To no one’s surprise.

‘Ex-Wife of UC Berkeley Professor Shot in Greece
Arrested on Suspicion of Plotting his Killing

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

If you followed the shooting death of Professor Dan Markel, you will find virtually all of the details of Przemek Jeziorski’s shooting death familiar. Annoyed that the father of her children wanted to father them, his ex-wife (speculating here, but on pretty solid ground) had some criminal connections, probably through her current boyfriend, and she hired them to blow his brains out right there in the street.

Not everyone has this particular skill – walk up to a stranger, shoot him to death – but both the Adelsons and Nadia Michelidaki seem to have known people who knew people with these abilities.

[A]uthorities arrested Michelidaki and accused her of convincing her current partner to kill Jeziorski.

Police also arrested her companion — who has not been identified — and three other men as accomplices.

The three men, two Albanians and a Bulgarian man, were accused of transporting the shooter to the crime scene and giving him the firearm used in the crime.

Another Greek news outlet, iefmerida, reported Michelidaki denied any involvement in the crime when she was arraigned, while her partner and the accused gunman admitted to authorities to shooting Jeziorski, and doing so at Michelidaki’s request.

UD, as readers know, likes to follow certain high-profile murders, and she must admit she’s GOBSMACKED by the stupidity of degenerates who think they can contract kill a person they’re known to hate with a passion… and get away with it! In both cases, the conspiracy included gobs of people (I’m counting at least seven in the Markel case, and this one in Greece looks to have involved at least five), and, you know, the more people in on it, the greater your chance of discovery. But beyond that, doesn’t it occur to these idiots that the sudden grotesque gunning down of a perfectly innocent random human being will confidently lead investigators to the only possible people who wanted him dead?

And look what the killers have achieved. They have produced orphans whose mothers killed their fathers. Mothers who will go to prison for life for their crime. Nicely done.

The Hamptons and Nantucket.

I don’t know what category this is. I just feel compelled to keep you updated on The American Story.

1.) Nantucket. Headline.

Nantucket Man Who Chopped Down Neighbor’s Trees for Ocean View Says He Was Simply ‘Clearing Out Her Crappy Trees’

In preparation for selling his neighboring house, Jonathan Jacoby walked over to Patricia Belford’s place and cut down sixteen trees her family planted fifty years ago. He did this to be able to say in his listing that his house had water views, which allowed him to put a big price on it.

Belford will win her lawsuit against him, but Jacoby doesn’t care. I’m sure he’s done the math. Reparations in this matter will result in a sum far less than what he’ll get for the house; and even if they don’t, he’s astronomically rich, so he doesn’t give a shit about massive outlays.

The important thing, for him, is the opportunity to express earth-core-deep contempt for everyone and for everything.

2.) Hamptons. Headline.

Everyone’s Suing Everyone Out East. Forget golf. The real local pastime is spending millions of dollars to win zoning wars.

The article is a cavalcade of people exactly like Jacoby.

The village government … granted [one owner] permission to clear some phragmites, a type of invasive grass, on the condition that he replace them with native vegetation. Instead, [he] clear-cut much of the land around the house and put in a floating dock and a kayak rack. He built white concrete patios on two sides, enlarging the house’s coverage area by thousands of square feet. He replaced the pool shed with a pergola and outdoor shower... [The same owner decades ago] notoriously demolished four Times Square buildings in the dead of night, to head off a moratorium on tearing down SROs, for which he paid millions in fines...

 [S]ometimes a [local attorney’s] client who wants something that requires a zoning-board approval will ask him, “Why shouldn’t I just do it?” He discourages that path as “very, very, very risky.” You might get away with it, but if you want to sell the place, some East End municipalities have ordinances requiring that you secure a new certificate of occupancy from their buildings department before a deed can be transferred. If an inspection turns up unauthorized alterations, you could find yourself stuck. This is the bind [this owner, who now cannot sell his house,] is in.

But for this person, as for Jacoby, the real point is to leave an empty rotting caught up in litigation house out there in order to convey earth-core-deep contempt for everyone and for everything. Remember that blank look on Bernie Madoff’s face as he explained that he didn’t really know why he stole sixty billion dollars from people? That’s the look on the facades of these houses: I am a monument to motiveless limitless existence-hatred.

Another owner built

 a chicken coop and other animal enclosures without permits. A children’s playhouse popped up near the fruit orchard. And a couple days before Christmas, the neighbors noticed that four alpacas had appeared like fuzzy magi. [They] surreptitiously recorded all these developments in snapshots and video clips… One of the videos showed [the owner’s] children chasing the alpacas around the reserve in an ATV. [One neighbor,] who had paid $4.6 million for a house next to the farm, filed dozens of photos with the town-planning department, scrawled with handwritten notations like “more waste and debris” and “2 years of Porta Potty.” [The owner] complained to the town about the invasion of his privacy, filing affidavits that accused [this neighbor] of harassing his laborers by filming them through her privet hedge. “Why is the manure structure so near my property,” [another neighbor] wrote to the zoning board. “I am very concerned about the odors which most certainly will deny my quiet enjoyment of my home for which I paid millions of dollars.”

This example literalizes the Madoffian I Shit in Your Face, World, and I Don’t Know Why philosophy.

Think, mes petites, how strange it is! Punishment, even with all their money and countersuits, is often immense, yet the death drive, the shit drive, the I’ll destroy you all and I’ll destroy myself drive, is so strong that it doesn’t care.

After breaking rule after rule to get a breakfast nook he wanted, an indignant Carl Icahn sued the town for having the gall to tell him to take it down.

Icahn sued in New York State court, and when he lost, he went on to appeals that have yet to be resolved, all so he could keep his 400-square-foot breakfast nook.

This example highlights the Ubu-infantility at work among the Madoffians. I’m suing! It’s taking many years and I keep losing but again the point as UD has been trying to explain is I’m so rich there’s nothing to be done but to kill everybody.

Maybe we’re all, at our idiest-core, infantile (me play big boy tennis!), vindictive, suicidal, and homicidal, like super-rich King Ubu. What’s special about our country’s Madoffians (the upcoming link is to the NYC residence of one of the Hamptons owners described in this post) is that they get to stage their psychoses.

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

Roger Shattuck on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…

Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

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

Poetic Addenda:

each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it

and pretty soon you get to like those jolts,

you and millions of other dolts who like to be electrocuted

by their own feelings

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

I want to date-rape life

‘Police reports say that at the end of the confrontation, [Kevin] Turner can be heard saying, “I can do whatever I want to do; I’m the mayor!”‘

Butte City Mayor Kevin “Have Gun will Gavel” Turner got pissed at some people during a city council meeting and pulled out his loaded Hi-Point 45 ACP model JHP. He seems to have started banging it loudly on the table (hence the “gavel” part of the name I just gave him) and to have screamed a lot. UD‘s favorite scream, with its keen sense of checks and balances, features in this post’s headline.

Good news is he did not proceed to rip open his camo shirt to reveal a swastika beneath. By Idaho standards, this makes him a moderate.

‘They say that Mr Cory owns / One half of this whole town / With political connections / To spread his wealth around…’

Rep Cory Mills (FL) certainly spreads it around: He lives in a super-luxury DC apartment with spectacular views, his rent an astonishing $20,000 plus a month.

And this is fine, fine: Dems like Schumer can boast they rent a room in a sorry little Capitol Hill townhouse, but mega-rich MAGAs like Mills are under no such populist compulsion. Go for it.

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

But… is he, like his role model, mega-rich?

D.C. Landlord Seeks to Evict Congressman, Alleging $85,000 in Unpaid Rent headlines the Washington Post, which never makes its articles free, but made this one free.

Mills suggested that he was unable to pay rent because of a technical problem with a processing platform.

Cory seems unaware that he could get a check, which he could fill out, and send in the mail… Or, given the amenity-rich building in which he lives rent-free, he could probably just hand his rent to one of the toadies in the lobby.

But UD‘s thinking the problem isn’t technical – a review of Cory’s rather fucked up life suggests he’s low on cash, plus way-distracted by personal and political problems, so that he, amazingly, didn’t notice that yet another part of his existence was going down the tubes.

‘Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis…’

In an opinion piece about whether what Israel’s doing in Gaza constitutes genocide, the writer duly notes Israel’s penchant for calling its enemies Nazis. What he doesn’t mention, but what intrigues UD, is the now routine tendency of Israelis to call other Israelis Nazis.

It’s gotten so bad that multiple efforts have been made to pass laws that would make it a crime to call someone a Nazi.

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

Most of the Nazi name-calling comes from Israel’s adorable primitifs, the ultra-orthodox.

Holocaust imagery has been an especially evocative tactic used by ultra-Orthodox Jews, particularly when they’ve felt their traditional way of life is under attack from Israeli society. Two years ago, ultra-Orthodox protesters wore striped prison uniforms and yellow Stars of David mimicking Jewish concentration camp prisoners.

Yoelish Kraus, who belongs to a fringe religious group that rejects the secular Jewish state, collects protest posters that the Ultra-Orthodox community has used. One, from the early 1980s, features a swastika, in protest of an Israeli archaeological dig of Jewish graves. Another compares a police chief to Hitler for his gruff handling of ultra-Orthodox street protesters.

(It’s much less routine for politicians to accuse other politicians of being Nazis, but it happens enough to worry people.)

With their prodigious fucking, Israel’s ultraorthodox are well on their way to demographic dominance, while the country’s educated are leaving in droves.

The sort of people who think it’s peachy to scream NAZI at the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are gradually taking over.

Found an in-progress nest in my front door wreath.

Had to take it down but GUILT.

‘The Perseid meteor shower occurs annually in August; however, in 2028, the shower is expected to evolve into a storm that will be even more spectacular than the standard, annual event.’

Something to live for.

‘The Gophers have taken some steps already to cut costs or raise money, like restructuring debt, trying to cut down on travel expenses for non-revenue programs, eliminating positions in the athletic department, adding a $100-per-semester athletic fee for students and hosting large non-sports events on campus.’

Ah the Gophers! Gnawing their way, for centuries, through the foundation of the University of Minnesota! Now they’ve got a nearly nine million dollar athletics budget deficit, and what to do? Hm, hm…

How bout we hit the students up for an extra one hundred dollars to pay for coach buyouts, litigation costs after scandals, upkeep on a massive underused stadium, etc etc etc.

Far as I can tell, UM students already pay 300 a year for sports whether they like it or not, so it looks as though UM is charging 400.

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

Did they mention cutting down on travel expenses?

After a storm, pleated ink caps…

… in the Bonhoeffer Garden.

Disassembly of God

 Tommy Fargis [is] the pastor at Deep Creek Baptist Church [NC], which is situated within earshot of [a] gun range’s location.  Fargis conceded that [the range owner’s] seemingly cavalier attitude about his church’s repeated complaints have tested even his own capacity for Christian forgiveness.

“He promised me on two different occasions that ‘we’ll stop shooting on Sunday until after your service,’” Fargis [said]. “That lasted one week. And I don’t take kindly being lied to because as pastor of Deep Creek Baptist Church, I represent Jesus Christ.”

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

“The peace of the Lord

CHOOMCHOOMBLAMCHOOMBLAMPOPOPOPOPOPOP

be with you and also

WHEEEEPOPPOPWHAMBANGBANGBANGBLAMCHOOM

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

Anyhoo the pastor’s client got His own back.

Finally the Jeziorski murder begins to get mainstream coverage.

No one yet seems willing to broach the child custody dispute that was almost certainly behind the killing. But as the story picks up steam, that should start to happen.

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

Wow. Okay; let’s go.

Poland holds its breath and eats strawberry pasta at the same time.

A third double fault from Anisimova on the opening point. Followed by another errant shot. And another. 0-40, three more break points. This is uncomfortable viewing. She just can’t shake the stage fright off. She needs the crowd to help her get into it, but they’re as subdued and shocked as she is. Even more so when Anisimova concedes the break to love. Anisimova has been known in the past for sometimes being fragile mentally on court, but had held her nerve so well in this tournament, especially when seeing off Sabalenka in the semi-finals. But she just can’t get going here.

‘The United States, at just 4% of the world’s population, has 35% of the firearm suicides globally.’

Wow! Talk about cultural dominance!

Richmond Va. doesn’t need any help amassing, aiming, and shooting guns.

Richmond Va. already has a shockingly high gun homicide rate; the good citizens of that city have long since proven their brilliance at getting guns and shooting them at people they want to kill (often turns out to be everyone). Folks from six to sixty are out there bangbangbanging.

UD therefore wonders whether the city needs yet another massive shooting range (these are only the best ten local ranges).

The annual Richmond murder rate has dipped a bit in the last couple of years, so maybe it’s as simple as Richmond not wishing a further drop in the rankings.

“Mississippi is the nation’s worst state in which to live.”

But it’s the best place to die! Especially if you’re a child.

« Previous PageNext Page »

UD REVIEWED

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

Archives

Categories