Australia this time, with a mother feeling for some reason compelled to lie through her teeth about having arranged a procedure she thinks comes “from God.” The jury found her guilty in a matter of minutes. Send enough mutilators to jail and the baby-slashing rate will go down.

UD‘s hometown, Garrett Park, is “the first Maryland town to ban single-use plastic straws,” I’ll have you know. The town council member behind the new law is one of the owners of Founding Farmers restaurant.

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UPDATE: From the comments section. UD loves the locally-popular Garrett Parkers are snobs meme cuz it makes her feel all elite. Listen up:

I live just outside Garrett Park.

This new ordinance is silly, because there’s only ONE restaurant in Garrett Park, and they probably find plastic straws are too “common” for their aesthetic anyways.

Hm – ‘just outside’ … Lady Bracknell?

Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.

Not only do we Garrett Parkers find anything short of silver straws common, we also find common people who randomly put quotation marks around certain words, and who write anyways when they mean anyway.

To cover up the scheme, … Esformes ordered his deputies to bribe Florida regulators to get advanced warnings of their inspections and would physically hide patients who didn’t qualify for government-funded care before inspectors arrived.

…it’s time to turn to the father of the most highly-bought-after player on the University of Pennsylvania basketball team! I promise you that the trial of the biggest Medicare fraudmeister in American history will be fun. Incredibly fun.

Wonder if Jerome Allen will follow it from his jail cell.

The FDA has stood back and watched proudly as its buddy John Hammergren [scroll down], head of drug distributor McKesson, pockets seven hundred million dollars for ten years of work — but he earned every penny of it, having engineered the distribution, for instance, of five million opioids to Kermit, WV, population four hundred.

Hammergren’s the sort of pusher-billionaire the FDA’s in the business of ignoring… ignoring? Nay, encouraging, as he finds and exploits bottomless wells of addiction in this nation’s hollers and thereby does his part to make America the economic miracle that it is. He’s honored everywhere: Arizona State University named him Executive of the Year; he sits on the board of the prestigious Center for Strategic and International Stupefacients… Because we want people like Hammergren setting policy for us, and for the world, China and India having much larger populations than Kermit, and awaiting McKesson’s ministrations…

Well, it’s all been a win-win arrangement, but now the butcher’s bill is really coming due on the whole opioid thing – ie it’s not just no-‘count West Virginians dying anymore, and even the FDA has today felt compelled to murmur a little demur or two…

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The FDA’s his best friend. Wanna know who his lover is? The DEA.

I been thinkin’, long as I’m a outlaw anyways, maybe I could — Hell, I ain’t thought it out clear, Ma. Don’ worry me now. Don’ worry me…  I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where — wherever you look. Wherever they’s a prime minister so corrupt he’ll make us billions, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a filthy leader taking all the money out of his country, I’ll be there.   I’ll be there in the way Malaysian children die in the hospital cuz they’re sick an’ they know Goldman and the prime minister took all the money out of the country . An’ when folks eat dirt and live in the streets — why, I’ll be there. See? 

This is apparently the last place Hungarian passion expressed itself. Poor Viktor Orban.

How do you convince the tiny female population you have left to become state-sponsored brood mares? Orban himself produced five children. Maybe the solution is for him to visit targeted Hungarian homes and fuck any woman under the age of forty whether she likes it or not.

“One, two, three, four! One, two, three, four! Come on, comrades, put a bit of life into it! One, two, three … I’m thirty-nine and I’ve had four children.”

…I’ve read about lately.

It’s a hugely popular sport.

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Why does Saudi Arabia go to such lengths to enslave its women? Given its contempt for them, its insistence on hiding their vileness from sight under veils and in houses, why not follow that instinct out logically and let them go (there’s what UD calls a “Jane Drain” happening there, with lots of high-profile female escapes from the magic kingdom — hence the popularity of the new female-passport-tracking app).

I mean, let’s say roughly ten percent of Saudi women enjoy wearing blankets in the desert, adore being secured under surveillance in their houses and allowed out only under male custody… wouldn’t have it any other way… So … from this population you derive your vaginas and wombs so that sexual pleasure and procreation may proceed. If you need more of this, you import it from countries where there’s a market in women who in exchange for money will throw on all the black shit and go out and rent their uteri.

SOOOOO many Harvard professors – the latest is Jill Abramson – have plagiarized parts of their books that UD figures it’s time to update Tom Lehrer’s famous song, “Lobachevsky.” It’s not plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize! anymore: It’s Harvardize!

And why wouldn’t a Harvard professor do the deed? They suffer no consequences (“Realistically, you’re not going to fire Laurence Tribe or Charles Ogletree.“).

Very nice sentence, from an amusing and well-written opinion piece by Dan Savage in the NYT.

.. and you can go to school there! The last time this blog glanced at the University of Louisiana Monroe, in 2010, it quoted a member of the campus community complaining that “We spend a disproportionate amount of money on academics.” At the expense of…? Hey whaddaya think… Athletics adds so much to the… ambiance… of Monroe:

[ULM football player] Kerry Starks, 21, grabbed Abriona Kirt, 26, by the throat with both hands and attempted to drag her out of Hammers nightclub in Monroe by the hair. He also allegedly caused an estimated $400 in property damage by punching out the rear windshield of Kirt’s vehicle with both hands.

Kirt was also placed into custody by Monroe Police after police say she pepper sprayed Starks in the back of the head while he was in handcuffs. Both subjects appeared to be intoxicated …

Know your enemy.

A HuffPost writer comes up with the perfect Bezos/American Media, Inc. headline.

(The Harvard one.)

After repeated violent racist events on the University of Colorado campus, “all of Boulder’s fraternities have been banned from renting campus spaces for a year.” Hurling racist epithets at people officiating at their charity football games, driving a motorcycle “at a high rate of speed through a crowd of about 200 spectators and players,” and of course everyone beating the shit out of everyone else – the University of Colorado seems to have decided that these are behaviors incompatible with university life.

In filing an appeal, the frats have hired an attorney, who puts the whole thing in perspective:

“It gets a little rowdy, as you would expect of any football tournament between 19-year-olds. …They are boys, and they get excited playing football. It’s not like croquet.”