Claims of Roman [Abramovich’s] pivotal strategic role in potentially ending the [Ukraine] war felt so fantastical that they might as well have cast him as some peacemaking chameleon, a very Zelig of international diplomacy. He was there at Westphalia in 1648, where he played some of his best treatying, and at Versailles in 1919, where he had an absolute shitter. And yet, many accepted and repeated the claims – performing ever more unpaid service in the reputation laundromat. Abramovich had bought himself yet another day of grace to add to the thousands and thousands of days of grace he has enjoyed in the UK since buying Chelsea [soccer club] in 2003…
Tomorrow Chelsea will host Newcastle, who are now owned by a group led by the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia – but remember, those guys are the good autocrats, because they buy our weapons. And use them in a war in Yemen that has thus far gone on for seven years, killing or starving hundreds of thousands, the vast majority believed to be children under five. But of course, the sovereign wealth fund isn’t the same as the Riyadh government. They just have a good relationship with it, same as Roman Abramovich just has a good relationship with Putin. “Which owner knows the guy who’s killed more babies?” is a question you won’t be seeing on any banners at Chelsea-Newcastle.
UD certainly expects college football players to fuck themselves up during spring break. This usually involves alcohol, and certainly does not feature hyper-clean-cut West Pointers. Nah.
And yet there they are, stretched out on the palm-edged front yard of their rental house, having fentanyled themselves almost to death. Policemen administer Narcan to their fine ripped torsos, while other attractive young people stand around being upset and useless.
In this post about UNC’s plagiarizing vice chancellor FOR RESEARCH, UD expressed amazement that “ninnies” at Chapel Hill let the guy get off with a slap on the wrist.
But then, thought she, he’s a honcho, he brings in the bucks, it’s the southland, he sports expensive suits, he’s in good with the boys’ club, blahbiddyblahblah…
How could UD have known about Mimi Chapman, who speaks for UNC’s faculty? Thirty minutes after someone high up in the administration – someone who knows how to read – read this letter from her, The Kay M. & Van L. Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of Genetics packed up his y chromosomes and went home.
Let’s take a peek!
… Over the last fewdays, faculty members from all over the University have contacted me about the current situation with our Vice Chancellor for Research, concerned that Vice Chancellor Magnuson has not stepped down from his position. As a faculty, we believe that this situation has the potential to taint our own scholarship and gives the impression that some members of our community are “untouchable” while for others such a situation would be a career-ender. Every hour, I have been hoping that an announcement would come so that I would not have to make this statement. But that has not happened and here we are.
… [P]lease resolve this situation in the interests of the institution and out of respect to this faculty with all deliberate speed.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Brava! I see no reason to stick quotation marks around untouchable, but with this small correction the letter is perfect. And it seems to have accomplished its goal. It has disrupted the sausage party at the top and reminded the guys that somewhere hidden among the sports programs at UNC is a faculty, and it can be quite ugly when provoked.
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And as for the institution-embarrassing miscreant himself, he opts for theI’m Too Good for this Worlddefense, stunning all of us with his life-saving achievements, which leave so little room for him to notice that he steals from multiple sources in grant applications. It’s a “teachable moment,” he piously informs us, forgetting to add that it’s only a teachable moment for people like him, who plagiarize.
As Kherson falls I pass the refugees around me in the night And I can’t help recalling how it felt to kiss and hold you tight
Well, how can I forget, Vlad? When there is always someone there to remind me Some Polish asshole there to remind me I was born to love you and I will never be free You’ll always be a part of me
If you should find you miss the sweet and tender love we used to share Just come back to the places where we used to go like our beloved Red Square
Well, how can I forget, Vlad? When there is always someone there to remind me Always someone there to remind me
[F]rom 2010 to 2019 gun deaths in [Wyoming] increased by more than 2 1/2 times the national average and gun suicide increased by nearly three times the national average. The rate of gun deaths has increased 54% from 2011 to 2020 in Wyoming, compared to a 33% increase nationwide.
According to the Wyoming Department of Health, suicide rates in Wyoming are consistently higher than U.S. rates. In Wyoming the rate of suicide by gun increased 43% from 2011 to 2020, compared to a 12% increase nationwide.
SOS has been reading up, this morning, on the just-sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and she found these extremely instructive sentences in a 2018 NYT article, so pay attention.
Unlike Mr. Deripaska, Lord Barker had a largely spotless reputation. His only minor brushes with scandal came in 2006, when he left his wife to live with a male interior decorator, and in 2012, while serving as energy minister, when he made the tabloids for using a microwave at Parliament to warm a cushion for his pet dachshund, Otto.
LOLOL. Do you see what the two extremely clever writers who produced these two sentences did? Do you see why the ghost of Lady Bracknell shines bright out of these two sentences? I mean, read it out loud, using her upperest of upper class British accents. Go on!
First, their set-up, and it’s vintage Oscar Wilde, as in
Then … Bada bing bada boom: … except in his domestic life.
So here we begin with another insipid cliche: spotless reputation… Though that sly largely tells you Bracknell waits panting in the wings. Largely, essentially – insert a seemingly innocuous adverb in front of your cliche and let fly.
That short first sentence, in other words, is the set-up. The second, much longer sentence, will launch us into the realm of absurdity… Or not launch, really – launch suggests an instant liftoff, whereas the trick actually involves sort of the opposite of a liftoff… a kind of sly gradual fizzling out is more like it… an operation whereby the sentence, instead of gaining steam and significance (writers are typically instructed to put their most significant material toward the end of their sentences, to work up to it — in part so that the reader is led to want to read further), delightfully self-deflates, leaving us in a terrain so beyond-trivial, so astoundingly non-serious, so insanely petty, so infinitesimally small, as to …
I mean, ask yourself: Why didn’t they write dog? Why did they belabor, bedeck, and bedew the sentence with breed and name? With warm? With pet? Have the writers not read Politics and the English Language?
Of course they have. But I don’t pay a fortune to subscribe to the New York Times in order to march solemnly through a stern-faced rendition of what is in fact a farcical story featuring sleazy twisted self-regarding idiots – I want a sense, as I read, that, along with the obligatory surface rendition of events, the writers grasp the sick world that set the events in motion. The writers correctly pinpointed the dachshund detail as a … sly … opening to that world, and they went with it.
The only thing SOS thinks could have improved this writing would have been if Lord Barker had inadvertently put the dachshund rather than the cushion in the microwave, in the same way Miss Prism inadvertently put the baby rather than the manuscript in the handbag. Alas, real life seldom cooperates to this extent.
Though it is certainly true that we got more than we might have expected in the name Lord Barker. Here life lent the whole thing a very Richard Brinsley Sheridan touch. Nice.
… presumably gearing up to accumulate her next million, when her former employer, the University of Maryland, finally got wind of her alleged two decades worth of theft while she worked for them.
Amusingly, her new job is in the field of ethics… But anyway I guess they read the papers at Hopkins, because her university page there has been Page Not Founded.
If precedent’s anything to go by, she and her lawyers are desperately seeking an AWP (Addiction with Poignancy) for her. Scuzzy unsanitary stuff like meth is out; usually what these people come up with is gambling.
“It was like a moment of humanity because you’re there and you just were holding your heart to them, and they would come up to you. It was a human moment.”
The recent academic history of UNC Chapel Hill is really stinky — just a shitload of scandals — so you might think faculty and administrators there would be superdupercareful not to add to the world’s growing sense that a once-respectable school has become a cesspool. But the awesomely titled vice-chancellor — FOR RESEARCH — a man not only eminent, but also distinguished, has been outed as a plagiarist.
In a grant application … but you and I know that soon enough many other instances of his plagiarism will be uncovered… though he seems to have convinced the ninnies at Chapel Hill that this is his one and only eminent distinguished theft from multiple sources, cuz they’re not really punishing the dude.
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Remember UD‘s tripartite plagiarism scheme (refresh your memory here). In this instance, we have Category One: ATELIER. Dude’s simply too esteemed and illustrious to bother writing his own grant applications or (UD feels certain we’ll discover) research papers, etc., etc. He relies on an atelier, his very own workshop of Santa’s elves, to do all his work for him, and he has fallen victim to the same thing all the other busybusybusy atelier-overseers (see oodles of Harvard law professors) fall victim to – he doesn’t review the work that goes out under his name. If you’re going to oversee, you need to oversee!
In short: I didn’t plagiarize! The dumb-dumbs that plagiarize on my behalf plagiarized. I give you my pledge: There’s gonna be a helluva shakeup on my staff and the new crew will know how to plagiarize and not get caught.
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Mr UD: “A reasonable punishment would be a fifty percent reduction in his adjectives. He’s currently the Kay M. & Van L. Weatherspoon Eminent Distinguished Professor of Genetics. The choice is his, but he must lose either Eminent or Distinguished.”
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Update: Yeah. Well. Initial reports that he’d get a slap on the wrist sounded way dumb to ol’ UD, and, as she suggests up there in this post, you don’t deal with a plagiarist in that way. You fire a plagiarist. Esp. one in charge of research for the whole school! Mamma mia.
Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters (pictured here in a recent lighthearted mugshot) is under arrest (if they can find her) for “three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, criminal impersonation, two counts of conspiracy to commit criminal impersonation and identity theft, all felonies, according to the Mesa County District Attorney’s Office. She is also charged with first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty and failing to comply with the secretary of state, all misdemeanors… In October, a judge also barred Peters [and an associate] from overseeing the 2021 election, and after Peters refused to follow new protocols, the secretary of state sued her again to stop her from overseeing the 2022 election. Peters is also under investigation by the state’s independent ethics committee, is facing campaign finance complaints in the Colorado Office of Administrative Courts and was cited over an allegation of contempt of court in another criminal case.”
UD ain’t exactly sure what she did – seems to have involved giving a buddy access to voting machines so he could … change the vote for Peters’ lord and savior Donald Christ …? I’m also a little unsure whether she’s … evading … the authorities or simply taking a few extra minutes for her makeup.
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
