We are aware that Sidney Powell held a can of Dr Pepper during her January 6 committee deposition; we are also aware that she drank from it.
Dr Pepper disavows any prior knowledge of this event, and affirms in the strongest terms its rejection of the global conspiracy theories and treasonous activities associated with Ms Powell. In the 125 years since our founding, we have consistently demonstrated love of country and fidelity to the United States and its institutions. We are appalled to see our soft drink featured so prominently in the shameful testimony of Ms Powell. The idea of our company being associated in viewers’ minds in any way with this person is anathema. Please do not judge us by events over which we have no control.
… We’ve simply got to do something about these free public chargers, even if it costs us $50,000! Those things cost tens of cents per hour, when they’re being used…
Critics of this bill might point out that increasing the number of electric cars could actually benefit owners of internal-combustion vehicles, thanks to reduced demand for petroleum products…
[Yes,] electric-car company VinFast is building a 2000-acre factory just up the road that will employ 7500 people, and Toyota is building a battery factory outside Greensboro that’ll employ 1750 people. But let’s remember that House Bill 1049 would also create a job — for the person who goes around and rips out the free public chargers …
President Donald Trump turned to Hope Hicks in June 2017 when he wanted a “number” to back up his false claims that his approval ratings were “setting records” for a first-year president...
[Trump’s] approval rating on that day’s Gallup tracker was just 36 percent…
Hicks … made Trump happy by offering up “seventy percent,” wrote the Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich, who witnessed the exchange...
[The poll turned out to be] from Tennessee [only], and … it was of Republicans.
As you know, this blog tracks the postmodern American way of death – described and discussed most vividly in DeLillo novels like White Noise – which takes place when something goes wrong while you’re having fun in a sought-after setting. Visual technology almost always plays a part.
Italian police had to rescue the tourist after he climbed up without a ticket and fell inside, but authorities are now charging him and his family for trespassing.
The man and three of his relatives had decided to bypass the visitor entrance, ignoring the turnstile and taking a forbidden route to the crater at the top of the volcano that looms over the Italian city of Naples.
He scrambled down inside the crater at the top of the volcano, which is active but has not seen an eruption for almost 80 years, seemingly to try and get better photographs.
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UD likes the additional frisson, here, of cretinous American arrogance.
… was in a business class lounge at Dulles Airport. She’ll be in London for ten days, half of them celebrating a clearly over-the-top wedding of an old friend (stretches for four days), and the other half in a Mayfair townhouse, training for a new job.
It remains, for LesUDs, a constant mild shock that their spawn works in the heart of the heart of capitalism. Both UDs come from academic families. Mr UD‘s family, for centuries, was about landowners/government officials.
With the exception of my father’s immigrant father, who owned and ran Rapoport’s Department Store in Port Deposit, Maryland (Grampa Joe: Early Capitalism / La Kid: Postmodern Multinational Capitalism), you just don’t find much capitalist activity in our background. We feel like Ma and Pa Kettle as we marvel at La Kid’s five-star ways.
… something stirred in UD’s headlet, and she searched the name Junod on University Diaries.
Sure enough, back in 2010, she cited Junod’s smart remarks about her beloved Don DeLillo; and one of those remarks has now helped her think about the Black Rifle Coffee/Dallas Cowboys controversy – a controversy that doesn’t seem to be dying down.
No, [DeLillo] has never written about Top Kills and Junk Shots and the odd flutter of hope elicited by the words “Containment Dome.” But in their suggestion of corporatized violence and above all in the violence they do to the language, they are DeLilloesque…
What DeLillo understood, long ago, is the end of the world would be experienced not as the end of the world but rather as a way of thinking and talking about the end of the world. What he understood is that the toxic cloud that has our name on it would be defined by its lack of definition; that we would never have as much information about it as we need to have or that someone else has; that it would turn into a free-floating void, exactly as withholding as it is encompassing; that it would become part of the landscape and that the landscape would become part of it; and that, of course, there would be footage, endlessly recycled but ultimately inconclusive.
Black Rifle, with its bloody brews (Murdered Out; AK-47), is corporatized violence becoming – via the Dallas Cowboys – a way of thinking and talking; a part of the landscape. What Brooks misses in his analysis of the origins and motivations of our teen massacrists is this normalization, this banality if you will, of apocalyptic weaponry and what it is doing to us. Coffee – that most banal of drinks – is now visually (via advertising footage, endlessly recycled) wedded to mass slaughter, to weapons that can literally murder us out.
An AK-47, first encountered by kids on a Jumbotron at a cool, fun, wholesome Dallas Cowboys game, is something that gives you the same vague chemical kick as a cup of Joe or a sports event. Everybody’s doin’ it.
Our violent psychotics do not necessarily, as Brooks argues, regard their AK-47s (often bought for them by daddy — Brooks has far too little to say about the depraved parents/suppliers of our killers) as charismatic icons of power and vengeance. They more probably seem to them utililtarian, normalized (how outlaw can AK-47s be when you get them from daddy, and when everyone’s drinking AK-47 coffee?), parts of the landscape.
Thus when Brooks gets melodramatically Biblical about guns (“The guns are like serpents in the trees, whispering to them.”), I wonder if he’s headed in the wrong direction. How can guns have this effect when dad’s chipped coffee cup has images of AK-47s all over it? When American parents routinely receive marketing pressing them to buy baby versions of AK-47s for their eight year old? When the raffle prize at the county fair is an AK-47?
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Our country’s most outspoken, violent teenager, after all, is famous for having boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody” and it would only intensify his supporters’ enthusiasm for him. He didn’t know how right he was. Even his reported excitement about the impending death of his vice-president did nothing to dislodge him from his position of undisputed king of the nation’s Republican Party. His sons are even more violent – in word and deed – than he; and his congressional spawn … How surprised are you going to be when Jim Jordan can’t take it anymore and blasts into the January 6 committee room with a – you know – in his grip?
Go ahead. Laugh at this scenario. Go ahead.
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Just as the handgun has become the home appliance of choice when you want to grab something to kill yourself with in this, our massively suicide-ridden land, so the AK-47 is simply there, part of the landscape, the thing you grab (dad’s far too ruggedly independent to lock it up) when your loathing of humanity reaches – let’s go with coffee – the boiling point. “Every country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them,” and only America goes a step further than flooding the country with guns for absolutely everyone and electing a pathologically violent president: America makes guns cute and sassy and savory, an unremarkable part of our shared corporate advertising world.
… U.S. News & World Report announced that it had “unranked” Columbia University, which had been in a three-way tie for the No. 2 spot in the 2022 edition of Best Colleges, after being unable to verify the underlying data submitted by the university…
The Ivy League university said then that it would not participate in the next rankings because it was investigating accusations by one of its own mathematics professors that the No. 2 ranking was based on inaccurate and misleading data.
… all nations – even Japan, with its incredibly low gun ownership/gun death rates – will have to assume that a madman with a gun lurks somewhere at even modestly significant public events.
If this can happen in Japan, it can happen anywhere. Grim as it is, public officials in most of the world are going to need American-level security, or something close to it. The guns have won.
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The killings used to creep up on you, didn’t they? A mall shot up in Copenhagen, a woman walking her baby on the upper east side shot pointblank in the head… You take each instance in (keeping vaguely in mind, to be sure, that in places like Chicago and Tijuana everybody’s shooting everybody else to death day and night) and there’s a shudder and a disbelief and a disgust and then you move on. Only gradually does it occur to you that it’s now everywhere and all the time – the bangbangbang of people killing other people with guns. The panic my friend Steve experienced when he realized his wife was on the same street as the shooter here in DC, on Upper Connecticut Avenue… When I heard his voice on the phone hours after the shooter killed himself — that was I guess the moment for me. No more waving off all the gun killing as somehow peripheral to me. What world do I think I’m living in?
What a poor sport this newswoman is. (Scroll down for the video.) She actually cited the astounding suicide-by-gun statistic among veterans – the very group the Dallas Cowboys claim to be helping by promoting blood-soaked Black Rifle Coffee.
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There are now reports that the Cowboys are about to announce a second coffee partnership, this one with CTE Coffee, the brew for people who love football-induced neurodegenerative disease. Each flavor is named after a dead CTE sufferer – Jovan Belcher, Dave Duerson, Frank Gifford, Aaron Hernandez, Junior Seau – and each features a graphic of their pockmarked postmortem brains. Strong stuff, you say? You betcha! The Cowboys are calling CTE America’s Brew cuz no one does lethal head blows the way we do! If you don’t like it, move to North Korea.
[Trump] is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I’m genuinely asking…
Mark Leibovich continues:
[Lindsay Graham] could not believe what Trump could get away with. It created a mystique, especially among politicians, who tend to be rule-bound by nature and chronically petrified of being exposed as frauds. Trump had no such fear of rules or capacity for embarrassment. He was a pure and feral rascal…
My mind roils with thought experiments of what else Republicans could tolerate from him: What if Mike Pence had been hanged? One would hope it would have been disqualifying, but who knows?
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
