Arday Was Just A Catalyst

 ... or maybe he was an indicator. I'll leave it to you to come up with the right descriptive word.

Dig this. The professor who pursued the Arday story and brought his fraud and fabulism to light, Nathan Cofnas, used to teach at Cambridge, but was hounded out of the university for uncovering Arday's deceptions and the university's willing compliance. From there, he went to Ghent University in Belgium. Ghent is no slouch, ranking as the second best university in Belgium and in the top 100 globally.

Ghent just suspended Cofnas.

Ghent University in Belgium announces it is taking “appropriate action” …against the academic who *exposed* the Arday plagiarism.

The rectors says they attach great importance to academic freedom, but it “may be restricted to protect the rights of others.”

Cofnas is convinced he's about to be fired.

I was just suspended by Ghent University. They will almost certainly fire me.

The decision was made by rector Petra De Sutter, a former leader of the Green Party.

 Who is Petra De Sutter? Well, he is the Rector of Ghent. He's also convinced he's a woman.

Rector Paul De Sutter, who goes by 'Petra' nowadays (shielding him from criticism), is an insult to science itself.

He hates real scientists and truth. Paul even denies the existence of binary biological sex. When I had a debate with him on national television about transgenderism, he lost badly and tried to get me kicked out of university out of spite.

Paul, leading member of the far-left Green Party, is also extremely incompetent. During his four year tenure as minister responsible for state companies, our two biggest state companies Bpost (postal services) and Proximus (telecom services) lost respectively 80% and 65% of their market value.

Take the claims about the debate by Dries Van Langenhove with a grain of salt until you've seen it for yourself. I haven't and I haven't even looked for it. I found sufficient corroborating evidence to believe "Petra" is indeed a loon who thinks he's a woman.

And so here we are. Jason Arday, a man who was clearly mentally ill, was vaulted into one of the most prestigious positions in one of the greatest universities on Earth by a pack of moral perverts and now supported by an autogynephilic man in a similarly prestigious university, himself holding a position of great consequence after having demolished a pair of large, state-run enterprises.

Matt Walsh's pithy take on the whole thing might be the best summation of what has happened to our top schools.

This Is A Fetish

Dig this.

When Jason Arday was named Cambridge's youngest black professor, the BBC made at least 5 documentaries about him and gave him his own radio series.

This is a fetish. It's gross. I feel like I've been given a view into a guy's bedroom where he likes to dress up in a French maid costume. 

It's not just Cambridge, it's all of them plus the newsmedia.

Arday Or Arday Not?

Apparently, the answer is Arday not.

That's some black humor, dark pun intended, after Jason Arday committed suicide following his public unmasking as a complete fraud and fabulist and his dismissal from Cambridge.

Well of course he did. Anyone listening to him spin his tall tales for even 10 minutes would have seen that he was a mentally ill compulsive liar. What was it, 30 marathons in 35 days, the last 5 on a broken leg? My goodness, any of his stories would have been enough to convince someone with even an ounce of sense that this guy should be seeing a psychiatrist, not the inside of the Cambridge faculty lounge.

And yet, there he was.

Arday was a pitiful person worthy of compassion, not censure. Yes, he had a habit of tarring accusers as racists and took steps to have them face court proceedings any time he was threatened, but what of that? Of course he did. The entire, rotten education, entertainment and news industries filled his head with twaddle about white supremacists and racial justice. The problem was never with Arday, it was always with Cambridge and its ilk.

You can substitute the names "Claudine Gay" and "Harvard" and save for the suicide, the story would be the same.

Our education system is very, very ill.

It was at that moment that Professor Wilson realized that his equations for diversity, affirmation and success gave him an unsolvable set of contradictory inputs.

Bonus Cambridgery

Arday is just the tip of the iceberg. From this X post comes the content below. Cambridge is hiring these people on purpose. 

Extracts from 11 Aug article in Spectator by Andrew Gilligan:

After the Jason Arday disaster, here is new evidence that things have gone deeply wrong at Cambridge University.

We can reveal that a former supporter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, now banned as a terror group, has been appointed assistant research professor of education at Cambridge, in the same faculty as Arday.

Ahmed is now responsible for postgraduate research in education at Britain’s top university, and for teaching undergraduate students, the future leaders of the profession, ‘how education shapes individuals and society.’

Farah Ahmed has explicitly attacked ‘western education’ as a ‘threat’ to Muslims, condemned democracy and integration, and criticised British schools for teaching pupils that child marriage is wrong. 

During her time at Cambridge, she has written that the Islamic concept of education is sharply opposed to ‘gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications’.

She attacks schools’ ‘attempts to integrate Muslim children’ as seeking to ‘produce new generations that reject Islam… if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.’

Worst of all, ‘religious tolerance is primarily pushed in religious education’, meaning that ‘Islam is taught as a religion like any other, putting its value on the same level as Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism and the like.’

Science is a problem too, because in the ‘teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam’. And in any subject, boys and girls may be asked to work together.

Gay? Arday? No Way!

By now, you've probably heard about Cambridge's very own Baron Munchausen, Jason Arday. His meteoric rise through the ranks of academia was originally assumed to be due to his brilliant achievements, but in the end, it was discovered it was due to his possession of one crucial characteristic that all upper-echelon universities crave: he's black.

If you haven't been following the story, it's really simple. He is a pathological liar and fabulist as well as a plagiarist. The leadership at one university after another fell over themselves to recruit and promote him until he ended up the youngest black full professor in the history of Cambridge.

If you haven't been following the story, it's worth some digging. I'm not kidding about the Baron Munchausen thing. In addition to stealing other peoples' work and taking it for himself, the guy claimed all manner of perfectly preposterous accomplishments including running several ultra-marathons in a single month. The more you read, the more pathetic ... Arday? No, not him ... Cambridge? Yes, that's it ... Cambridge becomes.

You can substitute Claudine Gay from Harvard in here and get the same results. The Daily Wire crew recently did some investigative journalism, something that disqualifies their staff from ever landing jobs at any of our prestigious newspapers, and discovered that Heidi M. Anderson, president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore, was also a massive plagiarist and her tenure as president is shot through with accusations of anti-white racism. She's black, you understand.

Any condemnation of Gay, Arday or Anderson is met with shrill cries of "Racism!" That's the tell.

What the desperate leaders at all of these universities are fighting is not white supremacy, but the very real possibility that the mountains of racial IQ data might be correct. They've tied themselves to the railroad tracks of racial interchangeability, if not white inferiority and now they're trying to keep from being run over by the train labeled "Reality." 

I'm not saying the data is correct or that it isn't the result of cultural forces. I don't really care either way. Genesis 1:27 tells me how to treat each person whether that's a white tweaker sitting next to me at a Waffle House in Arkansas or a black theoretical math student in class with me at UCSD back in the day. Like the evolution debate, I don't have a dog in that fight.

That leaves me free to speculate. If the average IQ for blacks is 90, say, and Harvard accepted only people with an IQ of 130 or above, then given the demographics of the US, you'd expect for the student population (6,700 or so) to have about 200 blacks in it. That's roughly 1 in 33.

Using that as a baseline, you might expect the faculty of the top shelf universities to have the same ratio.

They don't. Not only do they not have that ratio, they're positively obsessed with getting black representation as high as possible.

If the IQ data is true, then the only way to do that would be to hire lots of people like Jason Arday and Claudine Gay and Heidi Anderson, which is what we're seeing.

You can't blame Arday and Co. They're just playing by the rules and rationally taking the opportunities offered to them. It's easy to point the finger at the plagiarists and yarn-spinners, but the moral universe the progressives have created has told them to ignore Commandment 9, the one about bearing false witness, when it comes to finding employment.

Can you blame them for doing what they did?

Ugh

It's been quite the adventure here in Alabama. I'm working full time while getting a fairly long list of tasks accomplished to get our river house ready to be a vacation rental. It's all going rather well and I'll be done in a week with the place ship shape. However, these endless 11 and 12 hour days are a grind.

I celebrated rather freely last night, having completed one of the most important tasks a bit ahead of schedule. A potent mix of alcohol and tobacco, you know. The results this morning have been dreadful. Naturally, I found just enough energy this morning to sit in front of the computer and type out some doggerel with the help of ChatGPT.

I could just hear Basil Fitzallen now in full Terry Thomas mode nursing a similar situation...

"You know, I'd hate to encounter great-great-uncle Reginald Fitzallen in the afterlife right about now. He fell under a hail of poisoned arrows from a group of enraged savages while exploring the Zambezi for the Royal Society. I've been laid low by tobacco and cocktails."

“Reginald, you understand, had been feverish for three days. Spear wound in the thigh. Lost two bearers to crocodiles. Nonetheless continued upriver because he'd promised the Society accurate measurements of the damned falls.”

Basil regarded his coffee with profound distaste. “I, meanwhile, consumed several perfectly agreeable drinks and smoked rather more tobacco than was strictly indicated.”

Bobby, looking equally bedraggled, looked over the rim of his cup. “Heroic.”

“Quite.”

“Did you at least discover anything?”

“Yes. Apparently there is an upper limit.”

“Important scientific work.”

Basil sighed. “The Fitzallens have always made sacrifices in the advancement of human knowledge.”

“Your great-great-uncle explored the Zambezi.”

“And I established the maximum safe dosage of Three Old Men tobacco.”

“Royal Society ought to hear about it.”

Basil considered this. “I rather think we'll keep it within the family.”

General Beauregard was lying nearby looking perfectly healthy despite having eaten something unspeakable he found beside the river. Basil stared at him.

"That animal consumed half a decomposing nutria yesterday.”

Bobby nodded. “Seems fine.”

“That hound is absolutely insufferable.” 

Who Has The Best Selection Of Lodge Cast Iron Skillets?

In South Alabama, it's this place. They have them all.

Buc-ee's is new to Alabama. This one is right off the I-10 in Robertsdale. Being a California boy, I'd never been inside a Buc-ee's. It was amazing. I've never seen such retail energy and this was on a Tuesday afternoon. The place was a frenzy of joyful purchasing. I don't mean that in a condescending, superior way, I mean that with genuine admiration and affection.

I didn't get a stuffed beaver, but I did get the Lodge battleship, their biggest skillet, a 15" monster. Buc-ee's had the entire line. Who knew?

I just realized I need to go back and get stuffed beavers for the granddaughter and the new tot next door.

Resolving The Ceuta Crisis Was Cheap

 ... especially if you shove the cost on future generations.

I know I've blogged this sentiment before, but watching the European and British leadership surrender to migrant invasions and then weather any and all electoral reckonings drives the point home again.

Here's a scene from the recent invasion of Ceuta.

Un conocido que trabaja en el hospital de Ceuta me escribe esta noche. Me cuenta que en los alrededores del hospital han arrancado tuberías para ducharse en la calle, que el Gobierno ha prohibido a las fuerzas de seguridad guiar a los inmigrantes hacia la frontera para que se… pic.twitter.com/CIx6ZXMmUL

— Martin Varsavsky (@martinvars) August 2, 2026

Translated: An acquaintance who works at the Ceuta hospital writes to me tonight. He tells me that in the surroundings of the hospital, they've ripped out pipes to shower in the street, that the Government has forbidden the security forces from guiding the immigrants to the border so they can leave on foot. He tells me that today they've continued entering and causing disturbances in some areas of the city. He tells me that the Muslim Ceutans with Spanish citizenship are already half the population or more, and that adding in the uncensused and the newly arrived, Christians are now a minority. It's the reconquest of the reconquest. He sends me these videos.

Imagine what the replacement cost of those pipes is, then multiply it by, what, 1000? That might get you close to the direct damage done to the infrastructure.

Now think about the damage done to housing prices. If you owned a residence or business there, good luck selling it now.

Add in the deployment cost of whichever Webelo troop the spineless socialists running Spain sent.

Add in hospitalizations, therapy costs, lost revenues, lost taxation and on and on and on. Who's going to pay for this? Who cares? As long as the government can borrow, all of these costs are Monopoly money. They are irrelevant to the citizens of Spain.

Dittos for the chaos and destruction going on in the rest of Europe and the UK. It's all effectively invisible because it's being shoveled onto future generations. The reaction of the citizens, even the progs, might be substantially more hostile if everyone had to drive to their local IRS equivalent and start writing checks to pay for the destruction.

Aside: Every time I see a Catholic Church burned or vandalized in Europe, Canada or here, I wonder about the reactions of my proggy hierarchy and the AWFLs that run the parishes and dioceses. We can't print money. Someday, if I get a chance, I'll have to ask about that.

At any rate, beating yet another worn out drum here, there ain't gonna be no revolt or civil war in Europe so long as the financial pain from the invasions is dulled by borrowing.