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.

As the Supreme Court today rejects without comment ISIS propagandist Hoda Muthana’s appeal of the decision to declare her not an American citizen, we do well to recall Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli’s comment about self-exclusion.

And listen. It’s just Muthana’s bad luck that the political and judicial establishment of this country has its hands full, at the moment, with January 6 domestic terrorists. We can’t get rid of those assholes. Apparently we can rid ourselves of Muthana.

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

Here are my Muthana posts.

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

It is time for Muthana to do what she should have done long ago: Look for alternative citizenship. She has claims on Yemen through her parents. And slavery is still quite popular in Yemen, so as an ISIS slaveholder, Muthana would feel right at home. Through her son, she has claims on Tunisia. Several countries offer citizenship for a price, and they may be willing to take a chance on her. Letting her innocent son grow up in the squalid prisoner camp they now inhabit is pretty vile behavior; even if she cannot accompany him to, say, Tunisia (his father was Tunisian), she should, for his sake, allow him to go.

Through her philosophically committed, extreme, and persistent violence against the US and other democracies, Hoda Muthana has certainly destroyed her own life. No one can be surprised if a person this depraved decides to go ahead and ruin her child’s life too. But it would be nice if she decided not to.

A second suit was filed by Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, against Mr. Trump, his son Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Giuliani and Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, accusing them of inciting the mob violence…

Mr. Brooks, who wore body armor onstage at a rally preceding the violence as he told the crowd to “start taking down names and kicking ass,” represented himself at Monday’s hearing after the Justice Department declined to do so…

“This was not to inspire people to attack the Capitol,” he said of his speech.

They knew all about it, because their neighbors took pictures and emailed them. Under wet, heavy snow, the main tree had fallen on some bundled wires, so there was a safety issue. PEPCO came out and pulled the wires back up, and then Asplundh came out and took away a lot of the big stuff.

Les UDs have been raking, lopping, hatcheting, and sawing the rest of it. Good honest work. We drag everything out to the front of the house and wait for the town maintenance guys to haul it away.

Rep. Jim Jordan’s announcement that he is refusing to talk to the January 6th committee has sparked celebrations across the nation, as Americans express hope that the congressman’s abstention from talking becomes a sustainable trend.

The guy’s a crooked old wrestling coach. (Scroll down.) UD‘s hope is that from now on he expresses himself, as our mothers always taught us, with fists, not words.

It’s been a month since the DOJ charged a high-profile University of Chicago professor with insider trading, and his university webpage remains fully, smilingly, intact. It’s the first thing that comes up when you Google his name.

They’ve put the dude on leave, but what to do about the fact that this now high-profile miscreant (he’s probably a miscreant; he seems to have been caught red-handed, and word is he’ll plead guilty) remains powerfully associated with a respectable university?

Rather than take the page down (you could do this; you could explain to the guy that it will come down until the case is settled), UD thinks it’s more straightforward to append a note to it:

Dr. Catenacci is on leave pending results of a conflict of interest investigation.

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

UPDATE: He’s been oopsed.

Our friends and neighbors in DC sometimes ask us why we don’t subscribe to the Washington Post — why we subscribe instead to the New York Times.

In part it’s about the incomparable Sunday NYT crossword puzzle.

But for both Les UDs, it’s also because there’s only one newspaper where paragraphs like the one in this post’s title – a single paragraph from a long article which sensitively and minutely explores a tragic chapter in the life of a high-profile New Yorker – are routine.

There’s indigenous “story weaving,” and there’s weaving together an academic article by plagiarizing from eight sources.

Eight? As I’ve learned over years of blogging about plagiarism, the number is probably closer to twenty.

Particularly contemptible in this case is Sandra Delaney plundering multiple unpublished dissertation theses. Stealing from young people who’ve not even gotten a chance to have their voices heard is really disgusting. Kill them when they’re just out of the womb.

Brutal colonization among those who make their living denouncing colonialism. A commenter at Retraction Watch writes: “One of the most ironic cases of plagiarism ever.”

Well, no one better than University of North Carolina Professor Anita Louise Jackson to do that. She herself, in contemplating unique funding opportunities within the United States Medicare system, has earned many millions in personal compensation.

It was easy: She simply performed hundreds of unnecessary procedures on hundreds of hapless patients … some of whom must really have wondered why she felt the urge to stick balloons, repeatedly, up their perfectly healthy nasal passages.

But one has to pay through the nose for a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course… uh, I mean we the taxpayers have to pay through the nose for Anita Louise Jackson to live in a megaMcMansion on a country club golf course; and if it weren’t for those pesky lawyers at the Justice Department wondering why a dinky rural practitioner is “the nation’s top-paid provider of a special sinus-relief procedure,” all would be well: Our hard-earned tax dollars would go to maintain Jackson’s lifestyle, and the farmers of northeast central Carolina would continue to boast the clearest nasal passages in the world.

That’s the football.

On his favorite day of the year, Trubu gets a presidential shellacking.

But like his namesake King Ubu, he will bounce back jollier and jollier and jollier!

LOL. Bad boy. Bad, bad, boy.

David, December, Rehoboth Beach


How all occasions do evoke thee
My own Lord Hamlet.  Here, beside the sea,
With only Philly Airport contrails for clouds,
I slip on icy boards and say your name aloud,
Because everything evokes thee.  Those contrails:
Your father, who mapped the moon, regaled
Me with their chemistry and their meaning.
Your Swiss cousin, who never left off keening,
Sends text messages about your mysterious life.
After all these years I've heard from your wife
Who finally wants the books you left with me.
And there's my yearly visit to the tomb
Of your mad Ophelia.  That keeps the ghost in the room.

Beyond all these, your famous sister is another thread
That keeps delaying your entry into truly dead
For every end of year my ritual is to read
Her widower's account of how he freed
Himself, a little, from the long pain of her dying.
When he said the Heart Sutra her soul went flying.

"I had a distinct feeling of a kind of expansion
Emanating from the furnace into the room 
And beyond.  Something was being released
From Eve's body and expanding into space."

For me, for your memory, no such amazing grace,
No closing mantra, no sense of you unrestless,
Over on the other shore, life and deathless.

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

Clear winter sunset now.

Ho! The horizon takes a roseate glow.
Pink's the sand where the whitelets flow.

Between the two, a table setting silver blue
Darkens to gray. Evoking you.

… on the morning after a dark violent snowstorm, precisely how precise the beach, ocean, and sky are now. The effect one sometimes has in this apartment of being on an ocean liner is more intense than ever – there’s even a sense of motion.

The white of the breaking, spraying tide merges with the white of the snow on the little dunes, and, with a full sun and cloudless sky shedding light so strong I can’t get a good picture of it from the balcony (this is a picture from earlier this morning), it’s … what? Pearlescent?

As for what one consciousness feels gazing at it — I’m thinking of a line from Harold Brodkey’s memoir:

Perhaps you could say I did very little with my life, but the douceur, if that is the word, Talleyrand’s word, was overwhelming. Painful and light-struck and wonderful.