One of Exotic’s ex-husbands, John Finlay, gives shirtless interviews that show off his abundant tribal tattoos—including a crotch adornment that reads Privately Owned Joe Exotic—and his undeniable lack of teeth. (Only in Episode 5 does Tiger King stop to note that meth has been a prevalent factor in Exotic’s world the whole time.) The interviews become more and more invasive. Travis’s mother is asked about her son’s death while she’s seemingly intoxicated. In Episode 7, one of Exotic’s zoo employees is so incapacitated that he passes out mid-interview. Exotic’s campaign manager is interviewed early on as a fresh-faced former Walmart manager enthusiastically crafting Exotic’s libertarian platform; a year or so later, he too has lost teeth, and appears considerably more disheveled than during his clean-cut canvassing days.

… North Carolinians don’t need an agency or committee of Burr’s peers to tell us what he did was inexcusably wrong. In a crisis that will define his state and country for years, the senator failed in his most fundamental duty, to serve and protect the people who elected him.

Now, everything he does will be colored by that failure. Republicans know Burr is an albatross, an example opponents will use throughout this election season to argue that too many in the GOP, especially the president, have seen COVID-19 through the lens of personal gains and losses. North Carolinians know that he will be a source of shame to our state.

Scanning stories about America’s highest-profile insider trader, I saw that Rolling Stone (along with virtually every other media outlet) had a story about him. Let it be by Taibbi, I thought; let it be Matt Taibbi… No one’s as good on the very highest-level greed as Taibbi, famous for coining the term vampire squid (“[Goldman Sachs] is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”).

So – click – and there he was. Zeyer vunderlekh. I haven’t read the piece yet. Let’s see…

Members of congress trading against a pandemic is as low as it gets.

Yes… that’s why The Onion took notice. Now we get a precis.

[T]he Senate’s Intelligence Committee chief was briefed by intel officials, actively reassured the public, dumped stock, whispered the real dope to rich connected folk, got busted by media, then feebly claimed he made financial decisions watching CNBC, before a seething public bracing for years of agony due to financial collapse. If there’s such a thing as a grand slam of political assholedom, Burr hit it.

LOL. I told you this guy was the best.

The coronavirus trading scandals may finally inspire enough public outrage to provoke change [in congressional insider trading laws] … [But if] not just one but many members of congress feel sufficiently bulletproof that they’re not scared of trading against a pandemic, how will the government ever deal with less obviously grotesque issues?

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.

… Committee.

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!

And it’s UD’s very own George Washington University!

… (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.