‘Ms. Noem, a Republican who is widely seen as a contender to be former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, shared details about shooting the 14-month-old dog, a female wirehaired pointer named Cricket, and an unnamed goat.’

LOL unnamed goat.

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

At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, she tied with Vivek Ramaswamy for first place in a poll of whom attendees wanted to see Mr. Trump select as a running mate.

In what is regarded as a desperate bid to overtake Noem, Ramaswamy was quick to claim a dog named Juno, an unnamed goat, and a local skateboarder.

Gevalt.

The sun provides light, warmth and life for us on Earth, but it’s also a star—a massive ball of thermonuclear and electromagnetic fury—and it would do us all well to never forget that…

Think of [a solar flare] like a bag of mousetraps: one snaps shut and jostles the bag, making others snap over and again, rapidly discharging their stored energy in a single explosive event.

Now imagine each one of these mousetraps is the equivalent of, oh, say a few hundred million thermonuclear bombs, and you will start to get the idea of how the sweatiest sci-fi apocalypse doesn’t even come close to the power of a solar flare…

Coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, are also ridiculously powerful solar phenomena. If solar flares are like tornadoes—local but intense—CMEs are like far larger hurricanes. They don’t emit much visible light, but they blast upwards of a billion tons of hydrogen into space, sometimes at speeds of several thousand kilometers per second.

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

And, you know, the point of the piece is that you really don’t want to be home when a big one comes calling.

‘Yoshihiro Sato, a Japanese bone-health researcher … fabricated data in dozens of trials of drugs or supplements that might prevent bone fracture. He has 113 retracted papers…’

For the most part, the retractions haven’t propagated; work that relied on Sato’s is still up: “His work has had a wide impact: researchers found that 27 of Sato’s retracted RCTs had been cited by 88 systematic reviews and clinical guidelines, some of which had informed Japan’s recommended treatments for osteoporosis.”

Scientific fraud leaves a real mess.

This essay suggests some ways to clean it up.

UD’s GW mail is lit up this morning with news of Pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
  • University Yard was previously reserved and is not available for demonstrations. GW Law final exams are taking place at adjacent buildings.
  • Demonstrators must move with their tents to Anniversary Park at F Street NW between 21st and 22nd streets.
  • GW will prohibit all non-GW individuals from participating in any demonstration on university property.
  • GW does not permit overnight encampments on university property. 
  • Students may demonstrate until 7 p.m. if they abide by the university’s free expression guidelines, the Code of Student Conduct, and other applicable policies. 
  • At 7 p.m., the students will be required to remove tents and disperse.
‘[O]ne out of every five [IDF] soldiers convicted of harming Palestinians or their property since 2010 comes from [ultraorthodox battalion] Netzah Yehuda, making it the unit with the highest conviction rate for such cases.’

Who can be surprised – even if you’ve only read this l’il ol blog – that an all-male concentration of moral primitives issues in so much enemy abuse that our country is about to sanction the group? These fanatics think it’s fine to spit on Christians, and women wearing skirts a quarter inch shorter than godly, and women who forget to sit in the back of the bus etc etc. They riot when slightly perturbed, set cars aflame when slightly more perturbed, and ignore court rulings against them that come from a nation whose existence they deny. They reject science and refuse to vaccinate their children. It’s hilarious that Israel thinks establishing a lord of the flies fighting faction will result in anything other than war crimes.

And oh yes. Right. Religious people are so much more ethical than non-religious.

It pays to know your garden.

And UD knows every inch of hers, especially the system of paths she created through her forest.

Early this morning, gazing out her back windows at the path closest to her house, she saw a largish unmoving object on it. Her binoculars revealed this.

It’s a stock photo. UD wouldn’t know how to photograph an animal at that distance.

Her fox was bigger than this one, and seemed half-awake, calmly watching me as I watched it. I’d never seen a fox this close, and certainly not one comfortable enough to bed down so nearby.

I had all the usual thoughts… It’s beautiful. Is it rabid? Is it wounded? When will it leave? I can’t let the dog out. Will I have to call animal control?

And then I Googled. Turns out this is not an unusual event – foxes are nocturnal and will sometimes bed down close to people in daylight. And I mean – our garden is packed with rabbits and voles, etc. Why wouldn’t you want to be around that?

Zip lining is SO not La Kid.

But Mexico seems to have inspired her.

Confession is Good for the Soul.

 I serve with some real scumbags! Matt Gaetz, he paid minors to have sex with him at drug parties. Bob Good endorsed my opponent, a known neo-Nazi. These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime.

A Texas Republican unburdens himself.

The Chihuahuan, the Mojave, the Sonoran, the Great Basin, and the Medical. 

A whole new desert for Arizona, as California fast-tracks Arizona’s women’s health care providers to practice in that state instead of in the land of no abortions.

‘He is now spending several hours a day being subjected to the contempt that ordinary people hold him in. Judging by his demeanor at the trial—when he’s not asleep, he’s scowling—it’s clear he doesn’t enjoy it.’

No wonder Donald Trump is such an admirer of Kim Jong Un: This would never happen in North Korea.

‘Bernard walked to the gardens quickly, but as soon as he caught sight of Olivier Molinier, he slackened his pace […]. Oliver blushed when he saw Bernard coming up […]. [He] walked away a little abruptly. Bernard was his most intimate friend, so that he took great pains not to show that he liked being with him; sometimes he would even pretend not to see him […]. Bernard… himself affected not to be looking for Olivier […].’

This passage, from André Gide’s novel, The Countefeiters, struck me when I encountered it as a Northwestern undergrad, and has stayed with me all these years. Of course I recognized this comical, poignant form of dissembling from real life, but I suspect this passage, on the fourth page of the book, was my first encounter with a lucid prose description of it. The ways we defend against the exposure of our strongest and most authentic passions intrigued and intrigue me; forms of emotional self-defense intrigued and intrigue me.

And why do we defend? Because precisely the places we feel the most are the places we can be hurt the most.

And also – see Adam Phillips – it disturbs us to think of ourselves as capable of volcanic affect; most of us cultivate what Stephen Dedalus called “the refrigerating apparatus,” and Isaac Rosenfeld “formo-frigidism.” We be cool.

We are too much for ourselves – in our hungers and our desires, in our griefs and our commitments, in our loves and our hates – because we are unable to include so much of what we feel in the picture we have of ourselves. The whole idea of ourselves as excessive exposes how determined we are to have the wrong picture of what we are like, of how fanatically ignorant we are about ourselves.

Window Seat on a Turbulent Flight

Dry. Flat. Clouds puddling the flat.

Are you the Great Plains? Somewhere east of Phoenix.

Calm but turbulent, manifesting what you hide

Behind nonchalant air. The tremble is

Always there.

La Kid poses above a stump in a park in…

… Mexico City. She went to a speakeasy last night.

‘If you’re going to push baseless allegations of liberal election fraud as Turning Point and its affiliates have, it’s best that your own operation isn’t being led by someone facing a lawsuit for election fraud.’ 

Mr Smith goes to… Oh, who cares.

Post-Coital…

Trumptesse

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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