For years UD has gazed, appalled, at the doll army of Japanese royal women — all of them kitted out in the same sick uniform: tight little pastel pillbox, hair tightly pulled in, supremely vapid tight smile, weeny uniform earrings, cheesy pastel body-covers, white gloves tightly suspended above any suggestion of sexual life, dead white pumps.

So how great to read that the third from the left automaton in this photograph decided that instead of a life of pilled up psychosis she would ditch the whole sick thing, fall in love with a guy who wears a ponytail, and move – where else? – to New York City. Look at her now!

UD is a sucker for these liberatory tales, especially tales that feature people who have the guts to suffer all the anguish that powerful perverted institutions can make them suffer for revealing/rejecting the perversion. There’s a word for women like Mako: pioneers. Because of her, the sick palace parade will perhaps die of its sickness.

Meanwhile, though, what a pleasure to watch her in that greatest of liberatory cities, New York, as she strides the open streets openly in her flowing hair and skirt and boy shoes!

… of the way we were...

Mr. Ng’s lawyers have attacked Mr. Leissner’s credibility, calling him a two-time bigamist — a description that Mr. Leissner acknowledged was true.

When she’s not singing opera, she’s making olive oil from her own grove in Greece.

“I cry when I come home. Whenever I board the plane, the tears begin. I need the sun as an inspiration.”

Now see that’s the part I’ll never understand. You’re running a vast, multi-million dollar criminal enterprise against the United States government. If you get caught, the prospect of your ever getting out of jail is dim. And yet when some entity at some point in your complex shakedown process refuses payment, YOU SUE THEM.

Does it not occur to you that it would be better to take this or that secondary loss and keep your head down?

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

Reminds UD of MIT’s sainted Dean Gabriel Bitran. He had a great criminal enterprise going until he and his son CONTACTED THE SEC.

The scheme was uncovered by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission when, while investigating potential victims of the Bernie Madoff fraud, SEC officials asked for documentation to support the Bitrans’ returns claims. The Bitrans then made false statements to the SEC examiners and provided fabricated records.

Ja, ja, the common thread here is mindless bottomless promiscuous depraved and degenerate GREED. I get it. Not one cent that you’ve earned through unnecessary surgeries or investor swindling must be allowed to slip through your hands. And by the way if Madoff money is being handed out, you’re damned well going to get some. Etc.

The criminal mind certainly has its … caesuras. I mean, no one is perfect – I get that, too – but you’d think veteran villains would avoid making unforced errors.

It’s hard to put the big guys away (just ask John Hammergren), but they did just get Laurence Doud, and that ain’t chopped opioids.

He got the pharmacist award the same year he was indicted, which means that the Pharmacists Society has now had, uh, five years to stop boasting about him.

The criteria for this award is very selective and discerning… He has provided creativity, innovation, and moral support for decades to his true passion: pharmacy. Doud also received an Honorary Doctorate from Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Science in 2016.

That’s six years the Albany College has had to mull its decision to honor CEO Inmate Number One.

… feeds a bird brioche in Cozumel.

Les Suissérables

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken
There’s a pain goes on and on
Empty jets and covid breaches
Now António’s dead and gone

He diverted to the Maldives

Just to have some harmless fun
And the bank paid for the Cessna
Which is — just the way it’s done…

But then nasty jealous voices

Spilled the beans on Chairman Tón
They objected to his privilege
And his seats at Wimbledon

I can hear his weeping now!

The very rules that he had broken
Became his last communion
On his final private flight
At dawn

‘Credit Suisse, oh Suisse, forgive me
That I drained you and am done
There’s much more I could have taken
But those dreams are dead and gone’

Phantom pilots at the cockpit
Phantom stewards at the door
Empty seats on empty Cessnas
Where António sits no more

Credit: Michael Frese.

… a la vida.

The brazen, inexhaustible nature and variety of his mendacity is something to see. When you read what he does and says, having been caught making up numbers for Temple University’s business school in order to score a US News number one ranking, you have to admire the sheer endurance/agility/creativity of his lying.

When caught by Temple administrators, he simply says Give me more time. I can fix it back. Now in a court of law, he has blamed all of his assistants, who turn out to be vicious prevaricating scum, for the wrongdoing.

For sure, his next move will be to announce to the court that he is profoundly mentally and physically ill, cannot be held responsible for anything he’s ever done, and needs to go home and lie down.

Be still my heart.

And again.

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

Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about? . . . People [hiding] even when no one is looking for them?

Jack Gladney, the hero of Don DeLillo’s great novel, White Noise, asks himself this as he searches out a university colleague who always makes it extremely difficult to find her. The novel is full of characters “avoiding situations,” as one of them puts it.

“I’m here to avoid situations. Cities are full of situations, sexually cunning people. There are parts of my body I no longer encourage women to handle freely.”

People in Gladney’s town, Blacksmith, drape themselves in oversized sweatsuits and create state of the art all-inclusive houses so they rarely have to go out. Their massive cars have darkly tinted windows. There’s a shared undifferentiated paranoia which drives people in on themselves. Some of his neighbors belong to tiny hidden cults.

In other words, the hijab and burqa were just waiting for us. Hiding’s what you do when it’s like this out there. UD‘s surprised it took this long for an entrepreneur to see the possibilities.

And…. YES. A perennial favorite of this blog, Rep. Louis Gohmert (Texas), appears on the ultra-exclusive list of GOP reps said to have taken important roles in organizing January 6.

As UD scanned this article, the mantra Make it Gohmert echoed in her mind; and, bingo. She is delighted beyond description at the prospect of his big ol’ lawsuit on this matter (lawsuit-filing-wise, Louie’s model is of course DJT), plus the spilling of the details of his involvement in the historic event.

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

Largest context, of course:

This remains perhaps the most important part of the whole investigation: the period of hours in which Trump gleefully watched his supporters try to hunt down the members of Congress and indeed Trump’s Vice President and refused efforts to calm the situation or order federal troops to stop the assault on the Capitol.

In this 2010 photograph, entrepreneur Shawn Baldwin, 2015 recipient of the Boy Scouts of America Whitney M. Young Jr. Service Award, stands next to Michael Milken. Milken was sentenced to ten years and fined 600 mill for violating securities laws, while Baldwin was just sentenced to seventeen years for doing a Bernie Madoff.

UD thinks it’s always nice to get a sense of the real people behind these posed, expensive suit, MBA-type photos…. I mean, who are these people, really? Once you get to know them, they’re just like you and me!