Yup.

Things are beyond bad.

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Harold Meyerson, American Prospect:

I do not believe the Israeli nation can endure half modern-democratic and half theocratic-primitivist; a house divided against itself cannot stand. Unlike Lincoln, neither do I believe that it will become all one thing or all the other. Someone there should start thinking about how to break it up.

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The idea of dividing Israel into cantons, which for years has been received with mockery due to the country’s small size and security challenges, has been gaining more and more traction over the past few months, and liberals are angrily calling to separate “Israel” from “Judea.” For some, Judea means the occupied territories. For others, Judea represents all ultra-Orthodox and messianic Jews, whether they live in Bnei Brak (in Israel proper) or Hebron (in the West Bank).

Gitit Ginat, Foreign Policy

It’s right there in their headline:

18-Year-Old’s Science Reporting Leads Stanford President to Quit

It takes a child to point out to the world that the emperor has no standards.

Everyone else – especially at places like Stanford, which make scientific entrepreneurs like Stanford’s president billionaires – plays the games, the insider trading, irreproducible results, conflict of interest, ghost writing, pharmawhore games.

And everyone’s making so much money playing the games that no one’s going to make a peep.

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So making noise about it takes some snot-nosed self-righteous little person at the student newspaper who thinks exposing corruption is more important than being able to stash billions away in your tax haven.

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… Kennedy Center Honors, 2005.

La Kid sang in the show’s chorus.

Something of an overreaction?

Saul Fox, mad Trumpian, has now tried to explain (see this post for background) the movements of two ancient, priceless, Israel-owned ceramic oil lamps. So let’s see.

Fox used his pull as a major donor to the Israeli antiquities authority to get the Israelis to send said lamps to the States, for use in a Trump-era White House Hanukah party.

So far nothing seems amiss.

But then we’re told the State Department vetoed the use of the lamps in the party. Does that make sense to you? I mean does it make sense that the big ol’ American State Department busied itself with the question of whether these lamps would be an appropriate addition to a holiday party? Or that “paperwork” on the lamps took so long for State to process that they overshot the party’s date?

So that’s the first part of this fakakte story what listen I swear to God keeps getting more by the day fakakte.

When the lamps were [eventually] released from State Department custody, Fox [says he] sent a courier to retrieve them and bring them back to his California home, where he locked them up and “sort of forgot about it” right as the pandemic hit and travel slowed to a stop …

First of all, Israel made clear to Fox it wanted them back right away, which okay. Of course Israel wants its priceless antiquities back that they didn’t even get used in the party for God’s sake. But Saul here decides to take them home and then – since they were nothing important, just priceless antiquities that belonged to another country – forgot about them. Plus we all know air traffic entirely ended for the duration of covid.

Are you on board with Saul’s rendering of events?

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So couple years later he’s invited to a Mar-A-Lago party, Trump having been thrown out of the White House. Saul brings the lamps that what he forgot all about with him, to show his beloved in a little ceremony in his office at the resort. Look at these precious lamps, Don!

In place of the awe Saul must have expected from our most cultured president, there was RAGE!

Trump … responded with a passionate outcry, according to Fox, who said the former president slammed his hand on his desk.

“Well, how come I only got 25% of the Jewish vote?” Fox recalled Trump saying. 

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Trump holds onto boxes and boxes of state secrets; his loyal retainer holds onto precious Israeli artifacts. Is anal retentiveness a heretofore overlooked constituent of Trumpianism? Can this behavior help us understand the phenomenon?

It pretty instantly went to 35 million views. But just in case.

Oppenheimer’s life story is relevant to our current political predicaments. Oppenheimer was destroyed by a political movement characterized by rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues. The witch-hunters of that season are the direct ancestors of our current political actors of a certain paranoid style. I’m thinking of Roy Cohn, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, who tried to subpoena Oppenheimer in 1954, only to be warned that this could interfere with the impending security hearing against Oppenheimer. Yes, that Roy Cohn, who taught former President Donald Trump his brash, wholly deranged style of politics. Just recall the former president’s fact-challenged comments on the pandemic or climate change. This is a worldview proudly scornful of science.

Out of all this summer’s blockbusters that have had film buffs chomping at the bit, few (really just one, actually) have elicited hype as visceral and sustained as Universal’s Oppenheimer biopic from director Christopher Nolan. With its sizable fleet of A-listers doing mid-20th-century accent work, a complicated historical figure at its center, and a respected auteur steering the ship, Oppenheimer has all the making of a summer blockbuster destined to continue dominating this year’s film discourse for months to come.

Okay, so it’s not a tragedy. But when your first paragraph throws bombs (“blockbuster” derives from powerful WW2 bombs, so it’s appropriate here), and then swerves to horses (the correct word is “champing”), and after that ships, the result is kind of a mess, kind of a confusing stew. Smaller problems (it should be ‘makings‘; cliches abound; summer blockbuster is used twice; you don’t need ‘really’ and ‘actually’; it should probably be ‘sizable crew‘ if it’s one ship being steered by one person) don’t help matters.

So Eli’s in trouble with the law again – an occupational hazard for the very worst of career criminals – and having helped get his buddy Trump to pardon Eli the last time, one assumes Alan Dershowitz is now hard at work on a second pardon.

Eli and his partners in crime hail from Lakewood NJ, a hotbed of theft which you already know about if you read University Diaries.

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What? You say there’s no way Fuckface can be reelected?

Silly. Everyone said there was no way he could be elected the first time.

They’ve been hammering away at the research misconduct at some of the president’s neuroscience labs, and he has been as high-handed and obnoxious with the little buggers as you’d imagine. But the school journalists were right on the money. They persisted, and they brought the dude down. The school’s investigation found “repeated instances of manipulation of research data and/or subpar scientific practices from different people and in labs run by Dr. Tessier-Lavigne at different institutions.”

[Stanford’s] investigation [of Marc Tessier-Lavigne] took eight months, with one member stepping off after The Daily revealed that he maintained an $18 million investment in a biotech company Tessier-Lavigne cofounded. Reporting by The Daily this week shows that some witnesses to an alleged incident of fraud during Tessier-Lavigne’s time at the biotechnology company Genentech refused to cooperate because investigators would not guarantee them anonymity, even though they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.

Of course some sleuthing would turn up a financial conflict of interest on the committee: that’s SOOOO Stanford. And as to the skeeziness on protecting the identity of sources — why wouldn’t the committee guarantee anonymity, given the Genentech people’s legal vulnerability?

Much of the writing and reporting for the Daily has come from the genetically overdetermined Theo Baker.

This page has links to Baker’s reporting on Tessier-Lavigne.

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A comment in response to an article in the NYT:

In three successive labs headed by this man, data was manipulated (ie, fraudulent). The connecting link is Lavigne, who apparently rewarded post-docs who produced findings that advanced his career, and penalized those who couldn’t do so. The obvious conclusion is that he consistently cut corners and closed his eyes to what his behavior led underlings to do. And when the misconduct began to surface, he simply refused to issue the necessary corrections. He is not a victim or some innocent party here. His research was shabby and he has now got what he deserves: loss of his primary job and his reputation.

Devoted readers know that UD‘s birthday coincides with the height of the Perseids, the best of the meteor showers. This year, the two big events will take place on Tilghman Island. Here’s hoping for some clear nights.

But I think we’re winning it.

She forgot to list Windsor, for a work gathering.

The rest of it was meeting up with friends, attending a wedding,

and exploring Lisbon, which she’s been wanting to visit.

We focus, at University Diaries, on the notoriously stinky field of psychology; what a comfort to know that dangerous fraud runs rampant in many fields of scientific research.