A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road… He had already shown himself capable of betraying friends and patrons who trusted him, but now he had advanced from the flagrant abuse of expense accounts to apparently absconding with hundreds of thousands of dollars… Epstein had lured investors in, used their money to book big profits and then refused to return their funds…

And there’s his BFF:

The year after meeting Epstein, [Alan] Dershowitz wrote an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times arguing that the age of sexual consent should be lowered to 15. Epstein seemed to see the potential of nurturing a relationship with the prominent lawyer. [LOL]… Keeping Dershowitz happy proved prescient. He would become one of Epstein’s highest-profile and longest-serving defenders.

… how massive majorities in UD‘s Maryland want the assisted suicide law that Illinois just voted in (it’s the thirteenth state to do so), but powerful religious lobbies have been able to block the legislation.

It’s hard to read the actual religious justification for letting dying people undergo protracted suffering without your eyes bugging out. National Review, which takes itself to be a respectable national publication, should be ashamed for publishing this mad screed, which tartly instructs us that God wants us to suffer because he loves us, and if you have trouble making sense of that, tough titties.

How can the strong will of a populace (62% of Maryland’s Catholics want assisted suicide) be overruled by obscurantist sadism?

Believe it, baby. Believe it. The world is full of people who praise god when parents shear off their newborns’ clitorises and sew shut their labia.

What’s hard to believe is that a British medical journal published a bunch of these people. A King’s College London professor writes:

 “I previously lived & did research in West Africa, working for an NGO that tackled female genital cutting. The British Medical Journal has published a ‘puff piece’ promoting FGC, saying it’s perfectly fine for the community (not the individual) to control her body.

“The article blames Western media for causing harm by wanting to tackle FGC. Nowhere does it mention that this is intended to reduce pleasure and maintain patriarchal control. Publishing this, academia is really digging its own grave.”

British academia digging its own grave by caving to moral degenerates is, you know, just what British academia does. God forbid we should intervene in its beautiful folkways.

See, you think the woman fell and skidded; but the person who fell and skidded is the writer. And thus the writer’s sentence falls and skids.

“Epstein and Summers were so close, Summers went to Epstein for advice about an extramarital affair he was trying to have with a reluctant grad student, in between bouts of calling women stupid.”

For mercenary reasons, Harvard prof Elisa New waxed lyrical about child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — until the world of decent people came crashing down on her and she couldn’t do it anymore. What an inspiring guide to the delicate art of poetry.

This one should keep the psychologists busy for decades. Watch the footage of the Bondi Beach terrorist attack. Ask yourself how it comes about that any human being has the courage of this guy.

They’ve got a ways to go. I believe the figure for American ultraorthodox Jewish children is one hundred percent.

I’m sure Stanford will get there. Just as Harvard’s endowment will eventually reach one hundred billion, so in the fullness of time all Stanford undergraduates will get there.

Steve Fisher was not geographically a Michigan man – he was raised in Illinois – but he had been on staff for seven years when Schembechler handed him the reigns of the team.

[The economics instructor] said he hid behind a desk with about 20 … students, and that one was shot in the leg.

About 20 other students ran out of the room’s side doors, he said. The students who were sitting in the middle row had a harder time escaping the gunfire. “The students in the middle were impacted the most,” he said. “Many of them were lying there and they were not moving. I have no idea how many.”

No one knows much of anything yet, but there’s apparently been an active shooter on campus for some time, and there may be multiple victims.

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

Two dead, nine critical. So far.

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‘Gov. Dan McKee of Rhode Island described the shooting as “an unthinkable nightmare”…’ How tone deaf can you be. Not only thinkable — same old same old.

Yes, same old, same old.

Don’t NOBODY do hazing like Texas. Plus nobody down there gives a shit.

SING IT

Tickets have a five-fold rise
Fans must pay a rip-off price
Too ra loo ra loo
Pat a pat a pan
When I pay my FIFA sum
How can anyone be glum

At this late date it isn’t about the ancient layers of moral filth in the soil of bigtime college football; even UD, who giveth not a fuck about collegiate sports, can recite the (highly selective) history of ick Mitch Albom reviews here — all of his nostalgia prompted by U Mich’s latest coaching scandal.

Its six million dollar a year coach got to be coach when the coach before him was suspended for recruitment violations (the new coach – duh – was also guilty of recruitment violations) but hey that doesn’t even count in any university sports reckoning, does it? Business as usual. Sex shit, however, plus assault, plus the guy who earns five million more than the school president is as we speak in jail… They’ve dumped the dude for cause but he’ll sue anyway and end up costing UM many millions. Life of the mind.

According to NBC News data, the K-12 vaccination rate for measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in Spartanburg County was 90% for the 2024-25 school year, below the 95% level doctors say is needed to protect against an outbreak. In neighboring Greenville County, the MMR vaccination rate was 90.5%.

Rapidly escalating outbreak. Stay the hell out of South Carolina.