Why is it that our most assiduous doctors, our physicians most devoted to the well-being of their patients, are the first to go to prison when an oxy-panic breaks out? Why is it that clinicians on the cutting edge, people willing if need be to try fentanyl, people even willing to kill a patient or two, mavericks in violation of the Anti-Kickback Statute and guilty of honest services wire fraud, are constantly being hounded by the Justice Department and federal prosecutors and judges and juries?
It makes UD angry on behalf of former McKesson CEO John Hammergren, simply a more … ample Gordon Freedman, a man whose company “in 2006 and 2007 … shipped more than 5.66 million opioid pills to a single pharmacy in a tiny town in rural West Virginia.” Quietly retired on his eight hundred million dollars in compensation for a few brief years of stupendous national drug distribution, Hammergren now has to worry that, like Gordon Freedman, he will be punished for his health-care zeal.
Time to tidy up the place.
Top management is slated to fan out to prisons across the world to promote generics while serving their sentences for bribery, price fixing, and violation of the Controlled Substance Act.
Or… whatever. If you prefer to read an entire article which discusses the incredibly corrupt pharmaceutical giant without once mentioning that they’re in spectacular legal (not to mention financial) trouble, go to this curious publication.
… London Bridge will remain a busy terrorist thoroughfare.
Warren hurt his feelings (something about how he was kinda greedy to take a seventy million dollar bonus at a time when the American people were suffering through one of our worst economic downturns – a bonus, kiddies – – above his zillions in salary), so he made a Pocohantas jibe against her, as in she’s a tribalist…”Maybe tribalism is just in her DNA.”
Ooch ouch that’s gotta hurt. But now that he mentions tribes, let’s explore the one Lloyd’s people belong to. Here ya go. He’s kind of a chieftain – much of the tribal ritual is about him. In particular, his greed.
Many good things may come out of our current political mess. This is one of them.
Trump, Giuliani, and Dershowitz, our purple-faced mountain majesties… Let’s first check in on Dersh, chatting not long ago with a reporter.
Alan Dershowitz won’t hang up the phone. He’s breathing heavily into the receiver. It’s August 10, the morning Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. At first Dershowitz wants to go off the record, and I agree. He doesn’t say anything interesting, just the same protestations that he’s made on Twitter and television for years. But when I start asking questions, he begins to berate me. “We’re on the record now,” I tell him. “You don’t get to insult me off the record.”
So he begins breathing into the phone. He will not hang up. He does not know what to say.
“If you don’t want to talk, you can hang up,” I say. “But I am not going off the record if you are just going to call me ‘fifth rate.’”
Silence. Breathing. “I won’t have it written that I hung up on a reporter!” He’s shouting. We do this a couple more times. I take notes. He’s livid that I won’t go off the record. He threatens to sue me. Tells me I am a nobody... Dershowitz later [again] threatens to sue me …
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Giuliani… Oh, just read this. UD‘s favorite mention is Soros. Soros is behind it all. He is always behind it all.
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Purplest of them all? George Soros in league with the Queen of England made him turn over his tax returns.
Yes, he’ll appeal. But we’re getting there.
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One more thing. Because he’s handling so many incoming… challenges, Trubu is behind on his personal insults. In particular, he has not yet caught up to Susan Collins. A week after she said something not nice, he is still working on his obscene alliteration for her. Scathing Online Schoolmarm proposes Cunty Collins.
Don’t worry. No one in the country can pick him out of the crowd.
Everyone calls the Isettes “brides” – jihadi brides, ISIS brides, I.S. brides… Sheer sexism, mes petites; a way of cutesying them and why? Everyone knows it’s Always a terrorist; never a bride; everyone gets that it’s like the first page of DeLillo’s cult classic (if you will) Mao II, which describes a mass Moonie wedding in Yankee Stadium: “grouped in twos, eternal boy-girl.”
Anonymous commandeered fuck-couplings (‘Ms Begum said her only role in the caliphate was to “make babies”) don’t really strike UD as very bridey…
Maybe you’re different. Maybe when you think of a filthy tenth century setting in which brainless degenerates deposit sperm after getting themselves sexually excited by watching beheadings you picture a dewy girl in a gown, catching her breath before saying I do… Ms Begum spent her nights fucking men she was directed to fuck and her sweltering days swaddled in black – you can call this way of life many things, but the adjective “bridal” doesn’t pop to mind.
You know why everyone cutesies them. Despite everything, people only want to think of men as criminals. If Marsha Edwards had been Mark Edwards, would he have shared a funeral with the children he shot to death, a pretty photo of him up on stage next to pretty photos of the people he killed?
Marsha gets to be not a murderer. She gets to be Mom.
As the debate over repatriating some of the most dangerous people in the world proceeds, UD hopes that the press will gradually phase out the whole bride thing.
(Also featuring Jeffrey Epstein, but that’s for a different post.)
[Before Hunter Biden’s legal but unethical activity in Ukraine,] there was already a template… for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit … a [government] crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Yes, she’s talking about Professor Andrei Shleifer, whose greed cost Harvard millions, but all is forgiven.
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UD wants very badly to see the end of Trump.
Yet she also thanks Chayes for focusing on a particularly disgusting practice.
Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.
There’s a lot to love on both sides of this one.
Three generations of them grace this land of ours – the grandfather, who established a dirty chain of nursing homes in Chicago; the son, who committed the biggest Medicare fraud in American history; and the grandson, whose admission to U Penn came about because of Esformes money paid to its basketball coach (now convicted of bribery). Read all about it.
Having spent every waking moment of his entire life breaking almost every known law, the son’s contrition in front of the judge today lacked a certain…
The son got twenty years, and might have gotten fewer if he’d been willing to say to the judge, in that contrition thing, exactly what he’d done …
At a critical juncture before he imposed Esformes’ punishment, the judge seemed willing to lower his final sentence by four years if the defendant agreed to elaborate on his “acceptance of responsibility” in his original statement to Scola. The judge said he would only acknowledge Esformes’ acceptance if he specifically admitted he paid bribes and committed other crimes. But … Esformes’ legal team chose not to go that route because it would have precluded their appeal of his trial convictions.
That’s it, babe. An Esformes to the bitter end. Might fuck up his appeal.
Is the niqab/burqa, as this New York Times reporter writes, the sort of thing you will wear (and make your female children wear: “A small girl of perhaps 7 or 8 was sitting atop a pile of humanitarian food aid boxes, clad in the black abaya and jilbab of a grown woman, but in miniature…” ) if you are a rigid, strict, fundamentalist, literalist Muslim? Actually, Mehdi Hasan makes a compelling argument that ISIS isn’t Islamic at all, but rather a cultic perversion of the faith. Plenty of others have observed that ISIS people tend to know shit about Islam and present instead as nihilists who like violence. ‘“I’m struggling to reconcile the two things, wanting to look at them as displaced people and human,” said Dareen Khalifa, an International Crisis Group analyst who has visited [a women’s detention] camp; but some of the women are “very ideological, and the atmosphere is very ripe for all sorts of indoctrination…”‘ It’s maybe the best thing about us, qua humans, that we struggle like hell to see fanatics, who unapologetically enslave, rape, and behead, as fellow humans, as sufferers, as (trying our very hardest here) confused and fragile victims…
UD remembers, thirty years ago, sweeping her eyes over images of bloated bodies on a hill in Guyana and feeling (along with a sense of witnessing inassimilable grotesquerie) almost unbearable pity for the suicidal stupidity of the Jonestown fanatics.
But ISIS is homicidal, mass homicidal, which makes the business of pitying (looking at them as displaced people and human) very much more difficult. Even those who haven’t literally killed, let’s say, but only enslaved… It’s like – well, here’s another memory. UD remembers trying hard to feel something human toward Hedda Nussbaum, who watched two children being tortured (one to death) by her partner and did nothing, and who at his trial claimed to have been afraid and herself brutalized, etc. Highly educated, an editor at Random House, a successful Manhattanite, Nussbaum asked us to believe this…
UD finds more worthwhile, in these and associated matters, to pose Ron Padgett’s question: What makes us so mean? Padgett writes a long, amusing poem, inconclusively pondering this. But having read lots of interviews with/memoirs by ISIS and other degenerates, UD is at least willing to conclude this: Sadism – watching it, taking part in it, even being the object of it – is for many people terribly, terribly, exciting.
[W]hat began as a populist movement to bring inexpensive, Indian-made morphine to the ill has given rise to a pain management industry that promises countless new customers to American pharmaceutical companies facing a government crackdown and mounting lawsuits back home.