I went through New York University when Avital Ronell was there. I had watched a lot of supposedly leftist professors line up to defend somebody I knew to be rather credibly accused of serious wrongdoing.

You recall Ronell? Mes petites, if you have the stomach for it…

Me? Nah. But, please, go ahead and read it all. From a series of 2018 posts.

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Other excerpts from Harper’s interview:

[Many Bates (College) faculty and administrators were] committed to an ontological claim that white supremacy is a mystical force that suffuses every aspect of society.

One thing that makes my head fucking explode is hearing from people with tenure saying, “Thank you for speaking up. I could never do so.” My reaction: ‘What the fuck are you talking about? You have tenure. You have the most secure job in the American economy…”

[Jason] Arday is a serial fabulist who seems quite unwell, who had no business being at [Cambridge.] But the whole scandal was allowed to unfold because of the racial neuroses of largely white progressive academics…

In the slough of Sunday in an August despond, when the gilded NYT reader (NY is by far the richest city in the world — over $3 trillion in private total wealth) pauses on the deck of her summer home to note the infinite recurrence of her personal sadness, an opinion piece about psychotherapy rises into view.

Though generous in its acknowledgement of the basic nothing/everythingness of this lucrative, universal practice (universal here means that everyone UD knows is and has long been engaged in it, with a few exceptions), and though willing to admit that psychotherapy seems to do nothing that a wise and intuitive friend or two can’t, the writer still aches after what he calls a “unified field theory” of the dealie. He insists it be empirical and organized into One Thing rather than everything everywhere all at once.

In short, the absolute mess of it, the desperation of sad Americans for it, and the inevitable overtaking of the … field? … by ever-new, ever-bogus, approaches, bothers the guy.

Excitedly, he announces yet another New Theory, and this one does the trick! It’s called predictive something, and is demonstrably, scientifically, good for what ails you!

Whew. It’s about time.

“On the ninth floor of the extremely prestigious hospital that I was training in, we had people playing pianos for foreign dignitaries coming to get heart procedures, and then in the basement [there were] indigent New Yorkers.”

Abdul El-Sayed

His bunker no longer available, America’s tiniest anti-Semite monetizes his predicament.

… pin.

A Birmingham judge so hilariously corrupt, incompetent, and racist that she managed to get indefinite suspension even in one of our most corrupt states, continues to smile down from her official probate court page.

An extensive reading of her case yields the thought that she simply went mad with power, enjoying – it seems – the thought of suffering people waiting for her decisions before they could be released from mental institutions and other forms of hell. Walking her dogs routinely took precedence over appearing in court and doing her job, much of which involved sick and vindictive plots against people she didn’t like. Like white people.

UD’s loving the Spy Who Came in with the Gold – a real pot boiler, destined to become a classic of its type.

How did the mysterious self-fabricator David Rush gain entry to the CIA in the first place, much less be promoted to a senior agency position? How did he – like the pyramid-building Egyptians; like the Moia-mounting Easter Islanders – move thousands of gold bars into his suburban Virginia manse? An enigma for the ages.

Like David himself. Like the super well-endowed federal agency that fed him the bullion while he fed it the bull.

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And these are only the opening chapters. Where do we go from here? UD is panting to know. Certain incipient plot lines are obvious – his explanation that he had a debilitating gambling addiction, frinstance… Was he clever enough NOT to buy seven Aston Martins in order to avoid suspicion? We’ve heard not a peep about his car collection.

Did a Russki kleptocrat on orders from Putin set the whole thing up?

Is it good for the Jews?

He’s not quite comfortable looking straight at the mug shot camera, but then he’s used to cloak and dagger. His dark identity needs to be carefully protected, along with the reason why, as a high-ranking CIA officer, he stole forty million dollars worth of gold bars, courtesy of your federal taxes.

Oh – also oodles of foreign currency, and “three dozen luxury watches, many of them Rolexes.”

He lied to the CIA about pretty much everything, including his extensive, totally made up, education. And was rewarded with a senior position that lasted decades. What gives? Is he a mole?

UD wonders if the current administration, faced with unbelievable negligence and stupidity at the highest level of American intelligence, will be able to blame it on an earlier administration.

A reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Ed offers a book-length interview with the curiouser and curiouser Dan Ariely – a Duke sociologist already outed as a likely research fraudster (sometimes with his buddy, the notorious F. Giro).

Ariely is now being … scrutinized because of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a friendship he talks about with the same idiocy/evasion as his other buddy, none other than Prince Andrew himself!

Okay, merely an acquaintance. They had tea together in a palace. But read the whole Ariely interview to see what a slightly smarter, slicker, Andrew would have said.

I think that we are developing very much a fear culture. I feel that given that I was in the Epstein files, I feel that I’m lucky that I’m a social scientist. If I were a physicist, I would just get the negative consequences. As a social scientist, I get to also learn something new about humanity. So every time somebody calls to wonder or to cancel or something, I have a discussion with them. And I try to understand what is going on. And my sense is that we are getting to be more of a culture that is driven by fear.

Driven by fear, or by disgust that amoral elites don’t give a shit about – or in the case of Andrew even seem to share – the vile sexual ethics of some of the super-rich? Fun as it is to receive lectures from Ariely about what cowards we are because we’re afraid to plagiarize or make stuff up or hang around with sick motherfuckers, UD thinks it’s better to keep the focus on people who plagiarize and make stuff up and hang around with sick motherfuckers.

Wowsa. Should definitely be giving squatting seminars.

Wouldn’t be a Bama statement without a nod in the direction of career management specialist Jesus Christ; and, when she was hired, UA Birmingham baseball coach Taylor Smartt made sure to thank the big guy for opening what turned out to be some amazing doors for her.

 [F]our current players [said] Smartt would threaten to loosen their buttholes with her fingers.

“She told me countless times she would take me to the bathroom and loosen my asshole for me,” one of the players said. 

In the long – uh – annals of twisted coaching (UD’s seen it all), this is a new one on me. I’ve written here, to be sure, about coaches who plunge students’ heads in toilet bowls and lock them in dark offices with no food or water for extended periods or pummel them with heavy objects blah blah. Digital anal abuse I’ll admit I’d not yet met, and I’ll further admit that I wonder about a God who would open a door and lead a person there.

At least the larger community of Birmingham is God-fearing.

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UD thanks Andrew.

TENDERLOIN CORNER STORE

SOLD METH OVER THE COUNTER

… but the source is Bloomberg, and it’s about a prominent member of the Sackler family having pled guilty to a felony she committed while addicted to the family brew. So it seems worth pursuing as other outlets pick it up… Cuz it casts a certain opiate spell…

As the Sackler family worked through a plan to pay $6.5 billion to resolve their liability over Purdue Pharma LP’s production of addictive opioids, the epidemic hit even closer to home.

Joss Sackler, the wife of former Purdue board member David Sackler, admitted deleting WhatsApp messages showing she was the intended recipient of a shipment of prescription drugs seized by US border agents in 2024. Sackler, who said she was addicted to opioids at the time, pleaded guilty to obstructing a federal grand jury investigation into the transaction.

“I am so truly sorry that when I was suffering from …”

If, as predicted, he suffers a crushing defeat, what will happen to all the state funds dedicated to keeping Hungarian women pregnant 24/7?

News from Texas.