News from Texas.

In 2012 and 2014, [HOA president Tara] Howie took plea deals in New Jersey for stealing $800,000 from wards in her care while working for a guardianship attorney. She was sentenced to a total of 9 years in prison.

Right now, she’s facing criminal charges in Orlando for stealing over $500 worth of merchandise from Target.

Plus she just stole all their homeowner fees! Shocker.

‘Hospice care is specifically for care in a person’s last weeks or months of life, sometimes six months or less. A tip off to investigators was finding patients who were enrolled in hospice care for multiple years, according to a DOJ spokesperson. The defendants allegedly transferred several patients between the three companies after six months to continually bill for services.’

Scathing Online Schoolmarm hastens to correct between, which should be among, since the writer is describing an action involving more than two people or things. But having done that, she will proceed to delectate the ghost hospice fraud story.

Spiritual Touch, ghost hospice — the language here is fantastic, as is the desperate problem of where to stash the pretend-dying to maintain payouts.

It’s like they’ve created a new mysterious Blue Zone, where, for reasons unknown, a group of 120 year olds keep on keepin on. Sardinia, Okinawa, Monterey Park Los Angeles County.

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

It brings to mind Donne’s magnificent sonnet:

Death, Be Not Allowed

BY JOHN DONNE

Death, be not allowed, though some have called thee 

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so; 

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow 

Die not, poor Death, long as they can pay me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, 

Much pleasure; yet from thee no bucks do flow, 

And so our almost-dead with thee don’t go.

Transfer their old bones; then, check’s delivery. 

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men, 

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell, 

And bogus death, O Death, doth pay us well 

With dollars better than thy stroke; why swell’st thou then? 

One fake hospice transfer past, we’re paid eternally 

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

A Collierville Middle School girl’s basketball coach was arrested on gun and drug charges… [The Memphis Tenn. coach is accused of] being a convicted felon in possession of a handgun; possession of cocaine with intent to manufacture, sell, or deliver; possession of a controlled substance with intent to manufacture, deliver, or sell; and possession of a firearm during a dangerous felony… Now, many are asking if the district did a background check before he started coaching in Collierville.

No shit.

[In a] deposition, [a DOGE staffer] was asked to apply his understanding of DEI to specific projects from which his department had pulled funding. In one example, he was asked why a documentary focused on female Holocaust survivors was characterized as DEI.

“It’s the gender-based story; that’s inherently discriminatory to focus on this specific group,” Fox stumbled. “It’s focusing on DEI principles, gender being one of them… specifically focused on Jewish cultures and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture.”

“It’s inherently related to DEI for those reasons,” he concluded.

‘Wellness residences’ generally optimize the built environment for long-term health, with a focus on things like air quality, water, light, acoustics, walkability and social connection.” …

The term longevity residences, however, refers to projects that take wellness a step further. They offer preventive and diagnostic health services such as biomarker testing, biological age assessment and AI-enhanced screenings. Other amenities sometimes include therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen, red-light therapy and cryotherapy. “In essence, they are bringing the programming of a longevity clinic or medical-wellness longevity resort home.” …

[One longevity development offers homes] in three design concepts, Embrace, Journey and Serene…

[Its amenities include] an Ammortal Chamber, a multimodular system combining red-light therapy, pulsed electromagnetic field therapy and molecular hydrogen inhalation. These treatments are designed to aid post-workout recovery, sharpen mental clarity and support overall well-being. Residents can also undergo DEXA scans to measure bone density, body fat, visceral fat and muscle mass, as well as VO2 max testing to evaluate aerobic capacity.

To assess joint health and physical power, the spa is equipped with VALD force plates and 3-D motion-capture technology that analyzes biomechanics and human movement. For sleep and relaxation, a HUSO sound-therapy system is also available, and homeowners can tap a medical concierge 24 hours a day...

[Other developments] offer therapies such as microbiome analysis, which is a molecular test of gut bacterial DNA used to optimize longevity. Stem cell procedures, in which a patient’s own cells are harvested and reinjected to stimulate collagen production, may also be offered.

[O]wners can [also] request on-demand services, such as red-light therapy panels and Normatec compression sleeves for the legs, arms and hips, which improve circulation and accelerate muscle recovery.

Velvaere, a development in Park City, Utah, which is already open, takes a similar approach. The 115 residences are outfitted with circadian-supportive lighting, filtered-water systems and smart-energy technology, along with dedicated wellness spaces that include infrared-light rooms, cold plunges, steam and massage areas...

[This] development has also partnered with the lifestyle robotics company Aescape to offer AI-powered massages, which scan the body with more than a million data points to deliver customized treatments, adjusting pressure levels, target areas and even music preferences…

[‘Ms UD, your music preference is My Guitar Wants to Kill Your Mama.’]

..The property will feature a dedicated wellness and longevity floor outfitted with a range of amenities, including contrast-therapy circuits—which pairs hot and cold treatments—infrared saunas, areas for AI massages, and stem cell therapy …

[B]iohacking-focused elements will extend into the residences themselves. Units will include low-toxicity paints and materials, hydrolyzed water filtration systems, and lighting strategies that support circadian rhythms and sleep.

The Well Bay Harbor Islands, Florida, where move-ins begin this spring, features residences outfitted with lymphatic drainage showers, red-light therapy, and air-purification systems. Residents and members will also have access to on-site Longevity Labs led by Dr. Frank Lipman, offering functional and preventive care, biomarker testing and IV therapies, among other treatments.

Sex, guns, and Hitler — Texas politics.

He hanged dogs; she shoots them. Both are sensual devils. The gothic fascination in watching them thrust their way through the world turns to horror and pity when their dark energy reveals itself as suicidal.

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

MarkTwain Mullin, insane pugilist, replaces her.

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

Fast-moving story.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a useful, confused article about Why It’s All Happening, especially to (largely male) academics. The author tosses his net in a variety of directions and catches some intriguing stuff (“gendered bullshit,” says one of his respondents), but UD thinks that a careful reading of the piece yields two dominant explanations, the first pithily summarized in my title by naughty and now dismissed from Yale Gelernter.

Call it the I’m an apeman
I’m an ape, apeman
Oh, I’m an apeman

theory, in which given freedom, privilege, privacy, money, whatever, a certain number of men will revert to Bill Belichick or Gene Lopwitz (“he had taken what he wanted.”). Aging wives with minds of their own represent, evolutionarily speaking, less stimulation than tractable teens, and if you think you can get away with it you’re maybe gonna go teenward.

That’s theory number one. Number two – I’ll call it Skank Sanctification – is associated with the man who was prez of GW when UD taught there, Stephen Trachtenberg, and also with Bard prez Leon Botstein. CHE quotes Trachtenberg:

Stephen J. Trachtenberg, who served as president of George Washington University from 1988 to 2007, is a hardened realist when it comes to [taking money and other goodies from people like Epstein].

“The people who have money are not always nice people,” he said in a recent interview.

During Trachtenberg’s tenure, the university’s endowment grew from $200 million to over $1 billion. As a fund raiser, Trachtenberg adopted the thinking of Cardinal Richard Cushing, who was the archbishop of Boston while Trachtenberg was an administrator at Boston University. Cushing told Trachtenberg: “You sanctify money with its use.”

Here the archbishop assures the university president that an alchemical cleansing of money takes place when the money is used for, say, legal payouts to victims of priests who rape children. The church has to date spent three sanctified billion on this.

A Jewish sanctification took place when Yeshiva University took Bernie Madoff’s money for its then president’s salary (one of the highest in the country) and other executive compensation. Trachtenberg has been a staunch defender of Yeshiva’s many not nice donors. Plus he made a heartfelt argument that GW shouldn’t rescind Bill Cosby’s honorary degree. He and similarly amoral Botstein model for their students a perfectly workable postmodern – and even pious – ethos: Ends, means, FUCK THAT.

Emerald Fennell’s wondrously sicko “Wuthering Heights” is a real-time aesthetic parallel to the ever-elaborating Epstein/Mountbatten epic. She couldn’t have timed her exploration of our darkest urges more brilliantly: Her film pulses with the power of perversity, but does its thing playfully, as art will.

In the real world we cluck and cluck about famous greedy depraved self-destroyers. We pretend astonishment at each new twisted twist.

As in:

The Nurse Racheds among us gasp to find ICE Barbie melting in the arms of her sub! Before this, she was a perfectly normal person who shot puppies (Heathcliff hanged them).

Canadian doo-doos are now deep in doo-doo.

The phrase ‘courting death’ comes to mind.

Can’t make this shit up.

Predatory journals take your two thousand bucks and publish anything you send. We all know this.

But Pascual Diago, a math professor solicited by a predatory ob/gyn rag, decided to go there. His abstract:

In an unprecedented quantum leap in interdisciplinary research, we introduce the concept of ‘Gyneco-Obstetric Algebraic Didactics’ (GOAD). This paper explores the impact of teaching mathematical models using obstetric metaphors on the cognitive flexibility of third-trimester patients and first-year mathematics students alike. Through the introduction of the Ovary-Function Theorem (OFT) and the application of the Cervix-Dilation Equation (D = √πr²), the study reveals that explaining non-Euclidean spaces through pelvic retroversion significantly improves calculus test scores and reduces birth anxiety by 13.7%. A case study with pregnant mathematicians and aspiring gynecologists demonstrates that integrating the Fibonacci sequence into labor progression charts induces spontaneous appreciation for abstract algebra and mild cravings for prime numbers. These findings challenge the traditional boundaries between prenatal care and set theory, suggesting that mathematical didactics and obstetric gynecology, when merged, can birth new paradigms in both fields. Further research is encouraged, especially in the context of cesarean matrices and post-partum group theory.

Of course they published it.

LOLOLOL