Credit: Michael Frese.
The brazen, inexhaustible nature and variety of his mendacity is something to see. When you read what he does and says, having been caught making up numbers for Temple University’s business school in order to score a US News number one ranking, you have to admire the sheer endurance/agility/creativity of his lying.
When caught by Temple administrators, he simply says Give me more time. I can fix it back. Now in a court of law, he has blamed all of his assistants, who turn out to be vicious prevaricating scum, for the wrongdoing.
For sure, his next move will be to announce to the court that he is profoundly mentally and physically ill, cannot be held responsible for anything he’s ever done, and needs to go home and lie down.
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Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about? . . . People [hiding] even when no one is looking for them?
Jack Gladney, the hero of Don DeLillo’s great novel, White Noise, asks himself this as he searches out a university colleague who always makes it extremely difficult to find her. The novel is full of characters “avoiding situations,” as one of them puts it.
“I’m here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people. There are parts of my body I no longer encourage women to handle freely.”
People in Gladney’s town, Blacksmith, drape themselves in oversized sweatsuits and create state of the art all-inclusive houses so they rarely have to go out. Their massive cars have darkly tinted windows. There’s a shared undifferentiated paranoia which drives people in on themselves. Some of his neighbors belong to tiny hidden cults.
In other words, the hijab and burqa were just waiting for us. Hiding’s what you do when it’s like this out there. UD‘s surprised it took this long for an entrepreneur to see the possibilities.
And…. YES. A perennial favorite of this blog, Rep. Louis Gohmert (Texas), appears on the ultra-exclusive list of GOP reps said to have taken important roles in organizing January 6.
As UD scanned this article, the mantra Make it Gohmert echoed in her mind; and, bingo. She is delighted beyond description at the prospect of his big ol’ lawsuit on this matter (lawsuit-filing-wise, Louie’s model is of course DJT), plus the spilling of the details of his involvement in the historic event.
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Largest context, of course:
This remains perhaps the most important part of the whole investigation: the period of hours in which Trump gleefully watched his supporters try to hunt down the members of Congress and indeed Trump’s Vice President and refused efforts to calm the situation or order federal troops to stop the assault on the Capitol.
In this 2010 photograph, entrepreneur Shawn Baldwin, 2015 recipient of the Boy Scouts of America Whitney M. Young Jr. Service Award, stands next to Michael Milken. Milken was sentenced to ten years and fined 600 mill for violating securities laws, while Baldwin was just sentenced to seventeen years for doing a Bernie Madoff.
UD thinks it’s always nice to get a sense of the real people behind these posed, expensive suit, MBA-type photos…. I mean, who are these people, really? Once you get to know them, they’re just like you and me!
Yeah I know but if you read it alongside this article, a mere babe at twenty-four minutes old, it spices up somewhat the dully predictable guilty sentence that America’s own Jay Gatsby – John Wilson, Harvard MBA – just received for bribing people and lying through his teeth to get not one, not two, but THREE of his rich, dim, klutzy spawn into fancy universities. Because Wilson himself is no stranger to … uh…
Says he played football at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. No record of it.
‘[S]ales quadrupled during Wilson’s tenure [at Staples, but] did not come close to the “10X” growth he touts. Over the same period, net income increased by 481 percent, according to the securities filing, not 800 percent.’
‘Wilson claims in his online resume that his success at Staples led him to be “selected by CFO magazine in 1994 as one of the Top 50 CFOs in the United States.” The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Vincent Ryan, was unable to find any record of Wilson’s recognition in the publication’s archive.’
Getting tired of quoting. There’s more.
She tried and tried, but no woman can resist you, you brute.
Late night weighs in on the forthcoming Mike Pence memoir.
“I’m sure there will be a lot of talk about religion, his hopes and dreams, and then maybe a chapter about how his boss tried to murder him.”
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I’m thinking he’s going to have a hard time competing with Hunter Biden.
Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) excoriated an oil company’s executive during a congressional hearing Tuesday after he suggested she did not understand a tax break under discussion. Speaking to Mark Murphy, president of Strata Production company, the chair of House Natural Resources Oversight Committee said, “How much of those intangible drilling costs do you get to deduct right away from your taxes?” Murphy responded, “We get to deduct all of those just like any other business. There seems to be a misconception out there that you’re operating from that somehow the oil and gas industry benefits from some special sort of tax structure. We don’t.”
To which Porter replied, “You do benefit from special rules. There’s a special tax rule for intangible drilling costs that does not apply to other kinds of expenses that businesses have. You get to deduct 70 percent of your costs immediately, and other businesses have to amortize their expenses over their entire profit stream, so please don’t patronize me by telling me that the oil and gas industry doesn’t have any special tax provisions. Because if you would like that to be the rule, I would be happy to have Congress deliver.”
There’s an irresistible fin de siècle sexiness to Washington County, Pennsylvania, whose Republican party has notoriously announced (everyone’s quoting it) that when it comes to morality, on s’en fout, babe.
We [do not send our representatives to Washington] to vote [their] conscience, we [do] not send [them] there to do the right thing…
Here’s Wash. Co.’s Republican chair, telling us bourgeois prudes to fuck off with the conscience and do the right thing shit. Life is a cabaret, you fools!
But it still will, of course.
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And then there’s the federal government:
“McKinsey’s abhorrent conduct also demands that Congress consider broader action. McKinsey earns billions of dollars from contracts with the federal government. No firm that proposes paying kickbacks for overdose deaths should receive a single cent from U.S. taxpayers.”
Massively fatal drug distribution, to alter the quotation slightly, been berry, berry good to John Hammergren, whose rancid immorality has been cleaned up nice and good by outfits like CSIS, which allowed him to buy his way onto its board of trustees.
Every now and then an article appears that brings back the beautiful Hammergren way of life, in which you direct floods of killing substances into clueless hollers in West Virginia and suck up hundreds of millions of dollars for yourself while everyone dies and entire municipalities wither.
Yesterday’s New York Times told of a recommendation by the consultancy McKinsey that Purdue (Hammergren’s now-notorious supplier) keep the drugs flowing like crazy, and its distributors happy, by handing them cash whenever someone in their distribution territory overdosed. Overdoses after all are so… awkward. So unpleasant. So… actionable? I mean, a lot of these people die. Some of them have very compellingly grieving mothers who talk to newspapers and attorneys and all.
It’s the old drug dealer problem: You want addicts of course, cuz that’s where your big reliable bucks come from; but you don’t want dead or spasming or frothing at the mouth or almost dead addicts. You want nice functional non-deadbeat addicts. McKinsey’s solution to growing numbers of dead and dying addicts that might make the distributors… uncomfortable… is to compensate them for each and every OD. A good faith gesture:
If you’re a pharmaceutical-company CEO who is making an opioid that is killing people, you already know it’s a problem, and you already have a pretty good idea of how you have to handle it. You hire a firm like McKinsey, in this hypothetical scenario, to make it look as if you’re not the one coming up with the unsavory options. It gives you some numbers and some options on paper (actually, at least traditionally, a hardbound blue book). It also gives you plausible deniability. “I didn’t come up with this idea, Your Honor. It was the consultants!”
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“How do the C.E.O.s of these companies sleep at night?” Bob Ferguson, Washington’s attorney general, said at a recent news conference.
Sleep at night? John Hammergren, from his CSIS perch, is currently handing out how-to-stay-healthy tips to the American public. Take long walks, try the Mediterranean diet, and cram twenty oxys a day down your gullet.
She said her meds were behind her last black pussy tweet – but how many black pussy tweets do you get before someone tells you to stop taking those particular meds?
Here’s more of Mehridith’s repeated orgasming over Kamala:
The possibilities are endless for little girls who whore their ways to the top!!
Is she a woman?
No! She’s a sex god with a strap-on just for me!!
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Timothy Snyder has it that authoritarianism-lovers like Mehridith are “giving way to sexual and physical fear.” I think that, for her and many like her, it’s as much excitement as it is fear.