… and therefore a popular early theory about the U Idaho students knifed to death in their beds seems plausible: It was a random ugly encounter, during a night of barhopping, with someone who turned out to be a vicious asshole, who followed them home and killed them.

PhD student, criminology, Washington State University.

FROM: SpartanFans! Graphics, Lansing

TO: MSU Publications, Trey Nowak, Head, Pub Office

SUBJ: 2023-24 University Brochure

Hey Trey hope you’re having a great day. With this email, SF!G is excited to present our revision/addition to MSU’s student recruitment brochure.

With the university’s recent push to get students to gamble, we brainstormed how we can exploit this new initiative, which promises to be very attractive to impulse-challenged teenagers across the country. Since MSU is one of America’s few fully-operational student-driven gambling businesses, we need to seize control of this market while we continue to enjoy a dominant position.

This is why we recommend the following image for the cover of the new brochure, with the accompanying copy:

MICHIGAN STATE: IT’S SO MUCH MORE THAN JUST LATE NIGHTS.

To anticipate your comment: No, he’s not holding a cigarette. We can easily add this, probably in front of the whiskey glass (once you decide which distillery you’d like to feature, among those with whom MSU partners, let us know and we’ll add a bottle with the relevant label). We also plan to edit in a large fraternity ring on his hand – probably the notorious Delta Kappa Epsilon haha! (Is it still under suspension?)

I don’t think we want to mess with the nice simple clarity of this image more than that (aside from, obviously, taking the gray out of the guy’s hair and thickening/tousling it a bit), but let us know if any other images (the muzzle of a gun between his fingers, in the context of gambling, would be an intriguing reminder of Stephen Paddock; but would it look too… suicidal?) seem attractive to you.

As always, we look forward to working closely as we optimize MSU’s advantages in the student-recruitment market.

One of the country’s safest locations suffers a mysterious bloody mass killing of four college students in their shared off campus house. Quite a few days later, with the community so afraid that many students are fleeing the school, the local police have still released extremely little information. What we do now know (assuming the information they’ve allowed out is correct) is hard to make sense of.

We are told that in the wee hours of the morning, with two other students asleep (?) in the house through the entire insanely violent attack, four students were knifed to death with an enormous “Rambo-style” knife. Only hours later the next day did someone call 911. Huh?

On the face of it, this is nuts. How can we possibly make sense of it? How can the surviving students not have awakened; how can they have waited hours (assuming they made the 911 call) to report the massacre? Did the killer tell them he’d come back and kill them too if they told anyone anything?

Okay, let’s assume sheer paralyzing terror plus drunk out of their minds? I mean, I’m digging deep here to find a mental condition that would allow them to be passed out through the thing, or motionless for a long time (who knows when the attacker(s) left?) in an attempt to save themselves. Could their paralytic terror have lasted into the next afternoon? No use of their cell phones? Why did neither of them, assuming a window anywhere near, hurl themself out of a window and run?

The killings were “targeted,” we’re told; which stands to reason. This sort of homicide is, as they say, personal. Robbery makes zero sense. At the same time, the word “grudge” seems absurdly inadequate.

Let’s say the killer wanted to kill only one of the four, but the others tried to defend him/her. Okay.

But then the question is how did one person with a knife (was there more than one?) overpower and destroy three other able bodied people? You would expect one or two to escape, screaming their lungs out and alerting the neighborhood. If the killer controlled the students by tying them up, why aren’t we being told they were tied up? UD understands that police withhold information for perfectly good reasons during the course of an investigation, but this seems strange nonetheless.

One way to go is to imagine that one or both of the surviving students did all this. They controlled the situation by quietly, methodically moving from room to room, taking on one student (or maybe two) at a time. But we know from the coroner’s report (she’s being very uncommunicative, but I think this is confirmed information) that bruises indicate one of the students fought like hell.

Since this sounds rather unpremeditated (rather, because the killer might have planned it for a very short time – let’s say hours), and viciously impassioned, I’m going to assume an abundance of forensic material. The killer, for instance, must also have bled somewhat, and must have (have had; he’s had plenty of time to shower) blood all over himself, bloody clothes, etc. Blood spatter must also be on walls and other surfaces. If there were sexual assaults, that might be another source of leads.

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Here’s one possibility.

All of the murdered students spent the night on the town – parties, bars, other social spots. During the course of this activity, one or two of the four got into a drunken nasty encounter with some random but dangerous/crazy other drunk person. Did some guy hit on a girlfriend and did that provoke one of the Idaho students? Something like that.

Let’s say the guy’s a member of one of Idaho’s many biker gangs. No sissy university student’s gonna humiliate him in front of his friends, he thinks, fingering the Rambo 9410 in his pocket… He follows them home and waits outside until they’re asleep.

… So I’ll trust you to go to YouTube and watch Sophia Rosing do her thing; I’d rather link you to this narrative by one of the long-suffering U Kentucky students attacked by this drunk violent racist.

About the video: It’s too bad for the worst among us that everyone’s got a camera these days and knows how to use it. This particular docudrama makes for irresistably engrossing viewing, so it’ll rack up a lot of views.

“Kiss your entire future away, babe,” says the camerawoman as Rosing spews it and spews it, and then hits everyone, including the policeman who shows up. Certainly her future at UK (Kentucky always makes the top ten most racist states lists, and for personal safety as well as reputational reasons, the school is going to have to let this … dynamic … white supremacist go); but she has looks, gumption, and the sort of straightforward approach to the race problem that guarantees her a political future in any number of Idaho congressional districts.

I’m gonna predict that maw and paw will bring out the jesus brigade to wrap her in their love and forgiveness. Cry like Jimmy Swaggart, Soph! If this happened a little further north, the folks would find some psychiatrist to attest to her years of emotional struggle; but it’s the southland, so I’m thinking it’ll be the jesus brigade.

When the frats kill – or destroy – a particularly young one, I post this variant I wrote of Randall Jarrell’s The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was 0.486 booze.

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

Don’t read how they destroyed him if you lack a strong stomach.

As with extreme gun enthusiasts, frat killers consider the death or almost-death of teenagers to be a perfectly okay price to pay for their pleasure.

Their obnoxious interruption of a debate on campus warranted immediate condemnation. But these are timid times. At least she came out with it.

“If you take away those two shootings, which of course are major, then it [is so far] vastly improved over 2021,” said resident-activist Matthew Gultanoff…

Police chased and caught a man who they said threw a 9 mm handgun into some shrubbery. The man told police he fired in self-defense. Video surveillance seemed to support his claim and Derrick Antonio Mitchell, 19, was charged only with three weapons violations, carrying a concealed firearm, tampering with physical evidence and possession of an altered firearm.

The “only” is priceless. Miami Beach has declared martial law. I mean a state of emergency/curfew.

UD certainly expects college football players to fuck themselves up during spring break. This usually involves alcohol, and certainly does not feature hyper-clean-cut West Pointers. Nah.

And yet there they are, stretched out on the palm-edged front yard of their rental house, having fentanyled themselves almost to death. Policemen administer Narcan to their fine ripped torsos, while other attractive young people stand around being upset and useless.

During a feminist theory class in my sophomore year, I said that non-Indian women can criticize suttee, a historical practice of ritual suicide by Indian widows. This idea seems acceptable for academic discussion, but to many of my classmates, it was objectionable.

The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.

I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcomed member of the group — and then I wasn’t.

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

Try saying we can criticize people who cut off Dawoodi Bohra Indian girls’ genitals! That’ll make your UVa classmates even angrier.

Have I ever. UD has been circling this thing for a few days, waiting for more information to be released before she blogs about it.

The much-laureled U Penn student’s last name – Fierceton? – was the first thing that seemed strange to ol’ UD. No one else has it – the only mention of it I can find appears in a translation of the ancient Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas – a book of myths whose translator puts the name “Fierceton River” on an obscure location.

Mackenzie’s last name used to be Morrison. Here her mother, Dr. Carrie Morrison, talks about breast density. Mackenzie dropped Morrison and added the dramatic Fierceton, which is fine, even fantastic, if you want to mark your separation from your roots, your own free fierce identity or whatever.

Fierceton’s roots are what you’d expect for someone born to a prominent physician: Private schools, horseback riding, cool vacations. But she has garnered all sorts of university goodies (scholarships, awards) reserved for underprivileged people, her argument being that her mother abused her, and in her teens she ended up in foster care. So she’s arguing that this means her background is foster care/abuse/underprivilege. Which a certain chapter of it is, but qua formulated humanoid she’s much more privileged than not, which puts into question the legitimacy of her underprivilege-based goodies.

Further – it certainly matters whether her claims of maternal abuse, amounting to broken bones, blocked breathing passages, and other nightmares, are true. All of the charges against her mother were dropped, and it looks as though hospital records list injuries much less nightmarish than the ones Fierceton claims.

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

One thing Fierceton has going against her is America’s really rampant culture of self-aggrandizing fakes, like UD‘s erstwhile colleague, Jessica Krug, an upper middle class Jewish woman from Kansas City who got all sorts of academic goodies by pretending to be a poor black person. Thanks to scads of identity scammers, we all have a vivid category into which to place Fierceton, whether this placement is in fact fair. Institutions are also hypersensitive – given this cultural background of scamming – to the possibility of being exploited by fakers, and in the case of Fierceton they have indeed started to come down hard on her. She is suing in response, so we will eventually know where at least some of the facts lie.

… but the ignominy lingers on. The University of Michigan just sits there refusing to acknowledge/apologize for its craven abandonment of Bright Sheng. The faculty is getting restless; seven hundred professors have written to the school to say what the fuck.

Of course the school had to suspend its grotesque “investigation” of an eminent composer who made the mistake of showing his class Olivier’s Othello; but now there’s the matter of setting things to rights and getting Sheng back in the classroom.

Sixty music department students have also written the school asking for their professor, and their school’s reputation, back.

But the school is still scared shitless, and must be pondering the truth commission one segment of the faculty proposes, where Sheng would publicly admit his centuries of injustice and beg forgiveness.

… where Big Murderers torture pledges and then make them drink themselves to death has been cut back a bit with the closure of one of the fraternities at BGSU; but never fear! Your eighteen year old has many other campus houses from which to choose his agonizing demise, so look forward to a life haunted by guilt and rage for simply having sent your son off to college. Good on Bowling Green for continuing to hold high the banner of the American Abattoir.

And – hint! – you haven’t drawn upon your ever-reliable fraternity system in a long time. Make that your next move.

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

And it looks as though USC’s long, happy relationship with the now-suspended Mark Ridley-Thomas will shine a bright light on the institution for some time to come.

Sing a song of dead men,
Stomachs full of rye.
Four and twenty freshmen
Baked in a Phi.

When the Phi’s indicted
The killers start to sing:
College life would be so dull
Without some poisoning.

Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan asks whether the latest dead eighteen year old – this one at the University of Kentucky, a grody football school whose frat system is exactly as disgusting as you’d imagine – might finally shame the nation into shutting down its collegiate slaughterhouses.

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

UD thanks Mondo for telling her about the latest.