… Annelise Barron.

This relatively young, very high-profile Stanford scientist has been featured on NPR and elsewhere. Her lab work sounds impeccable, cutting-edge. Her personal life is a mess.

It’s actually difficult to follow the story of her arrest for child abduction – that’s how messy her life is.

She seems to have two ex-husbands. Or one estranged husband and one ex-boyfriend? Anyway, she had two children by one of these guys and one child by the other. She’s involved in court-ordered mediation and court cases with both. On the day she was supposed to appear in court on a custody issue with – the boyfriend? – she instead moved out of her California apartment and flew – with all of her children – to Hawaii. She cut off all phone contact.

The other guy – the estranged husband? – who was supposed to get a visit with his kids but instead came to understand that she’d fled to Hawaii with them

described Barron’s recent behavior as “extremely disturbed.”

According to a declaration Jardetzky filed on Dec. 19 in hopes of obtaining sole custody of his children, Barron’s hasty departure was fueled by fears that “apocalyptic changes in the world” would occur on Dec. 21.

Authorities soon learned that Barron and [her nanny] had taken the children to Kauai. Emails obtained by police also indicated Barron was arranging to have personal property and her car shipped to the island.

So this eminent scientist was allegedly in full Mayan prophecy panic and withholding children from their fathers.

To make matters worse:

Barron also said her inquiries about having personal property and her car shipped to Kauai were related to a sabbatical she was hoping to spend at the Hawaii Institute of Unified Physics. She said she is friends with its controversial director of research, Nassim Haramein.

Yeah well controversial is right. Quite the kook, it seems. Strengthens Jardetzky’s claim about her mental unbalance.

… and it’s been clear for years to UD that she needs – like some highlight/copy/paste Draculetta – regular infusions of the stuff.

After following academic and artistic plagiarism over the course of a decade, UD knows that a new high-profile p-story pops up on average every twelve days. But sometimes – lately – things dry up. No politician has been found to have lifted her dissertation from Wikipedia. No fancy schmancy pundit has been found to have plagiarized his columns. No law professor has been found to have plagiarized his books. No wunderkind has been found to have copied his neuroscience best sellers. Etc.

BIG etc. You can just count on plagiarism.

So maybe it’s spring fever… a certain lassitude among the paste-chasers as the summer begins… But I could swear it’s been at least a month since a really solid case of word theft.

Keep in mind that we’re not counting, here, the high school principal (heartfelt commencement speech) or the man of God (sermons). Although they always bring a sparkle to UD‘s eyes, these cases are too measly to be worth noticing.

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Award-winning poets who have stolen their intensely personal ruminations on suffering and passion – that’s good.

The poetry community is now asking itself just how widespread plagiarism is.

Yes, and that’s because there’s now a second case within just a few months of a poet having transferred his palpitations directly from the palpitations of others.

Many others. As you know if you follow this blog, UD has seen confirmed again and again the reality that almost all plagiarists plagiarize promiscuously and obsessively. Whenever, wherever, whoever. Once people start looking in a particular plagiarist’s direction, they almost always find a solid wall of stolen words.

This is heartening to plagiarism-buffs like UD, since extensive theft extends each story. But eventually the thrill is gone. You can only enjoy the revelation that a particular person is a sneaky unscrupulous creep for so long. You begin to seek fresh blood.

So here is David R. Morgan, whose “Monkey Stops Whistling” is his raw sardonic hard-bitten Dylan Thomasesque lament about the

dark glass we look through darkly when we
want to see the ghosts of our former selves

dear God the booze and how it’s undone me … dear… uh… oh, dear Colin Morton. That’s Colin Morton’s scotch-soaked mulling…

Okay so the rule is: Every tormented poet gets to be an alcoholic. Alcoholism is community property. But every poet has to render his drunken despair in his own words.

Notre Dame’s rector says exactly the right thing in the wake of Dominique Venner, a far-right activist protesting France’s legalization of same-sex marriage, having stuck a gun down his throat and fired in front of schoolchildren visiting the cathedral. It takes a special sort of madman to make a bloody spectacle of himself in a church full of children.

You stay classy, FAU.

… Miami.

If you’re Brown University, it’s champion! DUH! If this isn’t the perfect description of the perfect university trustee, UD doesn’t know what is!

This Business Week writer turns a bit dour toward the end of his article about Brown University’s highest-profile trustee:

Markets are moody. No matter how smart you are you’re going to make mistakes. And that’s why [Steven A.] Cohen looks suspicious. While it’s certainly possible for someone to produce a 30% or better annual return for 18 consecutive years through smarts, it’s not likely.

Cohen has been subpoenaed.

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After five years of being chased like Al Capone, an immunized Cohen might finally be able to stop looking over his shoulder.

Yes, time for him to devote more time to sharing his gravitas with Brown University.

More great PR for professors coming up.

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LOST MONEY
SELLING BEER TO COLLEGE KIDS

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UD thanks Dave.

… and just post a link before we even really read the thing!

Okay right so we fund research - we here being the federal government, being our taxes – and these three NYU medical researchers give the results to China in exchange for money.

Details here.

Now’s the time for Brown University to inaugurate a Steven A. Cohen Legal Defense fund, as the federal government begins to look as though it might move against that university’s most high-profile trustee.

True, for now Cohen has not been charged; and for now his personal fortune is close to ten billion dollars. But he may be charged; and already he has what Bloomberg News calls “fleeing clients” costs. Just in case things do go south for him, this would be a fitting continuation of the support of the hedge fund manager that the Brown Corporation has thus far maintained.

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At least he’s in good company.

By seeking Mr. Cohen’s testimony, federal prosecutors could be trying to get him lie before the grand jury, legal experts say. This way, they could try to charge him with perjury instead of insider trading, which was a similar tack that the government took in its criminal case against the media personality Martha Stewart.

Er, yes. And this is why: Say your president really doesn’t like homosexuals. Really doesn’t want to appoint them professors. Your university puts a gay man up for an appointment and the president says fuck that. And if the guy doesn’t like what I’ve done, he can take me to court.

This is not very becoming. You should probably be able to do something about it, so that your country, the Czech Republic, does not become a laughingstock. Much as we all respect the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it’s probably time to review your laws dating back to it.

Kessler famously argues that about half of us are mentally ill; really though, he adds, thresholds being what they are, we’re all mentally ill. The only question is where you draw the line.

But there’s no question any more, is there? Kessler’s being faux-naif. The line – given the arbitrariness of science in the matter – the line lies in commerce. At what point does the pharma market become saturated with requests for psychotropics? At what point does demand exceed supply? Look there for the line.

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Demand is huge. All praise to the DSM for holding up its end.

Happily, supply is also robust. Holding up very well indeed.

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Half of us mentally ill? Markets don’t do things by halves.

We’re well on our way to one hundred percent.

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Think like a Buddhist:

Where you do you draw the line?

There is no line.

… like New Mexico, is that you’ve got to read shit like this.

Most people just lie there and read it and try not to feel so defiled by its stupid lies that they want to jump off a cliff (there are amazing cliffs in New Mexico). Others can’t help taking the words in and responding to them, as these two New Mexico State University students did.

Although their effort to introduce reason, decency and (you gotta be kidding) intellect to the state – and, more specifically, to the chair of the NMSU board of regents – is the very definition of noble futility, along the lines of, say, the Warsaw Uprising, they are to be admired for the effort. Attention, as they say, must be paid.

[The chair's letter] is a strangely defensive account of the glories of our sports program and why it deserves the funding it currently receives, including a controversial $4.1 million annual transfer out of the academic fund.

The Cheney letter may have largely been prompted by the “firestorm” created when then-presidential candidate Garrey Carruthers stated that dropping football to a lower division or even eliminating it entirely were options on the table.

Carruthers nearly immediately retracted that statement, but Cheney seems to still feel the need to rally against the critics. “Like it or not,” the chairman of the board tells us, “we must live in the reality that is collegiate sports today.” We have to keep doing what we’re doing, because everyone else is doing it. We have to pay our football coach more than the entire philosophy department combined, because that’s just the reality of the market…

… [It is impossible to] justify the robbing of academic funds to cover the athletic program’s debts at a time when professorships are being reduced and money for research and public service continues to decrease. The Aggie-pride factor doesn’t take away from the fact that many student-athletes leave NMSU with a subpar education and a host of physical and financial problems. Wins don’t justify the overblown importance of big-time sports on college campuses. Instead of blindly going along with the “reality that is collegiate sports today” — the reality of the NCAA’s perverted money-making machine, of rape cover-ups, of steroid abuse — why don’t we put our foot down, be different, recognize that they’re just games and act accordingly? Why not do groundbreaking work to redefine the role of collegiate athletics rather than just trying to keep up with the big schools?

Bravo. You lose.

This too I know–and wise it were
If each could know the same–
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

With midnight always in one’s heart,
And twilight in one’s cell,
We turn the crank, or tear the rope,
Each in his separate Hell,
And the silence is more awful far
Than the sound of a brazen bell.

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Who knows if this brave prisoner’s plea will meet with justice?

I fear not!

“Monday nothing, Tuesday nothing, Wednesday and Thursday nothing…” You’d be surprised how many American universities are the educational equivalent of one of UD‘s favorite songs. These are truly nothing places full of fully salaried nowhere men and women. Everyone knows they should be shut down – even current and potential students. All have shrinking enrollments and massive absenteeism (professors and administrators are as absent as students). All are farcical in the way of Rube Goldberg contraptions that have blown every fuse but continue to make random movements.

Baltimore’s Coppin State is a notorious nothing; this letter writer to the Baltimore Sun says the obvious: Let it go. Public nothings are incredible wastes of money. Stop humiliating the taxpayers of Maryland.