Creepy panopticon Monaco, financial crime capital, has managed to eke out three murders or almost-murders in the last few decades, all involving high-level corruption and/or un max d’argent. The latest is a bomb attack on a corrupt Ukrainian oligarch right at his doorstep.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nc/charlotte/news/2026/06/26/confederate-flag-displayed-at-n-c–exhibit-at-america-s-state-fair

’. A symbol that the state itself never chose, attached to its flag without permission, displayed at an event meant to celebrate American unity…’

This is why these people need to be kept in Syria. Off she goes onto the free streets of Melbourne, to work her magic. The newspaper article describes her, before anything else, as a bride and a grandmother. If this were about an ISIS man, would his first description be groom and grandfather? UD’s blood boils.

Other well-meaning courts in other well-meaning countries will do the same — I guess because holding Yazidi teenagers as slaves is no big deal.

And what’s really idiotic is that these courts clearly think women can’t be terrorists. Women can’t focus their minds enough to evolve a terrorist ideology. This chick said what they all do and the court bought it – I never really, you know, believed … what does ISIS believe again? It’s only women who are little by little being allowed to walk free. Everyone’s fine with male terrorists staying in Syrian prisons. But women are too stupid to be real terrorists, so let them go.

So there’s the university angle, which interests us here at University Diaries (though lack of qualifications earning a person a job at a Spanish or Italian university isn’t exactly news — that’s one of the ways your big whole entire modern rich country gets exactly one university on a respectable position on the international ‘best of’ lists, and that one – U of Barcelona – only staggers up to #88 on one list, and #145 on another). But the Spanish PM’s now-arrested wife’s expanded list of misdeeds is far sexier than squatting on a university position for which you don’t qualify: ‘embezzlement, influence peddling, corruption in business dealings and misappropriation of funds.’

UD admits to relief at this bigtime Spanish corruption story. She has missed the almost-fall of the monarchy (King Juan Carlos; his daughter; his daughter’s ex-husband) due to breathtaking corruption. So now she has this.

Sing it.

After you’ve gone and left us cheering
After you’ve gone and left us jeering
You’ll feel blue, you’ll feel sad
You’ll miss the dearest wall you’ve ever had

Now your name’s gone and we’ll forget it
When you’re gone too we won’t regret it

After you’re gone, after you’re gone away

You’d think pharma would be on to the scheme by now. Or do companies care that they’re buying bogus studies guaranteed to confirm the legitimacy of their shit?

The whole thing’s a win/win, after all. Except for the dupes buying worthless and destructive drugs.

And the panel of wusses who recently went through the motions of taking it seriously as an interrogative couldn’t help but conclude shucks yeah I guess…

For twenty years, the academy’s position on the incineration of – for instance – literary study has been just like this.

And now – God knows why they suddenly got the thought in their head – there’s something to see here.

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

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has for years published opinion pieces that equate an interest in the aesthetic values of art objects with — not making this up – Trumpism. Here’s one of many examples. It’s a little rich that the publication now gives air time to people who have begun wondering whether that might not be a fit thing to argue.

Like many such pieces, this one is simple bullying (give it a read). You shouldn’t let yourself be bullied into contributing to the death of literary studies.

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 loves her some literary scandal. Hold tight.

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

… it can be hard to focus on particular states. A new study confirming that NOLA must be relocated will certainly get our attention, but basically if you’re like UD there’s a bunch of pretty squishy territories out there, all of which somehow add up to USA.

She knows Utah’s all virtuous and the Deep South deeply fucked; and because of her special interest in the country’s amazing rates of gun ownership/gun violence/gun suicide, she can rattle off our leading abattoirs.

But when a drug use/drug overdose map like this one comes out, the bright red disparities really jump out at you — as in mega-malsain New Mexico, where a few years ago the desperate governor, knee-deep in gore, declared a health emergency, making it illegal for anyone to carry a gun for thirty days. Angry bangbangers practically torched the state when they heard that one.

As for this most recent map, New Mexico dominates the national overdoses too. While clueless coastals like UD persist in picturing Georgia O’Keefe meditating on Taos Mountain, the reality of (by pretty much any metric) our worst state screams out at them in bright red on a drug map.

Tim King, the former leader of the Urban Prep charter schools who resigned in 2022 amid sexual misconduct allegations, now faces federal charges alleging he embezzled more than $100,000 in school funding.

Sniff-sniff. I mean… AS IF. As if Ken Griffin, who as of 2019 (this list must be way out of date) owns

the most expensive home in America, a $238-million Manhattan penthouse. According to Bloomberg, he already owns two floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), a Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), another Chicago penthouse ($58.75 million) and another apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).

… as if this guy is going to lower himself to respond to the mayor of NY choosing to announce “a [proposed] annual fee on luxury properties valued above $5 million whose owners do not live in New York full-time” while standing in front of Griffin’s always empty four-floor penthouse.

Griffin did feel compelled to make a statement awhile back, when people noticed the emptiness.

[His apartment is] not a short-term investment, but a home where [Ken] Griffin will spend considerable time, said Zia Ahmed, his spokesman.

I don’t follow the guy around, but far as I can tell he’s spent somewhere between zero and zero days in his warm authentic inviting home.

Construction crews rebuilding the sepulchre to Griffin’s invisibility standard have, however, moved in for the long haul, and neighbors have not been happy, all these years, about the noise.

Given all this civic yumminess, it’s no surprise that Mamdani chose Griffin’s sarcophagus as ground zero.

Like oy my aching MS, gotta visit my mom, I’m a mental wreck, it’s an Islamophobic conspiracy…

And of course he can still appeal blah blah.

But as a career rapist who enjoyed practically killing his numerous prey, the eminent Oxford don Tariq Ramadan – for years one of the highest-profile, most respected, representatives of Islam to the West – was eventually going to be found guilty.

You recall – if you read this blog – that Oxford took forever to dump him… Kind of an Epstein thing. Boys will be boys.

He got 18 years. We’ll see whether he serves any of them.

[John A.] Miller served as the executive director and treasurer of a Philadelphia-based religious nonprofit organization that provided financial assistance to the widows and orphans of deceased clergy members. 

Amid the endless effluence of fraud (here the stolen money went to luxury travel, a luxury condo, etc.), I’d say this case stands out.

Jeffrey Toobin brought out the pathos of just-convicted bad boy Tom Goldstein in this 2025 interview.

I choked up when Toobin described one Honda in Goldstein’s driveway where once there were two Bentleys.