New Mexico State (feast your eyes) puts a guy on court who just goes ahead and punches the lights out of another player.

New Mexico State’s Robert Carpenter pulled back his arm and delivered a powerful punch to the face of Liberty’s Shiloh Robinson, sending the forward to the floor, [breaking his nose,] and leading to an ejection during an Aggies overtime win.

The beauty of it is the coach initially said Carpenter’s a great guy and I’m sure he’s remorseful and maybe we’ll suspend him for a game or something… And then I dunno someone must have talked to the coach cuz now it’s oh he’s suspended indefinitely blah blah.

Wowsa. It’s rarely this glaring.

That’s Georgy Kurasov‘s work on the right. (Kurasov’s totally charming self-description is here.) The plagiarism — featured, until blasted off, in a Cairo metro station — is on the left. Ghada Wali has been sentenced to six months in prison.

Let’s hope so. Let’s hope the current high-profile involuntary manslaughter trial scares the bejaysus out of America’s most cretinous heatpackers.

Hey hon says dad as he watches the Crumbleys carted off to jail, maybe we shouldn’t give our violent, schizophrenic kid an AK47 for Christmas…

Esformes pleads guilty, and we will be deprived of a trial.

On the upside: His life has been ruined.

Put Esformes in my search engine to revisit all his despicability.

… amid all the plagiarism misconduct, so Harvard’s Khalid Shah has arrived not a moment too soon.

Time was UD followed bogus stem cell studies constantly, with this almost immediately discontinued 2005 Korean stamp

the high point of the bogosity. But maybe word got around that bogus stem cell results were getting caught and careers ruined, because stem cell naughtiness kind of fell away.

But bogus, brain-related, stem cell research seems to be what has done in the much-laureled, over-extended, madly-publishing Shah, a man unfortunate enough to have been on the receiving end of one of Elisabeth M. Bik’s punishing data analyses.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Yeah you read dat right. 32 authors coming out of what —- one million thirty two labs, schools, departments, clinics, each location populated by poohbahs professors grad students scoundrels standers-by and why oh why is anyone surprised that research protocols like this generate longterm fraud??

1. From the promotional literature for new assisted living apartments a mile away from Les UDs.

McCaffery and Solera Senior Living have partnered to co-develop The Modena Reserve at Kensington, a 135-unit luxury independent, assisted living and memory care community. Located in the high barrier to entry town of Kensington, Maryland, and adjacent to the historic Kensington train station offering direct access to Washington D.C….

2. UD had a consult this morning with a pulmonologist. Faithful readers know UD has episodic bronchitis. She hasn’t had any trouble for months, but she decided as a precaution to talk to a specialist. Here’s a bit of conversation from him.

When I joined this practice ten years ago, I thought the partners wanted me because of my impressive education. Harvard College, Hopkins med school, Harvard internships… But when I made partner they told me ‘Franklin, we hired you to be our shabbos goy.‘

… but if it’s true that Harvard’s chief diversity officer is a plagiarist, everyone’s gonna start talking.

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Just today, a new complaint emerged against Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, alleging that she, too, engaged in scholarly misconduct. (Neither Charleston nor the university has responded to a request for comment on those allegations.)

Story jumps to Atlantic mag.

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The Harvard Crimson covers it today. Here’s the part that makes UD sit up.

The complaint also alleged that extensive passages in Sherri Charleston’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation lifted language from a 2005 book written by Rebecca J. Scott, a professor of history and law at the University of Michigan. Scott co-chaired Charleston’s doctoral committee and advised Charleston on her dissertation.

Many passages describe or analyze historical events using phrases — and sometimes whole sentences — identical to those in Scott’s book. In each case, Charleston cites Scott but does not quote the shared language.

If they really were extensive, and if they were not quoted, it’s legitimate to ask why Scott didn’t notice anything.

Why no one noticed anything. The language was taken from a very high-profile book.

UD was there a few weeks ago, and Florence is indeed pimping itself out to the world. The Italians shouldn’t pretend to be shocked when someone calls them on it. Stop allowing unrestricted tourism, and people will stop calling you a prostitute.

Even Venice has imposed restrictions.

Wotta shocker.

[T]he athletics department at the University of Arizona is on track to lose approximately $65 million over two years.

… [T]he UA athletic department is operating at a roughly $30 million loss this year. Last year, the department lost about $35 million.

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Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Curiouser and curiouser. The title refers to a number of pro-Israel billionaires who recently sponsored a fund-raiser for the North Carolina Republican leading the federal harassment of Ivy League universities for their purported anti-semitism.

These same lads – shockingly – are going after the manifold tax breaks that make it possible for Harvard University both to be designated a non-profit organization AND be worth around eighty billion dollars … or something like that number… I mean, there’s the endowment, whose amount we know; but there’s also real estate, about which we don’t know — so this is UD‘s probably pretty lame estimate of Harvard’s pile of dough…

… What the fuck make it a hundred billion. There are other assets. Make it five hundred billion. Who the fuck knows.

Anyway, a lot of these pro-Israel billionaire guys are working against their own interests, cuz they’re the very moneybags who have over the years given SOOOO much of their loot to Ivies like Penn and Harvard that they’re practically running the places, but they couldn’t have given so much and gotten so powerful without the tax breaks against which they’re now militating! Ya falla?

Four student deaths at UW River Falls, in pretty quick succession – with all of them apparently serious depressives … That sounds very much like a cluster, one death inspiring another.

[Tania] Riske said [her daughter] Sabrina struggled with severe depression for many years. She had a team of counselors and doctors working with her in her hometown of Eau Claire. But Sabrina declined help from campus counselors, Riske said…

“A lot of people were asking me what [the university] could have done better. I don’t think it had anything to do with a shortcoming,” Riske said. “I think they are doing appropriate things. And I’m happy about that.”  

As with this earlier post about campus suicide clusters, the problem is not necessarily a lack of school support, though obviously there’s always room for a school to monitor some students more closely, add therapists, etc. The problem is that in some cases of severe protracted depression there’s not much that love, pills, ketamine, teams of counselors and doctors, etc., can do. It’s a hellishly powerful drive, the drive to leave.

The mother of a suicide (her son’s name was Seth) talks about another recent suicide (John).

You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.

If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.

If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.

Americans are practical, success-oriented, ingenious, optimistic, religious — it’s arguably particularly hard for Americans to come to grips with the deathward tenacity of some suicidal people.

I mean, maybe we can grasp this in a frail eighty-year old. A twenty year old college student?

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Forget slipped the surly bonds: We’re talking stripped the bonds off hard, with both hands. “I’m climbing up through the clouds and then just gonna head out outside of everything,” a 23 year old student pilot not long ago radioed a confused traffic controller before crashing his plane. He desperately wanted out of everything. His words have gone viral – there’s poetry in head out outside of everything – and we should pay attention to them. Some suicides are virtually punching their way out of the atmosphere. Hard to go up against such people.

But you wouldn’t want to mess with the special magic that is guns, gangs, and late night clubs… Let’s do nothing and see if things improve…

After all, the club’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep guns out.

 [There are] up to 20 guards on duty, two armed guards outside, two pat-downs at the door, a metal detector and more than 80 surveillance cameras.

And yet the lads keep getting in with guns!

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Hold on. Maybe Buffalo is ready to act…

After the fourth shooting at or around Club Marcella this year, the City of Buffalo has shut down the popular nightclub.… [The shootings all took place] … in less than a year. On January 29, a security guard was shot in the parking lot. Two weeks later on February 12, one person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting inside the club. The third happened in October.

See? That’s all it takes to shut an American night club down.

He comes up with “cutting and pasting,” but this has, arguably, a more pejorative feel than “plagiarism.”

“Dilation and curettage”?

Even the Norwegians! Even the Norwegian in charge of academic integrity!

On [South Korea’s] Jeju [Island], it’s not unusual to see signs at camping grounds or guest houses stipulating both lower and upper age limits for would-be guests. There are “no-teenager zones” and “no-senior zones”, for example, and even plenty of zones targeting those somewhere in between.

So numerous have the “no-middle-aged zones” become that they have collectively been dubbed “no-ajae zones,” in reference to a slang term for “uncle.”

One restaurant in Seoul rose to notoriety after “politely declining” people over 49 (on the basis men of that age might harass female staff), while in 2021, a camping ground in Jeju sparked heated debate with a notice saying it did not accept reservations from people aged 40 or above. Citing a desire to keep noise and alcohol use to a minimum, it stated a preference for women in their 20s and 30s.

Other zones are even more niche.

Among those to have caused a stir on social media are a cafe in Seoul that in 2018 declared itself a “no-rapper zone,” a “no-YouTuber zone” and even a “no-professor zone”.

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I assume that last one is because professors order one tea and then sit at a table all day, reading a book.