LIMERICK

It’s obvious why Ancelloti

Along with the other lads –  thought he

Could simply relax

And cheat on his tax.

The big football leagues are that grotty.

“[W]e have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.”

Too right, David French.

French, a Christian, focused, in this much-read opinion piece, on “an academic superpower in Christian America,” Liberty University (known to readers of this blog as Libertine University), and its fecalicious Falwellian fiefdom. French noted that, no sooner had the school overthrown the Falwell dynasty, than the Education Dept came after the place for lying about campus crimes, not to mention intimidating students who tried to report them.

Liberty mishandled claims of sex abuse and sex harassment on campus and used its strict code of conduct, the Liberty Way, against victims of sex abuse. If, for example, victims had been drinking or engaged in any other conduct prohibited by Liberty policies, those details in their sex abuse complaints could be used against them in school disciplinary proceedings.

Today we got word of the exact amount Libertine’s gonna have to pay to get out from under its sex/crime/omerta obsession: $14 mill. — “by far the largest [fine] ever levied under the Clery Act, a law that requires colleges and universities that receive federal funding to collect data on campus crime and notify students of threats.”

Of course all of it – Judas David French, the satanic federal government – is a plot against the righteous, and the captain of their soul, Donald Trump.

‘The defendants were first tried on charges of tax fraud in 2016, after they claimed that Guy and Alec Sr.’s father, Daniel Wildenstein, left just $50 billion to the pair on his death in 2001; the bereft sons failed to report assets including an enormous wildlife sanctuary in Kenya, racehorses, stables, a New York apartment, dozens of paintings, and a Gulfstream jet. Tipped off by the pair’s widowed stepmother, Sylvia Wildenstein, French investigators determined that Guy and Alec Sr. had secreted assets totaling roughly $675 billion in offshore accounts and in various locations—detailed in the New York Times as including a free port in Switzerland, a nuclear bunker and a disused firehouse, both in New York State, and a vault in Paris—in order to avoid paying taxes.’

Beware the evil stepmother.

Beware.

Prosecutors say the Wildenstein family pulled off “the longest and most sophisticated tax fraud” in the history of modern France in part [due] to their savvy use of storage: artworks were scattered across multiple countries, shell corporations, and innocuous holding facilities such as a nuclear bunker in the Catskill Mountains, a former fire station in New York, and sites in the Bahamas and the Channel Islands.

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

Clever headline!

ART STASH SET FOR AN HEIR RAID

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

NYT

Struggling to say something snide about this.

Not there yet, but will write more when I arrive.

Sadomasochism in Myrtle Beach

Where else? It’s long been one of America’s most twisted locations. Nothing surprising here.

Shooting pledges with air guns, making them eat butter with dirt on it and making them drink bong water led to a Coastal Carolina University fraternity’s five-year suspension … [A] first-year student pledging the fraternity was injured after being shot multiple times with an air gun as part of the group’s initiation process… [He] was shot twice in the head, twice in the stomach and multiple times in the back… [The] student sought medical attention in the following days for headaches and hearing difficulty… Shortly after, he received texts from some of the fraternity members, including one who allegedly told him to “keep the frat’s name out of your mouth,” according to the report. The pledge withdrew from the university on Jan. 9, 2023, for medical reasons.

The Empty Canvas

If you don’t have anything nice to say, Barnard College tells its students, don’t say anything at all.

New policy: NOTHING may be displayed on your dorm door. NOTHING. Onaccounta you might say something that upsets someone. We’re thinking lately of Palestine, but into the future we can think of lots of other shit. Maybe you’re Iranian and you dare express some negative thoughts about the hijab. Maybe you’re antiabortion, and you put the phone number of adoption agencies on your door. Hey, maybe you even oppose American support for the war in Ukraine. Maybe you think women should carry guns.

All of these and more are guaranteed to piss off some of the people who walk by your dorm door – not to mention some of our donors – so shut the fuck up.

Judicial Temperament, Oklahoma

 [Judge Brian Lovell] was arrested for reportedly firing a gun at five cars, then ramming his SUV into the back of a woman’s car twice. [He] then attempted to push the woman’s car into oncoming traffic.

Late at night, cram hundreds of people into a dark shed in the middle of nowhere, and let men with guns roam free.

It’s the sort of scene you associate with SS massacres, but our own West Point Mississippi offers just this scenario every Saturday. Y’all come down.

UD has owls every night because her tall old trees have been left alone for so long.

When she walks her paths, piles of feathers mark battlefields.

Here are two feathers (mourning dove?) she picked up and brought inside yesterday.

A local poet, who lives next to an old forest slated for development, writes about her owls.

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

The owl came because he wants this scrap of woodland, wants the beeches and their hollow hearts, their cavities. He came because so long ago the farmer left his fields alone to grow their latent crop of trees that no one came to cut. The owl wants this wooded hilltop, its ancient oaks that stand among heaped quartz the farmer or his father or his father’s father cleared. The owl wants the hilltop’s crown of hollies, wants the deep-shade roost they’ve made; he wants this open branch that ends a wing-wide tunnel through the hollies’ shelter, wants this place to watch, to rest and cast his pellets, wadded clumps of fur and bone the rain dissolves to show he wanted squirrels, and voles, and frogs, and once a huge black beetle. If you knew a wood would call an owl back, if you knew the owl’s calls would fill the winter wood until another owl answered, wouldn’t you want to leave the land alone to grow its woodland, wouldn’t you want to grant the owls what they wanted?

Headline of the Day

Fox News Guest Decrying “Migrant Crime”

Previously Arrested After Getting Violent

Over a [Too-Cheesy] Grilled Cheese Sandwich

‘The 55-page complaint accused the official, Alade McKen, of copying material in his 2021 dissertation at Iowa State University from more than two dozen other scholars and from Wikipedia, which is written and edited by volunteers from the general public.’

See when it’s this bad, it’s on Iowa State as much as the plagiarist. To pass a dissertation that plagiarizes more than twenty-four other authors!!!! seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution.

No, that’s Bracknell. Make it a contempt for the ordinary decencies of scholarly life. Make it a remarkable incuriosity about a document that must be a pretty fucking weird read. If anyone at Iowa State read it.

When a person who has everything kills himself…

… it’s a frightening reminder of the power of the brain. Our brains, when diseased, can kill us.

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

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

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

Comforter, where, where is your comforting?

Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief

Woe, wórld-sorrow; on an áge-old anvil wince and sing —

Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-

ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief.”‘

    O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.

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

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest:

[I]t was as if a large billowing shape came billowing out of some corner in my mind. I can be no more precise than to say large, dark, shape, and billowing, what came flapping out of some backwater of my psyche I had not the slightest inkling was there. … It was total psychic horror: death, decay, dissolution, cold empty black malevolent lonely voided space. … I simply could not live with how it felt. … I understood the term hell as of that summer day and that night in the sophomore dormitory. I understood what people meant by hell.

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

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. … It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed….

ugh

“It is dismantling white epistemic logic, removing the centering of the oppressor’s historical lens, and lifting the Black perspective voices. To be clear, I am not arguing for an essentialization of African culture and Blackness; Blackness and Black people are complex and multifaceted, but I am interested in the historical narratives that throw away the Eurocentric ways we think about Black people throughout history.” 

It’s not that this has been plagiarized. It’s that it was ever written in the first place. The worst thing about the ongoing march of DEI plagiarism stories is toppling undefended into this prose. Reader, beware.

UD’s father-in-law, Jerzy Soltan, hits the glitz of Architectural Digest, Polish Edition

It’s a (positive) review of a book that just came out about him.

Click English in upper right corner.

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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