Let us sing of a country all of whose prime ministers (well, more than a few) plagiarize their dissertations – dissertations written merely, it seems, to append DR to their names.
Seldom has the search for respectability led so many to such disreputability.
Indeed Romania’s current prime minister (in 2012, this blog covered the last plagiarizing prime minister) is plausibly accused of plagiarizing a third of his military thesis.
That’s a bit less than the 2012 guy plagiarized, so bravo…
And yet… UD has been writing about plagiarism long enough to know that when the given figure is a third, the actual figure is probably… Just making a rough calculation here… Let’s see… Uh… Yes. Got it: — The real figure is one hundred percent.
**************
UPDATE: Amusing motive-explanation here.
A man charged for participating in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot had his pretrial release revoked Tuesday after a dramatic arrest for allegedly driving while intoxicated. James Tate Grant was arrested for drunk driving in a Wake County, North Carolina in December. He told the police who flagged him down that he had been at the Capitol on Jan. 6 …
Grant attempted to get away during the arrest… In his car, the cops found an AR-15, 60 rounds of ammunition, and combat fatigues… [H]e awaits trial for allegedly assaulting a police officer on Jan. 6, prohibited firearm possession, excessive drinking, and drug use … He had previously tested positive for amphetamines twice…
And UD uses any golf game! For UD, there’s no white noise like the sotto voce, basso continuo, green-hills-far-away gestalt of golf.
Of course she’s not the first to discover this.
She discovered football as white noise in a long, very thoughtful New York Times comment thread appended to the 450th article UD has read in which a conscience-stricken person reckons with his inability to stop watching football even though it’s so nasty. This particular cri-de-coeur has become so common a plaint that it now constitutes a whole school of American philosophy: Reformed Calvinism, transcendentalism, pragmatism, Post-Thiesmann-Fracturism.
But what she really wanted to share was the most thoughtful comment of all. She plucks it from comment obscurity and places it here for you.
“Football is really the new American Pastime, not baseball. It’s like guns at this point – woven into the meaning of being American for large swaths of the populace. Among the potential player pool which is largely Black (as am I, and I played and loved football), it is still seen as a “way out” — fortune and glory overrides concern for CTE in their 50s. For a teen, life ends at 30 anyway. And for all the racism in the sport, the players are still largely black and show up to play every weekend, so it’s only logical that the public takes its cues from them. If they all went on strike to protest, then they could really open eyes.
And let’s not overlook the “manly” aspect of it. Those with more of a progressive streak will scoff at the barbarians smashing their heads together, but we’re still mammals. And mammals are hard wired in specific ways. Yes, over-glorification of manliness and the NFL’s fusing with military marketing is particularly perverse. But it comes from a real place.
Remember, boxing was a huge sport for a long time. 95% of the spectators would never get in a boxing ring to get their bodies pummeled for a living, but yet they came to watch. Now MMA is picking up where boxing left off. Let’s face it, we have a bloodlust as long as it’s someone else getting bloody.”
DeSANTIS BETTING THAT REPUBLICANS
WANT A STUPIDER VERSION OF TRUMP
….and even Fox isn’t sure it agrees with her that Fauci is history’s worst psychotic sadist.
But her problems are just beginning.
Congressperson Paul Gosar is reportedly suing her for defamation on behalf of the Mengele estate. An email sent to major news outlets, purporting to come from his office, says: “No one, arguably, has been more consistently and viciously maligned in our time than Dr. Josef Mengele, whose contributions to twin studies alone merit acclaim. Now Lara Logan puts him in the same boat with a man who with his Chinese abetters released a fatal pathogen into the world population and is directly responsible for the deaths of millions. Logan will answer for this calumny.”
A reader alerts UD to a University of Kansas provost who plagiarized the MLK Day inspirational message he sent to everyone at the university. “If you want to go technically, then yes,” he replied when asked whether he did it, shaming all us tight-asses who care more about the trivial technicality of stealing other people’s words than the wild sweeping grandeur of uplifting sentiment.
D.A. Graham highlights “communications specialist,” “integrity leader,” “and “Adjunct Faculty: Writing” on his LinkedIn page.
***********************
UPDATE: Lift every voice, press SEND, and resign. Respectable schools keep a very close eye on their reputation (except when it comes to sports, of course). Kansas is a very good school, and will fire people who bring it into academic disrepute.
A provost who sends plagiarized material out to the entire school under his own signature belongs at a school like (cough) West Liberty. West Liberty retains a plagiarist president. Reputable schools won’t even let a provost get away with it.
Put her in high heels, so she can’t run
Carve out between her legs so she can’t come
Get her a dress, for easy access
Tell everybody that she’s just like all the rest
How long? How long, how long, how long
How long? How long, how long, how long
Tell me I’m ugly so I’ll buy your crap
Tell me you want me ’cause I don’t talk back
Tell me I carry the original sin
Tell me I’m holy when I cover up my skin
****************************
Pushing all the buttons there, eh? We’ve got FGM; we’ve got burqas. “[S]ome radio stations have told her they won’t play it,” and good for her! Who gets to be seventy and still get banned? “I will not disappear,” she sings.
Her voice is still remarkably strong, and her guitar work has held up well.
For UD, the Ian song that’s held up beautifully over decades and decades is Jesse, which I love to sing and play at the piano.
‘All the blues and the greens
Have been recently cleaned
And are seemingly new
Hey Jess me and you’
The song has a drifty sad pace which really grows in dramatic focus and intensity; more than that, the poetry of the thing is remarkable: All of its details are banal and domestic – the bed, the hearth, the light on the stairs, the floors and the boards, the pictures, the table – but they heighten until we feel the pathos of her material as well as emotional isolation (she still sets the table at noon).
And then we have at the end this amazing image: ‘We’ll swallow the light on the stairs.” Come back, and we’ll become the light. We’ll become all the light we need.
In America, it’s one-stop shopping! You can come here with no weapons at all and buy all the guns you want for your terror attack right off the street!
Why kill people in countries where getting weapons is difficult? Why run the risk of transporting them? In America the streets are lined with Glocks.
…. By which UD means that almost every actual, non-fictional human being presents with nuance, a sense of unreachable depth, ambiguity, contradiction. Norman Maclean gets at this when thinking about his tragic younger brother: “[I]t is those we live with and should know who elude us.”
Even those to whom we’re closest, that is, ultimately present as mysteries, exhibit the human traits of unreachable depth and contradiction. Everyone, really – or almost everyone – is recognizably human by virtue of their possession of a complex, enigmatic, and vulnerable private self.
*********************
And then there’s Alan Dershowitz. For as long as he’s been in the public eye, Harvard’s finest seems nothing — nothing — but a strutting monomaniac, a staggeringly unidimensional embodiment of the medieval humor “choleric.” Tip him forward in time and find him, post-medieval, on Moliere’s stage, firing up the floor boards with rage, hypocrisy, sense of entitlement, and faux moral indignation. A person who regards himself as a supremely righteous exemplar in a world of villains, his speech consists of rifle-blasts of accusations against his enemies: LIAR LIAR NAZI WHORE LIAR WHORE NAZI.
Moliere’s Dershowitz has gotten rich defending, in courts of law, female genital mutilators, murderers, and many other bad people, but this, he roars, proves his ethical superiority: GIVE ME YOUR TIRED YOUR POOR NO ONE ELSE WILL DEFEND THESE HUDDLED MASSES. And despite evidence of his using that wealth to lead a rather decadent personal life among rather decadent friends (sometimes they are the same people he is defending in courts of law, or in the newspapers, or, reportedly, to President Trump, in search of a pardon for them), he boasts that he belongs to not one, not two, not three, but FOUR synagogues. So there!
Like all flat characters, Dershowitz is as hilarious as he is heinous; it’s always funny in a startling way to find puppetry rather than profundity – Ubu rather than Macbeth – and as he gets close to death and we realize the long-expected moment of self-recognition or shame or at the very least reflection, the moment he becomes a recognizable human being instead of a machine, will never come, our laughter at him becomes more unsettling. It is guilty laughter, laughter at a person trapped in a failure to become a person.
His latest rifle-blast, in the pages of scummy Newsmax, begins with a boyish, wide-eyed, gentle, baffled photograph of his friend Prince Andrew. In this picture, Andrew asks Why is this happening to me? And in the fevered defense that follows, Dershowitz explains that it’s all because of greedy whore Virginia Giuffre, who also plucked Dershowitz himself out of thin air to sue for millions of dollars. It’s a travesty. A TRAVESTY.
The hideous University of Hawaii is a perennial subject on this blog, in particular because of its sordid sports program. They’re always hiring high-priced asshole football coaches, always quickly firing them amid scandal, and then always digging into their empty pockets to pay the coaches zillion dollar buyouts. You’d think a university system might, over the course of decades doing the same stupid ruinous thing, learn a thing or two. Not Hawaii.
Game attendance is pathetic. Deficits are astounding. But above all the place is constantly buying out assholes. The latest is standard-issue hyperchristian hypocrite Todd Graham, who between sermons about Christ’s love talks dirty and treats players like shit. You see this dude all over university football – Son, let us pray, you stupid cunt hold onto the fucking ball. Its more sophisticated form can be seen at places like Baylor, where soldiers of the lord preside over armies of rapists.
A tenured Penn lawyer named Wax
Has problems with Asians and blacks
Though everyone’s through
With her vile racist spew
The school cannot give her the axe
Italy’s Church of Saint Ducea: The wave of the integralist future.
Have I ever. UD has been circling this thing for a few days, waiting for more information to be released before she blogs about it.
The much-laureled U Penn student’s last name – Fierceton? – was the first thing that seemed strange to ol’ UD. No one else has it – the only mention of it I can find appears in a translation of the ancient Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas – a book of myths whose translator puts the name “Fierceton River” on an obscure location.
Mackenzie’s last name used to be Morrison. Here her mother, Dr. Carrie Morrison, talks about breast density. Mackenzie dropped Morrison and added the dramatic Fierceton, which is fine, even fantastic, if you want to mark your separation from your roots, your own free fierce identity or whatever.
Fierceton’s roots are what you’d expect for someone born to a prominent physician: Private schools, horseback riding, cool vacations. But she has garnered all sorts of university goodies (scholarships, awards) reserved for underprivileged people, her argument being that her mother abused her, and in her teens she ended up in foster care. So she’s arguing that this means her background is foster care/abuse/underprivilege. Which a certain chapter of it is, but qua formulated humanoid she’s much more privileged than not, which puts into question the legitimacy of her underprivilege-based goodies.
Further – it certainly matters whether her claims of maternal abuse, amounting to broken bones, blocked breathing passages, and other nightmares, are true. All of the charges against her mother were dropped, and it looks as though hospital records list injuries much less nightmarish than the ones Fierceton claims.
*******************
One thing Fierceton has going against her is America’s really rampant culture of self-aggrandizing fakes, like UD‘s erstwhile colleague, Jessica Krug, an upper middle class Jewish woman from Kansas City who got all sorts of academic goodies by pretending to be a poor black person. Thanks to scads of identity scammers, we all have a vivid category into which to place Fierceton, whether this placement is in fact fair. Institutions are also hypersensitive – given this cultural background of scamming – to the possibility of being exploited by fakers, and in the case of Fierceton they have indeed started to come down hard on her. She is suing in response, so we will eventually know where at least some of the facts lie.
