‘Yesterday, an assassin’s veto silenced Charlie Kirk, just as it silenced the journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo a decade ago, and just as it attempted to silence Salman Rushdie in 2022. But we cannot let the censors win. We cannot let violence prevail. We can and must come together in defense of our rights to be who we are and to speak our minds.’

Reminders from FIRE.

‘Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) asked for a spoken prayer [for Charlie Kirk], which led to Democrats jeering and claiming Republicans had virtually ignored a separate school shooting Wednesday. In turn, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) appeared to accuse Democrats of causing the violence. A Democrat responded, “Pass some gun laws!”’

What a nice idea. Some gun laws.

Without a Dowd

UD stopped watching MSNBC when she realized she’d been an idiot for believing their smug insistence that Trump would never win. So she wasn’t watching when Matthew Dowd, one of their commentators, said Charlie Kirk was responsible for his own demise:

 [H]ateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions… You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place…

Dowd has been fired, which is fine, but there’s more where that came from at MSNBC.

‘[P]eople started running out of the outdoor pavilion area, knocking over barricades… Blood is seen flowing down from [Charlie Kirk’s] neck and the crowd audibly panics and begins to run.’

Never a dull moment when every insane dipshit in the country has a gun. Don’t know yet whether Kirk, a prominent conservative sitting on a stage waiting to give a speech and then slumped over and bleeding from a neck wound, will survive. Or whether, if he does survive, the bullet has damaged his brain.

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

Active shooter, Colorado high school. I think we’re almost up to one a day.

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

Kirk has died.

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

Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.

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

Oh, and the Colorado school shooting: Two students in critical condition. A mother at the scene:

“I think if I’m being honest with myself, I always knew it was ‘When, not if?’”

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

Oh, and back to Utah: It’s an open carry state, colleges included, and it’s so routine to see people carrying guns that I doubt the killer – even if his AK 47 or whatever was slung in front of his chest – attracted much interest.

‘[Mayor Jacob] Frey’s special meeting was initially planned for three days after the charter school next to [Hamoudi] Sabri’s property [- a homeless encampment -] started classes, but was rescheduled due to the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church and School.’

Commentary from one of the encampment’s residents: “There’s a school right there. It looks bad, people leaving needles all over and there’s people nodded out … like it’s just gross.”

Yeah, looks bad, elementary students walking around syringes and deadheads to get to their school building… Unfortunately, the mass murder of other local schoolchildren meant a delay in a scheduled meeting about the problem…

UD was a writing tutor at the University of Chicago.

She has absolutely no memory of it. She just discovered this photograph – taken in the late ‘seventies, I guess – in the University of Chicago archives.

My buddy Nan links to a great back to school ad.

https://www.threads.com/@profgalloway/post/DOUUz-BiEJM/media?xmt=AQF0KH1VTARZsSurzmxkyIQtP2TeJiUqeSoQ79ojhfq8Yg

‘Trust leads us to be insufficiently skeptical. It allows us to believe pretty unbelievable effects — for example, that moving a signature [on an insurance form that asks you to estimate mileage on your car] could lead to an average [and more honest] change in mileage reporting of over 2,000 miles.’

Silly boy. Make that utterly unbelievable effects. But after all your field is psychology, currently riddled with fraud, and given all that fraud, you should have acted on your suspicions about those two AMAZING PERSONALITIES, F. Giro and D. Ariely. You worked with them, after all.

Fuckwits and Glocks Cont’d

Killing field cities are full of… certain… bars… Bars that do everything they can (you should look at their advertising!) to attract extremely stupid, jumpy, armed, people. The MO is to pack them in very very tightly, make them drunk and high, make them bump into each other (Fuck you for bumping into me BANG), make them fight for the prossies, make them, you know, fight. In the bar world, fighting without a firearm is like a day without sunshine, so mass shooting’s guaranteed.

So now here’s a tussle in Cleveland where a fight at or near one of the skeezy bars shot up six people, three of whom might die. The mayor’s pissed, embarrassed, whatever, and has not only closed the bar in question, but boarded it up. The owner is definitely pissed, and swears all the bullet holes were elsewhere.

‘[A] decade later, Nigeria still bears the shameful record of having the world’s highest number of FGM survivors.’

Laws don’t mean shit if you don’t enforce them.

Wowsa. You know you’re in trouble when your homicide rate per 100,000 …

makes Puerto Rico look good.

Turks and Caicos lies very close to Haiti.

‘A “performative microphone,” dubbed that by onlooker Cameron Davis ’28 because it didn’t work, was passed around the group of participants.’

At Yale, Performative Males ( “These guys perform femininity to attract women without actually giving a fuck about the feminine perspective.”) vie for the title Most Performative Male. The winner:

Marco Getchell ’29, … claimed his residential college was the Women’s Table, [and] called being a performative male “a lifestyle.” He arrived more than 15 minutes early, armored head to toe in thrifted garb for the afternoon festivities. He clutched a copy of Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a brown teddy bear, and a Metropolitan Museum of Art tote bag which held a vinyl copy of Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” and a speaker blasting “Perfect Pair” by beabadoobee, an indie artist.

LOLOLOLOL

“She didn’t pass away. She killed herself.”

UD ain’t a huge fan of Jane Fonda, but her response to the dainty NPR interviewer who referred to Fonda’s mother having “passed away” is so wonderful.

UD ain’t a huge fan of psychotherapy, but when Fonda said she has started going again to “figure out why I’m not a better person,” UD also found that wonderful.

“Devices can be extremely counterproductive in school.” 

Uh duh. Starting back in… what? 2000? this blog has blasted phones, computers, clickers, powerpoint, all that shit. See categories CLICK THROUGH [and] THRU U, Online Makeover, PowerPoint Confidential, powerpoint pissoff, technolust, and others.

Now everybody all over the country is like yeah you’re NOT a pathetic luddite, it’s like TRUE that all that shit kills thinking and kills human contact. Wow. Who’da thunk it.

‘The ongoing investigation has uncovered a “significant number” of guns, both secured and unsecured, as well as loaded magazines with writings related to school shootings. Authorities also confiscated clothing and writings that suggested a mass shooting scenario.’

The problem is that this person is only thirteen years old, living with parents who haven’t bothered to enroll him in school, much less stop supplying him with weaponry. The juvenile justice system is hopeless with thirteen year olds who are already hardened criminals. It will fuss therapeutically with him during his brief incarceration (assuming he gets any jail time at all) and then release him to the very same degenerate parents.

He’s so breathtakingly young! Many decades of gun massacres ahead of him.

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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