… photograph… but also likes to shake his tush...
‘The vessel notified MD Department of Transportation (MDOT) that they had lost control of the vessel and an allision with the bridge was possible.’
Yup. An allision is an accident in which only one ship is moving.
[Professor Francis] Quek told the officer who visited with the witness, according to the arrest report, that he normally uses the [faculty] lounge to practice with his [fully loaded] handgun and that he had not had any problems in the past with people walking into the lounge.
Quek’s reward: Texas A&M has put him on paid leave, so … He shoots, he scores! No teaching, at full salary!
Another feather in soccer’s cap. We tend to focus on the brutality and bigotry of European stadiums, but let’s not forget the great fans closer to home!
To paraphrase Lady Macbeth.
American political rhetoric on the right is gushing blood. Katie Britt’s excited smile when she described the country as “steeped in the blood of patriots” has weirded out lots of commentators, as has candidate Trump’s recent enthusiastic prediction, at a rally, that if he loses, “there’s going to be a blood bath for the country.”
Trump is always going on about blood – not, like Britt, that of patriots, but of the streets.
Yet who would have thought the Grand Old Party had so much blood in it? Republican red flows literally now; the MAGA GOP is the party of plasma, with vampirish Trump vamping about the crimson hellscape the USA already is, and certainly will be, should he fall short of victory.
Politicians almost always invoke blood in the context of fallen patriots, although in MAGA world, as in the case of Britt, there’s often a heavy blood of the lamb overlay. Britt and much of her Evangelical audience is used to singing lyrics like these every Sunday:
There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.
Evangelical music directors draw on a … flood of this redeeming gore in their programming, and no one in church says boo about it.
But Trump’s arterial oratory is something else again. His audiences are perfectly prepared to hear God and country, and even Revelation/Armageddon, in his thundering; but some seem taken aback by the angry sense of meaninglessness coursing through his veins. They’re not being washed in Trump’s bloodiness; they’re choking to death on it.
***********************
In fact they are watching, in real time, as a lifelong nihilist reckons with old age and death, not to mention likely electoral defeat, and it ain’t pretty. And it certainly ain’t religious.
Trump’s evangelicals long ago made their peace with his stark godlessness; he represents their flawed but elected transformer of the Supreme Court and other heathen elements. What they hadn’t reckoned with is what people like Donald Trump – see Christopher Lasch’s book, The Culture of Narcissism – turn into toward the end.
One of my acquaintances – a high-profile architect/artist – told me on his deathbed that he was convinced the world was coming to an end along with him. He took bitter pleasure in the thought that if he had to endure the insult of death, at least all other living beings did too, in one big wipeout. Trump’s delectation of the bloody death of America is exactly this cold comfort – if he has to go, he’s going to take everything down with him. Death is for losers.
As is age and debility. Already he paints himself, an aging coquette, like Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach in “Death in Venice”; already he insists his aphasic moments are intentional satire. But no cover story, no makeup, can hide his predicament: He is a human being like the rest of us, which means he gets the same tragic life we do. Most of us grapple with that – philosophically, spiritually – in an effort to come to terms with it. But people like Trump do not do this, and his audiences have the dubious privilege of observing his gaping existential wound as he is forced to glimpse the reality of the end of life.
At its best, nihilism produces Samuel Beckett. It produces Charles Baudelaire (‘Nothing in nature now remains unblooded. / I used to hope that wine could bring me ease, / Could lull asleep my deeply gnawing mind. / I was a fool: the senses clear with wine. / I looked to Love to cure my old disease. / Love led me to a thicket of IVs / Where bristling needles thirsted for each vein.’); it produces Sylvia Plath (‘The world is blood-hot and personal / Dawn says, with its blood-flush.’). At its worst, in the current Republican presidential candidate, it brings to mind the earth-killing fantasies of Trump’s predecessor, the French reactionary Joseph De Maistre: “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things … until the death of death.”
The closer you get, the worse Harvard’s Gino looks. This is from a Vox piece.
[W]hile there are many people who could have manipulated the data for any one of the studies, the only common denominator across all of them — over eight years — was Gino…
Between the dishonesty researchers who have one by one turned out to be dishonest and the cancer research that turned out to be reusing Photoshopped versions of the same test result pictures, the last few years have been full of discomfiting reminders that, yes, some [of the highest-profile] people will cheat to get ahead in science, and we lack a robust process for catching them.
Scientific integrity currently depends on the willingness of individuals to speak out when they see fraud, and it’s precisely that willingness Gino’s [defamation] lawsuit targets.
Background here.
… John Calipari, whose latest thing is losing lots of games at Kentucky but costing that stoooopid school over 33 million if it wants to get rid of him.

The 1929 Evening Journal (Wilmington Delaware) reports that UD’s grandfather, Joe, and Joe’s brother Nathan, had warrants sworn out against them by an angry dance hall owner, who considered it unfair that he had to close on Sundays, but Ocean City boardwalk amusements did not.
For the second time, Scathing Online Schoolmarm has caught someone using exuberant when they mean exorbitant. The first one was
Rehoboth Beach is Delaware’s most overrated destination mainly due to the cost of parking and its exuberant enforcement of parking meters.
I think the writer probably had excessive in mind along with exorbitant. Whatever.
And there’s this.
Ball told him that was “a felony,” but she wouldn’t report it. She just kept prescribing him exuberant amounts of oxycodone.
[W]hen Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX) had his turn to speak, he presented a big map on an easel which identified Ukraine as Kazakhstan and vice-versa.
197,000 people, or 17.8 percent, voted for either Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis [in the Florida Republican primary], despite both candidates having dropped out of the race. The results suggest the former president is losing support in Florida compared with the previous election in 2020.
… Trump’s VP list.
Francesca said Nina did the dirty and now all hell breaks loose.
Nina is a product of Atelier Ariely … so…
UD ain’t SUPER sympathetic with ultraorthodox women pulling a Lysistrata because in their sect you don’t get to divorce without your husband’s permission. Without your husband’s permission.
You’re the ones who choose to live in the eighteenth century, ladies, under degrading conditions set for you by morons. No-divorce is just part one. Why don’t you leave.
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.
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