So, I have been watching a Spanish series on Netflix called (in English) ” “Unauthorized Living”, a 2 season, 23 episode series. Each episode is a little over an hour long, so it’s a commitment. It accompanies me while I am on our stationery bicycle. I think it is pretty good if you like that sort of thing. I have only 3 episodes to go.

It has an enormous cast, and (with – so far – only one exception) everyone who has a significant role (and that’s a lot of folks) is a bad guy, and a poker faced liar, and someone with at least one hidden agenda. It’s the story of a Spanish Galician drug family, competing with a Mexican drug family, and a Columbian drug lord, and – in addition to the competition – there are many family relationships between members of the various groups. The head of the local family, Nemo Bandereas, has a wing-man, a young lawyer named Mario Mendoza, who is charming, attractive, really smart and as evil as they come.

He, in effect, is Nemo’s Michael Cohen. Not only in his utter loyalty to his employer, but in his decision (maybe) to turn tail, and destroy him. You can hate Mario, but you gotta like him. Just like Michael Cohen.

Well, the latest is that Cohen’s lawyer, David Schwartz, made a submission to the Court (trying to get Cohen’s probation shortened), that included detailed references to some cases that – surprise, surprise – don’t exist. This, by the way for you non-lawyers, is a no-no.

Schwartz says that Cohen gave him the references. Cohen agrees. He also says that another lawyer (whose name I don’t remember) who was a former federal prosecutor reviewed the document before it was filed. (He also says that this second lawyer was the source of the false info, but the prosecutor denies it, and Cohen has admitted that he did it himself.) The prosecutor says that he did review the filing, but that he never even considered reviewing the research work and the case cited by Schwartz. ”Why not?” is a great question.

The former prosecutor also says that obviously Schwartz should have reviewed the cases before citing them (duh!) and that the fact that the info as provided by Cohen is irrelevant. Cohen says that he is no longer a lawyer (I know that feeling), and that he does not have access to lawyers’ research tools (I know that feeling, too), and that he got the information from a Google app called Google Bard, apparently an artificial intelligence application that has the ability to make things up, as well as to transmit actual facts. I don’t think Google advertises that part of it. Cohen assumed that the Bard of Google was giving him actual information, not that it was creating its own alternative set of facts.

I still like Cohen. I can’t believe that Schwartz did this. And I hope it doesn’t work against Cohen, whom I think is now (like Mario Mendoza) doing God’s work, fighting the evil he used to promote.

Yes, we know artificial intelligence is a problem. But, there were problems before artificial intelligence. Take (as Henny Youngman would say, “please”) Claudine Gay, for example. She is, I assume you know, the future former president of Harvard. I think she should quietly fade into the sunset. Harvard has enough problems to be solved, without the solver to get in the way.

First, (a la David Schwartz, more or less) Gay relied on her (real) lawyers and avoided direct and helpful answers to Congressional questions on antisemitism – I don’t think she really believes that saying that Jews should be killed depends on context. At least I hope she doesn’t.

Secondly, she apparently, inadvertently or vertently (which should be, but may not be a word) took other scholars’ words and put them in her PhD dissertation, either forgetting quotation marks or forgetting to cite the sources. I can’t judge how severe these problems were in the dissertation; I can’t judge how Harvard would react if professors reviewing a thesis today discovered similar shortcomings. But the president of Harvard, like Caesar’s wife (I think it was Caesar’s wife) has to be purer than pure. And Gay is not. She really should resign her post, and use her talents in another way.