“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!

Four different people came forward with concerns to [Vice Principal Ebony] Parker about the student on the day of the shooting, the lawsuit alleges.

During opening statements, [the teacher’s attorney] claimed that Parker did not act on her authority to search the student or remove him from school…

An Israeli soldier states the grotesque truth.

About sixty percent (!) of its GDP comes from cybercrime.

What makes it even prettier is that they traffic, imprison, and abuse the scammers.

It’s where all the rich scum go.

Federally allocated taxpayer money to feed hungry Missouri children! Twenty million dollars! So generous! SOOOO generous that the person allocating it figured she could take most of it herself – McMansions and a fluro yellow $200,000 Mercedes and lots more shit like that. She left a trickle for the kids.

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UPDATE: Got sixteen years.

… is trashy enough.”

Every day their beloved superintendent turns out to be guilty of yet another category of crime. Today: Drug trafficking! Stay tuned!

He was arrested by ICE with the help of the Iowa State Patrol on Sept. 26. ICE said Roberts attempted to flee arrest and was found hiding in the brush. The vehicle he was driving was found with $3,000 in cash, a fixed blade knife and a loaded Glock 9mm pistol, which led to additional criminal charges of being an illegal alien in possession of firearms.

A real gift to Trump. All tied up with a ribbon.

Iowa will never live it down. They actually paid money to a firm to vet the guy!

Wouldn’t want to leave Yale out of the Epstein saga. The Yale Daily News weighs in.

The germ theory of disease is the work of the devil.

Just when this blog started to run out of bad things to say about Louisiana.

Yeah but meanwhile there’s an easy $150,000 to make by lying… er… testifying about a Tylenol/autism link. Headline, Harvard Crimson:

Harvard’s Public Health Dean Was Paid $150,000 to Testify Tylenol Causes Autism

Really disgusting. Surprising this behavior comes not only from Harvard, but Harvard’s dean of public health!

Greedy little dude refuses to talk to the Crimson about it, which is NOT surprising. If the Crimson keeps at the story, its reporters stand a chance of earning a journalism prize or two. And meanwhile, the greedy little dude gets to enjoy his time in the Trump sun.

Talk about trading on Harvard’s name!

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Shades of Dipak Panigrahy. Monetizing your Harvard connection in exchange for lying/plagiarizing/whatever ain’t exactly unpredecented. Remember another of Harvard’s finest, Ben Edelman? Andrei Shleiffer?

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Whaddya want me to say? Just tell me what to say in order for me to get paid or to save my ass:

In a statement on Monday night, Dr. Baccarelli slightly distanced himself from [the Trump administration’s claim of a causal relationship,] saying, “Further research is needed to confirm the association and determine causality, but based on existing evidence, I believe that caution about acetaminophen use during pregnancy — especially heavy or prolonged use — is warranted.”

In his 2023 expert report for the lawsuit, however, Dr. Baccarelli wrote that “substantial evidence supports a strong, positive, causal association between acetaminophen” and neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly autism and A.D.H.D.

Will he be fired? Stay tuned. Will a congressional inquiry happen? Stay tuned.

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“THE RIGHT DEAN AT THE RIGHT MOMENT”

Uh. Okay.

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Headline, Wall Street Journal:

Trump’s Favorite Harvard Professor