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.

… stripped pretendian Buffy Sainte-Marie of the Order of Canada.

Sing the Juan Manuel Corchado Song!

The rector of the University of Salamanca has been, since 2017, picking up – at remarkable speed – citations to his work:

 Corchado’s resume was “artificially” embellished starting in 2017, when he lost the election for rector of the University of Salamanca on his first attempt. At that time, the already veteran professor of computer science and artificial intelligence had just 4,750 citations, a number that suddenly jumped to 15,000 in 2018, then to almost 31,000 in 2020, and 44,000 by March 2024…

How’d he do it?

Twas not the work of a day. Various complex schemes, combined with simple threats and bribes (or so it appears; it’s not easy to figure out exactly how he got everyone he knew to throw his name repeatedly into any piece of research they cooked up), achieved his rector-winning outcome.

Corchado gave instructions to his employees to add dozens of citations to himself in their studies over a period of years. 

“Gave” is nice. Given that they were his utterly beholden underlings, maybe “told” or “ordered” or “commanded” would be better?

The Ethics Committee of the Spanish National Research Council, an independent body created by the government and Spain’s autonomous regions, urged the University of Salamanca on June 11 to exercise “its powers of inspection and sanction” in view of “the alleged seriousness” of the practices of its rector. The response of the Salamanca institution was to commission a report from the historian Salvador Rus Rufino, an old acquaintance of Corchado who had even defended the rector in public. On September 9, Rus Rufino presented a superficial and exculpatory analysis, which was unanimously rejected by the 11 members of the committee…

LOLOLOLOLOLOL.

 [The] rector [is not only] accused of “systematic manipulation” of his credentials, but also [of] those bad practices having spread to other university bodies such as Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca and the Library Service, ultimately responsible for the deletion of some 200 documents. 

Oh, did I mention he also got his slaves to delete incriminating docs? And…

… Corchado has deleted the texts from his blog, in which he boasted of being the fourth-best scientist in Spain and one of the 250 best in the world in the field of computing.

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UD thanks Elizabeth.

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More UD posts on citation cartels are here, here, here, and here.

I have access only to the headline, but that says it all – Oregon State U, after an unconscionably long time, has finally rid itself of galloping fakeroo Qwo-Li Driskill, outed by actual Native Americans, and by the students he reportedly bullies and demeans.

How do you think he kept all that money coming in?

12News asked [Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom] Horne on Thursday whether he believes [Bridget] O’Brien should be disqualified as an authorized vendor, given her history of alleged Medicaid fraud, nonpayment of contractors, dog-napping, and alleged SBA loan fraud.

“Ms. O’Brien is entitled to her day in court,” Horne said in a written statement.

UD has taken a break from MSNBC. Used to watch it all the time. Can’t anymore. I hope that will change.

The comment is from Andrew Sullivan.

They’re putting them in jail.

Far right Christian fanatic Dinesh D’Souza made a whole film that followed evil ballot-stuffers around the country as they stole the election from Jesus H. Trump.

Now that its claims turn out to be bullshit, D’Souza can’t be found, even by the New York Times.

His producer, under humongously expensive legal pressure from defamed non-stuffers, has issued a desperate apology, but D’Souza – an avid and lunatic conspiracy theorist – stands his ground.

The defamation cases won’t yield the way-whopping settlement Dominion Voting Systems got ($787 mill), but I’m sure they’ll do well.

Will this remarkable, all-encompassing fraud ever get the boot from Oregon State?