If you’ve been here, you know. You know you’re in Fauquier County when the air changes. Take a deep breath, as our motto has it, and enjoy the musty aroma of sulfuric acid as our friendly people shoot at you for getting lost and driving onto their property.

Fast-paced city life melts into the distance, and your eyes rivet onto the amazement of Virginia’s Horse Wine and AR-15 Country.

Just 40 miles west of Washington, D.C., at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. So far from the inner city. And yet so near.

[UD thanks her sister.]

… just keeps going. That university doesn’t see why it should shut down its lucrative Sackler money-collection project just because everyone else is shutting theirs down. As UD predicted, it’s hemming and hawing and hemming and hawing. And the Tufts-Sackler love affair looks significantly ickier than that family’s other alliances, because, like the University of Toronto before it, Tufts seems to have let Sackler money mess with its curriculum.

The Sackler family also funded the Master of Science in Pain Research, Education & Policy (PREP) degree program within the Sackler school…

In a powerful editorial, the Tufts student newspaper says what needs to be said.

Companies identified human pain as a source of perpetual profit and knowingly created addictive and lethal substances to exploit that opportunity. This act was the ultimate perversion of medicine, a corruption of the relationship of trust and care that ought to exist between healthcare workers and the sick. Tufts took money from a company and a family whose fortune was based on knowingly creating addicts and lying about it. Tufts is still willing to take money from them.

In a recent France 24 documentary on ISIS foreign women in the Kurdish-controlled Al-Hawl camp in north-eastern Syria, a camp director said that “when they [foreign ISIS women] gave themselves up, some of them told us that the IS group briefed them, telling them, ‘Surrender, go back to your countries, get your strength back and we will start again.’”

The Unsinkable Molly BOOM.

… was plagiarized.

“Haha. I mean we’re going to fight like crazy.”

You think American soccer can’t go the way of European? Read this.

The reluctance of countries all over the world to repatriate the WE 🖤 DECAPITEES folks will almost certainly mean the creation of an on-site international tribunal for them. This article makes clear that there will be immense difficulties in putting such a thing together. But there is probably no alternative.

“Notwithstanding their rhetoric about meritocracy, admissions offices already make the pragmatic compromises necessary to cultivate — and pay for — good scholarship.”

But it’s all falling apart! What will happen to Yale without that money?

OOOOOOklahoma!

Where the smack comes sweepin’ down the plain

Where the cowboys rope

Prescription dope

And it fucks so badly with your brain …

OOOOOOOklahoma! Every night my pharmacist and I

Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk

As we share the most amazing high…

We know we belong to the land

Of incessant controlled-sub demand

So when we say … Hey! The Sacklers just gave way!

We’re only saying you’re in a fix Oklahoma

Oklahoma nokay.

Seal

Mourning doves and dogs barking and new bees

And air traffic heavy out of Dulles:

I’m gone a week and I come back to spring.

At the beach I walked right into a seal

At rest on the blank Atlantic shoreline.

For a second I couldn’t believe it.

The seal watched me stand there being slack-jawed

And then I dropped my shells and my backpack

And again and again took its picture:

Gray, gazing, grazing.  Crazy.  I alone

On the printless winter sand at seven

Circling, thirty feet away, the wild seal.

And this was stark, and not spring: printless sky

And featureless seal and long trackless strand

And nothing of green and the buzz of bees.

This was, you recall, Mike Royko’s famous proposed motto (Where’s Mine?) for the incredibly corrupt city of Chicago; it now clearly stands for the tragic city of Baltimore, whose already-hapless mayor has revealed not only her personal corruption, but – along the way – the corruption of the University of Maryland medical system board of trustees.

Tragicomic, really, since the latest confirmation of the link between urban collapse and systemic corruption comes from sales – make that non-sales – of children’s books the mayor wrote (maybe – maybe someone else wrote them for her), self-published, and then sold in bulk for permanent storage in a warehouse to the same UM med system on whose board of trustees she sat.

Nothing unusual about that arrangement, though — huge numbers of trustees were self-dealing through the hospital system. The head of the UMMS board of trustees is doing mucho harrumphing about “managed conflicts,” but the phrase managed conflict has about the same persuasiveness as the phrase managed massage in the mouth of Robert Kraft.

… calls time.

… hiking in Harpers Ferry.

Come out, come out, wherever you are: The only Islamic high school in Amsterdam needs your support! Municipal subsidies have been withdrawn because… well… We had to threaten the inspector in order to make him leave… And then despite our scaring the shit out of the inspector, the authorities still managed to find out about our … visitors… and our … practices… and our foreign contacts… and our guest lecturers. And all. Send money!

Windswept wastes do bewail, they say; but SOS hears hymns of joy in the windy waste material wafting out of architect-whores when they defend lucrative massive destructive projects. Oscar Wilde called fox hunting “the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible;” mega-mansioning is the unspeakable in pursuit of hilariously haughty vacuity.

Architect Thomas Hickey of GRADE New York, who has designed the vast home, admitted it is one not commonly found in the region. He described the style as “transitional” in a neo-Tudor style with modern details…

“We are not building history, instead a translation of history,” he said.

The psychotic billionaire from whom we got mucho bucks to build this thinks he is a Tudor king – a big fat bastard who rules the world, like Henry VIII – and his castle will certainly not “commonly” be “found in the region” (sniff) because it is a castle, see.

Cues were taken from the surrounding vernacular styles and paired down to create a modern design. 

Wouldn’t want to spend any of that money on spelling.