Jose Maria Marin, the 85-year-old former president of the Brazilian football federation, is out on bail during the [FIFA] trial and is living under house arrest at his $3.5 million apartment in Manhattan’s Trump Tower.

UD knows you have been waiting with anticipation equal to hers for the further adventures of university rector Petro Melnyk. To refresh your memory:

The former dean of the National Tax University in Irpin (Kyiv oblast) was arrested in July 2013, allegedly while receiving a bribe of 120 thousand UAH. He was placed under house arrest on Aug 1 that year, but escaped, after removing his electronic bracelet. He was in hiding in the USA until April 1, 2014 when he was arrested at Boryspil Airport on his arrival from London. The initially hefty 30 million UAH bail was reduced by the court to 600 thousand UAH and Melnyk was released from custody soon after that second arrest.

Melnyk was tried by the Irpin City Court, in the same town where he has business interests. The trial dragged on for an entire year and ended in his acquittal on July 9, 2015, with the court finding that there was ‘not enough proof’ that the 120 thousand UAH he was alleged to have received was not a ‘donation’.

In short, Petro didn’t have to run away at all! Acquittal was waiting for him all the time in his neighborhood court.

The acquittal was eventually overturned, though nothing bad has happened to Petro, who is busy selling off all of his university’s buildings to his family. He was just acquitted of that, too.

A court in the Kyiv oblast has acquitted Petro Melnyk, the former Head of Ukraine’s National Tax Service University, finding “no proof of a crime” in Melnyk’s sale of four buildings belonging to the university to a company founded by his wife, son and father-in-law.

… While finding that “the university” had sold the four pieces of real estate to the ‘Inter-regional Finance and Law Academy’ with infringements of procedure for selling state property, the court declined to find Melnyk himself guilty of embezzlement or squandering of property through abuse of his official position (Article 191 § 5 of Ukraine’s Criminal Code). It rejected the prosecution’s assertion that the property had been knowingly under-priced and said it had seen no proof that Melnyk had himself, or via others, had any influence on the price. This is despite accepting that the initiative to sell the property had come from Melnyk as the Dean. The argument was that the sale was agreed “by an organized conference of the staff unanimously”. Melnyk in court denied that he had known during the tender that the company founded by his wife and son was seeking to buy the property.

The court also rejected a civil suit brought by the university for compensation of 33,44 million UAH damages.

This is the value that the investigation established the properties were worth. Melnyk’s relatives paid only a third of that price – 10,87 million UAH.

The four large pieces of property were sold in 2007-08 by auction to the ‘Inter-regional Finance and Law Academy’, whose founders include Melnyk’s wife Tetyana Melnyk; his son Maksym and father-in-law Volodymyr Shcherban. Melnyk’s nephew Roman Melnyk ran the company.

Virtually all the items of property were subsequently let to the university.

The Florida Atlantic University professor who believes Sandy Hook was a hoax, with the parents of the dead children diabolically pretending to be parents of dead children, has lost his legal effort to get reinstated into his tenured job at that most pathetic of American universities.

He tried to make it a free speech case, but FAU successfully argued that it fired him because he doesn’t fill out required forms.

Jurors were first asked to decide whether Tracy’s blog posts were “a motivating factor” in the university’s decision to fire the professor from his 11-year tenured position. If they answered that question yes, they were to decide if the school would have terminated Tracy if he hadn’t publicized his conspiracy theories.

Since they answered no to the first question, they didn’t have to answer the second one. By deciding that Tracy’s blogs weren’t a “motivating factor” for university officials, they apparently accepted FAU’s claims that Tracy was fired for failing to fill out a mandatory form reporting his outside activity to his bosses.

You and I know why this veteran conspiracy theorist didn’t fill out those forms, right? Because the forms came directly from the Office of Aliens Trying to Fuck With My Head and Damned If I’m Going to Give Them the Keys to my Precious Bodily Fluids.

So it’s all over except for this. Why is FAU, a vile school that tenures the vile, allowed to exist?

Just heard from the NPR reporter that the Garrett Park segment of the Ferdinand the Bull report for tomorrow morning got edited out. So I won’t be appearing.

It’s an academic bloodbath down there. If you’re looking for the heavy-hitters, look no further than Texas Tech, where a wee freshman of nineteen years just blew a campus cop away – shot the guy to death in cold blood, holding the gun inches from his face.

This is one of the few guns-on-Texas-campuses stories that rose to national attention. The threats, the gun play, the fraternity weaponry — these are so routine as to pass unnoticed.

If you really want to get noticed – a student with a gun on a campus in Texas – you have to have a very big gun, you have to be on the football or basketball team, you have to threaten to kill multiple people, you have to have drugs on you, you have to be part of a conspiracy, you have to flee the police, you have to ditch the gun… You have to do a lot of shit to be worth paying attention to if you’re a college student with your gun out at a Texas university.

So props to Zaycoven Henderson, one of our Sacred Aggies, for accomplishing all of that, and getting all the press attention he and his gun-mad school so richly deserve.

Just a few hours earlier, Henderson was honored at the A&M team football banquet.

You don’t want the recent history of A&M. Trust me. You don’t want the background on A&M.

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

You know, when a few Texas professors, disgusted by the state-wide gun-love, resign or take jobs in safer states, they’re called pussies or whatever. But in Texas, the shits really are trying to kill us. And they’ve got amazing, amazing, guns. And they’re our students.

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

Here’s Zaycoven’s hagiographic page at Texas A&M. In the first photograph, he’s doing the classic WHERE’S MY RIFLE? TOSS IT DOWN TO ME. play.

Take the page down?

Nah.

It’s Texas A&M.

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

Have to go to the local paper for local responses. From a comment thread. Parenthetical remarks from UD:

rippy Dec 11, 2017 5:33am
Welcome to Aggieland Jimbo!

[That’s the new greedy coach they just hired for a zillion dollars.]

pragmatist Dec 11, 2017 5:51am
It is a big challenge to operate a successful program when you depend on young folks who have grown up with little or no guidance in terms of right vs wrong. Don’t know this guy’s history, but it is a safe bet his only male leadership came from football coaches. Coaches, at their best, can do very little to point an 8th grader in the right direction and once the kid gets off course, it is hard to self-correct. It takes a real Dad and a real Mom.

Tragic and far too common but there is no room for this guy at A&M.

[Sad little “pragmatist” hasn’t bothered to check that Zaycoven comes equipped with a father and a mother. And pragmatically speaking, I wonder why Aggie coaches recruit people like Zaycoven. The commenter fails to speculate about why many … questionable people end up on his football team. Do they show up and push themselves forward? Or are they feverishly sought?

“No room for this guy at A&M.” UD always finds this a touchingly delusional sentiment. Our pure school – where Johnny Manziel was so recently God – shudders and passes on morally impure people like Zaycoven.]

Dec 11, 2017 7:00am
Would you look at that. I’ll be willing to bet this kid was recruited solely for his athletic ability and not his character. Another legacy of Sumlin …that goes with the washed up Heisman winner [Manziel] and a new field. Neither of which spells National Champion.

[Implicitly, this commenter expresses the pathetic faith-in-the-new-coach thing. Bad old coach (Sumlin) did this; he was responsible for the now-embarrassing Manziel too. But new god Jimbo will make everything beautiful again.]

…players it turns into vegetables.’

“The Texans QB visibly quivered and twitched
on the ground as an official stood over him…”

[Sing it.]

Everybody’s talking at me
I don’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Everybody’s talking at me
Can’t hear a word they’re saying
Only the echoes of my mind

Some people like pandas; some people like koalas. UD likes this hardy Scottish breed with a double-layer coat (you can leave them outside all year).

Although the UD clan does have twenty acres of farmland just sitting there in upstate New York, and although she and Mr UD did, not long ago, price a small Beltie herd while driving the long flat roads of Delaware on the way to the beach, I would not hold my breath waiting for Les UDs to become cattle farmers.

Still, UD follows the beltie news. There’s this Norfolk couple who just got Pasture for Life Certification; and in Sweden there’s this case of a missing herd. UD went to Google Translate for details:

There are signs that the group of spacecraft has been divided. Gunilla tells that one of the struts moves in the immediate area and is about to be captured.

Just read through this update on FIFA
And I’m sure you will want to shout vifa!
Its governing body
Can be a bit naughty.
It’s the moral equiv. of a queef (ugh).

That’s the kind of logic we appreciate here at University Diaries.

And it’s what’s made the University of Louisville – “a sports empire on top of a midlevel commuter school” – what it is today: An object of intense interest on the part of the FBI and many other law enforcement agencies. A national disgrace. An international joke. Everything.

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

With kings and princes and nobility and everything.

“I don’t think [the fired athletic director] gets this, and I don’t think [the jail-bird-in-waiting ex-president] got it,” says state Rep. Jim Wayne, whose district includes parts of Louisville. “The University of Louisville is a state facility … and it is not their kingdom. They are not the kings, and the princes, and the nobility in the kingdom. They’re temporary stewards of these programs. And instead of seeing this as something that they should be responsible for and hold high ethical standards as they execute their jobs, they’re doing just the opposite.”

In Louisville, “doing just the opposite” means shaking the school upside down and pocketing every little piece of coin and cash that falls out of it.

Kings have palaces!

[The school’s arena] required a bailout to keep it from defaulting on more than $300 million in bond debt. [The] athletic department agreed to pay an additional $2.4 million a year. The public, meanwhile, was saddled with another 25 years of arena-related taxes totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. In the end, the arena will cost more than $1 billion, with taxpayers funding most of it. Despite the bailout, some experts fear the FBI probe’s effect on the arena’s primary tenant could be catastrophic.

Excellent to see that National Public Radio is covering FGM in the United States without any bullshit about “cutting” instead of “mutilation.”

Even nicer: The pro-FGM word “nick” – as in It’s just a little clitoral nick; nothing to see here! – appears nowhere in the report.

Apologists for FGM are everywhere in the United States, led that by all ’round great guy, Alan Dershowitz. Give it your all, Al.

1924 – 2017

If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world — every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste. There isn’t very much satisfaction in getting the world to accept and praise you for things that the world is prepared to praise. The world is prepared to praise only shit. One wants to make sure that the complete self, with all its qualities, is not just accepted but approved . . . not just approved — whoopeed.

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

I know of nothing more difficult than knowing who you are, and then having the courage to share the reasons for the catastrophe of your character with the world.

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

But really I loved him because he understood the greatness of my even greater love, Malcolm Lowry:

When one thinks of the general sort of snacky under-earnest writers whose works like wind-chimes rattle in our heads now, it is easier to forgive Lowry his pretentious seriousness, his old-fashioned ambitions, his Proustian plans, [his efforts] to replace the reader’s consciousness wholly with a black magician’s.

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

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Sing it.

Get hired for your womb.
Would you? Would you?
A woman’s just a room.
Would you? Would you?

He’ll ask you with his eyes.
Would you? Would you?
Your egg I’d fertilize.
Would you? Would you?
You ask him with a throb
Is that the way I got this job?
I would. Would you?

That seems like a lot when vanishingly few people go to the games.