Curious sort of savior. Because she stole over a million dollars from a big federal grant, the government went ahead and killed it. The most vulnerable Native Americans in Arkansas – drug addicts and suicidal depressives and impoverished widows – will now just have to do the best they can on their own.

So fuck her and her tears and her I dunno and her I took all the money because I’m Jesus. She’s going to jail for four years (no parole) and has to pay it all back.

UD thanks her Garrett Park neighbors for linking me to this NYT story about Ferdinand the Bull. Its author, Munro Leaf, lived and died in UD’s house. UD knew his wife, Margaret.

Whenever I introduce a new element to the garden, I find myself hoping that it’s in line with the spirit of Ferdinand, as Leaf conceived him.

The directive has gone out: The name must be removed from all Kennedy Center communications.

UD loves her some literary scandal. Hold tight.

The New Yorker article detailing Belle Burden’s murkiness about money is here.

One of the many people just arrested for massive insider trading wrote a financial advice column for Orthodox Jews.

Many are the reasons Americans need firearms.

UD used to cover insider trading stories, especially when the insiders also sat on university boards of trustees.

Yeshiva University – Land o’ Madoff – was the most brazen offender – not only with insider trading, but with pretty much any other form of malfeasance available to it.

And now here’s a really massive insider trading story featuring Yeshiva grads – and other orthodox and less orthodox members of UD’s tribe – stealing confidential M and A information from all over town and selling it.

One wee example of how it went down:

[A cooperating witness] was staffed on the Enstar deal because his firm was advising Sixth Street on its roughly $5 billion acquisition of Enstar. He shared news of the deal with his former [college] classmates, who told him a few days later they had purchased between $2 million and $3 million in Enstar shares. After the deal was announced, [the witness] was allegedly due a $30,000 kickback…

More broadly:

[The ringleaders] [who met at UD’s George’s Washington University! Maybe she explained Melville’s The Confidence Man to them and got the ball rolling] recruited attorneys with access to confidential information at elite firms, paid them kickbacks of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, and then fed those tips through a layered network of traders and middlemen who placed trades ahead of nearly 30 public merger announcements, using burner phones, encrypted apps, and coded language, including referring to tips as airline “flights” and upcoming deal announcements as dates when a “rabbi” was scheduled for surgery. The whole thing generated tens of millions of dollars in illicit profits and is one of the largest insider trading cases charged in years.

If you’re an antisemite looking for your very own actual Jewish conspiracy, you’ve come to the right place! The godly even used pious rabbinical language to encode their nefarious texts… which they clearly figured were securely encrypted but gevalt.

All their yiddishisms now appear on the DOJ website.

As for why detection took so long … Yeshiva’s BOT treasurer (Bernie, that is) had a good long run too before they caught him. I’m sure there are people in this current case, like Harry Markopolos in regard to Madoff, who’ve been telling anyone who will listen about the insider conspiracy, but eh. American capitalism’s riding high at the moment. Very little interest in falling off the horse. Plenty of respectable people call for the legalization of insider trading. Expect the raft of defense lawyers for these thirty or so defendants to ridicule the absurdity of criminalizing the act of stealing and monetizing private information.

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A thoughtful article in Tikkun about the criminal propensities of Orthodox Jews. (You need to register to read the whole thing, but the first paragraphs alone are worth a read.)

Here’s what that failure looks like on the street.

Lynne Cooke-Case allegedly threatened [her neighbors with a firearm,] saying she would “put (the gun) in the mouth of anyone who got in [her] way.”… Cooke-Case’s dogs [then] killed a neighbor’s chicken and she [started] firing a gun from the road while threatening people… Cooke-Case fired about 20 rounds into the air. According to court documents, Cooke-Case also claimed there were bombs inside her home, and troopers reported a strong odor of gunpowder inside.

Insane people have no trouble getting guns in NH; and here is an example of how they use them.

People are overlooking a sad American retirement story that should by all rights dominate our headlines. But perhaps we just don’t care anymore.

There’s a growing trend of older homeowners unable to sell their investment properties as they attempt to downsize later in life. Dan Snyder, for example, lowered and lowered the price of his house along the Potomac River until he was forced to give up. He ultimately made it a charitable gift to the American Cancer Society, which was in turn for years unable to sell it, until in desperation they auctioned it off for 9 million (original price 50 million).

Now Bill Koch can’t unload his house in Aspen, which for over a decade, with multiple price reductions, has failed to sell. Koch started at 100 million, then 80. Then, regaining hope, he listed it for 125 million. Then, despairing again, he asked 99 million.

As Tuli Kupferberg would put it NOTHING. NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING NOTHING! By way even of a nibble.

This home too will now go to the ignominy of auction.

A Birmingham judge so hilariously corrupt, incompetent, and racist that she managed to get indefinite suspension even in one of our most corrupt states, continues to smile down from her official probate court page.

An extensive reading of her case yields the thought that she simply went mad with power, enjoying – it seems – the thought of suffering people waiting for her decisions before they could be released from mental institutions and other forms of hell. Walking her dogs routinely took precedence over appearing in court and doing her job, much of which involved sick and vindictive plots against people she didn’t like. Like white people.

SOS says: Virtually all style guides prefer administering to administrating. Stick with administering.

Or, as a headline expressing the absurdity of trying to name the place Trump/Kennedy has it, COURT SAYS TRUMP CAN’T NAME THE KENNEDY CENTER AFTER HIMSELF.

Plastering over the name of a man whose death convulsed the country. Muscling aside the memorializing of national tragedy for the sake of juvenile conceit. It was too disgusting for a judge not to notice.

As long as the United States has a legitimate judiciary, we can hope for more outcomes like this.

UD will make every effort to be there to record the sandblasting of the name Trump.

Nothing remotely like it will happen; but of course Deresiewicz is right. Some humanities professors should be encouraged to write lively art criticism, for instance, in the sort of places that have a bit of a profile and some actual readers. But the unread hyperspecialized stuff should end.

It won’t.

Two of their football heroes got drunk and started screaming at each other in a Dewey Beach parking lot. At 3 AM.

One’s a thief.

Both lied about their identities.

Police said both suspects attempted to flee on foot as officers continued their investigation. During the attempted detention, a struggle broke out and one suspect allegedly interfered with officers trying to take the other into custody. Officers reported that one suspect was stopped after a Taser was deployed, while the second continued resisting arrest before being restrained with assistance from a bystander. Both were charged with disorderly conduct, felony resisting arrest with force or violence, offensive touching of a law enforcement officer, providing false information to police, and two counts of underage possession or consumption of alcohol.

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And this one was just a few days ago. Poor Whitman.

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UD thanks her sister for the link.

Sierra Leone’s First Lady says YES!!! to clit-stripping. Almost every little girl in that country is held down and castrated by village butchers and Jabbe-Bio couldn’t be more proud.