Historic District, Phoenix.
In the Phoenix historic district…

… a house with everything to love. Including a real rooster on the front steps.

UD couldn’t stop photographing this little paradise.

Francesca Gino switches her specialization from honesty to crisis management.

Every day’s a new… challenge … for the Harvard B School whizkid. She’s already suing the school for 25 mill because some mean people analyzed her work on ethics and uncovered research fraud. Now a different set of mean people have uncovered plagiarism all over her books. Her technique appears to be chiaroscuro — a scattering of pieces from this place and that for an overall intriguing mix of elements which must have caught the eye of the mean people.  “Gino never reached out to me for permission to use my words and my thoughts, something that high school students do on a regular basis when asking if they can use my articles for their school assignments,” said one of her, uh, sources. To which Harvard University says OUCHIE.

Statement from Nicole Beausoleil, about her daughter, at the Crumbley sentencing.

“While you were purchasing a gun for your son and leaving it unlocked, I was helping her finish her college essays. When you knew the gun was missing, you called the police, knowing it was your son that took it. I was having family call every hospital describing what she looked like. While you were hiding [from the police], I was planning her funeral.

The negligent parents of a high school mass shooter get 10 – 15 year sentences.

Mysterious Dr Seussy object in window of…

… Corning Museum of Glass. Taken on UD’s morning walk in that sweet city. Tomorrow she goes to Sedona, AZ.

Limerick.

Subpoenaing Gosar and Biggs

Makes me break into jubilant jigs.

Bizarros of MAGA

Don’t get any more gaga.

Let’s watch them and break out the cigs.

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

(Yes, subpoenaing contains every vowel.)

‘People who wanted a secular, liberal and modern Turkey felt trapped in a cycle of lethargy, as though in a variation of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot – stuck in sameness, repetition, waiting for democracy.’

As opposed to an inward-looking, navel-gazing, ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious, increasingly authoritarian and illiberal Turkey, the dream of a secular, democratic, pluralistic, inclusive and modern Turkey is still very much alive. [The incoming mayor of Istanbul posted:] “As we celebrate our victory, we send a resounding message to the world: the decline of democracy ends now. Istanbul stands as a beacon of hope, a testament to the resilience of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism.” … [In] these elections the proportion of locally elected women has almost tripled… [One new female mayor] was applauded enthusiastically by crowds chanting, “Women, life, freedom”, in an emotional reference to the plight of women in Iran… “The essential doesn’t change,” says one of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play. But sometimes it might. 

Background here.

In Corning, NY…

… for the eclipse.

The ArmaLite doesn’t fall far from…

the tree.

Another magical early morning at the West Wing.

But this one wasn’t about solitary pleasures; my friend and neighbor Tammy came along, and we talked and talked about art. As usual, UD liked all the muted-color paintings (browns, blacks, tans, grays) like ter Brugghen’s Bagpipe Player. The garish reds (robes, blood) of the big Christian canvases do little for your blogueuse.

‘[T]he rate of firearm fatalities among children under 18 increased 87 percent from 2011 to 2021.’

87’s amazing. But let’s go for a hundred! You’re not going to kill scads of our kids as long as the number of guns in private hands here is a mere four hundred million plus. Our under-eighteen cohort will only be shot to death when there’s at least one gun in easy reach everywhere in this country – school, home, church, car, playground, public transportation, airports, campus, boardwalk, amusement park, zoo, corporate office, library… Handguns need to be liberally sprinkled about for teenage suicides, gangbangers, and the criminally insane to get hold of instantly.

I’m not worried about the private home or the high school. Guns are already strewn about with abandon at many of these locations. I’m more worried about places like airports, where they actually search you for guns.

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

True, airports do a poor job of screening for weapons, but technology is improving all the time. The one thing we have going for us is significant increases in gun purchases. More guns, more deaths by guns, and this under eighteen group is arguably our most fertile killing field, because a lot of them are really young and they don’t even realize what’s happening when they find a gun and play with it by killing their sister. It’s simple to think of tons of scenarios like that among toddlers and the like, and all you need is negligent gun-strewing parents, which describes millions of Americans.

This is the face of the fight against fascism in America.

[Photo Michael Noble, Jr. NBC News]

Kristi Balden chairs Enid OK’s Social Justice Committee. It’s prob got like seven members, prob all of them women. (Enid’s only got around 50,000 people.) Not sure where the men of Enid are on the fight against fascism front.

When Balden discovered that a City Council member was as close to a card-carrying Nazi as you can get, she mobilized bigtime and put up with a lot of shit from a lot of townspeople, AND threw the fucker off the Council. Little Hitler (“I JUST CANT FEEL SAFE IF IM NOT PACKING AN AR WITH A 100 ROUND DRUM AND SPORTING MY SWASTIKA ARMBAND.”) just got voted out.

While UD sits on her ass and reads Timothy Snyder on the fight against fascism, Kristi Balden gets up and fights and wins against it. I salute her.

Christian Visibility Day

“If you don’t believe in God, something’s wrong with you… [P]eople don’t really understand that our path was divinely ordered. And the order was for us to be national champions on this day… For all those crushed in defeat by the favor of God having been exclusively directed at my team, I will pray for you to rebuke Satan, to get Satan out of your lives, so that someday you can experience what I am feeling – the glory of having been singled out as one of the elect, and the sincere desire, from my mountaintop, to help infernal losers like you up the path to victory.”

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

Okay, only some of that was Miss Christian Visibility 2024; UD embellished a bit.

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

RETREAT FROM RELIGION

CONTINUES SWIFTLY

_________________________

Gee. Wonder why.

_________________________

AndMr Christian Visibility Day!

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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