Countless players suffer from early dementia, depression, confusion, suicidal tendencies, and countless other alarming, often mortal, conditions resulting from the game… [T]he beauty [of football] is the beauty of a car crash in an action movie —
only here there are no stuntmen, no C.G.I. As N.F.L. players often say, nearly every play feels like a car crash, a real one. Even after an “injury-free” game, players soak themselves in ice baths; they are, head to toe, an enormous contusion.

Eastern Michigan. A national sports joke. It has spent itself into the gutter on games. It thinks for-profit online courses are going to save its sports-dead ass. What absolute total idiots.

Now that Ramadan has been charged with rape (including apparently rape of a disabled woman), it’ll be interesting to see how long Oxford University decides it wants to delectate headlines of this sort.. I mean … It’s a man’s world… And he’s their man… Maybe they’ll just go with it until he achieves the vindication I’m sure awaits him…

If this horrible man gets his way and makes fraternities illegal throughout the state of Tennessee, say goodbye to butt chugging. You won’t have anal enemaists to kick around any more.

Yes, say goodbye to lengthy press conferences like this one, offering precise details about what it’s like when fraternities full of drunk teenagers “introduc[e] alcohol into the rectum and colon via the anus.”

Farewell, golden college days…

No, that’s the wrong color. That’s the color when they make pledges lie down and then they piss all over them, and then they make them sit up and drink piss.

Farewell, russet college days.

Aw. That happened to me when I was twelve too. We’ve all been there.

Not all of them do, but most of them do. (Read this blog’s Click-Thru U and/or Technolust categories.) They’re positively criminal for slower learners — and in public high schools, slower learners are exactly the people the system shunts into online “credit recovery” courses, unsupervised, cheating-friendly, online make-up classes. If you flunk out of a person-to-person class, you can still get the credits you need to graduate by pretending you took the same material online. It’s a solution sweeping the nation, a scandal in every state, but UD‘s own Washington DC has had truly remarkable results with the technology: Every year, all but two public schools illegitimately graduate gobs of students.

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The romance with tacky online education continues to power forward in this country, because there’s plenty of money in it for the vendor, and because it’s absolute bliss for give-a-shit cynics. Despite all the scandals, expect it to grow.

Take heed of one thing DC schools are doing right away in response to the scandal: They’re keeping the program but calling it something other than “credit recovery.”

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But they’ll never beat the pros.

Now that Tariq Ramadan is in police custody over alleged multiple, strikingly violent, rapes, let’s cut right to the chase, and recall Mona Eltahawy’s brilliant Foreign Policy essay on the widespread hatred of women by men in the Middle East.

Name me an Arab country, and I’ll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend. When more than 90 percent of ever-married women in Egypt — including my mother and all but one of her six sisters — have had their genitals cut in the name of modesty, then surely we must all blaspheme. When Egyptian women are subjected to humiliating “virginity tests” merely for speaking out, it’s no time for silence. When an article in the Egyptian criminal code says that if a woman has been beaten by her husband “with good intentions” no punitive damages can be obtained, then to hell with political correctness. And what, pray tell, are “good intentions”? They are legally deemed to include any beating that is “not severe” or “directed at the face.” What all this means is that when it comes to the status of women in the Middle East, it’s not better than you think. It’s much, much worse. Even after these “revolutions,” all is more or less considered well with the world as long as women are covered up, anchored to the home, denied the simple mobility of getting into their own cars, forced to get permission from men to travel, and unable to marry without a male guardian’s blessing — or divorce either.

How can anyone be surprised that, according to several women who have now spoken out, a man who refuses to condemn stoning female adulterers, a man who wrote the preface to “a book that cites the Qur’anic passage enjoining husbands to beat their wives under certain circumstances,” allegedly carried out particularly thorough and vicious assaults against women? And these were women who approached him to tell him how much his work meant to them.

French journalist Caroline Fourest (catch her film, Red Snake, about women soldiers fighting ISIS, when it comes out) began hearing from victims years and years ago (she wrote a high-profile book attacking Ramadan for other reasons). Rumors have abounded for years and years. And yet this country tried in 2004 to recruit him to a professorship at – of all places – the University of Notre Dame, and only evil Homeland Security’s refusal to let him come here kept Notre Dame from offering the same hearty defenses of him that Oxford University ultimately offered.

Ya, so a nineteen year old Virginia Tech freshman was arrested for possession of an AR-15; he was also looking to buy 5,000 rounds of ammunition, and had already bought “a former police vehicle outfitted with special bumpers.” Plus he was “researching bulletproof vests.” But the university is fine with it, fine! No need to alert the campus. Let’s all calm down, people. The guy represents absolutely no threat. And it’s not as if VT has any particular cause to worry about this sort of thing…

… we might feel a little disgusted by his greed and ostentation, but if the free market, plus a little, you know, is going to reward Steve Cohen with a $13 billion dollar personal fortune, there’s really not much we can say.

University presidents aren’t rapacious free market capitalists; they’re people who run non-profits. When they act like Steve Cohen, it attracts attention. Negative attention.

So for the many years Shirley Ann Jackson has been Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s president, her unstoppably greedy ways have attracted consistently negative attention. To put the matter as bluntly as possible: She. Loves. Money. Indeed one might conjure images of her in her office counting her many-millioned compensation, but she’s on so many corporate boards (lotsa funny money there) she’s rarely around.

Years and years of grandiose, autocratic, institution-destroying behavior on Jackson’s part have certainly generated high-profile anger among faculty and students, and each protest and no-confidence vote duly gets covered in the local press; but nothing happens, and Jackson keeps raking it in. Her compensation four years ago was at least seven million; UD’s figuring with raises and continued multiple board ass-coolings, she’s up around ten mill by now.

RPI’s financial picture is now so bleak that everyone’s again up in arms; but this time they are informed that they are sexists and racists for complaining, so that will shut them up.

Jackson’s no spring chicken, by the way; at 71, she’s got to be ready for retirement soon. UD assumes RPI is bracing itself for one last, long, hard pull at the money tap before she goes away.

A chatty student, with a hearing guide dog, stood next to me. As we both left the elevator and went outside, I got a good look at her.

Sara Soltani! Her video for the Hillary Clinton campaign was spectacular – I watched it a bunch of times.

“You’re famous!” I said. “I really liked what you did for the campaign.”

She thanked me.

The vice-chair of the scandal-plagued University of Louisville’s board of trustees takes note of the fact that when your university has devolved to what whatshisface would call a shithole, it breeds a bit of animosity on the faculty when $55 million is found to make your stadium bigger.

… it staggers us, it makes the papers, it’s a big deal.

Sometimes, as in the 2016 case of Ohio State football player Kosta Karageorge, it’s not a mystery: Macho, covering up concussions that are starting to produce symptoms, easy access to a gun, a fight with a girlfriend, a history of depression. What one remembers of Karageorge is not the mystery; it is the unbearable pathos of his having placed himself inside of a dumpster before pulling the trigger.

More typically, the suicides of intense and gifted student athletes – like, most recently, Washington State University quarterback Tyler Hilinski – are indeed mysterious. Most exhibit few to no overt signs of serious mental disturbance; up until the moment of death, they seem genial, social, active in their sport. Indeed, intensely active – and this is something Karageorge shares with many more enigmatic student athlete suicides: All of these people seem too intense about training and winning.

“He was really hard on himself,” a Yale friend said of Cameron Dabaghi, who jumped off the Empire State Building eight years ago. “If he lost a tennis match, it wasn’t because of a blister or a bad line call … He believed in fairness, he believed he had to be better.”

“Madison [Holleran] was beautiful, talented, successful — very nearly the epitome of what every young girl is supposed to hope she becomes. But she was also a perfectionist who struggled when she performed poorly,” writes Kate Fagan about a University of Pennsylvania runner who jumped off a parking garage. Another woman, an intensely competitive track star at Wesleyan, set herself on fire on one of the school’s playing fields.

Hilinski took (without telling him) a friend’s AR-15-style rifle – a much more physically destructive form of suicide than the pistol Karageorge used. Certainly any discussion of young, often impulsive, student suicides needs to note the wide availability of profoundly destructive firepower in the United States.

Hilsinki’s predecessor as WSU quarterback tells Yahoo Sports:

“I feel like at times we feel like we can’t express our emotions because we’re in a masculine sport and him being a quarterback, people look up to you as a leader. He felt like he really probably couldn’t talk to anybody. We’ve got to change some of that stuff. We have to have resources and not have a stigma of people going to that.”

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A former Clemson player:

“Especially a male athlete, and a football player in such a physical rough sport, you never want to be the guy that’s having to admit that something’s wrong. You get that mindset of always pushing through. Nothing’s wrong. I’m good to go.”

… two!

This is the overcast expanse Amazon
has chosen as one of the finalists
for the site of its second headquarters.

It’s in Montgomery County, Maryland,
just down the street from UD‘s Garrett Park.

… went after fascist Robert Spencer when she caught sight of him in her local gym. I kind of thought that was cool, the way she just went up to him while he was stretching his biceps and called him a nazi and all. I even celebrated her in song.

I was less enthralled when I found out Fair had gone hammer and tongs at a woman who wrote in an opinion piece that she had decided to vote for Trump. The woman has filed a complaint about her with the university.

With this latest incident, in the Frankfurt Airport, Ms Fair has shifted altogether from refreshingly confrontational to Diary of a Mad Housewife. The story just broke, and there aren’t any good sources yet, but let’s go with the Daily Mail anyway…. Oh, Kansas City Star just picked it up… That’s better…

So what seems likeliest to have happened (police say they have witnesses, and I’d think they’d also have security footage, but whatever) is that they told her her deodorant was basically a liquid and she couldn’t carry it on the plane. She freaked and called them nazis, which as you may know in Germany is not at all, legally speaking, a good idea. After she was hit up with a fine, she wrote an essay blaming it on sexism (German police do this to so many women at airports!), or on a young man with a nazi haircut nearby who upset her, or some such bullshit. I mean, writing that way in her own defense was as stupid as shouting nazi to security police at a German airport. In kindness to her, I won’t link you to the essay, but I’m sure you can find it.

Christine Fair is now, how you say, a woman with a past. Not much, however, Georgetown University can do about her. Beyond awaiting her next bimbo explosion.

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Update: The German authorities do not intend to play nice.

And yet and yet and yet. After following this professor’s behaviors (chronicled above) for some time, UD offers the following theory: She’s not really out of control. She’s an attention-whore. And she’s getting what she wants.