… the NCAA.

They’re here. They’re armed. Get used to it.

Ian Buruma:

Western businessmen, architects, artists, university presidents and museum directors – or anyone who needs large amounts of cash to fund their expensive projects – now have to deal with non-Western autocrats… [P]andering to authoritarian regimes and opaque business interests is not a wholesome enterprise. The contemporary alliance of Western interests – in the arts and higher education no less than in sports – with rich, undemocratic powers involves compromises that might easily damage established reputations.

One way to deflect the attention is to borrow the old anti-imperialist rhetoric of the left. Dealing with despots and shady tycoons is no longer venal, but noble. Selling the franchise of a university or a museum to a Gulf state, building yet another enormous stadium in China or making a fortune out of soccer favours to Russia or Qatar, is progressive, anti-racist and a triumph of global fraternity and universal values.

Has to be relevant in some way.

So far I’ve got

ABLEST PERP

BERATES PPL [internet slang]

… due to mercenary incontinence.

… but the ridicule to which he is subjected that does him in.

The Clinic, a Chilean satirical magazine … ran popular internet memes on its website showing photoshopped images of Blatter in jail, Fifa as a mafia organisation, Maradona giving it the finger and the Uruguayan president, José Mujica, describing Fifa as a “manga de viejos hijos de puta” (a bunch of old bastards).

This came closer to capturing the mood on the streets, in stadiums and on social networks, where chatter was more of the nature of “At last!” and “The bastards had it coming!”

On Twitter, the Brazilian commentator Xico Sá called for a minute of noise at Thursday’s football matches to celebrate the arrests.

This is fun.

I hope Blatter has his Ceaucescu moment in public. Like Ceaucescu.

The FIFA thing is happening Way Over There, Way Over Yonder, Way Way Far Away from little New Zealand over here in the far opposite corner… Nothing to see here… We haven’t even gotten the Morse Code clicks on the thing yet… What are you talking about…

One Swiss lawmaker calling for [Swiss non-profit laws] reform has noted contemptuously that that a multibillion-dollar global organization like FIFA “still has the same status as a Swiss mountain village yodeling association.”

Yeah, that’s nothing. Bribery racketeering wire fraud, forget it. There’s so much more.

… sell their universities to corporations run serious risks.

UD‘s pal Carl Elliott tells all in a New York Times opinion piece.

When Joan Baez received Amnesty International’s Ambassador of Conscience Award this week, it made me nostalgic.

Baez hates nostalgia as only someone who has lived long enough to be the object of every old hippie’s nostalgia can be. For a lifelong pacifist, her language about it is positively violent: “I think I’m trying to strangle people into coming up to the present so much of the time, because people tend to live aeons ago.” But there’s nothing wrong with being knocked back to the past now and then, and the occasion of her award knocked me back.

It knocked me back to 1968, to after-school afternoons I spent in the biggest bathroom in my parents’ house in Bethesda (good acoustics), playing my nylon string guitar and singing Child ballads the way she sang them, the way I learned them from listening to her. Geordie, House Carpenter, Queen of Hearts — they were all songs of doomed lovers, all fraught tales set in the darkest of keys. Matty Groves, an adultery and murder ditty, had twenty three verses. I knew them all, and went into long trances, chanting them in my little echo chamber.

There are certain soprano voices – Kathleen Battle’s, Julia Lezhneva’s – equipped with an absolutely eerie high-piping perfection, a radically original and expressive force. Joan Baez was my first encounter with this type of unsettling sound. Long before I knew anything about the operatic voice, I was haunted by the folk treble, and spent hours trying to produce it myself. “Beauty brings copies of itself into being,” writes Elaine Scarry in her book, On Beauty and Being Just. Beauty inspires imitation. Wherever Baez was when those notes streamed out of her, I wanted to be there too.

Almost fifty years later, I still pursue that treble. I’m at my baby grand in the living room now (the guitar leans on a wall nearby), but the tattered Joan Baez Songbook remains my favorite thing to play. W.H. Auden called music “the best means we have of digesting time,” and I think that’s because – for me, at least – the making of music never changes. It’s always in some ecstatic way the journey back to tonal paradise.

Think of that whole “lost chord” idea in Arthur Sullivan’s famous song. The chord he keeps searching for was “the harmonious echo / From our discordant life.”

No doubt Baez will receive the Amnesty International award for her political work with a sense of irony. “I’m a little concerned about offering hope,” she said in a recent interview. “But one has to bash on regardless.”

At a young age I sensed the serene concord Baez had somehow made all the discordance of life yield; I sensed the way she summoned that harmonious echo again and again. And that’s also a form of bashing on – keeping the long song going, verse after verse, whatever the circumstance.

Having heard Baez, how can I (to quote the great old American folk song) keep from singing?

Oh dear, what can the matter be?
Oh dear, where can Sepp Blatter flee?
Oh dear, Qatar is up a tree,
FIFA has had quite a scare.

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Old World and New, folks – Old World and New. Two notorious all-male criminal syndicates gather for their respective high-level organizational meetings. The American group chooses as its venue a tits and ass sports bar overlooking a parking lot in a shopping mall in Waco Texas. The Euros choose a five-star Swiss hotel with views of Lake Zurich and the Alps. The Americans resolve their differences with each other and with the police outside the venue by shooting wildly. The Euros go quietly.

Yes, when it comes to class, the old country still has us beat.

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In 2011, Emory University was touting the achievements of Aaron Davidson, 93C. Aaron is currently awaiting charges on – let’s see – bribery, bribery, bribery, bribery, and bribery.

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When you control the most popular product of the most popular sport on earth, you can do [anything]. Neither the shady awarding of World Cups nor the thousands of slaves that will die in Qatar building World Cup stadiums has made a serious dent in FIFA’s power. One can only hope this will.

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International soccer has a notorious reputation for corruption and intrigue, one that contrasts sharply with its squeaky-clean image in America. For millions here, the sport represents an antidote to the cynical, alienating gloss of the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Don’t buy it.

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The “sheet” play.

… four?