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

Mr Smith goes to… Oh, who cares.

… Trumptesse …

Doug Mastriano Touts Endorsement from

Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi who Expresses Sympathy

for Capitol Rioters and Believes Hitler was Part Lizard

Yeshiva University’s most honored benefactor (now that Bernard Madoff is no more) doesn’t just loot his polluting businesses to build the largest private home in America for himself; he also funds Israeli settlers. It has been a privilege, over many years, to follow the morbid disgusting ways of one of America’s great money obsessives, and to note the proud smiling faces of the many academics here and abroad who carry the Ira Rennert name throughout their careers. Nothing he does – tax fraud, stealing pensions, destroying his neighbors’ lives this way and that – seems to shame any of them.

UD has been sitting tight, awaiting the latest Rennert … distastefulness … but it looks as though one of her favorite pursuits may be over. The dude’s been out of the news for awhile, and has recently turned 89, and his current thoughts must certainly revolve around how to fuck the world over postmortem. Maledizione!!

Ira Rennert has aired his world-hatred with a scope and depth available only to the screechingly rich; how to keep screeching that hatred from the quiet of the tomb?

The directives in his will are clear to anyone who, like UD, has made a fetish of the man: Above his vast sepulchre on the grounds of his house, his Sikorsky helicopter must circle eternally in a memorial riot of noise that will deafen and defeat all of the Sagaponack neighbors who have been praying for his death. When the Sikorsky runs out of gas, his other copter will replace it until its fuel tank refills.

… to see her cowritten book in distinguished company (Danto, Felski, Scarry, Donohue, Dutton) in a list of “notable works” on aesthetics. The list appears in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Art.

See this post, where UD lists some of the motives for plagiarism. She forgot an obvious one: money. Expert witnesses often get paid TONS (I’m looking at you, Feinerman), and professional expert witness Fancy Harvard MD has been in the trade for awhile. As with the Georgetown Law guy in my parenthesis, Harvard’s Dipak Panigrahy knows a get rich quick scheme when he sees one. Get paid – I dunno, $500 an hour? – to get one of your underlings to plagiarize vastly in your expert report. Pad it up good with gobs of plagiarized material for more moolah and place your bigshot name upon it. Voila.

Only, as with that parenthetic Georgetown guy, someone bothered to examine the report, and discovered – in the judge’s dismissive word – a ‘mess.’

Yeah, he threw the whole thing out.

Will the dude get paid anyway?

What a deal. Thousands and thousands of dollars for … uh …

“Indeed, the plagiarism is so ubiquitous throughout the report that it is frankly overwhelming to try to make heads or tails of just what is Dr. Panigrahy’s own work,” [said Judge Dalton].

Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The Battle of Gettysburg. What an unbelievable, I mean it was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways. Gettysburg. Wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee ― who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor ― ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general, and they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.

photo didier descouens

in a garden where we stopped on the way to the Grand Canyon.

Mighty purdy round here. But hard to forget how fucked up the place is.

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

UD thanks Al.

Don Wilson he pulled out his cock.

At his rich flow of pee he did gawk.

‘Dear Lord, what a man!

Piss a bucket I can!

Now what did I do with that Glock?’

UD does wonder, as the plagiarism pins keep falling, why people do it. Naive question, ja, but in weighing whether to

1.) ruin your career and humiliate yourself by doing something you really don’t have to do; or

2.) grind the thing out (what do they want? fifty? a hundred pages?) even though you really have to drag your ass to do it, and the result may be an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine own,

doesn’t it seem obvious you should just grit your teeth and write the fucker?

Because one of the many bad things about plagiarism is that it makes people wonder whether you actually ever had the capacity to write a serious scholarly work of a certain length. Why, after all, did you plagiarize?

None of the answers is good. Cynical ambition. Laziness. Incapacity.

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

UD couldn’t stop photographing this little paradise.

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.