I could have had a …

… malaria vaccine!

But I decided to take my 450 million dollars and buy a small poor quality Leonardo of uncertain provenance and stick it in a storage facility.

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

How quaint.

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

Robert Hughes, 2004.

… which the university will ignore.

[T]he Tufts administration still has not openly acknowledged the [opioid merchants] Sacklers’ role in fueling the opioid crisis. In light of the recent exposés, Tufts should publicly recognize its own complicity in receiving money tainted by the epidemic, resolving to take an active stance against it. In order to align its values, Tufts should change the name of its biomedical school to better reflect the mission of the institution. With any remaining funds from the Sackler family, Tufts should fund research grants for the opioid crisis and further support outreach programs for its victims.

[President] Monaco and the Tufts Board of Trustees should revoke the honorary degree conferred on Raymond Sackler posthumously. There is past precedent for this. Bill Cosby, although never found guilty of sexual assault, had his honorary degree revoked by Tufts. Someone the university has honored has committed an egregious moral, if not illegal, offense, and the university must withdraw its support.

Tufts won’t ignore the, er, Sackler problem forever. But, like Yale, it will hem and haw and harrumph as long as it possibly can.

Will it, like SUNY Buffalo, still burdened with the risible Kapoor School of Pharmacy, decide (Buffalo will probably decide – especially if their man goes to jail) to desacklerize (Clever, UD. Why is it clever? Because it’s very close to desacralize, see.) its biomed school?

Probably. The Sacklers are still dumping their opioids all over Asia. But the decision will be long in coming. From Yale and from Tufts we will hear a long involved contradictory emotional story about what a blessing opioids have been for the world though unfortunately… I mean, to be sure…

Well but this is America, and if all you’ve been doing is shooting off bullets left and right in preparation for your mass killing, be our guest.

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

Cristal Caravez, who lives across a ravine from the road where [the killer] and his first victims lived, said she and others heard constant gunfire but couldn’t say for sure it was him firing.

“You could hear the yelling. He’d go off the hinges,” she said. The shooting “would be during the day, during the night, I mean, it didn’t matter.”

She and her father, who is president of the homeowners association, said neighbors would complain to the sheriff’s department, which referred the complaints back to the homeowners association.

“The sheriff wouldn’t do anything about it,” Juan Caravez said.

What kind of a neighborhood is this? A mentally ill person in and out of jail for assault who constantly shoots off his guns – and no one does anything?

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Caitlin Flanagan is quite right that insincerity and the perfectly chosen word can take you places for a long, long time. A man can found a career in letters on it. And then he can continue using that approach when his career bites the big one.

Elie Wiesel would have said I will not waste this reckoning if he’d been alive to respond to this. It has a way-dignified biblical-lamentation cadence which SOS would recommend for any Great Man found to have nibbled a tit.

I will not waste this reckoning, announced George Bush The Elder.

I will not waste this reckoning, insisted Bill Clinton.

I will not waste this weckoning, said Elmer Fudd.

As we wind down toward December, this year’s fraternity-death totals are coming in, and they’re – as usual – awesome. Nothing kills eighteen year old American men in search of friendship and a college education faster than a night with the Sweethearts of Sigma Chi, professional sadists who have, over the long storied years of their chapter, perfected the art of murder by forced alcohol intake. Nothing bonds brothers like working together over many hours to make sure someone who’d like to join their club chokes to death on his vomit – unless it’s the scary manslaughter case that follows, a shared experience of adversity that brings together the boys, their adoring parents, and their supportive community, in another one of life’s tests of blood loyalty and the Greek way.

After a century packed with dead pledges, everyone agrees there’s not really anything our country can do about the Geertzian “deep play” of massive insane drunken football staging area universities like Penn State as they stagger from serial child rapist coaches, to post-game riots, to jock-on-jock homicide in the frat houses. The whole wild synergy put Penn State’s last president in jail, but this seems to have been viewed as the ultimate test of the school’s commitment to destroying the life of everyone who studies or works there without regard to status.

There are scads of universities like Penn State. There are scads of universities that make Penn State their role model.

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

Because the blood and the violence in these football/frat cultures are beautiful. Remember what Professor Murray Siskind, a character in White Noise who teaches a seminar on car crashes in the movies, says about these ever more violent collisions. He is talking to one of his colleagues.

“All that blood and glass, that screeching rubber. What about the sheer waste, the sense of a civilization in a state of decay?”

… “I tell [my students] it’s not decay they are seeing but innocence. The movie breaks away from complicated human passions to show us something elemental, something fiery and loud and head-on. It’s a conservative wish-fulfillment, a yearning for naivete. We want to be artless again. We want to reverse the flow of experience, of worldliness and its responsibilities. My students say, ‘Look at the crushed bodies, the severed limbs. What kind of innocence is this?'”

“What do you say to that?”

“I tell them they can’t think of a car crash in a movie as a violent act. It’s a celebration. A reaffirmation of traditional values and beliefs. I connect car crashes to holidays like Thanksgiving and the Fourth. We don’t mourn the dead or rejoice in miracles. These are days of secular optimism, of self-celebration. We will improve, prosper, perfect ourselves. Watch any car crash in any American movie. It is a high-spirited moment like old-fashioned stunt flying, walking on wings. The people who stage these crashes are able to capture a lightheartedness, a carefree enjoyment that car crashes in foreign movies can never approach.”

“Look past the violence.”

“Exactly. Look past the violence, Jack. There is a wonderful brimming spirit of innocence and fun.”

Look past the teenager on life-support to the high-spirited innocent fun of the postmodern American campus, where advances in recording technology and a booming liquor industry promise Americans years of morbid viewing pleasure.

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

For those who consider this a “problem,” which must be “solved,” UD says: Wisconsin. Concentrate the behavior in one state. Designate one American state whose universities may, with impunity, pick off their freshman males.

Why Wisconsin? It is well-located, right in the middle of the country, for ease of access. The state has a long glorious tradition of drunkenness, and is full of jock-centric state university campuses. All universities outside of Wisconsin would shutter their Greek houses, and they would make life so difficult for the remaining illegal off-campus fraternities that the lure of Wisconsin would become irresistible.

The Yale Daily News takes note of the … awkward friendship between Yale and the company that made and marketed all those opioids that fucked everyone up.

[T]he Drug Enforcement Administration found that [Sackler company] Purdue Pharma had used “excessive and inappropriate” marketing that “very much exacerbated” OxyContin abuse. In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its executives pled guilty to federal charges of misbranding the drugs, collectively paying more than $600 million in fines… Mundipharma, a company associated with Purdue Pharma and owned by members of the Sackler family, has continued to push [OxyContin] in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. A Los Angeles Times investigation found that Mundipharma had paid doctors to give presentations abroad on the benefits of the drug. In 2015, the company saw a $100 million increase in sales from China — a jump of 45 percent — compared to the previous year, although Mundipharma did not disclose the portion of its revenue that came from OxyContin sales alone. There, the company used cartoon videos that understated the likelihood of addiction in a campaign for opioid pain relievers.

The YDN asked various friends and beneficiaries of the Sacklers on campus to comment, and … well… what do you expect?

“These are gifts that different family members made as individual family gifts. These were not gifts from the company — these were individual family gifts, so in that sense, these individuals have wealth that they gave to us, so it’s no more complicated than that when they made these gifts a number of years ago,” said Vice President for Development Joan O’Neill.

God knows how they got all that money… But for sure in the process of converting that money from corporate earnings to individual assets, they… uh… It’s no more complicated than that it all became … laundered?… And anyway, it was so long ago…

“While it is now clear that these drugs have been abused and there is certainly an addiction problem in our country, responsibility for it cannot be attributed to a single cause.”

You’d think the dean of Yale’s med school would be able to distinguish between a problem and an epidemic which the President of the United States has declared a public health emergency. As to his larger capacity for argumentation: Who said there was one cause? He’s correcting a straw man, ain’t he? All we’re talking about is one of the very biggest, and one of the most unconscionable, ongoing, causes.

Anyway. It’ll all settle down. Most opioid addiction occurs in no-‘count places like West Virginia, and why should a place like Yale give a shit about that?

… Alabam.

… case, as the deleted video of Timothy Piazza being handed 18 drinks in 82 minutes is, with the help of the FBI, undeleted. The tape has yielded a whole hell of a lot more charges against the group that killed him.

… Semester Abroad.

Capacity of Aloha Stadium: 50,000.

Background here.

Not a problem. They’ll be running promos for this instead.

… hope.

Sing it.

They’d said “You’re tax-free till you die.”
They’d said “Vast billions, all tax-free.”
And as the years went slowly by,
She went past Jordan’s GDP.

They kept a tally on their wall,
And went half-crazy now and then
She’d given thirty mill apiece
To her favorite money men.

She kept the main part for herself
Though Grassley said that wouldn’t do.
She read his thoughts on five percent,
And told him “Senator, fuck you.”

I went to see her just today,
And now the tears began to flow
Endowment’s pushing forty bill,
But some of that might have to go.

They started taxing her today
They placed a wreath upon her door
And soon they’ll carry her away
They started taxing her today

Sometimes it’s hard to be a Christian
Giving all your love to fallen men
You’ll have bad times
And they’ll have good times
Telling kids to touch them with their hands

But if you love God you’ll forgive them
For Satan makes their cocks to swell
Satan grabs their tighty whities
And then he hurls them down to hell

Stand by your man
Give him your child to cling to
And something young to come to
When Satan’s lusts are burning

Stand by your man
And give him teenly pleasure
Your man’s a godly treasure
Stand by your man

[The University of Louisiana] is playing Ole Miss on Saturday without four starters, each of whom is suspended …

[Okay. Four players is a lot at one time, but… ok…]

… The suspensions are related to the four being arrested during the offseason last spring.

[Related? Caused by, no? And were they arrested together because of the same offense? What’s the deal?]

Thirteen UL players, including those four, initially were arrested for conspiracy to commit felony theft.

[Whoa. Now thirteen. Thirteen, even by the rancid standards of this country’s student-athletes, is a lot. What gives?]

It’s believed the other nine served a one-game suspension at various points earlier in the season, but their suspensions were not made public at the time – and the Cajuns did nothing to make clear the real reason they were out.

[Murkier and murkier! So the university quietly suspended this player for this game and that player for that game without telling anyone… Cuz a couple of player absences per game isn’t going to attract attention… And the university said nothing about it…]

It some cases, it was thought the absent players were out because of injuries.

[Why was that thought? Because the coaches told the local press that?]

The 13 later had the charge against them reduced to criminal mischief, a misdemeanor, with a chance to have the charge eventually dismissed upon completion of a pre-trial diversion program that includes community service, drug testing and other program requirements.

[What the fuck did they do? Aren’t you a newspaper? Aren’t you supposed to tell me?]

… They were arrested April 25, following an investigation that produced video evidence of an occurrence at Huger Hall on campus.

[An occurrence? Now I’m laughing! WTF.]

The alleged victim in the case: former teammate Artez Williams, who was arrested for felony rape on the same day items allegedly were taken from his room.

[My head is spinning. Hold on. We don’t know what they did, but they did it to Artez, whose recent terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day featured an arrest for rape and the theft of items from his room, but whose woes also include a still-unspecified attack by thirteen current football players…. Or are we talking about the theft?]

Williams recently had a pre-trial hearing in which he was scheduled for another pre-trial for a date in 2018.

[… And?… But this is basically the end of the article…]