October 11th, 2023
There are plenty of non-baby-beheading groups militating in various ways against Israel, and Harvard’s now-notorious Group of 33 could have affiliated itself with any of them.

However, it chose Hamas.

And now the Group of 33 is being blacklisted by corporate America, a place a lot of them probably assumed would welcome them with open arms.

[Bill] Ackman, the CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, tweeted he has been approached by “a number of CEOs” asking for the names of the student organizations to ensure “none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” arguing students “should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists.”

Jonathan Neman, the CEO and co-founder of healthy fast casual chain Sweetgreen, responded to Ackman’s post on X, saying he “would like to know so I know never to hire these people,” to which healthcare services company EasyHealth CEO David Duel responded: “Same.”

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

Here’s how UD thinks of it. Go ahead and publicly affiliate yourself with the fifth century. But don’t then expect to step smoothly into the twenty-first.

August 8th, 2023
Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of financial collapse over seven long years:

They could have apologized long long ago

Or filed no appeals and settled it (doh!)

They could have let up on destroying the shop

But no one and nothing could make them stop

And now the school weathers yet more horrid news

Insurance won’t pay so they’re going to sue

Yes, more crushing payout for many more years

All because Oberlin stopped up its ears

June 25th, 2023
Teach for America

The recent remarks of Wisconsin State Representative Chuck Wichgers, during a debate in the state house, have gone viral.

Wichgers’ statement in opposition to birth control points to the failure of Wisconsin’s schools to educate its citizens in even rudimentary literacy, oral expression, and thinking skills.

“Nature has an intention and when you have that act—when pregnancy naturally occurs, that’s nature doing what nature does. The woman then has to counter nature by taking something that is highly systemic and highly invasive, according to the documents and the books that people that are pro the pill stated in their books. That’s a science. We would begin to see ourselves as the ultimate masters of nature, so when nature does something it’s supposed to do and then we say, ‘Let’s not do that’—we’re talking not about getting a pimple if you eat Doritos and eat chocolate; that would be contrary to a health movement or nature.”

It is hard to think of a more poignant demonstration of the importance of quality, universal education than this public statement by a high-ranking official of the state of Wisconsin. Surely with all of America’s wealth and resources we can do better.

January 25th, 2023
See now Japan is currently demonstrating the problem with being a patriarchy. I mean, go right ahead, be a patriarchy, but when you patriarchically decide to lecture the little ladies on how they have to figure out a way to get their husbands to fuck them so as to be impregnated by them or else the country’s going to shrivel up and demographically die… they might not listen to you! They’re downtrodden, see, you downtrodded them, and they hate you because you’re the fucking Japanese patriarchy. See? So when they tell you to shove it up your ass you shouldn’t be too surprised.

When they tell you YOU get knocked up and make Japanese babies you stupid motherfuckers, you shouldn’t be offended because you’re the ones who make life hell for Japanese women and now you want to make it more hellacious by burdening them with children in a nauseatingly patriarchal state.

I mean, take a look at Hungary, boys! Same deal. How’s Hungary doing as it frantically tries to get its dick up the national vaginal canal?

Short answer: Not well.

April 13th, 2022
‘Oberlin has [fewer] than 3,000 students enrolled and an endowment of nearly $900 million; the research-intensive Canadian university where I teach, McMaster, has more than 30,000 students enrolled and in 2017 its endowment was about $704.7 million. The U.S. dollar is worth about C$1.30, so that means Oberlin’s endowment has more than USD$300 million than McMaster’s…’

But that was 2019. Little Oberlin’s endowment currently stands at $1.09 billion.

A few years ago, Oberlin College did a hell of a lot of damage to a local bakery – falsely accused it of racism, got tons of people to boycott it – and a jury’s decision that it pay the bakery $33 million in compensation doesn’t sit at all well with the school. But the decision has been upheld; the school’s only option at this point is to kick things up to the Ohio Supreme Court… or hey, maybe the US Supreme Court would like to air, for the nation and the world, a billion dollar school’s vicious attack on a local small business.

Let’s wait and see what Oberlin decides to do. Not paying will expose it to yet further penalties, one assumes; so it can’t do nothing forever. I’m figuring an Ohio court at any level will share the outrage of an Ohio jury in regard to the arrant vileness of Oberlin’s behavior. I doubt the Supreme Court would look at the case. And, you know, Oberlin has enough money in its endowment to pay what it owes.

It’d be nice if they concluded something humane and useful for themselves as a result of all of this, but that ain’t gonna happen. Mob rule will prevail.

*********

UD thanks David.

March 2nd, 2022
“Zemmour this week finally got the required signatures of sponsorship to stand in the first round of voting in April’s Presidential election – but his poll numbers have suffered a drop in recent days. He has been an outspoken admirer of Russian president Vladimir Putin and has lamented in the past that France does not have ‘its own Putin’.”

Even Hungary is taking in Ukrainian refugees; but Eric Zemmour says absolutely not. Not one Ukrainian refugee should be accepted into France.

It’s a little difficult to see France voting for its very own Vlad Putin, Eric Zemmour, especially (cough) now.

Zemmour’s tanking poll numbers suggest he might have backed the wrong butcher.

July 13th, 2021
‘Baker Tilly (the City’s consultant for the recruitment of the City Manager position)…’

UD always wonders, when these recruitment catastrophes happen, why the firm hired (at great cost) to find the catastrophic applicant never seems to suffer consequences.

College Park, where lies Mr UD‘s University of Maryland, hired, thanks to Baker Tilly, a woman whose easily accessible personal website ought at the very least to have provoked Baker Tilly to wonder whether the person they promoted for city manager would prove an embarrassment. As it is, College Park hired with great huzzahs and then fired – with what will probably be a good deal of legal/financial trouble – Natasha Hampton, only days before she was due to take the job.

[P]rior to her start date of June 1, 2021, the Mayor and City Council were made aware of certain discrepancies in the information Ms. Hampton had provided to the City.

The hyper-vainglorious nature of Hampton’s website suggests that indeed she may be exaggerating this or that achievement a tad… And how hard would it have been for Baker Tilly to determine that her college is close to losing its accreditation? Etc. You hire firms like this in order to avoid this sort of outcome.

January 30th, 2021
They’re…

coming around!

December 28th, 2020
Beware Technically Apt Men in their Early Sixties who are Getting Noticeably Weird.

UD shares a little end-of-the-year end-of-the-world wisdom with you.

July 20th, 2020
‘[Ex-Fox anchor Ed] Henry mocked the concept of climate change, insisting that “first, it was ‘global warming,’ then it was ‘climate change.’ Now, maybe ‘extreme weather?’” Apparently befuddled over the terminology, Henry claimed that “the left keeps rolling out new terms but pushing the same agenda.”’

Maybe now, with all the extreme weather coming his way, Ed Henry will reconsider his dismissal of the term.

October 12th, 2017
‘The Audacity of Blaming Sex Addiction’…

… is an article in The Atlantic about Harvey Weinstein.

These are … problems of power and status that manifest as a violent disregard for others — a failure to acknowledge the autonomy of women or a problem accepting it and a compulsion to revoke it by force. So it feels especially jarring to hear that same person professing a lack of agency in these acts.

Whether you refuse to let women out of the house unless they cover every inch of their body with a black sheet, or refuse to let women transact business with you unless they take off their clothes and go down on you — whether it’s All clothes off! or King-sized sheet on! — it’s quite the same thing: The violent revocation of women’s autonomy.

The only thing that differentiates American from French culture in these matters is that when Dominique Strauss-Kahn (an uncannily identical twin to Harvey Weinstein) was himself finally outed, bigshot philosophers defended him.

[Bernard-Henri] Lévy says … that the man he calls a friend of 20 years, “bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast now being described nearly everywhere. Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally, but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it’s absurd.”

BHL is a smart guy, but he seems unable to grasp that you can be an articulate, enlightened economist, or a sensitive maker of art films, and a primate.

June 23rd, 2017
Limerick.

These United States

Alabam’s our wild red yonder
Jeff Sessions makes its heart grow fonder
Inside its schools
The rightwing rules
In the person of Mr. Ponder

March 24th, 2017
“[P]ossibly the most serious criminal conviction of a college leader in American history.”

Whether your campus administrators are protecting coaches at Penn State or professors at Berkeley or athletes at Baylor…

… Seems as though there’s eventually an awfully high price to pay.

August 20th, 2016
In keeping with his Russian …

orientation, Donald Trump has adopted a fierce Lysenkoism in regard to science. Scientific American is not amused:

Donald Trump also has shown an authoritarian tendency to base policy arguments on questionable assertions of fact and a cult of personality… [T]he major Republican candidate for president has tweeted that global warming is a Chinese plot, threatens to dismantle a climate agreement 20 years in the making and to eliminate an agency that enforces clean air and water regulations, and speaks passionately about a link between vaccines and autism that was utterly discredited years ago…

August 12th, 2016
Mrs. Gingrich to Donnie: “I think we’ve had quite enough of THAT, little fellow!”

He has got to learn to use language that has been thought through and that is clear to everybody, and to stick to that language.

No one ever said being a kindergarten teacher is easy.

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