… yet another of his employees (the career fraudster Michael Martoma) has been found guilty of insider trading? That’s the question on everyone’s mind.

“From a public perception, how do you go after all of the subordinates, but stop before getting to the guy on top,” asks trial lawyer Thomas Rohback, a partner and chairman of the litigation group at Axinn, Veltrop & Harkrider. “If somebody is a billionaire, and you’re sending other people that have worked for him to prison, isn’t there something lacking if you don’t bring the possibility of a jail sentence against that person,” continues Rohback.

… Under Dodd-Frank, the statue of limitations for financial crimes was extended to six years, from five previously, meaning Bharara and his team still have time to bring criminal charges against Cohen.

Board of trustees meetings at Brown must be awfully… awkward lately…

“So Steve any inside scoops on potential donors for the new arts center? …Ahem! … I mean… haha! … Any ideas…?”

Brown just can’t let him go yet. His fellow trustees sit across from him at that big ol’ conference table and whenever they look at him, whenever he opens his mouth, they’re all thinking the same thing:

NINE FUCKING BILLION DOLLAR PERSONAL FORTUNE! F-U-U-U-CK…

It’s just too much. They’ll hold onto him because they figure he will never go to jail because they figure there MUST be a law in the United States that says something like once you’re worth seven or more billion dollars you cannot be jailed because your legal status is no longer person. Something like that. You’re like a Gross National Product. Your legal status has actually changed and you’re actually too rich to go to prison. It’s like at some point you’re too rich to die. What’s that line from White Noise?… Babette says, of the very rich: “I have trouble imagining death at that income level.” It’s like – if Madoff hadn’t had to give it all back, he’d have been too rich to go to prison… Yeah, good ol’ Steve! He won’t go to jail. And if we hold onto him some day he’ll give Brown say one billion say…

I know one is supposed to be anguished and perplexed; but when you’re a veteran hoax-lover like UD, there’s such a merry, almost over-full, feast in the Samuragochi saga. Pardon me for laughing.

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

Okay, some good article titles are beginning to appear… Ode To Fraud is good… I have one (she said, blushing becomingly):

Die Fraud Mit Schatten

Ja, ja, it’s extremely convoluted, and you have to be extremely cultured to get it…

Okay, here.

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

An earlier musical hoax.

UD laughed so much reading that, her stress incontinence problem almost acted up.

… when you’ve got Wongene Daniel Kim?

A spokesman for La Trobe University said the research was of community interest as many Australians used complementary medicines and that the research would allow consumers to make better decisions.

Yes, and because many Australians check their star charts every day in the newspaper, La Trobe will be taking fifteen million dollars from the Association of Australian Astrologers to research their claims. This will allow consumers to make better decisions.

And because many Australians believe crystals cure cancer, La Trobe University will be taking fifteen million dollars from the Australian Association of Crystal Manufacturers to research their claims. This will allow consumers to make better decisions.

La Trobe University encourages other businesses to approach it with research funding ideas.

Bravo, students at Pristina U. The place is run by unspeakable hacks, and you’re doing something about it.

All UD can do from here is pay attention to you, write about you, and of course write a limerick.

There’s the sort of research that is splashy.
There’s the sort of research that is trashy.
But if you want to go
To the lowest of low
Then you need to read Ibrahim Gashi.

For details on where the hack got his stuff published, go here.

Only 33, and already so adept at fudging conflict of interest for his own gain!

Well, you’d expect such a wunderkind on the faculty of Harvard Business School.

And it just goes to show the strides universities like Harvard – which has had you don’t wanna know from conflict of interest scandals! – have made in dealing with the problem. Really getting the message down to younger faculty.

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

OTOH: This guy’s mom must be so proud! Look what sonny boy did! Still a pisher and he wrote something and the stock in that company just fell like a rock!

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

All UD can say is: When your models at Harvard are COI giants like Andrei Shleifer and Joseph Biederman (search their names if you dare), the sky’s the limit.

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

Oh, one more thing UD can say – and she always says it: Beware Beware Beware the B-School Boys.

Just thinking out loud here about the theory that certain actors have no self – which makes them brilliant at playing other people, but leaves them dangerously empty at the end, as it were, of the day. These people – parasitically, I guess – use their successive roles to assume, to inhabit, an identity, but eventually their sense of emptiness draws them toward heroin as another (more reliable) filler…

See, first, druggy Peter Sellers:

[Jonathan] Miller — who had been a member of the “Beyond the Fringe” team, another 60s quartet influenced by Sellers and the Goons — called the actor “a receptacle rather than a person. And whatever parts he played completely filled the receptacle, and then they were drained out. And the receptacle was left empty and featureless. Like a lot of people who can … change their characters, he could do so because he hadn’t any character himself.” (Kubrick famously said, “There is no such person as Peter Sellers.”) [Peter] Hall adds this cogent caveat: “It’s not enough in this business to have talent. You have to have the talent to handle the talent, and that, I think, Peter did not have.”

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

Then see these thoughts on Philip Seymour Hoffman in the New Yorker:

[Sometimes] the price of remarkable creative vitality is a wasting away of mortality. Or, to put it another way: without the need to flee from pain by transfiguring it, you would not have the energy to endure the suffering, the solitude, and the uncertainty that are part and parcel of artistic expression.

This comes dangerously close, I know, to the banal romantic notion that all genuine artists must suffer, which is accurate only in the sense that people are by definition gregarious and that making art, even if you are an actor plunging, in public, down into your depths, is solitary, even asocial, in its untrammelled freedom. Still, the link between suffering and creativity seems less romantic than pragmatic. There is something to Aristophanes’ satiric parable in which humans were once whole and were then split down the middle, and thus spent their lives seeking their other half. We would not love or desire if we had everything we needed. Some artists, like Hoffman, would not escape into their creations if art did not mend what life had painfully shattered.

It’s a different model, I realize. Sellers, we hear from his friends (and he said it himself) had no self at all; Hoffman, by this account, had half of one.

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

UPDATE: Russell Brand:

In spite of his life seeming superficially great, in spite of all the praise and accolades, in spite of all the loving friends and family, there is a predominant voice in the mind of an addict that supersedes all reason and that voice wants you dead. This voice is the unrelenting echo of an unfulfillable void.

Without access to clean needles, users are suspectible to deadly infectious diseases such as HIV and Hepatitis B and C.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm shares a rather charming writing error.

… notorious GlaxoSmithKline enabler Professor Martin Keller, now tries its hand at legitimate research in the form of an article that actually cautions against polypharmacy.

[B]ecause no clinical trial of bipolar medications has ever tested more than two drugs in combination, prescribing three or four exceeds practices supported by the field.

“By definition that’s not evidence-based treatment,” [the article’s lead author] said.

No prior studies had looked at the total medication burden, rather than just that of pyschotropics. It’s important to do so, Weinstock said, because cardiometabolic diseases, in particular, are often concurrent with bipolar disorder. Among the 230 patients in the study, for example, about half had such medical problems.

… “[The] increased reliance on polypharmacy does not appear to be contributing to decreased rates of illness chronicity or functional impairment in [bipolar disorder].”

I guess Brown faculty can do market-depressant research now that Keller (he was a honcho) has retired.

… as long as we’re all thinking about it in the wake of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death. This is from a review of a biography about jazz trumpeter Chet Baker:

In this book, heroin, as it takes over one musician after another, one scene, one city, one country (Gavin quotes the pianist René Urtreger estimating “that by the midfifties, 95 percent of the modern jazz players in France — himself included — were hooked”), is more than a plague, more than an endless horror movie, the reels running over and over, out of order, back to front (“It was like the Night of the Living Dead,” one fan tells Gavin of a Baker show in Paris in 1955. “Dark suits, gray faced, stoned out of their minds. Everything seemed strange to me, unhealthy. They were playing the music of the dead”). By the end — “Baker filled the syringe, then held it up. ‘Bob, you could kill a bunch of cows with this,’ he said. He plunged the needle into his scrotum.” – ”The man was a walking corpse,” the Rotterdam jazz hanger-on Bob Holland told Gavin. “He was living only for the stuff. Music was the last resort to get it” — it’s as if heroin itself has agency, and seeks out bodies to inhabit, colonize, and use up, not a substance but a parasitic form of life whose mission is to destroy its host, knowing that it can always leap to another. But the essential humanity of the host — his or her actual reality as someone who planted a foot on the planet before he or she left it, to be forgotten along with almost everyone else — is, in these pages, never reduced, whether it is that of Baker, or any of the musicians, friends, wives, or lovers trailing in his wake, those he knew and those he didn’t (from one dealer’s client list: “Bobby Darin, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Anita O’Day, Lenny Bruce, and the rock star Dion”), by 1981 “a growing trail of corpses.”

… would definitely be weird and embarrassing, but this is America, where anything is possible.

On the other hand, this is also the land of evil elites who might try to deny bogus degree-holders the right to represent legitimate universities in state politics…

Carol Ammons is running in Illinois to be the Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives in the 103rd District, home of the University of Illinois. Ammons is quite sure all this talk about her Walsingham University degree being bogus amounts to “the elites” smearing her for being a woman of the people, but so far, try as he might, Erik Jakobsson has not been able to find any evidence that Walsingham is anything other than a scam.

“When I thought about the relationship between what she had done and the possibility that she would represent the district that has Parkland College and the University of Illinois in it, that seemed to me to transcend politics as usual,” he said.

… “One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this is because I’ve spent my whole career at the university, and diploma mills totally undercut and undermine and devalue what real institutions of higher education do, like Parkland and the University of Illinois. We just can’t have someone in Springfield who doesn’t value that.”

… interpreter.

Jeet Thayil’s The Heroin Sestina.

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sober, unknowing, the happiness chemical blown
from your system, unable to taste the word heroin
without wanting its stone one last time.

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

Let’s walk (drift?) through it, thinking about heroin.

First: a sestina! Note the repeated final words from stanza to stanza (with a few variations): heroin, taste, know, low, time, stone. Circling around again and again to those words conveys the obsessive ritual nature of the addiction dance itself, the getting-nowhere, time squashed flat, everything you know flattened to a thin white line recurrency of using. But also: Our sense as we read of the mental burdens the form imposes gives us access to the oppressive intellectual puzzle that generates the poem itself: Why would anyone inject heroin? Low, dirty, Death, junk, wasted…

Or, as Jeff Deeny writes:

The addicting substance is characterized as “cunning, baffling and powerful.” It sounds like a cliché until someone with more than two decades clean, with a beautiful family and a career that is the envy of the world trades it in for a glassine envelope of dope and a set of works.

The speaker of the poem, a former user still drawn – by the mere invocation of the word heroin – to the drug, poses the question. Why trade death for life? So the poem is a typical lyric in that it represents one musing consciousness questioning (insistently, repeatedly, and not very productively; hence the sestina choice) itself. Why did I do that? Why do I still want to?

The bizarre but familiar answer the poem provides is that a lot of people really like – adore – feeling dead. They find irresistibly seductive the idea of Stop the World I Want to Get Off. If you are astounded by something as massive as propofol – a drug “used exclusively by anesthesiologists” being in Michael Jackson’s blood, you should consider that fatal doses of propofol are the logical extension – given enough money and the capacity to find ways around rules – of the I Want to Be Dead idea.

Time squashed flat. Wasted time.

the way it lays you low,
flattens everything you know

to a thin white line. I’m saying, I know
the pull of it: the skull rings time
so beautiful, so low
you barely hear it.

… When you said, “I mean it, we live like stones,”
you broke something in me only heroin

could fix. The thick sweet amaze of heroin,
helpless its love, its know-
ledge of the infinite. Why push the stone
back up the hill?

Sisyphean life is one damn thing after another. Pushing the stone up the hill. A meaningless suffering that simply persists – deepens – until time ends it with our physical deaths. But if we end time? Heroin takes us into a strange micro and macro reality: It reduces everything in the world to itself, its thin white line, the immediacy for the user of the particular works he’s manipulating when he’s using. But heroin at the same time expands the universe out to infinity. It takes away our small painful one stone after another wretchedly individual lives and gives us instead a skull in which the flame of time and the self has been radically lowered, to the point where, subdued as specific suffering time-bound beings, our immortal souls (if you like) rise to the ether of the cosmic, the infinite, the non-human. Heroin isn’t death; it’s the glorious sensation of liberating oneself into non-being. As in Doris Lessing’s story To Room Nineteen:

delightfully, darkly, sweetly, letting herself slide gently, gently, to the edge of the river

So sweet is the thick amaze, the user risks being

unable to taste the word heroin
without wanting its stone one last time

It’s free rein; not free reign (the NYT might have fixed it by the time it appears here).

But, while acknowledging that Times columnists appropriately have very free reign in choosing subject matter and commenting on it as they see fit, I am troubled by the same questions raised here by Dr. Rasmussen.

Thomas Marciniak, the FDA review-team leader [of AstraZeneca’s new anticlotting drug, Brilinta] … wrote that [according to trial results] 12 patients reported their own deaths by telephone.

Perhaps not wishing to stir up too much excitement among consumers, AstraZeneca is remaining mum on the matter.

AstraZeneca declined to comment on the allegation about patients reporting their own deaths…

One question UD has is whether users of Brilinta are able to report their deaths only by telephone, or let’s say they prefer tweets or email, or old-fashioned face-to-face.