A Michigan State student who spent hours terrified, hiding in the dark, while one of many Americans working out his personal issues via mass slaughter killed people around her, registers her loss of innocence. Oh. Here too.
Here there everywhere. Everything everywhere all at once.
Also perhaps that particular American accounting: We only lost three. Virginia Tech was 32.
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Her partner rejected Va Tech because of the unbearable pathos/enduring stigma. You can’t forget the way that 76 year old professor died for his students… Or the sickening gun-toting photograph of the madman – mad boy – who did it… Maybe you know enough to know about yet other murders and lockdowns on that campus.
Enough already. Who needs it. Go someplace with at least a lower body count. Better chance to get out after four years alive, or not critically wounded. It’s like figuring out your chance of getting out of Baylor not raped.
Oh well. Enough of that. Back to the Murdaugh trial.
In this interview, he blames the shutdown of the basketball program, plus a purge of its coach and others, on a total lack of leadership at the school. No one’s home. Because no one’s home, someone recently hired a shitty clueless coach who probably doesn’t even see what’s wrong with hazing; because no one’s home, the lame duck chancellor let a university sports team full of gunnies and hazers form itself.
Eventually the gunplay and sexual assaults on fellow teammates (with the team watching) just got to be too much sleaze, even for bigtime university sports.
Plus they can expect a LOT of lawsuits, from players and coaches. Expensive.
The guy also pointed out that what with the loss from the roster of
*the guy who recently shot and killed a UNM student he’s been fighting with,
*the two guys who are leaving cuz they can’t take the sleaze anymore,
*and the three hazers who are leaving cuz they’re expected in court (court; not basketball court),
the team doesn’t have enough players to play the game anyway.
The remaining democrats in Israel – those who haven’t given up on the mess and moved to Bethesda, Maryland – gather in droves to protest the destruction of their judiciary.
How sensitively put… Wouldn’t want to bludgeon the end of the sentence with the blunt force sexual … Want to gentle things along with the delicate smidgeon in nature…
And yet…
What do you really want? Do you want a writer who waves her crumpet and says Well I declare! Multiple sources … [wink wink nudge nudge]…
Or do you want ol’ UD to spill the tea… er, beans? UD, who has for years been covering what guys do to guys in the locker room when broom comes to shove?
Ok. While of course UD did not have the pleasure of attending the New Mexico State University haze, she’s pretty sure three or four guys held down each victim (the event was probably witnessed by much of the team, and to make the police investigation a snap, some of the stupider players probably recorded it on their cell phones) and while he lay writhing and shrieking one of them shoved the end of a straw broom up his rectum.
That night, vomiting with rage and self-disgust, the victim(s) took his nightly call from his mother, who heard something funny in his voice, got him to confess he’d been anally raped, and when she got off the phone with him she and her husband called the university, a lawyer, the cops, and the local newspaper.
NMSU, a wholly vile and dysfunctional location, all of whose leadership is interim times ten and desperately trying to leave, issues a pallid statement, shuts down the rape club, and prays the state legislature doesn’t hold against the school the fact that it’s a cesspool. (Spoiler Alert: The corrupt and mindless state legislature won’t hold it against the school. Boys will be boys. These are real bonding experiences.)
Now I’m not saying there were guns involved. Usually this quaint lad on lad action involves merely fists and brooms; but this being the USA I can’t see why there wouldn’t have been guns involved. Look at the team logo.
Maybe they shoved gun butts up their butts.
Ave Atque Vale:
Now they are a shit show. You have a player involved shooting, a catfishing, a fight with a rival. Shit even the cops chased [the] team bus down the highway. Yet here we are after all of that, [with hazing incidents and a decision] to suspend its season.
Yeah. I also called the “in front of the team” thing.
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The victim, whose name was redacted in the report along with those of the other players, said other incidents involving inappropriate physical and sexual touching had been occurring in locker rooms and on road trips since last summer.
What a team! If they don’t outright shoot you, they at least finger your anus.
[T]he new allegations involved potential violations of university policy and were separate from the November 19 shooting of a student from the University of New Mexico.
[T]he allegations involved multiple players hazing a teammate more than once with a police report filed.
What can we say on this blog about nauseating New Mexico State that we haven’t already said a hundred times? (All the up-to-date details you can stomach here.) In an academic landscape of booze, guns, hazing, and cheating, schools like NMSU, where reporters must distinguish among ongoing acts of vileness, stand out boldly.
You figure the highest paid person on campus must be the recruiting coach, cuz he’s the one bringing the hazers and the killers — people whose intrinsic violence does wonders on the court. And recruits can rest safe in the knowledge that the rest of the staff will hide the guns that do the killing from the cops. Definitely a team effort at this school.
I mean, some of these players make the shooter at Richneck Elementary look like a kid.
New York’s Williamsburg Charter points the way: Students enjoy multiple school-based mass shootings over the course of the school year, with all the opportunities they offer for small group discussions of violence, firearms, conflict resolution, the role of the police, and so on. As faculty who try to intervene are picked off, discussion is enriched with explorations of mortality.
The mystery of the awful 2021 Tesla crash, about which I wrote here, has been solved.
A final report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board found that a 2021 fiery crash that killed two people in a Tesla was a result of the driver speeding and being intoxicated… NTSB’s investigation determined the probable cause of the crash was “the driver’s excessive speed and failure to control his car, due to impairment from alcohol intoxication in combination with the effects of two sedating antihistamines, resulting in a roadway departure, tree impact, and post-crash fire.”
You can take the Texas good ol’ boy out of twentieth century car technology, but you can’t take him out of revving the engine plus polypharmacy.
The twenty-first century televised adaptation of William Faulkner’s Snopes family saga – As Murdaughs Lay Dying – proceeds apace, but the prosecution, which should easily take down Big Daddy Murdaugh, the obvious murderer, has run into a shrapnel of trouble.
Used to be all sorts of firearm evidence – stuff like gunshot residue – could put a case over the top; but now that all-American clans like the Murdaughs own forty trillion guns which they’re always toting around and shooting off, almost any piece of gun evidence is, er, shot down. When your entire house, car, wardrobe, fields, and gardens are gun-residue saturated, it’s hard to determine which residue comes from family-slaughtering and which comes from, you know, jest reglur family fun.
Although Scathing Online Schoolmarm is eager to introduce the Toscano Law Group, Newport News, to the semi-colon (there’s no problem with the sentence I’ve quoted in my headline, but throughout the letter the absence of the semi-colon is a problem), she nonetheless acknowledges that, effective-exposition-wise, its extended letter about the public elementary school system, to which you entrust your little ones every day, rocks.
You begin to understand homeschooling when you read about daily life at Richneck Elementary School. When your six year old tyke’s classmates aren’t smacking at/spitting on the teacher, they’re on the playground fingering their Glocks. Put aside curricular questions; your family definitely stands a better chance of not being reduced to multiple quivering mounds of blood if you stay locked in your house.
The key to transforming your school to Lord of the Flies With Firearms is the school’s administrative team. Without a strong shared commitment to violence among the principals and vice-principals you are getting nowhere in terms of mass slaughter.
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Violent cultures make violent toddlers, so for optimal school slaughter you also need a critical mass of parents who leave loaded guns lying all over the house, the way the Richneck shooter’s parents did.
Do you think, knowing all too well they had a psychotic would-be killer on their hands, these parents were “negligent”? How many guns do you think they had at home — again, knowing their kid wanted to kill? Ten? Twenty?
Babe, it’s not negligence, is it? Nor is it negligence when an assistant principal rejects desperate begging from multiple teachers and students that she check a psychotically violent student for weapons.
Let’s call it what it is.
Large swathes of the country are shooting off guns all the time. They like to. It’s exciting and satisfying, as America’s finest news source reminds us. American flag pins in Congress have been replaced by AR-15 pins. From the highest to the lowest forms of civic life in this country, guns are everything. They are everywhere. You’re a bloody fool (literally) if you don’t know this and begin to act accordingly.
Are you afraid, as Varsity Blues concludes with its mastermind’s prison sentence (he got a few years), that we’ve seen the end of colorful, fun, characters like these?
DO. NOT. FEAR. When God closes a door, He opens a window.
First of all, Philip Esformes is headed for a retrial, and nothing Varsity Blues has to offer comes anywhere near Philip Esformes.
Plus if you’re not watching the State of South Carolina’s multipart adaptation of the greatest William Faulkner novel of all time – As Murdaughs Lay Dying – you are missing the glorious reincarnation of Flem Snopes and his clan. The trial is ongoing, available live on YouTube.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
