… Mike Bianchi.

[Florida State University] decided to fire Willie Taggart after a year-and-a-half and pay him nearly $20 million NOT to coach for the four years remaining on his contract. That was followed up by the Arkansas Razorbacks firing Chad Morris in less than two years and having to pay him more than $10 million NOT to coach. This is on top of the $12 million in buyout money the Hogs are still paying their previously fired coach, Bret Bielema…

[W]hen did it become OK for public educational institutions to simply fritter away millions of dollars like this? Think about it: In what other profession could you cost your company $17 million over two years — which is essentially what Arkansas AD Hunter Yurachek did by hiring and firing Morris — and keep your job? Can you believe Arkansas will actually end up paying $17 million for a coach who never won a conference game?…

Why, for example, did Tennessee feel the need to hire Jeremy Pruitt and give him a six-year contract worth nearly $4 million a year. Couldn’t the Vols have signed him Pruitt to, say, a four-year contract worth $2 million a year? …

Before hiring Pruitt, Tennessee fired its former coach Butch Jones and had to pay him an $8 million buyout. Why? Because Tennessee extended Jones’ contract after he went — wait for it! — 6-6 in his second season…

Why did the Florida Gators extend Jim McElwain’s contract in June 2017 and fire him four months later? When McElwain was hired away from Colorado State, the Gators had to pay most of McElwain’s $7.5 million contract buyout with his former team. When McElwain was fired, he negotiated another $7.5 million buyout settlement from the Gators. In other words, the Gators paid millions for McElwain both coming and going.

This mountain of a man is under increasing subterranean pressures, and something’s got to give. As faithful servant to his yet more herculean campanian, he has been living in fertile but shaky splendor amid the peaks of power.

Once a cool and sophisticated statesman, Pompeo is feeling the heat, and now seems destined to be buried under the acidic, blistering cleavage between himself and his master. Already you can discern the outlines of the plastered-in void his decaying corpse will leave.

… you’re a better man than I am. The writer struggles to give a complete account of all the multimillionaire assholes on NFL teams, but like everyone else who tries this trick, he seems overcome, toward the middle of the piece, by his own incredulity at the numbers.

UD wonders if it will ever occur to this guy that the reason violent, amoral, and on occasion overtly demento, shitskies are all over our best teams is that the game targets them. Still unclear? RECRUITS them. SCOUTS for them. COMPETES for them. LAVISHLY REWARDS them. The worst of the worst, most recently, were both team captains. Beau idéal: Richie Incognito. Tell me if this is still over your head.

Warren hurt his feelings (something about how he was kinda greedy to take a seventy million dollar bonus at a time when the American people were suffering through one of our worst economic downturns – a bonus, kiddies – – above his zillions in salary), so he made a Pocohantas jibe against her, as in she’s a tribalist…”Maybe tribalism is just in her DNA.”

Ooch ouch that’s gotta hurt. But now that he mentions tribes, let’s explore the one Lloyd’s people belong to. Here ya go. He’s kind of a chieftain – much of the tribal ritual is about him. In particular, his greed.

Here’s a headline with a whiff of the obsolete. Not long from now, parents will recall for their children the quaint practice of suspending football games when people in the stands or on the field initiated mass shootings. “Now of course they play right on through it – couldn’t have youth football if you suspended every game where some little fella took out his AR-15! … People still scatter. But as soon as the shooter’s finished, everyone comes back to the stadium. And something I’ve noticed is that there’s an excitement factor, a wake-up factor – like the guys on the field and the people in the stands are all shook up – but in a good way – after the shooting. The players are sharper; the fans are more enthusiastic. The whole thing feels more real; bleeding children remind the crowd of the preciousness of life and how lucky they are to be here, on a sunny day, watching football.”

Many other high-profile cases of in-game assault have gone unpunished by the criminal justice system. Kermit Washington nearly killed Rudy Tomjanovich with a punch, and was never charged. Nor was Mike Tyson for biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear. Nor was Albert Haynesworth for stomping on Andre Gurode’s head.

In the immortal words of Rufus T Firefly:

Tell him to take a teaspoonful of bicarbonate baking soda and a half a glass of water.

And it’s Texas A&M, arguably the country’s most pornographic football school, so you know that however many other people Myles Garrett beats the shit out of on national tv, the page will stay up…

UD loves the way everybody’s all ooh I’m shocked that a football game would produce a brawl and the brawl would produce an assault… And when the hero of Texas A&M, now a professional player, gets no jail time and a three-day suspension, are you still gonna be shocked? No, because your initial shock will give way to appreciation of the sincere and heartfelt violence of the people you love to watch splitting heads on the gridiron. These dudes mean it!

Says on Garrett’s Texas A&M page that he “regularly speaks to young people at various schools around the local community,” and I’m wondering what he said. If anybody annoys you, I want you to pull off their helmet and use it as a weapon to smash their head.

But look. I mean, A&M. A player arrest rate that will make your smashed head swim. Johnny Manziel’s enabler through his long alcoholic history there. Zaycoven Henderson! Rick Perry was a cheerleader (not kidding).

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Garrett [already] had to fight the perception he was a dirty player after multiple penalties in Week 2 against the New York Jets, including one roughing the passer hit that broke Jets quarterback Trevor Siemian’s ankle. He was not suspended for that, however.

Now, when he kills someone… then his hero page will come down.

Nah.

… has ruled that ISIS propagandist Hoda Muthana is not an American citizen and can’t come back here? The New York Times, which runs a Pietà image of her with her child, calls it a “surprise ruling,” but if you read this blog you’re not surprised. There’s reasonably compelling evidence, in this case, that as the daughter of a Yemeni diplomat she never held actual American citizenship.

[Judge Reggie] Walton expressed sympathy for [Muthana’s father], but he ruled that there was enough evidence that Hoda Muthana was born while her father still had diplomatic status…

Assuming she can obtain Yemeni citizenship, she will be much happier there, because, just like ISIS, they still have slaves in that country.

Airbnb: Bringing Gangland to your neighborhood.

“It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement,” Cooperman said… “I’m just saying that it’s not an impressive amount of capital for two people that were leading physicians for their entire work life,” Cooperman went on. “You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating.”

Just to get you situated pronto in le monde Léon, if I may, where ten million dollars is a shocking shortfall, a humiliating failure, and an opportunity to shoot one’s mouth off about one’s own incomparable booty… Did bribery help Leon? Did insider trading (he had to pay a five million dollar fine to make the SEC go away in that one) help Leon? Is it fair for him to compare himself to two sadly fraud-challenged physicians who probably didn’t even engage in theft of medicaid funds?

In the political realm, Leon loves to bat designated-belligerent-billionaire-hitter. He hit one out of the park with Obama – said he never worked a day in his life; said he was just like Hitler! And now he’s taking a big ol’ swing at Elizabeth Warren, who had the temerity to remind people that he had to settle that big ol’ insider trading charge (this was long after he settled the bribery charge). (Why did he settle the insider trading charge? He said he was going to fight it.)

[Cooperman called] Warren “disgraceful” in an interview with CNBC. “She doesn’t know who the f— she’s tweeting. I gave away more in the year than she has in her whole f—-ing lifetime,” Cooperman continued. Cooperman also said he “won” his case involving insider trading, though he actually just settled it with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Someone should write an essay about that favorite word of the rogue: DISGRACEFUL. DISGRACEFUL. DEEZGRAITZFOOLLLL. The president, Giuliani, Dershowitz – all of our country’s highest-profile, most wretched rogues, use it all the time. Such a prim prissy word – the sort of thing you associate with Margaret Dumont – and yet all these guys – who are clearly Groucho Marx in the matter – are doing her. They’re doing Dumont! Why, I never! Really! There are certain conventions!

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UPDATE: It takes a strong man to cry. On national tv.

How do you solve a problem like McMansions?
Cavernous shells impossible to sell?
Rent them all out for huge illegal parties
Making the life of those around them hell


Price is eight hundred daily for the trashing
Don't give a thought to local rules and regs
Jam all the folks and weaponry you want to
Plenty of room for super jumbo kegs


Everyone lies, the owner and the renter
Neighbors complain but town officials suck:
"We won't do shit, but here's a little wisdom:
When bullets start flying the best thing to do is duck." 

… but the melody lingers on.

A blog like this one, which features a much-used category titled Beware the B-School Boys, welcomes a bunch of new books with titles like Nothing Succeeds like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools and Leadership BS. Also a bunch of new opinion pieces with titles like We Should Bulldoze the Business School. Very nice.

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UPDATE: Right on cue. A perfectly timed news item on the subject just broke, and it’s being widely covered for all the wrong reasons. Everyone’s hyperventilating about a photogenic go-getter abundantly and shamelessly lying her way into a high-profile job in the current… troubled federal government. Said she went to schools she didn’t go to. Bought her degree from a diploma mill. (Read this page while you can.)

But as you know if you read this blog in its infant days, diploma mills (see that UD category) are a permanent structural reality of all countries. It’s a quirk of the United States that when people here find out you bought your college or graduate degree they actually get upset and do something about it. Most countries don’t care. This is why you want to wait til you get back to the States for that surgery.

So the fact that Mina Chang is a diploma mill grad who claims on her cv to have graduated from Harvard is a ho-hum revelation. Generous chunks of the military, fire departments, and public education are all milled up. Why those locations in particular? Because if you demand an advanced degree for job advancement, people will, er, advance them.

No: The real story lies here:

According to her educational history on LinkedIn, Chang writes that she took part in an “Executive Nonprofit Leadership” program at Southern Methodist University in Texas.

The Non Profit Leadership Certificate Program is a six-day program with a $900 fee.

That’s right, kiddies: Leadership BS at nine hundred (with travel, etc. let’s make it an even thousand) for SIX DAYS. Can you imagine the amazing leadership bs you’re getting for that moolah? Reminds ol’ UD of this 2011 six day New Zealand bs leadership seminar (run by a diploma mill grad – beginning to see the synergy?) that cost around $13,000 dollars in American currency. Or, closer to home, there’s this (quoting meself in a 2010 post about leadership bs seminars paid for by the federal government):

The Center for Creative Leadership doesn’t just have a great name.  It’s located on ONE LEADERSHIP PLACE, Greensboro, North Carolina.  Its street is a leader. This alone perhaps warrants a certain premium for leadership trainees who, even as their rented cars pull up to CCL headquarters, can sense that the very ground upon which they motor is imbued with leadership.

A five-day leadership course at the CCL will cost you between $6200 and $10,600.

And that’s not all, folks! Here’s another example of your tax dollars at work, again from a 2010 post:

[Let’s see what] the Kennedy School is charging these days for their Senior Executive whatever — all of it paid by the government.  The school has just raised the tuition.  It now costs almost $20,000 for four weeks… The costs for this and similar four-week courses offered by other outfits the Office of Personnel Management uses are 460% higher than all costs for one month at an average private American university.

As Michael Kinsley once wrote, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal. That a hyper-ambitious young person would survey Trump University World and come to certain conclusions is no scandal. That the federal government enables, and schools like Harvard exploit, the leadership racket is, if you ask UD, scandalous.

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Oh, whoops. Forgot the big shocking news item about Chang and that leadership program. Shockingly, she didn’t really attend it. Shockingly, she listed it on her resume but actually did not attend.

UD finds this admirable. I ain’t saying I’d hire the woman! But she definitely shows good sense here.