The Onion captures one of UD‘s favorite memes – she’s covered it for years on this blog – the Criticism of any Form of Financial Activity is Merely Jealousy of Someone Richer than You Are meme. It’s been fun to quote Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow (read the whole page) on the “politics of envy” over the decades.
Last time I checked, using sensitive information to enrich yourself at the expense of hundreds of millions of other people was totally fine.
Absolutely; and you can read article after article calling for the legalization of insider trading, a move blocked by the petulant resentment of the many against America’s winners. And now Burr’s getting sued over something that should be totally legit!
Alan Jacobson, a shareholder in Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, sued Burr in federal court on Monday, alleging that the senator used private information to motivate a mass liquidation of his assets. It is illegal for senators to use nonpublic information in conducting securities exchanges.
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There’s something so bracingly, so utterly, so fundamentally human about pleasuring yourself at the thought of screwing the unwashed, of being first in line for goodie bags at events no one else even knows are happening… In a great piece of satire – The Christmas Letter – Gregg Easterbrook captured the pleasuring perfectly. Here’s how it begins:
What a lucky break that I’m in first-class on the plane back from Istanbul, because there’s room to take out the laptop and write our annual Christmas letter. My brand-new laptop receives wireless satellite Internet from anywhere in the world. While I was at the board of directors session during the Danube cruise, I pretended to be listening to the chairman but actually was using the laptop to watch Emily’s oboe recital on live streaming video from Chad’s digital minicam! So the world really is growing smaller. And if you haven’t gotten one of these new laptops, you should. Of course, now there’s a waiting list.
Of course, now there’s a waiting list. When these rare birds are captured, we can, like Diana Henriques, interview them; but the secrecy at the heart of their pathology makes it difficult to yield much.
Now that Burr’s been unveiled, he’s calling for an ethics investigation into himself because, in the immortal words of George Costanza, “if anyone had said anything to me at all [about how] that sort of thing is frowned upon…”
Act!!
UD‘s advice for Arizona’s Rep. Biggs.
Weh Weh Weh Weh Wait. Greed and bad parenting? C’est entendu. It’s not a good look for the New York Times – paper of the privileged – to explicitly fail to say why people who cheat so their rich dumb kids get into better schools than they qualify for (and thereby block smarter, more hardworking, children of non-oligarchs from the education they deserve) are being publicly shamed. If greed and being a bad parent were sufficient cause for public shaming, we’d have nationwide public shaming fatigue syndrome.
Most countries have an utterly corrupt, utterly entitled, utterly immune oligarchy buzzing above sordid cities in private helicopters on their way back from Gstaad, and there’s no sense protesting that cuz it has always been true and always will be true. A teeny number of countries (The Nordics… Canada?…. États–Unis?) seem to have a less baked-in ownership class, and it therefore feels worthwhile to see if the courts will be willing to punish them when they, say, destroy the economy (answer on that one here in the States: no), or, more modestly, destroy the intellectual functioning of our universities through the relentless metastasis of morons into them.
(UD of course has no way of knowing whether these hapless spawn of moral degenerates really are desperately dim; they can thank their parents for allowing us all to proceed on the assumption that they are. We certainly know that some of the kiddies cooperated with the scheme, so their self-appraisal is pretty clear.)
Americans haven’t yet had to settle into the paralyzing, corrosive, bitterness/nihilism that comes from witnessing a class of belligerently destructive people whose essential horror is that they know they act with absolute impunity. Maybe that nihilism is in our future. Maybe that’s why Bernie Sanders is winning – we’re seeking to avoid it. Maybe that’s why it’s only a matter of time before one of the campaigns tells us all about this. The Varsity Blues parents, by the most random, unlikely turn of events, got caught; they got caught and now carry on their shoulders the burden of our knowledge that rich degenerates are destroying our institutions. The important thing is to cut them down to size by laughing at them and, of course, by putting them in jail.
This blog’s focus on universities means that it has mainly looked at the way admitting violent whack-jobs to your school because they whack people on football fields can have unfortunate consequences. The situation is really grotesque in public junior high and high schools, where a toxic brew of incompetence, indifference, and ideology seats hardened criminals next to schoolchildren in classrooms. We’ve already seen it in my coverage of a local high school’s gang rapes on the football team; now there’s another local school – Clarksburg – where we’ve got a twofer: A fifteen year old tyke brings a handgun to school (that part’s like so fucking what… they’re in every other locker.), shows it off to his gang in the school bathroom, and a member of the gang steals it. LOL.
So … let’s see…
Despite having an “extensive criminal history,” one of the five suspects in Monday’s handgun robbery at Clarksburg High School was allowed to remain enrolled, raising questions about the school system’s top-down disciplinary policy.
According to court documents obtained by ABC7, Tyson Brown, 16, of Clarksburg, is well known by law enforcement, with prior criminal charges including armed robbery, robbery, and second-degree assault.
- March 11, 2019: Police arrested Brown for possession of stolen property linked to an armed robbery in Germantown.
- September 2019: Police implicated Brown in a series of “pizza robberies.”
- September 5, 2019: Police served a search warrant on Brown’s Clarksburg home, confiscating a Glock pistol magazine from his bedroom.
- January 2, 2020: Grand jury indicted Brown as an adult on six criminal counts including armed robbery, conspiracy to commit armed robbery, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery and two counts of participation in a criminal gang. The case, filed in Montgomery County Circuit Court, is scheduled for a three-day trial in late April.
This case also gives us an opportunity to get up close and personal with the guy who instigated the Damascus rape:
[T]he ringleader in the Damascus High School rape case was expelled from Clarksburg High School during the 2017-2018 academic year after he targeted and robbed an LGBTQ student.
The 6-foot-1, 240-pound ringleader managed to enroll at Damascus the following school year, where he joined the storied football program. Initially placed on the varsity squad, the ringleader was quickly demoted to the JV team for bad behavior, court testimony in the criminal case would later reveal.
According to a civil lawsuit filed last week, during his less than three months at Damascus, the ringleader “physically assaulted” a special needs student. He also “intentionally physically struck” a female educator, injuring her. The lawsuit argues that repeated slaps on the wrist kept the troubled 15-year-old athlete among good, hardworking students, in turn, allowing him to perpetuate the Halloween Day 2018, locker room rapes.
Oooh, a lawsuit!
Your education taxes at work.
… stay for the anti-vaxxers!
… (see post just below this one) — way to kill your kid.
She has a bunch of other kids. If the state has any function at all, it is to remove innocents from depraved caretakers. Take them away.
Samantha Bee reviews the president’s defense team.
But hyuk I mean if you’re gonna go down that road re Jeffrey Epstein’s BFF…!
I fuckin love the way these stories get written! Here’s a totally filthy organization – among the biggest drug companies in the world, as it happens – whose self-inflicted collapse inspires The Sorrow and the Pity-strength keening all over the business media. In one short article, one writer touches on four massive ongoing criminal cases against TEVA, and the company faces far more trouble than this.
What evil agent traumatized TEVA? Why should it suffer like this?
Oh, right. Because its business model is bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations, bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations. Why can’t we just leave it alone and stop traumatizing it?
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More like it.
Scandal-Ridden Teva Pharmaceutical Is Fishing for a Bottom
Investors take note: There is very likely no bottom.
And where, UD wonders, is the long New York Times article about the relentlessly criminal enterprise that is TEVA? Doesn’t anyone think it’s newsworthy that the world’s most powerful pharma corporation – arguably – is indescribably corrupt?
The Imperial Family of Oxy, the Sacklers, are getting it up the ass, which is fine; but let’s focus, this year, on other worthies. If the point is to make others who fatally addicted America take a very deep bow, the choices are practically infinite among pharma corporations, drug distribution companies, pharmacies, the whorish FDA, doctors, bogus industry-bought pain organizations, members of Congress… So UD’s choice of these two – the mind-bogglingly filthy pharma giant, Teva, and the happily retired billionaire head of McKesson, one of the country’s biggest drug distributors – is somewhat random. But the scandal of Teva continuing to be treated like a business instead of a criminal enterprise, and CSIS’s lucrative, white-washing embrace of Hammergren, who now doles out health-advice to the nation, stand out as landmark evils within the larger landscape of drug-dead America. Li’l UD is only one blogger, and though by her lights she’s amazingly well-off, she can’t exactly compete with the resources of dirty rotten billionaire scoundrels. But she pledges to do her bit, in the year ahead, to keep her own modest spotlight on these two.
This blog has featured some less than ideal places to attend college or university, places that seem to UD not optimal if you’d like a little peace and quiet and not too much gun-play to go with your studies. Trigger-mad Waco, Texas, for instance, with its breastaurant-biker riots/mass killings, rape- friendly university (Baylor) and good ol’ boy judges (most of them Baylor grads) does not seem to UD to shout pursue a higher education here. Unless you already know you want to study American cults up close and personal (the Branch Davidians raped their children here) you might want to look elsewhere.
Similarly, Huntington, West Virginia, home of appalling Marshall University, might not be the best place for you to study. Folks there saw in 2020 by shooting everybody up at a bar that calls itself Kulture Hookah and has a very strange, uh, provenance.
Back in July the city approved the place because its owner was a fine lass struggling to raise drug-free kids and she was fervently opposed to alcohol and any form of acting up in the joint. This would be a quiet, strictly private refuge full of oldies. Profits from the place, she told the unanimously-impressed Board of Zoning Appeals, would go toward the eradication of the town’s well-known drug problem.
One sharp-eyed commenter on the story about this in a local paper asked
Is the owner the same person convicted of operating a heroin distribution house in Huntington in 2016?
but the Huntington zoners got all choked up at her sob story and didn’t see any need to check newspaper articles or court records about how the hookah bar owner
pleaded guilty in 2016 to maintaining a residence for the purpose of distributing heroin.
[She] was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
They musta been mighty surprised to find out, day after the mass shooting, that
The bar advertised their New Year’s Eve party via social media and left an aftermath of drinks, party favors, and blood on the floor.
I mean. How can UD say this politely? Some places are just too stupid for you to go to school there.
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Update. When asked if [the bar owner] would have been given a business permit given her criminal history, [Huntington’s mayor] said it’s important to have all the information when making those decisions.
Yeah, it’s important but we’re too dumb to have it… I mean, we’re too high to have it… And yeah, I hear you: The state with the nation’s highest overdose death rate should maybe keep a bit of an eye on heroin distributors and maybe not give them permits to open bars, but … uh… (nods off)…
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Second Update: Getting better and better.
The flier for Wednesday morning’s party included a picture of a woman holding an assault weapon.
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Third Update: Just before she was given her certificate of occupancy for the retail shop, court papers reveal [Kulture Hookah’s owner] was cited for shoplifting at Walmart.
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Dunno. At this point there are two distinct possibilities: Huntington West Virginia is actually this stupid; or everyone in the government is getting huge sums of money to coordinate running the city with the best interests of the well-established Huntington/Detroit drug cartel in mind.
“If you want to be a private doctor, be a private doctor, but if you’re a teacher, be a teacher,” [a university lawyer] said.
Und so weiter. It’s easy to find observers puzzling over the stubborn tendency of people who want to make a lot of money to also want to be professors. From the perspective of high-profile medical researchers who have developed lucrative ties to pharma, continuing to be a shittily paid professor (a few hundred thousand a year, versus millions from sitting on do-nothing corporate boards, pushing sketchy drugs and devices, and receiving all manner of other underhanded forms of payment in exchange for conferring an aura of legitimacy over what pharma does) would seem an obvious waste of time. And yet in many cases you don’t get to that coveted position of legitimacy-aura-conferrer without also first having gathered unto yourself the selfless idealistic purely intellectual aura academia gives you. You have to gird yourself with the symbolic capital of the university before you can generate real capital by passing yourself off as the neutral not-profit-motivated objective evidence-based independent respected expert pharma needs to gain FDA approval for oxycontin.
It’s a kind of Catch-22: You have to keep being a professor for pharma to want to use you as a classy unimpeachable kind of thing; but being a professor is a Real Fat Pain in the Ass. Universities are thrilled you’re bringing in a lot of corporate-sponsored research money, of course; but universities can’t look like the pharma-whore you are. They’ve got that whole… lemme look back over that list I just wrote… that whole selfless idealistic purely bumpadah bumpadah to keep going or they lose their non-profit tax status and a whole lot of other goodies. Universities have to make sure that they don’t look like institutions set up to house the profit-making activities of medical entrepreneurs, so they cook up rules to monitor how much outside money you’re making plus how much time you’re spending doing business off campus. Since many medical faculties are making money hand over fist by moonlighting for pharma, they rather resent the intrusion.
The way they deal with this intrusion is by the simple expedient of ignoring outside income/outside time reporting rules. It’s not as though only a few miscreants do this; chairs of departments do it. At some schools, everybody’s doing it.
Take this guy.
One UC Davis professor of veterinary medicine allegedly ignored the [reporting] requirement. In 2014, the UC Regents sued Dr. Jack Snyder in state court, accusing him of making — and keeping for himself — more than $1 million in unreported income from clinical work and consulting in multiple states, including California, Montana and Hawaii. Snyder, who is known for his expertise in equine surgery and has provided veterinary care for equestrian events at the Summer Olympics, frequently missed scheduled meetings, clinical shifts and laboratory classes without receiving prior approval, the complaint states.
In court documents, Snyder denied the allegations and said the university had not been harmed in any way.
Parker White, a lawyer who represents the university in the pending case, said the university does not discourage faculty from doing work outside the university, but it wants to take the profit incentive out of it. The primary responsibility of veterinary faculty should be their teaching and clinical duties, he said.
“If you want to be a private doctor, be a private doctor, but if you’re a teacher, be a teacher,” White said. “He’s not here showing the students how to be doctors.”
Synder left the university shortly before it filed suit in 2014. Last year, the federal government indicted him for filing false tax returns and tax evasion.
LOLOLOL.
UD‘s been telling you and telling you that most online classes are trash, trash, trash. Easy to cheat in SO many ways. You can of course pay someone to take them for you. If you do take them, you pretty much learn nothing. It’s a big ol’ ripoff, but no one cares. Students obviously love them; universities make bundles off of them at very small cost. It’s win/win/win/win/win! — if you’re a cynical nihilist, which I guess a lot of people are.
The shabby absurdity of online reveals itself, most recently and most amusingly, in the latest chapter of the endless college admissions scam, which is rapidly filling America’s luxury lockups with our wealthiest amoralists. Karen Littlefair (there’s something wonderfully eighteenth-century-drama about that last name) bought her Georgetown University son out of the bother of actually taking courses by handing Rick Singer thousands of dollars to hire someone to pretend to be the little shit.
Littlefair paid Singer’s college counseling business, known as “The Key,” to have an employee complete online classes in her son’s name, the criminal information states. She ultimately paid Singer’s company about $9,000 in exchange for an employee taking four classes, and Littlefair’s son graduated from Georgetown in May 2018, prosecutors said.
It’s seems so … little fair that sonny boy could be said to have… graduated from Georgetown, a university far too busy dealing with its naughty basketball team, a lawsuit from another Varsity Blues bogus degree holder (Georgetown revoked the degree, but the dude sees no reason why he shouldn’t hit them up with a zillion dollar lawsuit to get it back; and UD is certain wee fair Littlefair Jr. will feel the same way) , fallout from their AMAZING tennis coach, Gordie Ernst, and – UD predicts – their royal-heads-of-Europe scandal) to worry about the legitimacy of some scamster pipsqueak’s degree… But it gets better. I promised some laughs.
One of the classes required video conferences with the professor. Littlefair wrote that her son would be out of the country and that Singer’s employee “should have a stand in for [my son] that is highly briefed.” The Key associate confirmed she would “take care of the meeting” if the son was unavailable by using a “fellow male colleague” to stand in for Littlefair’s son, the documents state.
Littlefair also sent an email asking Singer to do “one more online course” in spring 2018 for credit at Georgetown, and the Key associate then secretly took an online class in her son’s name offered by Arizona State University. The credits were then sent to Georgetown and credited to Littlefair’s son on his academic transcript, the court documents say, helping him graduate.
In April 2018, Singer’s company sent her an invoice for $3,000. She responded that she thought she’d be given a “discount” because the “grade [Key associate 1 earned] was a C and the experience was a nightmare!” according to the criminal information.
Singer replied that he would not discount the invoice because the “process was a nightmare for all.”
Those fucking online courses! Their pathetic efforts to insure that highly paid fakes aren’t taking them for scuzzy people otherwise engaged overseas make them a nightmare for all. And… mes petites! … You gotta admit that when it comes to Thrifty Little Mama Littlefair… Well, allow me to quote Albee’s George: There isn’t an abomination award going that she hasn’t won.
For the next four months, Inmate Littlefair will follow in the footsteps of Martha Stewart and shed sweetness and light upon the meth heads in the next cell.
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UPDATE: “[Georgetown officials] are now implementing measures to prevent cheating and plagiarism in online courses…” Good luck with that, Jesuit fathers! Why do you think there’s a nationwide industry in online college scams like this one? Tell me how you’re going to prevent cheating and plagiarism? Do you realize that not only students taking online courses, but people hired to give them, cheat? It’s just as easy for some disembodied entity, hired by some school to present a series of screens to students, to fake her identity, ja? Pocket the money – give ten percent of it to some high school grad drudge who’ll actually handle 200 online humanoids for you – and head for Cozumel.
I’m telling you, the whole thing’s trashy. Ask Arizona State University, which specializes in the con and happily passed along one of Littlefair’s bogus courses to Georgetown.
But although it’s a national scandal, it’s far too useful and lucrative for schools and students to give up the racket. Entire football and basketball rosters would be gutted if it weren’t for bogus online courses! Instead, universities will implement all sorts of expensive, real free-thought-enhancing security measures: Mandatory fingerprinting; pinchy devices on the fingers to check your pulse or sweat glands or something … And please stick your head in this facial recognition machine, after which Mr Ness from the FBI wants to ask you a few questions. Breathalyzer, sperm sample, and inner-cheek swab go here.
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UPDATE on the Big Daddies of online education, which most universities emulate in their own online programs: the for-profit companies:
“People just laugh in my face.”