... father-in-law.

One of his naughty etchings, in our front hall.

(My title comes from this 1963 essay.)

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Everyone’s laughing at Schultz’s request not to be called a billionaire; instead, he asks that we use the phrase ‘people of means.’ Some of the more amusing responses to his ‘billionaire’ problem:

I prefer ‘wealth extractors’

[how about] ‘money hoarders’

‘poverty profiteers’

Thank you Howard Schultz for calling out the dehumanising label ‘billionaire’ applied to people merely for causing vast swaths of the world to live in absolute, crushing misery. I vow to do better

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Why would a billionaire not wish to be called a billionaire? I can’t think of instances where millionaires asked not to be called millionaires. Michael Hiltzik wrote a recent column titled America is Falling Out of Love with Billionaires, so there does seem to be a problem of some sort. (“The plus side of Howard running is he’s making more people hate billionaires.”) What could it be?

Let’s start with Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs:

The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

Millionaires can be pointlessly and destructively greedy, but only to a certain, reasonably comprehensible, extent. Billionaires can – nay, many of them, it appears, must – really go to town, in a way that strikes the rest of us as simply mentally ill. There will always be no-limits wealth defenders to tell us we’re envious or we’re going to destroy personal enterprise; but it’s hard to know how to be envious of people who desperately unenterprisingly do things like this:

Last week it was reported that Daniel Snyder, the owner of the NFL’s Washington Redskins, was spending $100 million on a 305-foot super-yacht complete with an on-board IMAX screening room. It’s his second yacht, after a 220-foot version.

At the same moment, hedge fund owner Ken Griffin was disclosed as the buyer of the most expensive home in America, a $238-million Manhattan penthouse. According to Bloomberg, he already owns two floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), a Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), another Chicago penthouse ($58.75 million) and another apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).

Titanic, duplicative, restless, vacuous greed unsettles us; it makes the ethical grotesquerie of one human being holding fourteen billion dollars extremely graphic. “Why,” asks Farhad Manjoo, ” should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?” What sort of people has our, uh, country of means spawned? Consider the vast antiquity of Robert Hughes’ 2004 comment on the billionaire art buyers of his day:

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

$104m? Try $450m.

Billionaires, notes Merryn Somerset Webb, typically exist

as a result of mismanaged monetary policy (free money can do a lot if you use it right); badly thought-out regulation; politically unacceptable rent-seeking; corruption; asset bubbles; a failure of anti-trust rules; or some miserable mixture of the lot.

Hiztlik quotes Keynes going deeper into the obscenity Hughes describes. Keynes found the emergent form of what he called “the money motive” repulsive, and hoped for an end to “many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues…. [T]he love of money as a possession [has become the goal] — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life. [This behavior] will [someday] be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Billionaires represent the compulsive masturbators of their day, and more and more of them are doing it in public. Schultz knows this.

If anything proves the theory football is becoming a gladiator sport of the poor performing for the rich, it’s the billionaire president who says the NFL isn’t violent enough also declaring he doesn’t want his son playing the sport… Trump, who has declared he wants more hard hitting in football, said: nope, I wouldn’t want my 12-year-old son Barron to play.

… American-style. The NRA is currently funding studies on how to arm fetuses for a fair fight.

… became a thing recently for a lot of people inside and outside that country because of a University of Toronto professor’s refusal to cooperate with a new regime under which his very pronoun use was subject to sanctions.

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Now there’s poor Frank Bauer, who comes from the Netherlands, where burqas have of course been banned for years. Head of a refugee assistance group in Alberta, Bauer finds himself part of a strange new world, within whose boundaries even an expression of discomfort with the burqa gets you labeled “racist, Islamophobic and misogynistic.”

What precisely did Bauer write in a social media post?

“I am a strong advocate for being welcoming, inclusive and respecting all cultures and religions, however find full face covering in public a notch too far,” Bauer wrote on Red Deer Local Immigration Partnership’s Facebook page in a discussion about religious accommodation.

“I would not feel comfortable in conversations no matter what the topic is, and believe this is an area where newcomers need to respect and adapt themselves to the Canadian culture and norms.”

Hiding behind a symbolic burqa, anonymous members of the organization’s staff filed a grievance against this bad bad man.

Bauer’s abject apology would have fit right in at a Stalin show trial.

An occasional series of pain-pensées- — from the addicted and formerly addicted.

Somewhere along the way we all started to confuse — disastrously — the eradication of pain with the eradication of suffering. Freedom from suffering should, indeed, be a basic human right. No one should have to endure unbearable cancerous or post-operative pain, and the patients-rights movement was an undeniable marker of progress. Somehow that turned into let there never be a moment of discomfort. The problem there, of course, is that any mild irritant can become unbearable. We build no tolerance to life.

‘Tis a fine country that makes sure 19-year-old lads have full access to the latest in firearms.

Only 19, Texas Tech student Hollis Daniels stepped up to a campus policeman sitting at a desk typing a report and blew his head right off. OOOOPS! said wee Hollis. “I fucked up.”

Only 19 and U. Central Florida student Max Chambers kept in his car on campus an

AR-15 modified to shoot fully-automatic.

Police said Chambers also had manufactured three drop-in auto sears, which can convert a firearm to shoot multiple bullets with a single trigger pull. Chambers told police he made the devices in December and had tested one earlier this month .

A UCF police spokeswoman declined to say how detectives believe he made the devices, citing an ongoing investigation. He told police he knew the devices were against the law, but said he doesn’t like laws, according to his arrest report.

Good on this country’s football universities for decimating their students’ brains! Plus there’s their commitment to social justice: Consider the lovely racial angle to the current game, detailed here.

… has just performed its first West Virginia University student riot of the year (they riot all the time at Gordon Gee’s WVU). This one featured almost a thousand students hurling beer bottles at city workers trying to plow snow from the street students had chosen for their couch burning. As WVU sociologist Karen Weiss notes in her WVU-inspired book, Party School:

[T]he party school is itself a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. 

They riot so much at WVU that it’s news when they don’t, as in this headline:

NO RIOTING IN MORGANTOWN AFTER WVU LOSS

This latest riot was quite violent and quite protracted, drawing various police forces and extensive weaponry.

[His just-purchased $240 million apartment is] not a short-term investment, but a home where [Kenneth] Griffin will spend considerable time, said Zia Ahmed, his spokesman. He added that Mr. Griffin has given … a $150 million gift to Harvard.

Yes. Britain finally sends a child-slasher – make that baby-slasher – to jail.

Let’s start with the story at good ol’ Mizzou.

“So many cheaters! What are we to do?

Their tutors will write their assignments,” they said.

Then the NCAA came and chopped off their head.

At Penn State the coaches fuck boys in the shower

The big men on campus make lesser boys cower

Even the frat guys get ready to die

When the athletes at Penn State stop by to say hi.

When your school or museum starts considering whether to return Sackler money, keep this in mind. Not just depraved indifference. Fiercely determined depraved indifference.

(Quoted here.)

Purdue Pharma, opioid epidemic, 2014:

In internal correspondence beginning in 2014, Purdue Pharma executives discussed how the sale of opioids and the treatment of opioid addiction are “naturally linked” and that the company should expand across “the pain and addiction spectrum,” according to redacted sections of the lawsuit by the Massachusetts attorney general. A member of the billionaire Sackler family, which founded and controls the privately held company, joined in those discussions and urged staff in an email to give “immediate attention” to this business opportunity, the complaint alleges.

I know. They’re not really the same thing. Business practices have evolved since 1982. The Sacklers alone make money at both ends.

[Yale] has lobbied against the [new] 1.4 percent excise tax on annual endowment returns, which targets 35 universities — including Yale — with assets greater than $500,000 per full-time student. According to a budget update published earlier this month, projected spending from the University’s endowment will grow by 6.3 percent next fiscal year, despite adjustment to the new tax.

Don’t worry, Yalies! We’ll labor night and day to keep the government’s stinking hands off that 1.4 percent!