“[T]he violence … is more than mildly sickening in its scale, its graphic presentation and its calculated gratuitousness. Well before the hero, Gi-hun (Lee), was playing the titular game in the final episode with a steak knife sticking through his hand, I’d had enough. Apologists can argue that the combination of businesslike dispatch and cartoonish exaggeration in the killing has aesthetic and thematic resonance, but nothing onscreen supports that take. There is little dread and even less emotion, just the logistical satisfaction of the body count…

[S]tylistic panache and mordant wit [allow some directors] to make outré violence feel like an organic element in their stories. In “Squid Game,” it’s just empty, bloody calories.”

Yet another example of the absolute refusal to name the primary reason Wyoming consistently tops national suicide rankings: All them surefire, convenient, guns lying around absolutely everywhere. This editorial in the Casper Star Tribune offers a full plate of cliches and a plea for better education. You betcha, partner.

“USC and its athletic department spent much of the past few years embroiled in various stupid scandals... USC was one focus of the Justice Department’s men’s basketball corruption case that went public in 2017, and the program finally got hit with NCAA probation earlier this year as a result. In 2019, USC was on the front page of the New York Times (and not the sports section) for its central role in the Varsity Blues scandal, wherein rich parents fabricated and bribed their kids’ way into elite schools. [USC] administrators [have been] dealing with racketeering and corruption cases and NCAA investigations… [O]utside legal disputes stemming from USC’s 2000s NCAA problems weren’t entirely wrapped up until the end of July. This July.”

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“USC had to fire back-to-back coaches in the middle of the season. Find another major program so badly directed that it’s had to do that.

And then USC had to do it again this year, something no other major program has even had to contemplate. Think of the degree of mismanagement that requires. From an incredibly immature Lane Kiffin to an incredibly intemperate Steve Sarkisian to an incredibly incompetent Clay Helton, they turned the keys of one of college football’s historic top three programs to an over-their-head trio of not-ready-for-prime-time players.”

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The second writer, who calls USC’s program “dead,” doesn’t even mention the very special Sarkisian/Puliafito/Nikias magic, about which UD wrote a few years ago. Surely he doesn’t mean to leave out of his autopsy the very top of USC’s leadership!

“Wealth is not necessarily accumulated at the expense of public interest and the needy.”

I guess this is what he means.

At least 173 shots fired in 3-hour span in St. Paul, injuring 7, but that was way back in May, and it doesn’t count because it was three separate incidents; whereas last night in St Paul, in one single incident at a bar, multiple shooters fired – and man, I don’t know, they’re not giving out estimates yet, but the shooters killed one person and injured fourteen and apparently the bambambam just went on and on so I’m thinking

multiple shooters

crowded venue

protracted gunfight, chaos

so okay let’s say conservatively that’s 400-500 shots and maybe many more. Not as many as the Vegas shooter – that was a thousand bullets – but he did massive planning and amassed a vast arsenal in his hotel room. It’s not fair to compare the bullet count in St Paul, which was a spontaneous massacre, to Stephen Paddock’s military-precision atrocity; but on the other hand, especially given its unplanned nature, the St Paul shootout is impressive.

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Less impressive, though I guess striking in a way, is St Paul’s sheriff predicting the shooting at the Truck Park bar the night before it happened.

“Quite the gathering here at the Truck Park,” [Bob] Fletcher said on his livestream. “Holy mackerel. This is a lot of folks. We’ve never had any shots fired right here. I hope we never do, but this volume at some point it’s gonna happen, right?”

His 16 year old daughter “shot herself with her dad’s handgun in their living room. The gun was kept on the mantle and her father usually took it to bed with him, but had not that night.”

Excellent protection.

Whether it’s rape, dirty recruitment, or assault, Boulder has long been front and center — and they’re keeping the beating-the-shit-out-of-everyone thing going with hotly recruited hometown hero Carson Lee, who titles his Twitter page with Isaiah 41:10, which in his case would seem to go something like yea, I will repeatedly pummel thee with the immense right hand of mine immense arm.

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According to the affidavit, the man said Lee punched him about 30 times. Doctors later said the man suffered a fractured skull and internal brain bleeding.

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Only nineteen and blessed with spectacular tackling skills – thirty blows resulting in the sort of brain injury you only see inflicted at the very highest levels of university football. Thirty shows commitment. It shows follow-through. It shows star quality.

UD fully expects Colorado to hold tight to Mad Dog Lee even if he’s found guilty; but on the off chance the school decides to let him go, we can all sit back and enjoy the spectacle of increasingly mindless, vicious university football factories taking their chance, one after another, on the guy. Eventually maybe he’ll hit the jackpot and turn into Richie Incognito.

… for whom 74 is the new 44.

See this post for background on PM Babis, undone by what came flying out of Pandora’s box. For indeed he has lost an election that was his to win, simply because he seems to be a grasping lying motherfucker.

But God never closes a door without opening a window. Babis’ consolation prize is his $22 million Château Bigdick or Bigaud or something which here’s the entrance and I hear tell it’s got the pool and the palms and everything a bounced Czech might need to make him feel a mite better.

And indeed I have covered some of the most obnoxious; but let us consider more pleasant things. Curtis Institute, the school that educated the unearthly Yuja Wang, just got an anonymous $20 million donation.

Anonymous: How about that? And given so that the world can be more musical. How about that.

Professor Bright Sheng leaves one Cultural Revolution and enters another.

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BOYCOTT WISCONSIN PUBLIC RADIO

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BOYCOTT KEVIN SCOTT

Yeah I know but if you read it alongside this article, a mere babe at twenty-four minutes old, it spices up somewhat the dully predictable guilty sentence that America’s own Jay Gatsby – John Wilson, Harvard MBA – just received for bribing people and lying through his teeth to get not one, not two, but THREE of his rich, dim, klutzy spawn into fancy universities. Because Wilson himself is no stranger to … uh…

Says he played football at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. No record of it.

‘[S]ales quadrupled during Wilson’s tenure [at Staples, but] did not come close to the “10X” growth he touts. Over the same period, net income increased by 481 percent, according to the securities filing, not 800 percent.’

‘Wilson claims in his online resume that his success at Staples led him to be “selected by CFO magazine in 1994 as one of the Top 50 CFOs in the United States.” The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Vincent Ryan, was unable to find any record of Wilson’s recognition in the publication’s archive.’

Getting tired of quoting. There’s more.

“[T]ax havens” aren’t really for avoiding taxes: They exist to help elites avoid the rule of law that they impose on the rest of us. The offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.

Therefore, the Great State of South Dakota will do all that it can to establish and sustain the world’s most secretive and powerful tax havens.

We found your poster boy.