Could the Waukesha mass murder event be terrorism?

It instantly made me think of the 2016 terrorist attack in Nice.

One onlooker summed it up.

“Right now, I’m just angry. It seems everywhere we turn, it’s just another violent day in the U.S.”

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

Doesn’t seem to have been terrorism; just a typical domestic atrocity, in which a violent person who should be in jail is driving around killing people.

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

Just makes you puke.

Progressive Policing: Under District Attorney Chesa Boudin, it’s Happening Now in San Francisco!

All wrapped up nice and pretty for the Trumpians to use in the next election.

Chesa might be recalled. Maybe you’d like his retail theft record in your community.

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

[I]n 2014 [California] classified possession of hard drugs for personal use and the theft of up to $950 of goods as misdemeanor offenses. In the Bay Area, the results have been stark: San Francisco’s overdose deaths rose to 81 per 100,000 people in 2020 from 19 per 100,000 people in 2014.

In the meantime, shoplifting has become endemic, brazen and increasingly well organized, culminating in mobs of looters ransacking stores and terrifying customers in the Bay Area last week. Local shops are closing, neighborhoods are decaying, encampments of drug addicts have proliferated, and streets are befouled by human excrement — a set of failures Michael Shellenberger calls in his thoroughly researched and convincing new book, “San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities,” “the breakdown of civilization on America’s West Coast.”

Pack of Tasteless Roses

UD‘s on Amazon’s German site, enjoying the not-quite-there English.

‘Rudy Giuliani, who at this point defies meaningful description…’

Scathing Online Schoolmarm likes the way Michelle Cottle just slipped that clause in there. Nice.

I hope you’re following the Moshe Porat trial.

The brazen, inexhaustible nature and variety of his mendacity is something to see. When you read what he does and says, having been caught making up numbers for Temple University’s business school in order to score a US News number one ranking, you have to admire the sheer endurance/agility/creativity of his lying.

When caught by Temple administrators, he simply says Give me more time. I can fix it back. Now in a court of law, he has blamed all of his assistants, who turn out to be vicious prevaricating scum, for the wrongdoing.

For sure, his next move will be to announce to the court that he is profoundly mentally and physically ill, cannot be held responsible for anything he’s ever done, and needs to go home and lie down.

It’s not ME. It’s the WORLD that’s sick.

“While his actions were dishonest and criminal in nature, he’s part of an industry sick from top to bottom where this sort of behavior is sadly commonplace.”

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

Almost all art dealers commit 86 million dollars worth of fraud and then flee to Vanatu. Vanatu has become a second home for multimillionaire art market fraudsters.

3:27 AM here, and it’s exactly like this.
I mean, add skimming white clouds and clear cold air! But exactly like this. Les UDs shiver on the bedroom deck, thrilled.

[photo CNN]

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

… the New-moon winter-bright!
         And overspread with phantom light,
         (With swimming phantom light o’erspread
         But rimmed and circled by a silver thread)
I see the old Moon in her lap…

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

But overspread with orange light!

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

And now – 3:57 AM – it’s like this – the merest sliver of silver… And because it sheds so little light, and because it’s a clear winter night, the STARS are out like mad…

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

4:57 and it’s brightening up again. 50/50 bright/dark. Didn’t expect that.

Weathered birdbox…
… at the Woodstock Special Equestrian Park, site of today’s hike. A fully sunlit, mild, ridiculously beautiful late autumn day.
‘Few thought criminals enjoy the kind of soft landing granted to UATX advisory board member Summers, whose ill-fated tenure as president of Harvard was notable primarily for his sexist views on women in science, his dismantling of one of the best African American studies departments in the country, his alienation of the majority of the faculty, and his series of lapses of judgment in his relationship with Epstein. Following a one-year sabbatical, Summers was rewarded with a Harvard University professorship, the school’s highest honor for a faculty member.’

She forgot to mention his steadfast defense of Andrei Shleifer, his taking over Harvard’s endowment and promptly losing $1.8 billion, his hedge-fund freelancing while president of Harvard, etc., etc. Summers is a-fucking-mazing.

When one of your country’s two parties is violently nihilistic, you can expect the word “nihilism” to get quite a workout.

And it does. Scan the political commentary of the last couple of years, and you’ll encounter the word again and again.

Seldom has it been invoked more powerfully than by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez today, in the discussion leading up to Rep. Gosar’s censure. She’s right – nothing matters to these people, so they feel free to act obscenely.

People like Gosar represent a kind of disease end-stage. He himself is obviously, literally, diseased: His siblings have begged people not to vote for this damaged man; his sister has described him as a “sociopath.”

He is, more importantly, the manifestation of the disease in his party.

Reliably Scummy University of Miami Does it Again.

The med school and sports program have, over many years, been the main source of scumminess at that benighted institution (go here), but now international relations has gotten into the game, with the last chair of the department (he has, uh, retired) just convicted of money laundering. His Venezuelan BFFs steal international funds meant for the poor and hide them in Swiss banks and Professor Bagley got his share of the goodies which having been caught in the act by a government agent Bagley’s way sorry and fuck it hasn’t he suffered enough?

Bagley’s defense attorney, Peter Quijano, said the former professor [shouldn’t get jail time because he] had already suffered “devastating collateral consequences” as a result of his conviction, the end of his UM career and the death of his wife earlier this year.

Dude was in his seventies when he started killing poor people unable to afford medicine because he stole their money, so his career was going to be over anyway, so let’s forget that devastating consequence. The fact that his wife died because of what he did (of embarrassment? heart attack from shock? He might at least have told her he was doing something that might end in jail time.) is totally on him, and if anything he should get more time for collaterally killing her along with all those Venezuelans.

I mean, UD totally understands that he figured this would be an easy way to score some really significant supplemental retirement funds, a fitting valedictory for a career specializing in international crime, but, you know, he took a risk and he lost. It happens.

The judge sentenced him to jail. Another feather in UM’s cap.

Rittenhouse Squared

[The] gun lobby [has grown] more powerful and darker… The N.R.A. … has worked hard to leave the impression that the ideology of gun ownership has been constant, emphasizing a Second Amendment politics that flattens the distinction between the eighteenth century and the present, and marketing AR-15s as if they were made for hunting. [By] the time of Sandy Hook, the gun culture … was all new: the treatment of lobbyists as charismatic leaders, the black-rifle influencers, the military weapons in the stores, and the military imagery used to market them. [This is] the world that the N.R.A. built…

The allegations against [Wayne] LaPierre may weaken the N.R.A., but the tactical culture that consolidated under his watch appears more durable. The sort of people who, not long ago, [one] might have characterized as “couch commandos” are everywhere on the American right — in power, and also on the fringe. Kyle Rittenhouse, … at the age of seventeen, got an AR-15-style rifle from a friend and brought it to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where he killed two men and wounded another … Representative Lauren Boebert, a Republican from Colorado, … owns a gun-themed restaurant in Rifle, Colorado; supported the storming of the Capitol; and has posed frequently with AR-15-style rifles.

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

Adam Lanza was twenty.

‘It was a common arrangement among ultra-rich buyers, who often don’t take physical possession of their works, instead leaving them in customs-exempt freeports while waiting for them to appreciate.’

And the best part is, no one gets to see the paintings that way. Wouldn’t want them on display or anything.

Nu? We’re all good here, right?

The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, a New York nonprofit, criticized the announcement [of forthcoming stricter oversight of private school education standards for New York students]: …”Yeshivas are in good standing with education law so why create a problem?”

We’re good! As recently as 2019

a New York City investigation of 28 yeshivas found that only two of them provided “substantially equivalent” education to secular public schools.

Two out of 28! That’s good, right? That’s around 93%.

‘In 2020, Temple’s online MBA program returned to the rankings at No. 88. This year, it is tied for No. 100 with 11 other online business programs.’

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

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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

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