… this New York Times editorial. “Prince Harry and Meghan should not be lamented as defectors from the old order, but celebrated as the heroes of the next installment, as modern royals renouncing some level of privilege to seek their fortune in the real world,” the NYT writes; and it’s as Katherine Anne Porter says in her great short story, “Holiday”:

[A]ll my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness. … I learned finally [to] take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers. … We do not run from the troubles and dangers that are truly ours… and if we don’t run from the others, we are fools.

Whatever becomes of these two, their story so far is about the guts and clarity to free oneself from a destructive life narrative that someone else has laid out for you. But in here it is I must kill the priest and the king, says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, as he taps his head. Mind-forg’d manacles are no joke, okay? Imagine how powerful they are when they’re royal. Nothing wrong, UD thinks, with being led to some extent in your life by the title of Graham Greene’s memoir: Ways of Escape.

The committee called for 2528 papers to be retracted from 541 journals.

And I’m pretty sure they’re just getting started.

(Headline source.)

Why muddy the beautiful simplicity of this exchange with classes, exams, etc. etc.? The never-ending, burdensome business of school attendance, paper writing, research — why not cut to the chase and do a win-win? Students get university degrees, faculty/staff get paid and everybody keeps their trap shut about it. Da? Duh!

Naturally any conspiracy involving tens of thousands of people is going to be a little … permeabil...

The prosecutors … recorded the pro-rector as he received large bags, bottles, and envelopes. Besides money, the bribes offered by students’ parents also included meat, wine, and spirits.

Bottles, wine, spirits… Getting a sense of Romania’s largest unit of currency here…

Began the day playing Bach’s Toccata in E Minor; and, as I got here –

They all go into the fraud,
The double dippers, the conflicted, the bogus guest speakers,
The whorish expert witnesses, the whorish corporate board sitters,
The twisters of research results to benefit their corporate masters,
The creators of bogus companies into which to deposit federal grant money,
They all go into the fraud…

To paraphrase T.S. Eliot. And as we enter a new decade, it’s good to remind ourselves just how rampant these and other forms of academic fraud are, especially in our medical, law, engineering, and business schools.

How rampant? So rampant that ProPublica has just released a helpful “reporting recipe,” a lengthy checklist of types of professorial corruption, and how you can discover/report them.

Double dipper Akhilesh Reddy, to take the latest instance, simply “did not notice” that two different universities were simultaneously paying him large salaries. And who can deny that overlooking large sources of funds from large institutions is something of which all of us are capable?

Sensing that this claim might not convince everyone, Reddy moved on to the what a tangled web we weave phase of his explanation.

The neurologist and researcher gave inconsistent statements about the money, claiming he only noticed the salary issue when he checked his account in February 2016, five months after starting at UCL, the tribunal heard… He said he thought the universities were “sharing his salary”, that there was an “overlap” in his salaries and also that he thought the large sum was just his salary from UCL... Prof Reddy said he thought “all necessary people were fully aware of the position.”

Before he could add that his dog ate his homework, the tribunal suspended him from medical practice. He has left England and moved to Pennsylvania, cuz there’s always another sucker.

Still – laugh with UD through this article about Iran’s absurd self-destructive tyrannies, and the spirited rebels who aren’t having any of it.

… had consequences.

Italy on Saturday expelled a Moroccan imam back to his home country because of what it said was his support for the Islamic State group.

Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese cited reasons of state security in sending the 41-year-old imam, identified only as M.G., back to Casablanca.

[T]he imam had expressed support for the late IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and shared jihadi propaganda on Facebook. [H]is Moroccan wife … also filed a formal complaint against him for abusing her because she refused to wear the covering niqab.

The article goes to note that Italy has been spared much of the terrorist violence other countries in the region have suffered, no doubt in part because of

its program of expelling suspected extremists. Since it began in 2015, the program has resulted in 462 people being sent home, including 98 last year.

I fuckin love the way these stories get written! Here’s a totally filthy organization – among the biggest drug companies in the world, as it happens – whose self-inflicted collapse inspires The Sorrow and the Pity-strength keening all over the business media. In one short article, one writer touches on four massive ongoing criminal cases against TEVA, and the company faces far more trouble than this.

What evil agent traumatized TEVA? Why should it suffer like this?

Oh, right. Because its business model is bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations, bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations. Why can’t we just leave it alone and stop traumatizing it?

***********

More like it.

Scandal-Ridden Teva Pharmaceutical Is Fishing for a Bottom

Investors take note: There is very likely no bottom.

And where, UD wonders, is the long New York Times article about the relentlessly criminal enterprise that is TEVA? Doesn’t anyone think it’s newsworthy that the world’s most powerful pharma corporation – arguably – is indescribably corrupt?

Who knew? Who knew that all the time UD spends on her balcony in Rehoboth Beach staring through binoculars at immense container ships with three immense initials painted on their sides she could be ON the ships, steaming to Hamburg? Who knew that the endless UD/Mr UD dithering about what’s on each ship, where it’s going, how it operates, what the thing’s various decks actually look like, etc., could so easily be settled?

A highlight [of my trip] was a morning’s tour of the ship, led by crew members. In addition to nearly 4,000 containers stacked on the exterior decks, there were six “roll-on, roll-off” decks carrying vehicles, ranging from a fleet of Range Rovers and transport trucks for the US army to an aeroplane fuselage. As the captain explained the complexities of the enormous operation, I marvelled at the sheer scale of everything around us, an industry responsible for transporting 90% of goods worldwide.

Cabins, with private bath, sound fine; on-deck activities are simple but fun (UD would of course play Scrabble); cruising instead of flying gives you big eco bragging rights…

Recent campaigns such as the Swedish flygskam (flight shame) had shone a harsh light on my blindness to the climate impact of air travel, and I had decided that booking a flight wasn’t an option. Since 2017, I’d emitted over 14 tonnes of carbon from flights alone. I realised that all my efforts to reduce my carbon footprint at home in Milan – I cycle to work, limit food waste and seldom buy new clothes – are wiped out by just one flight between Canada and Europe.

I’ll see your flygskam and raise you thirty years of not driving cars, taking trains everywhere, walking everywhere, living in a small house, owning one teeny, insanely fuel-efficient Prius, very seldom buying new clothes (so there!), and indeed finding virtually all of my consumer goods as brand-new castoffs in my daughter’s long-since-abandoned bedroom. The only food I waste is my once a year pomegranate martini at the beach — I can never finish it.

… in a story about the Golden Globes, she notes that Ricky Gervais said this to his Hollywood audience:

You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

A canny comment, and quite true: As UD has pointed out before on this blog, it’s rare for our stars to have attended even a little bit of college.

(Gervais himself earned upper second-class honours in philosophy.)

Male graduates of BYU earn 90 times more than their female peers, with a median income of $71,900 by the age of 34. Female graduates, on the other hand, earn on average $800 per year.

CLEAR SAILING: For Di and Steve

The cost of clarity is cold weather.
 Fog kept the beach mild;
It clouded over the quadrantids.

 New Year’s dinner, the four of us together,
 I toasted: “Bewildered, and beguiled!
But when I raise my lids

No need to question whether
Four hearts are reconciled.”
Meanwhile, January rids

The beach of fog, and there’s never
A chance of warm retreat.  It’s wild:
All softened unknowing forbid…

So we breast the chill, the clear-eyed pressure,
The sharp-horizoned world to which we are unreconciled,
But which strands us here, shivering, unhid.

The Imperial Family of Oxy, the Sacklers, are getting it up the ass, which is fine; but let’s focus, this year, on other worthies. If the point is to make others who fatally addicted America take a very deep bow, the choices are practically infinite among pharma corporations, drug distribution companies, pharmacies, the whorish FDA, doctors, bogus industry-bought pain organizations, members of Congress… So UD’s choice of these two – the mind-bogglingly filthy pharma giant, Teva, and the happily retired billionaire head of McKesson, one of the country’s biggest drug distributors – is somewhat random. But the scandal of Teva continuing to be treated like a business instead of a criminal enterprise, and CSIS’s lucrative, white-washing embrace of Hammergren, who now doles out health-advice to the nation, stand out as landmark evils within the larger landscape of drug-dead America. Li’l UD is only one blogger, and though by her lights she’s amazingly well-off, she can’t exactly compete with the resources of dirty rotten billionaire scoundrels. But she pledges to do her bit, in the year ahead, to keep her own modest spotlight on these two.

1.) Austria’s Conservative and Green parties have agreed plans to extend a headscarf ban in schools … [Austria’s new Conservative/Green governing coalition] deal includes banning the headscarf in schools for girls up to age 14, an extension of the garment ban that applies until age 10 approved by lawmakers earlier this year.

If women want to cover, they can decide that for themselves; the business of forcing it on children is disgusting. Note too what UD has been saying for years: Opposition to compulsory covering of girls is one of the few issues on which left and right in many countries agree.

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

2.)

… “White Wednesday” and “My Stealthy Freedom” campaigns have seen women film themselves without hijabs in public in Iran, which can bring arrests and fines. [Even with the threat of jail] there have been signs of women increasingly pushing back against the requirement.

During a trip to Iran in July, an Associated Press journalist spotted about two dozen women in the streets without a hijab over the course of nine days. Many other women opted for loosely draped colorful scarves that show as much hair as they cover.

While there have been women fined and arrested, others have been left alone as Iran struggles with economic problems and other issues under re-imposed U.S. sanctions …