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“[W]hat [Jonnie Williams] did want — state funded studies of his product, Anatabloc — he never got, defense attorneys stressed.”

And that’s because our universities – bless their hearts – are unlikely to want to waste their time studying bullshit substances even if the state the universities are in makes it clear it’s willing to throw a lot of money at the universities to do so.

So Governor Vaginal Probe and the Missus have been found guilty of corruption (the maker of the bs substance threw money at them in order to get them to get the universities to produce studies of the substance in order to give it respectability so people would buy it…) and will go to prison in part because they were too stupid to realize that rank and total intellectual corruption is something almost no university (in the States; they should have tried the scheme in Italy) is going to approve.

Margaret Soltan, September 4, 2014 2:26PM
Posted in: conflict of interest

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4 Responses to ““[W]hat [Jonnie Williams] did want — state funded studies of his product, Anatabloc — he never got, defense attorneys stressed.””

  1. Contingent Cassandra Says:

    That was one of the things that struck me, too — Williams’ apparent certainty that a governor should be able to tell researchers at a state university what to study, and they’d hop to it. Apparently we have very different ideas of how the system is supposed to work (but/and I’m afraid Williams’ idea may be where we’re heading).

    Has anybody suggested appointing Williams to the UVA board yet? He might fit in very well.

  2. Margaret Soltan Says:

    Contingent Cassandra: Williams on the board – LOL.

  3. va whatevs Says:

    Williams also suggested testing it on state employees. You’ll love these pills! Tobacco, like grapefruit, has odd biochemical effects, but that’s not what makes it special. There’s a Tobacco Fund run by an apparently corrupt board down in Southside Va., which handles the money from the tobacco settlement.

    Some hawking an all-things-connected theory have tried to tie the Williams scandal to the Dragas scandal (firing the president of UVa). Nothing there. Williams claimed a Johns Hopkins researcher liked his pills. Dragas likely planned to nominate a JHU medical administrator as the new UVA pres. But the JHU claim by Williams was untrue and investors sued him for using it to pump up the stock value.

    The most likely scenarios are that Williams was doing anything to build a pill company, and Dragas was trying to make her name by transforming higher ed in an entrepreneurial big ideas game. Or she humored the big ideas people in pursuit of a regime change. Some key actors on and near the UVa board were new ideas enthusiasts reminiscent of the throbbing teenager in Alan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, or a bad TED talk. They were more New Age (UVa Contemplative Sciences Center) than evangelical (Gov. McDonnell, Atty. Gen. Cucinelli, and, I suppose, Jonnie Williams), but when it comes to money, what’s the difference?

    (For details on how magic tobacoo pills are just plausible enough to sell a scam, see the journalistic account here: http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/a-chemical-romance/Content?oid=1920271 )

  4. University Diaries » ‘JACK ABRAMOFF’S PRISON ADVICE FOR BOB MCDONNELL’ Says:

    […] The Guv’s sentence will be announced in a few moments… […]

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