‘[T]here have been fights between folks in the crowd at the Griffin vs. Spalding basketball games in recent years. … Back in October, a 15-year-old student was shot and killed after the same rivalry match in football.’

No fans allowed to a high school football game in Georgia. Guns keep going off.

Wow. I’m bad at math, but even I can spot the disparity.

According to the SEC, the group reported cash and cash equivalents of $461.7mn for 2022 in the bank accounts of its Nigerian subsidiary, Tingo Mobile, which says it provides farmers in Nigeria with microloans, weather forecasts and an online marketplace. But the US watchdog claims the actual balance was less than $50 for that financial year.

‘[M]otions to reduce his salary to $1, strip him of his authority and powers, no longer approve expense reimbursements, and censure him … [all] passed.’

They’re feeding Christian to the lions.

“I think to go through something like this makes you question everything you know about yourself, and why are you here? What are you doing with the voices in your head that, you know, just there in darkness are so powerful? I will take the experience that I went through and some really, really, really dark days that I went through, and I will use that to not just make myself more resilient but to use my uniquely having to go through this to be able to … hopefully help others through similar circumstances …”

Corrupt, stupid, insane, and YOUR MAN in Tallahassee!

‘[Romanesco Italia Fractal Broccoli is] an Italian heirloom with stunning, apple-green heads that are superbly flavored. Its fractal form is a fascinating logarithmic Fibonacci spiral.’

And it was featured today in Garrett Park’s outdoor market.

Somehow reminds UD, who used to snorkel a lot, of coral reefs in Cozumel.

‘[Giuliani’s lawyer] had warned that an award of the scale being sought by the women would be the civil equivalent of the death penalty for his client.’

Rats. Just the civil equivalent.

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

In the event, the jury did not award the women the original rumored amount of damages – around forty million dollars.

It awarded them $148 million.

 “[This award sends a message] to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”

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

“This case is what happens when you combine vicious, over-the-top defamation against innocent victims with the single worst legal strategy ever devised by a human mind,” [Elie] Honig said [the day before damages were announced]. The former federal prosecutor broke down Giuliani and his lawyer’s approach to the case, explaining that because they agreed Giuliani was liable and conceded to defamation, he should have gone into the trial expressing remorse in an effort to minimize damages. “Instead, they go in on this damages trial and commit more defamation,” Honig concluded. “They are just asking for a massive verdict and I think we’re gonna see that tomorrow.”

The IMF sure knows how to pick ’em.

Sixteen percent of its directors have been crooks. During the glory years (2004 – 2011) they went from Rodrigo Rato, soon to start another jail term, to Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Has the IMF ever issued a statement distancing itself from its mafia? UD doesn’t think so. Why not?

Has Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which long touted Rato’s having graduated from the school, ever issued any kind of statement acknowledging his crimes? Again, UD doesn’t think so. All over the web you can find them praising their Frankenstein. Don’t you think the school should say something official? Or maybe it doesn’t care.

‘The core of the gun-rights movement—and the firearms market—is made up of white men who live in suburbs or rural areas. These buyers are among the least likely to encounter gun violence, but the most likely to die by their own hand using a firearm.’

This is a subtle and sensitive examination of the gun suicide epidemic, featuring Bob Owens, whose death was hypertypical.

[A] journalist who was friends with Owens said that many gun owners [like Owens] are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.

Eh bien. UD’s heart goes out to these silent, lost, sufferers, but their logic’s a bit skewed. Surely they know they are overwhelmingly unlikely to need their twenty firearms for self-defense; surely they know (or at least intuit?) that those guns are far more likely to be used by someone in their home for suicide.

They may even know that the act will be impulsive – one drunk self-hating night; the failure to complete some task or other; a bad fight with your wife. Gun, stage left.

And it wouldn’t even be about taking the weapons away. It would be about temporarily locking them up until a crisis passed. But even that…

What does one say about flagrantly suicidal people who refuse to go to doctors and refuse to put away their guns?

Christian thinks the Republican party chair is like…

… a football coach.

If you think there are going to be any cheap jibes on this blog about…

… the dead Turkish guy and the wrath of Allah, you are sadly mistaken.

Some like to recite the Shema. UD likes to recite this…

… and variations on it.

Giuliani is poised to get hit with a multimillion dollar ruling against him in D.C. over his baseless accusations of election fraud against two poll workers. After that civil trial concludes, he’ll turn around and begin preparing for a criminal trial in Atlanta, where he’s facing many of the same racketeering charges he once wielded as a federal prosecutor against mobsters in New York. And throughout it all, Giuliani has a long list of creditors, from former associates to contractors, who are also hounding him for money. For Giuliani, 2023 will likely end in penniless defeat. But 2024 could be even worse—it could actually end with him in prison... 2021 was the ruining of his professional reputation, with New York and the District of Columbia suspending his law license for spreading lies and his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. This year exposed his financial ruin. Next year, it could be prison.

V’imru Amen.

Edna St. Vincent Ziegler

PURGE WITHOUT MUSIC

I am not resigned to the shutting away of hypocrites in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness we go, Bridget and Christian.  Crowned

With sex toys and strap-ons we go; but I am not resigned.

La Kid hung out with Oprah last night.

Or, uh, not exactly...

But after unveiling her National Portrait Gallery portrait, Oprah had dinner at the same place La Kid booked for her office Xmas gathering. So La Kid gazed at her a lot.

‘[Draymond] Green is 33 with four championship rings and has signed his name on two $100 million contracts. No punishment is going to make him change his ways. He received the second contract after punching a teammate… The millennial NBA bully has bought all the way into his role and has no incentive to change. If Green wasn’t kicking, stomping, choking and swinging, he would not have been in that In-Season Tournament commercial.’

I say give the guy a gun out there! America! Fuck the Euros! Fuck yeah!

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

BREAKING: The guessing game is over: Draymond Green will be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate.

‘[In North Korea,] the life of the human being … is completely pointless. The concept of liberty or humour or irony or happiness or love doesn’t exist. You are there simply as a prop for the State.’

My much-missed hero, Christopher Hitchens, nailed it.

No wonder The Great Leader wept with desperation recently as he begged the linings of the country’s uteri to thicken.

Why reproduce? Why do anything?

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

Yes, yes, of course: South Korea’s fertility numbers are even worse. But there’s a difference between living in an advanced society full of competing possibilities for women, and living mouth to mouth in a squalid gaping hole.

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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