How the fuck did this become a legal case in the first place? What needs investigating is the mental health of the fanatics currently running the University of Washington. HUGE embarrassment for the institution.
For few, read tens of millions of course… The indispensable Kathleen Stock scathes through the now-notorious defense of FGM in a once-respectable British journal…
[A]nti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.
Auctioned off at a pathetic thirteen million from an original asking price of $50 million — if this doesn’t fit the definition of Aristotelian tragedy, I don’t know what does.
Bad boy Lawrence Krauss was forced, back in 2018, to retire from Arizona State; you’d think ASU would know by now that you take down bad girl Elisa New’s university page before announcing she’s been dumped too. But there she is, bright and shiny, eager to gentle you with poetry…
[M]easles can cause complications like blindness, brain swelling and even death. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97% effective.
The Texas Mennonites merrily kill their kids and spread measles to the rest of the country. Plus they’re “now staring down the barrel of a different vaccine-preventable outbreak: whooping cough,” which will torment their children and kill some of them.
One-day wonder Da Costa posts her way out of a Mamdani job. She lasted 24 hours.
Some witnesses said he said nothing. There are some that say he made a barking noise.
How easy, in the USA, for an absolute lunatic to get a gun and kill Brown U. students and an MIT professor.
The motive is also easy: Loser Kills Winner. Graduated from the same school in Portugal as a man who went on to lead a lab at MIT, while this guy went nowhere. Ditto for the Brown students – he dropped out of Brown; they were succeeding there. All had to die.
They have things in common with Phil Hartman’s 1998 death at the hands of his angry, substance-abusing wife. An argument apparently preceded it; he was talking about divorce. A very public argument preceded the Reiner patricide/matricide. Hartman’s wife killed him while he slept in their bed; Nick Reiner did the same. She killed herself after killing Hartman (the Reiner son is on suicide watch). Jealousy was a huge issue in both cases; both killers wanted the entertainment success other family members achieved. Both had mental health problems.
I’d say that massive drug intake was what separated maybe physically abusing people from being unhinged enough to shoot and stab them.
It’s the fourteenth, and they keep on coming.
*************************
Support for the legalisation of assisted dying has been steady for several decades in many nations throughout the world, with about two-thirds of those polled supporting its legalisation. No jurisdiction that has legalised assisted dying has subsequently ended the practice, and public support for the practice tends to grow once legalised. In addition, when assisted dying is not available, many will seek it out at considerable expense or inconvenience to themselves. The Swiss organisation Dignitas has assisted in several thousand deaths for individuals willing to pay significant fees and travel expenses (currently estimated at $20,000), as well as to risk possible legal ramifications in their home countries. There is a high demand for enjoying freedom over one’s death.
How do you even reckon that up? What do you do with all the other dirtiest programs in college football?
Will Dana-Farber include in its brag sheet that she left in disgrace, trailed by now-confirmed research misconduct charges? Her West Coast equivalent, busy-bee billionaire Marc Tessier-Lavigne, stepped down in identical disgrace, brought low by a determined student journalist.
The departed CEO of Dana-Farber, and her co-authors, were exposed by some random guy in Wales (now enjoying his 2.63 million dollar award), and I’m sure they felt the same confident contempt for him that Stanford’s prez felt for the student journalist. What can these nothings do to us? We represent (and, with their scuzzy vieux Larry Summers, do they ever) the American elite.
Brookline MA is one of the safest neighborhoods in the country, so it’s unlikely the murder of an MIT professor at his home there was random. He was apparently shot multiple times.
**********************
What happened? It might have been domestic; it might have been a mentally ill graduate student or colleague. We shall see.
A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road… He had already shown himself capable of betraying friends and patrons who trusted him, but now he had advanced from the flagrant abuse of expense accounts to apparently absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars… Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds…
And there’s his BFF:
The year after meeting Epstein, [Alan] Dershowitz wrote an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent lawyer. [LOL]… Keeping Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s highest-profile and longest-serving defenders.
… how massive majorities in UD‘s Maryland want the assisted suicide law that Illinois just voted in (it’s the thirteenth state to do so), but powerful religious lobbies have been able to block the legislation.
It’s hard to read the actual religious justification for letting dying people undergo protracted suffering without your eyes bugging out. National Review, which takes itself to be a respectable national publication, should be ashamed for publishing this mad screed, which tartly instructs us that God wants us to suffer because he loves us, and if you have trouble making sense of that, tough titties.
How can the strong will of a populace (62% of Maryland’s Catholics want assisted suicide) be overruled by obscurantist sadism?
Believe it, baby. Believe it. The world is full of people who praise god when parents shear off their newborns’ clitorises and sew shut their labia.
What’s hard to believe is that a British medical journal published a bunch of these people. A King’s College London professor writes:
“I previously lived & did research in West Africa, working for an NGO that tackled female genital cutting. The British Medical Journal has published a ‘puff piece’ promoting FGC, saying it’s perfectly fine for the community (not the individual) to control her body.
“The article blames Western media for causing harm by wanting to tackle FGC. Nowhere does it mention that this is intended to reduce pleasure and maintain patriarchal control. Publishing this, academia is really digging its own grave.”
British academia digging its own grave by caving to moral degenerates is, you know, just what British academia does. God forbid we should intervene in its beautiful folkways.
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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