Just after featuring the rape-positive, bonkers-for-BB-guns school in a long article in the Sunday Magazine, they’re at it again in a whole new article, gnawing at FSU like a dog with a bone… Why can’t they leave FSU alone to live in the way the school has chosen to live?

Does the New York Times fly down to Sicily once a week to try to upset the delicate balance among the mafia, the courts, and the police? No! The newspaper recognizes and respects the right of Sicilians to live in their traditional fashion, under the ethos of omertà, etc. If, in just the same way, the heart of the FSU community has always depended on a complex synergy among football players, coaches, police, lawyers, boosters, and the leadership of the university – a synergy that keeps players on the field and out of jail by ignoring their crimes, plus makes everyone rich off a winning team – what business is that of some newspaper?

Tattle-tale reporters just can’t resist sharing details of the FSU way:

At least 13 football players have been implicated in a string of wild public shootouts with CO2-powered BB and pellet guns, causing thousands of dollars in property damage, endangering bystanders and eliciting a police response. Yet until the most recent case — a previously unreported shootout in June that caused such a commotion that a sheriff’s helicopter was called in to search for suspects — none of the episodes led to charges, even though elsewhere in Florida suspects as young as 12 have been arrested for doing the same things.

It’s like they think they’re better than the folks in Tallahassee or something…

Money from the Boosters has helped pay the salaries of high-ranking athletic officials and the university president, whose performance goals included enhancing “the partnership” between the Boosters and the athletic department.

And… And? … You got a problem with that? Everybody benefits! It’s not like we’re not gonna cut the president in on the deal. He’s the chief fucking academic officer! He, like, keeps the place all intellectual and all. Without that we lose our tax breaks.

“[Heisman voters] gave him the benefit of the doubt last season when he was accused of — but not charged with — rape. It’s unlikely that they will give him the same leeway after first being caught stealing and, now, after shouting obscenities into a microphone.”

FSU: It’s all good. Only way to make it better is to dispense with what’s left of the pretense of academics altogether.

And dammit! Let them have their chiropractic school! Somebody’s gotta bind up all them wounds.

American university football: The most perverted product of Western culture since The Story of O.

… four? It’s almost impossible to count. Here’s the trustees page for UDC. A careful reading yields four real voting trustees… though I’m not sure.

And then you go to this Washington Post article and it identifies a whole other person as chair of the board of trustees.

This Post editorial notes that ten out of the fifteen seats for trustees are empty — the City Council and the Mayor can’t agree on appointees.

Meanwhile one of our most troubled universities operates with virtually no trustee oversight.

From the obituary in the Tallahassee Democrat:

A devoted Marxist, Hodges was an organizer for the Communist Party and labor organizations as a young man. At FSU, he inspired a cadre of students who formed FSU’s controversial Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter in the late 1960s.

Many were students in a short-lived interdepartmental program Hodges created called social philosophy, which taught “anarchism, Maoism, Trotskyism, anything except capitalism,” said former FSU activist, … Jack Lieberman.

“He was keenly aware what he was doing would not meet the approval of the administration,” said Lieberman, now a Miami businessman. “But it was some of the best studies of my life and I learned a lot.”

Hodges was infamously cantankerous. Before his 2003 retirement, he lived more than 20 years in the Miccosukee Land Co-Op, where “He was not much involved in the community because he was not interested in anyone telling him what to do,” said Mitchell.

Hodges never learned to use a computer, imposing constantly on the philosophy department secretaries. He spent six years as chair of the philosophy department, until colleagues voted him out for spending the department’s entire travel budget on one of his research trips.

… “He could be a pain in the butt, no question about that,” said longtime FSU philosophy professor Russell Dancy.

… I’ll grant you that... But one thing all the highest-ranked schools know is that there’s always another school nipping at your heels, challenging your predominance…

And yes, you’ll say Indiana? What?

But the place has serious fire power, and the Florida syndicate had better take notice:

Indiana University safety Antonio Allen has been suspended from the football team after his arrest Tuesday on multiple drug charges.

A Monroe County jail spokesman said Allen was charged with dealing cocaine and with dealing heroin (over 10 grams) with a firearm.

Sure, the Florida Football Syndicate will point out that the other IU football arrestees over the last few weeks were nuthin. Nuthin! DUI, battery, bupkis! Plus Indiana football doesn’t have the entire legal and legislative apparatus of the state in their pocket, the way FSU and UF do!

Oui oui! C’est entendu! All UD is saying is that Florida’s institutions of higher learning should not rest on their laurels.

Success! These universities have truly made it.

But their commitment to intellectual integrity goes further than this.

Last year, I decided to stop watching [college football]. I kept seeing players get concussed during games, which I find more disturbing at the college level because I’ve actually taught undergraduates.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste. What you want to do is bash it in on a football field.

American universities should have drills on what to do when there isn’t an active shooter on campus.

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Says here they’ve arrested someone. Four people are being treated in hospitals.

Let’s see if we can’t draw a picture of the shooter. Male. Very young, like 19. Psychotic, has been undergoing treatment for years. Name either excruciatingly Mayflower (Randolph Higginbottom The Fourth) or way ethnic (Alfredo Ibn Gandhi).

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You remember, right? The last shooting at FSU?

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[A] student who lived through the Parkland shooting entered [a room where students were sheltering]. “He was like, ‘Man, I never thought this would happen again.'”

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“At least one dead.”

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Hoping against hope this is inaccurate: Five dead, four injured. Two shooters, one of them dead.

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Thinking of that gun billboard on the streets of Oakland. Suggested slogan: USE IT TO KILL EVERYONE BECAUSE YOU HATE THE WORLD.

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 “[N]ormal college dude” … a white man with light hair, wearing an orange t-shirt and khaki shorts.

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Apparently the five dead/two shooters report is incorrect.

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I was off by one year: The tyke was just 20. I was right about the funny name: Phoenix Ikner. His parents – they’re in law enforcement and have mucho guns at home, very convenient for their troubled son – gave him [I’ve corrected this; see a later post on Ikner] that wondrous, grandiloquent first name, regarding their babe I guess as a great beautiful mythic bird reborn from its own ashes. They probably didn’t anticipate that he’d reduce everyone around him to ashes. Maybe they were blinded by that name; maybe, less blinded, they would have made an effort to keep him away from guns. They may face prosecution.

1.) The murderers of Florida State law professor Dan Markel have slowly, slowly, gone to jail. True, the hired thugs who shot his brains out while he sat in his car in his driveway were put away long ago; but the woman who brought the thugs and the criminal mastermind together was convicted of first degree murder only last year. The mastermind – Markel’s ex-brother in law, who was pissed Markel wanted equal custody of Markel’s kids after he and this guy’s sister divorced – goes on trial in October. Insanely, it has been nine years since Markel was killed. His parents and sister have suffered through those years, waiting for the worst of the conspirators to face justice. Finally, it seems, the worst of them will.

2.) The absurdly corrupt University of Southern California (put its name in my search engine and go to town) conspired with an absurdly corrupt LA politician to make money for the school in exchange for favors for the politician (details here). Mark Ridley-Thomas will go to prison for three and a half years.

[M]ost professors, even conservative ones, will avoid institutions they know are restricting academic freedom. They know that in such places, because of whom it might upset, they may not be able to engage in the research they wish to explore and cover topics relevant to their academic discipline.

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UD calls Florida Little Hungary: Like that country, it’s shutting down its best schools (Hungary hounded out Central European University) to make the world safe for professors like John Eastman.

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Texas is the other state you don’t want to be in if you’re a self-respecting academic. Look how the state’s lieutenant governor started blubbering when one of Texas A&M’s most impressive professors said something negative about him.

OTOH: Take a trip down memory lane here at UD about the filthy jockshop which is A&M, and recall that ganging up on professors while kissing the ass of characters like Johnny Manziel is Job One at that school.

The numbers are out. As you’d expect, many prospective college students seem likely to avoid Ensouled Zygote states.

OTOH: If you’re a teenage girl for whom rape, drunkenness, berserk athletes/frat boys, gun and gang violence, self-righteous Christian/sexist administrations, and absolutely no abortion in the state, sounds like the ideal higher ed environment, UD (who has followed these schools for years) recommends the following:

Baylor University

Florida State University

Jackson State University

Louisiana State Baton Rouge

As with all lists, not all of these schools will feature all of your desiderata, though Baylor comes closest to ticking off all the elements you’re looking for.

With its latest accomplishment – caught by the feds stealing gobs of money in a wide range of inventive and patient-anguishing/bankrupting ways – UM Med maintains its national position as America’s most corrupt medical school ever. With a rogues’ gallery of leaders and doctors, the school has, over decades, enriched itself in ways so deeply and consistently depraved that at some point you have to grant it grudging credit for having utterly transformed a place of healing into an abattoir. The state of Florida is to be sure already the USA’s epicenter of elderly people and medical fraud; it took decades of clever planning and moral squalor for UM to make itself the epicenter of the epicenter.

“Tens of billions of dollars are lost annually to fraud, waste and abuse, and Miami is the Medicare fraud capital of the United States,” [the whistleblower’s attorney] said. “Today’s announced settlement and the schemes described in the DOJ press release are ironic considering they were committed by an iconic South Florida institution under the leadership of the former Secretary of Health and Human Services [the appalling Donna Shalala], the very agency that promulgated the Medicare rules that were violated.”

Wanna know exactly what they did? Details here.

Whether it’s the real game, at a high school, or the virtual game, at an entertainment complex, football and Florida go together like Smith and Wesson.

Put America’s most violent game together with virtually universal gun ownership, throw in an open public venue, and POOOOOF! Mass shooting.

The shots and shrieks are recorded by all the dying people, so the soundtrack of America writes itself: Concussive hits from the game; RATATATATATATATATA; fuck they’re shooting run; bodies running; grunts; bodies falling.

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And Parkland’s only four hours away! The Sunshine State’s full of opportunities – at many of the same locations! – to get killed in a large-scale event.

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Their flagship university.

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[E]very country contains mentally ill and potentially violent people. Only America arms them.

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SEVENTEEN TRILLION

“How many mass shootings in your state will it take for you to do something?” David Hogg tweeted to U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

[A UF football player] told police he needed [a loaded AR-15 assault rifle in his car] for protection from locals in Gainesville because “they be coming after us.” The stop came after tension (and at least one fight) between some Gators and Gainesville residents, including Devante “Tay Bang” Zachery.

Best part of all: Police can’t arrest him. Cuz it’s perfectly fine to drive around the state of Florida with a loaded AR-15 in your car.

The University of Florida is well on its way to being America’s first university to host a protracted armed conflict on campus. Talk about town/gown.

Shades of James Tracy, Mike Leach, and other campus conspiracists.

Rather than simply acknowledging the Sandusky/Nyang’oro Principle at our most sports-obsessed schools – university administrators can’t and won’t control anything having to do with big-ticket athletics – Jim Jordan and his fellow conspiracists deny the fucking obvious and the obvious fucking at one more degenerate American university sports program.

Called to account for what happened at Ohio State, they reach way, way outside the orbit of anyone’s moral responsibility.

Indeed the Deadspin writer I quote in my headline is right: Eventually Jordan and Louie Gohmert and company will determine that like the “dead” “kids” of Sandy Hook and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, their accusers from the wrestling team are all crisis actors.