… used since its inception as an ATM by administrators, has scored its first guilty plea. A vice-president stole tens of thousands of dollars. But he’s doing okay:

“You go to bed with it, you wake up with it. You have good days and bad days, but it’s always there,” he said. “Thank God for medication and professionals [helping me] through all of this and my family.”

VERY.

[Athletic Director Mike Hamilton’s] resignation is effective on June 30, [just days before the NCAA’s infractions committee comes to pay a visit] but he will be on administrative leave beginning Monday. According to reports, he will receive a buyout of $1.335 million over the next 36 months or $445,000 per year ($37,083.33 monthly)…

Hamilton fired football coach Phil Fulmer in 2008, Bruce Pearl in March and most recently baseball coach Todd Raleigh. He hired Lane Kiffin to replace Fulmer, but Kiffin resigned after one season to take over the University of Southern California program, which was sanctioned by the NCAA.

According to the News Sentinel, Pearl is being paid $948,728, and Raleigh is owed $331,657.53 for a total of $1,280,385.53.

According to The Tennessean, Fulmer received $6 million when he was fired.

The football violations being heard by the NCAA this weekend are under Kiffin’s regime.

He also fired baseball coach Rod Delmonico and basketball coach Buzz Peterson, who received $1.39 million in 2005 when he was fired, according to the News Sentinel.

According to The Tennessean, the total cost of all of Hamilton’s firings is $9,070,385.53.

Ed Greif, a local sportswriter, does the numbers.

Tennessee: Hire guys you have to fire because they get caught breaking rules, then pay them millions and millions of buyout dollars for years. Genius.

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

A LIGHT STORM OVER THE OCEAN

A light storm over the ocean!
As if day were trying to wedge itself back in.
Flashes over clouds are like flashes over mountains.

After days of heat, a hard cold wind!
And the sheeting of clouds without rain.
A light storm over the ocean.

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

… about whether we’re becoming decadent and late imperial and all.

What makes political decadence possible is the luxury of a secure international position, which makes it possible both to meddle in various global problems where our vital national interests are not really at stake (Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, etc.) and permits Americans to think that it’s perfectly ok to put climate change deniers, religious fanatics, former body-builders turned actors, and other unqualified individuals in high office.

That sort of thing.

[T]he Weiner episode mark[s] the culmination of several months during which other sideshows involving outrageous male behavior — John Ensign and John Edwards come to mind — dominated news coverage at a moment when our country’s future really is on the line.

That sort of thing.

UD would only ask y’all to calm down and think this through.

We not long ago elected an eminently serious, eminently qualified president, for instance.

And vice-president.

We pay our taxes. Etc.

You want decadent, look at Italy, where they elect Berlusconi and don’t pay their taxes. In a recent New Yorker post about Strauss-Kahn, Adam Gopnik reported that

[F]or lovers of France and French life, there is something deeply depressing … [in] what many in Paris see as the “Italianization” of French life—the descent into what might become an unseemly round of Berlusconian squalor…

The very fact that we react strongly to trivialization and irresponsibility in our country’s politics suggests that we know what it means to be politically respectable. Did you see what President Obama did to Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner?

Let France glance over at Italy and worry. It has plenty to worry about. We have much less.

Newt Gingrich Aides Resign En Masse.
The candidate’s too dégueulasse.
Each gets a pin
From his Tiffany’s tin
In remembrance of things past.

This is potentially a very big story. I want to read more about it before I comment, but it’s important enough for me to put a couple of links up already. Here, and here.

Original report here.

What am I talking about? The BBC explains:

A report from the US-based thinktank The Oakland Institute claims that the scramble for arable land in Africa by foreign investors is forcing millions of small farmers off their ancestral land.

As global food prices rise and exporters reduce shipments of commodities, wealthy countries and investment funds are seeing an opportunity in Africa and acquiring huge tracts of fertile land to produce crops like wheat, rice, corn and biofuels for consumption back home. The report says that an area the size of France has already been sold or leased to foreign investors.

Because of poor land ownership laws in many African countries and a lack of transparency about deals, it is claimed, these land deals are delivering almost none of the benefits promised to African citizens.

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

WTF?

In the west African country of Mali, one investment group was able to secure 100,000 hectares of fertile land for a 50-year term for free, according to the Institute’s report.

A local reporter demonstrates that a particular high school is a diploma mill. Miami Dade College accepts their graduates and will, it informs the reporter, continue to do so.

… (pronounced embolize), is UD‘s term for the tendency of some MBA programs to lie about their job placement numbers.

An ethics complaint made to [the University of Florida] alleged that Warrington College of Business Administration officials manipulated data on the [2009] job placement of program graduates.

A higher percentage of graduates were reported as being employed in order to maintain the program’s ranking in U.S. News’ annual guide to graduate schools…

The school admits the numbers were madly inflated, but denies lying. It was just “inexperience” or something.

Fudging is very much the way at UF. Take this statement from the Distance Learning page on the business school’s website:

Studies have shown that there is no significant difference in the learning outcomes experienced by students in a traditional classroom versus those in a distance learning situation.

Footnote? Wanna source that? Why not?

… the European Court of Human Rights has winner written all over it.

The application states the principal applicant is the husband who “expects and instructs” his wife to wear the burqa, a full-body covering that includes a mesh over the face, as well as the niqab, a face veil that only leaves an opening for the eyes.

But he will be at risk of prosecution under French law if he crosses the Channel because he will admit that “he expects and instructs his wife to wear the niqab/burqa”.

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

UPDATE:

When I see a woman in a burqa, my feelings are of revulsion. Not of the women themselves, of course, but of the culture and the men who require this of them. Not only do I want to set them free, I want to protect my own daughter from the sight of what appears to me as forced subservience.

Boston College law professor Kent Greenfield describes exactly what happened to UD ten years ago, in Virginia’s Pentagon City Mall, as she walked with her ten-year-old daughter. At the sight of three women in burqas, UD immediately, instinctively, put her hands over her daughter’s eyes.

Greenfield concludes:

It’s time to have an American conversation about the burqa. It will not be the same as a European conversation; it will take into account distinctive American ideals, some of which — like liberty and equality — inevitably conflict. We should not presuppose that the conversation will be simple or have only one possible outcome.

Yes.

… say Richard Vedder and Matthew Denhart in Forbes, nothing will change in the supremely scummy world of big-time university sports.

Wannabe schools in the shadows of the Ohio States of the world often lose $15 million a year or more on sports, usually directly or indirectly financed by socking it to students, a large portion of whom do not share the enthusiasm of some alumni and others for whom sports is a passion. Even at these schools, it is difficult to find a football coach who earns less than $200,000 a year. Fans often claim these salaries are driven by market forces. Yet one doubts that a properly functioning market would ever provide such high compensation to the chief executive of a company that loses millions annually.

But back to that unless. I doubt it’s unless a herculean scandal occurs. It will occur; and it won’t happen at just one school. There will be, simultaneously, herculean scandals at, say, five schools. The national headlines, for weeks on end, will feature universities — universities — buried in piles of pig shit. People will definitely notice.

And what will happen?

They’ll replace the head of the NCAA with another guy just like whatzisface.

Maurice Clarett puts the blame where it belongs.

.. and author of a series of books on strength conditioning, has killed himself.

He suffered from depression.

He jumped off the roof of the New York Athletic Club.

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

On the same day, an opinion piece in Emma’s city’s newspaper, The New York Times, features this phrase:

suicide is generally wrong

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

Indeed the opinion piece’s headline makes the wrongness of suicide paramount. It asks:

WHAT’S WRONG WITH SUICIDE?

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

This is the writer’s second column, in the last couple of days, on suicide. In neither column does he even begin to hint at a justification for the claim that suicide — assisted or non-assisted — is wrong. Let’s see if we can do that.

There is an obvious religious way in which suicide is wrong. You are born by God, you live by God, you die by God. For many religious, taking your death into your own hands is – like abortion – denying the will of God in regard to the most basic of human realities. It is a sort of grotesque disobedience, a usurpation of divine powers, essentially unforgivable in its extremity.

Other spiritual traditions may not bring so punitive and outraged a rhetoric (and indeed damnation) to suicide, but they may well see it as … not exactly wrong, but, as the Buddhist Matthieu Ricard explains:

[W]anting not to exist any longer is a delusion. It’s a form of attachment that, destructive though it is, binds you to samsara, the circle of suffering existence. When someone commits suicide, all they do is change to another state, and not necessarily a better state either.

Here, suicide is just sort of stupid, since it doesn’t accomplish the surcease you’re after. On the contrary, it almost guarantees the unpleasantness of your next go-’round.

If you’re not part of a spiritual tradition in which the will of God or karmic action prevails, in what way is suicide wrong, or ontologically mistaken, and therefore to be rejected?

Here are three possible ways: One is the harm argument; a second is the antithetical-to-life argument; and, finally, there’s the cowardice argument.

Harm: Everyone knows that suicide hurts other people. When suicides write notes (apparently Tom Emma did not), they almost always include the words I’m sorry. Weighing on their minds as suicides do the deed is the shock and despair and guilt they’re handing people who love them, and they routinely ask their forgiveness.

Just as for the religious you are, in killing yourself, denying yourself to God, for human beings you are denying yourself to them. The act is the ultimate taking. Hence, suicide is wrong because it is cruel beyond reason.

Antithetical to life: In his memoir, Experience, Martin Amis writes that “because of what I do all day ,… suicides … are antithetical.” An artist, a writer, creates, makes something out of nothing. Her material is us — living breathing human beings and their ongoing dilemmas — and she needs us to be there, to keep at it.

When we check out, we take the air out of everyone’s tires. We threaten the fundamental, unthinking commitment we’re all supposed to have to the human comedy and our part in it. Life is good… or at least interesting… or at least compelling in its pleasures. Something like that. Each suicide is thus an intimately demoralizing act for the rest of us. Why persist? Why create? Who says life is good? Suicide is wrong because in killing oneself one ontologically puts at risk all of us.

Cowardice: Old age, people like to say, is not for sissies. All of life is full of challenges and deficits and sorrows and anxieties, and old age is of course rife with them; but, as the cliché suggests, only a sissy would take the easy way out. Life, under any circumstances, is a gift. Your life is a gift to you, and to others. Suicide is wrong because its commission makes you a supreme sissy, someone whose unseemly fear of existence itself blights your very being.

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

UD would argue that none of these three arguments succeeds in marking suicide as wrong.

The mother of a Purdue University student who died of heatstroke in the forests of Grand Cayman Island last week recalls his passion for reptiles. “We’ll find comfort in that, as upset as we are.”

Rescue crews had enormous difficulty reaching him.

The rescue attempt included fire and ambulance workers trekking through about two miles of bush land while carrying stretchers and other equipment to reach the man, who was believed to be suffering from hyperthermia (heat stroke). The bush was so thick that emergency vehicles could not be driven into the area.

Medical personnel stabilised the man while the Royal Cayman Islands Police helicopter was called out to attempt to pick him up.

One problem: Nowhere to land.

So firefighters used machetes and a chainsaw to clear trees and bush to create an area large enough for the chopper to touch down. The man was then carried to the helicopter to be transported to hospital.

The very peak of default.

It’s got everything but a university.