August 19th, 2025
‘The CT5-V Blackwing Is Cadillac’s Most Cutthroat Performance Car’

‘[The Blackwing] immediately became Cadillac’s most powerful and aggressive vehicle across its extensive portfolio… Unlike the standard CT5-V, which utilizes a twin-turbocharged 3.0-liter V6 engine producing 360 hp, the Blackwing wades into battle with a huge supercharged 6.2-liter V8, which transmits an angry 668 hp to those complaining rear tires… The raging powerplant … gets the Blackwing to 60 mph in 4.6 seconds, with the grunt being channeled through either a six-speed manual or 10-speed automatic transmission.’

This guy paid $200,000 so that he could “driv[e] 103 mph in [a] wrong-way crash that killed [an] Olympic swimmer” and along the way fuck up six other drivers. What power! Now he’s in jail waiting trial for “aggravated manslaughter, vehicular homicide, and assault by auto.”

‘Cutthroat… aggressive… raging… angry… battle… supercharged… ‘ Paid a fortune and got exactly what he wanted and now it’s just a matter of cell time before he can parade his lethal rage in front of us all. Guns or cars, a lot of Americans can’t get enough, and I’m sure right now Cadillac’s engineers are studying the crash to see how he could have hit ten cars instead of seven, and killed three instead of one. VROOOOOOM.

August 8th, 2025
‘Princeton Eliminates Tuition for Families Making $250,000 a Year’

Gevalt. TOLD you this is a rich country.

August 7th, 2025
Lucky Luciano – or no, his name is Michael Lucchesi – held important positions at a financially struggling hospital in Brooklyn…

… and through seven long years he stole and stole and stole from it. His reported haul was $1.4 million, but I’m thinking that’s all they could trace, cuz for a serious larcenist, capable of watching closeup while patients suffered due to … mysterious underfunding, less than three or four million over that period of time is unthinkable.

This story is about the perils of hospitals (and universities — recall the University of Louisville) which become stinky pigsties. They start attracting only pigs, and things get worse and worse. Nor are these pig pits about to detect the rootin’ going on inside them. By definition the only people left in the sty are thieves or idiots.

July 30th, 2025
Tourist Brochure Copy, Hamptons

‘The Hamptons are less a location that’s a beach than a beach that forgot it was a beach. The place has become the rictus grin of the nouveau riche. It’s the Upper East Side’s revenge against urban humidity and decay, a spiritual center of sorts devoted to musing smugly upon your life and how it’s gone so right.

July 16th, 2025
The Hamptons and Nantucket.

I don’t know what category this is. I just feel compelled to keep you updated on The American Story.

1.) Nantucket. Headline.

Nantucket Man Who Chopped Down Neighbor’s Trees for Ocean View Says He Was Simply ‘Clearing Out Her Crappy Trees’

In preparation for selling his neighboring house, Jonathan Jacoby walked over to Patricia Belford’s place and cut down sixteen trees her family planted fifty years ago. He did this to be able to say in his listing that his house had water views, which allowed him to put a big price on it.

Belford will win her lawsuit against him, but Jacoby doesn’t care. I’m sure he’s done the math. Reparations in this matter will result in a sum far less than what he’ll get for the house; and even if they don’t, he’s astronomically rich, so he doesn’t give a shit about massive outlays.

The important thing, for him, is the opportunity to express earth-core-deep contempt for everyone and for everything.

2.) Hamptons. Headline.

Everyone’s Suing Everyone Out East. Forget golf. The real local pastime is spending millions of dollars to win zoning wars.

The article is a cavalcade of people exactly like Jacoby.

The village government … granted [one owner] permission to clear some phragmites, a type of invasive grass, on the condition that he replace them with native vegetation. Instead, [he] clear-cut much of the land around the house and put in a floating dock and a kayak rack. He built white concrete patios on two sides, enlarging the house’s coverage area by thousands of square feet. He replaced the pool shed with a pergola and outdoor shower... [The same owner decades ago] notoriously demolished four Times Square buildings in the dead of night, to head off a moratorium on tearing down SROs, for which he paid millions in fines...

 [S]ometimes a [local attorney’s] client who wants something that requires a zoning-board approval will ask him, “Why shouldn’t I just do it?” He discourages that path as “very, very, very risky.” You might get away with it, but if you want to sell the place, some East End municipalities have ordinances requiring that you secure a new certificate of occupancy from their buildings department before a deed can be transferred. If an inspection turns up unauthorized alterations, you could find yourself stuck. This is the bind [this owner, who now cannot sell his house,] is in.

But for this person, as for Jacoby, the real point is to leave an empty rotting caught up in litigation house out there in order to convey earth-core-deep contempt for everyone and for everything. Remember that blank look on Bernie Madoff’s face as he explained that he didn’t really know why he stole sixty billion dollars from people? That’s the look on the facades of these houses: I am a monument to motiveless limitless existence-hatred.

Another owner built

 a chicken coop and other animal enclosures without permits. A children’s playhouse popped up near the fruit orchard. And a couple days before Christmas, the neighbors noticed that four alpacas had appeared like fuzzy magi. [They] surreptitiously recorded all these developments in snapshots and video clips… One of the videos showed [the owner’s] children chasing the alpacas around the reserve in an ATV. [One neighbor,] who had paid $4.6 million for a house next to the farm, filed dozens of photos with the town-planning department, scrawled with handwritten notations like “more waste and debris” and “2 years of Porta Potty.” [The owner] complained to the town about the invasion of his privacy, filing affidavits that accused [this neighbor] of harassing his laborers by filming them through her privet hedge. “Why is the manure structure so near my property,” [another neighbor] wrote to the zoning board. “I am very concerned about the odors which most certainly will deny my quiet enjoyment of my home for which I paid millions of dollars.”

This example literalizes the Madoffian I Shit in Your Face, World, and I Don’t Know Why philosophy.

Think, mes petites, how strange it is! Punishment, even with all their money and countersuits, is often immense, yet the death drive, the shit drive, the I’ll destroy you all and I’ll destroy myself drive, is so strong that it doesn’t care.

After breaking rule after rule to get a breakfast nook he wanted, an indignant Carl Icahn sued the town for having the gall to tell him to take it down.

Icahn sued in New York State court, and when he lost, he went on to appeals that have yet to be resolved, all so he could keep his 400-square-foot breakfast nook.

This example highlights the Ubu-infantility at work among the Madoffians. I’m suing! It’s taking many years and I keep losing but again the point as UD has been trying to explain is I’m so rich there’s nothing to be done but to kill everybody.

Maybe we’re all, at our idiest-core, infantile (me play big boy tennis!), vindictive, suicidal, and homicidal, like super-rich King Ubu. What’s special about our country’s Madoffians (the upcoming link is to the NYC residence of one of the Hamptons owners described in this post) is that they get to stage their psychoses.

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Roger Shattuck on Alfred Jarry’s Ubu:

[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…

Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character?  It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability,  the vestiges of original sin.  Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him.  He remains a threat because he can destroy at will… Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images.  He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu  – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.

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Poetic Addenda:

each jolt of meanness replaces the one before it

and pretty soon you get to like those jolts,

you and millions of other dolts who like to be electrocuted

by their own feelings

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I want to date-rape life

April 4th, 2025
July 25th, 2024
‘[F]ederal agents flying in and out of Pittsburgh noticed the size and scope of the mansion and started asking questions.’

As UD pointed out here, more than a few megamansion owners are crooks. And sometimes the megamansion itself can be their undoing.

July 23rd, 2024
‘Delaware County Prosecuting Attorney Eric Hoffman called Hedrick “a total disgrace to the medical profession” during the sentencing.’

“Hedrick is a convicted felon and a complete, utter, and total disgrace to the medical profession. I call upon Indiana’s medical licensing board to immediately revoke his license to practice medicine,” said Hoffman.“

Harsh words. But at least he takes a nice preppy mug shot.

June 27th, 2024
How will it affect their dinner parties?

One of UD‘s wealthier friends sups with the opioid-famous Sacklers when he’s in Gstaad; the friend reports that these are really terrific dinners, without any undue pressure from the hosts to try OxyContin.

The good news is that in the foreseeable future my friend can continue to sup in the Alps with the Sacklers; but today’s Supreme Court rejection of the nice deal the family worked out with the trillion or so people whose family members fatally overdosed in order to finance Sackler dinners in Gstaad means that eventually the dinners might be imperiled.

June 19th, 2024
Pretty much everyone steals; but since this blog has a special interest in universities, we’ve always focused on how people steal from universities.

Certainly we’ve learned, after many years, that med schools, engineering departments, and above all bigtime sports programs, are fraud central; but, more recently, IT managers are, fraudwise, really sitting pretty.

Yale thought it was being clever when it imposed a $10,000 upper limit on med school computer-related purchases signed off by only one person, but Finance Director Jamie Petrone-Codrington was all over that one. With patient stealth, for more than ten years, she racked up charges, gave the equipment to someone who fenced it, and stole 30 million dollars.

Where the fuck were Yale’s auditors? Damned if I know.

Same deal, more or less, at today’s hapless ripped off institution. “After receiving approval to purchase hundreds of items of IT equipment by falsely claiming the equipment would be used or installed at university locations,” Webster University’s IT director “sold that equipment to a third-party.”

June 18th, 2024
In the horse and buggy days of this blog…

UD‘s coverage of illegal drug distribution featured a crusty old pill mill proprietor named Buster, and his best bud/pharmacy owner Lloyd, way down in Russellville Alabam. Out front of Buster’s place (What a Wonderful World Pain Clinic) long lines of pale pierced men hid their faces in oversize sweatshirts and funny thing is all the cars in the parking lot had Ohio license plates. Local Doc Ching-Ting Peng, just over from Taiwan, spoke no English, and had the sorest wrist in Russellville from signing a million empty prescription slips a day.

It was a rickety kind of bidness, sure, but didn’t nobody bother nobody and it was full of real interesting characters and everybody all over Akron got their very own fatal overdose. In the unlikely event the shit hit the fan and the boys got shut down, they moved to Phenixville and renamed the place Praise the Lord Pain Emporium.

*********************

Course now it’s all slick city folk who figured out how to put it all online and advertise all over social media and make – I mean, let’s say Buster and Lloyd and Ching-Ting divided like 300 thou a year among themselves – the folks at Done digital health pulled in hundreds of millions before the Justice Department finally noticed. You buy a membership in the thing and they’ll sell you all the Adderall you want forever, no questions asked. ‘According to the complaint, one Done member described the company as a “straight up pill mill.”’

May 15th, 2024
UD thanks Nancy for sending.
August 30th, 2022
High-end evasion of the police reaches new heights with the just-completed Bentley Residences Miami.

Until now, narco-billionaires seeking to avoid capture by the authorities through living in gated/patrolled high-rises have always risked exposure when leaving their cars, giving the keys to the parking valet, and then walking, in complete view of other people, into the building, into the elevator, and down the hallway of their floor, where they risk running into neighbors.

Beyond the obvious fact that narco-billionaires are unlikely to be pleased that strangers (even building staff) are getting inside their cars, where they can look around and find god knows what, there’s the larger point of all the exposure involved in walking into the building.

Bentley Residences has solved every one of these problems, allowing international criminals to enter all the way into their apartments without ever getting out of their car. Owners drive into sophisticated car elevators that lift them directly into their apartment, where they leave the car in a glass-enclosed garage which allows them to look at it while eating dinner (see images in this article).

July 29th, 2022
You can’t make this shit up.

Hawley Book ‘Manhood’

Set for Release Next Year

*************************

From his publisher:

‘Runs about 350 pages.

Initial press run of 10,000 paperback copies.

Expected to be a runaway hit.’

July 27th, 2022
‘[C]ash conversion that low sparks a little paranoia about its ability to extinguish debt.’

And Teva Pharmaceuticals – the remarkably corrupt megacorp we’ve followed on this blog for years – does have one dumpster fire of debt. It’s way up there in the billions.

**********************

But what’s this? Teva stock “is on fire today.”

See, they just settled – again, for several billions – the latest of … billions? … of criminal cases against them, these involving the company having been a big ol’ drug dealer during the heyday of opioid addiction (I guess we’re still in the heyday). Now that Teva has paid its way out of its most recent vileness, the company looks much more stable, and investors can heave a sigh of relief, all the while preparing to withdraw their winnings before the next gigantic criminal scheme takes Teva down for good.

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