Evil People Make the Best Copy.

Fuckface’s ex chief of staff lets it rip.

A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

… A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

La Kid turns…

… 33.

No Child’s Behind Left.

I mean, the church thought it was done.

Now the law has changed and it’s time to declare bankruptcy.

“[Extremely high Wyoming suicide rates derive from] the relaxed attitude about having loaded guns in the household. So many people have loaded firearms that are not secured. Guns are the most lethal way of suicide; if a person has access to guns and is suicidal it is more likely they will complete suicide.”

Question: How do they relax in Wyoming?

Answer: By having lots of loaded guns loose around the house.

We four little kids used to giggle as our ancient (he was probably 60) Grampa Joe Rapoport padded around his Baltimore apartment sipping borscht, wheezing, and muttering OY…

… when he got bronchitis.

Today UD can report that, having picked up bronchitis on a recent trip to Vermont, she is doing exactly the same thing.

Snapshots from Home

UD’s favorite exchange from yesterday’s Biden impeachment inquiry featured her polygamy-defending GWU colleague, Jonathan Turley:

Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL): Professor Turley, in 2006, you wrote an op-ed in The Guardian entitled, quote, Stop Persecuting Polygamists. There, you likened polygamists to, quote, persecuted minorities. And you said polygamy is, quote, a practice with deep and good faith, religious meaning. Isn’t that what you said?

Turley: I represented the Sister Wives, a family, in challenging a polygamy prosecution.

Krishnamoorthi: The answer is yes. You’ve been crusading for legalizing polygamy for years. In fact, in an op-ed in the USA Today, you said that a Utah polygamist named Tom Green, who was also convicted of pedophilia for raping his 13-year-old stepdaughter, should not have been charged with polygamy. 

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

Years ago, UD wrote one of her best limericks (at least I think so) about her many-wives-loving colleague:

A colleague of UD‘s named Turley
Wants one boy to have many girlies.
“My thing on polygamy
Makes UD quite sick of me,
And even my wife has turned surly.”

“Noctalgia” means “night grief”…

… and wants to capture humanity’s sadness at losing its dark skies.

UD thought of some other words:

UMBRALGIA

MELANOPENIA

DARKOLEPSY

 ‘A $100 million [high school] stadium [in a district that already has a great stadium] should come as a shock only to those who haven’t been paying attention. It’s as Texas as Dr Pepper and the Alamo.’

‘As a non-native, I can’t relate. My high school football team held all its practices on an open field in New York’s Central Park.

At our team’s games, we didn’t sit in a massive stadium, but on old rickety bleachers. We never had a home game because we never had a home field.

But we excelled in book learning. Every one of my classmates was accepted by a college.

I know times have changed, but $100 million goes a long way in education.’

Oh shush. We all don’t need some New Yorker come down here tell us how to live like we should care we’re 35th among states in education blahblah. We’ll get that thing built and fuck you.

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

UD thanks John, a reader, for the link.

‘With LSU reportedly interested in [Mel] Tucker amid his 2021 [football coaching] success, the Spartans rewarded him with a massive contract extension. At the time, his annual salary trailed only Nick Saban’s at Alabama and put him in the company of other national title-winning coaches, such as Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher.’

Michigan State was happily on its way to bankrupting the school, via massive payments (an almost hundred million dollar ten-year contract extension!) to a football coach who racked up some winning games, when (quoting James Bond) “something big came up.”

Given that as recently as 2018 another Michigan school was out 500 mill because a team doctor also had something come up, you kinda wonder

1.) how does one of America’s not at all rich states keep finding all this dough (and more) in its university sports programs? and

2.) will the state ever realize that hugely expensive degenerates tend to populate American university sports programs at the highest levels? (Tuberville not high-profile enough for you?) Because once you get RID of, say, Tucker, he’s gonna turn around and sue you for hundreds of millions more, the way all of them do when you fire them, for cause or not. Right? Has anyone besides UD been following this history?

As daunting as the remaining two months remaining on the schedule appear, there’s also the potential for a lengthy legal fight with Tucker hinting at his intent to sue the university over the roughly $80 million remaining on his contract. Michigan State doesn’t want to pay a dime and will have to decide if it’s worth absorbing hefty legal fees and headlines continuing to link the school with Tucker or reach a settlement to bring the saga to an end.

3.) can anyone at these institutions of higher learning think about cause and effect? As in, when you suddenly give a hundred million dollar contract to a… not too upstanding person, might that money and power go to his head? Make him think he can get away with anything cuz he’s such hot shit?

Yeah. You kinda wonder why so many American universities are ineducable on the most basic patterns, the most basic matters.

France Wins the Secularity Gold Medal.

Yeah, yeah, the usual suspects are fussing up a storm, but France is adamant that its Olympics athletes will not wear that must-have Iranian fashion statement, the hijab.

Meanwhile, the world’s hardest working organization, CAIR, which must express outrage every day as hundreds of countries and regions all over the world (including, for instance, Egypt) outlaw public-sphere wearing of such things as burqas, hijabs, abayas, chadors, etcetcetc, is drawing itself up yet again this morning in high umbrage over a secular republic’s declaration that people representing that republic and its values to the world may not wear religious stuff while doing said representation.

France is not a theocracy, and women whose fanaticism burns so bright they refuse to take off a headscarf in public fit uneasily into seriously non-theocratic states. These women, like CAIR, are free to spend their lives in worldwide social and judicial combat over escalating and widening public-realm Islamic dress bans; or they can move to more blanketing-friendly places, like Malaysia (uh-oh). Hell, in England they’re erecting statues to the greatness of the hijab! (The monumentalized hijabi in question don’t look too happy, IMHO, but whatever.)

‘The war of religion that officially began in Israel on Yom Kippur this year will be ugly. In Tel Aviv and perhaps other Israeli cities the tolerance for outposts of intolerant Judaism has run out.’

There is no way now to bridge the divide between those who saw the events of Yom Kippur in Tel Aviv and other cities across Israel as an attempt by religious fanatics to defy the High Court ruling and force gender-separation on a liberal city, and those who saw there radical secularists preventing Jews from holding a sacred event.

Yes, absurdly enough for such a small country, people are talking about the separation of populations.

UD is heart and soul with the Tel Avivians, but she wonders how many will want to keep fighting the fight. Large numbers of rational, self-respecting people are leaving Israel, and who can blame them.

Claiming – and maintaining – the bottom: Alabama shows you how it’s done.

“Alabama always ranks at the bottom” of every state-based quality of life list, notes a local opinion writer; and if you want to know how they do it, look no further than Auburn University’s Neville Arena, purpose-built for basketball, but – er – converted the other night, by the school’s multimillionaire sports coaches (football and basketball), into a massive Christian revival/pep rally/public baptism. We Ask You Lord/In Jesus’ Name/Make Us Win/ Tomorrow’s Game

Some have dared point out that Auburn is a public university, and here in the States, uh….

But the Guv herself just shot that right down as in like how dare sicko atheists dare tell us what to do down here …

And meanwhile all the smart people on campus (Jews, Hindus, Muslims) take one look at this sponsored, schoolwide thang and say Wow this is even freakier than Notre Dame… I’m getting the hell out of here…

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

And that’s how you do it. That’s how you keep your school – and your state – stupid. In the name of the Father, the Run, and the Goaly Posts, Amen.

At Home with the Meadowses…

… on deep state bonfire day.

America’s…

Lecher.

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

“I feel his frozen fingers trail up my thigh. He tilts his chin up. The whites of his eyes look jaundiced. My eyes dart to [Trump adviser] John Eastman, who flashes a leering grin.”

Eastman’s a “devout Catholic,” see.

‘She had planned to retire this year before she was asked to serve as acting president.’

Temple’s acting president died of what sounds like a sudden heart attack during a university event today.

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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