‘This Article is More Than 2 Years Old’

Yeah I know but if you read it alongside this article, a mere babe at twenty-four minutes old, it spices up somewhat the dully predictable guilty sentence that America’s own Jay Gatsby – John Wilson, Harvard MBA – just received for bribing people and lying through his teeth to get not one, not two, but THREE of his rich, dim, klutzy spawn into fancy universities. Because Wilson himself is no stranger to … uh…

Says he played football at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. No record of it.

‘[S]ales quadrupled during Wilson’s tenure [at Staples, but] did not come close to the “10X” growth he touts. Over the same period, net income increased by 481 percent, according to the securities filing, not 800 percent.’

‘Wilson claims in his online resume that his success at Staples led him to be “selected by CFO magazine in 1994 as one of the Top 50 CFOs in the United States.” The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Vincent Ryan, was unable to find any record of Wilson’s recognition in the publication’s archive.’

Getting tired of quoting. There’s more.

Preamble, State of South Dakota Constitution

“[T]ax havens” aren’t really for avoiding taxes: They exist to help elites avoid the rule of law that they impose on the rest of us. The offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.

Therefore, the Great State of South Dakota will do all that it can to establish and sustain the world’s most secretive and powerful tax havens.

Calling the Federalist Society!

We found your poster boy.

The Kill-Your-Country Three-Step

Just do-si-do kinda like this, while doing this:

First phase, Trump goes to court. Loses every lawsuit, which claims there was voter fraud in the election. Next, he decides he has to take over the Department of Justice and the attorney general, and have the attorney general push this narrative on to the states to tell them to stop from sending in their Electoral College vote totals. When that failed — and our report goes into graphic detail of the efforts that were made — the third step was to turn the mob loose on the Capitol the day we were counting the ballots…

‘I AM NOW NO LONGER THE KNIGHT WHO SAYS……. NI.’

A lawyer for [Alex] Jones said last year that the Infowars host no longer believes that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.

Abdulrazak Gurnah wins the literature …

Nobel.

I simply arrived at a certain age and thought to myself that this was something I’d like to do, as for example going to England with the difficulties of being of that age and moving from one place to another. Being a stranger, living through the difficulties of finding my way, having kind of abandoned home, things like that influenced me. I’m not like Virginia Woolf, who knew at the age of ten she wanted to be a writer. I just found myself writing things down one day, as people usually do, and found new pages that built up on these ideas and then came to the point at which I thought: What is this? What am I doing with this? And there you reach the difference between writing things down and writing.

UD’s beloved, intrepid sister-in-law is in the Azores.

BWAHAHAHA!

‘We’ll figure out where this individual got this gun from,’ Jeff Boshek, special agent in charge of the ATF’s Dallas Field Division, told CNN. ‘Our agents won’t sleep, working with our partners here, to figure out how he got this weapon in his hand to come in this school and cause this tragedy today.’

Heck I reckon the little tyke got it… deep in the heart of Texas!

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

Uh huh, I know what you’re saying. All his buds that what he got in a tiff with this morning in class shoulda been carrying too so we’d a had one fine fettle of a gunfight. Hell, there’d a been time for someone to record it and all.

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

Memory lane! SOOOOO many to choose from. Here’s one that kinda stays with me.

LOLOLOL

Yeah I know alarming government intrusion 1984 yes. OTOH, it’s funny.

America’s Education…

BOOM!

BOOM BOOM BOOOOOOOMM!!!!

Laurie Anderson…

… is UD‘s prediction for this year’s Nobel in literature. I like her because she’s on NO ONE’s list, so I get to claim her. I like her because they gave it to Bob Dylan so they should give it to a woman who’s kind of like Dylan. I like her because she’s truly avant-garde, a hard thing to be today. Israel already figured all of this out, having recently given her its version of the Nobel, the Wolf Prize.

Not literary enough? Is the 2021 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University literary enough for you?

‘South Dakota … and North Dakota … [are] two states with a combined population of less than two million that get four senators. Meanwhile, not quite a century after South Dakota was admitted to the union, amid the economic slump of the late 1970s, this imposter of a state began its transformation into a paradise for tax evaders, kleptocrats, and other wealthy lowlifes.’

Already South Dakota ha[s] no income tax, no capital gains tax, and no estate tax. Why not make the state even more hospitable to the wealthy by repealing something called “the rule against perpetuities” and rendering family trusts immortal?South Dakota’s lax financial regulations are … fantastic enablers of illegal or brazenly immoral activity unrelated to tax-dodging...

We’ve put up with this moral sewage long enough. Let’s abolish South Dakota by merging it into North Dakota. If Congress has the power under the admissions clause to admit new states, shouldn’t it also have the power to dissolve them? Everybody makes mistakes! As Jonathan Chait argued some years back in [The New Republic] about Delaware, the Mount Rushmore state long ago forfeited through bad behavior any claim on our allegiance or respect… Now the place is just 77,000 square miles of undead family fortunes.

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

Timothy Noah, a wonderful writer, in TNR.

A jeweled web trembles…

… in the wet wind, along the side of UD‘s house.

Laughter is the best medicine.

Scroll down to hear the audience laughing at Czech Prime Minister Babis as he assures the country he’s financially clean. The video is marked El Mundo.

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

In 2016, Mr. Babis scolded the wealthy Czechs whose names appeared in the Panama Papers and, in a 2020 interview, proclaimed that a governing philosophy was to “cut off the heads of the ‘corruption-Hydra.’” Now he’s accused of using a string of offshore shell companies to purchase luxury real estate on the French Riviera, including a chateau worth $22 million.

Heartland Values = $360 billion

SOUTH! Dakota! Where the trusts come right behind the gains

Where within the wheat our banks secrete

All your dirty money on the plains!

SOUTH! Dakota! Every night my narco boss and me

Contemplate in awe the way our law

Gives us narco-perpetuity!

We know what we’re doing is banned

Except in this wonderful land!

So when we say… Yeeow! Aye-yip-aye-yo-ee-ay!

We’re only sayin You piece o’ shit South Dakota

South Dakota okay!

« Previous PageNext Page »

Latest UD posts at IHE

Archives

Categories

Bookmarks

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