Les UDs are on their way
to Rehoboth Beach,
for the Sea Witch Festival.

Of course UD will
blog from there.

Unlike benighted Yeshiva University which, when stories of the arrest of their esteemed trustee/treasurer Bernie Madoff broke, went into full silence, denial, web-erasure, Bernie who?, we’re a victim mode, the University at Buffalo, on receiving today’s atomic bomb about mega-donor and (wait for it) pharmacy school namesake John Kapoor, quickly and admirably issued a statement.

That’s the way you’re supposed to go when something grand and consequent and deeply embarrassing happens to your university: spit it out. Acknowledge it. And then when – inevitably – you have to blast the Kapoor name off of the building his massive fatal peddling of fentanyl has turned into a sick joke, you have as it were laid the groundwork for the blasting.

There’s a long description of the Kapoor caper here. To save time, here’s UD‘s paraphrase of it, a sentiment out of Norman Mailer:

THE SHITS ARE KILLING US.

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Thanks, dmf.

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Inaugurating the building soon to be renamed the Kermit West Virginia Memorial Hall.

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[Kapoor’s] Insys even made a video featuring a sales rep dressed as a giant fentanyl spray bottle, rapping and dancing to a song that pushed the idea of getting doctors to prescribe higher doses…

… it.

I am the very model of a modern major predator
I squeeze the tits of everyone from copy girl to editor
When I attack I’m confident that no one else will credit her
And if they do then I consult a first-rate lawsuit settler

I’m very good at hiding out behind a piece of shrubbery
Then jumping out and treating you to genitalia rub-ery
And now that my behavior is a matter of discovery
I’m getting very penitent and sorrowful and blubbery.

What if they gave a football team and nobody came?

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UD thanks John.

Leon Wieseltier stayed true to his obsessions, even up to his mid-sixties.

Then they caught up with him.

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His partner uses the withdrawal method.

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.