Rep. Ralph Norman “Bates”: One of the few certifiably insane people in the current American Congress.

Bates can’t keep his gun in his panties, and is always waving it around, loaded, especially at the ladies.

He thinks his most favorite thing – martial law, which includes lots of guns to wave at women!!! – is spelled marshall rather than martial, and that’s because Bates is soooooooooper stooooooooooopid and now everyone’s laughing at him.

But that part of this story is, you know, okay. You get what you vote for, and folks in parts of SC like stupid people, and that’s democracy, and democracy is a beautiful thing, and UD will defend it as long as she draws run-on sentences.

Howsomever. Bates’s breathless excitement as he demands from Mark Meadows and the president a military takeover of the United States in the wake of Trump’s defeat is not quite as okay as the right of stupid people to be represented by stupid people:

[W]e are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!

Bates’s misspellings and errors and exclamations and caps and all tell you he is really excited, really agitated, really in need of calming himself down by exposing his loaded gun to groups of women, or, lacking that, leading a military coup against the United States.

Is Rep. Bates a threat to our country? He will be until we can find some way of dealing with his shpilkes, his inability to calm himself down in the matter of guns. I see two possible ways to go.

  1.  Cyproterone Acetate is a chemical castrator whose tranquillizing effect is well-known.

2. A more unorthodox approach would involve penectomy followed by surgical attachment of an NAA Mini-Revolver or other appropriately portioned piece.

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

Whoa. Now they’re talking about suhdishun.

‘For Now, Rick, He’s All Yours / Telfair chooses Pitino, Louisville’

Return with me now to those glory days at one of this country’s establishments of higher learning, when Rick got down on his knees and begged Sebastian Telfair to gain his education at the University of Louisville. Telfair said yes! I will pursue my scholar/athlete career at your fine school, playing basketball, living in a university-provided brothel, and giving a big ol’ fuck you up the ass to my fake classes, all on the taxpayers’ dime — and the people of Kentucky could not have been more grateful and excited. To make matters even more wonderful, sports-mad James Ramsey, who would go on to become the nation’s highest paid public university leader by the simple expedient of stealing everything at UL that wasn’t nailed down, had just been appointed UL president!

Truly the stars were aligned at this fine school which some have taken, cruelly, to calling the U of Smell.

And now… Ladies and gentlemen of the jury! as Humbert would say: Look at this tangle of thorns.

Rick had to be gotten rid of because of sex, recruiting, financial and anything else you’d like to add scandals. Reduced to coaching Greek basketball, where the chain smoking, flame throwing fascists in the stands turn every game into a terrifying slaughter (holy shitkos), he is currently suing UL for forty million dollars haha nahnah got you you’ll pay up the ass for being mean to me while I was building a winning team even though we had to vacate all our wins cuz they was SO SO SO dirty. I’ll get you back, UL.

President Ramsay was forced to resign in disgrace for the aforementioned larceny plus overseeing the most pornographic sports program in the United States. UL’s suing him to try to get a few tens of millions back (it’s all been plowed into multifarious mcmansions up and down the Florida coast), and the latest on that is that during his reign Ramsay apparently told the then-chair of the board of trustees that a fellow trustee had bankrolled the brothel for the boys!! I do declare (fanning my lace stays with my perfumed hankie), it takes a whole lot for UL to do anything that would generate italics, bolding, and double exclamation marks, but this school constantly exceeds expectations.

… Uh, where we were? Oh, the hotly recruited Telfair... He was last seen ranting like a madman in court, where he was sentenced to prison for carrying spectacular weaponry (‘three loaded handguns, a submachine gun, ammunition, extended magazines and a ballistic vest’) in his car.

!!!!!!!

All good writers know never to use exclamation marks! I mean, almost never!

But UD has stumbled over a piece in the U Penn newspaper which demands exclamation marks. She will now quote some of the piece and insert the quotation marks its content demands.

In the wake of the admissions bribery scandal! involving former Penn men’s basketball star and coach Jerome Allen, Penn Dean of Admissions Eric Furda is saying that safeguards need to be put in place in both the athletics and admissions departments.

On Oct. 5, Allen, who is currently an assistant coach for the Boston Celtics, pleaded guilty to bribery in connection to the recruitment of a student athlete – now Wharton senior Morris Esformes – to gain him admission to the University. Allen had been implicated in an indictment of businessman Philip Esformes, who had allegedly defrauded the federal government of $1 billion!!! and had used some of that money to bribe Allen and help Morris get into Penn.

… Furda suggested new professional development and training for staffers in both departments to prevent future incidents of bribery!!!!

[So a guy comes at you with tens of thousands of dollars, private luxury jet trips on his dime, and anything else you want, and says in exchange for this I want my kid who can’t play competitive basketball to get a basketball scholarship and thereby admission to your school. Slowly, now. Think it through. Is this RIGHT or WRONG?]

… [Morris] Esformes was accepted to Penn in 2015 as a member of Allen’s final recruiting class before Allen was replaced by current coach Steve Donahue. Esformes never played or appeared !!!!! on the men’s basketball team’s roster.

Does it matter if you can’t write worth shit?

Scathing Online Schoolmarm will let you decide.

No she won’t.

Look. If you’ve got something to say, and that something matters a lot to you, and you’re lucky enough to have what you say appear in all sorts of high-profile places, you should really go to the trouble of writing it competently.

You’re a smart person, so you know you have trouble writing well. You also know that the crappier your statement of your position on a subject, the more likely you are to be ignored. So you write your thing, and then you give it to a friend for editing. Right? You give it to someone who’s a good writer before you send it out to all those publications. Yes?

If you’re William Wulf, hotshot computer professor at the University of Virgina who resigned in protest during the Teresa Sullivan dust-up, I’m afraid no.  You don’t bother giving your writing to someone who can shorten it, clarify your points, take out the heavy breathing. All the things good writers know how to do and bad writers may never learn.

So here’s Wulf, reprinted in the Washington Post, explaining why he still won’t return to U Va, even though Sullivan has been reinstated. His basic point, which should have taken four paragraphs tops, is that the board remains a bunch of corporate know-nothings, and until people who understand and care about universities appear on the board, he won’t reappear at U Va. So far, of the six comments on the letter, two are about his terrible writing. Terrible writing distracts from what you want to say. It draws attention to your writing, rather than to your argument. And when your writing is this terrible, it also makes people wonder how generally cogent you are, and therefore how strong your arguments here (or anywhere else) are. See why competent writing — SOS doesn’t even say good! She just means writing that gets you there, that gets it said! — really does matter?


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

Just in case you missed it, I am one of the folks that publicaly [glaring spelling error] resigned over the forced resignation of President Sullivan. I resigned because I deeply care about the University, I thought President Sullivan was doing a great job, and thus felt deeply that this action, and the way it was taken, was profoundly damaging to the University. [Commas where semi-colons should be, but this isn’t important, and SOS wouldn’t even mention it if it weren’t part of a larger shitpile.]

I was frankly surprised by the magnitude of the positive faculty and media reaction to my resignation – I don’t think of myself as the “marching in the street, and placard waving” type. [Unnecessary, distracting quotation marks. Why are they there? Who is he quoting? Is marching in the street and placard waving a well-known phrase?] So, after the initial flurry of email, except for bland replies to some, I have kept pretty quiet about the whole fiasco. But now I feel I need to voice a perspective on the solution to the underlying problem.

I have been asked by President Sullivan, my Dean, and even my departmental faculty, to “un-resign” – I have said NO, and the rest of this note is to explain to all of you why, and perhaps what it means to you. It is not because I don’t love UVa, and would love to rejoin its faculty – quite the opposite, it’s precisely because I do love and respect it so much! [Vaguely messy, conversational feel to the whole thing. Which is fine. No one says you have to write with more formality than that, and this is after all a letter. But lack of parallel structure – would he or would he not love to rejoin its faculty? – as well as what’s going to be an avalanche of exclamation marks will confuse and distract the reader.]

Like most of you, I was delighted by the re-instatement of Terry Sullivan – but that, I my view, didn’t fix the underlying problem!  [typo, exclamation] As my original message noted, my wife [Relevance of wife to his expertise?] and I have extensive experience in both executive positions and board positions in industry, academia, and government – we’ve seen the executive-to-board relationship from both sides, and in multiple contexts – and my judgment is that the current BOV is incompetent to govern UVa! Let me repeat – it’s incompetent for the task of governing UVa!  [Bad writing is often hyper-emotional, insistent, vehement, compulsively redundant.  Note that he repeats in almost exactly the same words what he’s just said.  A pointless, diluting move that merely makes the reader wonder what he’s on about.]  I am more than willing to stipulate that the BOV members are smart, good and accomplished people –but to be competent on a board requires a significant understanding of the institution they are governing. That’s what is lacking!  [The editor he didn’t consult would have put a big fat red line through the last sentence.]

The present BOV appointed by the Governor is 14 lawyers or corporate executives with no experience with academic governance, one part-time medic at John-Hopkins [Don’t bother to learn how to spell the university; you wouldn’t want the reader to think you cared enough about the people and the situation to get that sort of thing straight.], and one CEO of a small university. Alas, they don’t even seem to know much about UVa! While fond of selectively quoting Jefferson out of context, they overlook the deeply philosophical fact that Mr. Jefferson’s design for UVa had *no* President or central administration – the faculty governed the University, and did so in an open collaborative way, not in secret meetings behind closed doors,with no faculty input. Total faculty control wouldn’t work for today’s larger university, BUT … the BOV’s instincts were that top-down, command and control management was “right” [More pointless quotation marks.] and so tried to impose it. Well, it’s not right for universities, especially for UVa – and in fact,the data says that it is not right for most corporations either! It certainly wasn’t right for the corporations that I ran! But my main point is that faculty involvement in university governance is central to all universities, and especially to UVa.

Moreover, the current BOV clearly didn’t even investigate the issue they expressed concern about – for example on-line presence of the University (seemingly a big deal in TS’s firing), but they apparently just reacted to the hype of recent announcements by some other universities without investigating UVa’s record on the subject. Well, our involvement in digital scholarship and learning goes back at least twenty years – I know because I was a principal in getting it started! Please note in the prior sentence I said scholarship AND education. Great universities are about both – not just mass teaching! And a future great UVa must be about both! The current BOV, or at least those involved in firing Terry Sullivan, pretty clearly doesn’t understand that.

Are these uninformed folks likely to make smart future decisions for UVa? Alas, I think not! Smart and accomplished as they may be individually in other contexts, they just don’t have the knowledge base to make good decisions for UVa.

Just imagine a board imposed upon General Motors that consisted of 14 smart/accomplished academics, but with no industrial experience, one Chevy customer, and the CEO of a mom-and-pop grocery store. Would that work? No, of course not! And the converse isn’t working here either!  [Pretty well-stated, pretty strong point.  But look how he takes the air out of his tires by his goofy garrulous sentences at the end.  Just stop at store.]

What we need is a significant fraction of the BOV to be folks that deeply understand academia, and UVa in particular – I have been astounded by how shallow and un-informed the comments [verb needed here] by rector Dragas, for example.

I have a substantial list of distinguished current or former academic administrators that I know first hand, that are really bright and I would be happy to recommend them to serve on the BOV, and I’d even to be the first contact with them – but I haven’t been asked. Alas, they almost certainly didn’t make major contribution to the Governor’s campaign, so the chance of their selection under the current system are probably nil. BUT, it’s the system needs to be changed!

I am a more-than-a-tad concerned that the reinstatement of President Sullivan has taken a bit of wind out of the sails of faculty/student pressure for reform. In my view the time is not to compromise, but to stand for the principles of the University, and particularly the principle of faculty deeply involved its governance!!  [Ah.  There we go.  Double exclamation marks.  Will he go for three?]

Corporate style boards (of which both my wife and I have deep experience) are NOT the model for the BOV – nor is “damn the torpedoes” top-down executive management – and the fact that the current BOV doesn’t understand that is damning and destructive, and says a lot about the selection criteria that chose them! We MUST fix the selection criteria!  [What are you visualizing, personality-wise, for the guy at this point?  I’m seeing a guy who can’t get one thought out without bursting his appendix.]

Permit me to cycle back to my opening – I am not a “march and wave placards” type – partly because I find it intellectually repugnant, but also in no small measure because I don’t think it’s especially effective in our context. You may disagree. What I do think we need is a moderate,well-reasoned argument for why the structure of the BOV needs to be changed for the benefit of the University – and the state. But please note that I think the argument needs to be delivered to the folks that can effect that change and that the present process is a political one,and while I am not in favor of marching and placard waving, I also think our actions need to include political ones – just what those actions are should be needs to be a collective decision of the faculty, so I’ll stay silent on that for now.

But we DO need to act to fix the problem underlying President Sullivan’s firing! Will she stay long term, or would we be able to recruit a comparable replacement given the current BOV and the criteria for future BOV selections? In my view — NO! Unless there is fundamental change, UVa is on a downward spiral. It hurts me to the core! UVa has been SO special! To see it self-destruct is as painful as I can imagine.

Virginia Vice…

… catches up with its vice-rector. He has just resigned. This leaves Dragas with her Dragas exposed.

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

And, as Teresa Sullivan anticipated, the Wulf is now at the door.

On Tuesday, engineering professor William Wulf sent a stern letter of resignation to the new interim president. It was unclear if Wulf had another job lined up. Wulf’s resignation was considered significant because he is one of fewer than 20 “university professors” among a faculty of 2,200, an honor bestowed on the school’s most accomplished educators.

“I do not wish to be associated with an institution being as badly run as the current UVa,” he wrote. “A BOV that so poorly understands UVa, and academic culture more generally, is going to make a lot more dumb decisions, so the University is headed for disaster, and I don’t want to be any part of that. And, frankly, I think you should be ashamed to be party to this debacle!”

Surprisingly well-written for an engineering type. Scathing Online Schoolmarm would have dumped the final exclamation mark.

I was visiting Dino Alexis…

… who lived in the house behind mine (and across from Nils Lofgren’s) in Garrett Park. Don’t recall how old I was — maybe thirteen? Dino’s father (here’s his obituary) owned a hair salon, House of Alexis, which Dino now manages.

I’d picked a book at random from a shelf in the Alexis living room, and it turned out to be softcore porn — not that I had that category in my head at the time. Harold Robbins kind of thing. The scene I opened to had a woman expressing her enjoyment of some mildly sadistic nipple play. “Aiee!!” she said. “Aiee!!”

This was a formative moment for little Scathing Online Schoolmarm, because it was her first encounter with the double exclamation mark. From that day forward, she gave a good deal of thought to when and how one should employ the exclamation.

Stuart Jeffries has a charming and thoughtful piece on the subject in the latest Guardian.

In general, SOS sides with those who counsel sparing use of this heavy breather; she believes that in almost all cases your prose, not funny little marks at the end of various sentences, should convey your sentiments, including exclamatory feelings like excitement, delight, surprise, rage, and love. Writing is a discipline; it’s about control. Excess exclamation marks suggest lack of control, as Jeffries notes in quoting some authors about them:

Elmore Leonard wrote of exclamation marks: “You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.” Which means, on average, an exclamation mark every book and a half. In the ninth book of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Eric, one of the characters, insists that “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind.” … Fowler’s Modern English Usage [says]: “Except in poetry the exclamation mark should be used sparingly. Excessive use of exclamation marks in expository prose is a sure sign of an unpractised writer or of one who wants to add a spurious dash of sensation to something unsensational.”

Jeffries goes on to note that in the age of email the exclamation mark is much-used. People say email’s a particularly cold and unemotional medium, and that the exclamation allows them to add warmth. Great to see you! Instead of Great to see you. Looking forward to seeing you! Rather than Looking forward to seeing you. We’re anxious for people to know we care, and the exclamation mark does the trick.

SOS notices that she only uses the exclamation mark in two ways in her emails. When a student she hasn’t heard from in a while writes to her — with simple greetings, or asking for advice, or asking for a recommendation — she in fact often opens her reply with an exclamation mark at the end of her first sentence: It’s wonderful to hear from you! She knows that students worry they’re bothering professors, or that professors don’t remember them, or whatever, so she wants to underline her happiness at having heard from them.

She also uses the mark ironically. Or sarcastically. Jeffries takes note of this use as well:

There is surely a point after which exclamation marks no longer express friendliness. In this post-literal time, exclamation marks become signs of sarcasm as witty correspondents rebel against their overuse. Hence: “I loved your last email! OMG did I LOVE it!!!!!!” The point is they didn’t. They were being IRONIC.

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