December 15th, 2016
Point One:

[The football coach at the University of Wyoming] is getting a pay raise to $1.4 million a year, starting next year. He is currently guaranteed $850,000 a year. The new contract provides for raises that will take his guaranteed salary up to $1.7 million in 2023 and includes added incentives, such as two $625,000 payments if he stays through the term of the contract.

The coach’s raise comes as the university has eliminated more than 100 staff and faculty jobs… No university faculty and staff received pay raises this year.

Point Two:

Board President John McPherson [said] : “We’re not shortchanging the academic side of the university by agreeing to [the] terms of coach Bohl’s contract.”

December 14th, 2016
They should be thrilled she showed up at all.

Few self-respecting women would.

December 14th, 2016
Perdonami, scusami tanto!

I reviewed your paper for the Annals of Internal Medicine, but I liked it so much I put my name on it and submitted it to another journal! Of course I made sure the other journal was obscure enough to fail to catch your attention but whooooops…. è colpa mia!… I played the angles and figured a fancy American like you wouldn’t notice an obscure Italian like me in the pages of no-name EXCLI Journal…

At least however I tried to show a fine Italian hand; you on the contrary have showed truly poor form by complaining about the matter publicly.

Dr. Michael Dansinger, of Tufts Medical Center, has taken to print to excoriate a group of researchers [Oh right. I put all my friends’ names on it too. Happy to share the credit!] in Italy who stole his data and published it as their own.

And what’s even more disappointing in your behavior is how you discovered my little mistake!

Dansinger was tipped off to their duplication while searching the internet for papers bearing his name.

Narcissism is an ugly character trait. Had I known how egotistical you are (searching the internet for your name!), I and my associates would never have chosen you. Next time forget it! Basta! You’ve put me through enough.

December 13th, 2016
“[Whitney] Howard’s criminal history includes arrests in June and August on suspicion of driving under the influence, both being drug-related.”

On the road again! UD trusts the courts of Athens Georgia will once again very quickly put Whitney Howard behind the wheel. So far she’s only killed one person, whereas it’s obvious she’s got the potential to produce far more carnage than that.

December 13th, 2016
First they came for my daughter’s niqab…

… Then they came for my child bride

December 13th, 2016
LOLOLOLOLOLOL.

LOL.

December 12th, 2016
“Asking them to sell a potentially deadly narcotic on an incentive plan created a powder keg primed to explode.”

Not really a powder keg. A morgue is more like it. A big fat national morgue full of dead Fentanyl users.

Remember Michael Jackson and how he hired a personal physician to knock him out with pain killers meant only for advanced cancer patients? Well, why shouldn’t all Americans have that same opportunity?

This was the business model of Insys Therapeutics, whose CEO (a Northwestern University business school grad, seen here dispensing not fatal opioids but career advice) identified this sort of doctor (read the whole thing) to write Fentanyl prescriptions for everybody! Everybody gets to join the party!

The CEO has now been arrested, along with a bunch of co-conspirators, and UD has been having a blast reading the racketeering etc etc case against them.

Killing this many Americans is not merely the work of b-school boys and pain pill docs. To keep the bodies mounting – to grow the business – you need these folks too, for they stand in the way of any prescribing restrictions at all. It’s the free enterprise system at its best, and our incoming prez will enthusiastically endorse it.

This teeny weeny arrest will embarrass a few people and amount to nothing. That doctor I told you about will move to another state and then another and keep doing his thing. And the opiates-for-all lobbyists will live forever.

Oh – and if your university has a med school, somewhere on the faculty there’s almost certainly a researcher paid by pharma to publish articles ghostwritten by opiate manufacturers – articles that reassure us about the efficacy and harmlessness of opioids. Whether it’s producing graduates like arrestee Michael Babich, or pill-propping professors, universities too have their role to play in keeping the morgue at capacity.

***********

UD thanks dmf.

December 12th, 2016
La Kid’s Award-Winning New Dublin Voices…

… makes a fund-raising YouTube.

La Kid shows up at the 35-second mark – she’s the blond in the middle.

They’re good. Promise.

December 12th, 2016
This is a small price to pay if you’re Bama.

Ain’t it?

In fact, at this point, UD assumes this sort of national attention paid to a university is a plus.

December 11th, 2016
From the world of the winding sheets.

The number of times I have heard Saudi women here, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say لهم الدنبا ولنا الأخرة (they get the world and we get the afterlife).

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

Kill the whore!

December 10th, 2016
One of UD’s little claims to fame is that…

… she was in the last cohort of tourists to see the actual Lascaux caves. Her family was on its way to England, where her father had a fellowship at London’s National Institute for Medical Research, and among the places they visited were the caves full of paleolithic drawings of animals (and a few people).

The press of people wanting to see the caves began destroying the paintings, so in 1963 the original caves were closed to the public, and a series of nearby replicas were created. The latest replica, just opened, is the biggest and the best.

December 10th, 2016
A contemptible and badly argued attack on burqa bans.

In the aftermath of Merkel’s call for a German burqa ban, it was inevitable that someone would write the following:

Such actions toward a religious group are not new for Germany, and one might believe that lessons learned long ago would be transferable to new times and circumstances.

Put aside the pissy prissy style in which the writer, more in sorrow than in anger, instructs Germans not to be Nazis again; think rather of the world of fascist burqa-banning states the writer conjures up, those other notorious Nazi regimes – Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, France, Switzerland – that have passed partial or full bans.

UD also finds remarkable the writer’s claim that since some women have been kept masked and swaddled all their lives, it would be an unkindness to unwrap them:

It is simply what they have been taught that decent women should do in public. It has been the practice of all the women they know for as long as they have been alive. For these women banning the veil has several possible effects. At best it makes them profoundly uncomfortable when they are forced into the public realm. It would be like passing a law that says I can’t wear a shirt in public. I don’t have a religious rational for shirt wearing, but having always worn shirts I’m quite uncomfortable with making my body an object for public viewing and quite possibly public judgment… It is difficult if not impossible to change a lifetime of learning reinforced through practice. Even if these women changed their minds, changing the emotional response to their own behavior would be nearly impossible. And frankly no one is trying to change their minds. The result for these women will simply be to drive them indoors, to keep them from going out in public.

Let’s unpack this, shall we? Note that the writer has suddenly decided he’s not talking about veiling the face – and this whole argument is about face, not body, veiling – so that really just as he gets to wear a shirt, they get to wear burqas, see?

And anyway, once you’ve been raised inside a cloth cage, you get comfortable with that and you find you don’t want to be uncaged. Again we’re treated to the writer’s pissy condescension:

It is difficult if not impossible to change a lifetime of learning reinforced through practice.

I don’t know… The Germans managed to de-nazify, didn’t they? … But wait! Maybe not…

One begins to discern a philosophy of life here, ja?

And here’s the kicker.

Even if these women changed their minds, changing the emotional response to their own behavior would be nearly impossible. And frankly no one is trying to change their minds.

Again, it’s “nearly impossible” for people to change so fuck it. And anyway… What does the writer mean when he writes that frankly no one is trying to change their minds?

Well, let’s see. We could take this frank admission of the frank truth a couple of ways.

1. These women live in Salafist environments and that’s just the way it is and that ain’t gonna change so leave them alone. You can’t change Nazis and you can’t change Salafists. Taking off their burqa would simply make these women hypocrites.

2. These women don’t live in democracies where everyone every day – from the baker on the corner to their children’s teachers to lawmakers – is in fact in various overt and covert ways trying to change their minds. Where the very legislation at issue is about trying to change their minds. No, no. Democracies do nothing to establish, protect and affirm themselves; they do nothing to teach the values of democracy to their citizens. Frankly no one’s trying with these women – and with the men who in many cases are the real problem here – so let it be.

December 10th, 2016
Yours, Mine, or Klein’s?

Faced with a famous, high-level plagiarist/physicist, a person the government just put at the head of an important scientific panel, France’s education minister has opened an inquiry into the curious cuttings and pastings of Etienne Klein.

We will see if UD is correct in identifying the source of Klein’s problem. UD suspects he hires people to write his books for him, but fails to read what they write before he puts his name on it.

If UD has said it once, she’s said it a hundred times: Keep an eye on the help.

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

That panel he’ll be heading?

… the mission of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology (IHEST) … is to restore trust between scientists and society.

December 8th, 2016
Ain’t football a blessing.

When Baylor first hired Art Briles
The prez and trustees were all smiles.
But there’s just no escapin’
A teamful of rapin’–
Get ready, get set, for the trials.

**********

And remember, kiddies: Baylor’s already paying Briles six million dollars or so a year to go away.

Truly, truly a blessing.

***********

Baylor University: Toxic Christianity.

While a lawsuit was almost certainly expected, if Briles thinks people at Baylor conspiring against him is why he doesn’t have another job, he’s clinically insane. Anyone associated with Baylor, its athletic department and its football team is toxic right now. Briles wouldn’t be considered for any jobs at any level even if he was carry a sack full of recommendations from Baylor’s administration.

After Briles gave an incredibly weak apology for the out-of-control program he ran at Baylor, did anyone think he would be getting a job any time soon? The guy just doesn’t seem to understand the havoc players wreaked under his watch and just how awful the culture he promoted was.

If Briles was smart, he’d have laid low for a few years, then mounted a comeback with some very serious apologies. Instead he’s out there suing his former employer and acting like he did nothing wrong.

December 8th, 2016
La Kid sends this snapshot from the …

… restaurant in Dublin where her office
Christmas party is happening right now.

The same Picasso reproduction hangs in
our Garrett Park house. It’s one of
our many homages to Munro Leaf, author of
Ferdinand the Bull, who lived here
before we did.

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