… but the Latin for “The person who plants, preserves” – which is the Roosevelt family motto – appears above the door of the building leading to Pope Farm Nursery, which supplies plantings for parks around UD‘s Montgomery County. UD and her sister visited Pope today – an insanely beautiful clear-full-blue sky day – and gazed at rows of green shoots in little green buckets.

Thank goodness he only implied it. Wouldn’t want to rush to judgment.

It’s only funny if you lack a thick description of Lake Charles, LA. If you lack boots on the ground knowledge of one of America’s most godforsaken, violent, hopeless locations, what McNeese University just did will look “absurd,” “ridiculous,” and all the other nasty adjectives everyone’s throwing at the place today.

What that school (23% four year graduation rate) did was hire a basketball coach so utterly filthy (recruiting violations and the like up the wazoo) that the school knows he’ll be hauled in front of the NCAA for all his prior bad shit.

‘Course McNeese U., as part of the Greater Lake Charles We Don’t Give a Shit, Motherfuckers region, could give a rat’s ass about what a bad boy good ol’ boy Will Wade’s been; but it does know the NCAA’s after him, so the school needs to do something, uh, preemptive.

So in a maneuver Jean Arp would approve, the school suspended Wade pretty much same time it hired him. Welcome! You’re suspended for five games! See, NCAA? We’re punishing him before you even finish investigating him! We’re not bad boys down here. We’re good boys!

What’s that you say? Wade’s preparing a lawsuit against the school, demanding ten million dollars in damages for humiliation and mental anguish? No prob cuz we’re so rich.

Everyone’s been looking for Larry for two years, and all this time he’s been hiding in plain sight among his fellow undergraduate fellows in the James Madison Program at Princeton University.

Woke locales at Princeton might produce some obnoxious disrupters of campus speeches given by conservatives; the Madison Program houses a violent seditionist, someone the FBI has been tracking down for two years!

Now that he’s been captured and is preparing for trial, it will be interesting to know whether the dude is more broadly violent. Like was his ecstasy at being part of a mob injuring police officers confined to just that one event, or has he found other outlets?

We might never know. But the lad is articulate, and has a lot to say. Let’s look forward to his Patrick Henry moments in front of the judge.

FIFA’s [scroll down] acceptance of Saudi sponsorship will mean VISIT SAUDI signs all over stadia where women are playing.

Since no self-respecting woman would go anywhere near that stinking desert, plastering unignorable ads enticing us to journey to the land of mandatory thick black abayas and enforced infantilizing sex segregation is a little rich, ain’t it? Let’s see what World Cup players have to say about it.

FIFA should be “‘deeply ashamed” even to consider such a thing, says one player who clearly doesn’t know much about this shameless organization. “Totally inappropriate,” says another. “Bizarre,” says yet another.

It begins to look as though FIFA might back out of this brilliant idea; but the filthy pigs who run the thing are so far probably just trying to figure out why anyone would object to it. Maybe VISIT TEHRAN, LADIES! signs would be better…?

And lo the prophecy (Daniel 11:5) has come to pass:

“Then the King of Fox will grow weak, along with many of his princes; and Dominion will gain ascendancy over him and obtain dominion; his domain will belong to Dominion indeed.”

For verily as the massively expensive Dominion lawsuit allows for the public release of internal Fox emails, the network faces not only billions in damages but also the exposure of its true feelings about its – in the words of one of its producers – cousin-fucking demographic.

Yet cuz-shtupping (to give it its formal name) is a perfectly legal activity in much of the United States, especially if you’re infertile and/or real old. Even if you’re not those things, there are more than twenty states in which you can on the up and up tie the tribal knot. So the Fox producer who characterized his viewers as cousin fuckers may have thought he was being mean, but he was actually just being ignorant.

A New Yorker article about a literary/academic fraud named Hache Carrillo, who was a colleague of UD‘s (she sat on the tenure committee that wisely turned him down, unlike the unwise GW history department that tenured his fellow fraud Jessica Krug, and as a result spent years very publicly paddling up shit’s creek), has appeared.

You’re probably not interested in the patented New Yorker long-form details of this pretty trivial cultural figure, but the article does feature a neat and sweet summary of the many literary frauds (venture even slightly out of just this one fraud category, and you’ll end up with an article too long even for the long-form New Yorker) who’ve tried to put one over on us in the last decade or so.

Go ahead and think of all the successful, high-functioning frauds who must as we speak be running around our literary landscape befrauding everyone cuz they haven’t been (won’t be?) caught.

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I guess administrators like the one in my title are worth thinking about. Before we condemn this anonymous person, let’s stipulate that a lot depends on the letter this person received. Was the letter writer a credible source? Oh yes. Is it likely that the letter was a naked example of envy, paranoia, nuttiness? Very, very unlikely. Does an administrator routinely get letters warning that a faculty member is a fraud? No. Does that mean you dismiss it as just a weird thing and throw it away? No.

Maybe you worry that anything you do could trigger litigation from Carrillo if he gets wind of it and so you toss it.

Okay, but let’s say you should do something. Fraud being as popular as it is, you should indeed do something. What do you do?

UD suggests that you pass it along to the dept chair/head of creative writing basically without comment. Maybe you scrawl a couple of question marks atop the letter by way of saying huh I dunno you deal with it. Hell, maybe that’s what was done, and the person we need to talk to about doing nothing is/was inside the English department.

But anyway we fired the dude, and he died a few years ago, so none of it amounts to much beyond another lesson universities should learn (most won’t) about the not inconsiderable number of people out there laying siege to their schools through fraud. Schools spend a lot of time worrying about larcenists and sexual predators, as well they should; but frauds do really really serious harm, and the fact that GW had two in succession – and tenured one! – is an institutional embarrassment.

‘As Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation battles to contain the Dominion lawsuit scandal that has engulfed its top executives and stars, another crisis is building in the wings that has the potential to cause further turbulence for the media empire.‘

Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit, targeting wiggidy wiggidy wacked New York University trustee Maria Bartiromo, is asking for twice Dominion’s damages: $2.7 billlllllion.

But you see the problem with the sentence in my headline, which comes from the Guardian. Tossing too much figurative language into your writing – aka mixed metaphors – is far from the worst style mistake; but it can fog up a reader’s understanding with a stew of confusing images. (See? A stew that fogs…?)

In this example, we move from the realm of battle to that of flooding, then take a theatrical turn (wings), and end up in a shaky aircraft cabin.

‘Flyers who forgot they had a gun in a carry-on previously received only the prospect of a civil penalty from the federal Transportation Security Administration, according to an airport statement. Now they’ll be criminally cited, too.‘

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Good lord! I had a loaded gun in my carry-on baggage as I boarded an airplane? Are you FUCKING KIDDING????

Wyoming Watches As Colorado Is On Verge

Of Passing Sweeping Gun Control Legislation

… “None of them (the gun control bills) are good,” [warned Jeremy Haroldson, R-Wheatland.] “But the worst is one placing liability on manufacturers for third-party crimes, which, in my opinion, is absolutely reckless.”

… Haroldson said Wyomingites should keep a cautious eye on what’s happening in Colorado. 

“My issue is, how can a state like Colorado, which even 15 years ago had a conservative logic toward gun regulation, get to the place where it is now?” he said.

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Theories as to how Wyoming’s neighboring cowboy-y state has gotten to the place where it is now abound; most popular, in Yee-Haw Country, involves a triumvirate of Jews, headed by anti-gun-fanatic Michael Bloomberg (the other two are George Soros and Hillary Clinton, who claims not to be Jewish). Colorado represents Stage One of their multi-state conspiracy to sap America’s vital fluids by weakening gun laws to such an extent that we lose our will to protect our freedoms, clearing the way for the Norwegian Socialist Forces.

Photo: Valeria Mongelli/AFP via Getty Images

[T]housands of Georgians took to the streets of the country’s capital Tbilisi for two days of protests, waving EU flags and facing down riot police armed with water cannons and tear gas. The contentious [now withdrawn] legislation would have required all organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents. The Georgian law was widely viewed as inspired by Vladimir Putin…

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SING IT.

Georgia, Georgia
The whole day through
As you march toward
Your place in the EU

I said Georgia
Georgia, what joy I find
Freedom’s old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind

Other arms reach out to you
Other eyes lie viciously
Still in peaceful crowds I see
The road leads back to you

Jenna Ellis, election denier, 2020.

Poor Jesus. Screwed again.

It’s a 2017 announcement, from the Pharmacists Society of the State of New York, of that year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner, Laurence Doud.

The criteria for this award is very selective and discerning. The award is intended to distinguish those who have the continued passion and dedication to pharmacy throughout the years… Doud has been one of the most influential and deeply committed executives to independent pharmacy.

Move on to this Albany College of Pharmacy honorary degree citation:

After decades of consolidation, most industry observers in the 1980’s believed that independent pharmacy would not survive. Larry Doud was not one of those people. Since he joined Rochester Drug Cooperative (RDC) in 1987, RDC has become one of the nation’s largest drug wholesalers, serving community pharmacies and home health care dealers (and by extension, patients) in eight states. During that time, RDC has helped launch and maintain more than 400 independent pharmacies – including the College’s own student operated pharmacies. Since the early 2000’s, the number of independent pharmacies has remained relatively stable, in part due to the efforts of people like Larry who understand that independent pharmacists remain an important part of the nation’s health care system.

As Larry’s carted off to jail for having flooded the Northeast corridor with opiates, let us pause on that independent and ask why Larry was so eager to foster his own independent chain of pharmacies unhampered by any large corporate controls… Let us also ask why Larry’s awards/honors/praise remain intact today on the websites of pharma organizations and schools. Just what are they trying to say?

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Prosecutors asked for “15 years in prison, saying that he should be held accountable for the ‘shattering impact’ his actions had on people to whom he had unlawfully funneled opioids.” He got two and a half.