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.)

… doing nothing?

Ingredients

$6.5 million

Michael Wu

Rick Singer

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

Equipment

Vincent Law, Esq.

Faux-Naïveté

Also seen all over town on this morning’s walk: Political signs. Details of the pitched battle for town council here. One sign – très Garrett Park – features first name only and an allusion to the trains that run through town. Indeed this candidate is a self-professed choochoophile who bought a house near the tracks so he could hear freight being hauled all the time.

… is featured in the New York Times. Hot stuff.

[Michelle] Caetano has been on an alternative work assignment outside the [URI] classroom since the legal process began, URI has said. She moved from NECC to URI in August 2012, according to her attorney, just before the outbreak was discovered. URI did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday after the verdict.

So Caetano, now convicted of a felony for her part in writing bogus prescriptions for the drug compounding firm [New England Compounding Center] responsible for the meningitis deaths of 76 people in 2012, remains on the University of Rhode Island faculty. Is she still giving out advice on assessing the behavior of her faculty colleagues?

You can’t make this shit up.

Our school of pharma doth deplore

The racketeering John Kapoor.

We’ve ordered a slurry

Cuz we’re in a hurry

To sandblast his name from the door.

Islamic scholars heard from on the burqa.

Sometimes you stumble on a fact that seems to you to belong not just in the headline of a story, but on the national news. Blasting your head off via one of your several household weapons is already wildly rampant all over Utah; quiet yourself for a moment, reader, and consider how beyond-rampant head-blasting is in the tri-country area…

And of course “depression and suicide aren’t talked about [in the region] because of a fear of having guns taken away.”

Surely the masses of men (most are men) who are doing this to themselves understand at this point that the guns they so anxiously cherish are about suicide and sport, with self-defense a distant third. When (to quote the Beatles), it’s all too much, The Gun is Utahan for Death With Dignity.

“Injuries and accidents, keeping your job, having a job tomorrow. It’s so up and down,” said Val Middleton, a former oil and gas safety instructor at Uintah Basin Technical College in Vernal. “The guys don’t eat right typically. No exercise, hard work, long hours, no sleep. That’s what adds up. The divorce rate is high. Really high. The family life is low.”

Val forgot to add alcohol.

Is this corner of Utah the wave of the future? Can freedom also be thought of as the scope to debrain yourself when you can’t stand it anymore? Says here that shitty life + immediately lethal instrument + sudden moment of hopelessness = suicide. If that’s true – and it seems pretty obviously true for hundreds of thousands of people – and if our culture perceives suicide as a bad thing, a sad thing, a thing we should try to prevent – why aren’t we paying any attention to massively suicidal, gunned-up places like the tri-county area? UD proposes that the hypermasculine culture of autonomy in such places makes suicide both inevitable for many and – in the eyes of many – sort of routine. Sort of okay.

What a great line. I wonder if Hillary came up with it herself. Who cares. Great line.