… shopping.

There once was a Rep. name of Friske
Who liked to live life at high risk
He slipped on his gripper
And shot at a stripper
To which all I can say is tsk tsk

Comment les choses changent.

What more can we do, its legislature asked, to make sure that for all time and in all categories we rank at the very bottom?

Oh. Right!

Certainly we’ve learned, after many years, that med schools, engineering departments, and above all bigtime sports programs, are fraud central; but, more recently, IT managers are, fraudwise, really sitting pretty.

Yale thought it was being clever when it imposed a $10,000 upper limit on med school computer-related purchases signed off by only one person, but Finance Director Jamie Petrone-Codrington was all over that one. With patient stealth, for more than ten years, she racked up charges, gave the equipment to someone who fenced it, and stole 30 million dollars.

Where the fuck were Yale’s auditors? Damned if I know.

Same deal, more or less, at today’s hapless ripped off institution. “After receiving approval to purchase hundreds of items of IT equipment by falsely claiming the equipment would be used or installed at university locations,” Webster University’s IT director “sold that equipment to a third-party.”

… UD‘s coverage of illegal drug distribution featured a crusty old pill mill proprietor named Buster, and his best bud/pharmacy owner Lloyd, way down in Russellville Alabam. Out front of Buster’s place (What a Wonderful World Pain Clinic) long lines of pale pierced men hid their faces in oversize sweatshirts and funny thing is all the cars in the parking lot had Ohio license plates. Local Doc Ching-Ting Peng, just over from Taiwan, spoke no English, and had the sorest wrist in Russellville from signing a million empty prescription slips a day.

It was a rickety kind of bidness, sure, but didn’t nobody bother nobody and it was full of real interesting characters and everybody all over Akron got their very own fatal overdose. In the unlikely event the shit hit the fan and the boys got shut down, they moved to Phenixville and renamed the place Praise the Lord Pain Emporium.

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

Course now it’s all slick city folk who figured out how to put it all online and advertise all over social media and make – I mean, let’s say Buster and Lloyd and Ching-Ting divided like 300 thou a year among themselves – the folks at Done digital health pulled in hundreds of millions before the Justice Department finally noticed. You buy a membership in the thing and they’ll sell you all the Adderall you want forever, no questions asked. ‘According to the complaint, one Done member described the company as a “straight up pill mill.”’

‘Nice work if you can get it. 

Provided you live long enough to see results. “Instead of 60-year-olds giving to 30-year-olds, it’s going to be 90-year-olds giving to 60-year-olds,” says Chuck Collins of the Institute for Policy Studies.

My heart bleeds for the late-middle-aged children of healthy old rich people, it really does. 

It’s a problem for all of us: baby boomers now account for half the combined net worth of the US.

Is this another one of those stories about boomers ruining everything? 

I’m afraid it is, yes.’

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Amusing back and forth in the Guardian.

… his spiritual advisor.

Two mass shootings in 24 hrs. So nu? 400 million guns in private hands and you don’t think mass shootings will occur on a more or less daily basis? Price of freedom, baby. Price of freedom.

Faithful readers know that UD predicts American mass shootings will be covered not at all in a few years. Way not newsworthy. They’ll be like coronal mass ejections – routine disruptions of no earthly consequence.

CEOs at Trump meeting:

Ex-president ‘meandering’ and

‘doesn’t know what he’s talking about’

Right around the beltway from UD.

A 41-year-old woman has been arrested and charged with two separate attempted armed robberies at McDonald’s drive-thrus in Gaithersburg… [The woman,] who was driving a gray Jeep Cherokee, pulled into the drive-thru lane with a handgun on her lap. 

When the employee approached the window, [the woman] motioned toward the gun and announced the robbery. 

The employee quickly closed the window, and [the woman] drove away.

Approximately 18 minutes later, [she] targeted another McDonald’s on Montgomery Village Avenue. She again drove into the drive-thru, displayed a gun, and announced a robbery. The employee immediately shut the window, and [the woman] left. [Then she was arrested.]

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

That sneaky “close the window” thing.

Any number of cliches pertain to the problem facing hijab defenders in France, who are outraged that French Olympics athletes can’t cover their heads during play.

Secularist France has nothing against people wearing the thing in all other Olympics venues, but wants those officially representing the country during games to project religious neutrality.

Supported by many human rights organizations, hijabis are making a lot of noise about overturning the ban before the event begins next month.

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

Ecoute. Here’s the problem, if you ask ol’ UD.

The far right so massacred Macron’s government in the recent EU election that Macron has called snap elections. My guess is that support for hijabs, abayas, burqas, etc., among this lot is approximately zero percent. Left, center, or right, in any case, French governments have long banned various forms of veiling, and it sure looks as though growing majorities of the French people object to strongly visible religious garb. At the moment, ye olde will of the people is against you, in other words, and while you’re free to fight the good fight, it’s arguable that this isn’t the moment.

It can’t help matters that, hijab-wise, most of the attention of the world is riveted to Iran, whose vile theocracy has succeeded in linking the head covering to murderous surveillance of women. Certes, it’s unfair, certes, it’s illogical, but efforts to portray the hijab as a symbol of healthy diversity, gender equality, and individual expressive rights (which all the letters from human rights organizations gas on about) are currently up against super-repressive mullahs who have made the hijab the central actor in their globally notorious death-to-women thing.

Hijabis in France, seems to me, would do well to acknowledge what they’re up against there, and act more strategically.

Here’s where you might start. Concede that hijabs don’t seem to most people to have jackshit to do with gender equality. (Recall this unfortunate campaign.) On the contrary. Drop that quixotic quest, and confine your language to religious freedom more broadly and indeed more vaguely.

IVF is “as immoral as anything we can imagine.”

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

A CBS News/YouGov poll earlier this year found that 86 percent of respondents thought IVF should be legal …

Only in America.

And every third world country.