… ‘bama.
While [a snowboarder] was filming his run, [Keith Robert] Stebbings [of Brighton] is seen [in a video] standing in his path while holding a shotgun. As [the snowboarder] gets closer, the homeowner can be heard saying, “Private property, you (expletive).”
During the confrontation, Stebbings, 67, can be seen pushing [the snowboarder] numerous times, while also pointing the shotgun at the snowboarder and saying “if you do it again there will be holes in you.”
… [A] later investigation found that there was no private property signage at the residence.
UD has chronicled for years on this blog the scandalous refusal of ultraorthodox men and women to defend Israel. Even under current combat conditions, they refuse to lift their asses off of their prayer seats.
But now Israel’s high court has frozen yeshiva funding! No money if you don’t fight!
Which means Israel will soon have a two-front war, since the Haredim will respond to this call to civic duty by setting the country’s cities aflame. Operation Black Hats will divert many of Israel’s soldiers to the streets of Jerusalem, where ultra-orthodox mobs will riot mercilessly in defense of their right to do nothing and care nothing for Israel.
See the lunatic with body armor and the AR-15, honey? I want you to smile real big at him while we walk by him out of the store. Now don’t walk too fast or look scared! Just be natural and walk normally and he’ll leave us alone. Okay?
No surprise here. One of the most degenerate Trumpian fanatics, up there with Lara Trump, Eastman will soon lose the law license he used in order to devise the vile and traitorous Jan. 6 plot. The judge who presided over his disbarment trial said Eastman’s “lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.” UD thinks he can still lead a meaningful life hawking sixty dollar a pop Trump bibles.
UD‘s thinking that the disaster in Baltimore might well decrease the number of freight trains that pass through Garrett Park. The longest CSX trains around here have car after car topped with coal.
Yet there he remains, smiling at you from the University of Rochester faculty pages. Now, if someone years ago had put his dissertation through a simple plagiarism check, UR might have been spared a lot of embarrassment, a black eye with grant-givers, and the drawn-out business of keeping his faculty page up while trying to minimize the possibility that he’ll pull a Gino and sue everyone for $25 million. A summary of the whole sordid tale appears here, but all you need to know is that whether the bully is Marc Hauser (like Francesca Gino, another Harvard winner) or Ranga Dias, or Berislav Zlokovic, let the journal/university/NSF beware: research misconduct is a Thing.
… a Rilkean meditation on bridges.
***********************************
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions…For the god
wants to know himself in you.
**************************
This is by way of a pep talk, mes petites, having to do with nothing less than the imperative to forge a creative, meaningful life. When you were a child (see Intimations of Immortality) the sheer visceral energy of being young, that heedless life force, “carried you over” the darkness and peril of being. But that was kidstuff, and it only pertained to you, and it didn’t mean much beyond simple inarticulate strength and delight in earthly existence. Now it’s time to transcend the unproblematic egotism of youth and offer something to the world, and that will mean struggling with complex, problematic forces to perceive and build so-far “unimagined” connections.
To infuse the world with wonder, to reveal its hidden beauty, means overcoming the dark abyss that lies under all that we do. That abyss (‘Winding across wide water, without sound. / The day is like wide water, without sound‘) is not merely our own awaiting mortality, but also the soundless nothing the world is without our articulate speech, without our artistic/architectural hand upon the land. So this is the pep talk: You can do it. You can shape and fill the earth with meaning, articulate sound, human beauty. Your soul offers you, grants you, the capacity for this earth-brightening achievement; you must not be afraid to accept what it wants to grant.
For after all, it’s “not too hard” for you to work with the seemingly unbridgeable complications of the world, to take its welter of Things and bring them together in clarifying, enabling ways:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of
Men into my hands
And wrote my will across the
Sky and stars
Indeed, you cannot shirk this imperative, much as you would like to be “swept along” in the abyss. You must be adequate to the challenge of the world.
Use your powers, stretch them out, flex your creative muscles! Stand boldly above the abyss and bring the seemingly irreconcilable complications of a world of turmoil into alignment, so that where there was once nothing there is now something — something upon which your fellow human beings can locate and know ourselves and the world. For the god / Wants to know himself in you. Only through our interiority can the earth arise and know itself. Only our human powers of perception and feeling can intuit and express both the contradictions of existence and their overcoming.
… photograph… but also likes to shake his tush...
‘The vessel notified MD Department of Transportation (MDOT) that they had lost control of the vessel and an allision with the bridge was possible.’
Yup. An allision is an accident in which only one ship is moving.
[Professor Francis] Quek told the officer who visited with the witness, according to the arrest report, that he normally uses the [faculty] lounge to practice with his [fully loaded] handgun and that he had not had any problems in the past with people walking into the lounge.
Quek’s reward: Texas A&M has put him on paid leave, so … He shoots, he scores! No teaching, at full salary!
Another feather in soccer’s cap. We tend to focus on the brutality and bigotry of European stadiums, but let’s not forget the great fans closer to home!
To paraphrase Lady Macbeth.
American political rhetoric on the right is gushing blood. Katie Britt’s excited smile when she described the country as “steeped in the blood of patriots” has weirded out lots of commentators, as has candidate Trump’s recent enthusiastic prediction, at a rally, that if he loses, “there’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”
Trump is always going on about blood – not, like Britt, that of patriots, but of the streets.
Yet who would have thought the Grand Old Party had so much blood in it? Republican red flows literally now; the MAGA GOP is the party of plasma, with vampirish Trump vamping about the crimson hellscape the USA already is, and certainly will be, should he fall short of victory.
Politicians almost always invoke blood in the context of fallen patriots, although in MAGA world, as in the case of Britt, there’s often a heavy blood of the lamb overlay. Britt and much of her Evangelical audience is used to singing lyrics like these every Sunday:
There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.
Evangelical music directors draw on a … flood of this redeeming gore in their programming, and no one in church says boo about it.
But Trump’s arterial oratory is something else again. His audiences are perfectly prepared to hear God and country, and even Revelation/Armageddon, in his thundering; but some seem taken aback by the angry sense of meaninglessness coursing through his veins. They’re not being washed in Trump’s bloodiness; they’re choking to death on it.
***********************
In fact they are watching, in real time, as a lifelong nihilist reckons with old age and death, not to mention likely electoral defeat, and it ain’t pretty. And it certainly ain’t religious.
Trump’s evangelicals long ago made their peace with his stark godlessness; he represents their flawed but elected transformer of the Supreme Court and other heathen elements. What they hadn’t reckoned with is what people like Donald Trump – see Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism – turn into toward the end.
One of my acquaintances – a high-profile architect/artist – told me on his deathbed that he was convinced the world was coming to an end along with him. He took bitter pleasure in the thought that if he had to endure the insult of death, at least all other living beings did too, in one big wipeout. Trump’s delectation of the bloody death of America is exactly this cold comfort – if he has to go, he’s going to take everything down with him. Death is for losers.
As is age and debility. Already he paints himself, an aging coquette, like Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice”; already he insists his aphasic moments are intentional satire. But no cover story, no makeup, can hide his predicament: He is a human being like the rest of us, which means he gets the same tragic life we do. Most of us grapple with that – philosophically, spiritually – in an effort to come to terms with it. But people like Trump do not do this, and his audiences have the dubious privilege of observing his gaping existential wound as he is forced to glimpse the reality of the end of life.
At its best, nihilism produces Samuel Beckett. It produces Charles Baudelaire (‘Nothing in nature now remains unblooded. / I used to hope that wine could bring me ease, / Could lull asleep my deeply gnawing mind. / I was a fool: the senses clear with wine. / I looked to Love to cure my old disease. / Love led me to a thicket of IVs / Where bristling needles thirsted for each vein.’); it produces Sylvia Plath (‘The world is blood-hot and personal / Dawn says, with its blood-flush.’). At its worst, in the current Republican presidential candidate, it brings to mind the earth-killing fantasies of Trump’s predecessor, the French reactionary Joseph De Maistre: “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things … until the death of death.”
The closer you get, the worse Harvard’s Gino looks. This is from a Vox piece.
[W]hile there are many people who could have manipulated the data for any one of the studies, the only common denominator across all of them — over eight years — was Gino…
Between the dishonesty researchers who have one by one turned out to be dishonest and the cancer research that turned out to be reusing Photoshopped versions of the same test result pictures, the last few years have been full of discomfiting reminders that, yes, some [of the highest-profile] people will cheat to get ahead in science, and we lack a robust process for catching them.
Scientific integrity currently depends on the willingness of individuals to speak out when they see fraud, and it’s precisely that willingness Gino’s [defamation] lawsuit targets.
Background here.
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UD REVIEWED
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