The next day, food and drinks with another trustee, Hilton Kramer, and a second guest cost the university $707. Mr. Kramer [was] The New York Observer’s art critic and a media critic for The New York Post.

The meal charges were actually modest; it was the bar tab that drove up the grand total. The bill was $454 for the 1982 Brion wine and Martell 100 cognac that Dr. Silber and Dr. Diamandopoulos drank. And the 1983 Chaval and Martell that he and Mr. Kramer sipped cost $552.

Whenever UD reads about the efforts of this or that university administrator to blow the school’s money on personal indulgences, she remembers the golden age of Diamandopoulos/Silber/Kramer, and it all seems so small. I mean yeah the current chancellor of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities has apparently blown the money he got from hardworking parents on bogus moving expenses, double-paid housing allowances, school credit card abuse, $1,000 per ride chauffeured trips, und so weiter. But does all of that even begin to form the Russian imperial picture of the guys sipping five hundred dollar cognac? Babe, you know they left some of that cognac on the table, or hurled it at their server, just to say HAHAFUCKYOUFUCKEVERYBODY.

I’m not getting that intensity of vibe from Terrence Cheng, though the limo rides are impressive. But even they lack the FUCKTHEWORLD psychosis of his predecessors, one of whom was so spectacularly filthy that he got a whole book written about him.

Who knew wee Reagan Airport was one of the most dangerous places to land/take off in America? If you grew up here, like ol’ UD, you think of Reagan as the dinky downhome alternative to sleek vast Saarinen-designed Dulles (with BWI — we’re really spoiled; lots of terminals near ‘thesda — a kind of afterthought for a quick hop to Bermuda). Now it turns out that self-important assholes have been jamming the place and creating a hellscape people in charge of the airport have been screaming about forever. Reagan Airport “is probably the most dangerous airport in the United States,” one pilot wrote in 2015. “The controllers are pushing, pushing, pushing in an attempt to handle the traffic they have.”

And ain’t it sweet that little Wichita’s Rep. pushed and pushed and got a daily flight out there THAT THE AIRPORT CAN BARELY HANDLE AND ITS ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN BEGGING FOR ALL THE ADDITIONAL FLIGHTS TO STOP.

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That copter thing. Reminds me of the Rennert/Bloomberg thing of just landing your immense thundering personal helicopter whenever and wherever you feel like it — illegality, and torment of homeowners, be damned.

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“Every senator in particular wants a nonstop flight to and from wherever they live,” said [Peter] DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat. He noted that a reauthorization of the Federal Aviation Administration passed last year added even more flights to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. “The airport said, ‘Don’t do it.’ And they did it. So they added to what DCA said is already an overly congested and over-capacity airport.” (Congress has added more than 60 new flights to Reagan since 2000, over the objections of airport officials.)

… The airport authority said, “We are over capacity. We cannot accommodate more flights, and we think this is going to be disruptive.” Unfortunately, … Congress mandated adding more flights into National Airport, so that more senators can have direct flights. I was chairman of the committee, and I always had to connect somewhere. I didn’t ask for a direct flight. So, that’s a problem. That is a problem, the political influence over the airport, as most recently exhibited in the last FAA bill. So, I think we might need to revisit the amount of traffic.

How third world, my dears. Bigass military egos, bigass senatorial egos, and here we are. Disgusting.

When they also run programs, and when it’s a conspiracy, it can be close to impossible.

UCLA – a pretty respectable school – handed the running of its orthodontics school over to a set of buddies who made a point of admitting students from way-rich middle east kingdoms. Once in residence, these students were ordered to come up with, er, supplemental fees in the tens of thousands of dollars, and if they didn’t they’d be out on their oil-rich asses.

Not sure how the school figured out what was going on, but for reasons of its own the school – after throwing the members of the conspiracy out – did nothing by way of prosecution of anyone, and worked hard to keep a report about their malfeasance secret.

Amy Wax loudly espouses views that most reasonable people find repellent. This does not justify punishing her for expressing them. Her suspension, with the other penalties, is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity. 

John McWhorter was right back in October, when he defended the free speech rights of U Penn’s benighted law professor; and now that she has, with great fanfare, sued the university for having imposed sanctions on her, this long sad story will continue for some time to play out.

FWIW, ol’ UD figures she’ll win her case and get herself some money and an apology. Her lawyers can easily point to really disgusting speech from U Penn professors that has occasioned not a peep.

That’d be Jews standing around drinking the blood of Gazans, vs Wax showing her racism. Lots of ick to go around at Penn apparently.

Wax is old and has cancer – maybe Penn thinks it can wait this out.

It’s hard to beat Operation Sudden Fall, but practically incinerating one of our frat pledges at an illegal party comes close. Scummy frats and don’t give a shit administrations remain central to the life of the mind at SDSU; expect more good shit from our school’s unique perspective on higher education.

His declaration that the Nazi gas chambers were “merely a detail” of World War Two history and that the Nazi occupation of France was “not especially inhumane” were for many people repulsive.

The arrest of prof. Dairon Garcia for drug trafficking is the latest of too many to count instances of high-level sleaze. Feast your eyes on this blog’s coverage of the nation’s dirtiest med school.

‘So why are none of its executives going to prison?‘

So this guy helpfully explains that banks can’t really do that much drug money policing; so UD assumes that TD Bank will now reform itself by issuing stern warnings to employees that they MUST NEVER exchange emails about drug money.

While we understand that our laundering of vast amounts of drug money is amusing, there is nothing amusing about the penalty you will receive (instant firing) if our surveillance of your work as well as private email/texts/etc uncovers even cursory use of words like COLOMBIA GET AWAY WITH LOLOLOLOL DRUG MONEY BAD GUYS EASY LOOK OTHER WAY VENEZUELA DEPOSITED A MILLION BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

Much of its asset base comes from accepting gobs of cash from international drug cartels, which you and I know as money laundering, but which at TD is considered plain old customer service. For ten years the bank (which sends transfer your accounts letters to Les UDs all the time — perhaps it has fingered us as people in search of a hiding place for criminal gains) has happily reached out and washed billions of dirty drug dollars; and now that it’s been caught it has to pretend that for a decade THE GOODIES at the bank had no idea, and THE BADDIES at the bank were ingeniously unspeakably undetectedly evil and we promise we’re going to fire all of them and pay a big fine and all.

But what you have to understand is that no one of any importance at the bank had anything to do with the drug shit. The entire insanely profitable and systemic scheme was hatched by a bunch of underling nonentities so don’t even think of putting any of the bank’s executives in jail or anything.

Pay no attention to that massive Ponzi scheme we were involved in last year, by the way! Again, we paid a big fine; a few underling nonentities took the fall, etc. etc. We are a dignified illustrious upstanding financial institution.

You can’t make this shit up.

New College Ranking Drops Double Digits

Second Year in a Row

(Background here.)

No way.

… UD reposts this commentary on the biggest corruption case of our time.

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‘… Malaysia’s then-Prime Minister Najib Razak … channeled over RM 2.67 billion (approximately US$700 million) into his personal bank accounts from 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), a government-run strategic development company.’

The hyper-pious ex-PM (‘Najib recently said Islam’s holy book, the Koran, would be the guide for all government policies and actions.’) allows modesty edicts to repress Malaysian women, while he himself pleases Allah by stealing seven hundred million dollars directly from the Malaysian people.

Theologically, it is a conundrum; Allah smiles equally upon downtrodden black-cloaked women AND the world’s largest kleptocracy case. He smiles at sick Malaysian children dying from lack of treatment because, of the six billion in the fund meant to help them and their country, four billion was stolen.

Everything would have been peachy; America’s sweetheart, Goldman Sachs, would have pocketed its suspiciously massive fees from 1MDB, all the other crooks who stole hundreds of millions for themselves would have been fine…

But people began to notice the absence of four plus billion dollars from the world. Things began to sour, see, onaccounta

‘Because the money was stolen, it wasn’t invested; without investment returns, the fund couldn’t pay back the bonds.’

Shades of pious Bernie Madoff (in his case his piety was orthodox Judaism — he acted as the treasurer – not making this up – of Yeshiva University)! Pious Najib and his legion of co-conspirators overlooked the fact that if anything goes wrong with schemes like this, you’re up shit’s creek cuz the money’s already up the nose of your cocaine-snorting, super-yacht-private-jet-super-thin-nyc-penthouse-owning Islamically pious investment group.

Najib now enjoys twelve years of uninterrupted prayer in a Malaysian prison.

Watch this video, titled Behind Goldman Sachs’ Alleged Involvement in the 1MBD Scandal. It explains the gist of the thing. I know you’re distracted by The Trump 300 (700?), but trust me 1MDB is more important; America will survive a once-in-a-lifetime madman having attained the presidency; the sad sick world cannot be defended from lethal international criminals (including, again, our own adorable Goldman Sachs) unless we all make an effort to understand how they are killing us.

Silly boy.

Details.