All my checks and cash and fees,
To Charlie Weis we bend our knees.
All for coaches! All for coaches!’
Scathing Online Schoolmarm hopes not. Whatever they are pouring over the cache is likely to degrade the value of their evidence against a guy who “[f]or close to 30 years, he has been a community safety officer supervisor at UC Santa Cruz.”
SOS thinks the Santa Cruz police department means pore.
The culture clash in this story about a man who has apparently been stashing an arsenal of guns and ammo in the walls of his mobile home as he prepares for some massive theft is noteworthy. For thirty years Mr Assault Rifle has been hiding out among the peace-loving hippies of UC Santa Cruz. Good cover.
Fadela Amara, “[French] founder of the activist group Ni Putes Ni Soumises, translated as ‘Neither Whores nor Submissive,’ and later … the Secretary of State for Urban Policies,” spoke a couple of days ago about France’s anti-burqa law at the University of Chicago’s International House (UD lived in an apartment directly across the street from I House when she studied there).
Amara knows France’s fundamentalist ghettos well; she has watched them become cults of “forced marriage, polygamy, [female] circumcision, and violence against women.” Outlawing the full burqa (the law had seventy percent support among the French) has had some effect on
[t]he strategy of radical Islamists … to send in veiled women to force unveiled women to wear the burqa. And this is a real battle that has been going on for 15 years in France. And women who do not wear the veil, who were refusing to wear the veil, have been harassed and attacked, either verbally or physically — verbally by insulting them and calling them sluts, because for them these are not women who are respectable…. So we decided to stop all of this. And to act in a way to protect the women who were resisting in these neighborhoods.
Israel – where any woman who boards certain buses or walks on certain streets can be assured of being called a slut and spat on – could learn from the way France is dealing with its fundamentalist bullies.
… life on campus becomes so degrading, that students take desperate measures. UD vividly remembers the American University students who, stuck with a president whose corruption had become a national disgrace, simply drove all day up and down AU’s main drag, honking their horns and calling out to people on the sidewalk to help them get rid of the pest. They emblazoned their cars with signs like PRESIDENT LADNER: WE’LL HELP YOU MOVE.
All of Washington laughed; the tactic worked. Ladner resigned.
Jake Mayfield’s similarly desperate online petition (I just signed it; if this blog’s long chronicle of the mind-wastage of big-time university sports has meant anything to you, you should consider signing it too) is unlikely to work. New Mexico State University (background here) is much too far gone for anyone to make much of a difference. Unlike AU, located in an intellectually ambitious state (well, district), NMSU is located in what UD calls one of our Right-Not-To-Think states. Imagine trying to explain – let alone get support for – an academic university in Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii, New Mexico. Not gonna happen.
Still, there’s nobility in what Mayfield (a recent NMSU grad) is doing; it’s an important gesture, and one worth supporting.
… are enough for public health officials to declare an outbreak there.
A large alumni reunion will take place nonetheless; participants are being cautioned to wash their hands a lot, avoid kissing everyone in sight, etc.
… a new pair of glasses.
La Kid has returned to Dublin
from Malta. She continues her
internship in the literary
department of the Abbey Theatre.
… and it’s been clear for years to UD that she needs – like some highlight/copy/paste Draculetta – regular infusions of the stuff.
After following academic and artistic plagiarism over the course of a decade, UD knows that a new high-profile p-story pops up on average every twelve days. But sometimes – lately – things dry up. No politician has been found to have lifted her dissertation from Wikipedia. No fancy schmancy pundit has been found to have plagiarized his columns. No law professor has been found to have plagiarized his books. No wunderkind has been found to have copied his neuroscience best sellers. Etc.
BIG etc. You can just count on plagiarism.
So maybe it’s spring fever… a certain lassitude among the paste-chasers as the summer begins… But I could swear it’s been at least a month since a really solid case of word theft.
Keep in mind that we’re not counting, here, the high school principal (heartfelt commencement speech) or the man of God (sermons). Although they always bring a sparkle to UD‘s eyes, these cases are too measly to be worth noticing.
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Award-winning poets who have stolen their intensely personal ruminations on suffering and passion – that’s good.
The poetry community is now asking itself just how widespread plagiarism is.
Yes, and that’s because there’s now a second case within just a few months of a poet having transferred his palpitations directly from the palpitations of others.
Many others. As you know if you follow this blog, UD has seen confirmed again and again the reality that almost all plagiarists plagiarize promiscuously and obsessively. Whenever, wherever, whoever. Once people start looking in a particular plagiarist’s direction, they almost always find a solid wall of stolen words.
This is heartening to plagiarism-buffs like UD, since extensive theft extends each story. But eventually the thrill is gone. You can only enjoy the revelation that a particular person is a sneaky unscrupulous creep for so long. You begin to seek fresh blood.
So here is David R. Morgan, whose “Monkey Stops Whistling” is his raw sardonic hard-bitten Dylan Thomasesque lament about the
dark glass we look through darkly when we
want to see the ghosts of our former selves
dear God the booze and how it’s undone me … dear… uh… oh, dear Colin Morton. That’s Colin Morton’s scotch-soaked mulling…
Okay so the rule is: Every tormented poet gets to be an alcoholic. Alcoholism is community property. But every poet has to render his drunken despair in his own words.
Notre Dame’s rector says exactly the right thing in the wake of Dominique Venner, a far-right activist protesting France’s legalization of same-sex marriage, having stuck a gun down his throat and fired in front of schoolchildren visiting the cathedral. It takes a special sort of madman to make a bloody spectacle of himself in a church full of children.
You stay classy, FAU.
If you’re Brown University, it’s champion! DUH! If this isn’t the perfect description of the perfect university trustee, UD doesn’t know what is!
This Business Week writer turns a bit dour toward the end of his article about Brown University’s highest-profile trustee:
Markets are moody. No matter how smart you are you’re going to make mistakes. And that’s why [Steven A.] Cohen looks suspicious. While it’s certainly possible for someone to produce a 30% or better annual return for 18 consecutive years through smarts, it’s not likely.
Cohen has been subpoenaed.
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After five years of being chased like Al Capone, an immunized Cohen might finally be able to stop looking over his shoulder.
Yes, time for him to devote more time to sharing his gravitas with Brown University.
More great PR for professors coming up.
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA LOST MONEY
SELLING BEER TO COLLEGE KIDS
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UD thanks Dave.
… and just post a link before we even really read the thing!
Okay right so we fund research – we here being the federal government, being our taxes – and these three NYU medical researchers give the results to China in exchange for money.
Details here.