Harvard Professor's Jihad Against Chinese Restaurant Over $4 Backfires

One reason why America is going to hell in a bucket is that the political establishment is jam-packed with Ivy League snobs who look down on ordinary citizens. The two centers of power in the USA, Wall Street and Washington D.C. are filled with graduates of elitist asshole factories like Harvard, Princeton and Yale who revel in their superiority. Big egos with pedigrees always know better than the unwashed  rabble and never refrain from shouting it from the mountaintops and even worse – implementing policy. Such people are responsible for the squandering of America’s credibility, a loss of morality, endless bankrupting wars, a financial system that is a total scam and unable to  function without government support and the creeping fascist state. 

Not all Ivy League products are able to make it to the big time and they walk among us. They have no less sense of entitlement and over-inflated sense of self-importance though and some may be a bit bitter that they didn’t make the cut to enter the halls of power. An example of such jackassery has been getting attention lately in the case of Ben Edelman who is an associate professor at Harvard Business School.  Mr. Edelman – who can’t be lacking in dough – went completely batshit after realizing that he had been overcharged a measly four dollars by a local Chinese eatery.

As reported by Boston.com in a story entitled “Ben Edelman, Harvard Business School Professor, Goes to War Over $4 Worth of Chinese Food”:

Last week, Edelman ordered what he thought was $53.35 worth of Chinese food from Sichuan Garden’s Brookline Village location.

Edelman soon came to the horrifying realization that he had been overcharged. By a total of $4.

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when a Harvard Business School professor thinks a family-run Chinese restaurant screwed him out of $4, you’re about to find out.

(Hint: It involves invocation of the Massachusetts Consumer Protection Statute and multiple threats of legal action.)

The story shows a series of emails between Edelman and the proprietor Ran Duan who was featured in stories in Boston Magazine and GQ and seems to be a great example of an immigrant who did it the right way. It seems that the egomaniac Edelman bit off more than he could chew as the story went viral, appearing on such varied websites as CNN,  Fox News, CNBC, The Guardian, The Washington Times, Gawker, Infowars, Raw Story and dozens of others. It seems like there is actually one thing that does unite Americans these days and it is a loathing of elitists getting over on the besieged working folks.

Edelman's idiotic overreaction also sparked a social media barrage and like most bullies the pride of Harvard backed down. Seems like the publicity over his tantrum may not have been good for business (he moonlights as an attorney) and he apologized. As the Washington Post reports "Harvard Business School professor apologizes for e-mail rant over a $4 overcharge":

After having seen the matter referred to the court of public opinion, where he has not fared particularly well, Edelman now says he’s sorry for the hubbub.

In an apology  posted Wednesday afternoon on his Web site, Edelman wrote: “Having reflected on my interaction with Ran, including what I said and how I said it, it’s clear that I was very much out of line. I aspire to act with great respect and humility in dealing with others, no matter what the situation. Clearly I failed to do so. I am sorry, and I intend to do better in the future.”

Edelman, who is an attorney in addition to a professor, said that he’s reached out to Duan and plans to personally apologize to him.

Score one for small business owners as well as against those once referred to by Spiro Agnew as an "effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals". The trouble may not be over for Edelman though, a new story at Boston.com, "There’s More: Edelman Did This Before, And Worse" shows that the man may have quite a history of such harassing behavior.

By the way, it is no coincidence that the biggest asshole in America is a Harvard Law School product. 

JACKPOT! Speculators Win Big as Iraq Shuts Down Refinery

Nothing can collapse the economic house of cards that is the phony Obama recovery faster than a massive spike in prices - oil and food or simply just oil as the black gold drives damned near everything and keeping the hoax of the "recovery" alive is getting tougher by the day for the big boys and their footstool at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. With the brutal wave of violence raging through Iraq, still a mystery as to the exact cause but the US warmongers supplying arms to religious zealots including admitted cannibals is a probable factor the early winners are already in and they are the oil future speculators and other commodity traders who just had a collective orgasm over the splendid news that Iraq has just shut down production at the country's largest oil refinery.

According to a story at Reuters, "Iraq's biggest oil refinery shut down, foreign staff evacuated":

Iraq's biggest oil refinery, Baiji, has been shut down and its foreign staff evacuated, refinery officials said on Tuesday, adding that local staff remain in place and the military is still in control of the facility.

Militants from al Qaeda splinter group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized Iraq's second-biggest city of Mosul last week and other Sunni armed groups have advanced into the town of Baiji and surrounded its refinery.The refinery shut down overnight, the sources said.

Baiji is one of three oil refineries in Iraq and only processes oil from the north. The other two are located in Baghdad and the south and are firmly under government control and operational.

“Due to the recent attacks of militants by mortars, the refinery administration decided to evacuate foreign workers for their safety and also to completely shut down production units to avoid extensive damage that could result," a chief engineer at the refinery said on condition of anonymity.

Potential "extensive damage" to the refinery itself maybe but certainly not to the high-rolling swine in the oil cartels whose profits are about to erupt like a geyser of money stolen from the schmucks who are doomed to lives of quiet desperation because in America they have no political clout. Nor will there be "extensive damage" to the summer parties of the con artists and government subsidized thieves while they frolic drunk, naked and flying higher off if their own arrogance than the pure cocaine that they will be inhaling by the mini-dune. The posh enclaves of the looter class at The Hampton's and Martha's Vineyard will resemble something out of The Wolf of Wall Street if not the sheer excesses of Roman orgies that are still notorious for their gross excesses centuries later. This is time to celebrate the coming tidal wave of money that will be lifting the yachts of the many at the expense of the few who are already suffering under the crushing burden of stagnant incomes and rising food prices - stick around, it's only going to get worse.

While Obama has once again lied to Americans in sending troops back into Iraq - there will be more following the token initial insertion of special operations personnel - the conflagration has all of the signs of further escalation especially since the US installed Iraqi leader of a failed country with an army of falafel eating surrender monkeys paid for by the US taxpayer accusing the Saudis of genocide.Not that our "partners of peace", those degenerate, terrorist funding perverts in the House of Saud would ever do such a thing, after all - it isn't like fifteen of the nineteen September 11, 2001 hijackers didn't hail from The Kingdom. The Libertarian financial blog Zero Hedge nails in in their typical fashion sans the sugar-coating in the piece entitled "This Is Not Going As Planned: Iraq Prime Minister Defies US, Accuses Saudi Arabia Of "Genocide""- from which I excerpt:

Shortly after the US revealed that, in addition to aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships it was also sending a few hundred "special forces" on the ground in Iraq, contrary to what Obama had stated previously, Washington made quite clear it wants Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to embrace Sunni politicians as a condition of U.S. support to fight a lightning advance by forces from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Then something unexpected happened: Iraq's Shi'ite rulers defied Western calls on Tuesday to reach out to Sunnis to defuse the uprising in the north of the country, declaring a boycott of Iraq's main Sunni political bloc and accusing Sunni power Saudi Arabia of promoting "genocide."

In fact, as Reuters reported moments ago, the Shi'ite prime minister has moved in the opposite direction of Obama's demands, announcing a crackdown on politicians and officers he considers "traitors" and lashing out at neighbouring Sunni countries for stoking militancy.

Not only did Iraq defy the US, but it also called out America's BFF (or at least formerly so until the arrival of Iran, which the US is aggressively, and inexplicably, rushing to make its new key partner in the region) for being the real aggressor behind the scenes? How dare Maliki point out the truth - doesn't he know that those US troops in Iraq can just as easily be used to depose the current regime as "fight" the Al Qaeda Jihadists the US itself armed in the first place?

Apparently not, and instead of seeking a broad coalition with Sunnis as the US ordered, the latest target of his government's fury was Saudi Arabia, the main Sunni power in the Gulf, which funds Sunni militants in neighbouring Syria but denies it is behind ISIL.

"We hold them responsible for supporting these groups financially and morally, and for the outcome of that - which includes crimes that may qualify as genocide: the spilling of Iraqi blood, the destruction of Iraqi state institutions and historic and religious sites," the Iraqi government said of Riyadh in a statement.

 As Reuters notes, Maliki has blamed Saudi Arabia for supporting militants in the past, but the severe language was unprecedented.

AND

But where it would get most messy - literally - is if as the previously reported shuttering of Iraq's largest refinery leads to electricity blackouts for Baghdad. Because nothing gets people in a murderous rage quite as 115 degrees and no air conditioning.

The criminal elite and the political class that has now fully unchained itself from any accountability to the American people, while they ride high today, arrogantly fucking over 99+ percent to fund their bacchanals had best pay heed to that which is being whispered on the warm summer winds that for now only serve to gently rock the yachts at Cape Cod and other privileged locales. With their decadent lifestyles fully dependent on manipulation and stealing from others soon the "murderous rage" from the smoldering oppressed may be a hell of a lot closer than Baghdad.