“Now whether he blinks or not, I don’t know. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t know whether Bannon is trying to martyr himself; I don’t know if Steve Bannon thinks that twelve months in the pokey is time to get in good shape and begin the next chapter of his career and write a book, like others have done in the fascist movement…”
Steve Schmidt, on The Beat with Ari Melber
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.
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UD thanks Mondo for telling her about the latest.
I prefer not to, says the football coach at Washington State, and haggadah tell you (Passover pun), UD‘s always had a soft spot for silent machos who canter off and everyone watches them go and says What a man and No one will ever know why and Miss Ellie’s daddy he owns the biggest copper mine in the state and everybody knows she wanted to marry him but.
Nick Rolovich gave up fifteen million dollars and the wild adulation of the entire Evergreen State because he refused to get vaccinated because… because none of your goddamn business is because. Fine. Nuff said.
Behind this flat descriptive sentence lie the breathtaking, deathtaking statistics of America’s most murderous state, Louisiana, where shooting, especially among the very young, is happening pretty much all the time, pretty much everywhere. Two fatal shootings within a week on one American university campus – Grambling State, with today’s killing at a homecoming party – tells you how normalized it’s all become. Soon this stuff won’t make the news at all.
Grambling’s not far from Shreveport, if you want to get a quick sense of the world we’re talking about here. Shreveport’s already got among the highest gun violence rates in the nation; this year, they’ve gone UP eleven percent from the city’s rate last year.
Today’s Grambling killing happened at two AM…? The shooter wasn’t a student…? You might say there’s not much one can do about this – but there is, actually. Why in the world would you let your kid go to school at a place where they let campus parties go til two AM; and why, given the riot of gun violence in Louisiana, would the school not check i.d.s and weaponry at campus gatherings?
The school claims it had all sorts of security there. And that tells you that not only is it dumb enough to sponsor large late-night parties in a very dangerous neighborhood, but it’s also incompetent.
Don’t let your kid go to Grambling.
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Update: You see the … fatal disconnect in the president’s remarks: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” Man seems to think he’s in dear old Arcadia rather than dear old murder capital USA. With that degree of denial at the very top, we shouldn’t be surprised at these outcomes.
“As an alumnus, I’m embarrassed,” said Edmond Davis, who was visiting his alma mater with his wife. “Deeply embarrassed. It saddens me.”
Yes. Your school can’t hold a homecoming without a fatal shooting. You should take the school’s president by the shoulders – firmly – and say as directly as possible Grambling is unfortunately located in the heart of the heart of American homicide. If you want the school to survive, you are going to have to make it as much of an armed camp as possible. And by the way, doesn’t the school have trustees? Do they do anything?
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“We must … accept that the issues we face with gun violence are non-students who come to our great institution and cause harm to students and other non-students who are casually enjoying themselves,” [Grambling’s student government president] wrote. “We must realize that at some point we must stop allowing outside individuals to pass through checkpoints without university clearance.”
Scandalous that this obvious necessity occurs to students but not university leadership.
She wonders why some people consider this a strange prediction.
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They’re a little slow down south. They’ll get with the program.
“What difference does [the ban] make,” said … proud father Nicola Sparti, 24, who described his occupation as “a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” (“Flees from Carabinieri on a motorbike,” read a recent newspaper article about him.) “One day the godfather’s there and the next he’s gone. But a father is forever.”
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When it comes to Catholicism, Sicily does a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
‘[T]he current fashion [is] a performance, a kind of, yes, virtue signaling… Upon what authority are [Bright Sheng’s denouncers] allowed such primacy of influence in how we speak, think and teach in our times?’
… an obsession with fundraising and money and a lack of oversight that has led repeatedly to scandal, from a drug-using medical school dean to wealthy parents cheating the admissions process.”
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As UD expected, they’re being WAY ageist. But … whatever works…
“They have decided to charge an 83-year-old woman,” whines ex-dean Marilyn Flynn’s lawyer. Tell it to this dude. Apparently you can be charged for crimes you committed even if you’re a coot.
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Nice side story, by the way, about the glories of online education, about which UD has written for a long time:
“Flynn [thought she] had found what seemed to be a lucrative line of revenue from online degree programs.
At first, the agreement with a company called 2U worked so well that Flynn was doing testimonials for investors, but eventually it became an albatross. USC was saddled with pricey downtown office leases and salaries for a raft of new teachers for the virtual program, and the university had to split the tuition money with 2U. The economics demanded constant growth and enrollment ballooned until USC was the largest social work program in the country. Student quality declined, rankings fell and an enormous hole opened in the social work school’s operating budget.
The school would ultimately be forced to lay off nearly 30 staff and slash spending… [The] school’s existence was threatened…”
Lack of oversight? Like Kwaaaaazy. Like has anyone noticed how Strega Nona over there in social work is cooking up an awful lot of pasta? Yeah looks weird but we’re kind of busy with our deadhead med school dean and the alcoholic football coach…
Datz how you get there… Datz how you get pretty much everywhere USC has been in the last ten or so years.
I’ve been worried sick they wouldn’t break fifty billion.
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Truly, these are the times that try men’s souls.
Brodsky Museum, St Petersburg
Circled by Belomorkanal smoke
And, near the Arctic, by fast-cooled chifir tea —
We want these old apartments to evoke
The depth of this, deeper than poetry,
Deeper than your bitter words that spoke
The nothingness of time and history.
That is: The bathroom stink you tried to cloak,
Sharing the bowl with two other families.
The desk display of poets who provoked
You into verse: Auden, Frost… A messy
Desk, a mid-modern aesthetic baroque
Of books and bottles and a cup of tea.
Asleep for years, these dusty rooms stoke
Unembittered hearts — too young for ennui —
Who press against the doorway to soak
In the atmosphere. They pay the entry fee
And immediately want to stroke
The same cracked imperial walls that he
Lived sandwiched between, bitter and broke
But not broken.
And big rich Norway couldn’t find a way to put him in prison for a long time? Is it Norway’s policy to wait until radicalized career criminals kill five people and injure three others to jail them? How long will he stay incarcerated this time? Six months?
The University of Southern California is colossally corrupt. It’s corrupt almost everywhere: In its athletics program (I’d name names, but there are too many); in its med school (Puliafito; Varma; Tyndall); in its admissions system (Varsity Blues); on its board of trustees (Barrack), and now in its school of social work. (Click on my first link for details on all of these instances.) It has succeeded in attaining Yeshiva University levels of corruption.
You have to pay close attention to understand the massive social work school corruption – here’s a good, detailed description of it – but know that the person allegedly engineering the scheme was the dean of the school, a woman desperately greedy for money after she apparently mismanaged the school to a huge deficit. She and the local politician she bribed in exchange for lucrative contracts are currently under federal indictment.
And here’s the real beauty of it, given USC’s perennial, and, most recently, one billion dollar, problem with sexual harassment: The dean arranged the quick hiring onto her faculty of the politician’s son – even got the entirely unqualified dude a professorship! – although the guy only needed a job because he was about to be charged with sexual harassment at his current job.
The politician is “a graduate of the university, from which he received a doctorate in social ethics,” and yes, you cannot make this shit up.
I said here that Jon Gruden’s the stupidest person in the world. That was before I met Brandon Fellows, echt Trumpian.
I come to praise Michelangelo’s David, not bury him.
Rather than submerging his naughty bits in a… shaft, Dubai should apply its local modesty icon- the hijab – to his middle section.