… flaunt it!

Then go to jail.

“Nir spent more money than God,” said a former HFZ employee. “No one was clear where the money was coming from. What success had the company realized that we were unaware of?” Feldman’s complaint against Meir alleges that Meir’s monthly American Express bill often exceeded $400,000. Meir spent hundreds of thousands on wine and kept a stable of luxury cars including five Mercedes G-Class wagons and a 1996 Porsche 911 Turbo valued at $300,000.

Bad boy.

Naked beneath a thin paper smock, a nurse checked my vitals …

Celeste Marcus is a bad writer. Salmagundi, which published her, seems not to have noticed. (The journal used to have higher standards.) She is bad not merely on the level of usage; she writes the breathless, self-regarding, histrionic bahdebah one associates with Naomi Wolf.

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None of this pertains to her recent rape accusation against Yascha Mounk, which, true or not, has already done professional damage: the Atlantic has suspended him as a contributor, as has Die Zeit. Hopkins, where he teaches, has announced an investigation.

I think you should approach this story with caution. Marcus did not report the rape; we will find out whether friends will confirm that she spoke about it. Far as I know, Mounk has no reputation as a predator, unlike the sexually notorious Leon Wieseltier, currently Marcus’s fellow editor/boss at a new journal.

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As you see, UD indeed brings skepticism to Marcus’s charge. What Marcus says could well be true, in which case throw the book at Mounk. But approach with caution.

She’s become addicted to the luxury/intensity of having the history of art to herself. She stays for an hour and a half or so, until other people dare to show up and share the goods.

I swear there’s almost no one there at ten AM on a cold weekday, so you just sashay about with an idiotic smile on your face as one unbelievable gallery after another beckons you. You hum Bach’s Cello #1 and the paintings hum back. Their lifeblood is bright red. They are right at you.

Even deathly pale their lifeblood is bright.

It’s you, the copyist, and the echoing halls.

Outside, UD takes heart from the writing on the side of the Archives.

Permanency. YES!

Although just in case I’m keeping a few of these pennies in my pocket.

Ms. Crumbley, 45, was convicted on four counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each of the four students who were shot to death by her son at Oxford High School on Nov. 30, 2021. The son, Ethan Crumbley, who was 15 at the time, used a pistol to kill Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14. Seven other people were injured. The gun was a gift from his parents.

She could – and should – get fifteen years. As I said in an earlier post, she’ll do the world some good by scaring the shit out of other fucked up gunnies who reproduced.

 [S]teroid injections [are sometimes] given to women undergoing elective Caesarean sections to deliver their babies. These injections are intended to prevent breathing problems in newborns. There is a worry that they might cause damage to a baby’s brain, but the practice was supported by a review, published in 2018… However, when [a group of scientific sleuths] looked at this review, they found it included three studies that they had noted as unreliable. A revised review, published in 2021, which excluded these three, found the benefits of the drugs for such cases to be uncertain.

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[C]ritically ill patients undergoing surgery were once sometimes given starch infusions to boost their blood pressure. This was based in part on seven now discredited studies by Joachim Boldt, a German anaesthesiologist. A revised round-up of the evidence published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in 2013, after his fabrications were discovered, concluded that giving starch infusions in these circumstances caused kidney damage and sometimes killed people.

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 [F]or more than a decade cardiac patients in Europe were given beta-blockers before surgery, with the intention of reducing heart attacks and strokes—a practice that rested on a study from 2009 which was eventually determined to have been based, at least in part, on fabricated data. By one estimate, this approach may have caused 10,000 deaths a year in Britain alone. And a systematic review showing that infusion of a high-dose sugar solution reduces mortality after head injury was retracted after an investigation failed to find evidence that any of the trials included in it, which were all ascribed to the same researcher, had actually taken place.

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… to her own private DC.

Winner and Still Champeen. Visits to the Archives always bring tears to UD‘s eyes, despite a certain amount of scoffing from Mr UD. (“Do they have benches where you can kneel in front of the documents?” he asked on my return.)

Imagine this scene in the insanely crowded Uffizi! Impossibile.

I’ll have the same quality of art as the Uffizi, free of charge, with one after another gallery to myself, please.

All topped off with a Teaism chai, and ginger scones.

Highly recommend this essay.

Took them a long time to decide to buy. But they were feeling empty.

New Mexico State (feast your eyes) puts a guy on court who just goes ahead and punches the lights out of another player.

New Mexico State’s Robert Carpenter pulled back his arm and delivered a powerful punch to the face of Liberty’s Shiloh Robinson, sending the forward to the floor, [breaking his nose,] and leading to an ejection during an Aggies overtime win.

The beauty of it is the coach initially said Carpenter’s a great guy and I’m sure he’s remorseful and maybe we’ll suspend him for a game or something… And then I dunno someone must have talked to the coach cuz now it’s oh he’s suspended indefinitely blah blah.

Wowsa. It’s rarely this glaring.

That’s Georgy Kurasov‘s work on the right. (Kurasov’s totally charming self-description is here.) The plagiarism — featured, until blasted off, in a Cairo metro station — is on the left. Ghada Wali has been sentenced to six months in prison.

Let’s hope so. Let’s hope the current high-profile involuntary manslaughter trial scares the bejaysus out of America’s most cretinous heatpackers.

Hey hon says dad as he watches the Crumbleys carted off to jail, maybe we shouldn’t give our violent, schizophrenic kid an AK47 for Christmas…

Esformes pleads guilty, and we will be deprived of a trial.

On the upside: His life has been ruined.

Put Esformes in my search engine to revisit all his despicability.

… amid all the plagiarism misconduct, so Harvard’s Khalid Shah has arrived not a moment too soon.

Time was UD followed bogus stem cell studies constantly, with this almost immediately discontinued 2005 Korean stamp

the high point of the bogosity. But maybe word got around that bogus stem cell results were getting caught and careers ruined, because stem cell naughtiness kind of fell away.

But bogus, brain-related, stem cell research seems to be what has done in the much-laureled, over-extended, madly-publishing Shah, a man unfortunate enough to have been on the receiving end of one of Elisabeth M. Bik’s punishing data analyses.

Though Bik alleged 44 instances of data falsification in papers spanning 2001 to 2023, she said the “most damning” concerns appeared in a 2022 paper by Shah and 32 other authors in Nature Communications, for which Shah was the corresponding author.

Yeah you read dat right. 32 authors coming out of what —- one million thirty two labs, schools, departments, clinics, each location populated by poohbahs professors grad students scoundrels standers-by and why oh why is anyone surprised that research protocols like this generate longterm fraud??

1. From the promotional literature for new assisted living apartments a mile away from Les UDs.

McCaffery and Solera Senior Living have partnered to co-develop The Modena Reserve at Kensington, a 135-unit luxury independent, assisted living and memory care community. Located in the high barrier to entry town of Kensington, Maryland, and adjacent to the historic Kensington train station offering direct access to Washington D.C….

2. UD had a consult this morning with a pulmonologist. Faithful readers know UD has episodic bronchitis. She hasn’t had any trouble for months, but she decided as a precaution to talk to a specialist. Here’s a bit of conversation from him.

When I joined this practice ten years ago, I thought the partners wanted me because of my impressive education. Harvard College, Hopkins med school, Harvard internships… But when I made partner they told me ‘Franklin, we hired you to be our shabbos goy.‘

… but if it’s true that Harvard’s chief diversity officer is a plagiarist, everyone’s gonna start talking.

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Just today, a new complaint emerged against Harvard’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, alleging that she, too, engaged in scholarly misconduct. (Neither Charleston nor the university has responded to a request for comment on those allegations.)

Story jumps to Atlantic mag.

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The Harvard Crimson covers it today. Here’s the part that makes UD sit up.

The complaint also alleged that extensive passages in Sherri Charleston’s 2009 Ph.D. dissertation lifted language from a 2005 book written by Rebecca J. Scott, a professor of history and law at the University of Michigan. Scott co-chaired Charleston’s doctoral committee and advised Charleston on her dissertation.

Many passages describe or analyze historical events using phrases — and sometimes whole sentences — identical to those in Scott’s book. In each case, Charleston cites Scott but does not quote the shared language.

If they really were extensive, and if they were not quoted, it’s legitimate to ask why Scott didn’t notice anything.

Why no one noticed anything. The language was taken from a very high-profile book.