Foreground, Orghini. Background, herd of deer.

UD‘s backyard, this afternoon.

Three separate shootings in one hour. “This is a safe community,” says mayor.

LOL.

Walter Johnson High School Football Players…

… deliver and spread mulch chez UD. It’s a fundraising thing for the school UD graduated from in 1971.

‘The fact that we weren’t sure if Pence would endorse the guy who tried to have him murdered … is wild.’

LOL

“Professor Gino’s repeated and strenuous argument for a scenario of data falsification by bad actors across four different studies, an argument we find to be highly implausible, leads us to doubt the credibility of her written and oral statements to this committee more generally.” 

Blame everyone else for the falsification, and sue the pants off the whistle blowers – Harvard’s Francesca Gino, having been outed, plays the cards she’s got.

But once it turns legal, once you make it legal, you run the risk that a judge will decide Harvard’s investigation into your apparently quite extensive research misconduct (and hey take a look at one of your co-authors, Dan Ariely!) should go public.

So we can all read your insistence, in interviews with Harvard’s investigators, that a bunch of incompetent underlings did it; or, if that doesn’t work, a malicious co-author decided to sabotage you.

Things that can bring a plane down.

[T]he plunge may have been caused by a flight attendant hitting a switch on the pilot’s seat while serving a meal, inadvertently activating a motorized feature and pushing the pilot forward into the controls. 

Glorious Spring Break…

USA! USA!

‘Now, two separate juries have taken the unusual step of holding a parent criminally responsible for a child’s horrific crimes.’

Yep, when the little bugger grabs one of the guns lying around the house and maims/slaughters all over his school, you get to go to jail too.

Macabre Mallows Bay…

… is the Ghost Fleet of one hundred World War I wooden ships, whose outlines lie in the shallow water. This was today’s outing.

Of course there are no surprises here. But it’s useful to get empirical confirmation.

Gun laws and regulations are among the most impactful policy factors [in college choice], with 80 percent of students saying these are at least somewhat important in their college choices, and 84 percent of those said they prefer campuses that restrict firearms… Reproductive healthcare policies are [also] a significant consideration, with 71 percent of students citing its importance to their college choice. Of this group, eight in 10 prefer states with fewer restrictions on reproductive healthcare. 

It’ll be interesting to watch enrollment trends in, for instance, Idaho, with utterly unrestricted gun laws and utterly restricted abortion laws. Ob/gyns are fleeing the state as fast as their specula can carry them. Let’s see how many female applicants find that attractive.

Perpetuum Mobile

 The former president now enjoys an unprecedented level of control over the Republican national apparatus. He can freely raid the RNC’s dwindling campaign coffers for legal defense money and appoint family members to key positions while personally directing House Republicans’ disastrous investigations into Joe and Hunter Biden. Trump’s total dominance of the Republican Party is a remarkable thing to behold. 

But Republicans’ willingness to bow to Trump on nearly every issue is making their party staggeringly unpopular with voters — and not just the rank and file. Colorado Rep. Ken Buck stunned Capitol Hill on Tuesday by announcing that he’d simply had enough of Trumpism (“This place keeps going downhill and I don’t need to spend more time here.”) and would resign in just about a week. In an interview with CNN, Buck slammed Congress as “dysfunctional” and remarked that many of his constituents were sick of Trump. 

Und so weiter. Title: TRUMP’S GOP IS ALREADY DYING.

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

Listen, my children, and you shall hear, of the ways of capitalism you and UD hold so dear.

Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.

It’s not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms... [S]ociety … is being continuously transformed by market forces … Looking to a future in which the market permeates every corner of life, Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto: “Everything that is solid melts into air”... The gyrations of the market are such that no-one can know what will have value even a few years ahead... This state of perpetual unrest is the permanent revolution of capitalism …

For UD, the most powerful, most poignant, current example of this truth is the contrast between Madonna — exhausted, barely gyrating, surgeried-up, a real living deadster — and her replacement, Taylor Swift… Capitalist society demands constant newness, incessant novelty, fresh gyrations, and it demands it mercilessly.

Trump intuits all of this, and has done his bit by generating stupendous levels of personal and political drama, sustaining that ever-changing drama over decades. But like his iconic has-been shadow, he too is beginning to lose his restless audience. His latest mavericky move – appointing Kim Yo Jong to run the Republican National Committee – snapped his increasingly bored followers to attention yet again, but isn’t going as planned. Lara’s “purge of the unfaithful” has creeped people out rather than excited them. And that’s because even his routine – even his – is becoming subject to capitalism’s iron law – all that is solid melts into air.

We can expect Trump’s novelty-desperation to become more radical even as it loses its effectiveness. Watch for him and Lara to divorce their partners, marry each other in a joint ceremony with 93 year old Rupert Murdoch and his fifth, and immediately announce Lara’s pregnancy. Gotta keep up!

As always, art gets there ever so much sooner than life.

Candace Owens’ theory that Brigitte Macron is actually her own brother recalls Buck Mulligan telling his British lodger about Stephen’s theory of Hamlet.

 “He proves by algebra that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.

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

Owens is a fanatic Evangelical, which leads me to this godly cosmic convergence: Sex addict, voyeur, alcoholic, fraudster, Falwell Jr introduces her as an honored speaker at a Liberty University convocation.

The two of them together! There’s so much – intellectually, morally, spiritually – for Liberty students to be proud of.

Don’t miss her delight at “the gift of Kanye West,” another great Christian.

I’m shocked – SHOCKED – to hear that gambling is …

going on in here!

It’s finally warm enough to let our lamb, Orghini…

… out of the barn! It does our hearts good to see her freely grazing in the fields.

“Who smiles when they say the line ‘steeped in the blood of patriots’?”

Jon Stewart weighs in on Katie Britt. But his rhetorical question shows that he just doesn’t get it. The sort of Christians Britt’s addressing smile with all their heart when they sing the words

There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.

Anyone who, like UD, sits at her piano and sings through hymnals in which every other song delights in personal salvation through submersion in gobs of blood, knows that exulting when you use phrases like steeped in the blood is the Evangelical order of the day. Britt’s audience represents a decidedly sanguinary sanctuary.

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

Here’s a variant of the same clueless liberal problem. Paul Krugman thinks he’s mighty clever when he writes

The other day [Trump declared] “I will stop the killing, I will stop the bloodshed, I will end the agony of our people, the plunder of our cities, the sacking of our towns, the violation of our citizens and the conquest of our country.” Which towns and cities, exactly, have been sacked and plundered? Did Attila the Hun swing by for a visit while I wasn’t looking?

Same haha rhetorical question thing as Stewart’s. Same smug shock at over the top bloodiness.

Trump’s people are apocalyptic, guys. Its an ongoing battle between the blood of damnation and the blood of the redeemed. Atttila the Hun didn’t swing by, but Lucifer did.

This language, from Britt and Trump and their preacher, isn’t lurid. It’s descriptive.

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte