April 3rd, 2024
‘By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom… [These] pledges of allegiance … enlist academics into the DEI movement by dint of soft-spoken but real coercion: If you want the job or the promotion, play ball — or else… Detractors also reasonably object to what they see as a troubling invitation to ritualized dissembling. A cottage industry of diversity statement “counseling” has already emerged to offer candidates prefabricated, boilerplate rhetoric.’

LOL diversity statement counseling but as ever UD stands amazed and impressed by the money-agility of capitalists. Now that even Harvard academics are reduced to pledge-reciting Girl Scouts (I promise to do my best to help other people at all times, especially those at home.), it’s time to cash in on coaching.

But let’s see what else Randall Kennedy, Harvard prof and man of the left, has to say.

Such pressure constitutes an encroachment upon the intellectual freedom that ought to be part of the enjoyment of academic life… By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of discourse that is seemingly impervious to self-questioning, the current DEI regime is discrediting itself… I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice. The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince. The practice of demanding them ought to be abandoned, both at Harvard and beyond.

But hey whoa! Not only are arrogant snobs like Kennedy (‘make me wince’) shutting down TWO viable industries (DEI statement generation/enforcement, and DEI statement coaching), they are also impeding the suicide mission of Democrats as the coercive, “easy to parody DEI lingo” makes us look like assholes to the world and thereby makes the world safe for Donald Trump.

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More of the same.

February 27th, 2024
‘In 1982, the year Forbes released its first-ever annual list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, the shipowner and real-estate tycoon Daniel Ludwig topped the list with a net worth of about $6 billion in today’s dollars. In 2023, the top three wealthiest individuals, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison, were worth $251 billion, $161 billion, and $158 billion, respectively.’ 

Much ado about income inequality.

February 22nd, 2024
Washington State University has consistently been one of the worst…

… universities this blog has chronicled. Go here for its perfect storm of corrupt athletics, inept leadership, give-a-shit board of trustees, demoralized faculty, homicidal frats, etc., etc. Go here for a sample post, from 2021.

Now – finally – 207 of its professors demand radical change. The school’s national ranking has tanked; its athletic debt is beyond belief; research faculty shrinks by the minute.

They want the clown president out, for starters.

February 20th, 2024
‘Le directed students in the Post-Master’s and Special Studies Certificate Programs to make tuition checks payable either directly to her, to a merchandiser from whom she purchased luxury items, or to leave the payee line blank.’ 

An administrator at UCSF’s nursing school stole a million and a half dollars by the simple expediency of directing students to give her their money.

***************

Le hid her theft by removing students from enrollment rosters so no tuition would be expected or creating fake bank deposit slips to indicate received tuition and providing them to her supervisor, the memorandum said. Le also falsely documented tuition payments on an Excel spreadsheet. 

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And as to how you get students to hand you blank checks... UD’s figuring most of the students Le chose to rob were just-arrived foreigners?

February 20th, 2024
“35 teachers absent.”

The biggest high school in Massachusetts scares off gobs of its teachers and really can’t operate anymore with all the violence: A committee there has requested National Guard protection.

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Antioch Library in Contra Costa County is in emergency shutdown: Same chaos/violence/crime/drugs/public sex as Brockton High. Staff scared witless. Details, if you can stomach them.

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What? Whaddaya want me to say?

Here’s a couple of things.

Contemptible local/state politicians made it happen, outright deny it, or insist they had no idea and if they’d known they would of course have solved the problem lickety split.

Everyone at these two places knows it’s a matter of time before guns add to the fun. It’s amazing it hasn’t already happened.

February 2nd, 2024
Oh boo.

Esformes pleads guilty, and we will be deprived of a trial.

On the upside: His life has been ruined.

Put Esformes in my search engine to revisit all his despicability.

January 30th, 2024
Well, yes.

UD was there a few weeks ago, and Florence is indeed pimping itself out to the world. The Italians shouldn’t pretend to be shocked when someone calls them on it. Stop allowing unrestricted tourism, and people will stop calling you a prostitute.

Even Venice has imposed restrictions.

December 21st, 2023
‘In May 2018, as he left his law firm to work with Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani had about $1.2 million in cash and about $40,000 in credit card debt… [B]y early 2019, Mr. Giuliani was down to $400,000 in cash and had up to $110,000 in credit card debt.’

[He and his third wife had] a $230,000-a-month spending habit, six houses and 11 country club memberships.

He’s tried unloading the real estate, but no one will buy because the houses have Rudy Cooties.

December 15th, 2023
‘[Giuliani’s lawyer] had warned that an award of the scale being sought by the women would be the civil equivalent of the death penalty for his client.’

Rats. Just the civil equivalent.

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In the event, the jury did not award the women the original rumored amount of damages – around forty million dollars.

It awarded them $148 million.

 “[This award sends a message] to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”

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“This case is what happens when you combine vicious, over-the-top defamation against innocent victims with the single worst legal strategy ever devised by a human mind,” [Elie] Honig said [the day before damages were announced]. The former federal prosecutor broke down Giuliani and his lawyer’s approach to the case, explaining that because they agreed Giuliani was liable and conceded to defamation, he should have gone into the trial expressing remorse in an effort to minimize damages. “Instead, they go in on this damages trial and commit more defamation,” Honig concluded. “They are just asking for a massive verdict and I think we’re gonna see that tomorrow.”

December 13th, 2023
‘[In North Korea,] the life of the human being … is completely pointless. The concept of liberty or humour or irony or happiness or love doesn’t exist. You are there simply as a prop for the State.’

My much-missed hero, Christopher Hitchens, nailed it.

No wonder The Great Leader wept with desperation recently as he begged the linings of the country’s uteri to thicken.

Why reproduce? Why do anything?

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Yes, yes, of course: South Korea’s fertility numbers are even worse. But there’s a difference between living in an advanced society full of competing possibilities for women, and living mouth to mouth in a squalid gaping hole.

December 12th, 2023
‘[Barbara] Furlow-Smiles and her husband Ernest exemplify the values and aspirations instilled at Spelman.’

Hope not. She just pled guilty to stealing four million dollars from Facebook when she was an executive there.

I wonder when – if? – Spelman College will take down the page celebrating this contemptible person. And her comrade in crime husband.

December 12th, 2023
Supremes say FORGET IT to UD’s favorite mega-crook, a character right out of Arrested Development…

… the compleat criminal, Philip Esformes, whose pardon by fellow fraudster D. Trump lacked full coverage (given that Esformes had around five thousand charges against him). SOOO the feds just picked and chose among the leftover charges and went after Esformes again WHICH has pissed this ultra-pious ultraorthodox person off no end and he’s been appealing up the wazoo.

But every court – now including the Supremes – has ignored him or laughed him out of the building … Cuz you know when you’re committing the largest health care fraud in American history and you get caught doing it, judges prob aren’t going to bend over backward for you.

December 5th, 2023
Florida Republicans will use Withdrawal Method.

But they’re still fucked.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm can’t help wondering if the local press is having a little punny fun with the situation.

Some of the most ardent MAGA Republicans in the Florida GOP are turning on Ziegler.

LOL.

December 4th, 2023
More Commentary on Dirk Diggler. I mean Zirk Ziegler. I mean …

 Lurid finger-pointing from conservatives is often, as most folks have figured out by now, a form of psychological projection. It hasn’t even been two weeks since the release of a similar story outing a Philadelphia organizer for Moms of Liberty for his 2012 conviction of sexual abuse of a 14-year-old boy…

 Time and again, we have seen this story play out: The self-appointed guardians of everyone else’s sexual morality often have rather exotic sex lives of their own. Just ask Jerry Falwell Jr. 

… We can rule out sincere concerns about sexual violence as the reason the Zieglers are looking friendless this week. Republicans do not hold rape allegations, no matter how credible, against their leaders. After all, a court found Donald Trump responsible for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll just this year, which comports with Trump’s previous bragging about how he likes to “grab them by the pussy.” Yet he is still sailing to the Republican nomination.

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You remember Dirk.

December 3rd, 2023
“Sex toys! I don’t know what world where that’s acceptable.”

Doms for Liberty head Bridget Ziegler may be found here hyperventilating about sex toys.

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