Looks promising.

UD‘s heart skips a beat when she realizes that this hugely intriguing figure was for years just across campus from her GWU office! A bona fide lecturer/researcher in the university’s medical school despite allegedly having lied about a number of his degrees, this man held on to his GW position while telling his boss Trump – or those close to him – that Fauci had to be fired, and that hydroxychloroquine was the solution to coronavirus. (Also involved in Trump administration hydroxychloroquine pushing: The Pride of New Jersey, Mehmet Oz.) He seems at the moment rather close to being in contempt of Congress, though I’m trying to update this information. He appears to be a “big lie” co-conspirator. He also seems to have used his personal GW email account for official WH communications.

Dr. Hatfill exchanged more than 1,000 messages using his George Washington University email account with senior officials in the Trump White House, federal agencies, private companies related to procurement and supply chain issues, and others about the federal government’s pandemic response.  In one email to an unidentified White House employee, Dr. Hatfill misleadingly stated:  “States favorable to Trump have a lower COVID Case Fatality Rate than the Fucktard states that do not.” 

SH doesn’t seem to be at GW anymore; but the question I’ve got is why such a person was ever there in the first place. Surely GW is as we speak asking itself that question.

… featuring Mr UD‘s father, who worked with Le Corbusier in Paris. We’re hoping it can be restored to the point where we can frame and hang it.

It’s great to see PBS focus on Wyoming, guns, and suicide; and the report is very moving.

However, what they needed to include and did not is the powerful, and vocal, other side. That is, they talked to no one who said we utterly reject any restrictions of any kind on our guns, including any form of safe storage rules.

And we reject asking gun ranges to scrutinize to the extent possible the mental state of people coming to shoot, and encouraging the ranges to reject the business of people who seem depressed or agitated.

Plus we totally reject coming down hard on parents whose tykes kill themselves and murder their sibs cuz the folks leave guns lying all over the house. NO to all of this, Wyomingites will tell you. They will also say:

You gonna restrict bridges too? Cliffs? Rope? Suicide methods are all around us; if you don’t use a gun you’ll use something else. Guns are part of our life blood, our very being, out here, and you’ll have, well, quite a bloody revolt if you try to tell us ANYTHING about guns. Full stop.

It was touch and go there for awhile, but Anne Frank – it has just been announced – has passed the notoriously rigorous admissions standards of the Keller Texas Independent School District public library, and will be allowed to return to its shelves.

Some parents had complained that Frank’s hiding out in Amsterdam and then dying in a concentration camp was pornographic and had no place in a young person’s library, but, after removing the book, the library’s Review Committee came down with the judgment that, although end-stage emaciation from typhus in Bergen-Belsen is certainly in questionable taste, well, chacun à son goût!

At the bar, a man who described himself as “someone who invests in things” explained that the reason the hotel could charge $28 for a cocktail is … because, after Sept. 11, many in the finance industry moved here from the Wall Street area.

This article about a new obscenely expensive hotel in New York City is echt-Don Delillo, with occult NYT argot only subscribers can understand (UD subscribes and — come to think of it — she doesn’t really understand the above sentence).

I approached two men in suits — one maybe 55, the other half his age…

What did they think of the hotel?

“Off the record, it’s fantastic,” said the older man.

When I asked for his name, he gave me a smile-smirk that seemed to imply that I should know who he was.

And this is a NYT reporter, so either she’s remarkably out of it not to know who he is, or she’s talking to someone who’s a legend in his own mind, someone with a deep need to say “off the record.” I’m thinking it was Devin Nunes.

But you see the theme in all the remarks – a paranoia which makes the elation of hiding out at a silent, closed, hotel with a servile staff the main feeling the place achieves in you. The people at the Aman New York don’t want anyone to know they’re there. People hate them because they’re obnoxiously rich; or law enforcement agents are after them because they’ve broken insider trading laws; or vindictive ex-mates have lately been showing up unannounced at charity events … Think Steven Cohen, Jacqueline Kent Cooke, Ron Perelman. New York’s clinically berserk billionaire class. The place takes their frenzied convoluted vileness, rolls it up into a ball, and transmutes it into a many-petaled temple offering.

The hyper-pious ex-PM (‘Najib recently said Islam’s holy book, the Koran, would be the guide for all government policies and actions.’) allows modesty edicts to repress Malaysian women, while he himself pleases Allah by stealing seven hundred million dollars directly from the Malaysian people.

Theologically, it is a conundrum; Allah smiles equally upon downtrodden black-cloaked women AND the world’s largest kleptocracy case. He smiles at sick Malaysian children dying from lack of treatment because, of the six billion in the fund meant to help them and their country, four billion was stolen.

Everything would have been peachy; America’s sweetheart, Goldman Sachs, would have pocketed its suspiciously massive fees from 1MDB, all the other crooks who stole hundreds of millions for themselves would have been fine…

But people began to notice the absence of four plus billion dollars from the world. Things began to sour, see, onaccounta

‘Because the money was stolen, it wasn’t invested; without investment returns, the fund couldn’t pay back the bonds.’

Shades of pious Bernie Madoff (in his case his piety was orthodox Judaism — he acted as the treasurer – not making this up – of Yeshiva University)! Pious Najib and his legion of co-conspirators overlooked the fact that if anything goes wrong with schemes like this, you’re up shit’s creek cuz the money’s already up the nose of your cocaine-snorting, super-yacht-private-jet-super-thin-nyc-penthouse-owning Islamically pious investment group.

Najib now enjoys twelve years of uninterrupted prayer in a Malaysian prison.

Watch this video, titled Behind Goldman Sachs’ Alleged Involvement in the 1MBD Scandal. It explains the gist of the thing. I know you’re distracted by The Trump 300 (700?), but trust me 1MDB is more important; America will survive a once-in-a-lifetime madman having attained the presidency; the sad sick world cannot be defended from lethal international criminals (including, again, our own adorable Goldman Sachs) unless we all make an effort to understand how they are killing us.

The humongous lawsuit everyone’s been anticipating against – among others – the people who make and market the military weapon which that teenager used to obliterate twenty one elementary school kids and teachers in Uvalde is announced ($27 billion, if you were wondering).

Daniel Defense is famous for this adorable ad:

I mean the one on the left. Paranoid, fully militarized variations of the one on the right are used by most gun makers, who typically target violent unstable teenagers with them. As Ryan Busse, a former gun executive, notes in my headline, manufacturers don’t even bother playing along with the protection/hunting bullshit anymore. Daniel Defense’s factory address is 101 War Fighter Way.

The ad on the left stands out because it doesn’t just go after insane eighteen year olds like the Uvalde guy; and it doesn’t just go after babies (what age is the babe in the photo? three? four?) but it sanctifies the AK-47 wielding toddler with a Biblical verse and a praying hands emoji. It adds Jesus to the mix.

The president of Daniel Defense sits on the corporate advisory board at Georgia Southern University but UD‘s thinking he’s desperately seeking his own consultants this morning.

I’m pretty sure I know what Bain or whoever is telling him. The suit won’t go anywhere but the whole thing’s gonna cost you a shitload of money. The good news is the NRA will pay it all.

Headline of the day.

UD likes to revisit, via her category CLICK-THRU U, the ongoing glories of online teaching.

After directing students to center themselves, keep looking directly into the camera, and maintain at all times an “attentive, present, and professional” demeanor, the instructor (see this post’s title) coaches her class to regularly scrutinize their own visage in case their professional facial expression flags.

UD suggests that if this professor remains unsatisfied with the degree of student cooperation, she refer them to any ten or twenty pages of Orwell’s 1984, with special reference to Winston Smith.

Smith&Wesson blasts back at deep state harassment over its kid-friendly/shooter game ad campaigns for human-pulverizing toys. Wee1 must also be pissed:

Not to mention BabyGun or whatever its called:

A little known fact is that rather than featuring in romper room play, most guns are simply used to kill yourself. Self-slaughter holds a vast majority over any other use. Guns are largely about blowing your brains out with one hundred percent certainty (other methods fall short of this standard), and in some states (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana) they’re scooping wildcatters and cowboys off the floor pretty much 24/7.

For instance, Utah, another gunny he-man state, boasts this remarkable statistic:

Utah has one of the highest death by suicide rates in the country, currently ranked sixth. According to the Utah Department of Health, suicide rates in the tricounty area [northeast Utah: Daggett, Uintah and Duchesne Counties] are 58% higher than the rest of the state.

Got that? The state’s already comfortably in the top ten; but the tricounty area is 58% higher than the state’s rate!

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

So one thing UD has never understood is why gun makers don’t feature ease and certainty of suicide in their advertising, since this happens to be the gun’s calling card, its claim to fame, the primary reason tens of thousands of owners own guns. One obvious campaign would feature pre-death videos solicited from, say, tricounty suicides, in which they explain why choosing a gun to blow their brains out was, well, a no-brainer!

And there’s no reason consumers need to degrade their final act by choosing cheap pistols and smaller arms; in one celebrity spot, manufacturers could feature quarterback Tyler Hilinski’s use of an AR-15 in his suicide. (A Glock will only set you back $500 or so, whereas an AR-15 costs around a thousand. Tag line in this campaign: WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO END THE VERY BEST.)

Guns command a vast and growing suicide market; their makers need to exploit this fact. A lot of drunk lonely cowboys are right now sitting on the fence suicide-wise; a strong ad campaign is probably all they need.

… Tetyana. A mural in Paris, by Nikita Kravtsov.

Yeah. That one delegate. When you boast the country’s highest gun suicide rate, you need to be ready to blow your head off at a moment’s notice. To keep your first-place ranking.

Once you start challenging library books, the firmament’s the limit. Provincial Keller TX has gotten TWO challenges of THE BIBLE, baby! Datz right. You don’t like Gender Queer; someone else happens not to like The Good Book. Hah! Both books get pulled. Plus purty much everything else in the library, I’d warrant. Eventually it’ll all go, and the state of utter ignorance the good folk of Keller seem to want for their kids will win the day. Good on ya, Keller.