… following all the different dirt being kicked up in the Philip Esformes trial (earlier posts about the pious Esformes family here). Paying off all of Miami to help him run his rotten to the core nursing homes! Telling one of his comrades in crime to kill himself so as not to have to testify against him! Hiding frail baffled old people when his paid-off tipsters told him an inspection was about to happen! Giving Penn’s basketball coach three hundred thousand dollars to lie and say Esformes Jr was so talented at the game he should be admitted to the school!

Jerome Allen, while awaiting sentencing for taking bribes, took the stand in the Esformes trial yesterday.

Allen said that the son was not qualified to play varsity basketball at Penn. He said he lied to the prestigious university about the son’s qualifications because he had been bribed by Esformes during a series of trips to Miami in 2013. He testified that the father gave him $10,000 in cash each time, the money tucked into a brown envelope stuffed inside a plastic bag, during their meetings in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel… In total, Esformes paid Allen about $75,000 in cash bribes and an additional $220,000 in wire transfers into the coach’s bank account between 2013 and 2015.

Esformes’ lawyer said

Esformes’ son has maintained a nearly 3.6 GPA at UPenn, made the Dean’s List at Penn and plans to graduate from the Wharton School with the class of 2019.

But he failed to mention who Esformes has been paying to take the kid’s courses.

… hanging out with work buddies. Poor thing.

Fuckin up the local economy, man.

… Texas style!

LOL

The New York Times brings to mind that famous headline, as its editorial board finally addresses, with anger, the refusal of many of New York’s ultraorthodox to educate or to vaccinate their children.

As New York City has finally begun to exercise oversight over ultra-Orthodox yeshivas that have graduated students without a basic education, some of those Jewish schools have defied city health department scrutiny and helped to feed a measles outbreak. Forty children have contracted measles in recent months, all of the cases linked to a single Brooklyn yeshiva that ignored an order from city health officials to prevent children who hadn’t been vaccinated from attending classes.

And yet a community with staggering rates of law-breaking, indifference to public welfare, and plain old pathology continues to lobby aggressively – and basically successfully – for less and less oversight by the government. Remember Christopher Hitchens on Jerry Falwell and others: You can get away with the most extraordinary offenses to morality and truth in this country if you’ll just get yourself called Reverend. Here getting yourself called Rabbi allows the most extraordinary offenses against health, education, and welfare.

For decades, the communities have largely been allowed to evade government oversight, thanks to politicians who have enjoyed their support as one of the state’s most powerful voting blocs. The price of that support has been largely paid by Orthodox children.

SOS often wonders: What did they mean? What were they, uh, grasping toward? Impeccable?

“I wanted to learn more about the ideology. I’m a political science major, global business minor. I like politics. I like travel, world events. That’s what I wanted to do,” he said.

… here she is, a child immediately buried under a burqa, relieved of her clitoris, vagina, and existence, raped at eight years of age by a man she was married off to, snuffed out in an honor killing.

Since 1990, the estimated number of girls and women in the US who have undergone or are at risk of [FGM] has more than tripled.

And this time he’ll get it right.

… which has approved an aid-in-dying bill. On to the Senate.

Yesterday the highest ranking priest in Australia; today the highest ranking in France. Whether sexually attacking children or protecting the sexual attackers of children, the Catholic church, at its highest levels, looks debauched – like something out of de Sade.

… the Sackler family.

My Sackler posts.

You MUST know by now that UD/SOS loves people who write like Charles P. Pierce. Pierce, in a brief Esquire piece, lets rip his pleasure at having discovered that the Very Reverend Kenneth Starr Esq., Baylor University’s highest-ranking academic officer (until that campus rape thing) is one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers. One of the guys who helped Epstein – a notorious sex offender – get a singularly light sentence.

As a headline from another source puts it:

Moralist Ken Starr Explains His Help For Billionaire Pervert Jeffrey Epstein

Ecoute: Those of us who love the full and frank exposure of full and rank hypocrisy love this story. It was written for us…. Continues to be written, cuz the tale of the high-profile men (including one of this blog’s favorites, FGM defenderAlan Dershowitz) accused of sharing Epstein’s underage sex slaves is finally – after years of flaccidity – up and at ’em again on the front page.

Not to mention the tweets.

Mahmood married an Isis fighter and reportedly rose up the group’s ranks to become a leading figure in the al-Khansaa brigade, the feared all-female force tasked with enforcing the group’s interpretation of sharia law with women and children.

Punishments have included arrests and beatings for women going outside without a male chaperone, lashes for wearing form-fitting abayas and floggings for “not being meek enough.”