ÅNGERMANLAND I will arise and go now, and go to Ångermanland, And a vast fortress build there, of rage and madness made; None else will I have there -- my world will I command And live alone in the bee-loud glade. And I shall have my rage there, for rage's wind doth blow, Blowing from the hearings, from where the RINOs sing; There Bennie’s all aglimmer, and Jamie's all aglow, And the transcripts full of Liz’s zings. I will arise and go now, for always night and day I see old allies dumping me and smirking more and more; I know that court awaits me some not too distant day, I know it in the deep heart’s core.
Chairperson Turd has just issued a video of her crouching, naked, over a picture of Rusty Bowers and defecating on his face. “Ah… That’s better. And now to finish this off the Arizona way!” she yells. Someone off-camera hands her an AK-47. “RINO hunting never felt SO GOOD!” She empties the weapon into his picture, tearing up bits of the floor with the weapon. “Let me say to all true Arizona Republicans,” she concludes: “It’s too late to go after Rusty’s dead daughter. But he’s still got plenty of family and friends left. YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO.”
***********
UPDATE: OOpsie! Smelli gets subpoenied!
*************
Getting where? To the final speech of Ceausescu, in this our own great county, at an enormous Donald Trump rally.
LAST two people I thought would divorce!
*********************
So. Let me tell you the truth. I’m not surprised. The mistake Murdoch made this time was marrying someone so old. He’s on a quest never to die, via marriage with the younger set. (One of his models seems to be Sumner Redstone.) This latest pairing, with Hall already in her sixties, made no sense to me, given the sex serum regimen he’s on. Number Five will be in her thirties, and this one will guarantee that Murdoch will never die.
Well hell’s bells I’ve heard of “deflection” before, but not deflection that involves deflecting attention from your abuse of your family and toward your murder of political opponents. But whatever.
Yes! Go for it, Katie! Alabama lags behind at only SECOND in the nation for gun violence: GET US TO NUMBER ONE and let that new gore gush all over the place!
Your uncompromising defense of the Second Amendment will splatter so much new blood onto our streets that in no time NO ONE will be able to catch up with Bama!!
GONNA BE NUMBER ONE GONNA BE NUMBER ONE
Vote Katie!

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.
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.)


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.
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UD REVIEWED
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