… Maryland to Delaware, for another stay at the beach.

Blogging continues unimpeded.

In front of a graphic reading, “Coronavirus Impeachment Hoax,” [Fox host Trish Regan] accused Democrats of creating “mass hysteria to encourage a market sell-off” and sowing fear about the virus “to demonize and destroy the president.”

... world.

Safeguard, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a lathered sea,
The worried-well hygienic bore
To their own healthy shore.

When quarantined I feel a rale
Thy hybrid structure virus shreds.
Thy micelle bubbles now we hail:
Thy hydrophilic head
And thy hydrophobic tail.

Now in its sixtieth year, it has hardly known a time when its fiscal affairs were not in chaos, when its board of regents was not dysfunctional, when its graduation rate was not shockingly low, and when exasperated white politicians in Austin were not talking about putting it under a conservatorship or ending its status as an independent institution.

Thirteen years later, that legacy remains fiercely intact, with Texas Southern University one of America’s most powerful epicenters of criminal negligence in the name of personal greed. One of its recent presidents just barely avoided prison; its last president is running around insisting he had nothing to do with the law school ignoring all applications not coming from people offering bribes, but time and a thousand ongoing outside investigations will tell. Meanwhile, the TSU bar passage rate in 2018 was 27%.

Hey, maybe the board of regents can help!

Ending its status as an independent institution… well, yes, but if it hasn’t happened after seventy years of malpractice , it ain’t gonna happen. What’s gonna happen? They will build new buildings. They will organize sports teams that brawl in empty arenas. The New York Times will visit and see reason to hope.

… this cause does. Help the guys loosen the grip of the feds! It’s up to us to pay their fine.

Sure, idjits are still buying McMansions; but lookee here: A sample of houses sold last week tells you a promising story: The two McMs had to take well over a hundred thousand off their asking prices, while the smallish house on Bayard Boulevard went for $56,000 over the asking price.

“I remember thinking this Trump thing is insane, but when it was down to him and Hillary, I kind of said, ‘Well, you are a Republican, and yeah he’s nuts, but maybe he’ll get better and you know he’s going to lower taxes,” Taylor said. “I slowly talked myself into it. ‘He can’t seriously be this deranged once he gets in there,’ and he’s even more deranged now than I thought then. So, I take the blame. I voted for him.”

Places like this deserve what they get. Men all over the world wear burqas to commit jewelry heists. Piaget didn’t know this?

They weren’t gang-raped while being beheaded.

Quebec is now ground zero for the fight between state and sect, having recently passed Bill 21, which bans all religious clothing and accessories among certain public sector employees in the workplace, and also having begun a Superior Court trial in a case brought against the province by an ex-hasid for educational neglect. Fiercely secular, Quebec followed France (which it sees as a model in the matter of laïcité) in banning burqas and niqabs from much of the public sector; Bill 21 extends this government constraint of religious expression (let’s be generous and agree that the burqa/niqab have something to do with religion – even though it’s more persuasive, it seems to me, to characterize them as pre- or even anti-Islamic and tribal) to things like hijabs and turbans and crucifixes on people who are working in the state sector. The ongoing Superior Court trial reveals that although Quebec claims to be quite secular, it’s not vigilant in secularity’s defense: If the complaints at the trial stand up, the government was perfectly aware for decades of the Tash cult, which kept its children in abysmal ignorance.

Jewish cultists all over the world, including the United States and of course notoriously in Israel, practice appalling educational malpractice, and although the court cases and school inspections and for real and we really mean it this time national education standards keep coming, the cultists persist in turning out unemployably ignorant people whose lifelong dysfunction our welfare payments support. No doubt the outcome of the Quebec trial will be a concession on the part of the province that they certainly fucked up in letting Canadian citizens raise their children according to thirteenth century standards; but without severe and unremitting penalties (school closures; unpleasant financial implications) nothing will change.

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

And as to the business of believing horseshit — the sort of thing the professor quoted in this post’s title mentions — well here’s how ol’ UD feels about that.

Our current vice-president doesn’t believe in evolution. Millions of Americans don’t believe in evolution along with him. Pence is leading the coronavirus effort, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally disbelieved the germ theory of disease.

The vice president thinks smoking doesn’t kill, condoms are “very poor” protection against disease, and the best way to curb an H.I.V. outbreak is through prayer.

Mehdi Hasan, whose opinion piece on the burqa I linked to up there, thinks Muhammed flew up to heaven on a winged horse. Plenty of competent, upstanding citizens who went to good colleges believe a crapload of horseshit. UD has some pretty weird articles of faith – or call them intuitions – herself, come to that… I mean, not as weird as the stuff I’ve been citing, but pretty weird.

So what. It’s the essence of personal liberty in the pursuit of happiness within a liberal democratic state that you can dabble in the alchemy of your choice on your own time as long as it doesn’t put anyone in danger, and as long as you fulfill the basic duties of a citizen. Mike Pence’s entry into the age of reason might all be a ruse, but as long as he keeps up the pretense of being one of us I don’t care. We’re onto ye olde private/public distinction here; and the position you take on Quebec’s Bill 21 will ride on whether you regard the outward exposure of your inward, arguably anti-democratic, and often anti-intellectual, beliefs to be damaging to the education of citizens of a secular state, or as undermining the authority and identity of a secular judicial system.

Broadcasts explicit invitation brandishing his big weapon.

***********

Sorry; wrong pic.

The author of “Integralism in Three Sentences” is a man who, according to the integralists I spoke with, has done more than anyone to revive both the term and the philosophy: Pater Edmund Waldstein, a 35-year-old Cistercian monk who lives in Heiligenkreuz Abbey, a twelfth-century monastery a few miles south of Vienna. The son of two theologians, one American and one Austrian, Pater Edmund was raised in an intellectual Catholic household and educated at California’s Thomas Aquinas College. By any conventional standard, his views are extreme: in addition to rejecting the separation of church and state, he is a monarchist who argues that the Church has the right to punish baptized heretics (Protestants), including by burning them at the stake. Yet he’s gracious and warm …

And now he’s losing. Maybe Israel can save its democracy. But only if it can keep its religious reactionaries from their work of destruction.

Dropped out. At very outset of his professional career, fined $20,000 for a late hit. Arrested for trying to carry a Glock 19 onto a plane. The University of Alabama watches with excitement for Quinnen Williams’ next move!