‘Some say that education consultants provide valuable skills and services to ensure schools can find the right leaders and focus on the right goals. Others say the business is a racket that wields too much influence and lines too many pockets.
[Des Moines Public Schools] has spent six figures of taxpayer money on that business. Now, it will spend boatloads more on attorneys to comb through the damage and shield the district from as much blame as possible for the [Ian] Roberts fallout.
And that’s to say nothing of the expenditure required to find a new superintendent.‘
The ed consulting racket is one of many rackets that made the world safe for Donald Trump. Here’s hoping the current notoriety of its most high-profile racketeer will help shut it all down.
‘Their collaboration has continued with [Ian] Roberts behind bars. [Roberts’ collaborator] said on Sep. 29 she was told by Roberts’ wife to move forward with publishing a book called “Unshakeable,” a compilation of Roberts’ inspirational messages to Des Moines schools.‘
Iowa’s finest, Ian Roberts, committed more than the so far – what? – five thousand? crimes he committed as Des Moines public schools superintendent. He also awarded Des Moines school district contracts to his own side business, which specialized in soaking DEI budgets.
The district did catch one of his early attempts to pocket money in this way; but apparently they failed to catch later, successful, ones.
How stupid is Iowa? MUCH stupider than I ever imagined.
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There’s a DEI sickness at the heart of Iowa’s public schools. It’s why they hired and retained a consummate con man.
Franchement, they got what they deserved. New leadership needed. Desperately.
Your namesake law school is a national embarrassment.
The good folks of Des Moines saw no reason not to hire Ian Roberts as their school superintendent, even though they did no due diligence on his, er, spotty background. Weapons arrests, in the country illegally, lied bigtime about his university degrees.
The lying thing is de rigueur among many school principals (you get a salary bump with a doctorate, and schools don’t seem to mind if, like Roberts, you buy it from an online vendor), but the rest of it makes for an unusually rich brew.
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Charged.
Story jumps to the NYT.
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The schools are suing the recruitment firm that fucked them up.
The Holocaust was somewhere in her have mercy keep me outta jail letter too; plus, even though she did effing EVERYTHING she could think of not to get caught, it turns out she’s full of shame despair and general poignancy when she reflecteth upon her Madoffian crimelife.
Give it a read – Ms Javice basically gets as close as you can get to saying YOU CAN’T JAIL ME I’M A WOMAN!!! — a remarkable sentiment for a person who – until JP Morgan figured out she robbed them of $175 million – was an icon of the tough as nails young financial genius. My grannies are dying! I wanna baby!
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How did I manage to miss this chick earlier?
‘But, How Will She Teach Pilates in an Ankle Monitor?‘
The loopiest litigatrix this side of Liguria just walked into a buzz saw: Harvard is suing her.
Silly boy. Make that utterly unbelievable effects. But after all your field is psychology, currently riddled with fraud, and given all that fraud, you should have acted on your suspicions about those two AMAZING PERSONALITIES, F. Giro and D. Ariely. You worked with them, after all.
Took a LONG time and a LONG list of undeserved grants and titles and shit (all of it based on his now-revealed-as-bogus Native American identity) for people to pay attention to the work of the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds, which states:
‘Klopotek has zero Indian ancestry. TAAF found that he is of only European ancestry. When TAAF asked him to document his claim to being Choctaw or to simply identify who he believes is his ancestor who is Choctaw, Klopotek chose not to respond at all to TAAF’s queries... TAAF asks that Klopotek publicly declare in writing that he is not Choctaw, explain his past actions in full, acknowledge the harm he has done, redress this harm, resign from his UO faculty position, and return, with interest, the funds he has received from lying about being Indian.‘
Look at his list of money awards! How do you say monetize, kemosabe?
Asking the dude to give it back would be like asking Bernie Madoff (may his memory be a malediction) to please claw back the sixty five billion he stole, with interest, please.
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Klopotek offers the old Mention My Name in Sheboygan defense: Folks back home know I’m really Indian and that’s all that matters, assholes.
“Nature is considered to be the one place free of human artifice, the place where deep universal truths can be uncovered that are not to do with us,” [Helen] Macdonald says, “which, of course, is bullshit. That’s not the case. We put all our deepest human meanings into nature. We sort of force them in there, and then we use them to prove the veracity of our own concepts back at us, which is what nature writing does all the time.”
Slurp! We scarf up fake memoirs.
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In hindsight, some of the details in the book did feel vague. The loss of the couple’s home was never quite explained and Moth’s physical issues never seemed enough to stop him walking on. However, I saw that lack of detail as part of Raynor ‘s intention not to dwell on the darkness, but to focus on the light...
Raynor claims that Moth is told by a consultant that he has corticobasal degeneration (CBD), a rare and terminal neurological condition, related to Parkinson’s, that causes sufferers debilitating symptoms: tremors, loss of limb control, dementia and devastating and irreversible brain damage. With no treatment, and no cure, life expectancy for CBD sufferers is typically six to eight years from diagnosis. Moth, however, has lived with the condition for 18 years. In fact I recall, having read the book, googling the couple out of curiosity and being surprised at how well he looked, but then thinking, “What do I know?”.
Gevalt, woman. You know a lot. You preferred to walk on through the wind, walk on through the rain! Though your dreams be tossed and blown, walk on walk on with hype in your heart…
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A writer for the Independent:
… I was an audience to two early Salt Path haters: my mother and grandmother. “A load of crap,” my grandmother exclaimed between bites of a pub lunch. “It was all a bit neat, wasn’t it?” added my mother.
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Full disclosure: I can be a credulous fool too.
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[T]here were a few nagging doubts in my mind: if the supposedly mortally sick husband ‘Moth’ was really suffering from an incurable and debilitating degenerative disease, why does he appear perfectly well in the many interviews that the couple have given to promote their story; and what exactly was the nature of the vaguely described bad ‘investment’ that lost them their home?…
[I]t is for me a real disappointment to discover, with a sense of weary inevitability, that they are probably just another pair of dishonest grifters making money out of our gullibility.
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Only last week, I was having lunch when The Salt Path came up in conversation. ‘That’s the one about the woman with the terminally ill husband who went off round Cornwall, wasn’t it?’ said one friend. I responded, perhaps a little heartlessly: ‘Yeah, and then the husband weirdly failed to die and she got a couple of sequels out of it.’
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Think of those endless airport books promising businessmen that they are just a mindset tweak away from becoming a billionaire, or evangelical converts who turn out to be running from some abominable secret. It’s even worse when it is combined with this sort of weatherbeaten tweeness, a sentimental, live-laugh-love vision of Britain in which whatever your situation – brain disease, homelessness, poverty – you are only a thermos of tea and a chat with a crofter away from happiness.
Nicely put.
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Even the film-makers appear to have baulked at some of what Winn describes. In the book, the disasters of homelessness and terminal disease are further exacerbated by the tragic death of her favourite old ewe, Smotyn (Welsh for spotty): “I curled on the grass next to her and sobbed… Let me die now, let me be the one to go, don’t let me be left alone, let me die.” This scene was quietly dropped from the film.
Winn [allegedly] took tens of thousands from a former employer, and … lied about being made homeless and about the circumstances under which the couple’s house was repossessed in the memoir [The Salt Path]. [An investigation] also cast doubt over the legitimacy of [Winn’s husband’s terminal] diagnosis.
Und so weiter. How eager we are, again and again and again, to buy what a moment’s serious thought would reveal as almost certainly incredible hard luck stories. The more extreme, the more incredible, the more gullible we. Homeless! Half dead! Treated like shit by strangers! Bring it on!
We never learn. The imposters are exposed, and we move on to the next patently impossible memoir.
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In this, as in so many things, our model is Lady Bracknell:
Now produce your explanation, and pray make it improbable.
Columbia University has far more serious problems these days than a not too expensive settlement of a class action suit. But since we’ve followed, on this blog, the story of one of that school’s own math professors who ran the numbers and figured out the place was gaming its rankings, we should take note of the way Columbia has resolved the matter.
Columbia University agreed to pay $9 million to settle a proposed class action by students who claimed it submitted false data to boost its position in U.S. News & World Report’s influential college rankings.
The EU agricultural funds were just sitting there!
All kinds of people tried to shut down this latest EU theft racket, but they either got fired by the ministers who ran the fraud, or
investigators encountered physical resistance from … staff while searching its premises. The government was then forced to fire the [farm] agency’s president for failing to cooperate and to announce it would shut down the organization.
These people fight. Physically.
And now the two ministers who seem to have run the fraud, having been duly promoted, are dealing, or not dealing, with press inquiries.
Makis Voridis, who was agriculture minister from 2021 to 2023 … is now migration minister, and Lefteris Avgenakis, who was agriculture minister from 2023 to 2024 … is now an MP.
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EU not happy.
A Manhattan art advisor explains that she tries to make clients feel comfortable and not taken advantage of in the intimidating, arcane, art market. Then she steals all their money.
… the UM faculty pages, and that’s because the school is as slow at 404ing as it is responding to fraudulent research. Professor Lestat… er, Lesne, has resigned in disgrace after heading up multiple dirty Alzheimer’s studies. It’s all the rage.