… (the wedding took place under somewhat strained circumstances), seems to have the inside track for Maryland House Speaker.

Les UDs have been selling, via Bonham’s, a number of just these Fangor paintings from the ‘sixties. The next sale of one of their Fangors is on May 16 in New York City.

An excellent article about al-Hol camp raises the right questions.

The reporter’s walk through the camp reveals, in all its fullness, the surreality, depravity, and indescribable stupidity of its inmates.

But it also gets something fundamental wrong: The children are of course innocents, and governments are slowly identifying their child nationals and, if they can, taking them out of the camp. But “their women and children”? The women were also the enemy, fully paid-up, active ISIS members; and if descriptions of some of them in the camp are accurate, they are still very much caliphate combatants.

The Auschwitz Memorial and Museum gets it said. Little shocks ol’ UD, but she must say she is shocked by this.

… monstruos.

The German Minister [of the interior] said it would be a “good move” to set up an international court that would try foreign jihadists rather than have Germany and other nations repatriate fighters and their families back to their home countries, especially since “terrorism is an international issue,” according to Die Zeit.

“That’s always better, for me, than bringing all ISIS fighters of German nationality [back] to Germany,” before trial, he noted.

“If several states have a prosecution claim, the trials should be conducted there. Trials should be conducted where ISIS fighters are now in detention, for example in Iraq,” the official said.

Be on the faculty of Brigham Young University.

Which is fitting, because he might be getting arrestoed.

Samantha Bee does a typically hilarious take on the dumbshits who are killing us because they won’t vaccinate their children. (Her visit to Kurdish women soldiers is even funnier.) But with some yeshivas lying about compliance and spreading measles wider and wider, the New York Department of Health isn’t laughing: It has now threatened to close noncompliant yeshivas.

This is a real win-win. Closing yeshivas that lie about their sick students makes children everywhere safer. And simply by virtue of being free of New York’s many substandard ultraorthodox yeshivas, students will almost certainly be able to set out on an actual education. Indeed the shameful noncompliance of some of these schools is shining a much-needed light on their scandalously low standards. Good.

Whoever among Ireland’s playwrights has inherited a gift closest to Samuel Beckett’s will find spectacular dialogue for her own Worstward Ho in a recent interview with an Irishwoman who joined ISIS in order to “fulfill her dream of living under Sharia law.” Read the following, if you can, with an artist’s eye.

We were in the taxi, he [her new husband] said, “When you go up here at the roundabout, close your eyes. There’s a man like this on the cross on the roundabout and his eyes are gouged out and he’s wearing a red suit and you don’t want to see it.” …

Life was like back home [in Ireland]. Just like back home. You get up in the morning, go shopping, get your stuff, come home, cook your dinner, clean your house. It’s just like my everyday life. Go visit a friend, drink some coffee.

This is what we came for, you know. We came for, like, no alcohol… no prostitution, no gays, no anything… And, for me, I really liked to live in the Islamic State because I never got to see any of this. I just had to experience a lot of bombing and this, that and the other, and hearing someone died and hearing this and hearing that but I didn’t have to see any of that.

You’re not gonna tell ol’ UD that this is not pure theatrical gold.

Rhino Poacher Trampled by Elephant and Eaten by Lions in South Africa

Snapshots from a country.

Philip Esformes, a man incapable, as a matter, it seems, of principle, of obeying virtually any law, has been found guilty of this country’s largest health care fraud ever.

Much of the Esformes tale, which features his self-presentation as a seriously religious person, is scripted by Woody Allen. (‘The witnesses described how Esformes would direct them to pay doctors in cash, using code words like “fettuccine.”‘)

With his corporate and personal assets frozen, Esformes’ father, Morris, paid for the son’s costly defense, which has included lawyers from Black’s high-profile law firm and other attorneys. The father, with his son’s assistance, had amassed a fortune in the healthcare field in Chicago before they set their sights on Miami, where they got into trouble with the law for the first time in 2006. Back then, the Esformes family and the owners of Larkin Hospital paid $15.4 million to the U.S. government in a Justice Department settlement to resolve a civil violation of recycling patients between the hospital and the family’s nursing-home facilities and ALFs — a precursor to the current criminal case.

And Morris… well, about Morris you don’t wanna know… Very highly esteemed at Rogue Central, University of Miami medical school.

All this malfeasance has led to the creation of a 200-page affidavit, and a bevy of other court documents, that can best be described as a kind of posthumous Tom Wolfe novella, one with a wide cast of very rich people behaving in such despicable ways that it makes The Bonfire of the Vanities look like The Pilgrim’s Progress.

The whole article’s good, and the last few paragraphs are very explicitly Wolfe-ish, in style and content. Here’s one:

All she wanted was an even playing field for her rich, white daughter! All she wanted was a few hundred SAT points so the girl didn’t get lost in the madness that has made college admissions so stressful, so insane, so broken, so unfair. “We’re talking about Georgetown,” Macy informed Singer about their hopes for their younger daughter. Fortunately for them, and for the younger daughter—and possibly for Georgetown itself—they had not employed him to work on this goal before the indictments were handed down. Fortunately for Macy (who seems to have taken a modified Parent B position), only Huffman has been indicted in the scheme.

Should come as no surprise that many of us are thinking of Wolfe, “the sage of status anxiety.”

How could Harvard not be part of the buy your kid into college story? The first story out of Harvard (expect more) is definitely classier, and un petit peu more convoluted, than the fork over money to the guy pretending to be a college admissions consultant dealie we’ve been reading about. This one’s about fencing, a sport which boasts lots of French words and is featured in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice. But it has in common with many other admissions scandal stories what I’ll call the sports vector. You get the kid in by greasing the already sweaty palm of an Ivy coach in some sport or other: soccer, tennis, water polo, basketball, and now fencing. Once he or she has collected enough money from you, the coach puts your kid’s name on a short list of desired athletes, which the admit office rubber stamps.

The complicated money-delivery angle here is that the palm-greaser bought the coach’s house for twice its value:

The house at 212 Forest Street in Needham, Massachusetts looked nearly identical to every other upper-middle-class colonial in the Boston suburbs. So when it sold in May 2016 at nearly a million dollars – well above the three-bedroom’s assessed value of $549,300 – the town assessor was so confused that he wrote in his official notes: “makes no sense.”

Reporting from the Boston Globe now provides a little more clarity into the not-so-rational purchase. According to the paper, the buyer, Jie Zhao – who “never lived a day in the Needham house” – had a son who was interested in applying to Harvard and fencing for the school team. Zhao purchased the home at a several hundred-thousand-dollar markup from Harvard’s fencing coach, Peter Brand. Zhao’s son got into Harvard, and joined the fencing team, and 17 months after his initial purchase, Zhao sold the house at a $324,500 loss.

A true Composé Attack, incorporating many elegant feints.

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

UPDATE: And there’s a local angle! Looks as though the world’s most nonsensical real estate investor lives just a hop skip and a parry from UD, in Potomac, Md.