As the University of California at Davis’s vice chancellor for DEI explained, “In these searches, it is the candidate’s diversity statement that is considered first; only those who submit persuasive and inspiring statements can advance for complete consideration.” In one faculty search at University of California at Berkeley, around 75 percent of applicants were screened out of consideration — irrespective of criteria such as teaching ability and research skills. Small wonder that many applicants engage in what Daniel Sargent, a history professor at UC Berkeley, calls “performative dishonesty.”

#BREAKING: Iranian president missing in helicopter crash on Azerbaijan border, presumed dead

… But … if you read this blog with any care, are you really surprised that a university sorority is being used as a cover for drug dealing?

True, VCU’s dainty prescription drug ladies don’t get anywhere near the mafia-level drugs and guns activity of the frat gangs of San Diego State, busted in the now-legendary Operation Sudden Fall. But as UD has pointed out a lot on this blog, you’d have to be an idiot not to see that frats and sororities are PERFECT operation centers for drug conspiracies. Clean-cut college kids who wash cars to raise money for St Jude’s! Earnest, physically attractive seekers after knowledge! Oh, you kids! All those hyper-secret events and insider signals and slogans – so cute! You wouldn’t want to put the closed cult thing together with the clean-cut moral cover thing and arrive at any conclusions…

Senator Josh Hawley and Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker have announced that this September they will visit the Islamic Republic of Iran to learn more about that country’s drone technology.

The men, friends and political allies, will be escorted to selected surveillance sites by President Ebrahim Raisi of the Combatant Clergy party.

“The intention is to gather information about Iran’s innovative use of drones to police its female population,” said a spokesman from Hawley’s Senate office. Under its new Chastity Law, the Islamic Republic beats and jails any woman found not wearing a hijab and loose-fitting, full-body-covering, clothing. The drone system allows the government access to any location girls and women may congregate – schools, libraries, restaurants, city streets, parks, public and private transportation, and the home – and facilitates immediate detention and beating on the ground by Morality Police.

“The applications here at home are extensive,” said Hawley’s representative, “in particular in regard to fertile white women who may be attending college and then entering the work force instead of becoming impregnated. It’s amazing to think we’re living in a time where we can keep daily tabs on non-reproductive citizens in order to identify them, counsel them, and offer them relevant incentives and disincentives. But first the Senator and Mr Butker need to know more about the technology.”

“I don’t quite understand how we can be paying people who aren’t on the payroll or paying an invoice without checking it and how we can have care being delivered and not know they are under-delivering,” [said a Kent County councillor].

 15 percent fewer U.S. medical-school graduates applied to Kentucky residency programs in the 2023-24 academic year, part of a trend related to states’ strong anti-abortion laws enacted after the federal right to abortion was abolished… In OB-GYN programs, there was an even sharper 23% decline… Kentucky hospitals are already dealing with an “acute shortage” of health care workers, with nearly 13,000 job vacancies in hospitals at the end of 2022…  [M]ore than half of Kentucky’s 120 counties didn’t have a single OB-GYN specialist in 2022-23…

“You wouldn’t come if you’re a young woman and know that if something happens to you, you might die because they aren’t gonna let you get the health care you need,” [explained one local pediatrician.]

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It’s already one of our very worst states, without adding a health system composed of the dumbest, most desperate MDs in America… or forget MDs… Kentucky will offer its populace their pick of degree mill grads from Dagestan and Irkutsk.

Soon to be Attorney General under the next Trump presidency.

Spawn of Franco Fanboy goes down.

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Bozell’s father submitted a letter to the court in which he … questioned prosecutors’ motives for seeking a terrorism enhancement.

“I have remained silent for the past 3 1/2 years because I didn’t want to tip the apple cart of justice,” he wrote. “But given what I saw in the trial, and more importantly learning about this terrorism enhancement, I no longer can. I believe there is more at play here.”

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Indeed there is, indeed there is. It is the hand of God. Praise Him.

… in Rehoboth Beach.

… Harrison Butker has initiated a petition of his own. It calls for striking the song “I Can’t Say No” from the score of Oklahoma.

CNN

Mr. Butker casually mentions that “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail,” a not-so-thinly veiled reference to a recent bill passed in the House to combat antisemitism.

The Jesuit Review concludes:

 Mr. Butker quoted the lyrics of his “teammate’s girlfriend” (Taylor Swift), “familiarity breeds contempt.” But he demonstrated what contempt for the outside world breeds.

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UPDATE: THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE KICKER

UD thinks the contempt point really gets at it. Here’s another writer:

 A sort of loneliness radiates from Butker’s speech; there is the sense, in his words as in Aaron Rodgers’s increasingly dire podcast riff sessions, that all of this displeasure has been bubbling away in there for quite some time without an outlet. Mostly, though, there is just disdain, not just for all the sinful things of the world but seemingly everyone and everything else in it. 

…  There is no room for anyone else in this worldview, no space for anyone to live or breathe. It’s striking how Butker is unable or uninterested to connect his own faith with those of the coreligionists listening to him; this whole belief system vibrates at the frequency of cable news, and so there’s nothing for him to share but a list of demands. If Butker’s speech works as a commencement address, it is only as an opportunity for new graduates to learn how they will be treated by the sour and vengeful mediocrities who are also the most powerful people in the world they are joining: as a series of shadows whose only purpose is to be harangued, so that they might learn to be less displeasing. The advice Butker offered at Benedictine College is not really trying to be a part of any kind of conversation. It’s just a kicker moving further and further out, to see what he can get away with.

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Masturbation is nothing to be ashamed of, any more than running away from a mob you yourself have excited; but if Butker and Hawley are going to present themselves as national avatars of generative masculinity, these are not their best looks.

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More deeply: If you want to find the world contemptible, babe, the world will always oblige. Piece o’ cake. Look around. But it’s kind of a mistake – one that is obvious to all of us when you make it – to confuse your misanthropy with unworldly piety.

[Gov. Maura] Healey was invited to give the keynote address on the opening day of [a recent Vatican] conference, a perhaps surprising choice by the Holy See given that she is secular, openly gay and staunchly pro-choice despite identifying as Catholic.

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UD thanks Joanna.

Although we did get bit
By the speech of Katie Britt,
I ask you people: What cur
Compares at all to Butker?
Rampaging, pureblood, Pit.

Including Dave Zirin.

Yes, the NFL wants female fans, and yes, they want fans of color, and yes, going soft on Butker risks that. But above all else, NFL executives exist to appease the whims of billionaires in the owners’ boxes most of whom—judging by their bankrolling of Donald Trump—agree with Butker. The destruction of Black bodies for white consumption and profit is an ugly business. Normally the NFL wants to keep the underlying ideology of its owners under wraps. The biggest problem with Butker is that he vomited it up for everyone to see.

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SOS grudgingly concedes that Butker’s speech displayed, Zirin notes, impressive concision.

Butker managed, in just a few minutes, to be homophobic, anti-abortion … and racist… He cried out against, “Things like abortion, IVF, surrogacy, euthanasia, as well as a growing support for degenerate cultural values and media, all stem[ming] from the pervasiveness of disorder.”

Given the size of Butker’s … vomit, you’d expect a great deal of difficulty coughing up a few tidy paragraphs, but he did the deed. He got it done. And now all of America is talking about it.