Alabam’s finest expresses sympathy with yesterday’s wanna-be Timothy McVeigh at the Library of Congress. That state, and its august federal reps, just keep getting better and better.

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Donald Trump Booed at Alabama Rally After

Encouraging Crowd to Get COVID-19 Vaccine

Ten minutes later, the American economy imploded, and apparently a decision was made to deal with the enormous shortfall that ensued by, in all sorts of ways, bilking patients and Medicare.

A UM med school executive blew the whistle, and last year UM had to pay the government millions and millions of dollars, and Shalala, of course, fired the naughty whistle blower.

Now the whistle blower has filed a wrongful termination suit for millions of dollars, which he’ll probably get.

When you add the Nevin Shapiro scandal to this one, Donna Shalala certainly has a lot to answer for.

‘In mid-2019, Madoff began applying for an early release from his 150-year sentence, given that he was terminally ill…

The records showed that Madoff’s application was blocked more than once by the prison warden and general counsel, on the grounds that Madoff’s offense had been so great and that he had declined to undergo dialysis as recommended by staff.

Medical personnel eventually stated that Madoff met the criteria for compassionate release and the warden agreed to submit the request to the judge in Madoff’s case, even though he recommended against it. In June 2020, Judge Denny Chin denied Madoff’s request, stating that he believed, “Mr. Madoff was never truly remorseful, and that he was only sorry that his life as he knew it was collapsing around him.”’ 

In “I Alone Can Fix It,” Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker write about a phone call between [Liz] Cheney and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which the Wyoming Republican describes a confrontation she had with Jordan during the riot, CNN reported. 

“That f—— guy Jim Jordan. That son of a bitch. … While these maniacs are going through the place, I’m standing in the aisle and he said, ‘We need to get the ladies away from the aisle. Let me help you.’ I smacked his hand away and told him, ‘Get away from me. You f—— did this,’” Cheney reportedly told the general.

Must make Jordan nostalgic for his all-male wrestling days.

Or maybe not.

Well, this Israeli didn’t grow up in a theocracy, so he finds the ways of theocracies unnerving.

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With its latest fragile, semi-rational, government, maybe Israel will suspend its theocratic ways and police its ultraorthodox hoodlums, but don’t hold your breath. Don’t expect the state to get in the way of mobs of men hurling hot coffee at women trying to pray, calling them whores, and ripping up their prayer books. That’s just the way they roll in a Zionist country running scared from violent anti-Zionists.

Don’t try to understand. And don’t hold your breath.

Put aside the ethical problems with professors who lie about their race/ethnicity, and thereby incalculably hurt other people and groups and the value of truth itself; ask yourself whether the problem with such people is not that they are contemptible, but that they are insane.

A person commenting on a New York Times essay on the latest identity fraud (this one’s a woman who claimed to be Native American to get ahead in academia) goes there: Is it not plausible that a person capable of spending her entire adult life pretending to be someone she’s not may be mentally unbalanced? Indeed, don’t we all expect to encounter Christs of Ypsilanti and Napoleons of Boca Raton only in institutions?

This woman, and Jessica Krug, and probably other fraudsters like them, went victimization-theft one better and harassed actual black and Native people they knew because the fraudsters found them inauthentic. Just as each of the three Christs impugned the Christness of the others.

Which is a real method in the madness thing, ain’t it? Talk about diverting attention from your own, er, lack of identity-evidence — look at that faker over there! And that one over there!

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When personal, belligerent, enactment of minority identity becomes more important than intellectual legitimacy… well, you get what you wish for. You get the performative professoriate; you get high-kicking Jessica Krugs putting blackness over on… on almost everyone.

Yes – all of these tired pathetic tales feature non-insane observers attempting to point out that the political steam issuing from the head of the department firebrand is BS. But y’all know how love is…

We hired Jessie in a fever

Hotter than a pepper sprout

We been talkin about Jessie

Ever since the fire went out…

Yet many of you would hire her again; and the latest Krug remains in a good academic job, and keeps getting published by (wait for it) the same press that published Krug. Even though everyone at this point knows she’s a truly vile liar.

It’s kind of like – if American academia likes brazen amoral liars that much, what’s it got against Donald Trump? Why does it think academia is superior to Trumpland? Both places promote people – even nutty scuzzy people – who satisfy deep dark desires. Trumpland’s just more honest.

And I’m sure we’re very happy CHS did so well (its CEO made $9.1 mill ), though when you read the fine print it turns out they did it through a wily combination of government handouts and suing – during a pandemic – patients who couldn’t pay their bills.

These sorts of suits are such a disgusting practice that almost no other hospital chain files them.

CNN interviewed more than a dozen people sued by CHS hospitals. Most said they had tried to communicate with the company’s lawyers, collections agents or the hospitals directly and found them unresponsive or unwilling to agree to a settlement they could afford.

Dr. Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins University professor who has studied hospital lawsuits around the country, said CHS was far more litigious than most hospital groups, and that the company’s financial aid policy didn’t go nearly far enough. “It’s like Marie Antoinette saying, ‘if somebody came to me begging for food, I would give them cake,'” Makary said. “It’s completely blind to the relentless, aggressive, predatory nature of debt collection on the ground.”

(One simple form of self-defense for some patients involves checking yourself out of the hospital. “[A patient being sued] said in an interview that his bill came after the hospital kept him longer than he had wanted.” You’re almost always free to leave a hospital when you want to – check out the AMA option. If you feel comfortable doing it, you’ll save yourself thousands of dollars, and spend less time living cheek by jowl with those pesky hospital-borne infections.)

One Injured After Hummer Stockpiling Gasoline Cans Bursts Into Flames In Florida

With its latest accomplishment – caught by the feds stealing gobs of money in a wide range of inventive and patient-anguishing/bankrupting ways – UM Med maintains its national position as America’s most corrupt medical school ever. With a rogues’ gallery of leaders and doctors, the school has, over decades, enriched itself in ways so deeply and consistently depraved that at some point you have to grant it grudging credit for having utterly transformed a place of healing into an abattoir. The state of Florida is to be sure already the USA’s epicenter of elderly people and medical fraud; it took decades of clever planning and moral squalor for UM to make itself the epicenter of the epicenter.

“Tens of billions of dollars are lost annually to fraud, waste and abuse, and Miami is the Medicare fraud capital of the United States,” [the whistleblower’s attorney] said. “Today’s announced settlement and the schemes described in the DOJ press release are ironic considering they were committed by an iconic South Florida institution under the leadership of the former Secretary of Health and Human Services [the appalling Donna Shalala], the very agency that promulgated the Medicare rules that were violated.”

Wanna know exactly what they did? Details here.

… publicity.

And explain to me why the sorority had no idea these two declared bankruptcy in 2016. They started stealing right after that – obviously a way to fix the bankruptcy problem. But why didn’t the sorority know? A three-second Google search produced the bankruptcy record.

… is a ruse as old as the establishment of charter schools in this country. You set them up, everyone applauds, and then you systematically loot them while the schools manage the best they can while wondering where the federal money went.

Someone’s always being caught and going to jail for this particular scheme, high-flier David Scott Glasrud being a recent case. Glasrud started stealing as soon as he established his first school, and no one stopped him until fifteen years and millions of dollars later.

At least Glasrud spent his ill-gotten gains on educational materials – a Maserati, a Porsche, a mansion, and gambling in Las Vegas.

Now there’s young, far more high-flying, Seth Andrew, a real best and brightest type with degrees from the Bronx High School of Science, Brown University, and Harvard’s school of education. Why did he steal from his charter schools? His wife is a rich high-profile media figure. He has plenty of money.

Or does he? It’s possible that in his world (see Bonfire of the Vanities) a family worth of only, say, five million plus is appalling, humiliating, fully unable to purchase the sort of Manhattan condo (plus Hamptons getaway?) you need to live your best life now.

Not that the $200,000 he allegedly stole is more than a drop in the bucket in Andrew’s world; but UD’s thinking he just needed a leeetle extra to get the mortgage he was after, so he pulled that particular teat. Silly way to ruin your life.

Jonathan Pentland, come on down!

No one watching the video can doubt the party has found its man.

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UD wonders about the person who chose to film this short feature from what seems to be a whites-only gated community in South Carolina. I mean, if it was a fellow gater filming in order to make a formal complaint to the community’s board about the development’s… border crisis … could this person not have anticipated that it might go viral? Or does its release to the world suggest that the film-maker was, au contraire, fascinated by the remarkable… clarity of this encounter?

True, and true.

And Philip Roth’s biographer responds to his interviewer’s quotation from Gornick in exactly the right way:

I think that says more about Vivian Gornick’s social circle than it does about women collectively.

I mean. Jesus. Let’s keep ’em away from Henry Miller, James Joyce, Hemingway, and Don DeLillo too. Wouldn’t want to expose them to great fiction!

And let’s hope Hadley Freeman’s social circle is a lot larger than Gornick’s.

[E]njoying a novel is not dependent on approving of the deliberately flawed characters, or its similarly imperfect author. There are many things that make a book good – elegant writing, emotional truth, narrative voice – besides its morality.

And of course there are plenty of great novels – Lolita, Notes from Underground, Journey to the End of the Night – whose immorality intrigues us.

There’s a popular children’s book called Everyone Poops; UD has one in mind called Everyone Steals. Seriously, do you know anyone (yourself included) who hasn’t stolen? If I didn’t already know that almost everyone steals, sometimes at a high level, the keeping of this blog over many years has certainly drummed it into me.

And my focus hasn’t even been billionaires (“Whenever people say, “Oh he earned his money himself,” I always say the same thing: “No one earns a billion dollars. People earn $10 an hour; people steal a billion dollars.”), but rather universities and university people. Universities, where you might think rates of simple theft – much less systematic looting – might be less impressive than in corporate, for-profit, settings.

And I mean, for all I know they are. But I also know that alongside academic institutions historically laced with larceny (Yeshiva University; the University of Louisville; several others), there are zillions of institutions — especially those blessed with this nation’s biggest sports programs — thick with thieves. To really see the depth of embezzlement, though, look beyond the wowza money corruption of big-time school sports and consider the sweet li’l Varsity Blues scandal, full of people like the crisply outfitted tennis coach at Georgetown University, who in his pre-carceral days taught the Obama girls how to play. Relentlessly, over many years, with the help of various co-conspirators, he shook down parents desperate to get their dim spawn into Georgetown. Gordon Ernst made millions in this way.

Or like the soccer coach at UCLA who, with a years-long, mob-like persistence identical to the Georgetown tennis coach, charged rich desperadoes $100,000 a pop to sleaze their kids in. He explained to the judge that, you know, he bought a house he couldn’t afford.