He is Peter Conti-Brown of Stanford law school, and he’s being quoted in my headline by Felix Salmon, who has a blog at Reuters.

Conti-Brown provides the hard numbers:

From 2003 through 2008, Harvard’s annual budget grew an average of 7% per year, starting at $2.43 billion in 2003 and ending at $3.46 billion. Including an estimated 30% loss to the endowment in 2008, the endowment grew an average of 10.15%, from $16.24 billion to $25.59 billion. In absolute terms, while the budget grew annually at an average of $206 million, the endowment grew an annual average of $1.56 billion. More strikingly, Harvard’s payout rates during this period remained a steady 4.4%, an average of more than 5.5% less than endowment growth. Far from spending like “drunken sailors,” universities were, if anything, not spending enough.

You already know all of this if you read University Diaries from ’03 to ’08. You also know that Harvard did spend like a drunken sailor on one thing: hedge fund employee compensation. (It didn’t need to spend like a drunken sailor on President Lawrence Summers’ salary because, at the same time he was running Harvard, he was a hedge fund manager. As Frank Rich at the New York Times puts it, he was “moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.”)

Salmon concludes, as does Conti-Brown that

If these institutions aren’t going to spend the money in their [ultra-bloated] endowments on providing educational services, they should pay tax on it.

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UD is particularly intrigued by Conti-Brown’s suggestion that the awesome, anally hoarded university endowment has finally transmogrified and hardened into a physical object, like a fantastic yacht, or Ezra Merkin’s Rothko room…. A commenter on the Salmon thread (all of the comments are worth a read) gets at something like this when he or she writes:

I see top universities with their massive endowments, tax free status, and generally state of the art and connected financial planning as becoming the new Church.

From the dark ages, to the middle ages and somewhat beyond the Church became an ever increasing landholder.

Yale in 2007 bought the nearby 137 acre Bayer Labs Complex which now makes it similar in size to the Vatican City.

Over the next hundred years, I see rich universities hoarding and growing their endowments and then splurging occasionally to buy up properties.

Are there any countervailing forces that will prevent Yale from owning one quarter of Connecticut 100 years from now?

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What if there were a car, the ultimate luxury car, called The Harvard Endowment? What would it look like?

Like this, I guess.

They took that Veyron and rammed it right into a wall.

If our top universities are going to become the new church, they’re going to have to manage their endowments better.

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But hey. Speaking of what you’ve got and how you should spend it… Allow UD, on this her birthday, a moment of payout.

The lesson of the crashed roadster is more than clear to me: Appreciate your assets, and be wise with them.

I’ve got a blog that a lot of smart, witty, and humane people read. It’s the most liquid asset in the world this thing, allowing me immense purchase on pleasure and understanding.

It even, amazingly, lets me do, in a small way, what I said from the start, in my blog’s tagline, I wanted to do: change things.

For this, I thank you.

For generations, students at the University of Texas have believed that if, on your way to a test, you see an albino squirrel on campus, you’ll get an A.

But a biology professor at UT says: “The squirrels — at least the ones I’ve seen on campus — are not true albinos… I have actually seen several color variants of squirrels on campus with light-colored hair but all with normally pigmented eyes. … There are squirrels that lack or have reduced production of eumelanin, or black pigment, which are known as amelanistic squirrels.”

Not only that, but a student comments in response to the article:

I saw an albino squirrel and had a threesome later that night ….

UN Reno’s new engineering dean owns a business – a bogus journal that for a couple hundred bucks a pop from its, er, contributors, will pump out, say, a seven-sentence article with five authors.

No questions asked. Publication faster than you can say No peer review.

Many of the articles were authored by said dean, his son, and his son’s wife – the sort of family affair that puts UD in mind of Italian university departments where much of the faculty shares the same last name (“The University of Bari, in the southern region of Puglia, springs to mind. The economics faculty must seem like a home from home for Professor Lanfranco Massari as he bumps into sons Lanfranco Jr, Gilberto and Giansiro, or his five grandchildren who work in the same department.”).

Nosy Andrew Gelman, hailing from a respectable university, brought the whole We Are Family thing to the attention of UNR’s student paper, which, as it takes down a dean, should be a contender for the same Pulitzer as that kid at Stanford.

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You know what’s gonna happen, right? After an indignant defense of the miscreant, the school takes forever to investigate. Eventually it issues a statement downplaying it all (“… made some mistakes…”), and then in a year or so it ever so quietly removes the dude from the deanship but keeps him in the engineering dept at the same salary (close to $400,000) he made as dean. Ta da!

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UPDATE: Students who spend $1,499 for Jones’s three-hour RFID certification course receive a free copy of his [self-published] book …

Gets better and better.

And that is for a really interesting reason: The vast majority of Wyomingites appear to be, looked at closely, pro-suicide.

I mean, think about it. You don’t get Wyoming’s astounding number of suicides year after year unless you’re practically advocating for it.

Here’s a local commentator:

Like most good ol’ boys, [Wyoming St. Sen.] Kolb hemmed and hawed and found an excuse to do nothing, even while kids in his community kill themselves… [Kolb says:] “As soon as we start dragging [suicide] down the emotional road, we’ve lost… ”

Kolb’s attitude about suicide — that we shouldn’t get emotional about it, that we don’t really need to take action — reflects the cold-hearted stubbornness that has kept Wyoming from dealing with [the state’s suicide] crisis in any real way… [A]s long as people running the state maintain the same harmful and lazy attitude that caused our state to become the worst in the nation for suicide in the first place, we won’t see anywhere near the progress we need against this issue that tears so many of Wyoming’s families and communities apart.

Don’t get all boohoo. Don’t take action. Guns are there to kill people, including yourself if you feel like it.

Cowboy nihilism is super-chic. The macho charisma of killing yourself with Marlboros, Wyoming Whiskey, and a Kahr CM9 Polymer 9mm.

The state’s most popular book.

Second highest rate of car crashes in America, even though no one lives there. Most guns per capita in the nation. One psychiatrist every whatever … every five thousand miles…

This is a subtle and sensitive examination of the gun suicide epidemic, featuring Bob Owens, whose death was hypertypical.

[A] journalist who was friends with Owens said that many gun owners [like Owens] are afraid to tell doctors about their mental-health struggles, because they worry someone will take their weapons away.

Eh bien. UD’s heart goes out to these silent, lost, sufferers, but their logic’s a bit skewed. Surely they know they are overwhelmingly unlikely to need their twenty firearms for self-defense; surely they know (or at least intuit?) that those guns are far more likely to be used by someone in their home for suicide.

They may even know that the act will be impulsive – one drunk self-hating night; the failure to complete some task or other; a bad fight with your wife. Gun, stage left.

And it wouldn’t even be about taking the weapons away. It would be about temporarily locking them up until a crisis passed. But even that…

What does one say about flagrantly suicidal people who refuse to go to doctors and refuse to put away their guns?

Like most good ol’ boys, [Wyoming St. Sen.] Kolb hemmed and hawed and found an excuse to do nothing, even while kids in his community kill themselves… [Kolb says:] “As soon as we start dragging [suicide] down the emotional road, we’ve lost… ”

Kolb’s attitude about suicide — that we shouldn’t get emotional about it, that we don’t really need to take action — reflects the cold-hearted stubbornness that has kept Wyoming from dealing with [the state’s suicide] crisis in any real way… [A]s long as people running the state maintain the same harmful and lazy attitude that caused our state to become the worst in the nation for suicide in the first place, we won’t see anywhere near the progress we need against this issue that tears so many of Wyoming’s families and communities apart.

Benjamin Baker, a former police officer who is now policy adviser on public safety to the governor, says the crisis is exemplified by a scene he witnessed in an Albuquerque park in July.

“I had my kid here for football practice — he’s 12,” Baker says. “And people decided to come have a rolling gun-and-stabbing battle within feet of where he was practicing. And it caused a person to be shot. And the ages of those folks were 13, 14 and 15.”

Baker says guns have long been part of everyday life in this Western city, but the nature of the local gun culture is different. He says people now see guns not so much as a tool, but as something “sexy.” And they seem more likely to fire them in anger.

“That should have been a fist fight! At worst!” Baker says of the teenagers in the park. “I cannot recall a time where things were as violent and as bad, and particularly how young the age of the perpetrators has become.”

[One policeman] guesses half the cars in Albuquerque traffic now contain guns, some of which wind up in the hands of felons or children.

Far out: New Mexico’s gun-splashed city is so unstaunched at this point that the governor has declared a health emergency! As in like you can’t leave your house, man, without some chance of being pulped; and that goes for your kids, too — so parents are increasingly reluctant to send their kids to school.

A pretty dire outcome for America’s dumbest state, and recent winner of Worst State Overall in which to live.

Suicidewise as well NM vies with The Headblaster Three (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) for Berettas to the brain. It’s right up there (this is from 2020), almost always securely in the top five.

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So for 30 days the cowboys can’t carry their guns in public, says the governor, and ‘course they’re all pissing their high-waisted Y-fronts at the news. ‘Course the governor’s a fucking dictator and when Trump comes back he’s putting her in front of a firing squad.

Witty protest signs abounded. “Bibi, haven’t the Jews suffered enough?”

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[One protester commented:] “It may not be a good idea to turn the Israeli army’s entire logistical command against you.”

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When fighter pilots rose to prominence among the opponents to Netanyahu’s plans, his minister of communications, Shlomo Karhi, suggested the pilots — who are lionized figures in Israeli society — “can go to hell.”

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Within half an hour of the bill passing, 64-0 amid an opposition boycott, hundreds of pilots posted pictures of themselves, many in tears, sending their unit commanders letters ending their decades of service. “We signed a contract to fight for the realm,” they wrote. “We will not fight for a king.” The Israel Defense Forces later revealed that more than half of the air force personnel that signed the original petition to Netanyahu, including pilots, had followed through and informed their units they would no longer report to reserve duty.

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I keep thinking of a phrase Harold Meyerson used to describe the people about to take over Israel: “theocratic-primitivist.” Yeah, theocratic; but the other thing is even more important. More devastating. I’ve written for years about the ultraorthodox in Israel and America, and it’s definitely their primitivism, rather than any particular form of spiritual adherence, that shocks. Several forms of theocracy exist in the world, after all; but the extreme archaism, the bitter super-regression of this massive cult, is the really distinctive and frightening thing. Pre-law, pre-science, pre-education, pre-reason, pre-individualism, pre-nation, pre-state, pre-equality, pre-humanity. Like their primitive precursors, the new owners of Israel grant humanity only to their own tribe, and consider violence – along with non-violent forms of criminal behavior – against extra-tribal forces justified under a wide array of circumstances.

They are a form of death. A death-cult. A burial society burying human life itself. They will certainly bury Israel.

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The reasonableness bill cannot be divorced from the entire package of legislation, which, taken together, will end Israeli democracy as we know it. 

… In a country that devotes more and more resources to maintain the occupation and the settlements; in a country with no separation of religion and state, where marriages are subject to religious law and allowed only for heterosexual couples; and in a country that allocates tremendous resources to religious institutions, where the ultra-Orthodox do not serve in the military and their participation in the labor market is extremely low, insisting that the very textural fabric of Israeli society is both Jewish and democratic is becoming less and less convincing. The battle in the streets is not just about the constitutional overhaul. It is whether Israel can have a future as a liberal democracy.

‘As Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation battles to contain the Dominion lawsuit scandal that has engulfed its top executives and stars, another crisis is building in the wings that has the potential to cause further turbulence for the media empire.‘

Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuit, targeting wiggidy wiggidy wacked New York University trustee Maria Bartiromo, is asking for twice Dominion’s damages: $2.7 billlllllion.

But you see the problem with the sentence in my headline, which comes from the Guardian. Tossing too much figurative language into your writing – aka mixed metaphors – is far from the worst style mistake; but it can fog up a reader’s understanding with a stew of confusing images. (See? A stew that fogs…?)

In this example, we move from the realm of battle to that of flooding, then take a theatrical turn (wings), and end up in a shaky aircraft cabin.

I wrote this two years ago, as ISIS fanatic Begum (she says she isn’t an ISIS fanatic anymore; British intelligence disagrees), stuck in a Syrian detention camp, had her request to return home at least to argue her case denied. The latest news is that — in line with UD‘s confidence she’ll never be allowed back in her home country — a court has on appeal upheld the decision to revoke her citizenship.

Straightforward, clarifying words, as ISIS terrorist and all ’round sweetie Allison Fluke-Ekren awaits sentencing.

UD ain’t sure why garden-variety mentally challenged racist anti-semites like Ye, who will never do anything, get all the attention, while an existentially imperiling American like F-E gets quietly carted off to jail without anyone paying her the sort of attention she deserves if we’re going to protect ourselves from our bloodiest.

Kanye is safely all over the place (Christian/ Midsommarian/ Satanistian/ Nurembergian… Next up: Quilting Bees), while F-E has displayed, over decades, remarkable ideological stability, discipline, and resilience; she’s a real, highly trained, soldier, and she wants to kill all of us. She has killed quite a few of us, and UD thinks a long jailhouse interview, conducted by someone like Stephen Biddle, would be a service.

A [divorced] teenage mother from Overbrook, Kan., Ms. Fluke-Ekren slowly embraced the Islamic State’s ideology...

[Her first ISIS husband] was killed in an airstrike as he was conducting reconnaissance for a terrorist attack …

… Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Islamic State terrorist, a Bangladeshi man who specialized in drones and worked on a plan to drop chemical bombs using them. After the man, Wamiq al-Bengali, died, Ms. Fluke-Ekren married another Bangladeshi man, an Islamic State military leader who was responsible for defending Raqqa, Syria. He died while fighting for ISIS in 2018…

She was smuggled out of Syria in about May 2019 and married a fifth time, according to the statement of facts. But the couple separated…

Babe, that’s okay. On AK-47s we’re good. Might use you for grenades and belts, but our kids are already cool with AK-47s.

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She will proudly plead guilty today, her only regret being her failure to carry out 9/11-style mass murder on an American college campus.

“Republicans are not going to expand mental health funding. Mental health care is for sissies and liberals. The only thing they’re going to expand is access to guns… The norm in this country has been that mass shootings have been used by state legislatures and governors as an excuse to loosen gun laws, not tighten them. This is our country.

… [T]here are two Clinton-era federal laws declaring schools gun-free zones. If the Republicans take over the House, they’re not going to have much of a legislative “agenda” beyond impeaching Joe Biden and getting to the bottom of the national crisis swirling around the question of why Hunter Biden’s canvases fetch such handsome prices, but I would expect that maybe they’ll repeal those federal laws and pass something getting us closer to their “Bushmaster in every classroom” fever dreams.

… McConnell has blocked vote after vote on gun safety. If he’s back in charge of the Senate next year, he’ll keep that grim, blood-soaked record intact. And he and his party will do nothing on mental health. How many children will have to die before a handful of Republicans will join Democrats to pass a sensible law or two? Whatever the answer is, it’s a ghastly and indefensible number. But I fear the real answer is that we’ll never know, because they never will.”

More Tomasky.

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PS: You know all about Wyoming, which Tomasky points out ranks almost, er, dead last for mental health care, because UD‘s always marveling at its AMAZING suicide statistics.