… a place where her family has roots starting in 1911. Like Myrtle Beach, OC has allowed itself (for stupid short-sighted commercial reasons) to be taken over by anarchic and/or criminal elements; and now that it’s a guns/booze/street fights/muscle car wasteland, there’s not much it can do about it. It’s hard to walk back the destruction of civic life.

The mayor, for instance, outlawed a major car rally for this year, after it spent last year trashing the city and “terrorizing” residents. But the rally guys said fuck you we’re coming anyway. They’re in OC right now, and will stay for a few more days.

In the language of a desperate, last-minute law the city got through the General Assembly, these are the actions that can trigger a $1,000 fine and/or sixty days in jail.

• Excessive or abrupt acceleration or deceleration.
• Skidding, squealing, burning or smoking tires.
• Swerving or swaying a vehicle.
• Producing an unreasonably loud engine noise.
• Grinding gears.
• Wheels losing contact with the ground.
• Transporting a passenger on the hood or roof.

Weren’t you smart to buy a condo in Ocean City?

How dully predictable that the endpoint of Jessica Krug’s violent nihilism is murder. Here she is exciting herself and her audience by applauding the gang killing of a fifteen year old kid who wanted to be a policeman.

Wonder if the clip was part of her George Washington University tenure application.

Owner selling because she “doesn’t need so much space.”

… lacks are two Presa Canarios.

… who, with her husband, did a Martin Shkreli and massively jacked up the price of a desperately needed commodity – in this case, hand sanitizer. Ellen was in charge of chatting up rich people in order to get them to give enormous sums to the university, but apparently OU doesn’t want to be associated with her any longer.

Wow. They certainly took their time taking them down. It’s hard to read about his activities in the Congo without throwing up.

That’s what it looks like Amy Cooper harbors, now that a second instance of her calling the powers of the law down on a man who has angered her has surfaced.

[Martin] Priest said Amy developed a “fascination” with him when they worked together at Lehman Brothers and filed [an expensive] lawsuit against him in 2015 with “fabricated” claims. “I never had a romantic relationship with her, period. She purposely engineered false allegations against me. And she made up allegations targeting my family’s physical safety,” Priest told The [Daily] News. … The lawsuit was dismissed in March 2018 after all parties failed to appear at back-to-back hearings, online court records show.

Right, so she’d done her thing, made her point, scared the shit out of the guy, and now her work was done. No need to expose her lies to scrutiny in court.

Precedents? I’ll give you one real, and one fictional. Whenever another Amy — Amy Bishop — got mad, she went hard against the person who made her mad and then boohooed to the cops that a frail innocent well-bred person like her could never do anything violent. Even more crazily, there’s Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest — another highly educated, impressively employed urbanite who didn’t take it well when a man angered her.

More violent than Cooper? Sure. But who knows what a cop might have done if Cooper had stayed at the scene and continued to make her hysterical claims against Christian Cooper?

Only Vinod Khosla and his beach (scroll down) can hold a candle to the story of this house in LA.

America!

Only he forgot a couple of things.

1. He gambled away $1.8 billion of Harvard’s money.
2. He made five million dollars working for a hedge fund while still Harvard’s president.

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.

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

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.