… Bared.

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Caroline Tait, a Métis professor and medical anthropologist who has worked alongside Bourassa for a decade at the University of Saskatchewan, said she grew suspicious of [Carrie] Bourassa’s story because she initially only claimed to be Métis, but later added Anishinaabe and Tlingit heritage…

Winona Wheeler, an associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan and member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba who helped Tait research Bourassa’s genealogy, told CBC that she was disgusted when she witnessed Bourassa’s TEDx speech.

“I was repulsed by how hard she was working to pass herself off as Indigenous,” Wheeler said. “You’ve got no right to tell people that’s who you are in order to gain legitimacy, to get positions, and to get funding. That’s abuse.”

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And listen. Now that we know this is a thing, that on a regular basis people are going to be faking minority identities in order to gain advantages, we need to start noting common features of the con.

As a dedicated follower of all sorts of identity frauds, UD has certainly noticed a few characteristic elements, most of them arising from the fact that the sort of person capable of conceiving of, let alone carrying out, such a wacky, brazen, incredibly high-risk act tends to be mentally unstable.

Call their most self-damaging syndrome Fulminating Fraudulence, in which they can’t leave fake enough alone and must always be metastasizing (Anishinaabe, Tlingit…), and always be appearance-embellishing (for that TED talk, Bourrasa practically disappeared under the weight of native drapery).

Recall a GW student’s description of Jessica Krug in the classroom:

[S]he was very adamant that she was from the Bronx — she had a very heavy accent throughout the whole class. She would come in with huge hoops and a nose ring and a crop top and tight, tight cheetah pants. She has a big tattoo on her arm of the socialist symbol [the hammer and sickle]…

If she hadn’t been unmasked, Krug would have been twirling Enver Hoxha nipple tassels.

Wealth-tax-wise, it’s certainly a question, and Paul Krugman, rather lamely, tries to answer it (They need to keep their competition with other billionaires going; they are petty insecure egomaniacs).

Hoarding of pointless billions, more generally, is a fascinating behavior. Harvard University – closing in on a $55 billion endowment – still asks UD‘s husband every few weeks to leave it all his worldly goods. Unimaginably rich people grasping self-destructively after money they don’t need is fascinating.

Greed on a much smaller scale we know all about; we couldn’t have classic literature without it. (Start at 1:50.) But refusal to shear off the odd billion from, say, $335 billion, for the common good, is truly puzzling. That is, one can sort of perceive a kind of panic in people like Fanny Dashwood (again, see 1:50); the intimate, familial, cruelty of her grasping, and the comical fact that she literally does fall upon every single stray farthing in her vicinity, sketch a human type, a baleful character, recognizable from our observation of, say, certain children who steal other children’s toys, and throw a tantrum if you try to take any of theirs away, even temporarily…

But words like pathological tend to get rolled out when unconscionably vast sums are hoarded, or trivialized, as in Robert Hughes’ comment about the 2004 sale of a Picasso:

When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

And that was 2004. We’re up to $450.3 million for a da Vinci. No painting is worth … five hundred million dollars?

*********************

How bout this.

Melanie Klein … saw greed as part of human nature, [and] she traced it back to the death drive. Human beings are unavoidably self-destructive, she argued, and we project that destructiveness onto the outside world in the form of insatiable acquisitiveness, envy, and hate. “At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast,” Klein wrote, describing the primal instincts of infants and psychotics. Though later psychologists have questioned Klein’s all-pervasive belief in the death drive, or Thanatos, many agree with her that there is an existential connection between our mortality and our desperation to acquire good things. Essentially, it’s death that makes people “greedy for life”; we seek to get as much as we can for ourselves before the game is over.

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Some suggested reading. An excerpt from it, taking a position a tad different from Klein’s.

A woman who titled a collection of essays The Virtue of Selfishness, [Ayn] Rand was given to brackish candor. Yet at a time when many people think that the common good is more often imperiled than empowered by unbridled greed, she provides an alternative defense of the acquisitive instinct by appealing to an ethics of gross achievement and a formulation of personal liberty that looks with suspicion and disdain on any talk of civic duty, moral obligation, or even prudential restraint. Her aim was simple: To relieve greed, once and for all, of any moral taint.

As Sepp Blatter (talk about a blast from the past!) finally gets indicted, this New York Times writer does his best, within the length restrictions of typical American newspaper articles, to summarize the hundred or so years of everyone within fifteen feet of FIFA stealing all of its money. The hilarious larcenous briberous free for all which is professional soccer just keeps rolling along, of course; but nothing in the organization’s history will ever come up to the tightly organized crime that Blatter oversaw. No wonder he is the recipient of so many honorary degrees.

Emory University’s Decatur Hospital is a “Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health Site” which… great, great. The name’s something of a mouthful, but whoever named it is clearly trying to cram a lot of good stuff in. Could have named it Community Centered Compassion Centered Spiritual Health and Wellness Center or something even longer, so fine.

It’s also a hospital, of course, with an emergency room and all…

But the reality of Emory Decatur’s emergency room is more like the stygian depths than the spiritual heights… By which I mean that, as described in this article, it’s more like hiring a plumber than leaning on the everlasting arms. When you hire a plumber (at least around these parts), you start paying the minute he walks in the door – seventy dollars for the first hour, a little less for after that. Dude could walk around doing nothing and you’d still owe him seventy.

Same thing at compassionate Emory, which explains in the email I quote in this post’s title that hell you could sit in the ER waiting room for seven hours with a head injury and then give up in frustration and you’d STILL get a bill for, let’s see, $688.35.

… but the ignominy lingers on. The University of Michigan just sits there refusing to acknowledge/apologize for its craven abandonment of Bright Sheng. The faculty is getting restless; seven hundred professors have written to the school to say what the fuck.

Of course the school had to suspend its grotesque “investigation” of an eminent composer who made the mistake of showing his class Olivier’s Othello; but now there’s the matter of setting things to rights and getting Sheng back in the classroom.

Sixty music department students have also written the school asking for their professor, and their school’s reputation, back.

But the school is still scared shitless, and must be pondering the truth commission one segment of the faculty proposes, where Sheng would publicly admit his centuries of injustice and beg forgiveness.

[Brett] Kavanaugh theorized that a left-leaning state could offer a $1 million bounty against those who sell an assault rifle, like an AR-15, then claim it wasn’t using state power because only private parties could bring the suits.

Hadn’t thought of that. Ha.

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You and Me Against the World

‘It’s hardly traditional to get injunctions against judges, injunctions against everybody, right?’ [Chief Justice] Roberts said. ‘That’s part of the relief you seek, isn’t it? … So you’re seeking an injunction against the world?’

********************

Genius Loco

Much of the debate revolved around a 1908 case, Ex Parte Young, where the Supreme Court ruled that state officials could be sued in federal court to prevent  them from trying to enforce unconstitutional laws. 

‘Some geniuses came up with a way to evade the commands of that decision as well as the command [of] the broader principal that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights,’ Justice Elena Kagan said. ‘To say, ‘Oh, we’ve never seen this before, we can’t do anything about it,’ I guess I just don’t understand that argument.’ 

                Ancient Medieval Modern

The high-speed train site, a substation with an epic switchgear,
Also has triple-transformers: Ancient/Medieval/Modern.  
Roman/Norman/New.      Keep digging.
Further down, something neolithic will appear.

Piling on with every mood swing...  Then, years later, turning over 
Statues, witch-marks, scratch-dial.

And now we lay down our own dedicated tracks:
Frail rail.

The mayor seemed entirely unstartled. It never stops; why should it stop for her press conference?

“The last time I was in the Bay Area, I went walking in the marina and saw seven consecutive boats named after characters from Ayn Rand,” [Abigail] Disney said.

For details of the latest, AMAZING, academic plagiarism, it helps to read French. Because even though attorney/politician Arash Derambarsh’s cut and paste définitivement rises to the level of English-language-world interest, someone has decided it won’t travel well. Listen up to realize just how wrong that is.

1. Almost every word of his dissertation, at deadhead Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne, is plagiarized.
2. Just in case anyone might look at it, he somehow got the university to agree to keep it secret for thirty years – because it contains incredibly sensitive, high-level, top-secret material, see.
3. For its part, the university assigned as his committee various buddies and non-specialists, all of whom – vive la France – passed the thesis with flying colors.
4. Someone managed to get hold of the thing, despite its ultra-top-secret status, and determined that it was entirely plagiarized, which forced the hand of deadhead Paris I, which began an investigation. Investigators were unable to find “the missing mandatory report on the defense (which legally has to be entered into the academic record for a PhD to be valid).” Derambarsh’s thesis advisor advised that it “was in a computer that had been stolen.”
5. Arash submitted to the investigators an entirely different piece of writing, this one cleansed of copying. Ballsy.
6. The thesis was voided; Derambarsh may never again register at any French university for any course of study.
7. He’s been disbarred.

His take on his famous memo keeps changing. Where is his sedition today?

Makes UD think of the classic song, featured in The Big Lebowski.

Well, they also published Joseph Epstein attacking a doctorate holder for being called doctor. Editorial decisions at the Wall Street Journal have gotten very mad tea party: “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which men thank God for not making them a woman is recited each morning.

******************

It’s like…

Though some scholars argue it should not be interpreted as a slight, a prayer in which white men thank God for not making them black is recited each morning…

Luxembourg’s prime minister committed plagiarism “unparalleled in its scope”in his master’s thesis. The headline in the Guardian says it all:

‘Only two pages’ of Luxembourg PM’s university thesis were not plagiarised

‘[O]nly “a few paragraphs in the introduction” and “an equally short conclusion” had not been copied wholesale…’

… Which leaves us free to imagine what those stunningly original intro and conclusion paragraphs had in them. Let’s see… hm…

**********

I should like to thank my wife Babette, and our daughters Lucette and Lunette, for their steadfast love, support, and patience, as I sweated bullets to get this thesis in on time. Only they can know, because they lived with me throughout, what labor this work represented, and how many piano and dance recitals I had to miss because of it. Forgive me! I hope this accomplishment of mine can in some way compensate for, or at least explain, my absences.

**********

I leave these pages with bittersweet emotions. My close study of voting systems in the European Parliament has been rigorous and even exhausting; and yet, as I bid it farewell, I find myself surprisingly melancholy, surprisingly reluctant to give up the work and hand my thesis in to my mentor, Professor Criqui*, whose no doubt minute reading of this work will result in extensive critical commentary and (I hope) a truly deserved A!

**********

*Author of the forthcoming Post-Plagiarism-Detecting Software and the Collapse of the European University .

**********

UD thanks Elizabeth.