… as that name generates one shameless POS after another. There’s Lance Armstrong, of course; and now there’s Charles Armstrong, career plagiarist. Both men enjoyed hero status in their professions for decades, even as both were absolute and, to use the word again, shameless frauds. Lance doesn’t need a link over his name; everyone knows what a shameless (there it goes again) liar and cheat that American hero turned out to be. Charles, thanks to enablers like Columbia University and Cornell University Press, has a lower profile, but reputable historians have been trying to tell anyone who will listen (which didn’t, for ages, include his publisher and his employer) that he’s been fabricating and stealing forever. Charles was obviously also helped along by a disciplinary community that failed to detect (willfully overlooked?) gross irregularities in his work.

But shameless. Let me tell you about shameless. When Armstrong, back in 2016, began fielding attacks on his latest book, it went like this:

Soon after the allegations were made public, Armstrong responded … that he “did not comment on any specific issues critics have raised with the book”. On December 30, 2016, Armstrong finally directly addressed the issues raised by the critics, stating: “For those who find the book flawed, inaccurate or insufficiently researched, the answer is simple: write a better book.”

Wee lads and lassies! Obscure jealous persons! Write a better book!

The fucker got away with it for so long; his main victim endured years of ridicule and neglect for daring to question The Great and Powerful Oz. Even now, Columbia has punished him by giving him a full year sabbatical and allowing him to “retire,” while Cornell Press has said jackshit about an episode (the fools even printed a revised version that Armstrong promised was all cleaned up) that reveals a great deal about the quality of their reviewers and editors.

He leaves, he tells us, on a high note; and who could disagree? From his refusal to step down from lucrative do-nothing corporate board seats even though they represented a conflict of interest; to his inept oversight, during his short tenure, of the most prolific, grotesque and high-profile athletic scandals American higher ed has ever seen; to his spending unprecedented amounts of school money on a football team so outrageously horrible that sports writers compete to describe it (“worst team in big ten history,” “so bad the big ten should kick them out,” “worst football imaginable,” “so bad it’s almost impossible“), Barchi has, allow UD to say, managed to embody to perfection the very essence of the postmodern American university president: Brainless, arrogant, greedy, institution-destroying, and deeply, deeply embarrassing for everyone involved. In other words: The bidding for Barchi to be president of your school has just begun!

Her anger at cancer personality bs featured prominently in her book Illness as Metaphor.

UD also remembers wondering why such obviously implausible notions continue to be taken seriously. This might even have been the beginning of UD‘s education in the sketchy field of research in psychology (this blog has over the years covered a zillion stories of disgraced high-profile psychologists, like Marc Hauser and Diederik Stapel).

Finally we seem to have the definitive trashing of the cancer personality. About time.

Wow. Encountering these statistics – shared in their broad outlines with many other states – UD suddenly perceives the NRA in a new way: Not as the steely-eyed advocate of hunters and hearth-defenders, but as a kindly Kevorkian, provisioning all households with reliable, easy-exit, appliances.

Not defending the right to bear arms, but defending the right to find life unbearable.

Given this country’s massive, and quickly growing, suicide market, we can eventually expect an NRA public relations campaign with a tag line like If you’re going to do it, do it right.

American archeology at its best.

Actually makes for a very engrossing read.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm finds this a nice, pithy description of America’s own Genius of the Carpathians.

Evan McMullin said it.

… the hero whose hero page will never be taken down because he’s SUCH a hero, seems to have assaulted his way out of a professional career. I guess ASU liked being assaulted when Vontaze was a (cough) student there. It certainly continues to celebrate and boast about its close association with a notoriously violent asshole. Turns out, however, that the NFL does have some limits when it comes to truly crazy shits in the league.

Not that it doesn’t love them! It does love them, and it gives them lots of money and makes them team captains (Vontaze was a team captain!). Fans adore them; they’re paying for the big hits. But things are getting so wussy out there, with concussion bs and all, and the teams are under incredible pressure to suspend (Vontaze is ALWAYS being suspended) and even dismiss people like Vontaze.

… and I suspect she did so because of her father’s suicide. It’s a meditation on Handke’s mother’s suicide. I don’t own the book, but Jeffrey Eugenides’ introduction brought the thing back to me:

[This is] … a rigorous demonstration of the failure of language to express the horror of existence. The American postmodernists gave up on traditional storytelling out of an essentially playful, optimistic, revolutionary urge. Handke despairs of narrative out of sheer despair.

… There is something funny about nihilism, and about super-depressing artworks by German members of the Generation of ’68. But this darkness arises directly out of German and Austrian history, a welter of grief and guilt that is only now, half a century after the German genocide, beginning to lift.

Oh good.

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

Lots of good stuff about Tokarczuk here.

It isn’t clear whether Trump considered his request for [Rex] Tillerson to intervene [in a criminal case] to be improper or was just testing the bounds of what he could do as president on an issue that could provide diplomatic benefits while also helping Giuliani, a longtime supporter…

Tillerson has said publicly that the president frequently asked him to do things that were illegal.

“So often, the president would say ‘Here’s what I want to do and here’s how I want to do it,’ and I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President I understand what you want to do but you can’t do it that way,”’ Tillerson said in an on-stage interview with Bob Schieffer in Texas last year. “It violates the law, it violates treaty you know and he just, he got really frustrated when we’d have those conversations.”

UD‘s old friend Peter, long a friend of the Kurds, talks about the situation.

If Turkey does take the battle to the 70,000 men and women who make up the Kurdish forces in northern Syria, it will be a bloody fight, Galbraith said.

“It will not be easy,” he said. “A lot of people are going to die.”

He can also be seen here.

Many good things may come out of our current political mess. This is one of them.

It’s not ol’ Boris calling burqas stuff like this. I found these references here.

Why is it not appalling that the common name for this, the most torturing of all burqas, relies on its resemblance to a shuttlecock, and appalling that Boris noted a resemblance between burqas and letterboxes? Shuttlecock! How dehumanizing.

And it ain’t Boris concluding that “we are seriously fucked up as a society” because we put schoolgirls in “coffins.” It’s ordinary Pakistanis, millions of whom have reacted with horror and resistance to some POS in some province mandating shuttlecocks for schoolgirls. The mandate has suddenly been withdrawn. Wonder why.

We can laugh openly at our Genius of the Carpathians.