… are public, parents and students should be hopping mad. How is it that a dangerous gang of rapists was admitted to the school? Some of them apparently already had serious police records.

In this instance, they raped children. Fourteen year olds. Classmates. Teammates.

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

Admitted, hell; these are football heroes. Students are instructed to go to their games and cheer.

Pschaw, say their lawyers. It was just hazing.

And hazing is totally legal and American as apple pie!

Pschaw further, say their lawyers. It’s the fault of administrators who didn’t keep an eye on the lads.

UD‘s pretty sure administrators not only didn’t keep an eye. UD‘s pretty sure administrators ran very fast in the opposite direction when they saw the gang coming.

So why were these guys sitting next to unsuspecting children in the classrooms of Damascus High School?

**********

Whoops. Every one of them turns out to be a stellar human being.

**********

New Zealand coverage. You can’t buy this kind of international publicity.

And, sure, similar attacks might have happened in the Champions League. Many have already pointed to the obvious example of Liverpool supporters attacking the Manchester City bus. But the big difference is the context, the control around it.

Our security apparatus is better.

Violence does love a vacuum, and it don’t get more nihilistic than bloody Buenos Aires football.

[W]hy do people care so much? What is the source of that passion? That, perhaps, is the most uncomfortable question of all. It is commonplace to discuss passion for a football club as an unquestionable good, but how healthy is it, really, for people to tie their self-esteem quite so tightly to the results of a football club?

What does that say for the other institutions from which meaning might be derived?

Can we even call it meaning? Isn’t it just jaw-dripping satisfaction at having eaten one’s enemies?

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

Hours after yet more absolutely insane soccer violence, G20 leaders arrive in the city for a summit.

The protests, looting and attacks before the Copa Libertadores final came just days before world leaders — including Presidents Trump, Xi and Macron — descend on the capital for the G-20 summit. The violence raises questions about the city’s preparedness to welcome an expected 8,000 visitors this week.

The team owners, the gangs who run the various game-related rackets, the corrupt police, the corrupt armed forces, the corrupt government – all have too much of a stake in the matches to care about corollary damage. And anyway…. Ours, theirs, in the stands, on the field, on the streets…

As any habitual observer of Argentina’s lower leagues – where police escorts are even skinnier and the headlines at national level sparse – can tell you, barely a match goes by without an away club’s vehicle being subjected to such an attack, with the minimum of repercussions.

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

The sadness of Argentina is that it has yet to disprove VS Naipaul, who in the blistering final pages of “Argentina: The Brothels Behind the Graveyard” seethes with disdain for a country that never grew up from being a colony, that worships idols, believes in magic, exemplifies misogynistic machismo, and will never move past a culture of violence, corruption, and plunder. These sentiments are hardly credible descriptions of Argentina’s past, present, or future, but Naipaul’s anger arises from witnessing cultural attitudes that Argentina still cannot entirely deny. There is still too much paranoia, still a tendency to quickly declare enemies, still an unnecessary level of acrimony on display in political life.

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

In an entire special section dedicated to the scandal, less than 24 hours after the violence occurred, [a] Nación columnist, Francisco Schiavo, wrote that “this happened right when it should not have happened, with the imminent G20 summit putting the city of Buenos Aires on lockdown. But it happened,” he wrote, “because of who we are as Argentines.”

Reuben Foster’s team manager knows a good kid when he sees one.

[Foster] … served a two-game NFL suspension to start this season because of his arrest for misdemeanor marijuana possession in January in Tuscaloosa, Ala., and a gun charge that was part of his arrest on Feb. 11, when a loaded Sig Sauer 516 rifle was found on a bathroom floor. In June, Foster pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor weapons charge and was ordered to perform 232 hours of community service. He was also given two years of probation, during which he is barred from possessing guns.

In 2017, before he was drafted, Foster failed a drug test at the NFL combine after allegedly submitting a diluted urine sample. He was kicked out of the combine after an altercation with a hospital employee…

In May, a Santa Clara County Court judge dropped domestic-violence charges against Foster, a week after [his girlfriend] took the stand and recanted her allegations that Foster struck her in Los Gatos on Feb. 11…

[The] inside linebacker was arrested on one count of first-degree misdemeanor domestic-violence battery [last] Saturday night at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay…

Only in America, mes petites; only in America.

Only in America would a person even think to say that anyone presenting herself to a surgeon as simply wanting this or that surgery must get it. The special brew here, of limitless national wealth and limitless personal entitlement, is uniquely American.

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

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: The quality of writing in the opinion piece is strikingly high; I love the prose. The larger argument that happiness is not an end (see Adam Phillips for some of the best language about this) is an excellent one. Plus, the writer had a lot of good stuff to say about the recent Avital Ronell embarrassment.

But otherwise. Good lord.

… reigns not merely in Buenos Aires (Argentine sports atrocities happen to be tonight’s global-media focus), but in empty soccer stadia everywhere. Fans, players, owners — so many now behave so violently that more and more games are played in Total Spectator Silence, today’s spectators being simply too dangerous to allow into the arena, or onto the streets near the arena. Games are postponed while authorities wait for everyone to stop beating and knifing everyone. When no one stops, games are cancelled.

Not enough that international soccer as an institution is fully, foully, hopelessly corrupt; to this sickening, all-the-way-down financial obscenity we must add disgusting endemic violence.

And… so…

On with the game! It’s a man’s world, babe, and if you think for one minute that injury rape and riot will stop international soccer (or American football, or American fraternities), you’re nuts. Meet the man of the hour, the face of the game, everyone’s soccer hero. Stand back! Everybody dies.

***********

And in other Argentine soccer news…

… whose last football battle featured the twenty or so Ole Miss students who showed up throwing drinks at the Mississippi State players before the game. During the game, virtually everyone on the field had a big ol’ brawl. Every player got an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty.

(But… you know…)

Life of the mind, deep south.

There is no bottom.

Ah, the public school system. Maybe your university will be lucky enough to have some of these young talented football players/alleged rapists on your team someday.

— 6:50 AM, November 22 …

As she scans the guest list for the (Whole Foods prepared) meal she’s setting out at two o’clock, she realizes that absolutely everyone – family and friend – (with the exception of Mr UD) is a serious singer. Among the guests are two excellent cantors, two award-winning a cappella singers, a performer with an impressive following on YouTube, etc., etc.

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

UD‘s parents met when her mother, visiting a Johns Hopkins fraternity house, heard Bach pouring out of a room and pressed open the door. Her father sang in the Hopkins glee club, played piano, loved all music. Her mother also sang, and together they made their children’s lives sing.

How many friends and lovers over the years have told me to tone it down while I tear through rooms warbling? I grew up in a six-person, two-dog Jewish house best understood as actually Italian, with Jewish noise (here’s how we behave on WhisperJets) plus Italian opera. Generations of people have told me I’m loud, and I still don’t get it. Loud is loud; I vocalize above the uproar.

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

Music is the best means we have of digesting time, wrote Auden, and how can I not be grateful for long meditative exultant time-devouring piano and song?

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UD‘s Thanksgiving table.

Nice comeback.

… The university also said its operations in the last fiscal year were dragged down by “nonrecurring” — meaning unusual — expenses.

Those included deferred compensation of $4.5 million owed to former Athletic Director Tom Jurich and a $5.5 million buyout of the contract of former basketball coach Rick Pitino, both of whom were fired after the program was swept up by a nationwide fraud and corruption sting into NCAA programs.

It’s always a pleasure to bankrupt ourselves and raise tuition by the highest percentage allowable in order to pay out huge bucks to assholes.

Oh, and on Pitino: Did you really think that $5.5 thing would cut it? He’s suing UL for FORTY MILLION.

Speaking of assholes, hold onto your hat as we sue our chiseling last president to see if we can’t get some money back from him! Meanwhile, though, legal expenses for that will add to our losses…

Constitutional questions derail America’s first FGM trial; the government will almost certainly appeal, and the beat goes on.

Saudi women are wearing their black sacks inside out as a sign of protest; their leaders are being tortured in Saudi jails.

The farcical current leaders of the Women’s March, with their passion for Farrakhan, Hamas, and Bill Cosby, are under serious pressure to fuck off. One of them, Linda Sarsour, is the Mad Trump of the movement, screaming for Ayan Hirsi Ali’s vagina to be removed, and every day sharing with us more and more of her pornographic imagination. Sarsour is in the grand tradition of

Houria Bouteldja, the [Party of Indigenous People of the Republic’s] charismatic spokeswoman, [who] has in recent years won notoriety for her defense of Muslim men accused of sexual violence. Faced with “testosterone-fuelled virility among indigenous men,” she has argued, women of color should look for its redeeming side, “the part that resists colonial domination,” and stand with their brothers.

Since Sarsour and her co-leaders represent the exact opposite of the democratic values for which the march stands, UD remains baffled as to their continued high profile. It’s precisely zanies like these who continue to sabotage the Democratic Party in this country, making it a big fat target for conservatives.

UD thinks the Hindustan Times is off by a bit; the actual number seems to be $500K.

I mean, after all… the guy’s an environmentalist… $500 million would be an excessive use of resources…

… flights.