And it was featured today in Garrett Park’s outdoor market.

Somehow reminds UD, who used to snorkel a lot, of coral reefs in Cozumel.

Rats. Just the civil equivalent.

*****************

In the event, the jury did not award the women the original rumored amount of damages – around forty million dollars.

It awarded them $148 million.

 “[This award sends a message] to any other powerful figure with a platform and an audience who is considering whether they will take the chance to seek profit and fame by assassinating the moral character of ordinary people.”

***********************

“This case is what happens when you combine vicious, over-the-top defamation against innocent victims with the single worst legal strategy ever devised by a human mind,” [Elie] Honig said [the day before damages were announced]. The former federal prosecutor broke down Giuliani and his lawyer’s approach to the case, explaining that because they agreed Giuliani was liable and conceded to defamation, he should have gone into the trial expressing remorse in an effort to minimize damages. “Instead, they go in on this damages trial and commit more defamation,” Honig concluded. “They are just asking for a massive verdict and I think we’re gonna see that tomorrow.”

Sixteen percent of its directors have been crooks. During the glory years (2004 – 2011) they went from Rodrigo Rato, soon to start another jail term, to Dominique Strauss Kahn.

Has the IMF ever issued a statement distancing itself from its mafia? UD doesn’t think so. Why not?

Has Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which long touted Rato’s having graduated from the school, ever issued any kind of statement acknowledging his crimes? Again, UD doesn’t think so. All over the web you can find them praising their Frankenstein. Don’t you think the school should say something official? Or maybe it doesn’t care.

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?

… a football coach.

… the dead Turkish guy and the wrath of Allah, you are sadly mistaken.

… and variations on it.

Giuliani is poised to get hit with a multimillion dollar ruling against him in D.C. over his baseless accusations of election fraud against two poll workers. After that civil trial concludes, he’ll turn around and begin preparing for a criminal trial in Atlanta, where he’s facing many of the same racketeering charges he once wielded as a federal prosecutor against mobsters in New York. And throughout it all, Giuliani has a long list of creditors, from former associates to contractors, who are also hounding him for money. For Giuliani, 2023 will likely end in penniless defeat. But 2024 could be even worse—it could actually end with him in prison... 2021 was the ruining of his professional reputation, with New York and the District of Columbia suspending his law license for spreading lies and his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. This year exposed his financial ruin. Next year, it could be prison.

V’imru Amen.

PURGE WITHOUT MUSIC

I am not resigned to the shutting away of hypocrites in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness we go, Bridget and Christian.  Crowned

With sex toys and strap-ons we go; but I am not resigned.

Or, uh, not exactly...

But after unveiling her National Portrait Gallery portrait, Oprah had dinner at the same place La Kid booked for her office Xmas gathering. So La Kid gazed at her a lot.

I say give the guy a gun out there! America! Fuck the Euros! Fuck yeah!

****************

BREAKING: The guessing game is over: Draymond Green will be Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate.

My much-missed hero, Christopher Hitchens, nailed it.

No wonder The Great Leader wept with desperation recently as he begged the linings of the country’s uteri to thicken.

Why reproduce? Why do anything?

********************

Yes, yes, of course: South Korea’s fertility numbers are even worse. But there’s a difference between living in an advanced society full of competing possibilities for women, and living mouth to mouth in a squalid gaping hole.

 … The major job of today’s university presidents is to solicit money, and their largest targets are typically denizens of Wall Street.

For the same reason, boards of trustees are packed with wealthy alumni, often from the Street, who routinely veto candidates for university presidents harboring views they find offensive.

But not until now have major donors so brazenly used their financial influence to hound presidents out of office for failing to come out as clearly as the donors would like on an issue of campus speech or expression.

As a Jew, I cannot help but worry, too, that the actions of these donors will fuel the very antisemitism they claim to oppose – based on the perilous stereotype of wealthy Jewish bankers controlling the world.

UD proposes significant American mental health aid to Poland, and pronto. An emergency assistance package for our old friend and ally.

Yesterday the paranoiac leader of the party that’s just been voted out of power trundled up to the podium in the parliament (he did this against all parliamentary rules) and, with an intensity of bitterness that would have impressed Iago, shouted at the new prime minister that he’s a German spy.

Today a schizophrenic parliamentarian, representing a fascist party, unloaded a fire extinguisher on a just-lit menorah in the parliament’s lobby because menorahs are satanic.

What will tomorrow bring? A hebephrenic from Hajnowka shitting on the Kopernika Monument? A catatonic from Katowice collapsing in the middle of St John’s Archcathedral and refusing to get up?

Hope not. She just pled guilty to stealing four million dollars from Facebook when she was an executive there.

I wonder when – if? – Spelman College will take down the page celebrating this contemptible person. And her comrade in crime husband.

Yesterday, Faruk ran onto the field and punched a ref so hard the guy had to be helped up off the ground. Faruk has now been arrested. SO…

Things are getting so much better in world soccer! The last time a team owner ran onto the field and attacked a ref, he did it with a gun!

************

photo credit: superlig

**************

Update: LOLOLOLOLOL

My aim was to react verbally to the referee and spit in his face. At this time, I slapped the referee in the face. The slap I gave did not cause a fracture. [The ref’s cheek was fractured.] After the slap I gave, the referee stood for about 5-10 seconds, then threw himself on the ground.  They immediately removed me from the scene because of my heart disease. Other than that, I am not aware of any incident that took place.

LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL

Because of my heart disease, I hereby resign from the club and place myself in jail for assault.