Good thing they’re too weak at the moment to come after us. They’re really good.

… Moscow police arrested the director of a BVI registered foreign company who allegedly used forged documents to embezzle over 1.28 billion rubles ($23 million) from the Atom Research Training Center for New Technologies and Materials, a Moscow-based subsidiary of state owned Rostec.

[T]he suspect and his accomplices forged a promissory note dated February 8, 2012 that said a state owned research center had assumed the financial liability of the … company in the amount of 1.28 billion rubles.

… Later, the suspect evidently found a notary who assisted him in creating a payment request for the research center. After the research center refused to pay, the notary prepared a deed of protest to take the dispute to court.

It’s the “take the dispute to court” thing that gets me. American fraudsters, having been refused payment, would almost certainly not draft a deed of protest and go to court. That’s the sort of brash, high-risk move from which stateside swindlers would shrink. Our guys would be unwilling to go all the way.

… [F]rats as a whole are ranked by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners as the sixth worst insurance risk in this country — just above hazardous waste disposal.

… underage drinking …”

They do, however, miss the occasional gang rape.

[Two Troy University] students were arrested and charged with sexual battery by multiple perpetrators … [T]he alleged rape took place sometime from March 10, 2015, to March 12, 2015, behind Spinnaker Beach Club, a popular bar and dance club for spring breakers.

Club Spinnaker’s owner has been among the most eloquent critics of Panama City Beach’s efforts to change its way-welcoming spring break rules.

Does Sendhil Mullainathan realize how many layers of irony there are in his citing Andrei Shleifer as an expert in self-aggrandizement??

Or does he think we’re supposed to forget about Shleifer having been found liable for conspiracy to defraud the federal government?

UD, as constant readers know, loves the rhetoric sports writers bring to these, um, unfortunate events.

Boise State Backfield Takes Another Hit with Recruit’s Arrest

The Boise State football team’s gaping hole at tailback grew a little larger Wednesday.

February signee Raymond Sheard was arrested Tuesday at Arlington (Texas) High on drug and gun charges. He won’t join the team, a Boise State official said Wednesday.

The Broncos need to replace the nation’s second-most productive running back in NFL-bound Jay Ajayi. They lost expected contributor Charles Bertoli last week when he decided to pursue other interests.

That leaves sophomore Jeremy McNichols, senior Jack Fields, junior Devan Demas and redshirt freshman Cory Young as the only scholarship running backs in the program. None has rushed for 200 yards in a season.

It’s all about the game! Throw a lot of players’ names and positions at me and drop the whole … what was it? Did our coach recruit a 19-year old about whom the good news is that “[An additional] charge of tampering with an ID number (serial number on gun removed) was dropped”? Poor coacha inconsolata! Can’t expect him to do due diligence… Of course, if the guy hadn’t been caught he’d have brought his special outlook on life here to Boise… You’d think an apology or something from the coach might be in order… An expression of regret…? Nah! “Guys have to step up, and that’s exactly what they did,” he said. Forward march.

And this one’s at already incredibly notorious Florida State University, run by a know-nothing politician, recent haunt of Jameis Winston, etc., etc., etc., etc. (For etc., etc., etc., etc., put Florida State University in my search engine.)

A federal grand jury handed down an indictment on embezzlement charges for former Florida State University finance professor James S. Doran on Thursday.

The indictment claims that between May 2010 and March 2011, 39-year-old Doran embezzled more than $650,000 in funds held by FSU while he was an assistant professor.

Says, somewhat mysteriously, he “embezzled FSU property valued at more than $5,000.” Given that he oversaw a student-run investment fund, UD‘s wondering if he pinched some of that, and/or helped himself to the classic objets of professor-desir (computers, cameras, anything of value that can be moved).

Italian angst after the shooting in one of its courtrooms puts UD in mind of one of her favorite Gore Vidal paragraphs:

Since the Second World War, Italy has managed, with characteristic artistry, to create a society that combines a number of the least appealing aspects of socialism with practically all the vices of capitalism. This was not the work of a day. A wide range of political parties has contributed to the invention of modern Italy, a state whose vast metastasizing bureaucracy is the last living legacy anywhere on earth of the house of Bourbon (Spanish branch). In fact, the allegedly defunct Kingdom of the Two Sicilies has now so entirely engulfed the rest of the peninsula that the separation between Italian state and Italian people is nearly perfect.

Entertaining his old friend on the board, John Silber, over dinner and drinks ended up costing Adelphi $546. Dr. Silber was president … of Boston University.

The next day, food and drinks with another trustee, Hilton Kramer, and a second guest cost the university $707. Mr. Kramer [was] The New York Observer’s art critic and a media critic for The New York Post.

The meal charges were actually modest; it was the bar tab that drove up the grand total. The bill was $454 for the 1982 Brion wine and Martell 100 cognac that Dr. Silber and Dr. Diamandopoulos drank. And the 1983 Chaval and Martell that he and Mr. Kramer sipped cost $552.

… Among Dr. Diamandopoulos’s expenses highlighted by Amy Gladstein, a lawyer for the Coalition to Save Adelphi, was a $579 pen he ordered for Ernesta Procope to celebrate her election as board chairwoman.

There was also the $82,314 Mercedes that Adelphi provided to Dr. Diamandopoulos.

RIP.

UD‘s favorite Don DeLillo novel, The Names, is being made into a film.

It took UD many readings to warm up to – to begin to understand – this moody broody beautifully written book. Indeed its hyper-seriousness means I think that the main problem the director will encounter is avoiding pretentiousness.

Then again, film isn’t such a great medium for big ideas (see for instance Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being), so maybe the writer and director will opt to avoid the various philosophies of language in the book… a book which, now that I think of it, could have been titled The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Both Kundera and DeLillo are interested in how people ground their lives and stop drifting about in the pleasant or unpleasant white noise of postmodernity. The Names is full of archeologists desperately digging under the earth for meaning, presence, authenticity, a sense of grounded existence; it is also full of international security consultants constantly up over the earth, flying from world capital to world capital as they write their reports for corporations wanting to know if it’s safe to do business in Karachi…

There’s a third existential location in the novel: Greece. That’s where the American narrator, James Axton, lives and works; and as a typically white noisy American, he gazes throughout the narrative at the achieved, grounded lives of the Greeks – neither low nor high, but simply here, on the earth.

Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing. It was a sea chamber raised to the day, to the detailing light, a textured pigment on the hills. There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravels. Striped flagpoles and aired-out rugs, houses joined by closed wooden balconies, plants in battered cans, a willingness to share the oddments of some gathering-up. Passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to a nautical gloss. A heart barely beating in the summer heat, and always the climb, the small birds in cages, the framed approaches to nowhere. Doorways were paved with pebble mosaics, the terrace stones were outlined in white.

A good film could do a lot, visually, with the contrast between that sort of scene and this one:

At the boarding gate, the last of the static chambers, the stillness is more compact, the waiting narrowed. He will notice hands and eyes, the covers of books, a man with a turban and netted beard. The crew is Japanese, the security Japanese… He hears Tamil, Hindi, and begins curiously to feel a sense of apartness, something in the smell of the place, the amplified voice in the distance. It doesn’t feel like earth. And then aboard, even softer seats. He will feel the systems running power through the aircraft, running light, running air. To the edge of the stratosphere, world hum, the sudden night. Even the night seems engineered, Japanese, his brief sleep calmed by the plane’s massive heartbeat.

… Erdely decided to look for the “right” rape victim, interviewing women at several colleges, but not finding their (doubtless accurate) accounts of sexual assault emblematic enough. This desire for the one perfect victim essentially committed Erdely to passing over dozens of women telling the truth, until she got to a sufficiently appealing fabulist. Erdely got conned by Jackie because she wanted to believe. Rolling Stone got conned by Erdely for the same reason.

An investigation by this newspaper found that college students at 10 of Ohio’s biggest public universities are paying more than $135 million for intercollegiate athletics through either mandatory fees or university subsidies – and most of the students don’t even know it.

UD‘s first cousin once removed, Shenandoah University student Joshua Fleming, interviews himself about his participation in the upcoming 88th Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival Grand Feature Parade.

UD thanks her sister for the link.

… are here.

… private colleges’ endowments of more than $500 million. Such a tax, which would not impact individual gifts to the institutions and would be reduced by the amount the schools dedicate to financial assistance, could generate $6 billion for the federal government to use for President Obama’s free community-college proposal. That large sum also could be used more generally for federal student aid programs.

The comment thread for the Washington Post article tells you how profoundly Americans resent it when people interfere with their freedom to subsidize 35 billion dollar organizations.

Shifting the dollars generated under the scheme to community colleges? The rankest Stalinist tyranny. Harvard = The Kulaks.

Want to know what crushing guilt looks like à la UD? Guilt that she can’t lift the morning, afternoon, and late afternoon after?

It’s last night. We’re at Boston Logan Airport, and our Southwest flight to Baltimore is delayed an hour. Posted departure time, 10:50 PM. We’re sitting alongside one another – UD, Mr UD, La Kid – in those hard black chairs all in a row at our gate, and we’re tired and grumpy and overheated.

Suddenly a skinny young man dressed all in black bounds up before us and excitedly says Are you going to Baltimore too? Guess where I’ve been? He’s euphoric, in a state of bliss he has to share. His skinny black t-shirt says something that seems to be a pun on the word censorship.

I was just at the anime convention and guess what happened to me?

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

Now understand. UD flies. She flies on planes. UD‘s a reasonably functional postmodern humanoid. But she is a bad flyer, and among the things she worries about when boarding is the possibility that her flight will include a disturbed person. A disturbed person who in a state of euphoria or rage or something will act in frightening ways…

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

So who knows what she might have done if they’d been at an outdoor cafe or something but UD simply put her head down (she had her laptop out) and did not respond. Mr UD got up and went to get some food for the flight. La Kid, bless her, said What? What happened to you? He paused a bit, daunted by our unfriendliness. I… I got interviewed twice… His voice trailed off and then he trailed off. He took a seat by some enormous windows and was very quiet.

UD took a deep breath and felt terrible. She looked over at him and noticed that outside his window an amazing huge golden-red moon (a blood moon?) was rising, so she went over to where he was sitting and said to no one in particular Look at the moon! and the guy looked and smiled a little.

But this didn’t make UD feel any better.

She had taken the wind out of the guy’s sails, and you should never take the wind out of someone’s sails.

This guy, I realized, as I looked around, was one of many funny-looking anime convention people on this flight and I love their bizarrerie, I want to reward their bizarrerie. I want them to know I love their blue beanies that go round and round and make little whining noises (a woman on board the flight had one of these) and I love their socks that are designed to look like shoes. The weirder the better for the love of god!

Had UD‘s (fear-induced) coldness taken this young man, at the height of his bizarrerie self-confidence, to the I guess I’ll go crawl off and be a conformist for the rest of my life depths?

GAAAAHH!