Nice of them to just come out and say it. But it gets better.

What many students don’t know is that despite worries about white students being ignored or missing out on participation points, Candela offers several avenues to participation credit aside from in-person discussion, including online discussion boards that everyone is encouraged to use.

You can’t even ask questions, much less make comments, in this class at SUNY Binghamton; but haha never fear! There are many other avenues open to you!

I won’t bother linking you to anything. Just put the name of the Mafia’s bank in your news search and enjoy.

Rep. Jim Jordan’s announcement that he is refusing to talk to the January 6th committee has sparked celebrations across the nation, as Americans express hope that the congressman’s abstention from talking becomes a sustainable trend.

The guy’s a crooked old wrestling coach. (Scroll down.) UD‘s hope is that from now on he expresses himself, as our mothers always taught us, with fists, not words.

… here are UD‘s Jussie Smollett posts from 2019, when the story broke. A most contemptible man.

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It was too hard to believe that any of this could be made up, because what kind of person would do something like this?

A former supporter of Smollett’s gets to the heart of so many hoaxes – from people (many of them academics) pretending to be minorities, to people pretending to have been physically attacked because of their minority status. You have to be one sick fuck to conceive of this behavior, let alone pull it off, and then sustain the hoax into the indefinite future. What kind of person…?

But our job is not to stand around being incredulous. After all of the destructive hoaxers we’ve encountered over the last few years, and in anticipation of others, we owe it to our social world to educate ourselves in the ways of our Smolletts and Bourassas. We have to try to see them coming. As UD has often said (having covered such hoaxers on this blog for a long time), one common tip-off is trying too hard. These people lay it on too thick: They claim large and proliferating minority memberships (tribal, ethnic, etc.); they claim the people who beat them up did this and did that and oh yeah I just remembered they did that too… Look into almost any recent high-profile hoax and you see this characteristic of overdoing, overkill, as if the hoaxer fears insufficient minoritization/torment will fail to convince. Or – just as likely – their motive isn’t really a motive at all, but rather an uncontrolled manifestation of their madness. Nuts don’t act in measured ways.

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Update: A Smollett juror illustrates the peril of overdoing.

Ah, but Rand Paul is also an asshole supreme, with whom Oz could never hope to compete.

She forgot to mention his steadfast defense of Andrei Shleifer, his taking over Harvard’s endowment and promptly losing $1.8 billion, his hedge-fund freelancing while president of Harvard, etc., etc. Summers is a-fucking-mazing.

And it does. Scan the political commentary of the last couple of years, and you’ll encounter the word again and again.

Seldom has it been invoked more powerfully than by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez today, in the discussion leading up to Rep. Gosar’s censure. She’s right – nothing matters to these people, so they feel free to act obscenely.

People like Gosar represent a kind of disease end-stage. He himself is obviously, literally, diseased: His siblings have begged people not to vote for this damaged man; his sister has described him as a “sociopath.”

He is, more importantly, the manifestation of the disease in his party.

“Hm…. Yes? … No? … Hmmmmm…. I just don’t know!….”

The best and strongest denunciation of the cowardly idiocy currently in action at the highest levels of the University of Michigan (background here) comes from – wait for it – the campus chapter of International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the University of Michigan, a Trotskyist group.

[Bright Sheng’s student/destroyer,] who evidently knows nothing about the play, its history, or Olivier’s career and intentions in his 1965 performance, has thus far been fully supported by the university in the baseless claim that Sheng’s showing of the film and the film itself were “racist.”… In a statement to the Michigan Daily, composition Professor Evan Chambers—who is replacing Sheng in the course—wrote, “To show the film now, especially without substantial framing, content advisory and a focus on its inherent racism is in itself a racist act, regardless of the professor’s intentions.” Chambers presents absolutely no evidence to support such an outrageous claim. The public is apparently simply expected to take his word for it… The whole incident is foul and shameful. For all the hand-wringing about students “needing context” and “trigger-warnings” about the play, there is virtually no discussion of the actual work or film adaptation…

Surprised to find the sharpest attack coming from the left? Don’t be. There’s a long history among traditional lefties of disgust with Foucauldian bullshit and its current “identity” emanations. See Richard Rorty’s contrast between the reformist left and the cultural left.

You don’t have to be anywhere in particular on the ideological spectrum to recognize the vicious unpersoning of Bright Sheng as fully reactionary, in the worst traditions of the most perverted forms of Orwellian “revolution.”

“Wealth is not necessarily accumulated at the expense of public interest and the needy.”

I guess this is what he means.

“[T]ax havens” aren’t really for avoiding taxes: They exist to help elites avoid the rule of law that they impose on the rest of us. The offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.

Therefore, the Great State of South Dakota will do all that it can to establish and sustain the world’s most secretive and powerful tax havens.

A lawyer for [Alex] Jones said last year that the Infowars host no longer believes that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.

Already South Dakota ha[s] no income tax, no capital gains tax, and no estate tax. Why not make the state even more hospitable to the wealthy by repealing something called “the rule against perpetuities” and rendering family trusts immortal?… South Dakota’s lax financial regulations are … fantastic enablers of illegal or brazenly immoral activity unrelated to tax-dodging...

We’ve put up with this moral sewage long enough. Let’s abolish South Dakota by merging it into North Dakota. If Congress has the power under the admissions clause to admit new states, shouldn’t it also have the power to dissolve them? Everybody makes mistakes! As Jonathan Chait argued some years back in [The New Republic] about Delaware, the Mount Rushmore state long ago forfeited through bad behavior any claim on our allegiance or respect… Now the place is just 77,000 square miles of undead family fortunes.

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Timothy Noah, a wonderful writer, in TNR.

UD‘s great-uncle, Nathan Rapoport, settled in Ocean City in 1912 and built some of its first boardwalk businesses. UD‘s father graduated from Ocean City High School. She follows the sad fortunes of that resort closely.

Like notorious Myrtle Beach, OC has over decades allowed large stretches of itself to sink into squalor, with resulting high crime rates, guns, drugs, fights, and even riots. Both of these locations might have done something to discourage their takeover by sleazy motels, cheap bars, ugly and dangerous city thoroughfares, and many other marks of civic degeneracy. But there was money in degeneracy.

Until there wasn’t. Non-degenerate locals and visitors are leaving.

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Now an established low-life magnet, OC is trying, late in the game, to de-magnetize. It banished, for instance, the annual vile H20i gathering of assholes with loud cars; but scofflaws don’t exactly care whether you banish them, and year after year thousands keep coming, turning OC, for a week in September, into a wasteland of smoking squealing crashing hulks circled by drunks recording the fun on their phones. After each year’s debacle the town revisits and revises its laws in hopeless, increasingly police-state, measures.

This month’s tweak, described in my headline, involves real surveillance state stuff, with, what, drones? satellites? tracking the movements and collecting the identities of the asshole brigade.

On the streets and even highways leading from the Bay Bridge to Ocean City, wall to wall police will engage in constant arrests, and, with those crowds no doubt pushing back, we can expect lovely results. Rumble strips will be everywhere. City officials have been having nice chats with the proprietors of the dumps that house the crowds and nicely explaining to them that if they keep housing overflows of people the town will put them out of business. Cars will be impounded, and, in an interesting twist, owners can no longer just come and claim them but must hire companies to drive them out – at no doubt great expense.

Oh – and next year:

In 2022, Ocean City hopes to hold a three-day concert during the weekend of H2Oi. Additionally, the town wants to host a sporting event that weekend.

“For the last 10 years when the pop-up rally was here, we’ve kind of been on the defense,” [the OC mayor] said. “I think we all feel it’s time to go on the offense and set our own destiny.”

Try to imagine what it’s like to live in Ocean City. You get to witness a yearly actual reversion-to-barbarism event. And you get to look forward to next year’s raid, which will add huge numbers of pissed off (what’s with all the police and those car assholes?) sports and country music fans. Where do I sign up.

Four kids, church-goers, Tea Party Patriots, the Roethles work hard to make Kansas a better place! Alana stars in a commercial attacking a Democratic congressional candidate – a commercial in which she identifies herself as just “a mom of four,” without mentioning that she’s “the secretary of Kansas’s Republican Party. She is also a member of the Kansas Lottery Commission … [and she] served as a delegate during the 2016 Republican National Convention and … attended President Trump’s inauguration.”

But that’s nothing! Scott just got indicted for health care fraud!

“[B]eginning in 2017 and continuing until at least 2020, multiple telemedicine and marketing companies paid Dr. Roethle illegal kickbacks, totaling $674,026, to sign prescriptions and orders for orthotics, genetic tests, and topical creams. Dr. Roethle was typically paid $30 for each order or prescription he signed. The marketing and telemedicine companies solicited patients through the media and cold calls and then electronically transmitted patient information to Dr. Roethle through an electronic portal. In almost all instances, Dr. Roethle had no contact with the patients and did not determine if they needed the items or services before he signed the orders.  Patients often complained to Dr. Roethle that they did not want or need the items he had ordered for them.

Roethle obtained medical licenses in 22 states and signed orders for thousands of patients residing in these states. Medicare Part B suffered a loss of over $26 million based on fraudulent prescriptions and orders signed by Dr. Roethle.”

It’s that fucking federal government, meddling in Alana’s commercial and Scott’s medical practice!

Oh – and Alana seems to run Scott’s office.

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UPDATE: Scott Roethle had apparently already piled up quite a few state disciplinary actions before the federal government took notice.