Wotta shocker.
[T]he athletics department at the University of Arizona is on track to lose approximately $65 million over two years.
… [T]he UA athletic department is operating at a roughly $30 million loss this year. Last year, the department lost about $35 million.
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Curiouser and curiouser. The title refers to a number of pro-Israel billionaires who recently sponsored a fund-raiser for the North Carolina Republican leading the federal harassment of Ivy League universities for their purported anti-semitism.
These same lads – shockingly – are going after the manifold tax breaks that make it possible for Harvard University both to be designated a non-profit organization AND be worth around eighty billion dollars … or something like that number… I mean, there’s the endowment, whose amount we know; but there’s also real estate, about which we don’t know — so this is UD‘s probably pretty lame estimate of Harvard’s pile of dough…
… What the fuck make it a hundred billion. There are other assets. Make it five hundred billion. Who the fuck knows.
Anyway, a lot of these pro-Israel billionaire guys are working against their own interests, cuz they’re the very moneybags who have over the years given SOOOO much of their loot to Ivies like Penn and Harvard that they’re practically running the places, but they couldn’t have given so much and gotten so powerful without the tax breaks against which they’re now militating! Ya falla?
Four student deaths at UW River Falls, in pretty quick succession – with all of them apparently serious depressives … That sounds very much like a cluster, one death inspiring another.
[Tania] Riske said [her daughter] Sabrina struggled with severe depression for many years. She had a team of counselors and doctors working with her in her hometown of Eau Claire. But Sabrina declined help from campus counselors, Riske said…
“A lot of people were asking me what [the university] could have done better. I don’t think it had anything to do with a shortcoming,” Riske said. “I think they are doing appropriate things. And I’m happy about that.”
As with this earlier post about campus suicide clusters, the problem is not necessarily a lack of school support, though obviously there’s always room for a school to monitor some students more closely, add therapists, etc. The problem is that in some cases of severe protracted depression there’s not much that love, pills, ketamine, teams of counselors and doctors, etc., can do. It’s a hellishly powerful drive, the drive to leave.
The mother of a suicide (her son’s name was Seth) talks about another recent suicide (John).
You could not have prevented it. Even if you think that you could have on that particular occasion, there is no guarantee that it would not have happened some other time. If you are wondering why you didn’t go with John or ask him to come over if he seemed out of sorts, don’t blame yourself. Seth’s roommate was in an adjoining room when he died. Having someone nearby made no difference at all.
If you’re trying to make rational sense of how something like this could happen to someone with such talent and such a bright future, you really can’t think about it rationally — there is no rational explanation. Normal people, those who are not sick in some way, do not kill themselves. Our most basic human instinct is for survival, so to cause one’s own demise subverts that in ways our healthy intellects can’t imagine.
If you’re thinking that John made a choice to end his life, I can’t agree. Whatever was tormenting him — depression, mental illness, some event that threw his mental wiring off kilter — that is what took him. As I said before, it isn’t a rational choice. Suicides are committed by people driven by a distorted mental and emotional reality. It isn’t really a choice.
Americans are practical, success-oriented, ingenious, optimistic, religious — it’s arguably particularly hard for Americans to come to grips with the deathward tenacity of some suicidal people.
I mean, maybe we can grasp this in a frail eighty-year old. A twenty year old college student?
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Forget slipped the surly bonds: We’re talking stripped the bonds off hard, with both hands. “I’m climbing up through the clouds and then just gonna head out outside of everything,” a 23 year old student pilot not long ago radioed a confused traffic controller before crashing his plane. He desperately wanted out of everything. His words have gone viral – there’s poetry in head out outside of everything – and we should pay attention to them. Some suicides are virtually punching their way out of the atmosphere. Hard to go up against such people.
But you wouldn’t want to mess with the special magic that is guns, gangs, and late night clubs… Let’s do nothing and see if things improve…
After all, the club’s gone to a lot of trouble to keep guns out.
[There are] up to 20 guards on duty, two armed guards outside, two pat-downs at the door, a metal detector and more than 80 surveillance cameras.
And yet the lads keep getting in with guns!
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Hold on. Maybe Buffalo is ready to act…
After the fourth shooting at or around Club Marcella this year, the City of Buffalo has shut down the popular nightclub.… [The shootings all took place] … in less than a year. On January 29, a security guard was shot in the parking lot. Two weeks later on February 12, one person was killed and two others were injured in a shooting inside the club. The third happened in October.
See? That’s all it takes to shut an American night club down.
He comes up with “cutting and pasting,” but this has, arguably, a more pejorative feel than “plagiarism.”
“Dilation and curettage”?
Even the Norwegians! Even the Norwegian in charge of academic integrity!
On [South Korea’s] Jeju [Island], it’s not unusual to see signs at camping grounds or guest houses stipulating both lower and upper age limits for would-be guests. There are “no-teenager zones” and “no-senior zones”, for example, and even plenty of zones targeting those somewhere in between.
So numerous have the “no-middle-aged zones” become that they have collectively been dubbed “no-ajae zones,” in reference to a slang term for “uncle.”
One restaurant in Seoul rose to notoriety after “politely declining” people over 49 (on the basis men of that age might harass female staff), while in 2021, a camping ground in Jeju sparked heated debate with a notice saying it did not accept reservations from people aged 40 or above. Citing a desire to keep noise and alcohol use to a minimum, it stated a preference for women in their 20s and 30s.
Other zones are even more niche.
Among those to have caused a stir on social media are a cafe in Seoul that in 2018 declared itself a “no-rapper zone,” a “no-YouTuber zone” and even a “no-professor zone”.
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I assume that last one is because professors order one tea and then sit at a table all day, reading a book.
… SNL noticed.
VOLVO CRASHES INTO WHOLE FOODS IN BETHESDA
Just down the block from ol’ UD. For other DeLillo headlines, some eerily similar to this one, go here.
Long article in the NYT on a subject of steady interest to this blog: University student suicides. The excerpt in my title goes to one of the many conundrums specific to this heartbreaking thing: You want to honor the student, but you’re rightly scared of contagion if you speak too loudly.
… The only thing missing, for the compleat Republican leadership scandal, is three-way sex.
As we contemplate two rather addled oldies vying to run our country, we need to buck up and realize the amazing achievements of the superannuated.
Example: Being 86 – almost 87! – didn’t stop Joe Lewis from racking up “the largest financial penalty for insider trading in a decade.” Securities fraud is typically a younger crook’s game, but Lewis shamed the whippersnappers and despite his age now faces twenty years in jail. Go, Joe!
SO reminds UD of an earlier tinpot dictator, Harvard’s disgraced Marc Hauser:
In 2007, a member of the laboratory wanted to recode an experiment involving rhesus monkey behavior, due to “inconsistencies” in the coding.
“I am getting a bit pissed here. There were no inconsistencies!” Hauser responded, explaining how an analysis was done.
Later that day, the person resigned from the lab. “It has been increasingly clear for a long time now that my interests have been diverging sharply from what the lab does, and it seems like an increasingly inappropriate and uncomfortable place for me,” the person wrote.
And that is for a really interesting reason: The vast majority of Wyomingites appear to be, looked at closely, pro-suicide.
I mean, think about it. You don’t get Wyoming’s astounding number of suicides year after year unless you’re practically advocating for it.
Here’s a local commentator:
Like most good ol’ boys, [Wyoming St. Sen.] Kolb hemmed and hawed and found an excuse to do nothing, even while kids in his community kill themselves… [Kolb says:] “As soon as we start dragging [suicide] down the emotional road, we’ve lost… ”
Kolb’s attitude about suicide — that we shouldn’t get emotional about it, that we don’t really need to take action — reflects the cold-hearted stubbornness that has kept Wyoming from dealing with [the state’s suicide] crisis in any real way… [A]s long as people running the state maintain the same harmful and lazy attitude that caused our state to become the worst in the nation for suicide in the first place, we won’t see anywhere near the progress we need against this issue that tears so many of Wyoming’s families and communities apart.
Don’t get all boohoo. Don’t take action. Guns are there to kill people, including yourself if you feel like it.
Cowboy nihilism is super-chic. The macho charisma of killing yourself with Marlboros, Wyoming Whiskey, and a Kahr CM9 Polymer 9mm.
The state’s most popular book.
Second highest rate of car crashes in America, even though no one lives there. Most guns per capita in the nation. One psychiatrist every whatever … every five thousand miles…
Four million dollars, Laurie Glimcher
Plus corporate boards O greedy Glimcher
Rich and important, research dimmer,
No time at all for thoughts to simmer
Shine little fraud-worm, glimmer glimmer
While Harvard’s rep gets dimmer, dimmer
Look out! The software’s gotcha, folks.
It’s coming for your hoax.
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[T]hese didn’t appear in a bunch of open-access journals that are run out of someone’s van in Samarkand – no, these are scattered across Science, Nature, Cell, and other marquee sites. And I can’t overemphasize just how many examples there are – [the whistle blowing] post just goes on and on, with cut-and-paste jobs in blots, graphs, photomicrographs, you name it.
… arrival at the surrealistic Sujan desert camp – the high point of the India trip for UD.
For a dark sky type like UD, the nights were … indescribable.