Whether it’s Philip Esformes or this dude, UD always eagerly welcomes back our country’s most inventive and prolific medical system… er… manipulators. Esformes, author of the biggest rip-off of the federal medical payment system in history, was pardoned by Trump, but he did SO MUCH shit wrong he has easily been brought to trial again on related charges. That’s one to watch.

Then we have the return of Pittsburgh’s most … uh… prolific surgeon, a guy who made buckets of money by performing like three surgeries SIMULTANEOUSLY babe and I ain’t kidding. He’d leave the geezers (he specialized in complex invasive surgery on the very very elderly — just what they need!) lying there on the table with a bunch of interns sort of standing around the anesthetized body waiting for hours for the guy to come back. Two patients lost limbs because of this sadistic protocol, but can you imagine how much money the guy made? While fragile ninety year olds lay there falling apart physically, robbed of any vestige of dignity while waiting for unnecessary and destructive surgery?

So UPMC and its star surgeon settled a WHOPPER of a federal lawsuit, after which I assume the dude went back to ravaging – in other lucrative ways – our oldest and most vulnerable in their final days.

But he and the school have refused to allow the government to keep an eye on them! The feds want to audit the dude’s billing; they want him to cooperate with a “corrective action plan.”

As part of the settlement, the government asked the defendants to sign paperwork — known as a corporate integrity agreement — that would place them under additional oversight. They refused.

Hell, I’d refuse too if I were making money amputed hand over fist!

So the feds are just designating him “high risk-heightened scrutiny,” and if I’m reading this right his patients are allowed to know this.

Just another day in the life of our well-meaning, absolutely pathetic, medical reimbursement system.

The bumbly scumbly Crumbleys are off to court for four counts of involuntary manslaughter.

Good on ya, Michigan Court of Appeals.

The imperial power dehumanizes the actual victim and claims to be the victim. When the victim opposes being attacked, being murdered, being colonized, the imperial power says that this is unreasonable, this is an illness, a phobia. … The term ‘Russophobia’ is an imperial strategy designed to change the subject from an actual war of aggression to the feelings of the aggressors, thereby suppressing the existence and the experience of the people who are the most harmed.

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 The Russian Federation called for a UN Security Council session to discuss ‘Russophobia.’ This is Timothy Snyder’s contribution.

America now suffers from a mismatch between the lethal weaponry which is currently endemic in its public schools, and the level of intelligence among some of the people who run the public schools. I mean to say that the level of intelligence is not adequate to deal with the lethality.

Compounding the insufficient intelligence problem are three further problems:

1. School leaders are incentivized to retain students.
2. School leaders are often ideologically twisted in ways that make them not want to “give up” on vicious, mentally ill, people.
3. Some school leaders are themselves in various ways violence-friendly or at least violence-tolerant. America is a violent country. It has a lot of violent people in it. Some of them are running our schools.

Schools are all about putting happy faces on everything. While superintendents and principals sit in their offices sketching school spirit happy faces, students and parents are out front in the parking lot sobbing in each other’s arms as police shut down their killing field for the rest of the week. It’s a strange duality, but one that won’t change, because of hardwired truths about some of the people who become public school administrators. Everyone can read the guns on campus numbers, the shootings/killings on campus numbers, all the way down to the elementary schools. (“The [Denver] shooting is the 83rd shooting on a K-12 school campus this calendar year, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.”)  UD assures you that, given the situation on the ground, they will only grow.

And no, UD is not picking on administrators. They are only part – though a crucial part – of the witches’ brew. Depraved parents whose children have easy access to AR-15s? Check. Fragile mental health plus growing up in a violent country? Check. Inept local police forces? Check. School districts that haven’t gotten the message that in a country with four hundred million guns their buildings have become armed camps and have to start looking like them? Check. There’s lots of stuff we could talk about. But the person in charge of keeping the schools safe holds ultimate responsibility.

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Read this background. The multiply-shot-up school at issue is simply a dumping ground. Disgusting.

Sickness McNuggets!

And now the mean government wants to take them away.

Details, if you can stomach them.

UD is pleased to say that the Fox/Dominion defamation trial (taking place down the road from Les UDs, in Wilmington), has already provided courtroom merriment, as the hapless attorneys for Fox do their thing:

[Fox’s attorney also] said that Dobbs’ decision to promote a press conference where [fulminating madwoman Sidney] Powell made outlandish claims was akin to CSPAN placing video of the event on its website.

[This] prompted [the judge] to cut in and ask whether she was asking whether Dobbs, known as a very conservative host whose opinion bleeds into his show, was akin to CSPAN, which is staunchly neutral, prompting some laughter in the courtroom. 

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Everyone incorporates in Delaware, for obvious reasons, and Les UDs sometimes entertain each other with speculation as to where people like Eisner and Ovitz stay when legal catastrophe forces them to spend time in unspeakable Wilmington.

The best hotel there is some historic whatnot charging reasonable rates, so that’s out.

We wondered about boutique hotels, and after concluding there aren’t really any, we settled on coptering up to NYC each night.

Yeah what the hell. On any given middle or high school day in Albuquerque, you figure there are maybe twenty guns in backpacks or in administrative offices or whatever, around the school system… Students and staff bring them onto campus for… whatever stupid reason! It’s certainly not our job to figure out why the children of New Mexico are menaced with death in the location that ought to be safest. What we can say is that the reasons are … whatever. Stupid.

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Today’s butcher’s bill. And this one’s just like the one in Newport News – both involved shooters so well known as incredibly dangerous that both schools had elaborate security arrangements just for them. Today’s for instance had to be patted down every time he entered the building; and this time while being patted down he pulled out his gun and started shooting.

Uh.

Duh.

Why is a public school system putting itself and all its children directly in the line of fire? What twisted “retention” philosophy (beyond the cynical financial one) is in play here? You designate a bunch of untrained victims-to-be to surveil, pat down, and discipline determined killers, so that… ?

So that you get dead people, wounded people, and WHOPPING lawsuits.

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Update: The shooter killed himself.

The shooting is the 83rd shooting on a K-12 school campus this calendar year.

… Or, actually, none of the time.

You know the old English proverb: Be careful what you wish for. The radical anti-abortionists in Idaho made it so women have to have babies – babies babies all the time! – and now we see the rather odd result: Ob/gyns can’t leave the state fast enough; and now an entire hospital has shut down its obstetric unit.

Ain’t dat funny? If you live in Sandpoint, you can’t have a baby or get any kind of natal care there! Wonder where the regional hospital that has some ob/gyns plus the budget to pay for all the lawsuits is.

And hey how bout that death penalty for mothers idea? That‘ll incentivize women to make babies babies all the time too!

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And then there’s Texas.

… and even though his name still emblazons the Arkansas State Medical Board website (he appears twice!), his apparent practice of billing the government – always at the severest level of illness – for patients he’s reportedly never seen has attracted the attention of the Attorney General.

Maybe update the web page? Maybe not so cool that the just-resigned CHAIR of your state’s medical regulator has all this time possibly been a bigtime Medicaid fraudster?

Crime-ridden SF suffers from – along with everything else – constant smashing of car windows to grab anything worth grabbing. A CNN reporter wrote that

her rental car was broken into outside City Hall even with hired security monitoring the vehicle. [Another person shared] a story from a visiting friend, who purportedly lost $10,000 in valuables and is now “scarred forever.”

A local pol ridicules the “scarred forever” thing cuz getting your car smashed and your valuables taken is nothing – this dude’s been car-smashed repeatedly, as have his friends, plus he has friends who have been murdered, for fuck sake! So you lost ten thou and there’s glass everywhere! Big deal! SF = crime, babe, and if you don’t like it move to the suburbs where a bunch of weasels want their families to be safe!

Why don’t our “beautiful sunsets go viral”? Why does it have to be these petty crimes that after all are a structural part of urban life everywhere?

Fond collegiate days.

‘Miami Design Preservation League walking tour waits while firefighters hose the blood off the Ocean Drive sidewalk from this morning’s fatal spring break shooting.’

Oh little town of Tenby!

On the western coast of Wales!

Town everyone did envy

For its beachy hills and dales

Its strands so nice and sandy

Its waves so wild and free

Its seals so fun and randy, its porpoises so dandy!

It was a place where tourists loved to be.

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Then rats as big as kittens

Or well – let’s face it – cats

Decided to be smitten

With its cliffsides and its flats.

They love to run about and mate

Inside the cliffside holes

They propagate and propagate.

They’ve taken quite a toll.

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The cliffs are all eroding

The townsfolk stupefied

The signs are all forboding…

It’s time for raticide!

… getting it up.