Wowsa. Mike Bloomberg, a Hopkins grad, goes to town.
Now that he has ignominiously exited Stanford’s presidency, retracting multiple papers as he goes, we can leave Marc Tessier-Lavigne behind, and take up the even ickier case of Harvard’s Francesca Gino.
Ja, Stanford, Harvard; and these are bigshots, humongous success stories, whose work is cited tens of thousands of times.
Both seem to have arrived at the ability to undermine vast fields of research through the simple expediency of making up their results.
Now Gino, as a social sciency biz school Ted Talk specimen, is no real surprise – probably fifty percent of the people who share her genotype are making shit up. T-L, however, does empirical research, so it’s more amazing when he (or his lab) just goes out and does irreproducible things.
Anyway, looks as though he’s going to fade into nothingness because he’s not going to get all shitty and vindictive and sue the people who outed him for $25 mill.
But that’s exactly what Gino’s up to; her fraudulence seems firmly established, but that doesn’t mean she can’t destroy the people who revealed her misconduct. Expensive lawyers, long horrible litigation… Why the hell shouldn’t they be just as ruined as she’s been.
*********************
One scientist, who has discovered research fraud in another high-profile person, has decided to keep it to himself, because, he explains, he runs “a non-zero risk of financial ruin, and no real personal upside. Probably many researchers are making this same calculation at this moment.”
What’s keeping this latest set of fraud-outers from financial ruin is a GoFundMe page (to which UD has contributed) which has in only a few days amassed $326,000.
Hey babe I know he’s awfully old to be president, but ya gotta admit…
The event went off rather better than the hilarious DeSantis campaign launch. 90 of the school’s 119 graduates attended.
YES!
Free speech martyr Salman Rushdie makes a surprise appearance at a PEN event last night. Read all about it.
The imperial power dehumanizes the actual victim and claims to be the victim. When the victim opposes being attacked, being murdered, being colonized, the imperial power says that this is unreasonable, this is an illness, a phobia. … The term ‘Russophobia’ is an imperial strategy designed to change the subject from an actual war of aggression to the feelings of the aggressors, thereby suppressing the existence and the experience of the people who are the most harmed.
********************************
The Russian Federation called for a UN Security Council session to discuss ‘Russophobia.’ This is Timothy Snyder’s contribution.
Photo: Valeria Mongelli/AFP via Getty Images
[T]housands of Georgians took to the streets of the country’s capital Tbilisi for two days of protests, waving EU flags and facing down riot police armed with water cannons and tear gas. The contentious [now withdrawn] legislation would have required all organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents. The Georgian law was widely viewed as inspired by Vladimir Putin…
****************************
SING IT.
Georgia, Georgia
The whole day through
As you march toward
Your place in the EU
I said Georgia
Georgia, what joy I find
Freedom’s old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind
Other arms reach out to you
Other eyes lie viciously
Still in peaceful crowds I see
The road leads back to you
Yuval Noah Harari addresses a pro-democracy rally in Tel Aviv.
One of the jurors who convicted Alex Murdaugh has broken his cover to tell how it took the jury just 45 minutes to find him unanimously guilty of double murder.
Only forty-five minutes to Guilty
Think of the changes it brings;
For the short time it takes
What a diff’rence it makes
In the ways of the people and things
Oh! What a fine bit of justice
Oh! A decision to cheer
Yes the jurors made hay
Took much less than a day —
Only forty-five minutes to clear
So let’s do it this way:
Fuck you, motherfucker.
The Volusia Florida sheriff gets it said, and then some.
Michel Clain: “We [Belgians] are in a corrupt country. Either the politicians do not understand, or they themselves are corrupt.”
The Belgian Prime Minister [asked to comment on Clain’s statement]: “If someone believes there is corruption, they have to prove it. You can’t say that, in such a way, lightly,”
Michel Clain [six months later]: “The latest report from the Financial Intelligence Unit reports astronomical sums laundered by criminal organisations. It is a state institution. You have 25 open cases of police corruption and the investigation is ongoing. So we are now six months after [the PM’s] statement. I wonder if we really still need to prove it to him?”
*************************
[Clain] cites French revolutionary humanist values as his guiding principles. For him, financial crime has destroyed fundamental aspects of society. “White-collar crime is the cancer of democracy,” Claise wrote in one of his books, “Le Forain” (The Showman)…
Claise’s dramatic [Qatargate] intervention has left the European institutions headquartered in Brussels scrambling to explain why it took a Belgian official to uncover corruption at the core of European democracy.
**************************
‘Course now that Clain has uncovered Qatargate, the PM’s boasting about him. “Belgian justice is doing what … the European Parliament hasn’t done.”
Politico writes:
[T]hat peacocking would be ironic to Claise, who complained in October that Belgium’s police are under-resourced, fighting a war against modern, high-tech corruption using “catapults.” Earlier in the year, he said the Belgian government was “on Xanax rather than Viagra.”
Pablo Eisenberg, a hero of this blog (UD has forever shrieked at super-icky moneybags who give their hundreds of millions to Harvard), has died.
**************************
(By the way — Harvard’s current endowment woes – it has only just reached 53.2 billion dollars – have energized its alumni network to organize a massive, unprecedented, Save Our School campaign, with outreach via Go Fund Me pages in addition to traditional methods. “Our rainy day fund is down to 10.5 billion,” warns Sam Bankman-Fried, an MIT grad who nonetheless accepted a position as head of Harvard fund-raising because “Harvard is the lifeblood of Cambridge; when it goes, the city itself is imperiled.”)
**************************
And as to how to convince people who give their money to Ivy League schools, rather than to the sort of places Eisenberg lists in my headline, to redirect their money… Well, you need to understand the cohort you’re talking about, first of all.
Let’s consider, for example, billionaire investor Marc Wolpow, who gives money to fat cat Wharton. What do we know about Marc?
Here’s our most recent information.
The wealthy head of [a] multi-billion dollar private equity firm is under investigation by Nantucket Police and the state Environmental Police for purposefully untying a 32-foot boat from a slip at Old North Wharf, allowing it to drift out of the Easy Street Basin and into the ferry lane.
The suspect is Marc Wolpow, the co-CEO and co-founder of the The Audax Group, who allegedly found an unknown boat in the slip he uses on Old North Wharf on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 16…
After Wolpow untied it, the boat drifted dangerously past Steamboat Wharf, got pushed northward in the wash of the car ferry the M/V Woods Hole, then collided with the $5 million, 70-foot Viking sportfishing boat “El Jefe” causing damage to that vessel. It eventually ran aground near 22 Easton Street.
Reached by phone this week, Wolpow declined to comment.
********************
Here’s what’s shocking about this story:
1 Just anyone reached Wolpow by phone.
2 Wolpow declined to comment.
Why allow just anyone to get past your protection squad and reach you by phone? That’s nuts.
Even more bizarre is Wolpow’s refusal to say the obvious about his behavior.
Heard of property rights, asshole? [“Asshole” here refers to the person who got through to Wolpow’s phone.] It’s my fucking slip, I own it, and I don’t have to look at some cheap shitty boat some person decided to put in it. Do you think I want Nantucket boat owners to think I have a cheap shitty boat? It’s my right to do whatever I like to cheap shitty boats and I think the fucker who put it in my slip will think twice before he does it again. Oh, and fuck you for calling me.
Getting a person of this sort (Marc Kasowitz, Howard Marks, Vinod Khosla, Noam Gottesman, the Heliport Guys, stop me when you’ve had enough) to give money to what he inevitably is going to consider cheap shitty recipients will be very difficult indeed.