Woke this morning to monarch butterfly caterpillars all over my milkweed.

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

UPDATE: There’s got to be a morning after…. There’s frass everywhere.

Yeah? And? Is that so horrible? Haven’t you been rolling around in your mind this week the announcement that Bezos now has a personal fortune of well over two hundred billion dollars? UD has been rolling it around in her mind. Cuz… I dunno. It ain’t sitting right…

Even Steve Cohen’s paltry thirteen billion ain’t sitting right…

Yet

if a [presidential] candidate were to go the full Piketty—by proposing enormous taxes on the rich and taking steps toward surrendering [national] sovereignty to a transnational socialistic union—do we really think that nativism and nationalism would retreat, rather than redouble? Would erstwhile supporters of Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and Geert Wilders evolve beyond their fears of Muslim migration and accept the new utopia?

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

Anyway. However you feel about Piketty’s proposals, you have to admire his refusal to be censored by radically unequal China. Think of all the copies of his latest book he could sell there. But he won’t, because he’s a man of principle. Bravo.

Mr Art of the Squeal takes a bow, while Rev Blueballs sermonizes.

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

A local newspaper’s editor updates its Jan 20 2017 inaugural coverage.

Falwell: A ‘gratifying’ day

amid inauguration events

[Keep headline: perfect.]

At the end of the day, it was hard to decide what had been best.  [Drop phrase starting with “to decide.”  End with “hard.”]

First there was the private ceremony [Quotation marks around “private ceremony”] for the friends and family of President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence that Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. was invited to speak at. [Change to: for President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell, Jr, and Becki ‘Fortunate Fallwell,’ which Jerry Falwell Jr was invited to watch.]  Then there was that moment when former President Jimmy Carter stopped Falwell to speak with him [Add: about his enormous penis: “Do you really call it Beef Fallwellington?”]. And then came the strangers who thanked Falwell for supporting Trump [Change to: came the Liberty undergraduates who thanked Becki for performing oral sex on them.]

“It was really gratifying; when I was walking through the crowd of people, they were yelling, ‘Thank you for what you did’ and ‘Your support made the difference,’” Falwell said as he and his family prepared to attend the Liberty Ball, one of three inaugural balls slated for Friday night in Washington, D.C. [Change to: your big dick made the difference.  Quotation marks around “Ball.”]

Becki Falwell said her husband was one of a few people asked to speak [Add, with quotation marks: at a “religious” “ceremony.”]

“As a wife, honestly, I was a little nervous; I get a little nervous when he speaks.”  [Change to: “I get even more nervous than when he’s watching me fuck our pool boy.”]

… when UD spent so much time covering academic plagiarism that she evolved a tripartite motivational structure for the act:

ATELIER

AMBITION

ADDICTED

See details here.

A recent high-profile case falls cleanly into AMBITION. A UC Irvine professor is young, smart, already remarkably successful, and admirably ambitious for her education reform ideas to gain traction. She picks up significant material from other sources without bothering to quote it, giving the reader the impression she herself wrote it.

If this woman is like most other plagiarists, more instances of this behavior will almost certainly be found among her published works.

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

So far a typical Ambition case. What distinguishes this person from other non-attributors is not her silence in regard to press inquiries – everyone caught doing this sort of thing is very tight-lipped – but rather the random appearance of a colleague of hers at Irvine, who has written a threatening, semi-literate email on her behalf to Retraction Watch.

UD must say – this doesn’t seem to me a red-letter day for women’s liberation. A woman is challenged, and in gallops some guy to snarl for her.

The Sackler Wing, India.

“To be perfectly frank, I feel like a lot of our clientele is fairly insulated from the current situation. I don’t think anything would change in terms of how they’re buying or collecting wine.”‘

Yep, life round these parts is jest bout the same, thanks for asking.

… on those airlines that haven’t yet figured out how to deal with the ultraorthodox.

[Melanie] Wolfson had paid an extra fee for an aisle seat on [an Easyjet] flight to London that took off October 10. An ultra-Orthodox man and his son were already sitting in the row when she arrived. As soon as she sat down, the son got out of his seat, climbed over to the row behind, presumably to avoid physical contact with her, [LOLOLOLOLOLOL] and proceeded to look for a male passenger who would be willing to change seats with her. A few minutes later, he returned, and the father asked Wolfson to switch seats with a man a few rows ahead. 

It gets better.

The father insisted that she move but made sure not to look her in the eyes while speaking to her…

Wolfson, enraged and humiliated, eventually felt compelled to move in order not to delay the flight, but flight attendants (who’ve obviously had more than enough of this shit) insisted she sue, and IRAC has gone ahead and arranged that for her. She’s only asking for a pittance; I’d have advised her to ask for a hundred thousand – not only for public humiliation and bullying, but for being forced to watch that guy climb over the seats. Can’t have been pretty, and she wasn’t warned in time to shade her eyes.

Although the airline is not based in Israel, IRAC will argue that it was subject to Israeli law while the plane was on the ground at Ben-Gurion International Airport, where the incident took place.

사랑하는 지도자 없이는 우리는 아무것도 아닙니다!

사랑하는 지도자 없이는 우리는 아무것도 아닙니다!

“They are the unmasking of a long-standing hypocrisy that has fed off the resources and goodwill of a Christian institution while despising the truths it was established to uphold.”

Rev Garman nails it.

As the illustrious spectacle of twenty-first century American politics rolls on.

[Goldie Hawn] took to Instagram to share a photo of Ken [Robinson], which had been edited with one of his inspirational quotes. It read: “Every day, everywhere, our children spread their dreams under our feet. We should tread softly because we tread on their dreams. – Sir Ken Robinson.”

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Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

… Not Going.

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

Ha. Cost you ten mill plus to get me hence.

And I’ve left behind the gift that keeps on giving: Your reputation is in tatters.