With a 3-13 record, the UNM baseball team plays in an “empty” stadium.
Monday the UNM Board of Regents approved the use of a $2 million Severance Tax Bond, which was allocated by the 2010 Legislature for a new baseball complex.
“It’s not money that could be used somewhere else on campus,” Krebs said. “If we didn’t use it specifically for this project it would revert … to the state.”
And while the state is in need of more money, the athletic department says this is money well spent.
An impoverished university, its academics gutted, builds a new baseball stadium for a team without spectators.
Okay… But this makes it look as though New Mexico State still uses Security Concepts to protect its campus.
Either way, you gotta wonder why they hired Security Concepts. The owner was “arrested in 1999 on racketeering and other charges in an investigation of crime in public housing that turned up allegations of illegality at [a] downtown Las Cruces bar.” Charges were dropped because they couldn’t find enough witnesses.
More recently (last month), the same owner was “charged with driving drunk with two loaded firearms in his vehicle.”
… [Michael] Gonzales refused to provide a breath sample … During a search of the Jeep, the deputies found an unloaded Phoenix Arms long rifle under the passenger seat, a loaded Charter Arms .38 Special and a Kel-Tec 9 mm Luger, which was not only loaded but had a round in the chamber …
The campus paper doesn’t name him, but his students know who he was, and they talk about him to the reporter. He was apparently killed, along with his girlfriend, by his girlfriend’s ex-lover.
… Student Felicia Lopez, in the professor’s Chicano Studies class, said her teacher did not show up for his 10 a.m. Monday class.
“He would tell us before if he was going to miss class,” she said. “He was always excited and passionate to show up to teach.”
… Student Oscar Ortega said the professor canceled class three times in the past two weeks because he had to testify in court as a witness to a domestic dispute case.
“He talked about how concerned he was about the domestic dispute case,” he said. “He was constantly talking about it.”
Students in the professor’s class plan to honor him by wearing black wristbands on their right arms, Ortega said…
A jock-sniffing, nepotistic president; sociopaths on the sports teams; Mistress Jade, who punishes naughty grad students with whips, on the creative writing staff… It’s all gotten too much for UNM, which has just hired an expensive ‘reputation management’ consultant to make the corrupt twisted people who make UNM what it is look uncorrupt and untwisted.
UD awaits the ministrations of the public relations firm upon her. She looks forward to her sense of UNM as a crony-ridden craphouse being transformed by clever pr into a sense of UNM as something that smells really good.
From a comment on a UNM Daily Lobo story about a sadomasochistic sex worker in the creative writing department:
I propose a no-holds-barred celebrity duel between Mike “Suckerpunch” Locksley and Lisa “Mistress Jade” Chavez to be held in Smith Plaza next Friday at high noon – 15 rounds or until one of our UNM celebrities can fight no longer – tickets will be sold to the public and all proceeds will go to settle lawsuits against UNM resulting from the earlier escapades of “Suckerpunch” and “Mistress Jade” – Come one, come all – see the show of a lifetime – and shake hands with the man who brought you the whole thing, Ringmaster David Schmidly!!!
He acted heroically during the mass shooting last year at Northern Illinois University, but NIU’s police chief has always been a bit unhinged, and students, with whom he has been abusive, want him out:
… [A]n editor of the campus newspaper [has] accused [Donald] Grady of threatening and shouting at him during an interview that became a three-hour tirade.
“It’s time to put an end to this mess. It’s time for a change,” the Northern Star student paper wrote in a blistering editorial calling for Grady’s removal. It accused him of employing intimidation to get his way.
School officials put the 56-year-old Grady on paid leave for 30 days starting last week while a panel reviews the allegations …
DeKalb County Sheriff Roger Scott is among the officials who have publicly backed the paper’s call for Grady’s ouster or resignation.
“NIU has isolated itself under his leadership,” Scott said.
… Controversy has dogged Grady, who also is from Beloit, Wis., during his career. After becoming Wisconsin’s first black police chief in the mostly white town of Bloomer in 1989, he created a stir by issuing nearly 300 tickets, including to himself, for violations of a snow-shoveling ordinance.
When he became Santa Fe, N.M., chief in 1994, he ordered officers to stop accepting free cups of coffee on the job and banned bolo ties.
Police responded with a 103-to-5 no-confidence vote in their boss. After digging in his heels for two years, Grady resigned, saying his reforms had encountered too much resistance.
And at NIU, well before the shooting, staff of the student newspaper had already complained that he often withheld standard crime reports, requiring the paper to file Freedom of Information Act requests…
A letter to the campus paper, the Daily Lobo, from an emeritus professor brings us up to date on this perennial class act.
The TV ads featuring Lobo Louie and his Lobo floozy accurately convey the tackiness of the partnership between the University of New Mexico Athletics Department and the Route 66 Casino Hotel. How did an institution of higher learning end up with the gaming industry as a roommate?
Sadly, these organizations have become soul mates. Intercollegiate athletics in America today has a bad case of gambling addiction. I do not refer to fans wagering on games. I refer to institutions that throw good money after bad in hopes of hitting that elusive jackpot — a championship.
Few, if any, NCAA Division I athletics programs cover their costs, especially if indirect subsidies for physical plant and utilities are factored in. Yet programs and their boosters insist on spending more and more for coaches’ compensation, sumptuous facilities and player recruitment. They say they want to “reach the next level.” Their behavior resembles that of a problem gambler who, in placing ever-higher stakes to recoup his losses, succeeds only in reaching the next level of penury.
Just as the family of a problem gambler suffers from the diversion of limited resources away from essential needs, so the academic communities of Division I universities suffer from the diversion of limited resources away from their basic educational mission.
Teaching, learning and research are starved as money is lavished on games.
Viewed from this perspective, Louie and the floozy are perfect for each other…
He sounds embarrassed, doesn’t he? But when it comes to tacky and the University of New Mexico under President David Schmidly, there’s so much more. Here’s a start.
How sensitively put… Wouldn’t want to bludgeon the end of the sentence with the blunt force sexual … Want to gentle things along with the delicate smidgeon in nature…
And yet…
What do you really want? Do you want a writer who waves her crumpet and says Well I declare! Multiple sources … [wink wink nudge nudge]…
Or do you want ol’ UD to spill the tea… er, beans? UD, who has for years been covering what guys do to guys in the locker room when broom comes to shove?
Ok. While of course UD did not have the pleasure of attending the New Mexico State University haze, she’s pretty sure three or four guys held down each victim (the event was probably witnessed by much of the team, and to make the police investigation a snap, some of the stupider players probably recorded it on their cell phones) and while he lay writhing and shrieking one of them shoved the end of a straw broom up his rectum.
That night, vomiting with rage and self-disgust, the victim(s) took his nightly call from his mother, who heard something funny in his voice, got him to confess he’d been anally raped, and when she got off the phone with him she and her husband called the university, a lawyer, the cops, and the local newspaper.
NMSU, a wholly vile and dysfunctional location, all of whose leadership is interim times ten and desperately trying to leave, issues a pallid statement, shuts down the rape club, and prays the state legislature doesn’t hold against the school the fact that it’s a cesspool. (Spoiler Alert: The corrupt and mindless state legislature won’t hold it against the school. Boys will be boys. These are real bonding experiences.)
Now I’m not saying there were guns involved. Usually this quaint lad on lad action involves merely fists and brooms; but this being the USA I can’t see why there wouldn’t have been guns involved. Look at the team logo.
Maybe they shoved gun butts up their butts.
Ave Atque Vale:
Now they are a shit show. You have a player involved shooting, a catfishing, a fight with a rival. Shit even the cops chased [the] team bus down the highway. Yet here we are after all of that, [with hazing incidents and a decision] to suspend its season.
Yeah. I also called the “in front of the team” thing.
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The victim, whose name was redacted in the report along with those of the other players, said other incidents involving inappropriate physical and sexual touching had been occurring in locker rooms and on road trips since last summer.
What a team! If they don’t outright shoot you, they at least finger your anus.
The athletic director draws inspiration from the fact that his team played so well after having been arrested.
Half the Eastern New Mexico State University baseball team was arrested (fight, campus parking lot) and then, having been bonded out of jail, they played a winning game that same day.
“A lot of teams in that situation where they saw several of their players get arrested two hours previously could have folded right there at that point,” said [Jeff] Geiser.
How many teams can come back right away from mass arrest to play a winning game? Not many, baby. But our guys were totally not fazed.
New Mexico State’s Robert Carpenter pulled back his arm and delivered a powerful punch to the face of Liberty’s Shiloh Robinson, sending the forward to the floor, [breaking his nose,] and leading to an ejection during an Aggies overtime win.
The beauty of it is the coach initially said Carpenter’s a great guy and I’m sure he’s remorseful and maybe we’ll suspend him for a game or something… And then I dunno someone must have talked to the coach cuz now it’s oh he’s suspended indefinitely blah blah.
Far out: New Mexico’s gun-splashed city is so unstaunched at this point that the governor has declared a health emergency! As in like you can’t leave your house, man, without some chance of being pulped; and that goes for your kids, too — so parents are increasingly reluctant to send their kids to school.
A pretty dire outcome for America’s dumbest state, and recent winner of Worst State Overall in which to live.
Suicidewise as well NM vies with The Headblaster Three (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska) for Berettas to the brain. It’s right up there (this is from 2020), almost always securely in the top five.
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So for 30 days the cowboys can’t carry their guns in public, says the governor, and ‘course they’re all pissing their high-waisted Y-fronts at the news. ‘Course the governor’s a fucking dictator and when Trump comes back he’s putting her in front of a firing squad.
West Virginia University is gradually reducing itself to nothing – no foreign languages, a lot fewer professors, no grad program in math, fewer undergrad programs.
Shit, place ain’t got no money, and customers are voting with their feet.
Lotsa boohoo about all this from the liberal elites, but hold on jest a minute! Hang on jest one sec! UD ain’t crying, and she’ll tell you why.
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As you know, UD sees no reason why a country (Hungary) or a state (New Mexico, Nevada, West Virginia, Florida) that wants to reduce itself to an intellectual desert should be kept from doing so.
The American system is already correcting for this. Notice, for instance, how Hampshire College has stepped up to offer an easy transfer to New College students who can’t take it anymore. Nevada has always done beautifully on the dumbshit tourist trade and doesn’t need fancy theories to run casinos. Its wretched state university system should call it a day; smart young Nevadans can go to California. Same deal for other pro-ignorance states – this is a big country with oodles of good (and some supremely great) universities.
As for West Virginia. Feast your eyes on UD‘s coverage, over many years, of WVU – a hopelessly drunk and disorderly party school in a hopeless state from which those who can flee are fleeing. Morgantown runs with squalid bars in which frat boys try to kill pledges via drink. The kids riot after purty near every football game. The football and basketball coaches continue to be paid like princes. It’s a world, to be sure; a party school world which is about what a state like WV can manage if you tell it to establish a university. But you’re never gonna get the yahoos in the legislature to smarten the place up, and fact is most of its students are fine with the way things are. Those who aren’t will find good schools in driving distance: FIVE states border WV, and three of them have good schools.
You don’t pay any attention to Hastings, Nebraska. Hell, you don’t pay any attention to Nebraska. But it’s itty bitty news stories like this one out of Hastings that tell you what’s going on in gun-blast USA.
Time was a punk revving his car a million miles an hour up and down the street where he lives would respond to complaints about that behavior by spitting on complainants or kicking the air and saying fuck you. Now, however:
Anthony Copley, 20, pulled a rifle on one of his neighbors, threatening to kill them.
The dispute came after one of the neighbors complained about Copley speeding through the residential area.
Police arrived on scene and arrested Copley for terroristic threats and use of a deadly weapon to commit a felony.
“Terroristic threats” is a new one; I guess it allows the court to increase jail time. But anyway, the wee lad no doubt owns lots of big guns and this is no doubt far from the first time he’s pulled the rifle he has on him at all times and stuck it in the face of someone bold enough to confront him about his behavior.
So this describes the new normal inside the blast furnace: Terrifyingly, terroristically, no place in America is safe from a rifle in your face because no place in America is without guns in everyone’s hands. You always have to assume that any complaint you make to any stranger or neighbor under any circumstance could eventuate in a rifle in your face.
Every locality in America has tons of stupid angry assholes like Anthony Copley, and almost every asshole has a rifle. Certain states – Alaska, Wyoming, Louisiana, Montana, New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama – pretty much guarantee you’ll get a rifle in your face at some point. Everybody’s got guns and I guess everybody’s an asshole in those states. Enter at your own risk.
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And yet our bloodiest gunniest states, like Texas, absolutely refuse to blame all the guns for all the blood. Too dumb to grasp correlation, they cannot see that the gunniest states are, overwhelmingly, the bloodiest states. So here’s the poor desperate mayor of Bryan, Texas begging citizens to help him at least slow the gun bloodbath.
“If you see something, report it. If you know something, report it. The problems we are having right now is with youth with guns. It’s not the guns that are bad, it’s the person holding the gun, pulling the trigger,” [Bobby] Gutierrez said. “Please, I’m asking on behalf of our council here. Do your part as well and report and make sure the police aren’t there by themselves to do this by themselves cause if everyone is there during a shooting in the middle of a park, and no one sees anything, and no one’s giving them anything, they can’t do their job.”
It’s not the guns that are bad, folks! It’s the person pulling the trigger. Plus we have a moral issue with all the people standing around watching a shooting in the middle of a park who don’t say anything to the cops about what they saw.
Wonder why witnesses don’t talk. Wonder why blast-furnace states have large populations of silent terrorized people too afraid of all the assholes with guns even to give police a description of someone depraved enough to shoot guns in a public park.
“The person holding the gun” has always lived in Texas; assholes are always around. What’s changed is exactly the number, the normalization, the open carry, and the ease of purchase, of guns. What’s changed is the breakdown of civility and the emergence of paranoia in regard to all other people.
The Taos County Undersheriff tries to explain to locals complaining about the quality of policing before and after last month’s mass shooting at Red River’s biker rally (see these posts for background), that he told them decades ago how super-dangerous the event was, but no one listened. Thus it’s a bit rich, after years of criminality and menace finally culminating in what anyone with a brain knew would happen, to listen to locals bitching about all the blood.
After all, ‘who would have thought 28,000 bikers converging in a 1-square-mile mountain town of 539 people for Memorial Day weekend could get out of control?’
[R]ecently filed court documents point toward years of turmoil in the state with two rival gangs — the Bandidos and Mongols — perceiving themselves to be at war with the other.
Ol’ UD could have chosen from a zillion recent bloody gun incidents; why so much blogging about the Red River massacre? Because a town promoted a huge, violent, cult ritual! Year after year, knowing full well they were hosting thousands of cretinous warring sects and calling the event family friendly! Drawing children to the powder keg!
‘These guys all seem likable enough: [people tend to think] that they are misunderstood, outlaws from the old days, and they ride motorcycles instead of horses,’ [one policeman] said. ‘Even cops think, “Oh they are just tattooed long haired guys who like to ride motorcycles.” And the reality of it is they are long-haired tattooed guys who ride motorcycles and sell a hell of a lot of methamphetamine and murder people and steal motorcycles and extort people and beat people up in bars for no reasons.’
When people around the world wonder what peculiar American cultural traits produce daily large-scale gun carnage, they need to look at gunny gangy states like New Mexico, and gun-mad towns like Red River within that state. Here’s a perfectly respectable town – a yearlong tourist destination! – with a chronic violence fetish. Why? If the CDC is serious about studying American gun violence, it needs to dispatch a team of epidemiologists to Red River to ask people questions like Why do you think 28,000 armed bikers are cute? What is it about open powder kegs that makes you want to smoke cigarettes on top of them?
I think part of the answer must be that states like NM, always eager to liberalize their gun laws, proudly perceive themselves to be Badlands. Wild west shootouts have always been part of their frontier history, and in these post-frontier days, biker rallies virtually guarantee the survival of that self-affirming drama. Like their neighbor, whose famous tagline is Don’t Mess with Texas, biker rally states assume as a default position paranoid belligerence – and what better organized group to exteriorize that world view than the Mongols?
If I’m right, then mass murder is baked in to states like NM and Texas. If I’m right, it’s constitutive of state identity. Hell, NM done got MORE gun deaths than TX!
Not to get all Freudian, but the evidence points here: Mass murder isn’t what NM and Texas dread; it’s what they crave.
Good luck with that, lady. Talk to Ocean City, Maryland. You can wave your mayoral wand and declare certain deadly events over, but, by their very nature, groups like bikers are likely to ignore you. There’s a reason they call themselves Outlaws and shit like that: They do what they want.
And they’ll probably want to keep coming back to little Red River and there’s nothing you can do about that.
You’ve whipped yourself up some real sorcerer’s apprentice type stuff, in other words. And it don’t help none that New Mexico is biker gang central. One of the top five states for biker gangs. These killers are your neighbors.
AND it don’t help that the current trend in America is for everyone to own and carry multiple crowd-pulverizers. I mean, way gun-friendly states like your beloved New Mexico don’t get to just rest on their cowboy laurels and enjoy their mass murder toys at gun ranges and all; folks are gonna wanna kill people with them, aren’t they?
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Now, for reasons unknown, your little town kept inviting tens of thousands of heavily armed biker gangs to hang out with you every year. I mean, it was great for business — the bars, the motels. The bars. And I’m sure some of your bar owners are even as we speak saying basically oh okay a few dead guys in the street. Cost of doing business! Don’t shut down the rally. Few bad apples. Get more police protection. Etc. The mayor will ignore them, but, again, it won’t matter. Chances are excellent massive waves of drunken louts with big guns will be back next year.
And lady, not to be mean, but you and your fellow New Mexicans created, and sustain, the gunny gangy world in which the Barbarians thrive. That’s why they choose to live in your state.
