it has passed, so cue the bishops… For UD, this issue is as clear a case as any that religion can really be a wild and crazy thing, peeling off penis parts and blanketing women in black and insisting that people dying in protracted agony must keep shrieking cuz the Lord who loves you also likes the sight of suffering or something.

Bizarre. Not just a minority opinion. Downright microscopic, since most people put basic humanity before dogma.

… or else.

The Indiana Bible College has caught hell for plagiarizing (it seems a clear case — listen to two performances) Auburn University professor Rosephanye Powell’s The Word was God.

Instead of doing the Christian thing and taking it down, IBC has sued Powell for defamation. And the beat goes on.

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UD thanks Andrew.

Just steps from Harvard Yard, a group has been trying to … [make] space for [conservative voices] for years… It … has brought in speakers like … Adrian Vermeule, a Harvard law professor who has supported the idea of a worldwide Catholic theocracy.

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F-u-u-u-ck. Has that ever been done before? I mean a worldwide Catholic theocracy? Did I miss the years before 1054 when Catholics bestrode the globe?

Okay they were doing well in Europe then, but THE GLOBE? Has pretty much anyone besides Adrian Vermeule thought about, much less lectured, on this unprecedented SOOOOOOOPERWILD thing?

You thought the idea that gender is socially constructed was radical. What about A FOR REAL WORLDWIDE CATHOLIC THEOCRACY? Maybe in his most buried dreams Savonarola’s unconscious generated images of A WORLDWIDE CATHOLIC THEOCRACY of which he would be the SOOOOPERBUSY executive in chief, but I can’t think of anyone, outside of Vermeule (including anyone within the territory of the Vatican), capable in our time of producing and then sharing with everyone the idea that from Azerbaijan to Zanzibar everyone gets to be forcibly Catholicized.

Which may help one understand why viewpoint diversity institutes, like the one honored to have this fanatic share his superpower fantasy, remain somewhat in disrepute.

… with anti-hijabis ignoring the law making veiling mandatory, and pro-hijabis screaming in the streets against the anti-hijabis, while also insisting that women, as per nonexistent divine command, should be far more veiled, the parts of the government that matter seem to have had enough.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said on Sunday that the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has instructed the legislature not to enforce a contentious law mandating stricter hijab regulations.

“Although I had no intention of publicly declaring this in such explicit terms, the SNSC has formally written to the Parliament, directing us not to promulgate the hijab and chastity law for now,” Ghalibaf told lawmakers.

On the other side, the religious fanatics running Iran into the ground have decided that stealing citizens’ personal information, and setting up a Stasi-like system of everyone spying on and denouncing everyone else, is a great way of enforcing an unenforceable law.

“Does the Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice even have legal access to people’s personal data?” asked Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, a former government spokesman and law professor, in a popular post on X.

But forget legal niceties! When God decrees hijabs and chadors for all, you gotta go there.

 [T]here were over 1,900 reported cases of students challenging the values of the [French] Republic in 2023 alone — from refusing to attend biology lessons due to perceived “immorality,” to threats against teachers who discuss secularism, gender equality, or the Holocaust. A growing number of teachers report self-censoring in the classroom for fear of retribution.

And the problem is not confined to France. In Germany, several states have reported an uptick in Islamist-linked intimidation in schools. In 2022, a Berlin teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for showing a satirical cartoon during a civic education lesson. In Sweden, a teacher in Malmö was assaulted after discussing LGBTQ rights in class. Even the UK is not immune: Batley Grammar School in West Yorkshire found itself at the centre of a firestorm in 2021 when a teacher faced threats and had to go into hiding after showing images of the Prophet during a lesson.

These incidents are not isolated. They represent a systemic issue: the infiltration of radical Islamist ideologies into the educational environments of liberal democracies. Schools — once viewed as neutral spaces for the development of civic identity — are increasingly contested zones where the state’s authority is being tested and, at times, eroded.

Well, the rhetoric’s grand for sure, but as UD reads the letter from fifty Yeshiva University faculty protesting the school’s bestowal of its highest honor on Elise Stefanik, she’s gotta ask the signers: Do you know where you teach?

Do you recall – it wasn’t long ago – that Bernard Madoff was your BOT‘s treasurer, Ezra Merkin an equally honored campus VIP, and to this day Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf remain high-profile, influential, beloved, donors? Do you know that by far the largest bloc in America voting for Trump was orthodox Jews? Have you noticed that, right after the courts forced Yeshiva to allow a gay club, the school found a way to shut it down?

I mean so nu it’s always nice to protest, but why don’t you try getting a job at a reputable school?

Now that he’s on trial, he’s hunched over a big bible during testimony.

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I guess it could work…

… monolingual Americans thing.

He speaks English, Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese, and … can read German and Latin.

Israel’s super-icky national security minister is wined and dined by a once-respectable Yale intellectual salon. The Times of Israel offers background on the moral deterioration of this group.

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If a figure as eminent as a rabbi based at Yale can legitimize a viewpoint as extreme as Ben-Gvir’s, well, that adds fuel to [anti-semitic] fire. If a Jewish educator grants a hechsher (the kosher seal of approval) to a Kahanist, then he’s making the job of the Israel haters easy.

As part of their rejection of equality, the foundation of democracy, [the Israeli ultraorthodox] reject the democratic system except in the ways it serves their purposes. Their ministers, MKs, and public all openly clarify that they are obedient to their rabbis and to their interpretation of religious law, not to laws of the state. They have held huge protests against the Supreme Court, whose decisions they do not recognize — unless they serve their community. The Ultra-Orthodox parties are completely subservient to a rabbinical council, much as in Iran — but unlike Iran, lack even a semblance of democratic mechanisms. They vote for whomever they are told to vote, en masse, and according to their ethnic breakdown: Sephardim vote for Sephardi parties, Ashkenazim for Ashkenazim.

… For the Ultra-Orthodox, the state is a foreign body to be milked like a cow, which exists only to serve them, and never the reverse. The expectation they serve in the Israeli army is to them utterly ludicrous. Why should they give their time — heaven forbid, their lives — to a country which is meant to serve them, to defend borders they don’t recognize (God promised them all of greater Israel), alongside people who are beneath them? Worse still, they wouldn’t dream of serving together with women who are impure, or take orders from anyone but their religious leaders...

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Once the Ultra-Orthodox realize their way of life, which is entirely dependent on the generosity of corrupt politicians who buy their support, is untenable and unsustainable, the open and democratic society can begin to incorporate, educate, and accept them. Otherwise, there will be a crisis not only regarding the shortage of soldiers, but of supporting the abundance of children in the huge families, on welfare by choice, whose only competence is in reproduction.

Sing it, sister. But is that even a competence? I think it’s an instinct.

… (UD ain’t Catholic, but various friends and family are), has died. The very embodiment of religious hypocrisy, he was allowed by a church fully aware of his depravity to prance around for decades enacting piety and telling other people how to live.

Part of the much-larger story of Catholic church cover-up and abuse of power, his legacy will be that, in a strong field of child rapists, he was pretty much the worst.

… Catholic integralist Adrian Vermeule invokes his triune Godhead: Giuliani, Eastman, and Clark. Where, he asks, was the rule of law (which his colleagues worry about in their letter) when those great and good men were trying to make the world safe for Donald Trump?

And as to what Vermeule means by the rule of law – listen as he lays out his law-ruled ideal state:

Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

Yup. Right outta 1984. ‘He loved Big Brother.’ This is the rule of rulers, not the rule of law.