… a creation of satirist Daniel Greenberg in his novel Tech Transfer, lives again as story after story lately features massive theft of federal/state tax dollars.

The Louvre, the Prado, and (I can attest) the Uffizi are all an ordeal, “like the Metro at rush hour,” and everyone’s too greedy to do anything about it.

Prosecutors said he included a fraudulent invoice in his [loan] application, which said he had been paid more than $800 for a “Three layer cake — 80’s Themed – Orange, Blue, Black and White — Tie dye color.” 

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Guy was soft on crime too. His bribery deal with funeral home directors was totally dependent on dead victims.

… AND it’s Texas A&M!

Anyone paying attention to that intellectual έρημος CANNOT be surprised that their BOT has now begun banning long stretches of Plato from classrooms because … uh… gender?

”What kind of university” does this, asks the miscreant who tried to teach a Dialogue or two.

The kind of university that tells the miscreant he either dumps transy P. pronto or he can teach Ethics and Engineering instead! UD is not making this up.

The local AAUP says

“A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust — and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning.”

Who da fuck ever regarded A&M as a serious anything? Have you read UD’s years of posts about that football-addled joke?

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Reminds UD of Benedictine College in Kansas, where

Sometimes, people here quietly admit, it goes too far. Like the students who loudly proclaim how often they go to Mass, or the young man who quit his classics course because he refused to read the works of ancient Greek pagans.

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UPDATE: Great title! Texas Plato Massacre

Bad boy Lawrence Krauss was forced, back in 2018, to retire from Arizona State; you’d think ASU would know by now that you take down bad girl Elisa New’s university page before announcing she’s been dumped too. But there she is, bright and shiny, eager to gentle you with poetry…

A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road… He had already shown himself capable of betraying friends and patrons who trusted him, but now he had advanced from the flagrant abuse of expense accounts to apparently absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars… Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds…

And there’s his BFF:

The year after meeting Epstein, [Alan] Dershowitz wrote an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent lawyer. [LOL]… Keeping Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s highest-profile and longest-serving defenders.

For mercenary reasons, Harvard prof Elisa New waxed lyrical about child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — until the world of decent people came crashing down on her and she couldn’t do it anymore. What an inspiring guide to the delicate art of poetry.

Don’t NOBODY do hazing like Texas. Plus nobody down there gives a shit.

According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.

Rapidly escalating outbreak. Stay the hell out of South Carolina.

… I stumble, at the Waldorf Astoria, on the global meeting where FIFA bigwigs divide the final World Cup teams into groups.

Faithful readers of this blog know how disgustingly corrupt FIFA is.

Palm Beach has hit billionaire financier Nelson Peltz and his wife, Claudia, with a daily fine [of $250] because officials say the couple built a padel court on their expansive estate without the town’s approval.

Very common billionaire behavior, as this blog has noted. When a culture produces billionaires, it produces people for whom rules and regulations mean jackshit. They’re perfectly happy to pay $250 daily for the rest of their lives in order to protect their belligerence.

Shades of New York‘s ultraorthodox cults! In both the well-established, ongoing theft of tax dollars by ultraorthodox groups in NY, and the more recently uncovered theft of tax dollars by Somali groups in Minnesota, fear of racism/religious bigotry-based lawsuits, and fear that being called out as racist will destroy one’s political career, has stayed the hand of governments in the face of staggeringly obvious crime.

‘Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.’ True, true, so the thing to do is continue stealing in the country that rescued you from that. Stealing from one of our least corrupt states, Minnesota.

No one, certainly. And yet the rise to great public positions in our once great republic of Donald Trump, Lawrence Summers, Marc Tessier-Lavigne, and other nasty pieces of work, forces the question of personal viciousness and the survival of liberal democracy. If Matt Ford is right that

At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.

then we need to return, at the very least, to Judith Shklar’s Ordinary Vices and its meticulous anatomy of what’s worst in us, as we try to forge American civic life despite it.

[Summers] is so convinced of his own genius, and he is so convinced that he is smarter than anyone else, that he is very bad at listening to other people, people who might be able to stop him, prevent him from doing really stupid things. I’m sure that he had people telling him, don’t be emailing Jeffrey Epstein, that’s a bad idea. But he would just go ahead and do it anyway because he has that kind of hubris, right?

He did one of the world’s worst ever fixed income trades when he was president of Harvard, where he decided that he was going to build a massive new campus across the river. And he knew that this massive new campus was going to cost a lot of money. And he was also convinced that interest rates were very low and they wouldn’t go down any further. And in fact, they were going to go up further.

And so he reckoned that when Harvard in the future was going to borrow money to build the campus, he wanted Harvard to be able to borrow the money in the future at the interest rates today. So he entered into this incredibly complex sort of future forward swap thingy. And then, of course, interest rates went down rather than up. He had to unwind the swap because they never built the campus. And he cost the university about a billion dollars.

… is the provocative title of a New Republic essay which goes there. It goes to the place where you say that the fault lies with us. Not just them – the Trump voters. Us – the other side.

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net,” [John] Adams once wrote to [a] friend. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral … people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So far, Americans are failing that test—and the republic itself... It would be tempting to dismiss the Epstein scandals as a purely elite phenomenon. But this is the society for which the American people have voted. The 2016 election could once be dismissed as a constitutional fluke since most Americans voted for Trump’s opponent. The 2024 election is more definitional. This country had nearly a decade of experience with Trump in power—the corruption, the lies, the bigotry and misogyny and abuse and violence—and welcomed more of it.

This is, if you like, the importance of Larry Summers. That Harvard University, of all places, appointed a corrupt greedy licentious reprobate president is a chapter in a story. It is a story about millions and millions of Americans, including our corrupt elites, including even presidents of our greatest universities, failing the test and failing the republic. Don’t forget Stanford’s disgraced corrupt billionaire ex-president! Coast to coast, at our greatest schools, reprehensible self-serving cynics and liars are appointed president, just as Trump is elected and re-elected the country’s president.

As late as 2014, Harvard ignored this letter from an anti-trafficking organization: “[It is] unusual and disheartening . . . to read almost daily press releases distributed by a pedophile [who] feels entitled to identify himself as a ‘Harvard philanthropist.” Who was allowed to identify himself as a Harvard philanthropist.

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At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.

Summers abused those he considered his inferiors – women – and he got his thrill by proxy. We assume.

Everyone [outside the contemporary American elite is] part of an underclass whom the wealthy can abuse and immiserate at their own discretion. The Epstein emails give the rest of us a glimpse into this world, where even the most grotesque crimes can be forgiven or ignored out of a sense of elite solidarity—at least until they become too publicly awkward to privately sustain—and where amorality is required to participate.