There are a couple of things you need to know if you’re going to survive a culture where huge numbers of people – some as young as nineteen, a rather volatile age – carry and, at the drop of a hat, shoot, guns.

1. If you are loving parents who worry that your drug-addled, illegal-gun-toting nineteen year old is becoming suicidal, do not call the university he attends and ask for a welfare check. Things could get dicey, and he could pull out his gun and shoot off the head of one of the people checking on him. Then you get to spend the rest of your life and all the money you have trying to keep your pothead kid from graduating to the harder stuff (“An anesthetic such as sodium thiopental or pentobarbital is used to induce unconsciousness, pancuronium bromide [Pavulon] to cause muscle paralysis and respiratory arrest, and potassium chloride to stop the heart.”) In order to avoid this outcome, call the local SWAT team, not the campus cops. SWAT teams are better at approaching babies with berettas.

2. This is directed to university staff: As the Scientologists put it, Go Clear. Shake your head of cobwebs and understand with piercing precision where you are and what’s going on. Situational Awareness is another way of putting this.

Let’s start with where you are. You are in the state of Texas, where people start sucking glock about the same time they start sucking teat. Guns are in the DNA. They are in the bloodstream. Concepts like “minimum age,” “legal,” and “illegal” are quaint nothings. For your own protection, assume that everyone, as soon as they can walk on their own, carries. Under no circumstances assume that the skinny, well-dressed, tow-headed little freshman from a prominent family in Seguin who is standing just to your right while you type up his report does not carry.

Unless you want to die, you will have to adopt a new attitude toward college freshmen at NRA Blue Ribbon schools like Texas Tech. You will have to deal with them as the cold-blooded killers that some of them are. Protecting yourself against the freshman class of Texas Tech University is a matter of life and death. That’s the new reality of legal and illegal, infant, baby, toddler, pre-teen, and teen (“Snap, Crackle, Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop Pop!!”), campus carry.

And a word to Texas Tech professors: …. : ….

Ah, forget it.

… is an article in The Atlantic about Harvey Weinstein.

These are … problems of power and status that manifest as a violent disregard for others — a failure to acknowledge the autonomy of women or a problem accepting it and a compulsion to revoke it by force. So it feels especially jarring to hear that same person professing a lack of agency in these acts.

Whether you refuse to let women out of the house unless they cover every inch of their body with a black sheet, or refuse to let women transact business with you unless they take off their clothes and go down on you — whether it’s All clothes off! or King-sized sheet on! — it’s quite the same thing: The violent revocation of women’s autonomy.

The only thing that differentiates American from French culture in these matters is that when Dominique Strauss-Kahn (an uncannily identical twin to Harvey Weinstein) was himself finally outed, bigshot philosophers defended him.

[Bernard-Henri] Lévy says … that the man he calls a friend of 20 years, “bears no resemblance to this monster, this caveman, this insatiable and malevolent beast now being described nearly everywhere. Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally, but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it’s absurd.”

BHL is a smart guy, but he seems unable to grasp that you can be an articulate, enlightened economist, or a sensitive maker of art films, and a primate.

From my mother’s sleep I fell into State U.
And I drank in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Miles from home, loosed from my parents’ love,
I woke to black vodka and the nightmare brothers.
When I died I was .495 booze.

In real time.

Sure.

I mean … I guess by Texas gunny standards
a nineteen year old university freshman who
– left alone with a random policeman –
takes out his weapon and shoots the man’s
head off — and before running away
coldly removes the body cam from the
corpse he just created — is absolutely
normal.

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He really told that guy, huh?

Don’t mess with Texas.

Member of the freshman class,
Texas Tech. Smiling cop-killer.

Don’t mess with our young ‘uns!

They’ve got guns and some of them will
blow your head off and lock down the campus.

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Time to dust off Amazing Grace one more time.

That song is getting a real workout.

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And it’s true what they say! More guns really do make us safer!

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Cut the little one some slack.

According to the warrant, [the shooter] told … officers that “he was the one that shot their friend.” He also told officers he “f***** up” and he “did something illogical.”

Texas Tech does offer logic, but the wee lad with the gun hadn’t had a chance to take it yet. Maybe next semester.

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

Great timing, by the way. Yesterday, Texas Tech’s president gave a big ol’ speech on how great the school’s doing, but it can do even better! Today one of its new admits kills a campus policeman in cold blood. Talk about stealing someone’s thunder.

… up close and personal.

“After he hit her, he didn’t even ask if she was OK. He just started yelling and swearing at her. I ended up walking over and told him twice to stop yelling at her.”

In a Facebook post from an urgent care facility, he said, “So first [bicycle] ride without the brace and some pedestrian wouldn’t move!! Centennial trial (sic) is not yours alone pedestrians!!”

… “I hate to slow down,” [Justin] Haller said when asked why he didn’t. “Most of the time people move. These people wouldn’t move,” he added, noting that the moms with strollers were part of the problem, too.

So the kid whips out his gun and blows the policeman’s head off.

Guns Up!

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UD thanks Charlie.

They’re in the comment section.

American football is already in serious decline, and I’m not sure a multimillionaire coach snorting coke with twenty dollar bills while telling his girlfriend he’d like to be “licking this off your pussy” (aka ‘Pulling a Puliafito’) is going to be good for business. I mean, maybe it will be. I don’t know.

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

That’s but a trifle here.

One of the city’s largest corporate pillars has pulled out of the KFC Yum Center but denies that the decision is related to the University of Louisville’s serial dramas.

Spirits and wine company Brown-Forman canceled its luxury suite at the arena in May leaving behind about 315 square feet of prime real estate at the 22,000-seat downtown arena.

UD loves the little denial-dance the spokesperson for this massively profitable firm performs:

“We basically canceled it because of internal reasons that are kind of complicated to go into, but it had nothing to do with U of L.”

Uh-huh.

… at the University of Florence — unable to overcome his dark ethical side.

[Jezzi] was allegedly put under pressure to withdraw his candidacy for a qualification as a professor of tax law.

Jezzi claims he was asked to step back so that a less qualified – but better connected – candidate could put himself forward, and was promised he would be selected next time in exchange for the favour.

Instead of accepting the offer, he reported the incident, which happened during the 2012-13 academic year, to police, and spent the subsequent years secretly record[ing] conversations with senior academics which have shed light on how widespread the exchange of favours was.

One phrase from the incriminating phonecalls, transcripts of which were published by Repubblica, has prompted a particular backlash in Italy.

When Jezzi protested about the way qualifications were being awarded, he was apparently told: “What will you do, appeal? That way you’ll risk your career. Stop doing things the English way and do them the Italian way.”

Benvenuto in Italia!

Arizona Football: Scottie Young Jr. Participating in All Team Activities Following Arrest for Domestic Violence

He can really beat the shit out of people!

The University of Arizona: Beautiful coach Rich Rodriguez. Beautiful team. A university sports legend in the making.

A well-placed source tells UD that the next dean of the University of Southern California medical school will be Harvey Weinstein.

It was while reading his letter of termination, signed by the latest vague desperate interim nowhere man running the University of Louisville yet deeper into the ground. As she read the guy’s list of Rick’s evil evil deeds, which must be listed in this letter in order for the school to fire him with cause and get a forty-four million dollar discount on the transaction, the following exchange from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? began running through my head:

George: You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart … ALL NIGHT… and that’s perfectly all right … that’s OK…

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!

George: I CANNOT STAND IT!

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!!

George: (Quietly.). That is a desperately sick lie.

Martha here is ol’ Rick, hotly sought after by UL and paid seven million dollars a year because no one cheats their way to a championship like Rick; because Rick’s a winner who sees what he wants in a restaurant and fucks it right there on the table; he’s a guy whose recruitment coaches run whorehouses in basketball dormitories, and whose program pays the biggest bribes to high school players, and… Louisville married him for it!. It wanted a world of gin-pissed vulgarians and pin-striped dress for success hypocrites to keep the ball rolling, and it correctly identified and highly rewarded Pitino as THE man to provide it.

But now! Now, just because of a teeny DOJ and FBI crackdown, it’s suddenly ooh what a nasty unethical person you are! We cannot stand you!

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

I’m afraid Rick is well within his rights, just as Martha is, to point out that these qualities and behaviors are exactly why UL fell so expensively in love with him in the first place. UL loved him so much that they let him sweep up most of the money available at the University of Louisville. It is impossible to find words to describe how much UL loved Rick Pitino, but it is quite possible to look at the immense money, power, and adoration they gladly gave him all those years. Because he won championships, and that’s all UL cares about and ever will care about because it’s Kentucky and it’s UL and that’s that. The next strutting multimillionaire fuckhead they bring on board to win championships will do exactly the same things to win them. Rick knows this, and has a right to feel aggrieved.

[University of Louisville Coach] Says Normalcy is Returning

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