FEVER
Never know how much I love you
Never know how much I care
When we do debate preparation
I get a fever that’s so hard to bear
You give me fever at the rallies
Fever when you hold me tight
Fever in the mornin’
Fever all through the night
Sun lights up the day time
Moon lights up the night
I light up when you call my name
And you know I’m gonna treat you right
You give me fever at your golf club
Fever when you’re raising cash
Fever in the mornin’
My toes have got a nasty rash
Everybody’s got the fever
That is somethin’ you all know
Fever isn’t such a new thing
You knew about it long ago
Donald he loved Melania
Melania she felt the same
When he put his arms around her
He said Melania baby you’re my fame
He gave her fever
When they cuddled
Fever with his flaming kiss
Fever I’m on fire
Fever yeah I burn and hiss
Captain Smith and Pocohantas
Had a very mad affair
When her daddy tried to kill him
She said daddy oh don’t you dare
He gives me fever with his kisses
Fever when he holds me tight
Fever I’m his missus
Daddy won’t you treat him right
Now you’ve listened to my story
Here is the point that I have made
Trump was born to give you fever
Be it fahrenheit or centigrade
He gives you fever
When you meet him
Fever if you live you learn
Fever till you sizzle
What a lovely way to burn
What a lovely way to burn
Entire Top of the Republican Party has been Exposed to Covid
‘President Trump’s campaign schedule has insured that that the top tier of the Republican party either has contracted or has been exposed to covid-19.‘
What is due in the way of kindness and sympathy to people who have no kindness and sympathy for anyone else? Should we repay horrifying cruelty in equal measure? Then we reduce ourselves to their level. But if we return indecency with the decency due any other person in need, don’t we encourage appalling behavior? …
The pandemic was not Trump’s fault, but at every turn, he made things worse than they had to be—because at every turn, he cared only for himself, never for the country. And now he will care only for himself again.
Trump should never have been allowed anywhere near any public office. Wish him well, but recognize that his deformed spirit will never be well—and that nothing can be well for the country under his leadership.
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The shriveling of Trump makes UD think of that Philip Roth title — The Dying Animal. Or the Yeats poem from which the title comes – for Yeats too knew how nightmarish it was to be merely an animal.
What is due to this self-sickened man? The pity we feel for a dying animal.
Once inside the venue, [having arrived too late to be tested,] the Trump party were approached by a white-coated doctor, who asked them to put on face masks, but they refused, NBC reported.
France extends its now well-established burqa ban to everyone providing public services. Excellent. And if you’re having trouble understanding the separation of church and state, this secular republic will be happy to educate you in its citizenship.
UD, by the way, has been giggling at the argument some people lately make about masks and burqas. Like, uh, covid forces everyone to wear masks in order to save their lives and the lives of others in a global pandemic. How is that different from parents making their eight year old daughters wear burqas? Or women in the banlieues intimidated or beaten up if they’re not wearing burqas? It’s the same thing, ain’t it?
… down the street from UD: Bethesda’s Walter Reed Hospital. (Around here, we all grew up calling it the Naval Medical Hospital.) The place is directly across from NIH, where UD’s father spent his career studying (among other things) BCG’s effect on cancer. BCG is now considered one of the more promising covid therapies.
On Trump: Absolutely no surprise here. You spend your days and nights surrounded by crowds of strangers during a pandemic. You’re elderly. You’re under a lot of stress. You lead a relentlessly active life. You refuse to wear a mask.
I mean, you have go to characters like Adrian Leverkühn, who “goes out of his way to catch syphilis,” to approach the intensity of self-destruction.
Sources cited by The New York Times say the President was already lethargic on the way back from Thursday’s New Jersey event, and that he fell asleep on Air Force One on Wednesday night when returning from a rally in Minnesota.
‘The Kimberly Guilfoyle Sexual Harassment Allegations Get Even Darker‘
Hold onto your hat.
Just hours before the president tested positive for Covid-19, he was shaking hands and posing for photos with wealthy supporters at his New Jersey golf club. Fifty thousand got you in the door; $250,000 bought you a seat at a private roundtable and, now, a likely two-week quarantine after direct exposure to a virus that has so far killed more than 200,000 people in this country.
They’re both currently reaping the personal rewards of cruelty, shamelessness, arrogance, and ignorance. And since the disease they recklessly invited to overtake them is insanely contagious, they are sharing those rewards with the rest of us.
“Most of the [ultraorthodox] community had it already, so we’re not so worried.“
***********
“Most people had it way back,” [Tzvi] Rosenberg told The Daily Beast, enjoying a cigarette unmasked a few feet from a similarly unprotected friend. “… We’re not wearing right now, because we’re smoking.”
***********
[M]any in the community believed in the Trump-touted … treatment of hydroxychloroquine…
[One man] approached his wife in synagogue and warned her … that masks cause COVID-19 infection.
***********
One man walking through Williamsburg provided the simple explanation.
“We all had it already,” he said of COVID, not stopping long enough to give his name.
An 18-year-old walking nearby said the same.
“I had it already and my community had it already,” he said…
***********
No major Hasidic rabbis in New York City have been seen wearing masks. In fact, photographs of large indoor gatherings — weddings, large prayer services and tisches, gatherings in which the rebbe sits at the head of a table surrounded by followers — have circulated on local news sites and social media.
***********
[M]ost of the rabbis themselves had the virus earlier this year and believe they have immunity.
***********
To some, the disregard for masks is evidence of an outlook in which everything in life is up to God.
“I don’t sense a lot of fear,” an administrator at a network of clinics in Williamsburg said. “I think there is a fatalistic attitude, like if it’s meant to be, I’ll get sick.”
************
************
And Trump’s epitaph? UD takes it, with a small alteration, from Larry Kramer’s great play about AIDS, The Normal Heart:
Being defined by [the president’s cock] is literally killing us.
In his swagger lies our doom.
Didn’t know the president was overseas today.
A Yale psychiatrist who has repeatedly raised questions about President Trump’s mental health argued that Tuesday’s debate against Joe Biden should never have been allowed to go forward.
Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at Yale School of Medicine and the president of the World Mental Health Coalition, said in an interview with Salon that Trump lacked the basic “mental health” to participate in a presidential debate…
She told Salon that the media’s shock at Trump’s disastrous performance was the result of a years-long problem that has gone ignored far too long...
‘[P]eople can see how [my colleagues and I] predicted, almost with uncanny timing, what would happen if we failed to contain the psychological dangers of the president. It has now spread into social, cultural, civic and geopolitical dangers, just as we said.‘
*****************
If there are two more debates, UD thinks we should be prepared for Trump to disintegrate so desperately during one of them that he pulls out a Glock and shoots himself in the head.
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