At the very bottom of yesterday’s filing of a protective order, Team Epstein’s Martin Weinberg signs his name like a second grader (see page ten). This isn’t Martin G. Weinberg, mature self-mythologized counselor, Mr Superlitigator who looks down at you with Olympian pity; this is
MAWNEBERG, boy in short pants still sweating over his cursive M.
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But of course that probably ain’t his signature. In the status-crazed world of the courts, you need to signal that you’re far too busy – and far too contemptuous of the other side – and far too supplied with assistants – to take time out for something as pedestrian as a signature. This kiddie-scrawl is the work of some squirrely little summer intern.
UD cannot read this NYT article without laughing. When she gets to the middle of it —
Mr. Kelty’s solution, a modification of methods used in some earlier studies, involved a 100-centimeter-long ladder (a little over three feet) and bags of weighted pellets gently taped to the rats’ rear ends. The animals received a Froot Loop when they reached the top of the ladder and soon started climbing willingly, even without rewards. After several weeks, the climbers showed increased muscle mass, indicating that the activity was effective weight training.
When [my story on Epstein] came out, [Harvard Law School professor and former Epstein attorney] Alan Dershowitz wrote an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee, trying to discredit my work and influence the board [not to award the Miami Herald a prize]. He must have said a million times, “I know that you’re not going to tell the truth because you’re just aiming for a Pulitzer.”
But Harvard’s finest is after bigger fish now. He’s smearing the New Yorker as an antisemitic rag.
We’ve seen, over the life of this blog, quite a number of walking advertisements for the abolition of tenure, but none of this guy’s predecessors shows anywhere near the same passionate commitment to depravity-while-maintaining-a-permanent-taxpayer-paid-$100,000-a-year job.
If you read the narrative sketch of his theft-spree, you detect that his problem is sexual climate change, as in he’s always battering/humping/dumping the women in his life as they, I guess, fail eventually to excite him, and replacing them with others with whom he goes through the same cycle. While things are hot, he spends university funds on vacations and presents for them; when cooling commences, he dumps.
This pattern turns out to generate a lot of people eager to bust the guy. They point out that where on his expenses report he writes “PR consultation” or “consultant expense,” he really means fucking to beat the band in Bali; and where he writes “testing equipment” he means Star Wars Battlefront for his kid.
Quite a specimen. And a named chair at the University of Minnesota forever.
The dam might have held, I suggest, had Trump not been elected president — but his win after more than a dozen women’s sexual-abuse allegations and his own confession on the Entertainment Tonight outtake, provoked a wave of anger and solidarity among abused women… Trump’s election turned out to be the catalyst for women speaking publicly about other men, starting with the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history the day after his inauguration. In the Epstein case, the legal system could no longer bear the weight of all the public shame. Unlike his old friend, the Abuser-in-Chief can dismiss women’s allegations, and fear no investigation, thanks to the power of the office. That won’t last forever. The clock ticks on the dirty old man.
So do me a favor and read this first. Everything Frank Rich says there about Ma Ingalls’ rancid hypocrisy in her NYT anti-materialism screed goes quadruple now that Harvard’s been exposed as Mr. Epstein’s main squeeze. Harvard has spent decades sucking up so much money – dirty and semi-dirty and semi-clean and clean – that its endowment alone is $40 billion (Harvard’s wealth goes significantly beyond its endowment, kiddies). It sucks it up and it doesn’t spit it out (see this notorious cartoon); it hoards it. One assumes the goal (why? why is this the goal?) is a $100 billion endowment. Harvard, everyone jokes, is a “hedge fund with a university attached to it”; this non-profit paid each of its fund managers $35 million dollars a year until a few people squawked and it ended up on the front page of the NYT...
Why should Harvard – the world’s most powerful reputation-launderer – give a penny of that shit back? Why should they do anything with what they’re sitting on, you son of a bitch? It’s their money and fuck you.
The federal government has sued a Tennessee state legislator and a bunch of doctors and executives for fraud — specifically, for mandating urine tests for everyone who ever walked into their, yeah, pain management clinics, and then just storing what they dubbed ‘liquid gold’ somewhere and rarely bothering with it.
One whistleblower … said [company] executives once took him on a tour of the lab, during which [the whistleblower] commented on the “overpowering and unpleasant smell of urine.”
“To me, it smells like money,” an executive responded…
[His cadre of intellectuals] could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance atelier.
On which, of course, the moral conscience of a nation and the late lamented president of the rapeabilliest and most Baptist campus in the country, appears.
… Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”
It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo.
… but only Margaret Carlson, so far, has really distinguished herself in this line. Her column in The Daily Beast is inspired.
A B-story involving the two famous lawyers on the case emerged on Thursday after attorney Alan Dershowitz, who’s worked for Epstein, boasted of his “perfect, perfect sex life” on Laura Ingraham’s Fox show. Dershowitz is furious that his ties to Epstein have been characterized by opposing attorney David Boies as going beyond parsing the rules of criminal procedure. Like a schoolboy, Dershowitz challenged Boies to a sex duel: to swear under oath that he’s only had sex with one woman during the same period.
Well but if you ask UD fiction is truth; you can’t approach an understanding of Ghislaine Maxwell without understanding, say, Madame Merle and Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil — two characters with whom Maxwell herself, with her high-level literary education (“I was drip-fed Shakespeare at Oxford,” she told a party reporter at the launch of book on Richard III by a Hollywood mega-lawyer in the late ’90s. “Just sniffing fresh ink gets me high.”), would be fully familiar. Naturally everyone’s citing The Great Gatsby in connection with Epstein — the identity is so strong that one assumes Epstein with some degree of self-awareness fashioned himself after Fitzgerald’s creation – and of course he called his notorious jet The Lolita Express. It’s not just that we reach for the deeper truths of the best literature in order to grasp the cruelties of human beings; some cruel human beings come to know and have confidence in their way of being in part through the discovery of literary models.
All of which is why the genius of Carlson’s little essay lies in her framing the entire Trump/Dershowitz/Epstein story as fiction. Not merely the Dershowitz B-story, but Trump’s “racist political thriller… a plot twist… Celebrity Racist… The Jeffrey Epstein Show… Billions meets Stranger Things meets Empire … The show is now on location in the Southern District of New York where former U.S. Attorney and recent Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, was dropped from the cast … Trump Trilogy… ” How really to understand Dershowitz (not to mention Trump) without revisiting the by-now fully fictionalized (for we know him through his engrossing, dominant role inAngels in America) Roy Cohn? Cohn “worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.”
… (details here) retires from his drug distribution days to the life of a highly respectable billionaire, ordinary dumbshit drug distributors in the state he helped destroy – West Virginia – go to jail. Let’s put the big drug capo next to the little drug capolinis, okay?
In a species of hypocrisy too grotesque even to laugh at, Hammergren, for years the CEO behind McKesson’s opioid carpet bombing of the US, currently heads up a task force on women’s health at the Center for Strategic and International Stupefacients (of which he is also a trustee; enjoy his written-by-someone-stoned-out-of-her-mind biography here). He ran one of America’s dirtiest businesses, and his personal greed is a national disgrace, but CSIS just loves them some Hammergren money and they don’t give a shit about those dead people cuz they wanna help people, see? You follow?
“No other corporation distributed more opioids in those years than Hammergren’s McKesson … Over his first 16 years as CEO, notes Bloomberg, Hammergren pocketed $781 million. His final months in the McKesson chief executive suite brought that total near $800 million. Upon his retirement, he walked away with a pension package worth $138.6 million.” When the rewards for addicting much of the nation get this high, you do not go to jail, mes petites; you make high-level decisions about women’s health.
So here’s John with probably more personal real estate than even Jeffrey Epstein, telling those American women who happened to survive his carpet bombing how to stay in tiptop shape … and here’s a couple of West Virginians – Samuel R. Ballengee and Devonna Miller-West – who saw the amazing business potential of opioids just as clearly as Hammergren but lacked his resources and connections. What happened to them?
They’ve landed where Hammergren never will – on a federal indictment for drug distribution. They’re both the sort of jerks who will end up going to jail rather than advising UD on how to keep her cholesterol low through the liberal application of OxyContin. Ballengee, once a pharmacist, and indeed a McKesson distributor until CBS aired a report about his pharmacy and McKesson went and got cold feet, got so pissed at CBS for ruining his business that he sued them for fifteen million dollars! That must seem like a lot to Ballengee, though Hammergren makes that much every time he takes a dump.
Anyway, a judge totally dismissed the lawsuit totally immediately (“These broadcasts were not only tolerable—they were applaudable... The people of West Virginia, indeed those all over the country, deserve to know about the evolution of the opioid epidemic and the identities of the bad actors.”), and now Ballengee’s unemployed, owes lawyers money, is the object of a bunch of civil suits from I guess survivors of overdosed customers, and has been named in a federal indictment. Loser.
Miller-West is similarly pitiable. She shares Hammergren’s tireless drug-entrepreneurship energy – she owned (still owns?) not only a pharmacy, but also Alternative Healing and Coalfield Cannabis (admiring local news article here) – but she too finds herself on the federal indictment.
Some headlines say it all, huh? And scummy WSU (feast your eyes) is playing all the tricks in the book on this one, like, I don’t know, let’s find some random year – 2023? – and promise that by that year everything’s going to be fine so Shut. Up.
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Really, I just read over my last few years of WSU posts, and it’s … I have no words. Why would anyone have so little self-respect as to be a student there?
A New York magazine article about Alan Dershowitz features this photograph [scroll down] of then-Harvard prez Lawrence Summers, Jeffrey Epstein, and Dershowitz at a “dinner Epstein hosted in 2004 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.” Look at the setting. Look at the restaurant. Any fellow Cambridge denizens recognize it?
Let me help you. Look at this photograph.
Note the same purple couch. The place is the (now defunct) Upstairs on the Square, where you “feel like you’re walking into Alice In Wonderland,” and where very young girls being taken out to tea are everywhere.
Nice, huh? I mean, where else would Jeffrey Epstein go out to dinner with Summers and Dershowitz?
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
