[His current legal disasters] reveal a corruption of character, triggered by a succession of moral compromises over the years undertaken to maintain the power and money that he’d grown accustomed to after Sept. 11... His political power has evaporated, and his riches have been almost exhausted — he’s been selling personalized video greetings for $325, and he dressed as a feathered jack-in-the-box for the Fox show “The Masked Singer” this spring.
I dunno. I mean, yes, for Giuliani the hoariest cautionary tale ever (Radix malorum est cupiditas) pertains; but UD has long felt that for Giuliani, Trump, Madoff, and other famous New York maniacs, some city-specific mental illness is also at play, as if the ultimate urban fever that is NYC’s speed, greed, hallucinatory arrogance, Kafkaesque removal from common grounded life — propels these people so far from anything real that they actually become clinically nuts. I think that in his novel Cosmopolis DeLillo was trying to get at this… Just as, from his title on, Tom Wolfe tried the same thing years earlier in Bonfire of the Vanities... Something about the ultimate urban cauldron that sets a soul on fire…
World’s best job: Sit around your entire career futzing with proposals for reform of ultraorthodox education knowing nothing will ever happen. The ultimate sinecure.
These [groups have also been allowed to be exempt] from the obligation to vaccination — [which] they are skirting based on their religious beliefs. Paying them to undermine public health [along with paying them to undermine education] is another wrong we can no longer tolerate for the health of the rest of us. Measles and now polio. No no no.
Another one:
As a public health physician since the 1980’s, I can also note that the disregard of the schools for vaccination requirements are a (large) part of the peril highlighted by yesterday’s polio disaster declaration in New York state, and the detection of polio in the waste water of multiple NY counties, the latest Nassau. The US school age vaccination rates for polio in the US approach 94 %; rates are much lower among yeshiva students, contributing to silent spread of an almost eliminated infection in the US.
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Systemic welfare fraud is something else we allow them.
The article also talks about teachers violently abusing their students. It appears to be endemic. We know that rates of sexual abuse are high in these communities as well.
No one cares. Nothing will change.
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Tell you what. I’ve been studying and following the ultraorthodox scandal, in the US and Israel, for years. I fully admit that I just do not get it. Israel’s ultras are routinely violent against the state as well – street riots galore. No one cares. Nothing will change.
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I will say this: The NYT piece is a brilliant, even exciting example of fearless investigative journalism. The one hundred percent outraged, very lengthy comment thread, full of readers describing themselves as absolutely shocked by the educational gutter the article depicts, tells you what? It tells you that all that’s ever been needed for ordinary taxpayers to be sick with disgust over a scofflaw, rapidly growing, hopelessly welfare dependent subculture in this country is for our paper of record to find the guts to write about it.
Once again, nothing will change. But talk about making the situation graphic. A final comment from the thread:
I never thought I would see a major news publication actually have the audacity to describe the situation accurately, bluntly, and plainly.
Manifold are the ways universities fuck with statistics so they can get higher US News rankings, and it’s just Columbia’s bad luck that it hired its own petard… I mean, someone at the school actually hired the math prof who figured out Columbia had to be cheating AND PUBLICIZED THE FACT ON HIS FACULTY WEBSITE. Now, months later, the school admits yeah we did that thing and we promise to stop.
WWWWuh oh. WWWWWWWWuh ooooooohhhhh. You is runnin headlong into theology, lady, as in God TOLD you He’s not a sadist but what you gonna do about the fact that God told your male Republican colleagues damn straight He IS a sadist?
This is South Carolina, the Jesus-Told-Me State. It’s like – you played your game of Telephone with the Lord, and He totally told you NOT to destroy mothers and children and babies with a no-exceptions state abortion law; but all them guys played their game of Telephone with the Lord and the Lord told them hell go ahead and force people to give birth even though it might kill them.
Static on the line? Who’s hearing it wrong?
Miscommunication – you said it. Might just make a body wonder ifn basing legislation on who’s hearing Jesus correctly might not be a good idea.
… as soon as the publisher tweaks this and that detail so the same legal team that’s doing a bang-up job for Dominion Voting doesn’t start sniffing around…
Actually a few copies of Dinesh D’Souza’s pre-tweaked 2,000 Ghoulsdid get to bookstores! Go here to enjoy NPR‘s close reading. Turns out the greatest scandal in the nation’s history was all about two thousand members of the American Communist Party who drilled down into a system of tunnels under Interstate 10 and established a bunker from which they sent out Soros-financed “ghouls” who snuck in, under cover of night, to ballot-storage centers in key states. Once they established entry, they keyed in the security codes (provided by Facebook), took out all the Trump votes and replaced them with Biden. The whole operation, once in the buildings, apparently took seconds.
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PS: Let the Bozo Beware!
Just after the 2020 election, a major Republican donor named Fred Eshelman gave True the Vote $2.5 million to assist in efforts to investigate allegations of election fraud. Just weeks later, Eshelman sued True the Vote in federal court, and accused the group of failing to pursue legal action in time to affect the election, and failing to communicate about what it was doing with those millions. Eshelman demanded that True The Vote return the donation. True The Vote denied any wrongdoing and refused to return the money. Eshelman’s lawsuit was eventually dismissed.
It’s such a small crime, and the jails are already full, and hell just let em go. The results have been spectacular if you’re a fan of neighborhoods with no stores in them, and the president and trustees at Oberlin, faced with their own neighborhood shoplifting problem, wasted no time expressing the same contempt for archaic law-abiders/merchandise retainers as their model, one-time SF DA Chesa Boudin.
An archaic local bakery, on discovering an Oberlin student shoplifting, viciously accused him of the crime, and then, when he denied it, proved its truth by approaching him and opening his jacket, in which two stolen wine bottles were hidden.
The crude, reactionary nature of the bakery’s response to the theft of its merchandise outraged Oberlin, which, under the organization of one of its deans, so relentlessly harassed the business – tagged as racist – that it practically collapsed.
The business sued Oberlin and won big – a way-angry jury awarded the bakery 44 million in damages, which a judge reduced to 36 mill. Oberlin proceeded to fail to pay, sending the suit to higher courts and failing upwards, and now Ah fuck it ok we’ll pay. Though where in our measly ONE BILLION DOLLAR endowment we’ll find it I don’t know…
… meteor shower, and she finds herself, à ce moment-là, at Pier 450, right on the Chesapeake Bay – a place pretty far from any settlements, and, if you stay here, you have private use of their pier all night long.
The first thing I saw, ambling down the pier and glancing at the clear water, was… a turtle? A dark reptilian head popped up to check me out, and I bent down to greet it, but lookee here: It trailed three feet of tail and turned out to be a northern water snake.
There’s a sculpture garden nearby.
And on Solomon’s Island, also nearby, I found a somewhat shabby Corbusierian house with enviable water views. I toyed with suggesting to Mr UD (who isn’t with me) that we try to buy it.
Yesterday I read Joseph Brodsky’s poem, A Part of Speech, which brilliantly and movingly evokes the unresonant character of what used to be his home.
… A nowhere winter evening with wine…
… [A] star blinks from all the smoke in the frosty heaven,
and no bride in chintz at the window, but dust’s gray craft,
plus the emptiness where once we loved…
… As for the stars, they are always on.
That is, one appears, then others adorn the inklike
sphere. That’s the best way from there to look upon
here: well after hours, blinking.
The sky looks better when they are off.
Though, with them, the conquest of space is quicker.
Provided you haven’t got to move
from the bare veranda and squeaking rocker.
As one spacecraft pilot has said, his face
half sunk in the shadow, it seems there is
no life anywhere, and a thoughtful gaze
can be rested on none of these.
… [O]ne sleeps more soundly in a wooden town,
since you dream these days only of things that happened…
But here, at the very bottom of mine own Maryland, a small state still insufficiently explored by ol’ UD , lie multiple scenes so resonant as to nudge up against surreal. The dark disapproving forest sculpture, the gray unmoving gulls at pier’s end, the massively overcast and also blue and also white bay sky. These will nudge me into dreams not only of things that happened.
Oh what a tangled web Webb weaves… His whole defense of Fox against Dominion’s $1.6 billion defamation suit lies in the contention that a conspiratorial madman who launched his career with a mad racist conspiracy against Barack Obama and kept going, madly, from there (most recently, he believes he’s president of the United States, and has the highly classified documents to prove it), should be taken seriously by a national news organization. It’s like saying that, because mad King Charles VI of France thought he was made of glass, all of his subjects were compelled to refer to him as Your Royal Goblet.
Of course it’s noteworthy that a fully delusional person presided over the country; and if Fox had reported this, no problem. Dominion’s case is based on the unexceptional contention that news organizations should not collude in the destructive claims of a well-established loon.
Timed to coincide with the president’s American Fascists speech, gun-toting cultists just showed up en masse at an Idaho public library demanding hundreds of books be removed or they’ll blow everyone’s brains out In Jesus’ Name Amen. The head of the library has already quit and run away, not wanting her brains blown out. “They start showing up at your house with guns on their hips and Bible tracts in their hands.”
Voters have grown more supportive of legalizing abortion following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, with a clear majority opposing restrictions, like bans at a certain point of pregnancy or barring women from traveling to get a legal abortion, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that underscores the importance of the issue in the midterm elections.
According to the survey, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 55% in March. Another 29% said it should be illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered, compared with 30% in March. And 6% said it should be illegal in all cases, down from 11% in March.
Lord, that last number’s falling fast! From a robust, representative 11% to a piddling SIX PERCENT since MARCH? Fu-u-uck.
What the no exceptions crowd needs is a catchy name and a Joan of Arc. The Joan is easy: Kristi Noem‘s a babe, a firebrand, a fine orator, and totally behind the whole let the mother ship go down thing.
And here’s an idea: Change your last name from NOEM to NOEX. It’s too obvious. It’s so good.
Name? Maybe GodBods. The one thing this miniscule minority has going for it is that God has told them that their position on abortion is the correct one. Their name must stress this metaphysical advantage over non-God-directed positions. Bods reflects the fact that this is all about what God wants women to do with their bodies once they become pregnant.
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Some more numbers.
In the six months before Dobbs, women [in Kansas] outnumbered men by a three-point margin among new voter registrations. After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points.
A parochial school … baptized 100 students without permission from parents—some of whom were left angry by the surprise. “My daughter calls me from the school and says, ‘Mama, can you bring me some dry clothes? I got baptized today,’” the parent of an 11-year-old told the Fayetteville Observer. “I said, ‘WHAT?’” At least three parents complained to the Northwood Temple Academy principal, who said a handful of students were scheduled to receive the sacrament and the others “just began to respond to the presence of the Lord.”
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The Honey, I Baptized the Kids! problem is more widespread than you might think.
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
