… Then they came for my child bride…

LOL.

Not really a powder keg. A morgue is more like it. A big fat national morgue full of dead Fentanyl users.

Remember Michael Jackson and how he hired a personal physician to knock him out with pain killers meant only for advanced cancer patients? Well, why shouldn’t all Americans have that same opportunity?

This was the business model of Insys Therapeutics, whose CEO (a Northwestern University business school grad, seen here dispensing not fatal opioids but career advice) identified this sort of doctor (read the whole thing) to write Fentanyl prescriptions for everybody! Everybody gets to join the party!

The CEO has now been arrested, along with a bunch of co-conspirators, and UD has been having a blast reading the racketeering etc etc case against them.

Killing this many Americans is not merely the work of b-school boys and pain pill docs. To keep the bodies mounting – to grow the business – you need these folks too, for they stand in the way of any prescribing restrictions at all. It’s the free enterprise system at its best, and our incoming prez will enthusiastically endorse it.

This teeny weeny arrest will embarrass a few people and amount to nothing. That doctor I told you about will move to another state and then another and keep doing his thing. And the opiates-for-all lobbyists will live forever.

Oh – and if your university has a med school, somewhere on the faculty there’s almost certainly a researcher paid by pharma to publish articles ghostwritten by opiate manufacturers – articles that reassure us about the efficacy and harmlessness of opioids. Whether it’s producing graduates like arrestee Michael Babich, or pill-propping professors, universities too have their role to play in keeping the morgue at capacity.

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UD thanks dmf.

… makes a fund-raising YouTube.

La Kid shows up at the 35-second mark – she’s the blond in the middle.

They’re good. Promise.

Ain’t it?

In fact, at this point, UD assumes this sort of national attention paid to a university is a plus.

The number of times I have heard Saudi women here, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say لهم الدنبا ولنا الأخرة (they get the world and we get the afterlife).

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Kill the whore!

… she was in the last cohort of tourists to see the actual Lascaux caves. Her family was on its way to England, where her father had a fellowship at London’s National Institute for Medical Research, and among the places they visited were the caves full of paleolithic drawings of animals (and a few people).

The press of people wanting to see the caves began destroying the paintings, so in 1963 the original caves were closed to the public, and a series of nearby replicas were created. The latest replica, just opened, is the biggest and the best.

In the aftermath of Merkel’s call for a German burqa ban, it was inevitable that someone would write the following:

Such actions toward a religious group are not new for Germany, and one might believe that lessons learned long ago would be transferable to new times and circumstances.

Put aside the pissy prissy style in which the writer, more in sorrow than in anger, instructs Germans not to be Nazis again; think rather of the world of fascist burqa-banning states the writer conjures up, those other notorious Nazi regimes – Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, France, Switzerland – that have passed partial or full bans.

UD also finds remarkable the writer’s claim that since some women have been kept masked and swaddled all their lives, it would be an unkindness to unwrap them:

It is simply what they have been taught that decent women should do in public. It has been the practice of all the women they know for as long as they have been alive. For these women banning the veil has several possible effects. At best it makes them profoundly uncomfortable when they are forced into the public realm. It would be like passing a law that says I can’t wear a shirt in public. I don’t have a religious rational for shirt wearing, but having always worn shirts I’m quite uncomfortable with making my body an object for public viewing and quite possibly public judgment… It is difficult if not impossible to change a lifetime of learning reinforced through practice. Even if these women changed their minds, changing the emotional response to their own behavior would be nearly impossible. And frankly no one is trying to change their minds. The result for these women will simply be to drive them indoors, to keep them from going out in public.

Let’s unpack this, shall we? Note that the writer has suddenly decided he’s not talking about veiling the face – and this whole argument is about face, not body, veiling – so that really just as he gets to wear a shirt, they get to wear burqas, see?

And anyway, once you’ve been raised inside a cloth cage, you get comfortable with that and you find you don’t want to be uncaged. Again we’re treated to the writer’s pissy condescension:

It is difficult if not impossible to change a lifetime of learning reinforced through practice.

I don’t know… The Germans managed to de-nazify, didn’t they? … But wait! Maybe not…

One begins to discern a philosophy of life here, ja?

And here’s the kicker.

Even if these women changed their minds, changing the emotional response to their own behavior would be nearly impossible. And frankly no one is trying to change their minds.

Again, it’s “nearly impossible” for people to change so fuck it. And anyway… What does the writer mean when he writes that frankly no one is trying to change their minds?

Well, let’s see. We could take this frank admission of the frank truth a couple of ways.

1. These women live in Salafist environments and that’s just the way it is and that ain’t gonna change so leave them alone. You can’t change Nazis and you can’t change Salafists. Taking off their burqa would simply make these women hypocrites.

2. These women don’t live in democracies where everyone every day – from the baker on the corner to their children’s teachers to lawmakers – is in fact in various overt and covert ways trying to change their minds. Where the very legislation at issue is about trying to change their minds. No, no. Democracies do nothing to establish, protect and affirm themselves; they do nothing to teach the values of democracy to their citizens. Frankly no one’s trying with these women – and with the men who in many cases are the real problem here – so let it be.

Faced with a famous, high-level plagiarist/physicist, a person the government just put at the head of an important scientific panel, France’s education minister has opened an inquiry into the curious cuttings and pastings of Etienne Klein.

We will see if UD is correct in identifying the source of Klein’s problem. UD suspects he hires people to write his books for him, but fails to read what they write before he puts his name on it.

If UD has said it once, she’s said it a hundred times: Keep an eye on the help.

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That panel he’ll be heading?

… the mission of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Science and Technology (IHEST) … is to restore trust between scientists and society.

When Baylor first hired Art Briles
The prez and trustees were all smiles.
But there’s just no escapin’
A teamful of rapin’–
Get ready, get set, for the trials.

**********

And remember, kiddies: Baylor’s already paying Briles six million dollars or so a year to go away.

Truly, truly a blessing.

***********

Baylor University: Toxic Christianity.

While a lawsuit was almost certainly expected, if Briles thinks people at Baylor conspiring against him is why he doesn’t have another job, he’s clinically insane. Anyone associated with Baylor, its athletic department and its football team is toxic right now. Briles wouldn’t be considered for any jobs at any level even if he was carry a sack full of recommendations from Baylor’s administration.

After Briles gave an incredibly weak apology for the out-of-control program he ran at Baylor, did anyone think he would be getting a job any time soon? The guy just doesn’t seem to understand the havoc players wreaked under his watch and just how awful the culture he promoted was.

If Briles was smart, he’d have laid low for a few years, then mounted a comeback with some very serious apologies. Instead he’s out there suing his former employer and acting like he did nothing wrong.

… restaurant in Dublin where her office
Christmas party is happening right now.

The same Picasso reproduction hangs in
our Garrett Park house. It’s one of
our many homages to Munro Leaf, author of
Ferdinand the Bull, who lived here
before we did.

Famous French popularizer of science Étienne Klein is apparently a serial plagiarist. Like Cary Grant in that movie, he is a very classy thief, his pinches revealing un homme très cultivé – Zweig, Zola, Bachelard… AND… UD is thrilled to add… Klein steals from an old friend of the Soltan family! Roman Jakobson was a Harvard colleague and Cambridge neighbor of Jerzy Soltan’s. Even after death the two men remain neighbors – their graves lie a few feet away from each other in Mount Auburn Cemetery. And even after death (especially after death – all career plagiarists know it’s better to steal paragraphs from people not in a position to complain) Jakobson is making himself useful…

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

Recalling UD‘s typology of plagiarists, Klein is clearly an Atelier, done in, I’m going to guess, by one of the many little people he hires to write his books for him.

There are enough overt racists among the students at Texas A&M to make the appearance of white nationalists there not that scandalous, not that surprising.

“When I heard about the Aggie European Alliance, I was disgusted; however, I was not surprised,” said graduate student Lia Epps.

Wonder why not.

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The school has responded strongly (counter-demonstrations) to this guy’s appearance, but there’s no denying that, if you’re an American fascist trolling for recruits, making Texas A&M – rather than, say, Hampshire College – the first stop on your speaking tour is a good career move. Texas A&M specializes in worshipping naughty naughty naughty white boys.

Angela Merkel joins the chorus.

UD is thankful for her strong statement. We’re getting there.

And by the way. The full veil is not appropriate anywhere.

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You can watch the reaction she got here.

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But Burhan Kesici, the general secretary of Germany’s Islamic Council, criticised Merkel’s comments. “The government should carefully study similar moves in France, and ask themselves if one side-effect of such a ban is that it can actually lead to women feeling more excluded from society,” he said.

Wirklich? More excluded than if they walk around completely covered in a black sack – down to their fingertips? Their mouths covered by cloth for enforced silence and difficulty breathing? Vitamin D deficiency for them and their babies because no sunlight?

If this describes, for you, any sort of “society” at all, let me know.

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

A voice from the left.

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

This symbol would divide humanity between those of glorious body, graced with no less glorious a face, and those whose bodies and faces are an outrage in the flesh, a scandal, a filthy thing not to be seen but hidden or neutralized.

A classic take-down of the pro-slavery position.

Comme vous le savez trop bien, ma gentille, UD does not bother reporting plagiarism stories unless they are really really big. Plagiarism is boringly internationally endemic, and now that everyone’s got detection software it’s all too much of a muchness. But Redscar McOdindo, a Kenyan poet still in his twenties, makes the cut.

And paste. The man has been raiding ladies’ panties all over the world (he steals women’s poems about things like female genital mutilation, and basks in the praise of poetry judges who marvel at his ability to write with intimate sensitivity to the other gender’s point of view), and he’s been doing it for years.

As is common in these stories, no one in the international poetry establishment suspected a thing as McOdindo collected one award after another. A sharp-eyed reader of one of his victims exposed him, at which he immediately shut down his blog and disappeared from the face of the earth.