Man Accused in $132 Million Medicare Fraud Scheme Is Building $6.8-Million Home
Sarah and Charles Warren said Puliafito wrote them prescriptions for asthma inhalers to soothe lungs raw from smoking marijuana and methamphetamine.
That’s Dr./Dean Carmen A. Puliafito, until recently the much-lauded head of the Keck School of Medicine, and a man whose compassion for his favorite fellow druggies extended to writing them prescriptions for some of the less attractive symptoms of chemical excess.
Carmen Puliafito’s career tells you all you need to know about why there’s a Black Lives Matter movement. Single-handedly Puliafito proves true everything anyone ever said about the breathtaking immunity white criminals may enjoy over long lucrative prestigious careers. I mean, Puliafito continues to represent the University of Southern California to the public.
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And why not? I mean, sure, he had to, er, resign his deanship with full honors when one of his mad meth-filled nights turned sour and got anonymously reported to USC’s president (the police knew about it too, but didn’t even write a report); but he remains on the faculty. And the same president who knew all about Puliafito’s criminal mischief a few weeks later enthusiastically hosted his elegant goodbye party:
“Today, we have one of the, not just the area’s, but the nation’s preeminent medical schools and medical enterprises — and, in many ways, thanks to the leadership of Carmen,” [the president] told the crowd.
Carmen himself, in his farewell remarks, really nailed it: “[T]he primary job of dean of a medical school is to bring leaders that will really set the tone of the organization.” And tone-setting starts at the top!
Who cares if Carmen’s penchant for hanging out with crooks for long nights of drug overdoses – sometimes in his offices on campus – was the reason for the goodbye party? Rich white people using illegal drugs in front of hotel cameras isn’t, it turns out, illegal in Pasadena.
White Lives Matter, in other words; and in fact Puliafito came to USC trailing all kinds of other shit no one bothered acting on:
His time at Miami was not trouble-free. Marc Brockman, an optometrist at the [university], filed a lawsuit against Puliafito in 2006 for assault and battery and accused the university of negligence in hiring him.
Brockman alleged in sworn testimony that Puliafito, in a profane “tantrum” over an inoperable piece of medical equipment, grabbed him by the collar of his lab coat and choked him.
Puliafito denied wrongdoing.
During the case, it emerged that the university had investigated separate complaints of sexual harassment against Puliafito, according to sworn testimony and court filings in the lawsuit. The records do not reveal the outcome of the investigation, and a university spokeswoman said in response to questions about the probe: “We don’t have anything to provide.”
Puliafito and the university reached a confidential settlement with Brockman in June 2007.
Two months later, USC hired Puliafito.
And what a hire!
In a court battle that is still playing out, the University of California filed [a $1.85 million] suit in July 2015 against USC over its poaching of a leading Alzheimer’s disease researcher.
Puliafito was the self-described “quarterback” of efforts to land UC San Diego professor Paul Aisen, a star in the state university system.
… The suit accused USC of civil conspiracy, aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary duty and other misconduct.
And he’s still a highly respected, high-profile faculty member at the University of Southern California!
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The latest thing is that someone got hold of a series of emails Puliafito wrote to the Los Angeles Times reporters who broke the story about him…
Fuck you.
I’m on you now.
You are fucking with me now.
Watch your back.
You are such a piece of shit.
Call me. Don’t be afraid you piece of shit.
Oh wait. Those are President Trump’s lawyer’s emails. I get mixed up.
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UD thanks John.
The first woman to win a Fields Medal, Maryam Mirzakhani, has died at the age of forty from breast cancer.
“She had a sort of daring imagination,” [said her Harvard mentor.] … “She would formulate in her mind an imaginary picture of what must be going on, then come to my office and describe it. At the end, she would turn to me and say, ‘Is it right?’ I was always very flattered that she thought I would know.”
Just before she became ill, she talked about her “big plans for the next chapters of her mathematical story. She has started working … to try to develop a complete list of the kinds of sets that translation surface orbits can fill up.”
Outraged Twitter feeds abound.
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You don’t get these outcomes – you don’t get a whole culture like this – without the character-formation that happens for many in the frats and the clubs.
As I said in an earlier post, these places are structural to our country’s economic success because they help make these people:
At Peter’s memorial service in 2015 — held in a place he loved, with sweeping views of the Pacific — a young associate from his firm stood up to speak of their friendship and of the bands they sometimes went to see together, only to break down in tears. Quite a few of the lawyers attending the service were bent over their phones, reading and tapping out emails.
Their friend and colleague was dead, and yet they couldn’t stop working long enough to listen to what was being said about him.
And these people:
Wall Street CEOs like to think they are the adults, the big men in the room, the ones who know how the world works. Well, you know what? They screwed up their own banks, the financial system, and the economy like a bunch of two-year-olds. Every single major bank would have failed in late 2008 without massive government intervention — because of wounds that were entirely self-inflicted. (Citigroup: holding onto hundreds of billions of dollars of its own toxic waste. Bank of America: paying $50 billion for an investment bank that would have failed within three days. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs: levering up without a stable source of funding. Etc.) The financial crisis should have put to rest for a generation the idea that the big boys on Wall Street know what they’re doing and the politicians in Washington are a bunch of amateurs. Yet somehow the bankers came out of it with the same unshakable belief in their own perfection that they had in 2005. The only plausible explanation is some kind of powerful personality disorder.
They’re making another, similar, version of these people at Penn State. They’re making them at most of our universities. You couldn’t have Wall Street without them. You couldn’t have Marc Kasowitz without them. You couldn’t have (had) Lehman Brothers without them. You couldn’t have contemporary America without them.
So Niall Ferguson doesn’t have to huff and puff. The clubs are where you learn high-level substance abuse and arrant indifference – the heart of our red-hot economy. They’re not going anywhere.
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UD thanks Jack.
… which looked like this, and drove – slowly – to Florida, camping all the way.
This trip accomplished two things dear to my father – it saved money on hotels and food (he was cheap), and it got him and his little Jewish tribe away from the madness of the Christmas season.
UD has grown up to detest camping, so I’m thinking I didn’t have the greatest time during all of this.
My one clear memory is being marooned in some state park that smelled of sulfur, and trembling in my half-dome tent as something close to a hurricane whipped the guy lines.
But it wasn’t all a nightmare. The one thing my father threw in to thrill the kids, to make it all worthwhile, to delight and amaze us totally, was South of the Border.
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South of the Border! We were allowed to stay one night at this immense garish wonderland that announced itself miles and miles in advance, in the form of billboards with hilarious messages on them. I don’t remember any of the messages, only that everyone in the car (father, mother, four kids) read them aloud (there were tons of them) and screamed with laughter.
The article UD just stumbled on, which informs her that – incredibly – South of the Border is still open, quotes one of these billboards:
Ees onlee wan South of the Border, Amigos
The article wrestles with the staggering political incorrectness of the place, entirely constructed as it was around the image of a fat lazy Mexican named Pedro. They dumped some of the most offensive billboards (like Ees onlee…), but have retained (according to the article) the basic fat lazy Mexican motif.
The article invokes the word kitsch, and indeed South of the Border must have been wee UD‘s first serious encounter with the phenomenon. Whenever she talks about kitsch in her course on beauty, visions of South of the Border dance in her head.
UD‘s not sure why she’s so happy to read that tacky campy South of the Border continues to thrive.
Let us all applaud that great good man, University of Oregon football coach Willie Taggart, for having the courage and moral clarity to dismiss a very valuable player from the team. Let us all read this testimonial in the local booster press about this heroic coach, who just said no to Darren Carrington. No, you might be a great player, but there are moral standards here, and we uphold them, dammit.
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Let’s not look too closely, though, at precisely how UO football does the morality thing. UD is the last person to want to bring up the fact that they kept Carrington on the team after he
1. broke a visiting UO alum’s arm in an act of unprovoked violence;
2. failed an NCAA-run drug test; and
3. “was cited by Eugene police for having an open container of alcohol while underage.”
No, no, all that was fine. Break an arm or two – no problem. But while using your massive footballer bulk to practically tear the arm off of a student is fine, fucking up a McDonald’s drive-through with your car is apparently the last straw. Students are just students; McDonald’s is not only private property, but a sacred symbol of what’s best about this land. You don’t come back from fucking up a McDonald’s drive-through.
It is important to remember these words of Christopher Hitchens’ as we encounter what little resistance to full-body veil bans is left in Europe.
As when a Human Rights Watch writer stages the burqa/niqab as a “choice,” and, quite perversely, an expression of female “autonomy.”
Look at the image that accompanies her article. This woman is not wearing a full face veil; she is wearing a full body veil. The writer asks us to respect the rights of women who will under the ban never be able to leave their house. They are now “forc[ed] …to remain housebound.”
Forced.
By whom? By what twisted understanding of religious texts? They are never to feel the sunlight again; never to take a walk. Because unless they look like the woman pictured in the article, unless totally wrapped to the point where they have no peripheral vision, their mouths pulled shut by tight material, they simply cannot leave their prison.
It was inevitable that democratic societies would eventually read the burqa/niqab, and the self-imprisoning (or husband/father/brother-imprisoning) of some of its wearers (most of its wearers, of course, will quietly accommodate themselves to the law, as they have in France), as a toxic refusal to engage in even the most basic forms of civic life. It is positively Orwellian for people like the HRW writer to champion the burqa as an icon of autonomy.
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Or think of it this way:
This goes to the foundational issue of whether anyone can want the wrong things… Some concatenation of causes has trimmed down [some womens’] world view in such a way that doors to human flourishing are closed to them. So for instance literacy for women: I think that it is an intrinsic good, and it really doesn’t matter how many women you can get to tell you from behind their burqa that they don’t want to read…
Being born a woman in Afghanistan any time in last thirty years was to be unlucky… These lives have been imposed on them. When you listen to the expressions of relief and humility and clarity that you get around this notion of wearing the veil… you are hearing that as a response to the thuggish misogyny of the men in those cultures. Women are treated like whores and considered to be whores if they are not appropriately veiled. They are groped and … beaten for not being appropriately veiled… No doubt many women feel relieved to be appropriately veiled in those cultures.
… it’s Ground Zero (well, Ground 37.6 Billion), and the multitude of comments after the article – about the possibility that Harvard will gradually phase out all fraternities and other private clubs – expresses better than almost anything else the deep structure of – one social type shaped by – institutions like Harvard (for similar observations about Princeton, go here).
(Hm. Someone seems to have removed the Crimson article’s comment thread. Why?)
Given the crucial importance of secretive sadistic clubs in the formation of super-predators like the man of the hour, Marc Kasowitz (he “brags to friends he makes anywhere from $10 million to $30 million per year. He owns an apartment in a white-glove building on Park Avenue and a mansion in Westchester County. He travels by private jet and, when in New York, is driven around in a black Cadillac SUV. He owns at least two horses, according to a lawsuit Kasowitz once filed against his daughter’s equestrian stable.”) and super-predators generally, UD assures you that America’s master-of-the-universe-nurseries are not really in danger. You couldn’t have Lehman Brothers/Dick Fuld et al without them. So relax.
But the comment section of the Crimson article is rife with anxiety. Nervously eyeing Harvard’s endowment of close to forty billion dollars (for a 22,000-student school), the commenters express fear that this palty sum will be further reduced by angry alumni withholding gifts. The article quotes a Harvard report on the matter calling Bowdoin and Williams (both have gotten rid of frats and similar clubs) “peer institutions,” which sets off another round of worry and sarcasm in the comments (“Williams and… Bowdoin – … 1.3 and 2.26 billion dollar endowments respectively… are PERFECT comparisons to Harvard… Thanks for enlightening us.”)
People are scared because they think Harvard might actually do it. And since everyone imitates Harvard, everyone might do it. But Harvard won’t do it, because without the clubs we couldn’t have hypercapitalism. Shutting them down would be the moral equivalent of war.
… Harvard’s Ben Edelman.
Now that was a man who knew how to handle email exchanges.
The path looks open for more countries to repudiate the humiliating, annihilating burqa/niqab.
It’s a good day for women and for democracy when a writer on the subject titles her article Does the Burqa Have a Future in Europe?
…hosta!
As a couple of readers already suggested, I was way off in identifying it as an assassin bug.
I wrote to What’s that Bug? about it, and lookee here!
Not only did they write back right away, identifying “this beautiful creature” as a parasitoid Braconid Wasp, they feature my photographs of it today on the blog’s front page.
In case you don’t click over to the site, here’s what they say:
This beautiful creature is a parasitoid Braconid Wasp, and we believe it is Atanycoius longicauda based on this BugGuide image. BugGuide states of the genus: “Parasites of woodboring beetle larvae, especially metallic wood-boring beetles (Buprestidae) and longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae).”
Commentary on the plot of an ongoing work of speculative fiction:
In 2026, … on Earth, people stopped dying or being born, meaning that the future world is populated by eight billion or so adults who have been left to confront the blessings and curses of immortality. To pass all that time, many Americans have turned to football, contorting it in a variety of strange ways to suit their new reality. People play thousands of simultaneous games, most of which take place over many years and cover extreme long distances — say, from Washington State to the Mexican border. In one of the story’s funniest sequences, two teams are stuck against the walls of a narrow canyon, both unable to move the ball but neither willing to stop playing. The great joke of the story, at once darkly comic and hopeful, is that men and women, faced with eternity and all its possibilities, have decided simply to fall back on the familiar comforts of the country’s favorite sport. Like the space probes processing the information sent out from the people back on Earth, they have nothing left to do but, as Pioneer 9 puts it, “perpetually hang out.” And so, everywhere and for all time, it’s football night in America.
… [For] the doomed people of this American future, “Boredom is their only enemy. And they get up in the morning and fight it every day of their eternal lives. Recreation and play sustains them. Football sustains them.” In what might be the most striking chapter so far, called “An answered prayer,” a video pans over the curvature of the Earth while playing audio of the announcer Verne Lundquist calling the famous final sequence of a game between the Universities of Alabama and Auburn in 2013. This glimmer of a moment has been transmitted out into the universe, to float on forever.
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Reminds UD of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, only there the sports obsession (car racing, not football) was about time rapidly running out — nuclear fallout has destroyed the entire world north of Australia and is rapidly reaching Australia itself. But there’s the same underlying motivation: boredom, anxiety, despair.
A New York City doctor talks about FGM in an excellent article about it.
The Myth/Fact list at the end of the piece is especially useful, as Alan Dershowitz and his fellow right-to-cut-seven-year-old-girls enthusiasts prepare a criminal defense based on every single one of the myths.
… Bug.
Not that she knew it.
The fool kept photographing
the thing on her potted hosta
because she’d never seen
anything like it before.
She could have been very
badly bitten.
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A side view.
From behind.
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