Williams, a former member of the Georgia House of Representatives who earned a $165,000 salary as the agency’s director, then paid for the cheaper saw using his credit card while wearing his forestry commission uniform, a cashier told police.
Williams, who was arrested when he returned to the store to speak to a manager, admitted to swapping the price tags, saying “he had done such things in the past and does it for the thrill.”
Donald [to Don Jr]: Oh I do so hope Rudy has the coronavirus. It makes all of us so much stronger and wiser. [Shouts.] Biden isn’t even coughing yet! He’s a total zero with his [spits]… MASKS. I have personal experience fighting the coronavirus. That firsthand experience, Joe Biden doesn’t have that.
Don Jr: Dad, I want a word with you. [Nervously, with his father still watching the screen.] You know how much better you’ve been lately… I mean, more … in touch! More grounded! The family really feels you’ve come back to us after… drifting from us a bit… [DT does not respond. Still watching screen.] But Dad, your behavior the last few days… It’s like you’re back in the … bad old days…
Donald: [Hand goes automatically to his hair. Scowls.] The nurses messed up my do. Son, am I still young and beautiful? Have my looks faded? Howard Stern – how long ago it seems! – told me I was the handsomest man he’d ever met. How much simpler life was then!
Don Jr: [Gazes with deep sorrow at his father.] I feel so damned sunk. Because this time you had me fooled. I really believed you were mentally sound. I really believed you had it licked. I can’t forgive you yet. I’d begun to hope… I’ve never known you to drown yourself in it as deep as this…
Just… read it. Just work your way through it. I promise it will bring a smile – and maybe even laughter! – to your face.
Excerpts:
‘Merchants Hospitality has filed an explosive lawsuit against former partner Adam Hochfelder, accusing him of running a Ponzi scheme, embezzling investor money and retaliating against his former associates after he was fired in June.
In a complaint filed in New York State Supreme Court last week, Merchants claims it went out on a limb to help Hochfelder get back on his feet after a two-year prison stint, only to catch him stealing from the firm and using its name and assets to defraud unsuspecting investors and partners…
Hochfelder went to prison in 2010 after pleading guilty to 15 counts of grand larceny and three counts of scheming to defraud his uncle, in-laws and other investors out of more than $18 million. He left prison and was hired by Merchants in 2012.
Now, eight years later, Merchants accuses Hochfelder of embezzling funds from its West 42nd Street hotel project — the site of a failed effort to run a high-priced Playboy Club in New York — and using his affiliation with the firm to run a $400,000 Ponzi scheme through his company email…
[Hochfelder] accused Merchants of fabricating the scheme by breaking into his computer and creating false documents…
Merchants brought Hochfelder on board during his prison stint to spearhead acquisitions and development for the firm…
In 2014, Merchant, the firm’s CEO, called hiring Hochfelder “one of the best decisions we ever made.” And in 2017, after allegations of sexual harassment against Hochfelder surfaced, [the CEO] defended Hochfelder, saying, “It’s easy for him to be a pinata because of his past. But I think everybody deserves a second chance.”…
Merchants claims it conducted an investigation into [one particular] embezzlement … and Hochfelder ultimately admitted to the scheme and begged his partners to let him repay the money, citing “his own psychological issues and problems with drugs,” according to the September lawsuit…
Hochfelder [allegedly] collected $125,000 for an investment in the Bryant Park Hotel, which Merchants does not own. The complaint also alleges that Hochfelder offered an interest in Merchants’ Z Hotel in Long Island City but had the investor wire $75,000 to an LLC owned by his wife.
On top of those accusations and the alleged $4 million payment withheld by Roche, Merchants says Hochfelder has left the firm with months of overdue car payments, traffic violations and an ongoing eviction proceeding at his Midtown apartment…’
[Israel’s] coronavirus czar… carved the country into red, yellow or green zones depending on their virus rates. He intended to enforce lockdowns in the hardest-hit places.
But his plan, which became known as the “traffic light plan,” turned into political dynamite: The red cities were found to be overwhelmingly ultra-Orthodox or Arab, attesting to the crowded conditions in which these communities live. Mr. Netanyahu, for whom the ultra-Orthodox parties are a crucial coalition partner, balked. We became the country with the highest rate of new coronavirus cases per capita in the world.
On Wednesday, it becomes official: The city’s viral hot spots will be locked down. Life can only go back to normal when these communities are able to bring their shockingly high infection rates (8 percent positivity in some neighborhoods) down; but this is unlikely. More likely are riots, and even more brazen (because now enraged) flouting of masking and distancing. As in Israel, struggling with the same catastrophe on a vaster scale, there’s nothing admirably tolerant about letting populations fail to educate themselves and their children in the germ theory of disease, or fail to grasp basic civic life and social responsibility.
How weird we are, my fellow Americans. We are witnessing the playing out of our version of Greek tragedy, the downfall of the hero, the revelation that one of our most gifted envied potent figures has been corrupted, has degenerated, has been brought low by hubris or some other fatal character flaw, leaving us to regard with pity and fear his appalling end.
Unlike Trump, however, the traditional tragic hero (Oedipus, Hamlet, Faustus, Kurtz, the Consul) starts off dramatically better than the rest of us – morally and intellectually superior. His fall is thus from a very high height, and this is the horror and the pity of it – that even the very best among us will be shot down by the gods, or by some long-latent intrinsic defect. Although the hero soars above the rest of us, his eventual all-too-human fall instructs us in (and, Aristotle argues, helps reconcile us to) the limitations of our human nature, and the universal extinction that awaits us all, high and low.
The model of the tragic reversal, the hero’s sudden turn from high to low, from glory to catastrophe, doesn’t fit the president, who, as many have noted, has from the start played out a strikingly low-life narrative. This American tragic hero seems simply to have brazenly gotten away with a lot of things, and now time and circumstance have caught up with him. No one watching his effort, during the debate with Biden, also to brazen that event out, can have missed the desperation of a man coming to the bottom of his bag of tricks.
And, well, I guess we can reference tragic irony, of a sort. As Maureen Dowd’s comment in my headline suggests, we certainly have here that old dramatic chestnut whereby the thing the hero dreads the most – in this case, losing – over-abundantly, maximally painfully, with the whole world watching, comes to pass.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
