Where is that girl with the zygote? That little girl was my big electoral chance The one whose father beat and raped her But no abortion under any circumstance!
…….
Did I need a gentler hand? Did I need a lighter touch? On abortion I was tough Nothing was too much Kill the mother in a clutch!
But the moment when I said full ban All my voters turned away God please say it’s not too late For me to totally reverse today
Was my stance a little cruel? Was my bloodlust less than cool? Did I let my mind go wild? Were my thoughts defiled?
She’s just a little child…
Yes it seems there were a million things I was dumb enough to say Can my voting base forgive If I walk them back complete today?
Should I blame my Trumpy operatives Who told me incest didn’t count?
What a shame I failed in human decency Before I lost the game
Was I something of a dick? Was my world a little sick? Was there too much MAGA crowd All too mean and loud And not enough of me?
Though I’ll ask myself my whole life long What went wrong along the way Would I make the same mistakes If I tried to be humane today? If that girl with the zygote Walked into my life today?
The hyper-pious ex-PM (‘Najib recently said Islam’s holy book, the Koran, would be the guide for all government policies and actions.’) allows modesty edicts to repress Malaysian women, while he himself pleases Allah by stealing seven hundred million dollars directly from the Malaysian people.
Theologically, it is a conundrum; Allah smiles equally upon downtrodden black-cloaked women AND the world’s largest kleptocracy case. He smiles at sick Malaysian children dying from lack of treatment because, of the six billion in the fund meant to help them and their country, four billion was stolen.
Everything would have been peachy; America’s sweetheart, Goldman Sachs, would have pocketed its suspiciously massive fees from 1MDB, all the other crooks who stole hundreds of millions for themselves would have been fine…
But people began to notice the absence of four plus billion dollars from the world. Things began to sour, see, onaccounta
Shades of pious Bernie Madoff (in his case his piety was orthodox Judaism — he acted as the treasurer – not making this up – of Yeshiva University)! Pious Najib and his legion of co-conspirators overlooked the fact that if anything goes wrong with schemes like this, you’re up shit’s creek cuz the money’s already up the nose of your cocaine-snorting, super-yacht-private-jet-super-thin-nyc-penthouse-owning Islamically pious investment group.
Watch this video, titled Behind Goldman Sachs’ Alleged Involvement in the 1MBD Scandal. It explains the gist of the thing. I know you’re distracted by The Trump 300 (700?), but trust me 1MDB is more important; America will survive a once-in-a-lifetime madman having attained the presidency; the sad sick world cannot be defended from lethal international criminals (including, again, our own adorable Goldman Sachs) unless we all make an effort to understand how they are killing us.
… Via the Los Angeles Times review of Bad City, a book about disgusting events at pretty much always-disgusting University of Southern California. My coverage of these particular grotesqueries can be found here. Put University Southern California in my search engine for years of scandal and corruption.
[T]wo major scandals at USC involv[ed] two doctors employed by the university: the medical school dean, Carmen Puliafito, and a gynecologist who worked at USC‘s student health center. Both doctors took advantage of young women to satisfy their prurient desires. Eventually, the book becomes a pointed critique of USC’s culture of secrecy and its shameful efforts to protect its public image. The university’s supporting role in the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal serves as a kind of coda to a dark tale of privilege, amorality and coverups...
In one especially outrageous scene, [Dean] Puliafito brings a pair of addicts into his office at the Keck School of Medicine, where they don the doctor’s USC lab coat and an inflatable Trojan hat after smoking heroin...
Forcibly evicted by the citizens of SF, the city’s appalling district attorney discovers (no he doesn’t, and he never will; but the rest of us discover it again today) that acting on assumptions and theories rather than acting on reality is murderously stupid.
[H]e didn’t seem to care that he was making the citizens of our city miserable in service of an ideology that made sense everywhere but in reality. It’s not just about Boudin, though. There is a sense that, on everything from housing to schools, San Francisco has lost the plot—that progressive leaders here have been LARPing left-wing values instead of working to create a livable city…
[W]ith the smartest minds and so much money and the very best of intentions, San Francisco became a cruel city. It became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results...
Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents...
[It’s] a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, …the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...
During his campaign, Boudin said he wouldn’t prosecute quality-of-life crimes. He wanted to “break the cycle of recidivism” by addressing the social causes of crime—poverty, addiction, mental-health issues. Boudin was selling revolution, and San Francisco was ready. In theory.
But not in fact. Because it turns out that people on the left also own property, and generally believe stores should be paid for the goods they sell...
We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.
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Don’t read the section on the school board unless you’re absolutely vomit-proof.
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The thing on nihilism and congratulating yourself on your radical personal freedom morality when someone dies on the street dovetails wonderfully with the same contemptible shit deep in the far-right libertarian weeds… The same necrophiliac splendor… Congratulating yourself, really, on your corpse-love… (“In February 2021, at a corner in the lovely Japantown neighborhood, just a few feet from a house that would soon sell for $4.8 million, a 37-year-old homeless man named Dustin Walker died by the side of the road. His body lay there for at least 11 hours.”) On the right, excitement at the big bloody holes in place of children a truly superior sporting rifle can make; on the left, the same excitement at the big bloody holes fentanyl can make all over dead bodies in city plazas. I wish I were Cormac McCarthy or William Burroughs or Irvine Welsh or Anthony Burgess or John Fowles or hey even Jonathan Swift so I could begin to be adequate to the blood-soaked hard right/hard left orgasms of this my beloved country. So many of our teenage massacrists spent all their time, before they picked themselves up out of their chairs, getting off on exactly this via unspeakable video games. No gun restrictions for this country. The pleasure is too deep, and lots of our senators either share the bloodlust or would never think of getting in its way.
For eight years, police have been trying to prove that Charles Adelson had Dan Markel killed. Anyone who followed the appalling story of a man killed simply because he wanted to share custody of his children knows that the evidence has always pointed to the brother of Markel’s ex-wife, but authorities only recently had sufficient proof of the conspiracy. Now a trial can proceed.
It’s been a long sit-down, but an appeals court has topped off the college v. bakery court case with a flourish: Gibson’s will indeed be served an abundant money feast from Oberlin (background here). So: bitter for Oberlin, sweet for Gibson’s.
The main miscreant in the matter, a VP at the school who sicced a student mob on an innocent local bakery (screamed all over town it was racist, organized a boycott, when all it did was confront a shoplifting Oberlin student), has moved on to generate her own particular form of magic at Oglethorpe. No doubt she is as we speak scanning commercial life in Atlanta to find a cafe against which she can organize a student mob. The obscenity she staged at Oberlin will cost the school thirty mill; here’s hoping Oglethorpe has a large legal payout fund.
Mother Russia was robbed by us fellas they say.
That's why we've got such wonderful yachts.
Give a little to charity? No, nyet, and nay!
We're spending each ruble we got.
We docked in Ibiza, but then they said 'ey, please-ah:
All di Rusos get out: bye bye!
Then we pondered it - Hum... hum... Where is the place for pond scum?
And the answer was clear: Dubai!
... Yes, Dubai! Yes, Dubai!
For there's nothing too vile for Dubai!
Ukrainians die and our money piles high
Come one and come all to Dubai.
… leave Garrett Park to go shelling on the Delaware beaches, while everyone knows that the real shelling action in that state lies within the nondescript buildings in Wilmington that house shell companies from around the world.
People are beginning to be aware of this because of all them Russky oligarchs in the news.
For the state of Delaware, thesesmall [incorporation] fees add up to as much as 41% of the state’s entire revenue. In 2019, they collectively amounted to$1.4B...
Adopted in 1899, the DelawareGeneral Corporation Law “reduced restrictions upon corporate action to aminimum” and promised to maintain the most hospitable business enclave in the nation — a place where corporations could frolic in the open fields of capitalism, unencumbered by income tax, bureaucratic policing, and shareholder litigation.
As we frolic ‘pon the open early spring fields of sand, all around us the open fields of capitalism sprout another astounding bumper crop for wee Delaware and we are so oblivious. It’s all secret, see, so even if we wanted to shake the sand off our feet and take a serious look at Delaware’s incomparable tax haven we couldn’t.
Delaware and Nevada are two of the jurisdictions where it is the easiest to obtain the anonymous companies money launderers like best. Those states are in fact significantly less transparent than famous tax havens like the British Virgin Islands... Delaware and Nevada have not just risked the rest of the country, they have risked the entire world. They have tunneled a gaping hole in the domestic laws of any country concerned with preventing corruption, fraud, tax evasion, drug trafficking, terrorism, and all the other ills facilitated by anonymous shell companies.
Here’s one guy who at one time had a slew of Delaware shell companies:
On 2 November 2011, [Victor] Bout was convicted by a jury in a Manhattan federal court of conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials, delivery of anti-aircraft missiles, and providing aid to a terrorist organization, and was sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment. Since June 2012, Bout has been held at the United States Penitentiary, Marion.
This guy must be itching to help Putin’s war effort!
[The British government sought] to find a way to make sure that Chelsea could continue to function, roughly as normal, once Abramovich’s other assets were frozen. The players, the staff and the fans — especially the fans — must not suffer, the government said. A few hours earlier, Russian artillery had shelled a maternity hospital in Mariupol, Ukraine. But the government was clear: The sanctity of the Premier League could not be sullied...
His arrival marked the start of what will come, in time, to be thought of as soccer’s oligarch age. It was Abramovich, as noted last week, whose arrival kick-started the inflationary spiral that has fractured European soccer beyond repair, with only a handful of clubs hoarding all of the wealth of the game, ruthlessly stripping its natural resources for their benefit...
Soccer’s age of the oligarch is over. This time, there can be no excuse for failing to understand what the game has become. On that, we have clarity.
… presumably gearing up to accumulate her next million, when her former employer, the University of Maryland, finally got wind of her alleged two decades worth of theft while she worked for them.
Amusingly, her new job is in the field of ethics… But anyway I guess they read the papers at Hopkins, because her university page there has been Page Not Founded.
If precedent’s anything to go by, she and her lawyers are desperately seeking an AWP (Addiction with Poignancy) for her. Scuzzy unsanitary stuff like meth is out; usually what these people come up with is gambling.
The leader of Italy’s far right does love him some Putin. The far right in lots of countries – including of course Trump’s America – does love it some Putin.My OTHER Putin shirt!
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
