Whether it’s Joe Paterno at Penn State or Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar at University of California Davis, you really want to keep an eye on your overpaid and overlaureled personnel. Eventually the money and adulation will do to them what it does to pretty much everyone. It will make them believe their own publicity, and it will make them consider themselves free to do what they like, immune from consequences.
Immunity is Muizelaar’s medical speciality; he’s a research surgeon who tries to activate patients’ immune systems to fight cancers. Together with another faculty member, he’s been intrigued by the possibility that introducing bacteria into the heads of people with late-stage brain cancer might activate their immune system and in the process attack the disease.
Well and good; but these guys seem not to have felt the need to get institutional approval for this human experimentation. Of course, no problem getting the patients’ approval; they’re desperate. But precisely because people are desperate and therefore susceptible to dangerous and unproven procedures, you’ve got things like institutional review boards and all.
The guys are now banned from human research. Davis risks losing its federal research funding altogether.
Classy. The Oklahoma State University librarian who according to tons of former football players wrote all of their papers for them has counterattacked. They’re all demented, see. One too many blows to the helmet.
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It’ll be interesting to hear what professors in the OSU sociology department – handmaiden of the football flunkies – have to say in their defense.
… “You don’t have to do anything. If you go to class, they’ll give you a C because they care about Oklahoma State football.”
Former wide receiver Artrell Woods told the magazine he didn’t write “a single paper” while at OSU, but rather had completed work dictated to him by a tutor.
Said former defensive tackle Brad Girtman, “Are you kidding me? I didn’t go there to go to school. I went there to play football.”
One of the former players named among those who received improper academic assistance is all-Big 12 wide receiver Dez Bryant, currently with the Dallas Cowboys. Sports Illustrated quotes a former assistant coach, who said of Bryant, “He just wasn’t supposed to be there. There’s no way he could do the college work. Once he got there, he was connected with the people that would help him.”
Maybe they’ll say the same thing the librarian did. The many players making these accusations are hopelessly gaga after years of tackles.
But it would be more seemly for people at this prostituted school to be honest about it. There’s a Jacobean comedy called The Honest Whore, and it would be truly wonderful, a wonderful thing for the American university, if the current madam of OSU – the university’s president, I assume – would honestly admit that OSU has been a sports bordello. Professors and advisors there should emulate Sonia, the redeemed prostitute of Crime and Punishment, and pray for divine release.
Far out: New Mexico’s gun-splashed city is so unstaunched at this point that the governor has declared a health emergency! As in like you can’t leave your house, man, without some chance of being pulped; and that goes for your kids, too — so parents are increasingly reluctant to send their kids to school.
A pretty dire outcome for America’s dumbest state, and recent winner of Worst State Overall in which to live.
Suicidewise as well NM vies with The Headblaster Three (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) for Berettas to the brain. It’s right up there (this is from 2020), almost always securely in the top five.
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So for 30 days the cowboys can’t carry their guns in public, says the governor, and ‘course they’re all pissing their high-waisted Y-fronts at the news. ‘Course the governor’s a fucking dictator and when Trump comes back he’s putting her in front of a firing squad.
Smith&Wesson blasts back at deep state harassment over its kid-friendly/shooter game ad campaigns for human-pulverizing toys. Wee1 must also be pissed:
Not to mention BabyGun or whatever its called:
A little known fact is that rather than featuring in romper room play, most guns are simply used to kill yourself. Self-slaughter holds a vast majority over any other use. Guns are largely about blowing your brains out with one hundred percent certainty (other methods fall short of this standard), and in some states (Alaska, Wyoming, Montana) they’re scooping wildcatters and cowboys off the floor pretty much 24/7.
For instance, Utah, another gunny he-man state, boasts this remarkable statistic:
Utah has one of the highest death by suicide rates in the country, currently ranked sixth. According to the Utah Department of Health, suicide rates in the tricounty area [northeast Utah: Daggett, Uintah and Duchesne Counties] are 58% higher than the rest of the state.
Got that? The state’s already comfortably in the top ten; but the tricounty area is 58% higher than the state’s rate!
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So one thing UD has never understood is why gun makers don’t feature ease and certainty of suicide in their advertising, since this happens to be the gun’s calling card, its claim to fame, the primary reason tens of thousands of owners own guns. One obvious campaign would feature pre-death videos solicited from, say, tricounty suicides, in which they explain why choosing a gun to blow their brains out was, well, a no-brainer!
And there’s no reason consumers need to degrade their final act by choosing cheap pistols and smaller arms; in one celebrity spot, manufacturers could feature quarterback Tyler Hilinski’s use of an AR-15 in his suicide. (A Glock will only set you back $500 or so, whereas an AR-15 costs around a thousand. Tag line in this campaign: WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH TO END THE VERY BEST.)
Guns command a vast and growing suicide market; their makers need to exploit this fact. A lot of drunk lonely cowboys are right now sitting on the fence suicide-wise; a strong ad campaign is probably all they need.
What a poor sport this newswoman is. (Scroll down for the video.) She actually cited the astounding suicide-by-gun statistic among veterans – the very group the Dallas Cowboys claim to be helping by promoting blood-soaked Black Rifle Coffee.
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There are now reports that the Cowboys are about to announce a second coffee partnership, this one with CTE Coffee, the brew for people who love football-induced neurodegenerative disease. Each flavor is named after a dead CTE sufferer – Jovan Belcher, Dave Duerson, Frank Gifford, Aaron Hernandez, Junior Seau – and each features a graphic of their pockmarked postmortem brains. Strong stuff, you say? You betcha! The Cowboys are calling CTE America’s Brew cuz no one does lethal head blows the way we do! If you don’t like it, move to North Korea.
When figuring out your university’s very own response to the empty stadium problem, don’t you see it’s gotta be one way or the other. You can cater to drunks – collegiate and professional football attracts lots of drunks – and you can have people bring alcohol to the event and you can serve alcohol at the event, etc.
Drunks like to be drunk, so this policy will certainly attract them; but on the other hand you’ve now got … well, let’s have this guy explain why he stopped going to Redskins games.
The tipping point for my decision not to renew came in the opener of the 2010 season, a Sunday night game against the Cowboys. In the middle of the second quarter, nature called and I needed to visit the restroom. As I was walking down from my 15th row seat, a young lady pointing to her pink Tony Romo jersey was blocking the row as her team was driving down the field. I asked her nicely if I could get by, but that just made her clutch the jersey harder and push it toward my face. As I raised my voice in an effort to make her understand my situation, an extra from the cast of Swamp People in a Jason Witten jersey popped up.
“Hey, you gotta problem, buddy?” asked Mr. Bleary Eyes.
“Um… yeah… I want to get out.”
Apparently to him, them’s fightin’ words. As he approached me in my burgundy LaRon Landry jersey, Ms. Pink Romo finally got out of the row to try to settle her man down, and I passed by.
“Stop! It’s not worth it!” I heard her say as I walked away.
But Swamp Witten kept following me. As I reached the mezzanine, his girlfriends’ clutching arms and desperate words finally registered in his addled brain, and they returned to their seats.
Now, I was not afraid. I stand over six feet and weigh 280 pounds. The guy was drunk, and a strong wind could have knocked him over. But I’m a 35-year-old adult, and this was ridiculous. I’ve never had to deal with a drunken fan harassing me in my own living room.
Nothing says university like a stadium bristling with police watching your every move and hauling the royally pissed out of their seats. What to do? You could offer rewards to make sober people attend anyway. You could basically, in other words, pay people to sit next to the drunks. At Syracuse University, whose stadium has the desolate air of a late Samuel Beckett play, a local reporter asks his readership about rewards. Goodies for people who, as he puts it, “behave themselves”?
Judging by the comments, his readers are skeptical.
— To alter Keats slightly as UD shares with you her excitement at the prospect of the return of university football… Those who scoff at the notion of student-athletes forget the contribution players make to the philosophy and physiology of violence. If our schools somewhat neglect their players’ brains while they live, this is amply recompensed by the postmortem attention lavished on their cerebral tissue. And the remarkable human wastage on-field prompts high-level discourse on violence. Dan Le Batard writes:
The gladiators who choose this particular career path are often shaped by broken backgrounds that help them arrive at football … with some sharpened and rewarded character traits that might not serve them as much away from the game. It is not a coincidence that the majority of football arrests occur during the offseason, when players have too much free energy and free time away from the [game’s] more disciplined violence …
This is not to suggest all angry, violent men would be good football players; it is to suggest you’ll find a lot of angry, violent ones in some of your best huddles. And football does a hell of a job of not only finding men who live on the edge of acceptable behavior but also feeding and needing them.
Or, as the words emblazoned on a cafeteria wall at the University of Oregon’s just-completed Ministry of War have it: EAT YOUR ENEMIES. Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, the University of Oregon boasts a special room where it fattens its young; but UO goes those stories one better by plastering the room with propaganda. Kill! Kill! Kill!
Le Batard points out the traditional conundrum of university football: You can’t win without significant numbers of unstable violent people on your team; but tip over into too many violent people and you’re going to be in legal trouble.
The last time Colorado was championship good at football, Sports Illustrated reported that one-third of the roster had been arrested. Ohio State went more than four decades without a national championship … until Maurice Clarett. Nebraska went without a national championship for almost a quarter of a century … until Lawrence Phillips. You can find links between arrests and compromised standards and winning all over college football, from those notorious University of Miami champions to the University of Florida ones who had 31 arrests in the brief time Meyer was there.
You can point to outliers, but it is much harder to find big winners without criminal complications than with them. Heck, in 122 years of football, Vanderbilt has been to only four bowl games but two of them have been the past two seasons … as their coach now uses a helicopter to find recruits in the Southeastern Conference . . . and last month had to kick four players off the team for alleged sex crimes.
You begin to understand the symbolic importance of spindly idiots in spectacles and bow ties at the level of the presidency. And cutesy quoters of scripture at the level of coach.
Le Batard concludes that we want “the gladiators [to] be more civil.” But how can that be? We want to watch them eat their enemies. We want them and their enemies to grow bigger and bigger and bigger so that the spectacle of the meal will be bigger and bigger and bigger.
