Oh, and…

If the California bar court finds [John] Eastman culpable of the alleged violations, it can then recommend to the California Supreme Court that Eastman’s law license be suspended or revoked. The outcome of this proceeding is surely of less importance to Eastman than his likely forthcoming indictments in Atlanta and Washington as a Trump co-conspirator.

‘Among all Americans, abortion and women’s rights (19 percent) ranked third behind freedom of speech (26 percent) and gun rights (21 percent) when asked about the specific types of rights they worry about losing. But for Democrats, abortion and women’s rights (36 percent) was far and away the rights they see as most under threat, easily ahead of freedom of speech (14 percent) and voting rights (12 percent).’

Women’s rights. Democrats seem rather fired up about them. That’s because the Supreme Court took important women’s rights away.

We’ve already seen this fervency play out in various states. We’ll see much, much more.

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

According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 62 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, [which represents] the high-water mark for legal abortion in Pew’s polling, which dates back to 2007.

… Gallup — which has some of the longest trendlines when it comes to issues like abortion — asked Americans to choose between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” after asking about views on the legality of abortion. They found these numbers to be higher than any other annual recording dating back to 1996: 52 percent picked “pro-choice” this May and 55 percent picked “pro-choice” last May…

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll last month found that nearly three-in-four Americans, 72 percent, think abortion pills should be legal in all or most cases. 

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

Of course, none of this bothers the Catho-Falangists (‘Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.’) or the Pencerian Evangelicals, since these sects possess divine moral truth and will happily shove no abortion/no porn/no contraception/forced reproduction onto the American population whether we like it or not. But it turns out that Americans are pretty ornery about people trying to destroy their basic liberties; and since current attacks blatantly go after American women‘s liberties, we can now watch in real time as American women rear up to become a most fearsome voting bloc.

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

Another poll.

AND She Teaches Ethics.

Via her reader, Seelye, UD learns of the latest iteration of way-bogus psychology scholarship.

She’s named Francesca Giro and she has a really cool website.

We’re all looking for easy steps to a better brighter you, and Happiness + Efficiency experts oblige us with studies showing that, like, thinking of eating meat makes you more boorish and less social. (I read this particular result, from world-famous Diederik Stapel, to Mr UD, who laughed merrily.) H+E experts (Dan Ariely – a co-author of Francesca Giro’s! – Marc Hauser – who shares with Giro the Harvard affiliation – Jens Förster, etc.) are always flooring us with amazing whodathunkits, and we fall for this shit every single time cuz it comes out of Harvard or cuz we just want to believe it or because we’re thrilled by the weird.

But Uri Simonsohn (a name known to readers of this blog) doesn’t fall for it. At all. He finds discipline-destroying lies enraging, and sets about, with a couple of colleagues, to keep the field reasonably clean through exposure of research fraud. The miscreants make stuff up and manipulate numbers in order to keep generating attention-grabbing amazements and giving amazing TED talks re: the amazements and Uri’s right behind them, running the numbers.

How can we protect ourselves from marauding high-profile psych frauds?

Step One: If something sounds bogus, it’s probably bogus.

‘Only relatives, or creditors, or Yevgeny…

…ever rings in that Wagnerian manner.’

Vlad hears Prigozhin at the door.

La Kid got to Edinburgh in time…

… to see the Pride March. She’s all over Europe, for a month, for business and pleasure.

Commentary, Bob Huggins and West Virginia U.

Background here.

If Huggins or the institutions of higher learning that employed and enabled him gave a rat’s rectum about “student-athletics,” he wouldn’t have spent 16 years coaching Cincinnati as it and he became nationally known for winning by recruiting “high social risk” players and academic non-achievers who had no legitimate reason to be enrolled in any college. Only 28 percent of his Cincinnati players, including walk-ons, reportedly graduated.

And he wouldn’t have spent another 16 years coaching his alma mater, WVU, paid up to $5 million per year to do so, apparently because WVU fully approved of his winning ways and means honed at Cincinnati.

So the national con of college sports — student-athletics — proceeds, no education, and in many cases fundamental illiteracy, in exchange for full scholarships, often on taxpayer funding.

Die Libs sind unser Unglück!

[Book banning group Moms for Liberty] released a newsletter called The Parent Brigade on Wednesday, which included a quote from Hitler on the front page

 ‘[A]fter one of the most disruptive Supreme Court decisions in generations, many Americans — including women, young people, and Democrats — are reporting more liberal views on abortion than major pollsters have seen in years. Even conservatives, although the changes are slight, are increasingly supportive of abortion rights.’

Details here.

Awful. Possibly imploded.

A debris field has been found.

Some experts have speculated that it could have suffered a catastrophic implosion as a result of a hull failure. The minivan-sized submersible was owned and operated by the private company OceanGate Expeditions.

The firm’s co-founder, Guillermo Söhnlein, told the BBC that he believes there may have been an “instantaneous implosion” of the craft.

His white lawyer says her client had no idea he was carrying onto a commercial aircraft a concealed loaded firearm, ammunition without a firearm identification card, and a large-capacity feeding device. Plus shame on social media, says his lawyer, for calling him a thug simply because he’s black.

And yet when you look for anyone calling Jack Jones a thug, what comes up is one of Boston’s preeminent African-American newspapers, which in one opinion piece calls him a thug nine times.

‘As [he] caught [his] breath and awaited direction from police, [White House attorney Greg] Jacob typed out one furious final line [in an email exchange with John Eastman]: “Thanks to your bullshit we are now under siege.”’

It’s the rare academic who sees his research implemented on a grand scale right in front of his eyes; and on Jan. 6 John Eastman’s mind must have been racing – as a mob enabled by his, er, bullshit attacked the Capitol – at the thought of the massive raise his university would be giving him to reward his remarkable research productivity. He imagined the school’s admiring pr write-up: “The John Eastman Theory of Vice-Presidential Powers is now routinely taught in jurisprudence classes across the nation, and indeed across the world.” Jacob could call it bullshit all he liked, but the shattered windows and bloodied police just down the street signaled a hugely important turn in human history, and he, John Eastman, had single-handedly made it happen. Forget his dinky academic gig – we’re looking at Attorney General… Supreme Court Justice…

TRUBU’S BACK!

Fox … is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a “hostile” network…

One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about—or even heard—what they just said. [LOL] He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie... [LOOOL]

“I’m no great fan of Fox,” Trump complained at one point. “You’re sitting here,” Baier responded calmly. “Well, you gotta get your word out somehow, right?” Trump mumbled, with that sullen, childlike affect that is always so disconcerting to see in a man closer to 80 than 8. [This is the moment to visit all of UD’s UBU/TRUMP/TRUBU posts over many years. (Scroll down.)]

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

Roger Shattuck on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…


Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

***********

UD thanks Dmitry, a reader, for pointing out that Fox settled 787.5 million, not billion. She has corrected it.

Limerick: John Eastman

When seeking to excise a varmint

The answer at hand is disbarment

For the absolute vile

You must put them on trial

And then cast them off like an old garment

Headline of the Day, from Golf Digest

Donald Trump Says He Lost Track of

Of Classified Nuclear Documents

In a Pile of Golf Shirts

The OLYMPICS???

Wow. Next you’ll be telling me FIFA‘s corrupt!

« Previous PageNext Page »

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories

Bookmarks

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.
Notes of a Neophyte