Enjoy it before they fix it.
JACKSON USED AESTHETIC TO SLEEP
I gotta take a break from surfing sports headlines.
Faithful readers know that UD doesn’t do child porn profs. Too many. And what’s it tell you about universities? Nothing.
I mean, if a university, like Cambridge University, which has a convicted, way twisted child porn prof on its faculty, does nothing, then UD will cover it. That’s what you call a scandal.
But generally, for libertarianesque UD, a sex on campus story has to be really something for her to provide coverage.
A faculty member and high-ranking administrator accused of selling his five year old son [UD thanks Jason for the fresh link] into sexual slavery makes the cut. A university which still hasn’t taken down this person’s webpage makes the cut. The irony of a man who teaches a course in the American health system and who may also have been involved in the total destruction of the health of his child makes the cut.
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UD thanks The Professor for the link.
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What? You’re looking for words of wisdom? I ain’t got no stinkin’ words of wisdom.
No way can a university know it’s harboring evil. If the man were overtly psycho, Duke would’ve been on it. But he’s obviously functional. So you can’t go after Duke, unless they fail to respond quickly and intelligently to the debacle.
This will be a big story. The child was adopted, and this is the ultimate nightmare of adoption agencies, so expect some discussion about parent selection standards. Otherwise, assuming that no one warned Duke about this person, and that there were no clues about him available to the university, I wouldn’t expect this to become a Duke story.
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Update: Lombard’s Duke page has now been taken down.
BURKA MAKES WOMEN PRISONERS, SAYS PRESIDENT SARKOZY
President Sarkozy threw his weight behind attempts to bar French Muslim women from covering their faces in public, calling their full-body dress a “debasement of women”.
Mr Sarkozy made his attack on a small but growing number of fundamentalist women in a “state of the nation” speech that was the first by a French President to both houses of Parliament since 1873.
… “In our country, we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity,” Mr Sarkozy said to applause in the Parliament’s ceremonial Versailles home.
“The burka is not a religious sign. It is a sign of subservience, a sign of debasement,” he added. “It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”
Mr Sarkozy was adding his voice to a strong consensus that has emerged this month against women in France’s five million-strong Muslim community who wear the full or nearly-full cover of their bodies and faces…
… government troops attack universities.
There are reports that a number of Iranian professors have resigned in protest against government brutality against students.
Photo from Tehran University blogger.
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Shirin Behzadi, 45, university professor, on Enghelab Square yesterday morning: “It’s very surprising that the whole world is silent now. I don’t understand why the international community just ignores what’s happening right now in Tehran. Why don’t they react and help hopeless Iranians? I’m quite confused why even the United States has not paid enough attention to the obvious vote fraud in Iran. I’m now thinking maybe the world’s big powers like Ahmadinejad. We are losing our semi-democracy in Iran. We had a very poor democracy and now we are losing everything we had. Why doesn’t the UN help Iranians? Everybody in the world is just concerned about the nuclear issue in Iran. Why is the world silent now when Iran is in turmoil and enduring a semi-coup?”
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Andrew Sullivan is following events with great care and thoroughness.
… in Tehran, commenting on events in Iran:
“Iranian people took up opposition and used an open space to express what they want. Their vote was not just against [incumbent President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad but [against] what he stood for.
… But the most amazing thing is just that so many people came out into the streets to demonstrate and protest.
And for me personally, the most important thing was that [Mir Hossein] Mousavi had taken up reformist slogans which he had previously fought against. I was there at the beginning and I was thrown out of the university that Mousavi shut down as part of the Cultural Revolution.”
[Interviewer]: You’ve talked about and write about the importance of literature and culture in the fight for human rights and liberty in Iran and around the world. But is art, culture, literature ever going to be more powerful than religion? Is it enough to start a revolution?
“If you look at it in the long term – yes it is. [I’ll] never forget when Paul Ricoeur, the philosopher, came to speak in Iran. He was an eighty-year-old but was treated like [the American rock star] Bon Jovi.
At one point the minister for Islamic Guidance said to him: “People like us [politicians] will vanish but you people will endure.” That will always remain with me. We don’t remember the king who ruled in the time of [14th century Persian poet] Hafiz, we remember Hafiz.
… I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. [The interview’s translator makes a mistake here. It’s canaries in the mine. But UD‘s enchanted by canaries of the mind.] If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women.”
… rise up in Iran. Follow it on Andrew Sullivan.
Shooting reported at the Holocaust Museum here. Man with a rifle got in, shot a security guard, and then was shot by another guard. It all happened too recently – around twenty minutes ago- for any of this information to be guaranteed.
Last year, one of them – with a dozen drugs in his system – flew his plane into a mountain.
Now one of them drowned in his home pool. He couldn’t swim.
Atherton police on Sunday said they are waiting for an autopsy before investigating the apparent accidental drowning death of Rajeev Motwani, a Stanford professor who inspired the co-founders of Google and influenced a generation of computer scientists.
“We’re kind of in limbo,” Atherton police Sgt. Tim Lynch said. “It could have been a simple accident or many other things.”
One of Motwani’s friends said the professor held a party at his home Thursday night with Stanford colleagues and students to celebrate the end of the school year. He had gone outside after the guests left to wind down and enjoy a cigar. The family’s nanny found Motwani the next morning apparently drowned in the pool, said Vish Mishra, a friend and colleague of Motwani’s…
… about ethics pledges and MBA programs and, in altering its headline, made it far more interesting.
The original headline:
A PROMISE TO BE ETHICAL IN AN ERA OF IMMORALITY
The ProJo headline:
IN AN ERA OF IMMORTALITY, MBAS PRESS FOR CODE OF CONDUCT
ProJo’s focus on eternal life puts the question of how graduates of MBA programs conduct their business in sharp relief. If you live forever, do you have a special obligation to be ethical? Or, knowing that whatever you do, you will continue to exist, do you not really care whether you are good or bad? Or again, are we to understand immortality here as eternal life in the Lord after physical death? If so, should MBAs be ethical in order to protect their eternal souls? In an era of secularism, are religious warrants sufficient to restrain unethical behavior?
… has apparently been found, so far off course that analysts speculate it might have been trying to return to Brazil.
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a civil lawsuit against two people, including a Texas A&M University professor, and two companies in an alleged multimillion-dollar foreign-exchange fraud scheme starting in 2006.
U.S. District Court Judge Sim Lake froze the defendants’ assets and allowed the commodities trading regulator to seize records.
Charged was Robert D. Watson, an executive professor in the Finance Department, Houston lawyer and accountant Daniel J. Petroski and two companies, PrivateFX Global One Ltd. and 36 Holdings Ltd. The CFTC accused the two men of urging potential investors to purchase shares in PrivateFX Global One by touting their supposed quarterly trading returns of 6% to 10% from January 2000 through June 30, 2006.
About 60 investors purchased $19.5 million in Global One shares since it began operations in 2006, according to the CFTC. The defendants reported returns of 1.5% to 3% a month and claimed to never have had a losing month, the agency noted.
A university spokesman couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
According to the complaint, the defendants provided the CFTC with falsified account statements showing alleged profitable trades at an international brokerage firm from the start of this year through April totaling $7.5 million in the trading account of 36 Holdings, of which $2.1 million was allocated as Global One profit. The defendants also allegedly provided the CFTC with false Swiss bank statements for 36 Holdings…
The university might not be ready to comment, but it seems already to have air-brushed Watson from all finance department webpages. UD can’t find him anywhere.
From the New York Times:
Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.
Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and became an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before entering private practice.
But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush, making good on a longstanding promise to appoint a Hispanic judge in New York.
Update on Ezra Merkin:
[Merkin] stepped down Wednesday night as an officer of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, a wealthy congregation founded 50 years ago by his father, and whose members included some of Mr. Merkin’s largest individual investment-losers.
Mr. Merkin disclosed his unexpected decision in a speech at the synagogue’s annual membership meeting, in which he declined the nomination to become chairman of the synagogue’s board of trustees.
Ira Rennert, a tax cheat, remains Chairman.