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.

… the most morally bankrupt of characters… [lacking] basic moral and behavioral standards…’

The Harvard Crimson calls for Larry Summers to resign.

Summers’ appointment as Harvard’s president “worried some of those who knew [him]. The economist had earned a reputation as a bull in a china shop, rudely dismissive of the opinions of others, astoundingly arrogant even by Washington standards.”

Some gems in this Politico piece.

It’s not just that Summers continued a friendship with a man who clearly had a pathological sexual interest in girls and had gone to jail for his sexual proclivities. It is also hard to imagine how Summers could have been so stupid as not to expect that emails with a convicted felon might one day go public.

As for the content of the emails… much of it is, in a word, gross. Certainly, we all write emails that, deprived of context, could embarrass us if they went public. But Summers’ emails went to a deeper, darker place; there is no context that absolves them.

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 In July 2011, the former Harvard president was interviewed at the Aspen Institute by its head, author Walter Isaacson, in front of an admiring group. A friendly Isaacson asked about the veracity of a scene in the movie The Social Network in which Summers agrees to meet with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two Harvard undergraduates who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them. The “Winklevi,” as Summers referred to them, came from Greenwich, Conn., rowed crew, were tall, handsome and old school — they wore coats and ties to meet the Harvard president. Summers disliked them instinctively, and the film portrays him treating them with humiliating condescension. Was it true? Isaacson wanted to know.

“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities,” Summers answered. “One is that they are looking for a job and have an interview. The other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”

The remark — a former president of Harvard describing two of its students as assholes — prompted near-unanimous laughter from the audience, titillated by this trash-talking rule-breaker. Summers wore the chuffed look of a man who rarely tells a successful joke but is pleased to have done so now. The funny thing is that Summers was wrong on both counts: Zuckerberg wound up paying a $65 million settlement to the Winklevoss twins, and Larry Summers turned out to be the asshole.

As vile a compendium of moral squalors as his French economist twin, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Summers has for decades evaded the reputational death he so richly deserves. Finally, this morning, his long, gushing intimacy with/admiration for Jeffrey Epstein has forced his hand a tiny bit – He’s going to keep teaching and also to hold on to many of his bigshot appointments in Democratic policy circles to be sure, but okay he’ll step back here and there somehow somewhere from ‘public life’ …

Like Prince Andrew, a degenerate protected for decades by the crown, Summers has for years depended on the kindness of powerful friends to misspend/ineptly manage public and private money, to hang with fellow degenerates, to turn Harvard University into a hedge fund, and to broadcast mentally retarded statements about women. The death of Elizabeth finally destroyed Andrew; the life of Epstein has perhaps done the deed on Summers. Perhaps! He’s not yet been banished to a cottage deep in the thousand acre Sandringham wood; the hapless Democrats are probably hapless enough to keep him front and center…

Seriously, read this rather long 2020 piece on the dude by Robert Kuttner and ask yourself why it took five more years plus domestic life with a convicted sex offender for fate to catch up with this guy, and the answer has everything to do with hated elites who make everyone else take a licking and who themselves just keep ticking. How in God’s name did Harvard prez Summers survive the Andrei Shleifer scandal? How did Shleifer survive it? Elites protect their own; elites aren’t like you and me. Greedy for money, hugely powerful, they have contempt for the little peoples’ silly rules of ethical conduct. Why shouldn’t they? Their intimate Alan Dershowitz is always there to bail them out.

Keep reading the Kuttner. I know it’s long, but it has to be, because it is touching on the serial sordid cavortings of Democratic Sage Larry Summers, who must have breathed a sigh of relief when Epstein died cuz Larry’s secrets died with him. But Epstein turned out to be another Rasputin, a man of many lives before and after the grave.

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Fun ‘degrees of separation’ fact: Summers buddy, protégé, and co-author Jason Furman bought his Cambridge house from UD‘s friend Peter. It’s a house UD knows well, but she’s certain Furman has totally redone the thing, so she probably wouldn’t recognize it. (I put that particular link over Furman’s name because a fawning 2008 NYT piece about Summers’ rehabilitation after the Harvard presidency fiasco ends with this wonderful quote: “Now, who talks about Harvard?” Mr. Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary, said. “It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.” In a few years, perhaps the same paper will roll out Furman to say “Now, who talks about Jeffrey Epstein? It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.”)

“This kind of mutually reinforcing corruption is what one sees in failing societies and empires in decline.”

To protect his own ass, Trump’s currently going after prominent Dems who got down and dirty with Epstein; and, as loyal readers of this blog know, Harvard prez Larry Summers was way dirty. Mutually reinforcing corruption being what it is, Harvard never issued a condemnatory statement about Summers, but hold onto your hats cuz it’s probably coming.

Here he is dining with Mr Lolita (and Dersh, natch) where? Oh, babe, you can’t make this shit up. An Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurant steps from Harvard’s campus. Your blogeuese has eaten there and can attest that it attracted droves of thirteen year old girls (it no longer exists).

[rick friedman/polaris]

On the multifarious ethical/financial corruptions of Summers, feast your eyes. Scroll, scroll, scroll.

… the grotesque Dan Snyder house undergoes more than a mere reduction; it thins all the way down to nothingness. For the price of a pre-war Manhattan studio with a Central Park view, you can now boast a home the size of Dulles Airport.

Will anyone bite? This will be fun to watch.

This blog has long chronicled one of the most notorious pathologies of billionaires — the compulsion to generate perpetual domestic construction noise. Infinite implosion, enlargement, elaboration, further enlargement, and finally reimplosion as the results fail to satisfy, or as the municipality makes the billionaire take it all down because he was too arrogant to get permits… Then the lengthy lawsuits resulting in further, somewhat amended, construction, deconstruction, reconstruction, deconstruction…

Imagine having spent a lot of money to live in a classy discreet Manhattan co-op only to discover that the hedgie next door is deep into a lifelong wall-explosion frenzy. Imagine (see my headline) living on Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto street and trying to deal not only with endless thundering construction zones but daily traffic from his illegal personal Montessori school, as well as from his restlessly coming and going non-specific serf-army. “Frankly I’m not sure what’s going on,” one neighbor said…“Except for noise and construction debris.”

Building private institutions (schools, churches, synagogues, and health clinics are popular) is another billionaire pathology, part of the paranoid journey whereby withdrawal from the public world into a hypersecure fully equipped private world completes itself.

The incoming mayor of a metropolitan area rife with billionaires and close-to-billionaires won big in the last election in part because billionaires have made themselves detestable. If Andrew Cuomo thought he could turn things around by taking gobs of money from … billionaires, he was a real idiot for thinking so.

We could spend time, I guess, analyzing the root causes of the two behaviors that make everyone who shares their world hate billionaires – total withdrawal from the public realm without the decency to shut up about it. The rest of us must hear and witness the cacophony of their world-contempt, their mad, haughty, removal from humanity. Howard Hughes had nothing on these guys. But he in his day was a one-off. In places like NY and CA they constitute a society – a loud, rule-flouting, society, for whom what lies outside the wall implosions exists to be ignored or exploited.

For all its seeming withdrawal, the ethos is one, obviously, of naked aggression.

Next thing you know he’ll say we shouldn’t have trillionaires; and today’s Elon’s big day!