UD hasn’t done one of these in awhile. This one’s largely taken from the language in this BBC article.

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EVERY FIFTH STAR HAS A PLANET LIKE EARTH

Every fifth star has a planet like earth,
One in five suns a habitable world.

Interplanetary Waldens.

… are kind of fun.

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This is pretty funny too. After the anchors announce that the posters are too obscene for tv, the filmed segment brandishes them in every shot.

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Background on Cuccinelli’s campaign against oral sex here and here.

Headline of the day.

What else can it do about the ongoing reign of trustee and national disgrace Steven Cohen? What other attitude can the student editors bring to its university’s leadership closing ranks around this man?

One of America’s great universities apparently means to wait until the head of the world’s dirtiest hedge fund is personally sent to jail.

[T]he threat of further criminal action still looms…

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The policy of Brown University in the matter of Trustee Steven Cohen can be summarized by paraphrasing Robert Emmet.

When my trustee takes his place among the jailbirds of the earth, then and only then let his epitaph be written.

Passed from hand to loving hand because he’s a violent psycho built like a brick shithouse … Passed from the University of Nebraska to the University of Oregon and then to the Rams and the Dolphins, the rich and celebrated football player Richie Incognito will be back on the field in a flash on some other team, as soon as he works his way through his latest dust-up; and the only reason the Dolphins are a mite nervous about this latest incident is that along the way it reveals that a lot of the other guys on the Dolphins team are … well… not certifiable, but in every other way strikingly similar to Richie.

Here’s how a Miami sports writer puts it:

This puts bullying on the NFL radar, at least. It forces the league to understand that it must be worried about more than just the concussion-related safety of its players or their arrests for stuff like DUIs or domestic abuse.

Yes, UD likes the way this guy puts it. Looks as though the NFL is going to have to start worrying about “not just” the concussion, DUI, and domestic abuse thing (yawn). Because le sujet du jour is bullying – regular old garden variety locker room bullying, as well as the incredibly well-compensated bats-in-the-belfry brutality of Incognito.

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“Richie is … this seems to be a person with a tortured soul.”

Brace yourself for the Offensive-Linesman-as-Dostoevsky defense.

Brace yourself for the televangelist who will train Incognito to look like this on camera.

Brace yourself.

Brings back memories of Mr Risperdal himself, Harvard University’s Joseph Biederman.

Brown University’s finest.

Steven Cohen remains on Brown’s board of trustees, an inspiring reminder to students there that you can run “the first large Wall Street firm in a generation to confess to criminal conduct,” a firm whose corruption is “unprecedented in the history of hedge funds,” a firm that has become “a symbol of financial wrongdoing,” and still be a Brown University trustee! Go ahead and be HUMongous financial wrongdoers, kiddies! The more money you make, the more likely you’ll be named to the Brown Corporation!

How humongous, you ask? The man’s a fucking pioneer! He’s making history! The SEC, emboldened by its success against Cohen, is said to be going after a number of other university trustees and honorary degree recipients.

[The SEC is] weighing a criminal charge against JPMorgan Chase [headed by Syracuse University commencement speaker/honorary degree recipient Jamie Dimon] related to its role as Bernard L. Madoff’s [Yeshiva University trustee] banker…

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UPDATE: MattF, a UD reader, links to this important background on Cohen. UD thanks him.

A Forward piece on Yeshiva University continues:

Its undergraduate schools admitted 84% of applicants for the 2012 academic year, far more than Brandeis, which admits just 39%, or nearby Fordham, which admits 43%. Y.U.’s acceptance rates have long been relatively high, but they climbed in 2012 as the number of applicants dropped. The undergraduate schools received 2,169 applications on the eve of the recession for the 2007-2008 school year; in the most recent cycle the number was down to 1,633. At the same time, tuition for students living on campus has jumped from $44,000 in 2008 to $53,000 in 2013.

Joel refused to comment on his grow-your-own-salary/avoid-responsibility-for-anything leadership philosophy. The Forward did pull up this explanatory remark from a recent public event.

“What I’ve come to realize as a president of a university… after 10 years as president, God rules the world. … I can do my part to partner with God, but ultimately God rules the world.”

Bad university presidents pass the buck. Scorched earth presidents pass the buck to God.

An entire section of Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 2013 book Government Bullies was copied wholesale from a 2003 case study by the Heritage Foundation, BuzzFeed has learned. The copied section, 1,318 words, is by far the most significant instance reported so far of Paul borrowing language from other published material.

… The copied text relates to the 2003 case of David McNab, a Honduran businessman who, along with three American businesspeople, was convicted of multiple felony counts related to the illegal harvest and importation of Caribbean spiny lobster tails in violation of the 1900 Lacey Act.

… offense.

Male Empty Stadium Hysteria (MESH) rages on, this time in response to student indifference at Mr UD‘s University of Maryland. UM’s got a great winning record, and still students aren’t showing up for football games! Or they’re clearing out at half-time!

A local commentator (quoted in my headline) exhibits a classic MESH symptom:

Saturday, I wanted to puke. As the Terps were fighting desperately to hang on to beat Virginia – a rival they were playing for the last time – the Cavaliers were driving into the teeth of a student section that was, I don’t know, three-quarters empty.

UD doesn’t want to nauseate this man yet more, but she would note that his point about only six Saturdays a year cuts both ways. As in – yeah, only a very few days out of the year, but every UM student has to dish out tons of money for the program and spend hugely on game day and sacrifice lots of other varsity sports for the sake of the football program etc. etc. etc. Really, quite an immense burden for six Saturdays a year.

Of course, all this means is that you’re going to have to pay new presidents of jock-schlock schools even more. Sports whores don’t come cheap.

… or are leaving en masse after the first half, this one would have to be ranked very high indeed. It’s written by a local booster/newspaper columnist about Florida A&M, whose marching band two years ago hazed one of its musicians to death. Multiple manslaughter trials are ongoing. Why aren’t students going to the games? Hm. Hm.

The columnist’s one oblique reference to the pesky group manslaughter problem is this:

Last season, … the Marching 100 was idled and Future and other rappers were brought in for halftime performances …

Idled? Why?

And given the program’s violent propensities, does the choice of Future as their half-time stand-in seem to the writer a good one (sample lyrics here)?

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The writer approvingly quotes one of his readers on the lack of fan support:

“If we treat our loved ones, friends and co-workers, wives and husbands the way we treat our beloved FAMU, with all its faults, and rebuilding seasons, no wonder marriages fail, friendships don’t last and we can’t even sell tickets to the game.”

Sweet phrases like rebuilding seasons are, uh, sweet, but, you know, until we learn how many dozens of FAMU band members are going to jail for how long I’m not sure we can start talking about this being the rebuilding season … To everything there is a season lalala, but group killing’s post-season seems to last a little longer than a few months. Ongoing disgust and embarrassment may account for a significant number of empty seats. People may remember, for instance, that FAMU blamed the murdered student for his own death.

As the University of Miami is also discovering, you don’t send your school barreling down shit’s creek for years and then, once you’ve paid your fines and sent people to jail and accepted – in the case of FAMU – the resignation of your president, turn around and welcome those tens of thousands of happy fans who’ve just been panting in the background, waiting to watch you play football again.

Having so many games available on television makes it tough to attract big crowds to the stadium.

That’s why North Carolina senior associate athletic director Rick Steinbacher says the challenge is to “try to make that in-stadium experience as unique and as special and as exciting as it can possibly be so it’s harder to choose to stay home than come to the game.

“Give the fans something unique and make them feel part of something when they’re in the stadium in a way that you don’t when you’re at home,” he said.

… tradition; the university itself is clearly proud of it, since after decades of totally pissed vileness it continues to respond with soft words… Continues to set things up on campus to achieve optimal pillaging. They riot when they’ve been sleeping; they riot when they’re awake; they riot when they’ve been bad or good — so let them RIOT for goodness’ sake!

U Mass Amherst is one of those schools which (let’s be honest) knows it would have to shut down if it didn’t admit its cohort, and the U Mass cohort happens to be gangs of alcoholic bullies from the eastern seaboard. Similarly, if Ole Miss systematically shunned Confederacy loyalists with a big thirst, they’d lose a significant chunk of their incoming class. Most universities are dominated by a representative slice of the American pie; U Mass Amherst, Ole Miss, LSU, Clemson, Auburn, Alabama, Cal State Chico … these schools are not. They play the role of the freaks of this blog, the frenzied teetering muttering mad uncles of the American university family. When you give their students guns, as at Oklahoma State, you witness all manner of amazing things.