“If I don’t act fast enough to save your life, prevent you from getting septic, I could be liable for civil cases … malpractice. But if I act too quickly and I’m not 100% certain that the patient is going to die from the complication she’s sustaining, then I could be guilty of a felony.”
… [Idaho] allows certain family members of a patient to sue providers who perform an abortion for at least $20,000 if the procedure breaks the abortion law.
Doctors in those cases also face suspension of their medical license, felony charges and even prison time.
Beyond that, Idaho’s governor also signed a law that says anyone helping a minor travel out of state to terminate a pregnancy – without parental consent – is guilty of a crime.
… [F]ive of the nine remaining full-time maternal-fetal medicine physicians in the state will have left by the end of this year.
… Jim Souza, the chief physician executive at St. Luke’s Medical Center in Boise, told CNN: “We’re at the beginning of the collapse of an entire system of care.”
… And because there are no ob-gyn residencies in Idaho, finding doctors willing to relocate given the abortion laws on the books is a real challenge.
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But God never closes a door without opening a window! Idaho will soon be America’s ground zero for diploma mill grads! Recent graduates of the Lake Natron School of Medicine will flock to the state, where desperate hospitals will snap them up. And all will be well.
Commencement at MAGA takeover site New College, Florida will be… interesting. Student response to having a MAGA maniac shoved down their throats as speaker has been to organize an altogether alternative event.
Students seem to have hoped for $20,000 or so in donations toward renting a space, catering, etc., but in only a few days the number has zoomed to over $122,000 (note that I have to keep changing this number; nothing like theocrat bullies to get the bucks flowing), so they are now collecting not just for the event but for other fuck DeSantis activities.
UD donated $100… I can’t think of a purer act of local democratic/intellectual resistance than this ingenious counter-staging. Here’s hoping the representative from Hillsdale College will be speaking his lies into a void.
Or, even better, to a bused-in crowd of not-yet-jailed January 6 insurgents who will hoot and holler throughout, and then – cuz it’s a college – set all the school’s books aflame in an enormous bonfire.
That’s the opening line of Baudelaire’s spectacular poem, Anywhere Out of the World, which UD reproduces below. But first, a small event which suggests that at least the USA, if not all of the world, is becoming a hospital: Texas legislators have introduced a bill that would train eight year old school children in battlefield trauma care — tourniquets, chest seals — so that during and after the various massacres that take place in their classrooms they can aid the wounded. (UD thanks Andrew for the link.)
A couple of thoughts about this. A lot of Texas parents are horrified by the idea; they say that children that young can’t be expected to do this kind of wound treatment.
But not so fast, says UD. The parents are assuming a one-shot deal, but especially in Texas one can assume that each child will experience multiple massacres; and with each massacre they will become more battle-tested, to the point where their weak and clumsy fingers will become expert binders of wounds. Give them time to become seasoned, and you’ll see how well they do.
Other parents point out that AR-15s don’t leave wounds; they leave broadly disseminated body parts at best and, at worst, deep pools of blood here and there with some flesh/organs/brain matter floating in them. Imagine the frustration of a highly trained eight year old as she scans the classroom for any X to tourniquet to any Y! Can’t be done.
So UD proposes revising the legislation: The state of Texas will fund/mandate elementary school field trips to Israel, where members of ZAKA, the organization that collects blood and body parts after terrorist bombings, will walk Texas children through the discovery, identification, and gathering process. Is that your BFF Jessica under her desk, or parts of her mingled with Jodie? Children will learn how to quickly discriminate among remains, based on fragments of clothing, pairs of glasses, blood spatter directions and locations, etc., etc.
The Holy Land is of course a blood-rich environment, and after their training children may wish to trace the bloody Via Dolorosa, and similar sites.
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ANYWHERE OUT OF THE WORLD
This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window. It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and this question of removal is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul. ‘Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, what do you think of going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and there you would invigorate yourself like a lizard. This city is on the sea-shore; they say that it is built of marble and that the people there have such a hatred of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. There you have a landscape that corresponds to your taste! a landscape made of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!’ My soul does not reply. ‘Since you are so fond of stillness, coupled with the show of movement, would you like to settle in Holland, that beatifying country? Perhaps you would find some diversion in that land whose image you have so often admired in the art galleries. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships moored at the foot of houses?’ My soul remains silent. ‘Perhaps Batavia attracts you more? There we should find, amongst other things, the spirit of Europe married to tropical beauty.’ Not a word. Could my soul be dead? ‘Is it then that you have reached such a degree of lethargy that you acquiesce in your sickness? If so, let us flee to lands that are analogues of death. I see how it is, poor soul! We shall pack our trunks for Tornio. Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or farther still from life, if that is possible; let us settle at the Pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and increases monotony, that half-nothingness. There we shall be able to take long baths of darkness, while for our amusement the aurora borealis shall send us its rose-coloured rays that are like the reflection of Hell’s own fireworks!’ At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: ‘No matter where! No matter where! As long as it’s out of the world!’
An eight year old with a loaded handgun. Big deal. The six year old in Newport News didn’t just smuggle in a loaded handgun — he shot his teacher with it! Maybe Grand Rapids is eyeing the forty million dollar lawsuit she’s filed against the N.N. school district; maybe Grand Rapids figures if it’s caught four handguns it’s almost certainly failed to catch another twenty or so.
Whatever. It has made the right call by banning backpacks: As UD has been saying, our public schools are currently living in a fool’s paradise, and until they look like armed camps they’re asking for a bloodbath. Guns are all over the schools; and of course they’re all over the schools’ surrounding communities. Inside and out, everyone’s a target, and as the wee Nashville massacrist demonstrated (using the same technique as the wee Sandy Hook guy), all you have to do is shoot out windows to get into a locked building. Which means the schools might want to take a look, first of all, at their windows. The safest schools won’t have windows at all (don’t laugh: did you think we’d see the end of backpacks?) but will look like the medieval fortresses they now need to be. Adding to the pre-modern feel will be a general arming of teachers and administrators, all of whom will now be able to solve work squabbles via shootouts.
And you know what? We’re going to see a large rise in home schooling — motivated not by any particular ideology, but simply by a desire to see your kid not be eviscerated by an AR-15. I mean, broadly speaking, the saturation of public life by guns means the end of public life – public schools, public shopping malls, public libraries – too dangerous. America is already overrun by gated communities with extensive private security. Get ready to see much, much more of that.
The Florida Senate rejects one of the guv’s hand-picked nominees for New College trustee. Herr Eddie Speir is the architect of A WHOLE NEW WORLD! He has announced his plan to fire THE ENTIRE FACULTY, JA? JA! His main activity once he’s done that will be informing students that Jesus Christ is King and that vaccines and climate change are anti-Christian conspiracies.
A whole new world A new fantastic point of view No one to tell us no Or where to go Or say we’re only dreaming
Here’s the long version, from the relevant campus paper.
She’s, like, totally innocent and only claimed the identity cuz ma and pa told her she had it; it never occurred to her to, like, confirm it before she began reaping its bennies. Whoops!
[O]thers are … skeptical of [Elizabeth] Hoover’s intentions… [Another academic of confirmed Native American extraction] has “long been baffled” by Hoover’s claim to Native American descent, and … Hoover’s statement comes as “no surprise” to herself and many other Indigenous scholars. [She commented that] “it is bizarre if not unconscionable” to claim to be Indigenous without confirming genealogical relationship or legal connection to a first nation … “She deliberately misrepresented herself,” [another Native academic] alleged in a statement. “Hoover was facing calls for accountability in American Studies back at Brown University... It is deeply upsetting to think of the higher education resources—from Williams College to Brown and now Berkeley—that could have supported the professional advancement of a young Native woman scholar instead… It’s important to note that Hoover never apologized for wrongdoing in her statement.”
“He’s off the wall. Doesn’t sit still, ever,” says the mother of the violent six-year-old who routinely beat up his fellow public school students and, as a special treat, took out the gun his mother had left lying around and shot his teacher because “he felt like he was being ignored.”
UD trusts that those parents who can are removing their kids from a system run by idiots. As for the others – tell your kid to keep her head down. And pray.
… greets you from their campfire along a lake in the Pennsylvania woods. UD, her sisters, and Mr UD (looking chiseled below) have been roughing it (as rough as ‘thesdans get) up north, and Les UDs are
I don’t claim it’s anything other than one of the meaner motives, but UD has always adored encountering flatout fulminating hypocrisy. This can’t involve just being – I dunno – silent, passive, and inert in regard to living a life obscenely at odds with your professed foundational values. The hypocrisy I adore announces itself – boldly, loudly, shamelessly, crazily, rambunctiously, crashingly, self-pleasuringly.
Take a look at this blog’s thick hypocrisy file – much but not all of it centering on the noisy superChristian superpiety of superperverted college sports coaches and Liberty University presidents – to share in the perennial delight of truly fa rumore hyperhypocrisy.
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And now we have a new category: Supreme Hypocrisy. Private jet and private yacht enthusiast Clarence Thomas shares this about himself:
“I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it. … I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.”
Who among us wouldn’t? I don’t know anyone who, given a choice between standing in a Walmart parking lot and lying on a beach in Bora Bora would choose abnormal Bora Bora. I mean, yech! Yech! (I’m spitting something nasty out of my mouth.) YECH.
Ah. That’s better. Where’s the fucking parking lot? I want to walk among the RVs…
[A]ny other trial outcome would have emboldened the nation’s militia movement and congressional firebrands like Reps. Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan. To date, Jordan’s attempts as House Judiciary Committee chair to attack prosecutors and the FBI have flopped. Had the Proud Boys been acquitted, however, those previous political stunts would have looked like warmup acts for future theatrics alleging the Justice Department was prosecuting innocent Americans.
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How cool for Green and Jordan to be mentioned in the same sentence with the militia movement!
And don’t forget the capo di tutti capi!
With these latest foot soldiers’ convictions, the baton now passes to special counsel Jack Smith and to Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis to complete the task by bringing accountability to the very top.
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
