Regardless of Mr. Hur’s motivation, the details that he presented spoke to worries voters already had. 

Duh. The dude’s showing his age, and you bet we’re worried.

UD has no problem, btw, with Hur having spilled the already-opened beans. In fact she’s proud of the fact that we’re the sort of democracy where non-loyalists get appointed to important positions. That’s a good thing, mes petites.

Of course she will vote for the shaky irritable old guy over “a corrupt and confused 77-year-old who’s facing trial on dozens of felony counts in four separate criminal cases and has recently been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation.” But, says today’s NYT editorial, “the combination of Mr. Biden’s age and his absence from the public stage has eroded the public’s confidence. He looks as if he is hiding, or worse, being hidden.”

I say do two things:

1.) Let the guy out. Let him misspeak and trip on steps and let him laugh about this and acknowledge that though he’s doing a very good job running the country (“In the most challenging moments of his presidency, in supporting our allies when they are threatened and in steering the U.S. economy away from recession, Mr. Biden has been a wise and steady presence.”) he’s old and sometimes it shows.

2.) Send him to the Naval Medical Center (couple of miles from Les UDs) and get him an honest, legitimate cognitive workup. My guess is that he’ll do okay. Not real well, but well enough. Time to stop hiding.

With its echt–DeLillo name and its alcohol-everywhere setting, the Phoenix Waste Management Open golf tournament has postmodern pandemonium written all over it.

I’m thinking a contingent of yesterday’s shitkickers was just coming off of the big Trump rally where he encouraged Russia to do whatever the hell it wants to NATO countries that underpay their dues. Fuck em! Kill ’em! This way-roused the crowd, a portion of which, still fired up, then moved on to the big golf game.

Whooooooops.

[O]n Wednesday, the Brevard County [Florida] school board held a meeting, in part to discuss a challenge to the books The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five. Only one Moms for Liberty member showed up.

All the other attendees spoke in favor of keeping the books on the shelves—and heavily criticized the parental rights organization. One attendee compared “the growth of the Taliban and its repressive autocracy in the name of religious nationalism” in The Kite Runner to “the rise of parental rights groups that want to limit what students learn.”

UN Reno’s new engineering dean owns a business – a bogus journal that for a couple hundred bucks a pop from its, er, contributors, will pump out, say, a seven-sentence article with five authors.

No questions asked. Publication faster than you can say No peer review.

Many of the articles were authored by said dean, his son, and his son’s wife – the sort of family affair that puts UD in mind of Italian university departments where much of the faculty shares the same last name (“The University of Bari, in the southern region of Puglia, springs to mind. The economics faculty must seem like a home from home for Professor Lanfranco Massari as he bumps into sons Lanfranco Jr, Gilberto and Giansiro, or his five grandchildren who work in the same department.”).

Nosy Andrew Gelman, hailing from a respectable university, brought the whole We Are Family thing to the attention of UNR’s student paper, which, as it takes down a dean, should be a contender for the same Pulitzer as that kid at Stanford.

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You know what’s gonna happen, right? After an indignant defense of the miscreant, the school takes forever to investigate. Eventually it issues a statement downplaying it all (“… made some mistakes…”), and then in a year or so it ever so quietly removes the dude from the deanship but keeps him in the engineering dept at the same salary (close to $400,000) he made as dean. Ta da!

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UPDATE: Students who spend $1,499 for Jones’s three-hour RFID certification course receive a free copy of his [self-published] book …

Gets better and better.

… at Drunk Shakespeare’s Macbeth. UD attended, with La Kid, this evening.

Monsieur Macho represented himself in his trial for defaming climate change scientist Michael Mann cuz NOT ONLY IS CLIMATE CHANGE A HOAX BUT … BUT… BUT … MICHAEL MANN IS JUST LIKE A PEDERAST!

And not just any pederast – Jerry Sandusky!

Mark Steyn has to pay Mann one million dollars.

… flaunt it!

Then go to jail.

“Nir spent more money than God,” said a former HFZ employee. “No one was clear where the money was coming from. What success had the company realized that we were unaware of?” Feldman’s complaint against Meir alleges that Meir’s monthly American Express bill often exceeded $400,000. Meir spent hundreds of thousands on wine and kept a stable of luxury cars including five Mercedes G-Class wagons and a 1996 Porsche 911 Turbo valued at $300,000.

Bad boy.

Naked beneath a thin paper smock, a nurse checked my vitals …

Celeste Marcus is a bad writer. Salmagundi, which published her, seems not to have noticed. (The journal used to have higher standards.) She is bad not merely on the level of usage; she writes the breathless, self-regarding, histrionic bahdebah one associates with Naomi Wolf.

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None of this pertains to her recent rape accusation against Yascha Mounk, which, true or not, has already done professional damage: the Atlantic has suspended him as a contributor, as has Die Zeit. Hopkins, where he teaches, has announced an investigation.

I think you should approach this story with caution. Marcus did not report the rape; we will find out whether friends will confirm that she spoke about it. Far as I know, Mounk has no reputation as a predator, unlike the sexually notorious Leon Wieseltier, currently Marcus’s fellow editor/boss at a new journal.

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As you see, UD indeed brings skepticism to Marcus’s charge. What Marcus says could well be true, in which case throw the book at Mounk. But approach with caution.

She’s become addicted to the luxury/intensity of having the history of art to herself. She stays for an hour and a half or so, until other people dare to show up and share the goods.

I swear there’s almost no one there at ten AM on a cold weekday, so you just sashay about with an idiotic smile on your face as one unbelievable gallery after another beckons you. You hum Bach’s Cello #1 and the paintings hum back. Their lifeblood is bright red. They are right at you.

Even deathly pale their lifeblood is bright.

It’s you, the copyist, and the echoing halls.

Outside, UD takes heart from the writing on the side of the Archives.

Permanency. YES!

Although just in case I’m keeping a few of these pennies in my pocket.

Ms. Crumbley, 45, was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the four students who were shot to death by her son at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021. The son, Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time, used a pistol to kill Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14. Seven other people were injured. The gun was a gift from his parents.

She could – and should – get fifteen years. As I said in an earlier post, she’ll do the world some good by scaring the shit out of other fucked up gunnies who reproduced.

 [S]teroid injections [are sometimes] given to women undergoing elective Caesarean sections to deliver their babies. These injections are intended to prevent breathing problems in newborns. There is a worry that they might cause damage to a baby’s brain, but the practice was supported by a review, published in 2018… However, when [a group of scientific sleuths] looked at this review, they found it included three studies that they had noted as unreliable. A revised review, published in 2021, which excluded these three, found the benefits of the drugs for such cases to be uncertain.

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[C]ritically ill patients undergoing surgery were once sometimes given starch infusions to boost their blood pressure. This was based in part on seven now discredited studies by Joachim Boldt, a German anaesthesiologist. A revised round-up of the evidence published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2013, after his fabrications were discovered, concluded that giving starch infusions in these circumstances caused kidney damage and sometimes killed people.

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 [F]or more than a decade cardiac patients in Europe were given beta-blockers before surgery, with the intention of reducing heart attacks and strokes—a practice that rested on a study from 2009 which was eventually determined to have been based, at least in part, on fabricated data. By one estimate, this approach may have caused 10,000 deaths a year in Britain alone. And a systematic review showing that infusion of a high-dose sugar solution reduces mortality after head injury was retracted after an investigation failed to find evidence that any of the trials included in it, which were all ascribed to the same researcher, had actually taken place.

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… to her own private DC.

Winner and Still Champeen. Visits to the Archives always bring tears to UD‘s eyes, despite a certain amount of scoffing from Mr UD. (“Do they have benches where you can kneel in front of the documents?” he asked on my return.)

Imagine this scene in the insanely crowded Uffizi! Impossibile.

I’ll have the same quality of art as the Uffizi, free of charge, with one after another gallery to myself, please.

All topped off with a Teaism chai, and ginger scones.

Highly recommend this essay.

Took them a long time to decide to buy. But they were feeling empty.