… had consequences.

Italy on Saturday expelled a Moroccan imam back to his home country because of what it said was his support for the Islamic State group.

Interior Minister Luciana Lamorgese cited reasons of state security in sending the 41-year-old imam, identified only as M.G., back to Casablanca.

[T]he imam had expressed support for the late IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and shared jihadi propaganda on Facebook. [H]is Moroccan wife … also filed a formal complaint against him for abusing her because she refused to wear the covering niqab.

The article goes to note that Italy has been spared much of the terrorist violence other countries in the region have suffered, no doubt in part because of

its program of expelling suspected extremists. Since it began in 2015, the program has resulted in 462 people being sent home, including 98 last year.

I fuckin love the way these stories get written! Here’s a totally filthy organization – among the biggest drug companies in the world, as it happens – whose self-inflicted collapse inspires The Sorrow and the Pity-strength keening all over the business media. In one short article, one writer touches on four massive ongoing criminal cases against TEVA, and the company faces far more trouble than this.

What evil agent traumatized TEVA? Why should it suffer like this?

Oh, right. Because its business model is bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations, bribe, cheat, steal, addict vast populations. Why can’t we just leave it alone and stop traumatizing it?

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More like it.

Scandal-Ridden Teva Pharmaceutical Is Fishing for a Bottom

Investors take note: There is very likely no bottom.

And where, UD wonders, is the long New York Times article about the relentlessly criminal enterprise that is TEVA? Doesn’t anyone think it’s newsworthy that the world’s most powerful pharma corporation – arguably – is indescribably corrupt?

Who knew? Who knew that all the time UD spends on her balcony in Rehoboth Beach staring through binoculars at immense container ships with three immense initials painted on their sides she could be ON the ships, steaming to Hamburg? Who knew that the endless UD/Mr UD dithering about what’s on each ship, where it’s going, how it operates, what the thing’s various decks actually look like, etc., could so easily be settled?

A highlight [of my trip] was a morning’s tour of the ship, led by crew members. In addition to nearly 4,000 containers stacked on the exterior decks, there were six “roll-on, roll-off” decks carrying vehicles, ranging from a fleet of Range Rovers and transport trucks for the US army to an aeroplane fuselage. As the captain explained the complexities of the enormous operation, I marvelled at the sheer scale of everything around us, an industry responsible for transporting 90% of goods worldwide.

Cabins, with private bath, sound fine; on-deck activities are simple but fun (UD would of course play Scrabble); cruising instead of flying gives you big eco bragging rights…

Recent campaigns such as the Swedish flygskam (flight shame) had shone a harsh light on my blindness to the climate impact of air travel, and I had decided that booking a flight wasn’t an option. Since 2017, I’d emitted over 14 tonnes of carbon from flights alone. I realised that all my efforts to reduce my carbon footprint at home in Milan – I cycle to work, limit food waste and seldom buy new clothes – are wiped out by just one flight between Canada and Europe.

I’ll see your flygskam and raise you thirty years of not driving cars, taking trains everywhere, walking everywhere, living in a small house, owning one teeny, insanely fuel-efficient Prius, very seldom buying new clothes (so there!), and indeed finding virtually all of my consumer goods as brand-new castoffs in my daughter’s long-since-abandoned bedroom. The only food I waste is my once a year pomegranate martini at the beach — I can never finish it.

… in a story about the Golden Globes, she notes that Ricky Gervais said this to his Hollywood audience:

You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.

A canny comment, and quite true: As UD has pointed out before on this blog, it’s rare for our stars to have attended even a little bit of college.

(Gervais himself earned upper second-class honours in philosophy.)

Male graduates of BYU earn 90 times more than their female peers, with a median income of $71,900 by the age of 34. Female graduates, on the other hand, earn on average $800 per year.

CLEAR SAILING: For Di and Steve

The cost of clarity is cold weather.
 Fog kept the beach mild;
It clouded over the quadrantids.

 New Year’s dinner, the four of us together,
 I toasted: “Bewildered, and beguiled!
But when I raise my lids

No need to question whether
Four hearts are reconciled.”
Meanwhile, January rids

The beach of fog, and there’s never
A chance of warm retreat.  It’s wild:
All softened unknowing forbid…

So we breast the chill, the clear-eyed pressure,
The sharp-horizoned world to which we are unreconciled,
But which strands us here, shivering, unhid.

The Imperial Family of Oxy, the Sacklers, are getting it up the ass, which is fine; but let’s focus, this year, on other worthies. If the point is to make others who fatally addicted America take a very deep bow, the choices are practically infinite among pharma corporations, drug distribution companies, pharmacies, the whorish FDA, doctors, bogus industry-bought pain organizations, members of Congress… So UD’s choice of these two – the mind-bogglingly filthy pharma giant, Teva, and the happily retired billionaire head of McKesson, one of the country’s biggest drug distributors – is somewhat random. But the scandal of Teva continuing to be treated like a business instead of a criminal enterprise, and CSIS’s lucrative, white-washing embrace of Hammergren, who now doles out health-advice to the nation, stand out as landmark evils within the larger landscape of drug-dead America. Li’l UD is only one blogger, and though by her lights she’s amazingly well-off, she can’t exactly compete with the resources of dirty rotten billionaire scoundrels. But she pledges to do her bit, in the year ahead, to keep her own modest spotlight on these two.

1.) Austria’s Conservative and Green parties have agreed plans to extend a headscarf ban in schools … [Austria’s new Conservative/Green governing coalition] deal includes banning the headscarf in schools for girls up to age 14, an extension of the garment ban that applies until age 10 approved by lawmakers earlier this year.

If women want to cover, they can decide that for themselves; the business of forcing it on children is disgusting. Note too what UD has been saying for years: Opposition to compulsory covering of girls is one of the few issues on which left and right in many countries agree.

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

2.)

… “White Wednesday” and “My Stealthy Freedom” campaigns have seen women film themselves without hijabs in public in Iran, which can bring arrests and fines. [Even with the threat of jail] there have been signs of women increasingly pushing back against the requirement.

During a trip to Iran in July, an Associated Press journalist spotted about two dozen women in the streets without a hijab over the course of nine days. Many other women opted for loosely draped colorful scarves that show as much hair as they cover.

While there have been women fined and arrested, others have been left alone as Iran struggles with economic problems and other issues under re-imposed U.S. sanctions …

This blog has featured some less than ideal places to attend college or university, places that seem to UD not optimal if you’d like a little peace and quiet and not too much gun-play to go with your studies. Trigger-mad Waco, Texas, for instance, with its breastaurant-biker riots/mass killings, rape- friendly university (Baylor) and good ol’ boy judges (most of them Baylor grads) does not seem to UD to shout pursue a higher education here. Unless you already know you want to study American cults up close and personal (the Branch Davidians raped their children here) you might want to look elsewhere.

Similarly, Huntington, West Virginia, home of appalling Marshall University, might not be the best place for you to study. Folks there saw in 2020 by shooting everybody up at a bar that calls itself Kulture Hookah and has a very strange, uh, provenance.

Back in July the city approved the place because its owner was a fine lass struggling to raise drug-free kids and she was fervently opposed to alcohol and any form of acting up in the joint. This would be a quiet, strictly private refuge full of oldies. Profits from the place, she told the unanimously-impressed Board of Zoning Appeals, would go toward the eradication of the town’s well-known drug problem.

One sharp-eyed commenter on the story about this in a local paper asked

Is the owner the same person convicted of operating a heroin distribution house in Huntington in 2016?

but the Huntington zoners got all choked up at her sob story and didn’t see any need to check newspaper articles or court records about how the hookah bar owner

pleaded guilty in 2016 to maintaining a residence for the purpose of distributing heroin.

[She] was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

They musta been mighty surprised to find out, day after the mass shooting, that

The bar advertised their New Year’s Eve party via social media and left an aftermath of drinks, party favors, and blood on the floor.

I mean. How can UD say this politely? Some places are just too stupid for you to go to school there.

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

Update. When asked if [the bar owner] would have been given a business permit given her criminal history, [Huntington’s mayor] said it’s important to have all the information when making those decisions.

Yeah, it’s important but we’re too dumb to have it… I mean, we’re too high to have it… And yeah, I hear you: The state with the nation’s highest overdose death rate should maybe keep a bit of an eye on heroin distributors and maybe not give them permits to open bars, but … uh… (nods off)…

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

Second Update: Getting better and better.

The flier for Wednesday morning’s party included a picture of a woman holding an assault weapon.

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

Third Update: Just before she was given her certificate of occupancy for the retail shop, court papers reveal [Kulture Hookah’s owner] was cited for shoplifting at Walmart.

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

Dunno. At this point there are two distinct possibilities: Huntington West Virginia is actually this stupid; or everyone in the government is getting huge sums of money to coordinate running the city with the best interests of the well-established Huntington/Detroit drug cartel in mind.

Mr UD (with binoculars), and friend Steve, wonder what the enormous white blob in the water in front of them is. Turns out it’s snow geese, which can (a woman who lives in our apartment building year-’round tells me) stretch out and float over large swathes of ocean.

For sometimes it is shown to me in dreams
The Eden that all wish to recreate
Out of their living, from their favourite times;
The miraculous play where all the dead take part,
Once more articulate; or the distant ones
They will never forget because of an autumn talk
By a railway, an occasional glimpse in a public park,
Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

… but then you get to the Atlantic coast and quickly realize that in this setting, mixed cloud and sun is gorgeous, exciting! From their second-floor balcony, Les UDs gawk at the sudden opening of the sky to sharp clear sunlight, which studs the gray waves with silver/white and shimmers the sand. Then the curtain falls and the moody blues are back, and your eye goes to the happy people on the boardwalk – people who get that being here now surpasses being here in August. They wear thin sweats in the mild weather, and as they walk some of them consider what it means to have come to the end of another year.

Some of them wear shorts and tee shirts: The 17th Annual Race into the New Year is about to start.

Me? When I got to our apartment last night, I discovered that my phone wouldn’t recharge and my laptop wouldn’t turn on. Mr UD was at the outlets picking up food and an extra blanket, so I fumed alone.

As I fumed, it occurred to me to get the hell out of the apartment and walk. Walk away. Take a humanity bath.

The boardwalk was very dark, and few people walked it. We couldn’t see one another – just bundled up bodies in motion. Yet as each of these solitary specters passed, they wished UD a happy new year. Virtually each one of them! As she trilled happy wishes back, UD‘s fuming went up in smoke.

Mr UD fixed all of her phone and laptop problems when he got back.

… to Rehoboth Beach, where they will join friends to see in the New Year. Blogging persists throughout.