1.) The murderers of Florida State law professor Dan Markel have slowly, slowly, gone to jail. True, the hired thugs who shot his brains out while he sat in his car in his driveway were put away long ago; but the woman who brought the thugs and the criminal mastermind together was convicted of first degree murder only last year. The mastermind – Markel’s ex-brother in law, who was pissed Markel wanted equal custody of Markel’s kids after he and this guy’s sister divorced – goes on trial in October. Insanely, it has been nine years since Markel was killed. His parents and sister have suffered through those years, waiting for the worst of the conspirators to face justice. Finally, it seems, the worst of them will.
2.) The absurdly corrupt University of Southern California (put its name in my search engine and go to town) conspired with an absurdly corrupt LA politician to make money for the school in exchange for favors for the politician (details here). Mark Ridley-Thomas will go to prison for three and a half years.
The Martha’s Vineyard library wars rage on. My headline is from 2022; this year, the female genital mutilator’s best friend has again been dissed by his bookish neighbors and is again screaming about how he doesn’t care that he’s been frozen out of the island’s book fair because he’s so great and but but but he’s going to sue the library for a quadrillion dollars anyway and shut it down forever so the elderly matrons of the Vineyard will have to find someplace else to volunteer haha.
He says the maltreatment’s cuz he’s all in with Trump and all; but really if you’re looking for reasons to dissociate from an unacceptably malsain person, Dershowitz offers so much more than that, from his way-close friendship with Jeffrey Epstein to his eager legal defense of some of the scuzziest humanoids on the planet. This is a man who calls Germans who oppose male circumcision Nazis. He has weathered years of being accused of plagiarism. He has just been sanctioned. Etc. When it comes to reasons to cancel Dershowitz, take your pick.
‘[Bruno] Cua planned his attack weeks in advance, brought weapons to the Capitol, tried to terrorize congressional staffers and was repeatedly aggressive toward police, prosecutors said… “Cua played a unique and prominent role on January 6, opening the Senate Chamber to the rioters, escalating confrontations, and leading other rioters into and through the Capitol.”
… Cua and his parents drove from their home in Milton, Georgia, to Washington D.C…
Cua was armed with pepper spray and a metal baton — weapons given to him by his father — when rioters breached police lines on the west side of the Capitol, according to prosecutors. After climbing scaffolding, Cua entered the building through the Upper West Terrace doors and and walked down a hallway toward the Senate.
“As Cua walked down the hallway, he tried to open every single office door he passed by pulling on doorknobs, pounding on the doors with his fist, and kicking the doors,” prosecutors wrote.
They said Cua intended to intimidate staffers who were behind the doors as he yelled, “Hey! Where are the swamp rats hiding?”
Cua went to the third floor, where he shoved a Capitol police officer who was trying to lock doors to the Senate gallery. After the officer retreated, Cua entered the gallery, shouting “This is our house! This is our country!” Jumping onto the Senate floor, he sat in the chair for then-Vice President Mike Pence, leaned back and propped his feet up on a desk.
Then he opened a door, allowing dozens of other rioters onto the Senate floor. Before leaving, Cua rifled through desks belonging to Senators Charles Grassley, John Thune and Dianne Feinstein.’
All that, and only eighteen years old. Off you go to prison, lad! Maw and Paw must be so proud.
When a lying shit-faced racist defames you and pretty much ruins your life, your options sorta whittle down to suing the motherfucker.
And damages-wise, things are looking good for Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, what with Rudy G. admitting today that yeah I made it all up but I thought, you know, women… And black to boot … Who’s gonna bother defending that?
What a distinction for Harvard, which gets a prominent mention every time Alan Dershowitz steps in another pile of shit, that he’s now been sanctioned for his involvement in Lake’s frivolous, time-wasting, and destructive suit against the integrity of Arizona’s electoral system. Hard to think of a more embarrassing old fart than Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus.
A rich dude in New Jersey just went ahead and cut down 32 of his neighbor’s trees because he wanted a better view.
Yes, he’ll be hit with an absolute fortune in fines. Yes, his name is all over the news so now everyone knows who he is and hates him. Yes, along with the fines he has to pay to replant the forest. Yes, almost certainly his enraged, equally rich neighbor will sue him for mucho damages on top of all the other payments.
All that and more is true. But it also remains true that this one POS has turned a beautiful mature forest into a dead mess simply because he’s a pig. We can’t fix that.
The question is not Why is a violent woman running around the big city being violent? That’s not newsworthy. The question needs to be put to Hunter College: Why is one of these on your faculty?
Part of the answer lies in ye olde erotic attraction to radically chic violence that Leonard Bernstein made famous in that same city in the ‘seventies. Shellyne Rodriguez’s art, she tells an interviewer, “highlight[s] the audaciousness of the Biker Boys who take the streets undeterred by NYPD’s futile crackdown.” Makes elements of brainy artsy NY go pitapat.
This sort of thing also exists on some sort of urban mischief continuum with the non-revolutionary, white collar crime (undeterred by the SEC’s futile crackdown) that has always found representation on the boards of trustees of the sorts of schools that think Shellyne Rodriguez is cool. Recall the many high-level lawless money men/university trustees we’ve featured over decades on this blog, starting with Yeshiva University’s dynamic duo, Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin. At the very top of this mafia today are of course Trump/Giuliani (who hold far grander positions than mere trustee) and a whole world of superrich rapacious give-a-shit NY bad boys… UD‘s just saying that when a significant high-profile portion of the local culture is composed of high-risk-loving financial criminals (see Steven Cohen, Brown University etc. etc.) quite a few of them holding powerful positions on university boards of trustees, we shouldn’t be too surprised that this sort of world has room for other sorts of sociopaths. The school that hired Rodriguez features convicted insider trader and trustee Leon Cooperman.
These white/nonwhite criminal twains, trustee and professor, meet with a mutual thrill, a tacit sense of recognition, at a campus cocktail party, say, and if Rodriguez hadn’t attacked a man with a machete the other day, Cooperman would probably eventually have signed off on the tenure of Hunter’s own Jessica Krug. (‘Perhaps one of the most disgusting things [Krug] publicly did was to attempt to justify the brutal murder of 15-year-old Lesandro Guzman-Feliz, who died in a machete attack at the hands of gang members in a case of mistaken identity, by claiming that had he lived he would have ended up being a cop.‘) High-flying scofflaw cultures tend to have no trouble with nasty pieces of work like Rodriguez. Self-aggrandizing nihilist subversive meets self-aggrandizing nihilist subversive.
Yes, yes, post-machete, post-other forms of non white collar violence, Hunter has dropped Rodriguez like a hot potato.
Hunter happily goes on loving itself some bad boy Leon Cooperman, but then he’s not a poor artist. He’s a rich insider trader. He gets to keep his trusteeship.
So the question of how Hunter College found itself holding on to Rodriguez in the first place has two answers: Ever-popular radical violence, and the allied and fully mainstreamed “audaciousness” of NY white collar criminality.
Blast from the past time – see these 2022 posts for background – as yet another high-level University of Southern California scandal resolves itself. We’re done with the deadhead dean of the med school; we’ve moved on to the bribery-facilitating dean of the social work school, who has already pled guilty. Veteran LA politician Ridley, her comrade in crime (truly grubby details here), now also awaits sentencing.
I know – it’s all wholly overshadowed by the first indicted prez… but since we brought this up last year, we needed to finish the story.
