… in Cooperstown. A beautiful rainy late afternoon.

Photos, Barbara Roberts.

Fragile. Fragile. Such a pretty, gentle word… Not really a word UD would instinctively apply to a massive, criminally insane pharma company, but okay, fragile. Teva is fragile. Fragile Teva.

When I say insane, I mean crazy like a fox… If your bottom line’s looking shitty, you illegally and conspiratorially increase the price of your drugs by… oh… a fragile one thousand percent or so. Yes, you might in doing so attract the attention of attorneys general all over the United States and some fragile shit could hit the fan and make things even worse for you… But… maybe you’ll get away with it!

Meanwhile, the rest of the big strong world whose only fragility is advanced MS or ALS wonders how it will pay for its medicine because fragile Teva keeps increasing the price..

… lately when you open this blog, never fear. We’re working on it.

This is the one for my mother, Mitzi Rapp, a historian.

… doing family things. Back to blogging in a couple of days.

… but when lives are on the line, principled people are willing to do it. This orthodox Jew for instance, took to the pages of the New York Times to denounce his people for ignorant and destructive anti-vax beliefs among some of them. And now the sister, brother, and niece of anti-vaxer Robert Kennedy Jr have denounced his dangerous opposition to immunization.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—Joe and Kathleen’s brother and Maeve’s uncle—is part of this campaign to attack the institutions committed to reducing the tragedy of preventable infectious diseases. He has helped to spread dangerous misinformation over social media and is complicit in sowing distrust of the science behind vaccines.

[These are poems whose lines come from a newspaper article.]

THE BIGGEST HEADWIND IS HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

Miles of buff-colored subdivisions

And new emotionless algorithms:

So the Phoenix home of Dora Cagnetto

Moves molto molto allegretto.

Selling a home with a handful of clicks

Scales and streamlines decades-old frictions.

And when the housing market cools? Where then

Is paradise? Well. It is a small part of the market.

And inside. The takeover of Greek soccer by violent fascistic gangs has led to the logical next step: No one, except for a few invited guests, will be allowed into the arena for the final of the Greek Cup.

Normal people have been driven out of Greek soccer arenas because the gangs are terrifying. Imagine bringing your kids to what are essentially enormous riots. This leaves the teams with nothing: a handful of peacekeeper/observers will be admitted, but that’s it.

The strongest loathing of the burqa is from within.

My Google News feed for BURQA has gone mad. With Sri Lanka in mind (that country is in the process of banning it) India is going there; and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but India is a very big very contentious place. Everybody’s screaming and threatening to cut everybody’s head off about the burqa.

As a dedicated burqa-banner, UD would like to state the following: There’s a reason – hundreds of reasons, really – why India is the number one worst place in the G20 to be a woman. Read the brief report at the link to get a sense of just how grotesque it is to dare to be a female fetus, let alone a girl/woman/widow there. Franchement, much as UD applauds worldwide efforts to ban burqas, all such efforts in India are gonna do is make the numerous men there who want to abort, prostitute, or assault their women even more bloodthirsty. Fuggedaboutit.

Variations.

Let’s bring a cold sharp Chicago School of Economics eye to the big ol’ worldwide elite college admissions scandal.

Ladies and gentlemen: To my left, a large cohort of global superrich so irresistibly attracted to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and let’s say ten to fifteen other colleges, that they are willing to pay the schools – what? – up to ten million? – bidding starts at ten million? – to get their kids in.

To my right, elite American universities with unimaginably large endowments. As we speak, for instance, Harvard’s is close to forty billion.

Hundreds of billions of dollars that might go to actual need sit static in the titanic endowments of our elite schools. What is the schools’ interest in this new proposed auction?

Well, they want more. Twenty, thirty, forty billion dollars: not enough. They bombard their graduates with pleas to make big yearly gifts; they scream bloody murder if you propose upping their taxes a tad; they talk poor all the time.

(By the way – these schools are not simply victims of their own success, but also of the world’s failure. Keep in mind that most countries – even rich sexy developed ones like Italy – have almost uniformly shitty and corrupt universities. I assume you already know this, but as a reminder: If you open up places at truly great, storied schools for auction — as one of Harvard’s money managers has proposed — you’re going to get a flood of spectacular bids from almost every country in the world. Beats there a Colombian drug lord’s heart so weak as not to want Isabel at Yale?)

It’s already pretty hard to distinguish between Princeton and Gstaad; once the auction is up and running you’re going to create enclaves of such landmark ostentation that a tourism industry will grow around them, generating yet more millions for the schools. Instead of Don DeLillo’s South Bronx Surreal poverty-voyeurism bus tour, Princeton by Copter will waft you – in the superrich’s favorite mode of transportation – over the leafy bejeweled campus.

… for one of the Soltans’ Fangors. Bonham’s auction, May 15, New York City. (Scroll down to Lot 7 here.)