Scroll down to hear the audience laughing at Czech Prime Minister Babis as he assures the country he’s financially clean. The video is marked El Mundo.
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In 2016, Mr. Babis scolded the wealthy Czechs whosenames appeared in the Panama Papers and,in a 2020 interview, proclaimed that a governing philosophy was to “cut off the heads of the ‘corruption-Hydra.’” Now he’s accused of using a string of offshore shell companies to purchase luxury real estate on the French Riviera, including a chateau worth $22 million.
Several members of Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s inner circle, including current and former cabinet ministers, “secretly owned an array of companies and trusts holding millions of dollars of hidden wealth,” the group reported. That could create a political headache for the former cricket star, who campaigned for the South Asian country’s highest office as the head of a reformist party that promised a strong anti-corruption agenda.
By Pakistani standards, this IS anti-corruption.
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Jordan’s monarch, King Abdullah II, used an English accountant in Switzerland and lawyers in the British Virgin Islands to secretly purchase 14 luxury homes worth $106 million, including a $23 million property in California overlooking a beach, the ICIJ reported, noting the country relies on foreign aid to support its people and house millions of refugees. U.K. attorneys for the king told the ICIJ that he was not required to pay taxes under Jordanian law, has never misused public funds and has “security and privacy reasons to hold property through offshore companies.”
“If you ever want to see your children alive again, you must purchase fourteen luxury homes worth one hundred million dollars.”
[Squid Game‘s] plotline center[s] around games resembling viral challenges that then translate seamlessly into memeification, particularly on TikTok, where much of the buzz for the [extremely violent] show has grown among a young audience already used to making nihilist jokes about school shootings and societal collapse.
… has struck again, defacing a public photograph of a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor. The routine defacement of Jewish faces all over the country’s cities accompanies a refusal to honor a nationwide moment of silence on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Authorities attribute their inability to stop the defacement to the country’s primitive security apparatus.
Disreputable people damage organizations. John One-Man-Rule-Whisperer Eastman, the dapper daffy Harold Bloom lookalike we’ve all seen in the now-classic photograph, not only “conspired … to overthrow an election by offering a twisted argument that was beyond the pale of serious legal scholarship,” says Jeffrey Isaac, author of a great book about totalitarianism. He represents, Isaac continues, a “21st century American fascism beyond the pale” of an organization like the American Political Science Association.
He and others are pleased that at its last national meeting the APSA made January 6 rally speaker Eastman and his merry band, the Claremont Institute, eat at the children’s table (ie, all their panels had to be online), but they want more.
[It is indeed] within the power and authority of APSA leadership to censure Eastman and the Claremont Institute, by making a very public statement that they are among [quoting here from one of the APSA’s own statements about January 6] ‘those who have continuously endorsed and disseminated falsehoods and misinformation, and who have worked to overturn the results of a free and fair Presidential Election,’ and they thus deserve to be condemned.
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Oooh, you want me to wrestle with the whole free speech/cancel culture thing, do you? You don’t want me to do a hit and run and move on to my next post… You want me to tell you why I don’t think your kid should stop reading anti-semite Roald Dahl but it’s perfectly okay for the APSA to boot the Eastman Gang clear out of stadium. Okay.
If you stopped consorting with great but antisemitic artists you’d miss out on a lot of great artists.
The conductor Daniel Barenboim, a Jew, is a champion of Wagner’s music, …and has made a point of playing it in Israel, where it is hardly welcome. His defense is that while Wagner may have been reprehensible, his music is not. Barenboim likes to say that Wagner did not compose a single note that is anti-Semitic. And the disconnect between art and morality goes further than that: not only can a “bad” person write a good novel or paint a good picture, but a good picture or a good novel can depict a very bad thing. Think of Picasso’s Guernica or Nabokov’s Lolita , an exceptionally good novel about the sexual abuse of a minor, described in a way that makes the protagonist seem almost sympathetic.
21st century American fascism is apparently what Eastman does (“Simply put, Eastman did everything he could to help stage a coup. He was not just expressing a controversial view; he was trying to nullify an election in a way that never had occurred in the United States… Never before have we had someone so actively try to overthrow our government… Had Pence followed the Eastman prescription, American democracy would have ended.”); good and great art is what exceptional people – some of them holding disgusting views — do. If Dahl’s stories were child-centered variations on Der Stürmer articles, that would be one thing. Eastman’s work (and political activism) on the other hand seems pretty straightforwardly committed to dismantling democracy; his once-respectable organization has become a hotbed of anti-democratic conspiracy theorists.
That organization, by the way, seems to be thriving; it has its own extensive publications, fellowships, public events, etc. No outside organization is compelled to grant it membership; and indeed from its own point of view Claremont might well ask whether expulsion from a seriously left-leaning whatever isn’t actually a blessing. Certainly they can do a lot of fund raising off of all of this.
UD spent yesterday on Kent Island, a place she’s sped by for decades as she makes her way to the ocean. Only an hour from Garrett Park, just beyond the Bay Bridge, its Anglican churches and white harbors and long bay views at the end of residential streets rekindled your blogueuse‘s love of her watery little state. A steadfast sun in a cloudless sky, and a cooling autumn wind, completed the absurdly perfect day, featuring a glossed-up viny garden at the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club.
Because America loves its fraternities, especially in l’Age de Trump, where it’s all about bullies and booze and Berettas. Identifying a loser and making him drink whiskey til he dies in agony is as American as apple pie, a rite of passage into manhood or into the beyond. When it gets so bad that 2,000 students rally against the Greek system, schools okay right well yeah we’ll look into the situation… Slap a wrist here and there for sure, and if much of the nationwide system features sophisticated drug operations protected by firearms, rampant rape, and the singling out of losers – people desperate to belong to our club – for death by poisoning, so be it. These boys represent the best of America.
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Now down south they got that famous frat/football nexus, and that’s a hell of a thing to watch in action.
Yet another American Stakhanovite punished by the federal government for working hard! UD has followed many of these on this blog over the years – doctors whose daily caseloads beggar belief, and what do they get?
A wildly popular physician whose willingness to go above and beyond for his patients was well-known locally, Orusa is now looking at decades in prison. This is a man who even finds ways to treat non-compliant patients.
Trial testimony from former employees and patients described a standing-room-only lobby area at Orusa’s clinic. Patients with insurance coverage were forced to visit the clinic four to six times a month and undergo cortisone shots to receive pain medication and Orusa threatened to withhold pain management prescriptions from those who refused the injections… Cash-payingpatients generally were not required to accept injections in order to receive prescriptions. Due to the excessive number of controlledsubstance prescriptions, Walmart and CVS pharmacies refused to fill prescriptions written by Orusa.
It seems like piling on to point out Orusa is a man of God, “the pastor at God’s Sanctuary Church International,” but UD really wants you to get a sense of the vile reach of the federal government.
