“[The fraternity brothers] were trying aggressively and affirmatively to make sure that Tim did not get help because it was against their interests,” [Timothy Piazza’s attorney] said. “They knew that if they were caught with liquor, if they were caught with a young man who had fallen down the stairs all those hours later, that it was going to be a problem for them. He was the unfortunate road kill in this adventure by these young men who thought that they were above the law.”

No kidding.

Lug the guts behind the bar and blame it on the boy.

Video evidence, photographic evidence, and now written evidence. Text messages from a Penn State University fraternity – a fraternity in good standing – as it poisoned and then ignored a student. And then covered up its involvement in his death.

… Burqa.

***********

UD thanks Barney.

Most of the research about fraternities and academic performance comes to the same conclusion: Membership in a fraternity is consistent with lower grades and diminished intellectual capacity.

… Just why the link exists is the subject of speculation. Here’s a possibility: Maybe it’s because fraternity members drink so much alcohol? One study by the Harvard University School of Public Health found that 86 percent of students who live in fraternity houses were binge drinkers, almost double the rate of other students.

Another theory: Time that could be used for studying is spent on fraternity activities, especially during the periods when aspiring members are undergoing humiliation or torture in disgusting or inane initiation rites.

Yet another possibility is that fraternity members skip more classes than other students, and lost class time tends to correlate with lower grades. Think excessive drinking plays a role there?

James Greiff’s 2013 opinion piece about fraternities provides some context as we follow ever more grueling accounts of the Passion of Timothy Piazza, the latest – and most high-profile – victim of marauding bands of drunk male idiots.

The beauty of these bands is that they thrive under the protection of our universities.

Usually manslaughter by fraternity occurs more straightforwardly than in Piazza’s case – you’re tortured to death while being hazed – and this blog has covered several of those sorts of stories over the years (put FRATERNITY in my search engine if you can stand it). Certainly forced alcohol poisoning, which Piazza endured, is often part of routine beaten-to-death incidents. But Piazza’s tortured end featured two unusual elements: His long dying was filmed by a security camera; and he died from a level of neglect you’ve probably never encountered – maybe never imagined – before. Vomiting, bruised, in agony, his limbs literally stiffening in front of his fellow drunks’ eyes, Piazza attracted little attention beyond mocking laughter, Snapchatting, and rough, random efforts to change his position so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit.

“Maybe there is a place for fraternities as hothouses for future alcoholics who engage in sometimes violent behavior,” concludes Greiff; but it is important to be very precise about the nature of these hothouses. They are secret all-male anarchic holes given cover and legitimacy by universities, of all places; their torture and killing goes on right next door to the school of theology; and everyone agrees to pretend that their charity car washes make their members something other than alcoholic sadists.

It is time to liberate these men from the stifling rules of universities – rules they don’t follow, true, but which can, in the aftermath of one too many deaths, come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fraternity hothouse has never been a very good match with universities, but it is a perfect match with outlaw motorcycle clubs. Transfer them out of the university and put them under the umbrella of the Hells Angels, the Pagans, the Outlaws, and the Bandidos.

UD‘s mother used to quote the end of these lines a lot – every prospect pleases, / And only man is vile – because she thought the sentiment was funny, and because it seemed to apply to a lot of the places she found herself (UD recalls her reciting it one summer on a crowded Ocean City Maryland beach). UD finally checked the source of the lines – the notorious From Greenland’s Icy Mountains – and now sees that for Reginald Heber “vile” simply meant heathen…

Penn State is always in the news. Hometown hero Jerry Sandusky (he had his own ice cream!) dominated the news for years – and you can still follow ongoing stories about how much his case continues to cost the university ($237 million as of January). Even as the Sandusky thing finally began to quiet down, everyone was covering the unconscious naked women thing… and now PSU has done it again, dominating the university-news cycle by hosting on its campus such spectacular cruelty (even by Penn State standards; even by fraternity standards) that the whole nation is once again riveted to Happy Valley.

Read the (literal) blow-by-blow here.. The frat camera records Timothy Piazza’s long dying. Highlights:

4:59 a.m.: Piazza stands up and staggers into the fraternity’s front lobby, falling again onto a stone floor. There, at 5:15 a.m., Beta brother Jonathan Martines steps over the prone Piazza on his way to the kitchen for a glass of water.

… 6:44 a.m.: One of Piazza’s fellow pledges, according to the report, enters the hall. At 6:57 a.m., he starts to take a video of Piazza using the “snapchat” app …

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

Yes, a most unusual school.

Baylor: A criminal enterprise and a noisily self-regarding Christian university.

Rather like Bernard Madoff and Orthodox Judaism.

There’s everything to be said, criminal-enterprise-wise, for a covering of piety.

Despite its appalling political cowardice – its announcement that it will refuse to call mutilation mutilation, but will instead call it cutting – the New York Times seems to have allowed the truth – the true word, mutilation (“[F]emale genital mutilation is the accepted term, and it’s the term WHO uses. Mutilation shows the gravity of the practice. You’re damaging healthy tissue and altering it in ways that may be permanent, for no medical reason.”) – to slip through in at least this one column. This remarkable column.

FGM is a cultural practice with one key aim: To control an emerging woman’s sexuality by physically removing the most sensitive part of her anatomy. In the back-and-forth dialogue on FGM over its religious association and clinical definition, there is one psychological aspect of FGM that continues to be ignored: sexuality as voice. A woman’s ability to feel and express herself is an extension of her voice. When little girls are stripped of their ability to feel, and are later shamed for expressing (or wanting to express) themselves sexually, it’s a form of mental abuse that silences the most primal form of communication: sex. It strips them of their ability to discover themselves before they have even reached the threshold of womanhood.

In these cultures, girls are cut off from themselves psychologically and spiritually far before the barbaric genital mutilation takes place. Girls are violated at the earliest age, trained to be obedient and submissive.

Shireen Qudosi really gets at it.

Don’t forget to add to this picture of womanhood the burqa: Female Oral Mutilation.

The latest antics of sordid, farcical University of South Florida catch the eye of a local judge.

Coach Strong, if you are listening, in the last couple of months there have been two arrests of your players for very violent felonies. This court, and I’m sure I’m not alone, questions whether you have control over your players. It’s fairly clear you do not have control of them…

Of course Strong isn’t listening, and why should he? First, the judge is a girl. Second it’s two arrests in two months which is nothing. Teamwork, as you know if you follow this blog, means that some universities have ten player arrests in two minutes. Third, no one in the “community” gives a shit that some of its members “have to suffer at the hands of” USF players. Everyone understands that you have to make some sacrifices for the game.

‘Tis curious how life instructs!
For instance, when it comes to ducts:
To get the test
That way seems best.
Yet when you get to it, it sucts.

She sat on a nearby Adirondack
very very quietly until this
cardinal came by. Not a great
shot, but it’s a start.

Egyptian Ilhami Agina
Wants ladies to have no vagina.
“And also no clit.
For it’s certain that it
Helps enormously with my stamína.”

[West Virginia governor Jim] Justice … summoned both Marshall [University] President Jerome Gilbert and five members of the school’s Board of Governors to his office on separate occasions to demand that the school get rid of [the school’s football coach, and hire a friend of the governor’s], who is 73 and last was a head coach in 2004.

UD‘s garden on a spectacular spring day.