Also pear of legs and currant of electricity.
Fran Lebowitz came to mind as UD read David A. Graham on the long, lucrative, openly illicit careers of Manafort, Epstein, Michael Cohen, Elliott Broidy, Harvey Weinstein… He could have thrown in Steven A. Cohen, the most prominent among thousands of insider traders, etc., etc. The point is that the world is full of billionaire thieves – and worse – who either totally get away with it, or get away with it for a long time. It’s basic; it’s structural; it’s Welcome to Our World. As long as a slave class of Alex Acostas and Alan Dershowitzes (Dershowitz, who kept naughty Claus von Bulow in circulation, continues to insist on the innocence of his friend and client Jeffrey Epstein) exists, these men will be fine. (Graydon Carter: Come on down!)
*****************
Fine? Better than fine.
Consider 1989, the year that the junk-bond king Michael Milken was indicted for racketeering and securities fraud, and the year that five teenagers of color were indicted for the rape of a woman in Central Park. Ultimately, Milken served just two years; the so-called Central Park Five served five to 15 years apiece for a crime that, it turns out, none of them committed. But even that wide gap understates the disparate justice typically available in the system. Milken’s case was unusual because it was an instance of white-collar crime that actually got prosecuted. Meanwhile, a noisy chorus was demanding that prosecutors throw the book at the Central Park Five—including Donald Trump, who took out ads in all four leading New York papers calling for the boys’ execution.
And where is Milken today? His name emblazons a school of public health, one of whose components is the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness.
Whether it’s high-profile Harvard University donor Jeffrey Epstein, repeatedly harassed by the courts simply for being a success, or vice chair of the Columbia University board of trustees Noam Gottesman, pilloried in the press simply for trying to get around in the big city, hedge fund managers are notoriously dissed — and not merely in this country.
Everyone this morning is reading about pride-of-Columbia Gottesman having created a fake private parking spot for himself in front of his Manhattan residence and sending out goons to threaten people who try to park in the pretend spot. He has a house in England, too, where neighbors’ complaints about helicopter noise prompted authorities to open
an investigation into whether Gottesman built a helipad on his property without permission. The probe began after several locals complained about [celebrity] flights into and out of the estate, which they say often occur early in the morning or late at night.
The authority is also looking into whether part of Gottesman’s estate has been turned into residential space without approval.
“No planning permission has been granted for a permanent helipad on the land,” a spokesman for the Basingstoke and Deane Borough Council said. “We have visited the site and met with the owners’ representatives and the enforcement case remains open.”
You can see why Columbia University found the civic values of Gottesman so compelling that they promoted him to vice chair of their board of trustees.
Turns out taking half a million dollars from the parent of a kid who wants admission to Harvard is a conflict of interest. Who knew?
Michelle Goldberg calls it “plutocratic rot,” yet another instance (didn’t we just finish washing the taste of Paul Manafort out of our mouths?) of “a deep corruption among mostly male elites across parties, and the way the very rich can often purchase impunity for even the most loathsome of crimes.” (Cue The Great Gatsby.) Speaking of which, we “can expect the feds to add child-pornography charges” to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking indictment. Great.
As longtime readers know, UD‘s go-to international source of truly madly deeply necrotically fulminating all-male plutocratic putrescence is FIFA, world’s most gangrenous gang; but there’s so much more (can you imagine what underage orgies are like in female-slave-state Saudi Arabia)? “Epstein successfully wielded his nearly incomprehensible money and power to influence the decision at the highest levels,” and the Saudis and the soccer boys are similarly financially incomprehensible.
So now all the bad boys go crying to the wings, Acosta, Dershowitz, Mountbatten-Windsor, Clinton (the title of Christopher Hitchens’ book about Clinton – No One Left to Lie To – turns out to have been premature. Plenty more people to lie to!), etc., etc.
*****************
Keep your mind in hell and do not despair, says St. Silouan, and these are fuckin wise words, okay? OKAY????
… b – b – b – but… how do we live them, UD?
Oh, stop blubbering. It’s different for everyone. I can tell you what works for me, but it might not work for you.
Fifty minutes of brisk aqua jogging per day, immediately followed by v. hot whirlpool and then sauna; obsessively listening to Pavarotti singing A Te, O Cara; careful perusal of The Onion; daily readings from the Gospel of Cioran.
The good old days:
[Jeffrey] Epstein’s appointment to the board of New York’s Rockefeller University in 2000 brought him into greater social prominence. .. [At the] Epstein Program for Mathematical Biology and Evolutionary Dynamics [at Harvard], … Epstein will have an office at the university. .. He says he was reluctant to have his name attached to the program, but [Larry] Summers persuaded him.
More recently:
Feds Allege That Ersatz Financier Jeffrey Epstein Is Indeed A Genuine Sex Criminal
Why does everyone on the Upper East Side look so nervous? … Epstein is something of a pervy Zelig in New York City high society and financial crime. … [He’s always been engaged in] a laughably inscrutable web of schemes, lawsuits and really shady shit. What makes it even more amazing though are the people who seem to have been involved with Epstein on all these batshit little deals, the kind of people who would really prefer if Epstein did not roll over on literally everyone he’s ever done dirty shit with in order to get out of life in prison for being the world’s most openly insidious sex criminal.
So while everyone else is watching out to see if Jeffrey Epstein flips on Donald Trump and/or Bill Clinton, we here at Dealbreaker will be waiting with bated breath to see if he flips on, well… you.
****************************
Anybody who helped Epstein in any way needs to get a lawyer and get scared.
So that’s from a 2018 article in the Harvard Crimson – a fascinating article about Jeffrey Epstein’s and Harvard University’s long hard passionate fuck.
Still-highly-esteemed emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz (horny Jorge was eventually de-emeritized) seems to have been the, er, let’s use the polite term enabler, between money-hungry Harvard (when you only have forty billion dollars to your name, you’ll take your money from any scumbag) and sugar-daddy-in-search-of-reputation-laundering Epstein. The captain of the Lolita Express paid for at least one of Harvard’s larger erections (at Hillel! but then Epstein’s BFF Dershowitz is passionate about religious tradition), and gave all sorts of money to Harvard professors studying human evolution (also makes sense: a seemingly highly civilized man might want someone to explain his compulsion to sexually enslave 13 year olds).
Trump retains Acosta and Harvard retains Epstein’s money and Dershowitz retains his emeritus status. Love makes the world go ’round.
*******************
[C]ould Attorney General Bill Barr run interference on this case? Yes. He is the head of the whole Justice Department, even the “Sovereign” district as SDNY is sometimes playfully called. And while it pains me to say this, given Barr’s conduct in the past acting more as a defense attorney for Trump than an overseer of justice, I am concerned that Barr might interfere if he thought that Epstein might implicate Trump, who was friends with Epstein. Barr did say in his confirmation hearings that he might recuse himself on overseeing matters with respect to Epstein because of his (Barr’s) affiliation with a law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, which was part of the Florida plea debacle. Now would be a good time to know if Barr followed through on that.
*******************
“Harvard should be ashamed of [Dershowitz’s] association with it.”
Rapinoe
I look for my heart
It’s Rapinoe
I lost it to her she’s divino
The day that the final started
Two in two years? Hell, that’s nothin’! It’s Bama, America’s most celebrated university football team. What do you figure the dude makes a year to holler at the boys? 3, 4 hundred thousand? Main strength coach at Bama makes around $600,000…
… should be afraid of (not this poor guy), has just maybe moved a few steps closer to serious exposure in the upcoming sex trafficking trial of his client and pal Jeffrey Epstein. Legendary Harvard personality Alan Dershowitz, defender of female genital mutilators, has long been accused of preying, via Epstein, on underage girls.
‘Paul Cassell, one of [alleged victim Virginia] Giuffre’s lawyers, told the court that if the records [of an earlier Epstein legal case] are made public, they “will show that Epstein [was] trafficking girls to the benefit of his friends, including Mr. Dershowitz.”’
Other commenters on this newly-reopened case will be more interested in higher-level Epstein connections – our current labor secretary and our current president – but this is University Diaries. We do universities.
‘Quick! Hypertonic saline!’
‘Fuck that. Get this chick an abbayah.’
… lectures the rest of us on the importance of open communication, the only thing to do is laugh.
Talk about self-loathing. It’s not just imperialist Europeans who ban it; Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria… and Egypt’s been trying to ban them for years.
UD in fact predicts Egypt will be the next place the full face and body veil will fall. Meanwhile, welcome, Tunisia, to the developed world.
… UD was approached by a man in line ahead of her who said Ma’am I’ve got the last of the shade up here and I want to switch places with you so that you can have it. UD gratefully accepted his offer and reflected, as she glanced at his MAGA hat (she’d overheard that he was visiting from Tulsa and was here for the festivities on the Mall), that it’s always crude and stupid to perceive other people in broad ideological terms. Leaving your little house in an affluent lefty bubble in ‘thesda and heading into the sweltering city means encountering the actuality of individuals. “Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath,” said Saul Bellow, and for UD you need the bath because money and technology and group-think make it easy to remove yourself altogether from the human story, and that removal really has to be resisted if you want to go on being human.
Today however UD was firmly within her tribe, putting out more and more beach chairs at the end of her driveway so that her Garrett Park neighbors could watch our little parade (theme this year: Garrett Park is an Arboretum) on yet another sweltering afternoon. By the time Mr UD stood up to read excerpts from the Declaration of Independence, a crowd had gathered to join us as we saluted, a few minutes later, the parade marshal, 93 year old Barbara Shidler, with whom UD‘s mother gardened and landscaped and helped establish the arboretum (scroll down to Mitzi Rapp).
Love of country; love of town. The day inspires.
