
Okay, so it’s not Mr UD. But it’s a river in Munich. The Eisbach. Details here. Mr UD returns tomorrow from co-directing the Summer School in Civic Studies in Germany. He took this picture.
Okay, so it’s not Mr UD. But it’s a river in Munich. The Eisbach. Details here. Mr UD returns tomorrow from co-directing the Summer School in Civic Studies in Germany. He took this picture.
… but you’re not focusing on what really excites me. Not so much How soon can we legally fuck them? But How soon can we cut off their clits?
Too bad, by the way, the burqa is legal here. I’d love for my legal career to go out in a blaze of glory (I’m eighty!) by defending parents who have not only genitally eviscerated their eight year old daughters but forced them to wear face and body shrouds!
What else can we do to little girls? Down, wanton, down!
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By the way — Elie Honig thinks just because he’s handsome and decades younger and all over tv he can write HAVE YOU LOST YOUR DAMN MIND? to me and I’ll just sit there and take it. That’s what he thinks.
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Oh, and I also have a boner to pick with Joe Patrice at Above the Law:
The problem [with Dershowitz] isn’t a warped view of how the law should treat girls, but a warped view of the law and women writ large.
Listen. I’ll put my perfect, perfect sex life up against his any day.
‘The big question is how does @Harvard Law still honor @AlanDersh by retaining him on its faculty list (esp as “Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law emeritus”). Imagine that distinguished jurist spinning in his grave !?’
Well, the hit piece is out, and though my threats seem to have watered it down a bit (no reference to my penchant for nude beaches), it’s still plenty nasty, painting me as a legal whore/publicity hound/status obsessive who might be guilty of sex trafficking.
Dershowitz, according to longtime friends, has an enduring fascination with fame, society, and wealth. Charles Fried, a distinguished jurist who taught with Dershowitz at Harvard Law School, told me, “If you get a chance to go to fancy places with lots of rich people and fly around on private planes – I think he probably finds that hard to resist.”
That makes me sound superficial. Do you know what Jeffrey Epstein read in prison?
While he was in jail, a friend asked what he was reading. ‘De Profundis,’ he replied, referring to the letter Oscar Wilde wrote from prison to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas.
From the depths! From the depths! I’m attracted to wealth, sure; but my wealthy friends are deep.
Okay. So this from Lawrence Tribe.
“He revels in taking positions that ultimately are not just controversial but pretty close to indefensible.”
What? Like female genital mutilation? Someone has to defend the cutters – if we let the feds come after infant clits, the next thing you know they’ll be coming after infant foreskins.
Nancy Gertner:
“He has squandered his position as a Harvard law professor and a civil libertarian – for the sole purpose of being on TV.”
See the Fried comment above. I’m certainly not squandering it solely to be on tv. There’s money and status at stake.
(For Part One, go here.)
Tradition! Tradition! Circumcision, female genital mutilation, nude beaches – these are just a few traditions worth keeping. I’ve written and/or litigated on behalf of the first two, while I’ve long lounged naked at the local beach. Why not? Why is the New Yorker so prudish as to mention my nude beach-going in its forthcoming hit piece on me? As I write in an open letter to that publication:
You could interview others who have been on the Martha’s Vineyard nude beach with my wife and me and find out that it has a tradition of occasional skinny dipping by people of all shapes and sizes, including judges, doctors, professors and political activists.
I only ever go with my wife, and I can certify that all the nudists are high achievers with bad bodies. Only the best people; only the worst naughty bits…
What I mean to say is, here’s one thing you’ll never see on a Martha’s Vineyard nude beach: a nubile fifteen-year-old girl. Never!
At the very bottom of yesterday’s filing of a protective order, Team Epstein’s Martin Weinberg signs his name like a second grader (see page ten). This isn’t Martin G. Weinberg, mature self-mythologized counselor, Mr Superlitigator who looks down at you with Olympian pity; this is
MAWNEBERG, boy in short pants still sweating over his cursive M.
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But of course that probably ain’t his signature. In the status-crazed world of the courts, you need to signal that you’re far too busy – and far too contemptuous of the other side – and far too supplied with assistants – to take time out for something as pedestrian as a signature. This kiddie-scrawl is the work of some squirrely little summer intern.
UD cannot read this NYT article without laughing. When she gets to the middle of it —
Mr. Kelty’s solution, a modification of methods used in some earlier studies, involved a 100-centimeter-long ladder (a little over three feet) and bags of weighted pellets gently taped to the rats’ rear ends. The animals received a Froot Loop when they reached the top of the ladder and soon started climbing willingly, even without rewards. After several weeks, the climbers showed increased muscle mass, indicating that the activity was effective weight training.
— she’s practically peeing herself.
When [my story on Epstein] came out, [Harvard Law School professor and former Epstein attorney] Alan Dershowitz wrote an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee, trying to discredit my work and influence the board [not to award the Miami Herald a prize]. He must have said a million times, “I know that you’re not going to tell the truth because you’re just aiming for a Pulitzer.”
But Harvard’s finest is after bigger fish now. He’s smearing the New Yorker as an antisemitic rag.
He’s a climate change expert at the University of Minnesota, still happily and expensively tenured although (says here) he’s an alcoholic with “mental health issues,” a convicted woman batterer, and an alleged thief of significant university funds.
We’ve seen, over the life of this blog, quite a number of walking advertisements for the abolition of tenure, but none of this guy’s predecessors shows anywhere near the same passionate commitment to depravity-while-maintaining-a-permanent-taxpayer-paid-$100,000-a-year job.
If you read the narrative sketch of his theft-spree, you detect that his problem is sexual climate change, as in he’s always battering/humping/dumping the women in his life as they, I guess, fail eventually to excite him, and replacing them with others with whom he goes through the same cycle. While things are hot, he spends university funds on vacations and presents for them; when cooling commences, he dumps.
This pattern turns out to generate a lot of people eager to bust the guy. They point out that where on his expenses report he writes “PR consultation” or “consultant expense,” he really means fucking to beat the band in Bali; and where he writes “testing equipment” he means Star Wars Battlefront for his kid.
Quite a specimen. And a named chair at the University of Minnesota forever.
Ringside fun for everyone, just a few miles from UD‘s house!
******
They’re dropping like flies! Get to a ring while they’re hot. I mean cold.
The dam might have held, I suggest, had Trump not been elected president — but his win after more than a dozen women’s sexual-abuse allegations and his own confession on the Entertainment Tonight outtake, provoked a wave of anger and solidarity among abused women… Trump’s election turned out to be the catalyst for women speaking publicly about other men, starting with the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history the day after his inauguration. In the Epstein case, the legal system could no longer bear the weight of all the public shame. Unlike his old friend, the Abuser-in-Chief can dismiss women’s allegations, and fear no investigation, thanks to the power of the office. That won’t last forever. The clock ticks on the dirty old man.
So do me a favor and read this first. Everything Frank Rich says there about Ma Ingalls’ rancid hypocrisy in her NYT anti-materialism screed goes quadruple now that Harvard’s been exposed as Mr. Epstein’s main squeeze. Harvard has spent decades sucking up so much money – dirty and semi-dirty and semi-clean and clean – that its endowment alone is $40 billion (Harvard’s wealth goes significantly beyond its endowment, kiddies). It sucks it up and it doesn’t spit it out (see this notorious cartoon); it hoards it. One assumes the goal (why? why is this the goal?) is a $100 billion endowment. Harvard, everyone jokes, is a “hedge fund with a university attached to it”; this non-profit paid each of its fund managers $35 million dollars a year until a few people squawked and it ended up on the front page of the NYT...
Why should Harvard – the world’s most powerful reputation-launderer – give a penny of that shit back? Why should they do anything with what they’re sitting on, you son of a bitch? It’s their money and fuck you.
The federal government has sued a Tennessee state legislator and a bunch of doctors and executives for fraud — specifically, for mandating urine tests for everyone who ever walked into their, yeah, pain management clinics, and then just storing what they dubbed ‘liquid gold’ somewhere and rarely bothering with it.
One whistleblower … said [company] executives once took him on a tour of the lab, during which [the whistleblower] commented on the “overpowering and unpleasant smell of urine.”
“To me, it smells like money,” an executive responded…
[His cadre of intellectuals] could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance atelier.
Frank Rich, who years and years ago condemned Epstein pal Larry Summers for his hedge fund activities while Harvard’s president, compiles a long list.
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On which, of course, the moral conscience of a nation and the late lamented president of the rapeabilliest and most Baptist campus in the country, appears.
… Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”
It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo.
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