Hell freezes over.

Pennsylvania is about to become the 34th state to ban female genital mutilation; the law passed unanimously in the Senate and in the “House by a vote of 196-1, with only state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, D-Philadelphia voting against it.”

Yes, Kenyatta alone stood up against the crowd for the right of seven year olds to have their clitorises and vaginal lips chopped off and then to have what’s left bleeding between their legs sewn up by some random person. Every girl deserves the right to sexual numbness and a lifetime of pain and infections, and Representative Kenyatta is working hard every day to make sure that right is protected.

If you’re one of his constituents, be proud. You have voted into office the only politician in Pennsylvania with the guts to go to bat for the forced amputation of female genitals. UD thinks the guy should run for president:

America Needs an Infibulation

Leave No Clit Behind

Yes We Can Cut!

The decision to kill gays as a matter of state policy, however abortive and hedged, is not one that lends itself to charitable interpretation from those who consider themselves broadly liberal. And indeed I find all these hedges as risible as they are sincere. They sound like cognitive dissonance: loyalty to a religion and to a sovereign, mixing uncomfortably with a cosmopolitan moral sense that says killing gays means killing gays, and is abhorrent under any circumstance…

But the Sultanate of Brunei is, by the standard of, say, Saudi Arabia (let alone the Islamic State), liberal.

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Excellent writing by Graeme Wood, in which, with a nod toward “the King’s touch,” he invokes the weird premodern/postmodern mix of many countries.

All the Cambridge girls made fun of him cuz his house was only worth half a million even though he coached at a school worth forty billion and overrun with the hyper-rich. “He can’t even afford to live in Cambridge,” smirked the walking-distance-to-Harvard crowd; and he was a fencing coach, too, which should have meant serious money but in his case didn’t.

Economists tell us that you’re only as rich as the people around you – if they’re living way over your head, it doesn’t matter whether objectively you’re doing okay. You feel like shit. So who can blame him for trading his insider knowledge of Harvard admissions for big money? His life has been a living hell, honey.

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To access the deep structure of this story, read this. Carefully.

Silly British tabloid thinks we’re a monarchy too.

You can’t have a sip of Campari.

It’s hotter than ten Kalaharis.

So tell us Michel.

I mean, what the hell?

Why did FIFA select the Qataris?

One hears far too little from women like Amani Ben Ammar, but they are the reason large majorities of Europeans and Canadians favor burqa bans and other public sector secularism legislation. Good on the New York Times for adding her voice to a trend whose coverage typically features only a morally outraged reporter, plus international elites screaming Islamophobia. Such coverage leaves unspoken the reason why 60-80% of many countries’ citizens, when asked whether they support burqa bans, say yes.

‘I have come to the conclusion that it is about time I made up my mind whether I am to become a writer… I foresee that I shall have to do other work as well but to continue as I am at present would certainly mean my mental extinction. It is months since I have written a line and even reading tires me. The interest I took in socialism and the rest has left me. I have gradually slid down until I have ceased to take any interest in any subject. I look at God and his theatre through the eyes of my fellow-clerks so that nothing surprises, moves, excites, or disgusts me. Nothing of my former mind seems to have remained except a heightened emotiveness which satisfies itself in the sixty-miles-an-hour pathos of some cinematograph or before some crude Italian gazette-picture. Yet I have certain ideas which I would like to give form to: not as a doctrine but as the continuation of the expression of myself which I now see I began in Chamber Music. These ideas or instincts or intuitions or impulses may be purely personal. I have no wish to codify myself as anarchist or socialist or reactionary…‘

A 1906 letter from James Joyce to his brother.

Seen on today’s early morning pick up trash walk. UD thought she’d have plenty to pick up – Saturday was insane with activity all over town – but the town crew must have swept through late yesterday, because the streets were frustratingly pristine. She did collect one half-full bottle (calorie free health drink, natch) in Wells Park, and a black plastic fork in front of the tennis courts, but that was it.

UD also lays some of the blame on fellow Garrett Parkers, who, all day long every day, do exactly what UD does.

‘[B]eing pissed off at the local college is not a valid legal doctrine for taking millions of dollars.’

An AAUP blogger demeans the Ohio jury in just the way the administration of Oberlin College has consistently done: The jurors are vindictive village idiots, unable to understand concepts like harm, defamation, and the rule of law, able to use the legal system only to stick it to the elitists down the block. For those who want to get rid of embarrassingly inexpert juries altogether, the lopsided outcome of the Oberlin trial ($44 million in damages and penalties to the college), in the Gibson Bakery case, is the icing on the cake.

Yet although this clearly was an angry jury, that doesn’t mean their verdict was dumb. The jury knows that Oberlin won’t in the end pay out that much money; they know that an appeal is thunderingly obvious. Appalled by the … well, let’s use the language of the AAUP blogger — a man who is sympathetic to Oberlin…

… Oberlin students behaved disgracefully, only to be exceeded by the incredibly stupid and repulsive actions and comments by Oberlin administrators. Protesters demanded a boycott over a case where the Oberlin students were clearly guilty (and later pleaded guilty) and there was no evidence of racial discrimination. They made accusations of past racism, but never presented any convincing evidence publicly. Oberlin’s administrators were even worse. They hurt Gibson’s business by refusing to stand up on their behalf and by boycotting the bakery for a time. They tried to intimidate Gibson’s into dropping charges against the Oberlin students by threatening to continue their boycott, and even asked the bakery to call the college rather than the police when students shoplifted in the future. And Oberlin’s administrators sent each other very dumb messages that alienated the judge and jury so much that the actual legal regulations about defamation [were overlooked].

Appalled by this behavior, which I suspect was felt as a personal attack on their community’s economy and reputation, the jury decided to communicate as forcefully as possible its unacceptable nature — perhaps with an eye to Oberlin eventually gaining some compassion and rationality along the way. As Bill Maher put it in lamenting Oberlin’s actions, “How do we get mainstream liberals to stand up to that faction?” One way is to jolt them awake with outrageous court awards; once awake, mainstream liberals might ask themselves why Oberlin has as a vice president and dean of students an angry factionalist, a woman way, way out of the liberal mainstream. That happened because no one’s watching. Now people are watching.

In court, one of the College’s attorneys, Rachelle Zidar, argued that the College and [the dean of students] did not seek to injure [Gibson’s Bakery] but rather the pause [in their business relationship] was meant to diffuse tensions that had built within the student body.

Pending an appeal, that’s their only move.

This is one angry jury; they just added $33 million in damages. See this post for details.

Why are they so angry? I’m gonna go ahead and guess.

1. Most people really hate bullies.
2. The jury perceives itself to be defending not just a family but a way of life, and the reputation of its community (which, by the way, voted for Hillary Clinton). These are things they take very seriously.
3. Oberlin has throughout this fiasco handled things with the delicacy, kindness, and rationality of Donald Trump. In the way of Trump, it has basically, and repeatedly, dismissed the jury as losers. The jury did not take this well.

Oberlin at this point desperately needs an outside public relations firm. But apparently it is too clueless even to realize that.

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UD thanks tp.

When close to one hundred percent of the people in a part of Arlington Virginia registered opposition to a gun store opening in town near an elementary school, a lawyer for the shop owners expressed bafflement. “What’s the danger they anticipate? Do they think 2- and 3-year-old children are going to come over and buy guns? … Or somebody at the store is going to start shooting up the place? I don’t know what they think is going to happen.”

Perhaps UD can help him out. At 3:00 AM last night, about a mile away from her house…

Four suspects are on the loose and one person is dead after a burglary at a Rockville, Maryland, gun store…

… As there are four possibly armed suspects on the loose, police are urging local residents to navigate the area with extra caution.

… The five suspects rammed into a police cruiser as they were fleeing the scene, causing police to shoot at the car, officials said.

Police later found the car a few blocks away from the area with a dead man inside, according to police.

Police say they found a bag with multiple firearms inside in a backyard not far from the scene. Three other guns were found outside the car the suspects tried to get away in. It appears two stolen cars were used in the incident — one to ram the storefront and a getaway car.

I just don’t know what people think is going to happen.

The American courts are taking care of Purdue; time to direct our attention to Purdue’s overseas conspirator, Mundipharma. Cuz they might be having a spot of trouble addicting us here, what with all the lawsuits, but overseas they are coked to the gills.

As Marx might put it, the people of the globe have nothing to lose but their sobriety; and they have a world of druggy deaths to win.

Look at Italy, a country transitioning from two glasses of wine for dinner to two bottles of morphine for eternity. I’ve just linked to a long article, but it’s worth reading for the bubbly richness of that nation’s surrender to Mundipharma’s ambassador, Guido Fanelli, a man who wants everybody Oxyed unto death. Fanelli’s war plan is so familiar to those of us who have for years tracked academic pharmawhores in the US – the releasing of bogus scientific papers, the organizing of bogus scientific conferences, the gathering-in of kindred prossies from universities and laboratories.

As the U.S. market contracts, opioid consumption is climbing overseas. Canada and Australia are already following America’s catastrophic course, with rising rates of addiction and death. Others may be on the cusp of crisis: Researchers in Brazil report that prescription opioid sales have skyrocketed 465 percent in six years. Overdose deaths are going up in Sweden, Norway, Ireland and England, fueled by prescription painkillers and the illicit drug trade.

Fanelli, “a motormouth and a braggart,” made it reasonably easy for Italian police to discover and record his epic monologues about his Oxy-obtained yacht, so he and various Mundipharma executives are currently somewhat up shit’s creek.

But there’s so much more to come:

Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University professor, published a paper in 2017 pleading with the world to pay attention, especially as prescription rates rise in developing countries with minimal regulation. “As Oxy marches around the world, the things we see in Europe will be disturbing,” he said, “but less so than they will be in Botswana or India.”