Most of the meetings took place in Esformes’ swimming pool (you need to register for access to the linked site) – he was worried Delgado might be wearing a wire – but this bit of personal counseling went on in one of the defendant’s many Medicare/Medicaid money extraction locations…

Man, I told you this trial would be fun! I told you! The biggest health care fraud in the history of this country is the culmination of generations of effort by the pious, illustrious Esformes family,  whose patriarch’s name adorns a chair at the University of Miami medical school, and whose scion played basketball so well for the University of Pennsylvania that his coach is going to prison.

The end of an affair.

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

This is our last book together

This printing will soon be long ago

And in our moment of parting

This is all I want you to know

There will be many more romances like this

I’ll be stealing plots from someone new

There will be other words to copy

But there will never be another you

There will be other paragraphs to lift

But they won’t thrill me

Like yours used to do

I’ll plagiarize a million scenes

A million characters too

But there will never, ever be another you.

Humor means we’re getting over it. Good.

This excellent question about the Smollett hoax right away reminded UD of another overdetermined hoax – a university one. And maybe in this overdetermined business there’s one small clue for us as we go about defending ourselves from hoaxers.

Seeking to destroy the faculty member who discovered his fraudulent credentials and research, West Virginia University epidemiology professor Anoop Shankar had an Indian friend go to this colleague’s office and …

“You Indians have nice brown skin,” [the colleague] allegedly said [to the student]. “But you smell weird with the spices that you use for cooking.”

Right about then the grey-haired professor supposedly pulled his chair closer and snatched at the young man’s penis.

[A second friend of Shankar’s, standing just outside the office,] claimed that from the hallway, he could then hear [the professor] rise from his chair and say loudly to [the young man], “Here, taste my white c–k.”

[The young man] said he fled rather than reciprocate and that [the professor] flew into a rage, his words echoing into the corridor: “I will destroy you!”

Allow UD to quote herself, starting with her post’s title:

PILING ON: THE SOCIOPATH’S UNDOING

When scripting these scenarios (one of the friends later confessed that Shankar had written and directed this drama), you need to be selective. Minimalism is more plausible than maximalism to most audiences. Deciding to throw in not merely an ethnic slur, but sexual harassment, and not merely sexual harassment but sexual assault, and not merely sexual assault but violent threat of retaliation, is just the sort of excess you’d expect from a sociopath.

Another example of piling on: The chief of staff at Upstate Medical College claimed

that he narrowly escaped a car bombing in Afghanistan… [that] he was hired by former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to work in the State Department, that he was in the White House when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred in September 2001 and is close friends with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

America’s rapeabilliest campus, Baylor University (scroll down), conducts its life of the mind business in Waco Texas, famous for murderous cults, biker boy shootouts, and breastaurants. To be kind, Waco is probably as close to the creation of an atmosphere for serious learning and respect for women Texas can manage, so let’s not be judgmental. Let’s instead update ourselves on the various ongoing Waco trials of various biker boys.

The 2015 shootout, a routine druggie-gunnie turf war that spilled beyond the confines of a breastaurant onto streets where Baylor families were celebrating graduation, killed a lot of people and kinda left a bloody mess all over Waco but I mean bikers go to Waco cuz Waco loves guns so much. Gunnies feel genuinely welcome there.

475 weapons were seized following the incident. The number includes 151 firearms, 12 of which were long guns. Other weapons recovered included knives, brass knuckles, batons, tomahawks, a hatchet, stun guns, bats, clubs, a machete, a pipe, an ax, pepper spray and a chain.

It can get a little noisy trying to study at Baylor, but that’s the sound of freedom.

Now here’s one trial we can take a look at. Headline:

Bandido biker yells at Waco judge in court: “Three years and nothing!”

This guy, seen standing over the dead body of a rival biker at the shootout, is pissed because it’s taking a long time to hear his case and meanwhile he can’t carry his AR-57 or talk to gunmates. But the mean judge seems to think the guy still shouldn’t have access to firearms….

But haha you and I know the guy still carries guns; he just wants to do so and not risk arrest.

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

UPDATE: But UD doesn’t want you to think that her very own neighborhood hasn’t been stockpiling too!

Show me the way to go home
I’m ISIS and I want to go to bed
And after all Islamic-ally you know
It’s wonderful to cut off people’s heads

I’m a Brit and she’s from Alabam
We find ourselves in something of a jam
So listen while we sing our little song
Show me the way to go home.

The English narrator of ISIS

Now finds himself somewhat in crisis:

‘I chopped no one’s head!

I made not one man dead!

Get to know me – I’m really the nicest.’

I mean, it’s better than the cake. The developing story of the latest fake hate assault has much more drama than the mere addition of some anti-gay icing.  Yet it’s the same contemptible attention- and money-seeking behavior (the cake guy sued Whole Foods; once WF proved he homophobed himself, it countersued), and UD has learned over the course of this blog that the business of staging things is sickeningly common. And of course incredibly destructive to efforts to take seriously actual hate crimes.

All the way back in 2004, UD covered the Professor Kerri Dunn business, when she spray-painted her car with swastikas etc. and everyone at Claremont McKenna rallied on her behalf and worried about incipient fascism until the guys who happened to be taking a walk nearby at the time she did it told the police about watching her paint her car. An education professor at Columbia University, under threat of dismissal for plagiarism (of her students!) hung a noose on her office door and claimed to be the victim of a hate crime. A conservative student at Princeton wrote himself some really nasty, anti-conservative letters and enjoyed right-wing martyrdom until he had to admit the truth…. Croyez-moi, I could go on! And on!

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

UPDATE: Now this I really don’t get. Washington Post, headline:

I DOUBTED JUSSIE SMOLLET. IT BREAKS MY HEART THAT I MIGHT BE RIGHT

Heartbreak is ridiculous. Anger’s the ticket. The Post editor continues:

I tried telling myself that it is possible that two assailants were walking around downtown Chicago at 2 a.m. in January in 10-degree weather, waiting for a black victim. In addition to that, they were stalking around with a bottle of bleach and a rope. And ultimately, the prey they selected was an actor on a show that they must’ve been somewhat familiar with, because they were able to not only name the show but also know that he played a gay character. Never mind the fact that he was likely bundled up because again: Chicago, January, 10 degrees. Also, after he fought to get away, he left the rope around his neck until he got to the hospital.

This ain’t doubt; it’s close to certain knowledge he was bullshitting. And he wasn’t new to bullshitting. Mature political actors – people like newspaper editors – don’t go into denial when people do bad, illegal, and destructive things; nor do they enter into heartbreak when what seemed obviously the case turns out to have been the case. When weirdly flagrant and flagrantly weird events occur, serious people respond with skepticism.

This is more like it:

Commentator Kmele Foster put it this way on “Reliable Sources” on Sunday: “Two in the morning, almost the coldest night of the year, you were attacked and someone conveniently had a rope? My heart goes out to anyone who gets attacked, but it’s totally appropriate to exercise a bit of skepticism and to exercise a bit of patience in waiting for the facts to develop around this story.”

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

As for the legal implications:

Attorney and CBS2/KCAL9 Legal Analyst Steve Meister says every state penalizes fabricating a crime and the trouble this case has caused is serious.

“That’s felony conduct because you caused a lot of people a lot of problems and you cost the city a lot of money and you took time away from what cops could have been doing to solve real crimes.” Meister says.

He says every state’s laws vary as do the penalties. In California a felony conviction for lying to a police officer is punishable by up to three years in prison.

UPDATE:

This case is an object lesson in what happens when people in positions of political and cultural authority abandon critical thinking and pressure those who don’t abandon their circumspection under pain of being smeared as bigots.

Professor Bishop, like the Aurora mass shooter, opened fire shortly after she learned of her termination (at the University of Alabama); and like the Aurora shooter she did the deed during a meeting with colleagues. And like the Aurora shooter, she had quite the violence/mental illness history (she sent bombs to perceived enemies; she shot her brother to death) and should never have had access to a gun. How much of the scary criminal background of these two employees did the university and the factory know about?

UD, on this brilliantly sunny and quite cold late afternoon, was standing at one of her front windows idly looking out, and coming down the street were three elaborately costumed girls telling whoever was listening that they could take their picture.

She opened the window.

“So I can take your picture?”

“Yes. You can take our picture.”

“Hold on.”

UD got her phone and went outside. She asked the girls to pose between her two bulls, Ferdinand and Isabella. “You all look great. Birthday party?”

“No. We just decided to dress up.”

… how many more besmirched names can this guy fit on his business card?

The compleat Louisiana State University student, Li’l Cade The Frat Man smiles at you from his latest mug shot. Get lost in his baby blues and you’ll find everything that makes LSU the fabled school that it is: Sports, Sadism, and Stupefacients.

Witnesses described being forced to lie on broken glass, face down while they both sprayed with a hose, had milk crates thrown at them, and were urinated on.

Duckworth was booked on three counts of misdemeanor criminal hazing (misdemeanor) and one count each of attempted second degree battery, second degree battery and false imprisonment — all felonies.

This was not Duckworth’s first brush with the law. In 2017, he was arrested following a home invasion and burglary near LSU. During a search of the home where the reported robbery took place, police found marijuana and MDMA, also known as ecstasy. Duckworth was booked on one count of possession with intent to distribute …

Honey, only two things missing – sexual assault and possession of an illegal AK47 – and you know the cops is gonna find them iffn they just look more careful.

You can read up on LSU right here on this here blog iffn you want some background on how a university becomes famous for spawning vast colonies of students like this here Li’l Cade. I mean, the place’d be nuthin without its Greek life.

... together!

Anal rape is all growed up.

Burqa backers sure do twist themselves up into pretzels defending the garment. As another German university bans full facial veiling in classrooms, a Green Party politician assures us that teaching has nothing to do with seeing the people you’re teaching.