Call out the NRA!

A Michigan prosecutor on Friday filed involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents of the 15-year-old suspect in the Oxford High School shooting.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were each charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter after their son, Ethan, was accused of fatally shooting four students at the suburban Detroit school on Tuesday.

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

When ordinary Americans can’t send their psychotic fifteen year old to school with a Sig Sauer 9 mm, things have taken a truly ominous turn.

The Mengele Maid: A Limerick
She's Fox News's new shogun
She shouts out her slogans
With every vile breath
Their Angel of Death
Choke on her name: Lara Logan

Mother: Heron-Watching at Lake Wilde, Columbia, MD. Daughter: Photographing Beautifully Tangled Limbs at Howth, Ireland.
” ‘Smells of Death’: Anti-Vax Priests Are Dropping Like Flies Here “

“They confused the metaphysical with science.” Oh whoops.

‘Dr. Oz Hopes to Replace Rand Paul as Biggest Quack in Senate’

Ah, but Rand Paul is also an asshole supreme, with whom Oz could never hope to compete.

UD’s been waiting SOOO long to put this song on her blog.

Thanks, Professor something or other at some school in Idaho. Here goes.

Another ordinary day…

… in America.

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

“It is insane that this is somewhat normal.”

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

“If the incident yesterday, with four children being murdered and multiple kids being injured is not enough to revisit our gun laws, I don’t know what is,” [Oakland County Prosecutor Karen] McDonald said.

Hello? Sandy Hook?

Beethoven’s Exhausted Second Movement Gets Yet Another Workout.

In a remarkable ten-minute propaganda clip, Eric Zemmour chooses the Seventh for his presidential announcement. Given the SUPER-chauvinistic, SUPER-French nature of his announcement, it’s head-scratching that he chooses a German composer for his soundtrack, non?

I mean, yes, the heavy-meaning-bearing second movement gets trotted out constantly — background music for The King’s Speech, background music for the end of the world — but what’s it doing in a hyper-nationalistic French politician’s presidential statement?

Obviously the haunting major/minor of this movement conveys seriousness and sorrow, gravity and dignity. It is both foreboding and, in its tenacious maintenance of its waltz-like tempo, somehow resolute. And since Zemmour’s whole thing is that France is dying – practically dead – it makes sense that this anxious sorrowing resoluteness would appeal to him. Joshua Bell comments:

I’d call the second movement the ultimate expression of despair, … especially as it reaches its peak. It’s the ultimate crying of lament. The slow movement even ends with an unresolved chord with no root, just as it begins. It leaves you feeling a kind of longing right from the beginning and it leaves you with that same feeling as it ends with an unstable chord.

Yet Beethoven is so un-French; Zemmour spends the entire ten minutes trumpeting the unique brilliance of French culture, and can’t come up with a French composer whose work adequately conveys his message?

It is not too late for the Zemmour campaign to align its values with its soundtrack. With no trouble at all, UD has come up with an equally famous and celebrated French composition that conveys, as does Beethoven’s, growing anxiety/intensity in the context of a beautiful melody. A piece that “has a pulsation that … is very close to that of, you know, the heartbeat. And … it grows in that sort of inevitable manner – something that, you know, cannot be stopped. It sort of unfolds and sweeps you away with it.”

Yes. Ravel’s Bolero.

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

PS: To render Zemmour’s entire announcement totally French, we’d also need to remove his reference to Johnny Hallyday (half Belgian), and have him quote from someone other than Abraham Lincoln (“by the people,” etc.).

Is Moshe Porat still a tenured professor at Temple University?

An April 2021 Bloomberg article says he remains a $300,000 a year tenured professor there, though he hasn’t taught or published research since 2018.

And he was just found guilty of enough fraud to send him to prison for 25 years.

Wow. Bill Cosby, Moshe Porat. Temple really knows how to pick ’em.

Limerick
As a big fancy Reb yada yada
I declare you persona non grata.
Dare not darken the door
Of my prayer room no more
Or I'll curse you forever to Yahweh. 
It’s a small world, after all!

Guns are creating an America in perfect harmony.

[P]ublic defenders argue that, historically, permits have been issued unevenly, and that still today, in many places, it is easier for whites and members of the middle class to get permits than it is for people of color and the poor. And they argue their clients should have guns just like other Americans do. In other words, the progressive left has met [the] far right in describing dangerous streets and the need to be armed on them.

… [This] nihilism … echoes the far right champions of the men we have seen on trial. Instead of taking guns out of the hands of the Rittenhouses and McMichaels of the world, these progressive public defenders want to level “up”— to make guns more readily available to their clients, to all of us. Their vision, if realized, would make the self-defense claims of Mr. Rittenhouse and Mr. McMichael unremarkable, not only in red states, but across the country.

The audacious position taken by these New York public defenders should give pause to anyone tempted to understand, and maybe even discount, the Rittenhouse and McMichael defenses as essentially conservative arguments playing to conservative juries in conservative states…

… [U]nregulated guns escalate violence across ideological lines.

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

‘All of us,’ by the way, needs to include America’s youngest shooters. As our headline has it, it’s a small world, after all; and the smallest among us, whose gun play is increasingly part of the country’s media landscape, also deserve self-defense in what’s coming to be called the Tot-on-Tot-Shot scenario. The only thing that stops a bad three year old with a gun is a good five year old with a gun.

What did you do in the war against democracy, Daddy?

MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Cruz told the attorney general you should be prosecuted. 

DR. FAUCI: Yeah. I have to laugh at that. I should be prosecuted? What happened on Jan. 6, senator?

There’s always some dude.

In the case of Bernie Madoff, it was Harry Markopolos, who knew instantly, easily, that he was looking at a Ponzi scheme.

In the littler case of Temple University’s Moshe Porat, who wangled a number one ranking for the university’s business school by similarly brazen malfeasance, it took John Byrne, founder of Poets & Quants, no time at all for grotesque numbers to jump out at him.

[O]nly 16% of students at the University of Maryland’s business school had submitted scores on the GMATs or GREs. At the University of North Carolina’s business school, only 15% did. Both schools show large enrollment increases that year…

“Contrast these numbers with number one Temple,” [John Byrne] wrote. “Temple was able to increase its online MBA enrollment by an impressive 57% to 546 students from 351. Yet, the school claimed that 100% of the incoming class provided either a GMAT score or a GRE.”

Of course, that 100% figure turned out to be false. It was actually 42 of 255 students, or 16%.

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

UPDATE: Guilty.

Porat [and others] falsified how many students had taken standardized test scores to get in, faked incoming students’ GPAs, made it appear the college was more selective than it was and lowered how much its graduates owed in loans, according to the indictment.

Nobel Prize Recipient Fails to Make the Cut at Canadian School Board.

The Toronto superintendent explains:

“We disinvited Nadia Murad from our speaker series because of what she went through to get the prize. Torture, rape, sexual slavery: It’s not Canada Nice. We can’t have our teenage girls asking questions about ugly things; our job is to protect them from the sort of stuff that comes from unpleasant parts of the world. Under our new guidelines, invitees will be drawn from women who have created tasty new tea brews and/or monetized their cat videos.”

The Japes of…

Rath.

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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