Navy in Name Only. (I’m linking via Reddit, because the Kansas City Star is entirely paywalled.)

Big Daddy Mike forced the Navy to sorta take the RINO butcher back, but boy were they pissed to have to do it.

Background here.

Plagiarism, as I’ve told you a million times, is a boring, endemic affair — so endemic, in most of the world, that it’s only mentioned at the very tippy-top. Prime Minister, President, King, Pope, Archbishop, Star Of Stage and Screen – maybe someone will try to make something of that. But probably not. Probably not even that. Plagiarism is a non-event, like graft.

There’s still a tiny slice of the world – the US, Europe, Australia – where people actually seem to give a shit if intellectuals and scientists and artists plagiarize. They seem to think there’s something wrong with stealing someone else’s work – ideas, creative vision, words – and passing it off as one’s own.

Piles and piles of plagiarism go unperceived — there’s so much of it — but on a regular basis some idiot performs such prolific and high-profile copying that it’s not only discovered. It becomes a story.

Such is the ongoing saga of novelist John Hughes, who at this writing has, in his latest novel, plagiarized from F Scott Fitzgerald, Svetlana Alexievich, Tolstoy, Remarque, Eric Newby, WB Sebald, Amos Oz, Loren Eiseley, Saul Bellow, and Nadezhda Mandel’shtam. You and I know that still lurking in his pages are… Let’s see. He seems to like angst-ridden early/mid twentieth century fiction tossed with a petit goût of global conflict … Look for Thomas Mann, for goodness sake, and Günter Grass and Iris Murdoch for starters… If there aren’t some decoupled Auden couplets somewhere in there my name ain’t University Diaries…

France is a secular republic, and this matters to them. Within that secularity, the equality of women and men – anathema to many theocracies – also matters to them. When France outlawed burqas, burkinis, and other overt marks of gender and religious submission, it made a strong statement about the primary importance of preserving to the extent possible a secular, egalitarian, public realm.

The full draping of women’s bodies in an expression of obedience to religious modesty mandates is anathema to a secular, egalitarian republic like France, so no one should be surprised that the city of Grenoble’s attempt to disobey the country’s burkini ban would provoke an outcry.

Grenoble has done what it can within the country’s court system to try to uphold its refusal to ban the garment, but today France’s top administrative court said nope. Not in public.

Grenoble is free to go to higher international courts, and I suppose it will. It won’t prevail there either.

This blog has long argued the importance of rescinding honorary degrees from, er, some of their recipients. Examples:

Bernard Madoff

Theodore McCarrick

Bill Cosby

Lance Armstrong

Sepp Blatter

Donald Trump

Sheldon Silver

James Levine

Almost all of these sex and/or money scumsters eventually lost the honor aura conferred upon them by America’s debauched universities (debauched because, in almost every case, a touch of due diligence would have uncovered enough rumors to stay their hand, but these schools apparently didn’t care).

But what about, say, a law degree? An actual degree you work for and pay for? Is there behavior dishonorable enough to justify rescinding a BA or a JD?

What about an MD? UD has argued that Jumana Nagarwala, who put her Hopkins MD to use allegedly slicing off the genitals of little girls all over the midwest, should have that degree rescinded under… call it the Mengele Rule. It’s pretty easy to argue that people who got BAs under false pretenses (as in the Varsity Blues case, where rejects took the place of qualified applicants because their parents faked their applications and paid various well-connected criminals enormous sums of money to help them) should have their degrees revoked. The principle here is that a legitimate university has a reputation to defend, and when it harbors filthy crooks it should formally, publicly, expel them.

And a lawyer? A student who attends your school in order to learn the laws of our land in order to use those same laws to destroy it? This is much like the 9/11 pilots who attended flight school here solely in order to crash their planes into buildings. It would seem to be rather at odds with the purpose of a legal education, a serious education in the rule of law in our democracy. If I were Chicago I’d be pretty fucking embarrassed to be the school that taught John Eastman the law solely in order for him to twist it to destroy the country. I mean, is my face red!

It’s not too early for UD‘s beloved U of C to start considering a process by which they can cleanly disassociate themselves from this piece of shit.

… hope.

Sing it.

Oh, we ain't got a barrel of money
Maybe we're ragged and funny
But we'll travel along singing a song
Side by side!

We don't know what's coming tomorrow
Maybe it's trouble and sorrow
But we'll travel the road sharing our load
Side by side!

When my deep depression
Makes me wish I were dead
I'll just grab my little buddy
Point you right at my head

When the booze and divorces undo me
When the cold lonely winters cut through me
I'll just go and unlock one of my Glocks:
Suicide!

Declaring himself “humiliated” by the national and international disgust he has evoked by releasing an ad depicting him killing Republicans insufficiently supportive of Donald Trump, Missouri Senate candidate Eric Greitens has released a new, final ad.

Speaking directly to the camera and wearing ritual seppuku garb, Greitens announces that because he has inadvertently brought dishonor to Trump there is nothing left but for him to disembowel himself.

“To make absolutely sure that my sacrifice succeeds,” Greitens says in a steely voice, “I have also employed a henchman to decapitate me.”

The ad was immediately taken down by all social media outlets, but can be accessed on his website. (Click on the link titled A FAREWELL.)

Here it is.

Both places from UD‘s outing today — a very beautiful day.

Epstein’s famous for a WSJ column pouring contempt on Jill Biden, a Ph.D. holder, for using the title “Dr.” He directly entreated her, an Ed degree grad from a state school, to cut out the pathetic vainglory. He directly entreated his readers also to drop her doodoo, stupo, pseudo, honorific, and admit her degree’s embarrassing worthlessness.

The column went over like a lead balloon. A really big, international, lead balloon. The WSJ was forced to issue – not a retraction, no sir. An editor there felt compelled, given all the hoohah, to double defensively down, endorsing Epstein’s titular rigor. (Here are all my Epstein/Biden posts.)

But Joe. Have you watched any of the January 6 hearings? Have you noticed how scrupulous the committee is in referring to John Eastman as Dr. Eastman? He is, like Jill, a Ph.D. holder. He is, unlike Jill, a traitor. But in this generous country, we not only refer to graduates of the University of Delaware grad school, like Jill Biden, as Dr. We even extend the courtesy to traitors. Here in the US, if you have a doctorate, even if you have conspired to destroy the country, we will respect your title. Think about that, Joe.

Great News! He Only Had a Knife.

If only it really were the end.

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

From Andrew Sullivan’s newsletter (no link).

I’ve told you a million times that no one’s a onetime plagiarist. Find one instance of plagiarism in someone’s work, and I promise, there’s tons more where that came from.

We recently covered the case of the Australian novelist who plagiarized – a lot – from Nobelist Svetlana Alexievich in his latest novel. This discovery inspired a yet closer look at the work, and gevalt.

[The novel has been found] to contain sections that were nearly identical to extracts from the Great Gatsby [and] Anna Karenina, [as well as the] Nobel laureate’s nonfiction work.

The guy’s still lying about it, which is unusual. All plagiarists begin by denying it, and then, in a day or two, they say ah fuck yeah I did it. This guy continues lying through his teeth.

It’s a Proustian moment for ol’ UD, as another obscenely compensated non-profit leader explains that he didn’t do his obscene compensation; it was forced on him by the organization’s board.

Proustian because little piggies squealing about their non-profit purity have for lo these many years been a mainstay of this blog, which loves to slop around in greed and hypocrisy; and the non-profit swine who blames his personal greed on a board whose absolute command he/she simply cannot disobey represents a spectacular distillation of greed and hypocrisy …

UD first encountered the board made me do it at her own institution, GWU, one of whose presidents assembled a compensation package so huge that the national media noticed, and it became quite uncomfortable for the school. His defense? I had nothing to do with it; the board forced it on me.

Yes, as the president of a university I am constantly making speeches to our students about the importance of independent thought and action… How many times have I recited Frost’s The Road Not Taken to the little buggers… Yet when it comes to something as important as the amount of money I personally drain from this non-profit, I shrink to a little Oblomov, unable to lift a finger on behalf of any recognizable set of moral values…

UD‘s also reminded of the Bremer Foundation’s board:

In 2004, the three trustees together received nearly $125,000. That figure has increased by nearly 10 times in 10 years… “These institutions get tremendously preferential tax treatment,” [Aaron Dorfman] said. “And because of the tax-exempt status they enjoy, the rest of us pay higher taxes and in effect subsidize nonprofit tax-exempt charitable foundations.”

Take a look.

Fun, huh?

So this latest dude, who just, you know, drained the money from an organization established to help appallingly underserved American populations, is running for Chicago’s mayor on this record, and given the raucous criminality of that city he’ll probably win.

  Sing it.

  I dream of Ginni in the witness chair
  Borne, like a traitor, on the summer air
  I see her bow her head and start to pray
  "Lord please tell me all that I should pr'haps not say."

 Many are the wild lies her merry voice would pour
All about the vile texts exchanged with cohorts
I dream of Ginni in the witness chair
Talkin 'bout John Eastman and the fond hopes they share

And so much more.

Watch the January 6 hearings.

They’re on now.

Watch them now if you can.

Or after work.

You won’t be disappointed.

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

And not to drop names, but UD is super-excited to say that the solemn bespectacled young woman on the right of your screen (she’s at the right of Judge Luttig), is her friend Alice!!