Francoise Hardy, whose song “Le Temps de L’Amour,” was so much part of the texture of Wes Anderson’s…

Moonrise Kingdom, has died.

“Look at me, look at me. I’m German, from Germany. My heritage is German. You come after me. I’m gonna give it back to you. And there will be a way, it doesn’t have to be now, but there will be a way they will know. Don’t worry about it,” she said.

TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME.

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

“Mrs. Alito’s comments do not sound better in the original German.”

At the Venerable Garrett Park Musicale…

… the venerable Dave Almy sings a John Prine song with his grandson.

Inspirational.

[Massachusetts psychiatrist Gustavo] Kinrys billed insurers 382 days of more than 24 hours worth of psychotherapy services in a single day, including one day in July 2017 when he claimed he had provided hour-long psychotherapy sessions to 70 different patients, all while outside the United States on vacation. 

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

Does he still teach at Harvard?

Nice writing.

Resentment of elites is a powerful motive in democratic politics, and so is the feeling … that the economy was better under Trump. But that disregards the moral and psychological cesspool himself: a bully, a liar, a bigot, a sexual assaulter, a cheat; crude, cruel, disloyal, vengeful, dictatorial, and so selfish that he tried to shatter American democracy rather than accept defeat. His supporters have to ignore all of this, explain it away, or revel in displays of character that few of them would tolerate for a minute in their own children. Now they are trying to put him back in power. Beyond the reach of reason and even empathy, nearly half of my fellow citizens are unfathomable, including a few I personally like. The mystery of the good Trump voter troubled me.

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

The essay is a sincere effort to understand Trump voters/enthusiasts.

The tragedy [of Kurtis Bay’s wife’s death in the hospital] fed his skepticism toward what he called the “managerial class”—the power elite in government bureaucracy, business, finance, and the media. The managerial class was necessary—the country couldn’t function without it—but it accumulated power by sowing conflict and chaos. Like the hospital’s doctors, members of the class weren’t individually vicious. “Yes, they are corrupt, but they’re more like AI,” Bay said. “It’s morphing all by itself. It’s incestuous—it breeds and breeds and breeds.” As for politicians, “I don’t think either political party gives a shit about the people”—a dictum I heard as often as the one about whiskey and water.

Bay saw Trump as the only president who tried to disrupt the managerial class and empower ordinary citizens. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. would do it too, but voting for him would be throwing his vote away. If Trump loses this year, the managerial class will acquire more power and get into more wars, make the border more porous, hurt the economy by installing DEI algorithms in more corporations. “I’ll vote for Trump,” Bay said, “but that’s, like, the last thing I think about in terms of how I’m going to impact my neighbor, my friend, my society.” Everyone wanted clean air, clean water, opportunity for all to make money and raise a family. If the extremes would stop demonizing each other and fighting over trivia, then the country could come together and solve its immense problems—poverty, homelessness …

I listened, half-agreeing about the managerial class, still wondering how a man who dearly loved his multiracial family and cared about young people on the margins and called his late wife “the face of God on this Earth” could embrace Trump. So I asked. Bay replied that good people had done bad things on January 6 but not at Trump’s bidding, and he might have gone himself if the timing had been different; that he didn’t look to the president for moral guidance in raising children or running a business; that he’d easily take “grab her by the whatever” from a president who would end the border problem and stop funding wars.

 “Clarity is quite beautiful. It is quite useful. The control of one’s faculties is nothing but beautiful. My biggest feeling about addiction is it is a rather sickening sense of wasted time.”

Frank Miller.

‘[P]olice faced roadblock after roadblock while looking for a place to keep the juvenile in custody.’

Not literal roadblocks. Legal. It’s New Mexico, America’s most dangerous state, where gun toting eleven year olds sack and pillage Albuquerque without consequence onaccounta they’re babies.

‘“Fortunately the governor, District Attorney’s Office and CYFD stepped in and helped us,” the police chief said.’ Yep, you just line up the gov, the DA, and the children youth and families thingie and you’re good to go.

Charges:

  • Aggravated assault with a deadly weapon
  • Conspiracy
  • Shooting at or from a motor vehicle
  • Shooting into an occupied dwelling
  • Aggravated Battery
  • Unlawful possession of a weapon by a minor
  • Non-residential burglary
  • Criminal damage to property over $1,000
  • Conspiracy to commit a fourth-degree felony
Howard University does the right thing, quickly.

This blog has for years followed universities dragging their feet about revoking honorary degrees awarded to people who turned out to be so dishonorable you could plotz. But having watched the Sean Combs tape we all watched, Howard gathered its trustees and right away not only revoked the degree; they returned his million dollar donation, and they shut down a scholarship program with his name on it. For good measure they issued a public statement… Something to the effect that men who routinely beat the shit out of women don’t get Howard honors.

Teeth, Wren: UD’s garden, early June.

Jawbone of a deer? Ever-present anti-mosquito spray. Pointless attractive teapot.

Gray watering can contains wren sitting on her eggs.

Blue!

The latest excavated room in Pompeii is some kind of wonderful.

I, UD, present…

IUD.

The only remaining question is why we ever let this happen.

DEI is DOA; but why was this brain-eating beast allowed to stalk our land in the first place?

 MIT announced a similar decision last month, saying it would stop requiring diversity statements for positions across the university.

… [Harvard] Psychology professor Steven A. Pinker, a co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, slammed diversity statements in a December 2023 Boston Globe op-ed, arguing that they “purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar.”

As usual, Pinker emerges a hero. But I tell you. The shit that guy has to put up with to defend free speech…

The only thing missing was the gun massacre.

UD‘s hopeless, hapless, Montgomery County could do nothing the other night as one of Potomac’s vast empty mcmansions hosted a pay as you go ‘Wet Dreams’ party for over a thousand. “Where are the whores?” nearby home owners report guests shouting on entry. “I think it was a sex party,” said the neighborhood’s state delegate.

Capitalism being what it is, an owner is free to furnish her house, leave, and rent the thing out as a big ol’ brothel (or is the brothel thing legal?); and there’s nothing like Potomac, full of massive empty or semi-empty mcmansions, for this purpose.

[One] couple called county police, but were not satisfied with the response. They said the one officer who responded was helpful and listened to their concerns, but said he wasn’t able to do much.

“The police should’ve shut this thing down,” [the neighbor] said. “We’re really darn lucky an incident didn’t happen.”

Huh yeah an incident and you better believe the Moco police did nothing about it out of sheer terror. Airbnb mass shootings and the like happen a lot; there’s a HUGE number of guns at these parties. Only an idiot would walk in on five hundred heavily armed post-coital drunks and druggies lolling about a pool.

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

UPDATE: Gets prettier and prettier. “Multiple neighbors told FOX 5, the owner of the home told them there would be a party on May 25. It wouldn’t be the only one. In order to offset “inordinate” personal legal costs, the homeowner said she planned to host both large-scale events and family gatherings.”

The idiot is now looking forward to much more serious legal costs.

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

UPDATE: Are we surprised it’s becoming a bigger story? Let’s see: Sex, wealth, Potomac, drugs, drink, a rancid owner, sordid Airbnb (one point subtracted, however, for no gunplay)… UD might have glombed onto “Wet Dreams” early, cuz this is close to where she lives, and she spent years visiting her aunt and uncle in their own vast lifeless Potomac mcmansion, but it was always going to break free from obscurity because of its unbeatable plot elements. And wait until some of the partiers begin to talk!

The new heroine of the pronatalist movement in the US and around the world is Lauren Bobert…

… whose masturbation of her partner in a public theater is the kind of civic activity we need to see more of if we are going to avoid the coming demographic disaster.

Bobert has inspired the movement’s new slogan – IT’S THE HANDJOBBERY, STUPID! – which has begun appearing on t shirts and bumper stickers as the pronatalists seek to draw Americans’ attention to quick and easy steps toward insemination.

Wow, New Mexico.

Fourth in the nation for non-suicide death by gun. Fourth in the nation for suicide by gun.

No wonder the Gov... etc etc etc…

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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