January 20th, 2022
15? That’s awfully old to be carrying a …

...firearm.

January 19th, 2022
All The Wondrous Things You AR-

A man charged for participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot had his pretrial release revoked Tuesday after a dramatic arrest for allegedly driving while intoxicated. James Tate Grant was arrested for drunk driving in a Wake County, North Carolina in December. He told the police who flagged him down that he had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6 …

Grant attempted to get away during the arrest… In his car, the cops found an AR-15, 60 rounds of ammunition, and combat fatigues… [H]e awaits trial for allegedly assaulting a police officer on Jan. 6, prohibited firearm possession, excessive drinking, and drug use … He had previously tested positive for amphetamines twice…

January 17th, 2022
Attention, World Terrorists!

In America, it’s one-stop shopping! You can come here with no weapons at all and buy all the guns you want for your terror attack right off the street!

Why kill people in countries where getting weapons is difficult? Why run the risk of transporting them? In America the streets are lined with Glocks.

January 1st, 2022
‘”By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence,” [Canadian political scientist Thomas] Homer-Dixon wrote.’

Hell, we’ve already got widespread civil violence, what with all them guns going off everywhere. Remember the slogan of the NRA:

You went to a lot of trouble and expense to build your arsenal. Might as well use it.

December 29th, 2021
Congrats, USA. You’d never see this on the streets of Paris. Or really in any of the world’s cities. But American exceptionalism now means burqa/open carry on the streets of Philadelphia.

And do we ever take open carry seriously. Look at the poor mayor of America’s current deadliest city, Jackson, Mississippi! Desperate, he tried getting rid of open carry — and the state came down on him like a ton of Glocks.

As for burqas – they’re banned in much of Europe, but babe this is the land of the free! Banish the thought.

December 9th, 2021
He graduated from a fly-by-night for-profit college so shitty it closed…

and he can’t remember when he puts a loaded gun in his work bag. But the US House of Representatives has been relying on Jeffrey Allsbrooks to be its Logistics Manager. Your tax dollars at work, mes petites.

December 4th, 2021
For an outcome as bad as this, it takes a village.

Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction [to abundant evidence of the shooter’s clear and present danger] “truly astounding.”

It was well within the school’s rights to require Mr. Crumbley, who has since pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges, to leave campus, Professor Ross said.

If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”

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

Some public school administrators harbor a sort of mulish assumption that public means everyone gets to go there. And stay there.

Or is this about incompetence? Indifference? As charges and lawsuits are brought forward, we will find out.

December 4th, 2021
Knick Knack Paddy Whack Give the Babe a Gun

Once they figured out their son was really seriously mentally ill, Kip Kinkel’s parents started buying him guns. Not long after, he mowed both of them down as they came home from work. Then he drove to his high school and mowed down students.

Nancy Lanza had written a check for a CZ 83 handgun for her son Adam’s Christmas present, but before she could give it to him he blasted her to kingdom come with another of the home’s many firearms. Then it was off to Sandy Hook Elementary. She knew Adam was extremely disturbed, but figured a personal weapon would be therapeutic.

The Michigan mass shooter’s Sig Sauer SP 2022 was also a Christmas present from his parents, who also had scads of evidence that he was right round the bend.

It is one of the crowning post-Trump achievements of this country that the dangerously mentally ill are more than encouraged to buy serious firepower. If they’re too young to buy guns for themselves, their loving parents, as we see from these three famous examples, can always buy guns for them.

December 3rd, 2021
Call out the NRA!

A Michigan prosecutor on Friday filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of the 15-year-old suspect in the Oxford High School shooting.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were each charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter after their son, Ethan, was accused of fatally shooting four students at the suburban Detroit school on Tuesday.

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

When ordinary Americans can’t send their psychotic fifteen year old to school with a Sig Sauer 9 mm, things have taken a truly ominous turn.

November 30th, 2021
Another ordinary day…

… in America.

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

“It is insane that this is somewhat normal.”

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

“If the incident yesterday, with four children being murdered and multiple kids being injured is not enough to revisit our gun laws, I don’t know what is,” [Oakland County Prosecutor Karen] McDonald said.

Hello? Sandy Hook?

November 29th, 2021
It’s a small world, after all!

Guns are creating an America in perfect harmony.

[P]ublic defenders argue that, historically, permits have been issued unevenly, and that still today, in many places, it is easier for whites and members of the middle class to get permits than it is for people of color and the poor. And they argue their clients should have guns just like other Americans do. In other words, the progressive left has met [the] far right in describing dangerous streets and the need to be armed on them.

… [This] nihilism … echoes the far right champions of the men we have seen on trial. Instead of taking guns out of the hands of the Rittenhouses and McMichaels of the world, these progressive public defenders want to level “up”— to make guns more readily available to their clients, to all of us. Their vision, if realized, would make the self-defense claims of Mr. Rittenhouse and Mr. McMichael unremarkable, not only in red states, but across the country.

The audacious position taken by these New York public defenders should give pause to anyone tempted to understand, and maybe even discount, the Rittenhouse and McMichael defenses as essentially conservative arguments playing to conservative juries in conservative states…

… [U]nregulated guns escalate violence across ideological lines.

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

‘All of us,’ by the way, needs to include America’s youngest shooters. As our headline has it, it’s a small world, after all; and the smallest among us, whose gun play is increasingly part of the country’s media landscape, also deserve self-defense in what’s coming to be called the Tot-on-Tot-Shot scenario. The only thing that stops a bad three year old with a gun is a good five year old with a gun.

November 23rd, 2021
Sibling Rivalry…

à l’Américaine.

November 17th, 2021
Rittenhouse Squared

[The] gun lobby [has grown] more powerful and darker… The N.R.A. … has worked hard to leave the impression that the ideology of gun ownership has been constant, emphasizing a Second Amendment politics that flattens the distinction between the eighteenth century and the present, and marketing AR-15s as if they were made for hunting. [By] the time of Sandy Hook, the gun culture … was all new: the treatment of lobbyists as charismatic leaders, the black-rifle influencers, the military weapons in the stores, and the military imagery used to market them. [This is] the world that the N.R.A. built…

The allegations against [Wayne] LaPierre may weaken the N.R.A., but the tactical culture that consolidated under his watch appears more durable. The sort of people who, not long ago, [one] might have characterized as “couch commandos” are everywhere on the American right — in power, and also on the fringe. Kyle Rittenhouse, … at the age of seventeen, got an AR-15-style rifle from a friend and brought it to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he killed two men and wounded another … Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, … owns a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado; supported the storming of the Capitol; and has posed frequently with AR-15-style rifles.

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

Adam Lanza was twenty.

November 15th, 2021
Keeping Up with the Jones.

Alex Jones that is, whose vileness has finally bumped up against a court of law. He has been successfully sued for defamation by the parents of the slaughtered children whom he dismissed as actors in a government plot.

How to assess a money penalty for the pain this monstrous man has inflicted on the Sandy Hook families?

Whatever the juries decide, UD hopes it ruins him.

November 1st, 2021
From this morning’s Supreme Court arguments about the Texas anti-abortion law.

[Brett] Kavanaugh theorized that a left-leaning state could offer a $1 million bounty against those who sell an assault rifle, like an AR-15, then claim it wasn’t using state power because only private parties could bring the suits.

Hadn’t thought of that. Ha.

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

You and Me Against the World

It’s hardly traditional to get injunctions against judges, injunctions against everybody, right?’ [Chief Justice] Roberts said. ‘That’s part of the relief you seek, isn’t it? … So you’re seeking an injunction against the world?’

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

Genius Loco

Much of the debate revolved around a 1908 case, Ex Parte Young, where the Supreme Court ruled that state officials could be sued in federal court to prevent  them from trying to enforce unconstitutional laws. 

‘Some geniuses came up with a way to evade the commands of that decision as well as the command [of] the broader principal that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights,’ Justice Elena Kagan said. To say, ‘Oh, we’ve never seen this before, we can’t do anything about it,’ I guess I just don’t understand that argument.’ 

« Previous PageNext Page »

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

Archives

Categories