The N.F.L. is a business enterprise where announcers are often capable of addressing the sport’s most pressing on-field issue only in tones of gallows humor. To wit: late in the Panthers-Bears game, the defensive end Akiem Hicks was slow to get up after the whistle. This prompted some brain-injury comedy in the booth. “They’ll take a look at him for a possible concussion,” said one announcer, proceeding to note that, “of course, [Hicks’s teammates] gotta pat ’em on the head.” His partner mildly marvelled, “It’s just part of the deal, Dan.”

How to get rid of her?

… is the slogan of the opioid-mad Sackler family, which takes its massive dope-earnings and ploughs them into high-profile gifts that glorify the Sackler name.

“It’s amazing how they are left out of the debate about causation, but also about solutions,” Allen Frances, [a retired] Duke psychiatrist, said of the Sacklers. “A truly philanthropic family, looking at the last twenty years, would say, ‘You know, there’s several million Americans who are addicted, directly or indirectly, because of us.’ Real philanthropy would be to contribute money to taking care of them. At this point, adding their name to a building — it rings hollow. It’s not philanthropy. It’s just a glorification of the Sackler family.” According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, more than two and a half million Americans have an opioid-use disorder. Frances continued, “If the Sacklers wanted to clear their name, they could take a very substantial fraction of that fortune and create a mechanism for providing free treatment for everyone who’s become addicted.” Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, created the Nobel Peace Prize. In recent years, several philanthropic organizations run by the descendants of John D. Rockefeller have devoted resources to addressing climate change and critiquing the environmental record of the oil company he founded, now called ExxonMobil. Last year, Valerie Rockefeller Wayne told CBS, “Because the source of the family wealth is fossil fuels, we feel an enormous moral responsibility.”

It is a dark, unacceptable irony that an institution devoted to developing intellectual capacity would allow, let alone celebrate, the systematic destruction of what it works so hard to create.

Guy says universities should stop playing football – just because it knocks the stuffing out of students’ brains…

… keep your eye on the University of North Florida! So far this semester two little tykes – one nineteen, and one just a wisp of an eighteen year old – have been blasting their guns around campus in that… you know… kinda random? kinda pissed off? way that promises some real action! And here’s the best news of all: One of the shooters had a gun safe in his dorm room! Already working on an arsenal, right there on campus.

Some would argue that Texas Tech is the place to watch, what with their tyke actually killing someone with his weapon – a campus policeman, so I guess not all that random – but they overlook the fact that UNF has in one semester produced two shooters, one of them with (let’s say it again) a gun safe in his dorm room.

Massacre-wise, UD‘s putting her money on UNF.

[T]wo vectors [are] colliding [at WSU] – football excellence and flagrant overspending. [So] WSU is at a crossroads. It will have to decide whether… any football expense is justifiable, or [whether it will] take another road, where some level of sanity and perspective about the role of sports within an institution of knowledge is regained… [WSU needs to decide if it wants] sports to occupy a place in the hierarchy of university priorities that is a bit less insane.

You better believe ol’ UD is just on the edge of her seat wondering which way Washington State University will go! I’m sure you are too! What a nail-biter!

… news story.

… in Kentlands, Maryland, this evening.

… work on our little upstate NY house.

… but UD‘s hometown abundantly – maybe even uniquely – caters to your every political whim. So UD has for awhile been taken up with the issue of global female genital mutilation (half a million women in the United States have been cut, or are at risk of cutting, 50,000 of them in the Washington region; Maryland, where UD lives, is one of eight states with the highest rates), and a couple of nights ago she had merely to walk a few hundred yards from her university office in order to take part in a spectacular global forum about it.

She was able to ask one of the lead DOJ attorneys on the Jumana Nagarwala case in Detroit if we’re actually going to be able to put this Johns Hopkins University med school graduate in prison for a long time.

“We do not,” she replied, “take cases we are not confident we can win.” (Applause broke out at this.)

UD looks forward to Johns Hopkins University publicly rescinding Nagarwala’s degree, on the grounds that medical schools in the United States are not butcheries.

Linda Weil-Curiel, a heroic French attorney with a heroic family history, described her years of successful prosecution against cutters. “My most rewarding moment? I was sitting in a courthouse, looking over some notes, when three large and menacing men surrounded me. ‘You’re the reason our women no longer obey us,’ they said.”

Here she talks about the central, overwhelming importance of a secular state with a commitment to universal human rights. Lately she’s been trying to get all of this across to hapless England, which has a scandalously huge FGM problem, about which it seems unable to do anything. But of course French laïcité gives them an advantage, in this as in so many other matters.

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

Speaking of visually compelling, Pierre Foldès, the surgeon who pioneered reconstructive surgery for those who’ve been cut, was also there, and he treated us to many large graphic images of the whole shebang: mutilation, rehabilitation. Ol’ UD wasn’t expecting this, and she doesn’t mind telling you she underwent a certain interval of heebie-jeebies until she settled in to the whole clinical observation thing.

THE NARCOTIC FAMINE

‘The American opioid-overdose epidemic must be addressed in the same stroke as the [global] narcotic famine.’

Hard to imagine
Narcotic famine

Their bitter unassistive pill.
Unpalliated kill.

When it comes to the source of their moxie
The Sacklers know how to be foxy.
“They don’t know from Oxy.
They don’t know from Roxy.
And I’m an anonymous proxy.”

Quebec follows many European nations and regions in banning the burqa and niqab in public places.

Opponents always say the same two dumb things.

They say only a few women wear it. So? It ain’t about numbers, baby.

They say it’s all about the cynical politics of the moment.

The National Council of Canadian Muslims issued a statement saying it was “deeply concerned” by the new law and that it “boils down to ugly identity politics” ahead of the 2018 provincial election.

Opposition to fully covered women, in country after country, is profound, and transcends politics.

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

As for ugly identity politics – hey. Better ugly identities than no identity at all.

IOW: For sure this is about identity politics. It’s about having an identity. End the blotting out of women.

Evil whoring assistant coach!
Evil whoring corporate roach!

Little boy innocent! Little boy blue!
Rick has no choice but to sue sue sue sue.