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.

Saul Fox, whose name emblazons a fancy professorship at U Penn, has got some splainin to do. How did the lamps get from his custody to some crapper in Mar-A-Lago?

The logic of integralism is straightforward. There is no neutral ground on fundamental questions of God, good and evil, and the purpose of human life. Political conflict entails conflict about these ultimate things, integralists argue. Accordingly, they view public institutions, social structures and religion as an integral whole. Nothing is truly private. Everything affects the common good; there is no private life or private conscience. The resulting vision is of a hierarchical society with concentrated power, close coordination between church and state, and public regulation of religious orthodoxy… [In short,] the Catholic Church should strategically co-opt the American state. The result would be a return of state-sanctioned religion and a politics that is at once socially conservative, statist and economically populist… [The ultimate goal of all human life] is heaven, and the integralist means of getting us to that destination is to subordinate politics to the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church.

UD so wishes her hero Richard Rorty were still around to do a number on these lost souls.

(For background, search Vermeule and Deneen on UD‘s search engine.)

[I]n this unpredictable era of reproductive health care in the U.S., Maryland is about as safe a place an abortion provider can be.

UD has always been rather proud to be a Marylander, but never so much as now, when the gulf between Tommy Tuberville and Jamie Raskin states has never been wider.

… are part of the pleasure of gardening.

What a distinction for Harvard, which gets a prominent mention every time Alan Dershowitz steps in another pile of shit, that he’s now been sanctioned for his involvement in Lake’s frivolous, time-wasting, and destructive suit against the integrity of Arizona’s electoral system. Hard to think of a more embarrassing old fart than Harvard’s highest-profile emeritus.