Or not. Apparently Sermon Stealing is worth noticing (by the New York Times!) on a sort of high-season basis, when one instance of it goes viral and prompts urgent discussion about the morality of getting emotional in front of the flock and testifying to someone else’s love of Jesus as if it were your own.

This latest shock and awe that ill-educated inspirationalists copy their betters will blow over in a sec, and the Bible Belt Industrial Complex will resume operations.

… tops that one by denying tenure to a scholar whose qualifications outshine almost everyone on the Chapel Hill faculty.

Not at all surprisingly, Nikole Hannah-Jones, having ultimately dragged tenure out of these dummies, immediately dumped the place for another institution. That was exactly the right thing to do: Make your point, embarrass UNC, and leave its sports-mad ickiness behind you in a cloud of dust.

Not that Howard, where Hannah-Jones has accepted a position, is a paragon. I’ve followed Howard University on this blog for years, and it’s got a pile of problems. But at least it’s trying to solve them.

… stands enthralled on a DC rooftop, watching last night’s fireworks.

[R]eplacing an expression with negative connotations is like swatting away gnats, because those same connotations regularly coalesce on the new term as well. Crippled was changed to handicapped; after a while, this needed replacing, and thus came disabled; today terms such as differently abled attempt yet again to elude the negative associations some assign to physical disability. This is an old story, one that the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls a “euphemism treadmill.”

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Hedonic treadmill definition here.

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And can this be true? No way does UD have the grit to read the actual document.

Do [the Brandeis Language Police] really intend to stigmatize the singing or playing of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”? Or to banish the expression rule of thumb because of an obscure and probably false folk etymology — namely, an antique British law that allowed men to beat their wife as long as the instrument used was no wider than a thumb?

Another DeLillo Death (others here) at the neighborhood golf club.

[T]he complex of foundations and bureaucracies that have embraced the new antiracism… increasingly play a similar role to talk radio in the Republican coalition. They represent an ideological extremism that embarrasses clever liberals, as the spirit of Limbaugh often embarrassed right-wing intellectuals. But this embarrassment encourages a pretense that their influence is modest, their excesses forgivable, and the real problem is always the evils of the other side.

That pretense worked out badly for the right, whose intelligentsia awoke in 2016 to discover that they no longer recognized their own coalition. It would be helpful if liberals currently dismissing anxiety over [the new anti-racism] as just a “moral panic” experienced a similar awakening now — before progressivism simply becomes its excesses, and the way back to sanity is closed.

… gaze from the back of Dave Almy‘s iconic green truck at parade spectactors. First Fourth I can remember when the weather was not just bearable, but actually pleasant. Photo: Bennett Roth.

No – at Penn State, we’re more about raping kids in showers than shooting guns into condos.

[Yesterday,] a [Massachusetts state] trooper stopped to help two cars pulled over in the breakdown lane. State Police said it appeared the two cars were refueling but the trooper noticed eight-to-10 people in the cars were wearing full military-style uniforms. Some had long rifles, some had pistols, and some had both. The trooper asked for driver’s licenses and proper licensing for the guns, but the group did not provide either.

While plagiarism accusations have proven a number one reason for political resignations in the Merkel era, they usually centre on politicians’ doctoral thesis. Baerbock’s [plagiarized] book, entitled Now: How We Can Renew Our Country, is a mass-market nonfiction title in which the Green politician lays out her political philosophy, ghostwritten by a journalist.

Somewhere, under the pile of plagiarism, ghostwriting, and vacuous title, lies – I think – a person, a Green party leader… Does she have a name, or did her parents hand that too off to a ghostwriter?

Oh, Baerbock. Does it say “Baerbock’s book” up there? In what way is a ghostwritten plagiarized pre-pulped poopoo platter Baerbock’s book? And since when does the Green Party endorse wasting paper on plumped up platitudes?

Their incoming fine arts school dean tweeted enthusiastic support of a man who has admitted to drugging women for sex, and whose conviction on aggravated indecent assault charges has just been overturned on a technicality. He continues to face multiple civil suits.

Now Howard University women get to worry that their new dean will bring her fierce defense of predators to their campus.

Its words are largely taken from this interview.

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Water seeping in from thunderstorms made

Changes at the geologic level

Until the pillars of the pool arcade

Put paid to all our revel

… to see exactly what UD sees almost every time she looks out the window. It’s always a female ruby throated.

As the photographer writes, bee balm is a “magnet” for hummingbirds.