A dispatch from America’s Number One Party School.

Ha! UD just walked out of her Montgomery County house to sample the humidity (absurdly high) and instantly saw, clinging to her house, both a living humming red-eyed cicada (it flew off when I approached) and, inches away from it, a discarded cicada shell. She brought the shell in and put it on her writing desk and it looks exactly like this.

Brian Emanuel Schatz
Expresses himself via blats.
“I learned it from Rona.
We met at Pomona.
It dates to my time in the frats.”

Is escaped university rector!

Esteemed ex-rector of National Tax University (is like if IRS had campus where to train agents) was under house arrest for selling admission to aforesaid university (here is photo of Petro Melnyk having vapors) for hundreds and hundreds hryvnia. Rector Melnyk “escaped by getting rid of an electronic bracelet… Interior Ministry addresses the citizens for help in obtaining information about possible stay of Melnyk.”

… meteor shower drags on, with Les UDs spending the night of August 12 somewhere in the mountains around here (or near the Chesapeake Bay) in search of a dark sky.

Les UDs are, this time of year, usually at their way-remote houselet in Upstate New York, where the night skies are amazing and where UD has indeed (wrapped in a sleeping bag and leaning back in a lawn chair) seen her share of meteors… But nothing you’d call a shower…

However life-altering or bitterly disappointing this year’s local outing, UD will of course blog it.

… with a Frontline investigative report (League of Denial) due in October, just keep in mind that this brain injuring violence is happening at universities, where that organ is supposedly being nurtured.

Think about it. We recruit young men to our universities in order for them to get their brains bashed in.

Only in America.

Mark Fainaru-Wada, an investigative journalist… said that it was difficult for viewers who watch the game on television at home to really appreciate how violent professional football actually is, something that came as a shock to him when he covered his first San Francisco 49ers game.

“I remember being down there for the first time and being both utterly shocked and terrified at what I was seeing,” he said. Watching the game on “TV or even being in person [in the stands] does not do justice to how violent, how fast, how loud the sport is… When you’re down on the field, even on the sidelines, it’s remarkable and it’s terrifying.”

I know, I know. What a sissy.

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PS: Note the song that accompanies the program’s trailer:

Hear the screams from everywhere
I’m addicted to the thrill
It’s a dangerous love affair…

An ESPN commentator fails to understand the ethical nuances of being a Texan. (Audio.)

… whoa-woo-woo-way-whacked-out Western Kentucky University go totally trailer trash via its decision in ’06 to join Division I-A football. One of their professors, Robert Dietel, begged them at the time to reconsider, and got shat on thusly by the board of trustees:

Western Kentucky University’s board ran roughshod over faculty regent Robert Dietel last week, as it rushed to embrace Division I-A football…. WKU’s board told Dietel to shut up. Contempt dripped from [one board member]: ‘People on this board dedicate their time for free. They have better things to do than let some university professor just keep talking.’

In 2009, WKU was the only winless team in the country. Moving briskly to 2011, things looked just as bleak. 2012 was all about hiring major gross-out Bobby Petrino as coach, a move hailed as “slime time” by the nation’s sports journalists.

Can you top that???

Yes. For 2013, I give you…

FIVE TOPPERS HAVE BEEN ARRESTED THIS OFFSEASON

And that’s just offseason! Damn season hasn’t even started yet!

And who’s the good ol’ boy gets to talk to the press ’bout how serious he takes moral and legal hoohaw?

Yeah! Billy Bob Bobby!

Div I-A.  SCORE!

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UPDATE: Bobby Petrino makes a small appearance in this helpful pre-season rundown of notable plays on SEC teams. UD knows we can expect more of the same this year!

Season of fists and ripe concussedness!

— To alter Keats slightly as UD shares with you her excitement at the prospect of the return of university football… Those who scoff at the notion of student-athletes forget the contribution players make to the philosophy and physiology of violence. If our schools somewhat neglect their players’ brains while they live, this is amply recompensed by the postmortem attention lavished on their cerebral tissue. And the remarkable human wastage on-field prompts high-level discourse on violence. Dan Le Batard writes:

The gladiators who choose this particular career path are often shaped by broken backgrounds that help them arrive at football … with some sharpened and rewarded character traits that might not serve them as much away from the game. It is not a coincidence that the majority of football arrests occur during the offseason, when players have too much free energy and free time away from the [game’s] more disciplined violence …

This is not to suggest all angry, violent men would be good football players; it is to suggest you’ll find a lot of angry, violent ones in some of your best huddles. And football does a hell of a job of not only finding men who live on the edge of acceptable behavior but also feeding and needing them.

Or, as the words emblazoned on a cafeteria wall at the University of Oregon’s just-completed Ministry of War have it: EAT YOUR ENEMIES. Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, like Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, the University of Oregon boasts a special room where it fattens its young; but UO goes those stories one better by plastering the room with propaganda. Kill! Kill! Kill!

Le Batard points out the traditional conundrum of university football: You can’t win without significant numbers of unstable violent people on your team; but tip over into too many violent people and you’re going to be in legal trouble.

The last time Colorado was championship good at football, Sports Illustrated reported that one-third of the roster had been arrested. Ohio State went more than four decades without a national championship … until Maurice Clarett. Nebraska went without a national championship for almost a quarter of a century … until Lawrence Phillips. You can find links between arrests and compromised standards and winning all over college football, from those notorious University of Miami champions to the University of Florida ones who had 31 arrests in the brief time Meyer was there.

You can point to outliers, but it is much harder to find big winners without criminal complications than with them. Heck, in 122 years of football, Vanderbilt has been to only four bowl games but two of them have been the past two seasons … as their coach now uses a helicopter to find recruits in the Southeastern Conference . . . and last month had to kick four players off the team for alleged sex crimes.

You begin to understand the symbolic importance of spindly idiots in spectacles and bow ties at the level of the presidency. And cutesy quoters of scripture at the level of coach.

Le Batard concludes that we want “the gladiators [to] be more civil.” But how can that be? We want to watch them eat their enemies. We want them and their enemies to grow bigger and bigger and bigger so that the spectacle of the meal will be bigger and bigger and bigger.

Because something is happening
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones ?

… Saving Normal, his book

about the benighted DSM-V.

Recent discussion here.

[Click on the image for a bigger picture.]

oh.

… has decided to follow events in the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh closely. After an August 4 cover story about the religious bullies there, TNR has already written an update.

Contemporary Beit Shemesh is, for UD‘s money, one of the flashiest of flash points in ye olde can liberal democracy survive? tale.

Recall Judith Shklar arguing that cruelty is the worst illiberal vice because it creates fear in everyone around it.

[By] designating cruelty as the chief vice, the summum malum, that liberalism must avoid, Shklar was calling attention to the accompanying sentiments of fear, degradation, and humiliation that would ultimately make a liberal polity impossible.

The women of Beit Shemesh move fearfully in the public sphere because of the degrading, humiliating cruelty of the fanatic haredim among them. These women live in an authoritarian, not democratic, city, because violently cruel haredim there hate democracy and commit themselves to acts of destruction against it every day.

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The New Republic writers note one hopeful development:

A piece by Sam Sokol in the Jerusalem Post suggested that the moderate wing of the Beit Shemesh Haredi community [has come to see] the [most recent haredi] rioting as a kind of tipping point, begging their more Orthodox neighbors to disavow violence once and for all. According to Sokol, in the wake of last week’s violence, “posters stating ‘Enough Bullying’ were plastered on street corners of the haredi neighborhood of Ramat Beit Shemesh by activists of the Tov Party, which, going into municipal elections, claims to represent what are being called ‘new haredim.’”

Evidently the posters decried the silence of Haredi leadership after incidents of anti-women violence in the town. The new posters announced that the extremists had “controlled the public thoroughfares and we were quiet. They insulted and embarrassed people in buses and we were quiet…. They brought a bad name to our town and desecrated God’s name, and we were quiet…. The time has come to stop the bullying and show responsibility for our city [and] to show responsibility for our community.”

Really all we can hope for when cruelty becomes systematic enough to kill democracy is that the intense disgust which the behavior generates in most people will, as it apparently has for some among the haredi population of Beit Shemesh, catalyze action.

This blog, written in the voice of Emory University’s president, shows you what a well-written satirical blog can do. UD selects the excerpt in her headline because over the years she’s heard variants of this statement from a host of overpaid university heads. I didn’t ask for this salary; the trustees set my salary; they insist on it…

These are people who spend their days and nights telling students to be independent thinkers, to become morally autonomous… Yet when it comes to the symbolically and practically important matter of their own compensation they’re suddenly sucklings. These tend to be same people who say ol’ T. Boone and Phil Knight insist that most of their billions go toward football, dammit, and there’s nothing we can do.

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UD thanks Carl.

… revisited.

Taiwan’s defense minister copies him.

The president of the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics has been found guilty of sexual assault. The 53-year-old Lutheran minister and Aberdeen University professor claimed the 26-year-old woman in the airline seat next to him was asking for it.

“First it was accidental – maybe we touched arms, very slight contact with her chest area,” he said.

“She encouraged me to keep looking out [the window]. The physical contact became more perceptible.

“After she closed her eyes I took it as an affirmative indication to stay close and maintain the physical contact.”