We found your poster boy.
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…
A lawyer for [Alex] Jones said last year that the Infowars host no longer believes that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.
… 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.
‘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.
… 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?
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.
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.
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!
… revelations.
Several members of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s inner circle, including current and former cabinet ministers, “secretly owned an array of companies and trusts holding millions of dollars of hidden wealth,” the group reported. That could create a political headache for the former cricket star, who campaigned for the South Asian country’s highest office as the head of a reformist party that promised a strong anti-corruption agenda.
By Pakistani standards, this IS anti-corruption.
*************************
Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II, used an English accountant in Switzerland and lawyers in the British Virgin Islands to secretly purchase 14 luxury homes worth $106 million, including a $23 million property in California overlooking a beach, the ICIJ reported, noting the country relies on foreign aid to support its people and house millions of refugees. U.K. attorneys for the king told the ICIJ that he was not required to pay taxes under Jordanian law, has never misused public funds and has “security and privacy reasons to hold property through offshore companies.”
“If you ever want to see your children alive again, you must purchase fourteen luxury homes worth one hundred million dollars.”
***********************
[Eastman] insisted that his two-page memo, which he said he hastily wrote while on Christmas vacation with his family in Texas, had been taken out of context…
*************************
THE SIX STEPS OF CHRISTMAS
On the first day of Christmas an idea came to me:
A coup to seize the presidency
On the second day of Christmas an idea came to me:
Make Mike Pence lead a coup to seize the presidency
On the third day of Christmas an idea came to me
Crown Trump king, make Mike Pence lead a coup to seize the presidency
On the fourth day of Christmas an idea came to me
Whomp up a mob, crown Trump king, make Mike Pence lead a coup to seize the presidency
On the fifth day of Christmas an idea came to me
He’ll crown me prince! whomp up a mob, crown Trump king, make Mike Pence lead a coup to seize the presidency
On the sixth day of Christmas an idea came to me
NOW I AM GOD!!!! He’ll crown me prince, whomp up a mob, crown Trump king, make Mike Pence lead a coup to seize the presidency
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.
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