A Vanity Fair writer assesses various scenarios that could tip the presidential race in favor of Donald Trump. Number Five:

5. CLINTON TURNS OUT TO BE A HOLOGRAM OF ONCE-LIVING CLINTON, À LA TUPAC AT COACHELLA
Projected odds of occurrence: below 0.01%
Disruptive power: medium

Clinton has not held any press conferences in a long time, and she normally seems programmed. But the odds of her being a hologram are still low, as she has repeatedly proven able to meet with donors this week. Also, it wouldn’t be a slam-dunk for Trump either way, because election law would come into play and Hillary’s hologram would have to be replaced by a flesh-and-blood candidate, something that might actually lower Trump’s chances.

So many full veiling bans have taken place – and will take place – in Europe that you can now discern at least one telling pattern in the process. Noise is made among political parties and leaders about introducing partial or full bans. IMMENSE numbers of opinion pieces appear in newspapers all over Europe, and in the United States, and in the Middle East. Almost all of these pieces oppose bans; the only difference among them involves the degree of anger and self-righteousness with which the author expresses her incredulity that anyone could fail to see the obvious degeneracy and threat to democracy such bans represent.

Next up are the national polls, which virtually always reveal that strong to overwhelming majorities in the country in question support a ban. Since taking seriously results like these is also a feature of democracy, and since disturbingly and very visually annihilated female minorities on your streets doesn’t, when you think about it, smack very powerfully of democracy at all, ban-opposers are in a bit of a fix. Always they write with the confidence that all decent-minded people perceive the evil of forcing women, via fines, not to be annihilated, and then it turns out that their confidence is badly misplaced.

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If they are honest, they ponder the disconnect between their sense of the world and what the world really is. Are virtually all of their fellow French citizens vile Islamophobes? Has everybody turned into Marine Le Pen? And what the hell happened to the goddamn European Court of Human Rights? The world’s gone mad!

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But it is now really the intellectual responsibility of people who defend a cultural status quo in which women are visually annihilated to examine with honesty and humility how it is that they came to be so out of step with the instinct of vast majorities in almost all of the European countries where the status of fully veiled women begins to become a matter of law.

Forget the six ND football players arrested in a span of a few hours last weekend for various violent offenses; cast your mind back to Notre Dame having recently paid football coach Charlie Weis a $19 million buyout.

Weis, currently doing nothing in a gated community in Florida while his wife buys horses, chats with an interviewer about his son’s effort to attend ND:

Charlie Jr. was on track to enroll at Notre Dame. Weis says [ND’s president] himself had promised that he would be accepted, as long as his grades and test scores qualified, which they did. But after Weis was fired, Notre Dame sent a letter deferring Charlie Jr.’s acceptance. Not long after that, Weis says, he got a call from someone in Notre Dame’s development office making him an offer: If he’d donate some of the money Notre Dame owed him back to the school — “seven figures,” Weis says — Charlie Jr. could get in.

Weis said no. Charlie Jr. ended up enrolling at Florida when Weis was offensive coordinator there for a year. Then he followed his father to Kansas. [To make matters worse for Weis, he also collected many millions in buyout money from Kansas. Now he’s a huge multimillionaire with nothing to do!]

Later, Weis says, a fundraiser for the school told him that Notre Dame used the [buyout] contract in pitches to donors, saying they needed to give more because the school still owed Weis so much.

Notre Dame: Classy.

At this late date in the history of scandalous Baylor University, we shouldn’t be surprised that this very assertively Christian University lacks the basic moral clarity a local newspaper columnist displays. “[W]hat Zamora did was illegal. But to me it’s not about the legality and more about what Zamora’s actions say about him as a person. A good, kindhearted, person doesn’t abuse innocent animals.”

[Baylor] fans just endured a disgusting sexual assault scandal and many are having a hard time supporting the team after that. But we were told all the guilty parties were removed from the team, so we’re not rooting for sexual predators. Baylor shouldn’t turn around and ask those who stood by them to root for an animal abuser.

Actually, Baylor just stonewalled – rather than endured – its way through a sexual assault scandal. It was dragged kicking and screaming to doing the right thing.

Baylor University is that most curious thing: a Christian institution seemingly designed to encourage cruelty and viciousness.

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What I’m talking about at Baylor goes beyond the moral dissonance demanded of all serious football fans – you must adore a sport so freakishly violent that its beau idéal is Richie Incognito, even as you tell yourself you’re adoring clean-cut all-American fun.

But that’s nothing. That’s step one. Now place yourself at Baylor. Or at Notre Dame. Pile university and Christianity on top of all that dissonance. Reconcile vast mass worship of a hyper-concussive sport, quite a few of whose standout players feature, on the field and in their private lives, exactly the sort of lunatic aggression you’d expect, with some stubborn vestigial notion in your mind, some vague remembrance, that the bloody ritual you’re adoring takes place on hallowed intellectual and spiritual ground.

It should be difficult to enjoy yourself unadulteratedly under these conditions, as the bullies, brawlers, domestic abusers, rapists, and animal floggers (fuck academic cheaters; forget cheaters; c’est entendu) bloody each other down there…

But hey. Turns out not only isn’t it difficult; it’s easy. It’s a pleasure.

Because – to state the bleeding obvious – violence is the primary object of worship in the world of Baylor University. You’re sitting in Waco – home of last year’s enormous bikers-with-guns melee/massacre. You’re sitting in the heart of Trump territory. Your choice for national leader is the man who has turned a presidential election into The Rime of the Ancient Tackler.

Strangely, you don’t even like nobly violent people; you cheer on chickenshits like Trump – a man who crapped all over a war hero because he was captured and “I like people who weren’t captured.” You cheer on players who beat up women, children, and animals.

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Some like it hot.

Hot and bloody.

It’s the Baylor way.

… in late summer. UD‘s back deck.

… scores, at the tender age of 26, an opinion piece in the New York Times.

Color UD impressed.

Quite the flub.

Trump so far merely exhibits mental confusion; little by little, he’s letting us in on why – perhaps – he’s confused.

My Secret Vote

(sing it with me)

Once I had a secret vote.
It needed utmost privacy.
The fact that I’m a masochist
Should stay unknown to all but me.

I’d shout my secret from the highest hill!
Sadistic Donald Trump gives me a thrill!
But these words I cannot say
Until I’m in a booth on ballot day.

The Clintons were just as willing to enrich themselves via the scummy tax-syphons as many Republicans were and are. Bill’s bogus chancellorship at a for-profit school paid him many millions to jet around the world now and then making inspirational speeches. UD is obviously a strong Hillary supporter, but the Clintons are paying now for what they did, and I’m afraid they deserve to.

Go to my Click-Thru U category for years of incredulity and anger that this should-be-criminal enterprise continues to thrive.

If you’re from Texas you know this venerable phrase, reminding you every morning to pack your cock (not Glock) in your knapsack (UD is so old she calls backpacks knapsacks) before you go to school. It’s part of a campus-wide protest against the new conceal-carry-in-classrooms law.

UD, a fervent supporter of this nascent open dildoes movement, admits to struggling a bit with the concept, though. What is the connection between showing a dildo in public and protesting against people bringing concealed guns to university classes?

At first blush, the gesture sounds merely aesthetic:

Cocks Not Glocks, a [University of Texas Austin] protest group formed last fall, is urging students and others to openly carry the sex toys around campus, offering a multicolored counterpoint to the concealed weapons that holders of handgun licenses can now legally carry inside UT classrooms and most buildings.

One of the organizers elaborates:

“As long as you have a dick on your backpack, people will be thinking about the guns inside of other people backpacks” [Jessica] Jin said Tuesday, dildo strapped to her backpack.

So it’s an aide–mémoire, a way of jogging your memory about the new fact of concealed guns all around you. Plus: obscene/obscene:

“The State of Texas has decided that it is not at all obnoxious to allow deadly concealed weapons in classrooms; however, it does have strict rules about free sexual expression, to protect your innocence. You would receive a citation for taking a dildo to class before you would get in trouble for taking a gun to class. Heaven forbid the penis.”

However, the university has announced it’s down with the dong, the more the merrier, go ahead with the dildoes, so the obscenity thing lacks a certain oomph.

I guess UD thinks of it as a counter-demonstration sort of thing, a provocative, amusing “response” to conceal carry… Also maybe a comment on guns as an aide-de-male-sexual-inadequacy-feelings? The gesture certainly skews female, certainly suggests a mordant womanly comment on boys and their toys…

Anyway there’s a rally on campus today and you should go if you’re in town because there’s something deeply shameful – not to mention dangerous- about so many guns out and about in states like Texas. UD doesn’t blame the UT architecture dean for resigning and moving to a non-lunatic state in response to campus carry (which, if I know Texas, will very soon be campus open carry), and she certainly hopes other faculty follow. Already a number of people who had planned to enroll as UT students have announced they’ll go to gun-free schools instead. And now you’ve got the dildo brigade, which is at once amusing and deadly serious.

It’s an annual autumn ritual in America: College presidents and trustees all over the country snap to it and notice that they’re running a student-chiseling, all-football, all-losses, no-attendance operation…

No, that’s wrong. What actually happens is that other people (legislators, faculty, journalists, students) notice with the start of another academic year how beyond-belief bad things are in places like the Alaska public university system, and those people make noise and that noise forces the mindless somnolent deluded sports-loving trustees and presidents to…

To say this is the end of sports as we know it at our university!

Yes, these stewards of the university have figured out that you can shut everyone up each year by saying ridiculous shit like you’re right we’re just gonna have to cease all physical activity on campus:

There are three athletics options under consideration by the university. Under the first, the University of Alaska Anchorage and University of Alaska Fairbanks would end all sports.

WHAAAAA….???? My lower intestine just curled around itself and I’m losing control of my bowels… Please no… no…

So that’s the basic move, whether you’re EMU or Fairbanks or dozens of other ridiculous hemorrhaging jockshops – scare the fuck out of people and wait for them to shut up.

Clinton also provided insight into how she’s preparing to handle Donald Trump’s freewheeling, improvisational style in their upcoming general election debates.

“I am drawing on my experience in elementary school,” she said before imitating a boy pulling on a girl’s pigtails.

… officers.”

Or, as the Notre Dame University football program would put it, GAME ON!

He was a football hero at the University of Southern California. The quotation above is taken from a 2014 newspaper article.

Things have gotten worse for him.

BAYLOR FOOTBALL SEEKS TO REDEFINE ITS IMAGE

It’s a terrific local propaganda piece, appearing days after one of Baylor’s football players was filmed viciously beating his dog. The player doesn’t make an appearance in the piece; instead, the football coach is quoted going on at length about

“We have a lot of really, really good kids… All I can speak to is since I’ve been at Baylor. We’ve lost some kids that were dealt with previously [this is the coach’s delicate allusion to rapists], but the kids I’ve been associated with are quality kids…”

Kids, kids, kids! UD loves it when coaches talk about their players as though they’re little boys… And they do it all the time. They’re the daddy; the kids are their boys… And there’s nothing like a boy and his dog to bring a tear to the eye, is there? Just one of coach’s adorable charges… Already 25,000 very angry people have signed petitions, a few days after the dog beating, calling for the coach to throw the lad off the team… but… you know… he’s a quality kid and just needs a little talking-to from Dad. Nothing wrong with him really except he, you know, likes to beat dogs. Not even worth mentioning in this local story about how in lots of other ways Baylor football – hell, Baylor University – would really like to redefine its image.

But what are you going to do? A disgraced president finally forced out; a huge and growing rape scandal; a football player starring in a home video all about his fondness for flogging animals… The stuff just keeps coming. Maybe Baylor should ask itself why.