Well, he wouldn’t, would he. His total mismanagement (we’re being kind: it’s just as likely it was total deliberate rule-breaking) of his school’s sports programs has fucked Stephen F Austin University over but good. The school has rewarded him by putting him back in the classroom, where he can share with generations of students his … innovative sports management techniques.

Stephen F. Austin faces a series of penalties, including the vacating of games, for a lack of institutional control violation (Level I) involving the “erroneous certification” of 82 student-athletes in nine sports over the past decade, the NCAA announced Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the NCAA announced an eventual postseason ban for the school’s baseball, men’s basketball and football programs, all of which were included in Wednesday’s release, due to an insufficient Academic Progress Rate.

With the latest reprimand, the school must return 50% of revenue (more than $60,000) from the 2016 NCAA tournament, when the basketball program was led by current Illinois coach Brad Underwood, and vacate any games that included ineligible athletes. Other penalties include a 2.5% reduction in football scholarships and a 5% reduction in baseball scholarships — which can be assessed this season or next season — plus three years’ probation.

Such trivial stuff: You wouldn’t want any heads to fall because of it… No one’s fault, really, and McDermand doesn’t want to talk, so let it go…

… (to paraphrase Yeats), as I looked around for language about tea in order to honor the first International Tea Day,

I finally remembered “Lament” by Thom Gunn. One of the most beautiful AIDS-era poems, it recalls the long sad death of a friend, and among its lines are these:

… Your cough grew thick and rich, its strength increased.   
Four nights, and on the fifth we drove you down   
To the Emergency Room. That frown, that frown:   
I’d never seen such rage in you before
As when they wheeled you through the swinging door.   
For you knew, rightly, they conveyed you from   
Those normal pleasures of the sun’s kingdom   
The hedonistic body basks within
And takes for granted—summer on the skin,   
Sleep without break, the moderate taste of tea   
In a dry mouth.

The poorest town in America, where living conditions are so crowded and squalid that in 1992 seventy percent of their children got hepatitis A, thanks this country for its willingness to let it live a welfare-dependent, scofflaw existence by breaking virus-containment laws and endangering hundreds of children, as well as the people of neighboring communities.

I wonder. If local and state authorities had ever, over the course of the last fifty years, taken the endemic law-breaking of this locality with real seriousness, I wonder if it might have stopped spreading epidemic illnesses among its children. (Don’t even talk to me about measles! Or vaccinations!)

… classrooms, Texas motivational speaker Eric Hogue steps up to ban not books but women. In his capacity as mayor of a small city, Hogue has decreed that women may not lead prayers at city council meetings onaccounta the Bible done said they caint.

Now ah don’t know much bout Christian invocations afore civic meetings, ahm a big ol’ blue stater, and round these parts the idea of praying together afore a town council meeting is pretty fucking weird, and, you know, making sure the prayer always happens to be Christian is even fucking weirder. But you caint quarrel with Mayor Hogue’s Bibleology – the Good Book do indeed go on bout how stupid and pointless women are, and how they better shut up ifn they know what’s good for them.

And I for one am ready to bow down to the superiority of men like Mr. Hogue to the female race. Just look at the guy and ask yourself if you could ever (I mean, ifn you’re a woman ask yourself) hope to accomplish all that he has accomplished. Start with his picture. (Scroll down.) The man is a Clown for Christ, bringing the Good News About Women, in a chock-full of chuckles format, to young people all over America. He has even self-published a clown book – Clinky The Clown (not to be confused with the very similar-sounding, very famous, Blinky The Clown) – which you can purchase. And he’s a magician!

What woman could hope to compete, invocation-wise, with a clown-magician who takes every single word in the Bible literally? Mayor Hogue, the stage is yours.

… to God’s ears.

… these two just got creamed.

From the outset, these two Varsity Blues parents passing their daughters off as rowers not only denied they did anything wrong; they truly believed… they knew… they did nothing wrong. That’s why they felt confident demanding that a judge throw out all the charges against them: How could anyone sustain charges when they did. nothing. wrong?

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

UD likes to point out instances of true moral degeneracy when they occur. For these two people, being rich means you use your money to hurt less wealthy people, corrupt systems, and gain advantages. Everyone knows that, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s reality. While serving their jail terms, and then throughout their subsequent lives, these two will continue to believe this, though they are now willing to acknowledge that stinking legal systems exist under which this activity may actually be prosecuted.

“It just seemed like they were trying to see what they could get away with.”

Why not? When you don’t know what science is, quarantines seem silly.

*********

A growing number of schools and synagogues have reopened in recent days, defying city and state restrictions.

Are parents on board? Who cares?

According to a recent report in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, some Borough Park schools have ended phone instruction, forcing parents to choose between sending their children to illegal in-person classes or risk falling behind.

The pandemic forced a temporary shutdown of random mass shootings recorded by the shooter, but as of tonight, we’re back in business: A wee babe with an AR-15 opened fire at a shopping center because “society is mean.”

The echt, iconic American scene playing itself out in Glendale Arizona – an insane idiot barely out of his teens trying to kill us all with his enormous rifle – tells you that we were only temporarily out of commission. Now we’re back, all guns blazing.

… Clitslash.

… from beneath a bush in her new garden.

Soundtrack: Deafening early morning birdsong.

Duh. Any idiot knows that online instruction, while sometimes okay, is never great, never anything like face to face real time real world classroom education.

Not that UD didn’t constantly hear, at campus meetings (long before the virus) devoted to onlining more and more of her university’s offerings, that online was “exactly the same quality as in-class.” People actually said this. They said it confidently. They said it as if prefacing it Everyone knows that… As if anyone who might be thinking about demurring might want to keep their trap shut.

The drama, spontaneity, and challenge of other smart human beings sitting around you discussing an issue? The intensity-packed emotional/intellectual presence of a flesh and blood professor in love with her subject and excited by her students’ responsiveness to it? That cherished moment after class when some of her students come up to her and want to keep talking into the hallways and into her office? Meh. Meh! Feh. Feh! Who needs it!

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

The university told a whopper. It made a Whopper.

Eh alors. Universities tried to keep the Online Whopper fresh and sizzling, tried to make it a tenderly expertly fashioned Beef Wellington rather than a … Whopper… But all it took was some scrutiny by a few people uncynical and serious about their education to reveal the sesame bun under the puff pastry.

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

And lo! Behold the lawsuits all over this land as people realize that $30,000 a semester for techno-fumbling, anonymity, and emotional disengagement is on the high side.

When you’re a theocracy, you reward the theos for their covid-amplifying ignorance/civic indifference (see many recent posts on this blog about ultra-orthodox criminal negligence in the matter of the virus in Israel). “They put everything in the hands of the ultra-Orthodox, they capitulated on everything,” laments one of Israel’s vanishingly few enlightened voices about the new government.

Yet what more capable hands than the corrupt and benighted rabbis who have impoverished and infected their own constituency?

From Richard Burr, On Going Away

Tell me not, citizens, I am corrupt
         That from the Committee
Of the Senate I all abrupt
         (To spend more time with family) fly.

True, more golf balls now I chase,
         More leisure time I yield;
And with a stronger faith embrace
         Insider trades afield.

Yet this self-dealing is such
         As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dears, so much,
         Lov’d I not stock dumps more.

[Recent] mass arrests [in Israel] are the latest incident in a global trend with dangerous consequences — a small but committed segment of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community from Israel to London to New York refusing to obey social distancing orders… About 50% of Israel’s coronavirus cases have been in largely ultra-Orthodox municipalities, according to a CNN analysis of Ministry of Health data through May 12. The country is about 14% ultra-Orthodox… Though some communities have been hit hard, ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel may look at the pandemic and think: “That’s what providence wanted and I accept this as it is…”

And how nice that they are accepting it also on our behalf.

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

Christopher Hitchens:

With a large part of itself, [messianic religion] quite clearly wants us all to die. It wants this world to come to an end. You can tell the yearning for things to be over… The contempt for the things of this world shows through … So that the painful business of living as humans and studying civilizations and trying to acquire learning and knowledge, health and medicine, can all be scrapped and the cult of death can take over… [What] a hateful idea.

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

“He” is one of many clueless coots running the haredim and everyone they come in contact with into the ground. Literally into the ground. All because Israel has allowed – encouraged – a large group of people to live in contemptuous ignorance of a world of other people.

Israel as a Jewish gathering-in. Quite the joke. At the moment it’s a Jewish cult-factory, and that country is living – dying – with the consequences.