…The answer is that we did. Our silence has turned us into enablers of those who are now foisting their religious beliefs on a country founded on opposition to an established church.

… About one-third of Americans, according to a recent Gallup poll, want the court to overturn Roe. And yet, as we saw last week, the right to abortion is already functionally dead in Texas, and its fate may soon be left to the whims of Republican politicians everywhere else. It’s incumbent on the rest of us to call out those who invoke God as their legislative drafting partner.

… [T]he country lurches toward theocracy...

Fashion designer Nicole Miller finds UD‘s friend Wojciech Fangor inspiring. UD‘s Fangor posts are here.

It’s small stories like this – the city put up a street sign honoring a drug dealer – that help you understand how far the place where UD was born has fallen.

No one was home, the relevant agency is corrupt, the relevant agency sees nothing wrong with honoring drug dealers – there are many possibilities…

And look. Why take the sign down?

“I don’t think they should have taken the sign down because, at some time, I’m sure he did some great works for humanity,” said Anecia Spears.

Sing it.

Thanks for the memory

Of Oversight and Rush

Of telling Fluke to hush

And women who were raped

Could simply pull the lever “FLUSH”

How lovely it was

So thanks for the memory
Of donor Foster Freiss
His aspirin gibe: so nice!
And now today it’s just as gay
With bounty hunters’ price.
How lovely it is

… USA.

UD often wonders: What dey do down dere? Legislation-wise, I mean. What matters so much as to engage the attention of their legislators and be enshrined into law?

Well all you gotta do is follow North Carolina’s massively covered squat story to know the heartbeat of America, southern-style.

So a big thing to do down there is modify your ginormous pickup by stickin’ the front up high and the back down low, so that… heck I don’t know why you do it. Cain’t see the road. Blind oncoming drivers. Run a much higher chance of tipping over. Lots of other stuff. It’s just a thang you do when you tryin’ to be bad.

Last June a bill prohibiting truck squatting passed the NC House — up in my headline, you see Rep. Willis’s poignant plea that the Jeep be spared onaccounta he likes Jeeps — and then it passed the Senate and today the governor signed the thing, which means, uh, squat cuz assholes who squat their trucks don’t fuck with laws.

There’s a powerful J’Accuse in Jalopnik, which I’ll excerpt here.

[M]any people seem to hate the Carolina Squat solely because of the way it looks. Check out all the bigoted comments on the Change.org petition that aims to outlaw the vehicle modification… I think it’s safe to say that few folks see a jacked up car and say: “I’m really concerned that that driver may not be able to see over the hood.” No, the criticism is usually one of simple disgust, and while I can’t assert with confidence that socioeconomic prejudices are at play with the general sentiments towards Carolina Squat trucks, I will say that anytime we notice scores of people hating something immediately upon learning about it or seeing it, we should all take a step back and try to improve our understanding… I’m just always a bit concerned when I see vitriol directed towards any misunderstood car subculture…

So who will actually go to this thing? Maybe the type of “normie” Trump fans who made up a big hunk of the crowds on January 6. These days, that often means people who ascribe to various conspiracy theories, from fanciful interpretations of the 2020 election results to the Qanon delusion.

A Washingtonian writer speculates about an upcoming DC rally and makes the ascribe/subscribe mistake.

A small primitive culture within larger, more advanced, cultures, the Taltex attempts to maintain its way of life against serious odds. Only about fifteen percent of Afghans support Taltex rule; a strong majority of Texans oppose Taltex beliefs about abortion.

We now begin to see serious civil unrest in Afghanistan, and boycotts of Texas, as the Taltex imposes its primeval social philosophy on a larger culture that rejects it. More broadly, in the US, we see anti-Taltex hacktivism and other forms of digital dissent.

Prospects for both current Taltex breakouts look dim: Endless bloodshed seems likely to characterize Taltex-A, whereas Taltex-T faces legal challenges, sabotage, and isolation.

And someone who is insane, and requires 24 hour police surveillance. But they didn’t watch him closely enough, and he grabbed a knife in a supermarket and started stabbing people, some of whom remain in critical condition.

Legal procedures for dealing with terrorists in New Zealand are also insane.

Maybe when your endowment’s $31.2 billion you don’t give a rat’s ass when someone steals a measly – I dunno – thirty million; but Yale might at least have thought of the embarrassment when this hit the press.

Yale law professor Kate Stith, who previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said that she prosecuted many similar cases of money laundering and mail and wire fraud, though she could not recall one on such a large scale because of how long Petrone-Codrington’s scheme went undetected. “One naturally asks: Where were Yale’s accountants and compliance officers?”

I mean, she was at this for eight to ten years.

And yes, yes – UD has long pledged not to bother blogging about these stories, since they’re as common as domestic slaughter with AK-47s… but this one has an interesting wrinkle, something UD discovered in doing a quick background check on the irreproducibly named JAMIE PETRONE-CODRINGTON. Jane Smith I wouldn’t have bothered with; but a name like Jamie P-C will yield only the best results.

And there you are. She is or was married to a semi-famous boxer! If I’m not mistaken.

“The Don’s” loss to Allan Green earned Green the 2005 knockout of the year award.

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

She split the purchases into orders below $10,000 so they did not require additional approval by her supervisors.

So that means she must have filed – what – 17 billion orders? And the system was that no one at Yale University saw any records of her purchases? Come again?

So this is where the mind naturally goes to a conspiracy. Who else at Yale Med School knew about/covered up the crime?

Bitch set us up.

And you’re gonna love the details.

Dude seems, among other things, to have taken a bunch of way, way old people and convinced them they should have demanding, elaborate surgery because you know they have so many more quality years of life ahead!

Dude is accused of having

regularly performed as many as three complex surgical procedures at the same time, failed to participate in all of the “key and critical” portions of his surgeries, and forced his patients to endure hours of medically unnecessary anesthesia time as he moved between operating rooms and attended to other patients or hospital matters.

Or golf game or whatever. What the hell did they care? Most of them had dementia anyway.

The point was to “increase surgical volume, maximize UPMC and UPP’s revenue, and/or appease [the dude].” Appease cuz he’s apparently one hell of a greedy egomaniac/control freak who, it says here, “endangered patients and cost the government millions in false billings.”

But look. If you could immobilize hundreds of people for hours and now and then hack away at them while at the same time fielding calls from patients also interested in having their last days destroyed through unnecessary surgery, wouldn’t you do it?

PIttsburgh loves him cuz he brings in SOOO much money. Like Lady Bracknell, it has for years ‘decided entirely to overlook’ his sick and vile behavior.

In January 2015, when Dr. Luketich [that’s the dude] had left the OR while a patient was under anesthesia and couldn’t be found for more than an hour, [the head of surgical oversight] emailed him and said such behavior was “irresponsible,” the [federal] suit said.

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

SHORT-HANDED

On one particular day in 2015,

‘Dr. Luketich was scheduled to perform five surgeries in five operating rooms. In OR 26 and 27, he was listed as the primary surgeon. In ORs 12, 16 and 25, he was listed as the assistant. In OR 27, the patient was undergoing a “substernal gastric pullup” that should have taken six to eight hours. Instead, the patient was on the operating table for 12-and-a-half hours. Residents performed critical parts of the surgery and then waited, with the patient under anesthesia, for Dr. Luketich, as he required them to do.

“The patient was left with unsupervised surgical trainees while Luketich was involved with four other procedures in four different operating rooms and not immediately available,” Dr. D’Cunha’s suit said.

As a result, according to the complaint, the patient suffered complications, including an inflammatory response that led to the loss of her hand.

“Luketich explained to the patient’s family (as he did with many families) that this was an unfortunate but possible risk from surgery,” Dr. D’Cunha’s lawsuit said. “However, it is not a risk when the surgery is completed within the expected time and when a surgeon is attentive to a patient and does not unnecessarily prolong the procedure.”‘

Two theological traditions collide in this story about the collapse of a Christian Scientist congregation in Los Angeles and the purchase of its iconic building by a Church of What’s Happening Now.

Famous for putting their trust in God even unto the deaths of their children, Christian Scientists are a little out of it when it comes to grand larceny too. This particular congregation collapsed because it failed to notice that for fifteen years its financial officer stole absolutely all of its money. This left it with no money, so it had to sell the iconic building...

The financial officer used some of the money to become a member of an “exclusive Disneyland dining club.”

This story is too rich a brew for me. It has too many moving parts. I merely record the outlines here, and direct you to various links.

‘SINGER JEFFREY FOUCAULT WON’T PLAY CONCERTS IN MONTANA‘

Onaccounta they’re real anti-vax there and that’s so fucking stupid.

Montana: Land o’ Guns (highest rate of ownership in the country), Suicide (second only to Alaska), Alcoholism (highest rate of alcohol-rated traffic fatalities in the country), Covid, and All Other Conceivable Forms of Early Death .