Acosta Resigns.

Good. Because it’s really hard to rhyme “Acosta.”

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

OTOH. UD thinks we’re moving to Caligula too fast. It’s possible Epstein will bring down the presidency or screw up re-election, but you’ve got to pace these things, and it’s only counterproductive to go to Caligula at this point.

Thus sprachs Michelle Goldberg’s headline in the NYT, but UD needs to insist that however “depraved” (Goldberg’s word, and I’m fine with it) this administration is, until it forces every woman on the White House staff to strip and prostitute herself with a stallion in the Oval Office, it’s not really in Caligula’s league. Rather, if you want to characterize what Trump has brought into the White House, go here, to a 2014 secret party of the one percenter boys; or (in its Early Years manifestation), recall the Duke lacrosse boys ordering strippers in for the evening. This isn’t the culture of Caligula; it’s about money crimes, woman abuse, and drinking. The only two obviously crazy people in this world are super-sanctimonious, totally blind VP Pence, and I Kept my Underpants On, Mommy! Alan Dershowitz. Neither seems capable of Caligulan behavior, but both are certainly as batty as the “little boot”; and while the unhinged Dershowitz is well on his way to permanent nervous breakdown, we do need to worry about Mad Mike assuming the throne.

Anyway, all UD is saying is cool your jets. All things come to those who wait.

Spider Web, Morning Sun…
UD‘s forest.

Yes! says Harvard’s highest profile emeritus; I did get a massage at Jeffrey Epstein’s house! But it was given by an “old, old Russian woman.”

Here she is on the runway: Alan Dershowitz’s massazhistka.

And not only that! “I kept my underwear on.”

Bail Conditions, Rockefeller University Trustee Emeritus Epstein

‘Jeffrey Epstein’s attorneys submitted a bail package proposal on Thursday in which he volunteered to go under house arrest at his Manhattan mansion—with a “trustee” who would live with him and make sure he doesn’t break any rules. [Finally a chance to get to know Ghislaine!] … [If] he’s released and put on home confinement, he would agree to wear a GPS tracking device on his ankle, install surveillance cameras, and ground his jet. [Stands for Girls Prepube Essent!]’

Limerick.

The adventures of Leniency Alec

Are now looking downright vandalic:

From Epstein’s erections

To child-sex projections

The theme’s become totally phallic.

Thank God for Mississippi…

… as the old saying goes – cuz you always need a bottom… If you’re Alabam, you thank God that at least you’re always one step up from Mississippi in all the state rankings cuz for sure Mississippi will always be dead last…

And ah say ah say this here Mississippi politician won’t let women interview him lessn they have a male chaperone which is soooooo Saudi it gets me all excited like.

WOTTA Shocker.

Survey: Nearly Half of Students Distracted by Technology

‘The hotel’s focus not only centers on relaxation but wellness, as well. Arctic Bath’s food program includes “regular exercise, peach of mind, and care of face and body.”‘

Also pear of legs and currant of electricity.

“[People tend to put the] word ‘earn’ in front of $100 million. I always say to people, ‘No one earns $100 million. You steal $100 million.'”

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.

Hedgie Lives Matter!

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.

Harvard Fencing Coach: Direct Elimination

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?

La Louche Continue

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.

Getting to Know Mr Epstein.

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.

‘Dershowitz retains his emeritus professor status, as does Jorge I. Dominguez — a retired Government professor who was accused of sexual harassment by at least 20 women over the past 40 years.’

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.”

Sing it.

Rapinoe
I look for my heart
It’s Rapinoe
I lost it to her she’s divino
The day that the final started

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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