David Brooks need only have mentioned, in his NYT piece dismissing people interested in the Jeffrey Epstein story as stupid conspiracy theorists, that he himself attended a smallish dinner at which Epstein was present.

This, however, would have unburnished his highly burnished self-presentation as a moral exemplar.

And this U Arkansas poli sci prof has a lot of them – or so it’s claimed. It’s claimed she simply made up a whole interview with an Iranian political activist (the person making the claim is, uh, the political activist); it’s claimed she engaged in research fraud in her dissertation (Cambridge, which published it, is investigating). As head of a mideast studies unit on campus, she called for the destruction of terrorist state Israel, which the university seems to have felt fell a bit short of the sort of official statement they had in mind when they appointed her.

He also killed multiple people and then, aware the FBI was close, killed himself in a secret location. It seems likely he killed (and Valente killed) because both were

1. insane; and
2. murderously jealous of successful people.

How the fuck did this become a legal case in the first place? What needs investigating is the mental health of the fanatics currently running the University of Washington. HUGE embarrassment for the institution.

For few, read tens of millions of course… The indispensable Kathleen Stock scathes through the now-notorious defense of FGM in a once-respectable British journal…

[A]nti-FGM laws allegedly cause “oversurveillance of ethnic and racialised families and girls” and undermine “social trust, community life and human rights”. All these things, it is implied, are flat wrong. This sounds like old-fashioned morality talk to me. But then again, if old-fashioned morality talk is permissible, may not we also talk explicitly about the wrongs of holding small girls down to tables and slicing off bits of them, or sewing them up so tight that they are in searing agony? These things sound like they might undermine “social trust, community life, and human rights” too.

Auctioned off at a pathetic thirteen million from an original asking price of $50 million — if this doesn’t fit the definition of Aristotelian tragedy, I don’t know what does.

Bad boy Lawrence Krauss was forced, back in 2018, to retire from Arizona State; you’d think ASU would know by now that you take down bad girl Elisa New’s university page before announcing she’s been dumped too. But there she is, bright and shiny, eager to gentle you with poetry…

[M]easles can cause complications like blindness, brain swelling and even death. Two doses of the measles vaccine are 97% effective.

The Texas Mennonites merrily kill their kids and spread measles to the rest of the country. Plus they’re “now staring down the barrel of a different vaccine-preventable outbreak: whooping cough,” which will torment their children and kill some of them.

One-day wonder Da Costa posts her way out of a Mamdani job. She lasted 24 hours.

Some witnesses said he said nothing. There are some that say he made a barking noise.

How easy, in the USA, for an absolute lunatic to get a gun and kill Brown U. students and an MIT professor.

The motive is also easy: Loser Kills Winner. Graduated from the same school in Portugal as a man who went on to lead a lab at MIT, while this guy went nowhere. Ditto for the Brown students – he dropped out of Brown; they were succeeding there. All had to die.

They have things in common with Phil Hartman’s 1998 death at the hands of his angry, substance-abusing wife. An argument apparently preceded it; he was talking about divorce. A very public argument preceded the Reiner patricide/matricide. Hartman’s wife killed him while he slept in their bed; Nick Reiner did the same. She killed herself after killing Hartman (the Reiner son is on suicide watch). Jealousy was a huge issue in both cases; both killers wanted the entertainment success other family members achieved. Both had mental health problems.

I’d say that massive drug intake was what separated maybe physically abusing people from being unhinged enough to shoot and stab them.

It’s the fourteenth, and they keep on coming.

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Support for the legalisation of assisted dying has been steady for several decades in many nations throughout the world, with about two-thirds of those polled supporting its legalisation. No jurisdiction that has legalised assisted dying has subsequently ended the practice, and public support for the practice tends to grow once legalised. In addition, when assisted dying is not available, many will seek it out at considerable expense or inconvenience to themselves. The Swiss organisation Dignitas has assisted in several thousand deaths for individuals willing to pay significant fees and travel expenses (currently estimated at $20,000), as well as to risk possible legal ramifications in their home countries. There is a high demand for enjoying freedom over one’s death.

How do you even reckon that up? What do you do with all the other dirtiest programs in college football?

Will Dana-Farber include in its brag sheet that she left in disgrace, trailed by now-confirmed research misconduct charges? Her West Coast equivalent, busy-bee billionaire Marc Tessier-Lavigne, stepped down in identical disgrace, brought low by a determined student journalist.

The departed CEO of Dana-Farber, and her co-authors, were exposed by some random guy in Wales (now enjoying his 2.63 million dollar award), and I’m sure they felt the same confident contempt for him that Stanford’s prez felt for the student journalist. What can these nothings do to us? We represent (and, with their scuzzy vieux Larry Summers, do they ever) the American elite.

Brookline MA is one of the safest neighborhoods in the country, so it’s unlikely the murder of an MIT professor at his home there was random. He was apparently shot multiple times.

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What happened? It might have been domestic; it might have been a mentally ill graduate student or colleague. We shall see.