- New Mexico – 95.0′
UD‘s been blogging about NM for years and ain’t surprised it came out on top on this and on other intelligence measures; but it’s always good to be able to point to evidence, and the recent decision to stage a huge public rally in a tiny town among warring biker factions will do nicely.
The mayor of Red River is shocked at the mass shooting (three dead so far, several injured) that ensued, cuz you’d NEVER expect fine folk like these to have gotten drunk at Red River’s bars and to have used their big big big guns to kill each other. Unprecedented!
How could such a thing have happened? Bikers were supposed to be at “a live music event by Warning Shot” (not making this up) but instead just blew past the whole warning thing and started killing each other. Coulda knocked the mayor and tourism director over with a feather: 28,000 armed bikers that hate each other! And now you tell me this didn’t bode well. Hidesight is 50/50 dude!!!!
Yeah what the hell. On any given middle or high school day in Albuquerque, you figure there are maybe twenty guns in backpacks or in administrative offices or whatever, around the school system… Students and staff bring them onto campus for… whatever stupid reason! It’s certainly not our job to figure out why the children of New Mexico are menaced with death in the location that ought to be safest. What we can say is that the reasons are … whatever. Stupid.
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Today’s butcher’s bill. And this one’s just like the one in Newport News – both involved shooters so well known as incredibly dangerous that both schools had elaborate security arrangements just for them. Today’s for instance had to be patted down every time he entered the building; and this time while being patted down he pulled out his gun and started shooting.
Uh.
Duh.
Why is a public school system putting itself and all its children directly in the line of fire? What twisted “retention” philosophy (beyond the cynical financial one) is in play here? You designate a bunch of untrained victims-to-be to surveil, pat down, and discipline determined killers, so that… ?
So that you get dead people, wounded people, and WHOPPING lawsuits.
********************
Update: The shooter killed himself.
The shooting is the 83rd shooting on a K-12 school campus this calendar year.
Thuggery is mainstreamed at the University of Alabama…
That’s not quite right. It’s celebrated; it’s an occasion for amusing witticisms, as it was for the Alex Murdaugh defense attorney who pointed an assault weapon at the opposing table and said “Tempting.” In this case it’s Haw look at me I carry guns so much officials have to check me for them before I play basketball. Haw.
******************************
Don’t bother Bama none that they recruit murderers and accessories to murderers. Guns? Everybody’s got ’em and fuck you.
The fact that he’s done this intro throughout the season is no excuse for his failure to read the room.
Huh? Who says he ain’t reading the room? What room? The US House chamber?
Anyway Brandon Miller’s pregame pat-down can’t hold a candle to New Mexico State’s pre-game introduction, where each basketball player pulls off his pants and invites the other players to finger his anus.
*********************
Here’s a guy with absolutely no sense of humor. Boo.
A passage from Matthew Perry’s book, turned into a poem by your blogeuse.
************************
1996
It was New Year’s Eve in Taos
It was about to be 1996
I was dating Julia Roberts…
We played football in the snow all day
She took my hand and said come with me
We jumped in a truck and drove up a mountain
Snow swirling around
I had no idea where we were going
We seemed to be heading into the stars
We reached a mountaintop
For a moment the snow cleared
We could see New Mexico
We could see Canada
Snow came down it was 1996
Add to this clear evidence of psychological decline – all sorts of bizarre statements/behaviors – since I posted (Nov 21, 2020).
**************************
Why Donald Trump Might Kill Himself.
He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser.
Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.
He has been in bad physical health. It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.
Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment. He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“
Hey. I ain’t drawing the pictures.
**********************
He is the very embodiment, in other words, of the suicide.
Demographically, he stands smack in the center of the self-slaughter sweet spot.
You’re shocked. You think it’s a crazy notion. Allow me to quote a recent NYT headline:
‘How Did We Not Know?’ Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic
Try to keep in mind two salient features here (You probably won’t be able to, because people HATE to think about suicide.):
- A suicide epidemic. In some states (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico), the numbers are staggering.
- General ignorance about the suicide epidemic.
“Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn’t realize was we have a huge suicide rate.”
How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.
I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.
************************
Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.” Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest. Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden. Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”
This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies). There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.
What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.
********************
There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.
*******************
Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.
Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.
The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…
*******************
Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.
*******************
Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.
*****************
How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.
A U. New Mexico basketball recruit has fled campus cuz of all the bullets whizzing by her in the dorm.
Due to the [two] shootings that have occurred at my apartment complex, as well as the on-campus shooting, I am saddened to say that I will be leaving the University of New Mexico. My family and I feel this is the best decision for me and my safety. I will be entering the transfer portal …
******
[Brooke] Berry’s mother, Amy Berry, told Ken Sickenger from the Albuquerque Journal that Saturday’s incident was “the last straw.”
“Brooke really likes the basketball team, and she wanted to stick it out, but she was scared,” she said. “She called us Sunday morning crying and said, ‘I want to come home,’ so her dad and I drove down 14 hours to get her. If something happened to her, we’d never forgive ourselves.”
Berry arrived in New Mexico from Billings, Mont. She lived at Lobo Village, a student-housing complex just west of the UNM basketball arena, otherwise known as The Pit. The two previous incidents happened close enough to Berry for her to be concerned for her safety.
“Brooke called when a shooting was happening, and she was hiding in the bathtub,” the mother told the Journal. “I was thinking, ‘This is crazy.'”
***********
The university has released a statement.
Brooke’s being a real GIRL about this… Everyone at UNM has hidden in a bathtub during a gunfight outside their room! BFD! What a baby.
*************
The traditional New Mexico State/University of New Mexico men’s basketball rivalry game has been cancelled. The latest dorm killing was between members of the rival teams, and since NMSU killed a UNM guy the rivalry’s been settled: NMSU wins.
The two schools are working out a new money-saving arrangement in which the big game will not take place at all anymore. The schools will share the cost of weapons and ammo and let the guys work out the rivalry by killing each other every year at this time.
Meanwhile, though: GO NMSU!!!!!
He’s an old white guy full of rage, despair, and vindictiveness; all of the strategies he’s used throughout life to be a winner have lately failed, and he now finds himself a very public loser.
Because he is narcissistic, the public nature of his failure is close to unendurable, and he continues to try everything in his power to reverse events. The collapse of these efforts only adds to his public humiliation.
He has been in bad physical health. It’s quite possible that at his age, and just having recovered from the corona virus, he has a number of serious medical problems, though these will not have been disclosed to us.
Many of his former friends and associates are bailing on him, or giving him the silent treatment. He feels lonely, isolated. He has isolated himself. Maureen Dowd calls him “a child isolated and miserable living inside a national landmark, lashing out and spiraling into self-destructive acts.” Former FBI counterintelligence director Frank Figliuzzi goes so far as to describe Donald Trump as currently a “barricaded subject.“
Hey. I ain’t drawing the pictures.
**********************
He is the very embodiment, in other words, of the suicide.
Demographically, he stands smack in the center of the self-slaughter sweet spot.
You’re shocked. You think it’s a crazy notion. Allow me to quote a recent NYT headline:
‘How Did We Not Know?’ Gun Owners Confront a Suicide Epidemic
Try to keep in mind two salient features here (You probably won’t be able to, because people HATE to think about suicide.):
- A suicide epidemic. In some states (Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Utah, Idaho, New Mexico), the numbers are staggering.
- General ignorance about the suicide epidemic.
“Utah has very permissive gun laws, but we also have a very low homicide rate. What we didn’t realize was we have a huge suicide rate.”
How can you not realize that you have enormous suicide numbers, like Utah? How can you fail to notice that three of your counties have suicide rates 58% higher than the rest of the state? Than the rest of the state with close to the highest suicide rate in the nation? You can only succeed in not seeing this carnage if you’re totally determined not to see it. Just the way you will not see – will laugh off – the idea that the president of the United States might not be immune to the suicide epidemic, even as he’s flagrantly melting down in front of the nation.
I don’t say it’s likely. I do say it’s possible.
************************
Suicide, writes A. Alvarez, is “a terrible but utterly natural reaction to the strained, narrow, unnatural necessities we sometimes create for ourselves.” Donald Trump is trapped in exactly this way: he has created necessities having to do with power, prestige, money, sexual conquest, cruelty, and above all victory in every contest. Yet he is about to lose power; he is widely viewed as a vulgarian; he has much less money than he boasts, and stands to lose a large chunk of what he does have as a result of many lawsuits; he is too old for sexual conquest; most people regard his cruelty as contemptible, and it certainly no longer works as well as it once did to frighten people into giving in to his demands; he has lost by six million votes to Joe Biden. Only the all-out paranoid or self-servingly degenerate are willing to appear on television to defend him. He himself has become quite paranoid. He moves in a paranoid world: “Under Trump, the Republican identity is defined not by a set of policy beliefs but by a paranoid mind-set.”
This horrible outcome is a result of extensive conspiracies against him (he appeared in front of the nation last evening, ranting in this instance about pharma conspiracies). There are too many of these conspiracies to count, and he feels undone by unrelenting deep state machinations.
What are his options? He lacks the courage and the cohorts to stage a coup; the prospect of doing anything on the outside after having been in the Oval Office is completely depressing. Degrading. For all his talk of 2024, he knows he’s already too tired to do the job, and that, realistically, he won’t have the energy to run again.
********************
There’s no compensation in affective life awaiting him – a cold wife; various ex-children, some of whom (paranoia, and an intolerable sense of being displaced, rising again here) clearly intend to ride his coattails into political positions of their own; a dwindling number of people willing to be seen with him on a golf course.
*******************
Then there’s guilt. People think he’s incapable of it, but his fatal failures in the matter of the pandemic gnaw at him. He knows he acted badly there; and not only badly. At night, in bed, he considers whether it’s true as many say that he is responsible for a lot of deaths. During daylight hours he can convince himself he’s a great man who saved many people. At night, images of the sick and suffering, of funerals, visit him. He thinks he begins to be haunted.
Another conspiracy against him. A conspiracy of the dead.
The only real pleasure left derives from the thought of the dread and misery he’s inflicting on his enemies. Also from the reception and broadcast of his suicide note, which he has written a thousand times in his head: Hope you enjoy seventy million Americans rising up to beat the shit out of you now that you’ve driven me to this…
*******************
Strangely, what sticks in his craw the most from all of this is his own daughter-in-law, Lara Trump. It’s so clear that, of the second generation, Bionic Woman, who even named her daughter for the state she plans to run in, will be the mid-twenty-first century Trump. Jesus.
*******************
Finally: It is in the nature of cults that the cult leader kills himself. He may, like Jim Jones or Marshall Applewhite or David Koresh, take everyone with him one way or another; but Trump has far too many followers for this to be practicable. He’ll have to take one for the team.
*****************
How? Barricaded subject shoots himself in the head, at his desk in the Oval Office.
And this distinction has stood us in good stead! We trail only New Mexico for the state with the most suicides, and we’re always in the top five. When sad ol’ Cowboy Jack doffs his Stetson and draws his Glock 17, tears of uncertainty beading his eyes, you wouldn’t want him to be able to be talked out of it.
Guns of course are ubiquitous at frats, but they’re an adjunct to the frat’s extensive drug dealing operation (see pages and pages of guns and frats here), or they’re AK-47s that the lads like to photograph themselves holding, or they’re be-well-son-and-take-care-of-yourself goodbye gifts from Maw and Paw as the little guy heads off to school. And of course they’re notoriously handy when suicide is in the air. All routine American gun use.
Real powpowpow, however, has been thin on the ground. Stuff that draws pledge-blood has been… anemic.
Yes, this Oklahoma State guy (an inter-fraternity council secretary)
used a loaded gun to scare two new fraternity recruits. The victims say (Owen) Hossack pointed the gun at their heads and asked if they would take a bullet for their brothers. Then, police say, he fired the gun …
But I mean big deal nobody got hurt and loyalty is an important value…
*****************
See, if you ask UD the omnipresence of guns, alcohol, drugs, teenagers, secret guys-only events, and loyalty tests should mean that America’s budding Stephen Paddocks begin routinely manifesting themselves at our fraternities. By national standards, shooting a gun at two guys’ heads but not killing them is, uh, kid stuff.
On the other hand, there’s evidence that things are escalating to the serious mass shootings UD keeps expecting. New Mexico State University (feast your eyes) is exactly the sort of walking abortion of a school you’d expect to be a first-adopter here, and sure enough they did manage to draw blood at a recent hazing event.
Dozens of students, including Jonathan Sillas, attended the Kappa Sigma fraternity’s initiation event.
As Sillas was leaving, another student, Miguel Altamirano, pulled him to the side and told him to turn around, according to a criminal complaint.
Altamirano pulled out a .40 caliber handgun, held the firearm against Sillas’ leg and pulled the trigger, the complaint states. The bullet went through Sillas’ leg.
Gun-friendly states always use the passive voice. The bullet went through. The shooter did not put the bullet in Sillas’s leg; the bullet decided to go through Sillas’s leg. And note the other thing going on at hazing events: Sadistic tyranny. Pulled him to the side and told him to turn around. Right out of The Story of O. Frat hazing (and sorority hazing) reeks, my dears, of S&M.
Duh. We all know that. It’s about torturing people pathetic enough to be willing to be tortured in order to join your club.
I mean, datz why I keep wondering why no mass killing at Sigma Alpha Epsilon yet! You know they’ve got guns galore, but no one’s gonna confiscate them because that would initiate a massacre of free Americans by the federal government. Little by little, a pledge shooting here and a pledge shooting there, we’re inching toward mass murder at an American university fraternity. Just be patient.
Ahem. Mes petites.
We have arrived at that point in the Jeffrey Epstein story where barely conceivable plausibility goes leaping out of the window, marooning us in the fictional world of Don DeLillo’s Zero K, in which a cryogenics-obsessed billionaire sets up his own vast body-freezing laboratory and gets to work being immortal.
Like all great artists, DeLillo has his finger pressed firmly on the pulse of the future – in particular, the way, in America, unimaginable personal wealth, staggeringly sophisticated technology, and an entirely unmitigated death-fear (see also, among DeLillo’s other novels, Cosmopolis) is generating people like Jeffrey Epstein, at once the toast of the world’s greatest, most celebrated scientists, and out of their fucking minds.
Yes, trailed by Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss (hm), Steven Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould… trailed by all of them as they sniffed out his beyond-big research bucks and enjoyed his private island, Epstein made it clear to anyone who’d listen that he had a bag of Caligulagenic I am a god tricks up his sleeve.
He hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch…
He told one scientist that he was bankrolling efforts to identify a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you.
At one session at Harvard, Mr. Epstein criticized efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor because doing so increased the risk of overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who was there. Mr. Pinker said he had rebutted the argument, citing research showing that high rates of infant mortality simply caused people to have more children. Mr. Epstein seemed annoyed, and a Harvard colleague later told Mr. Pinker that he had been “voted off the island” and was no longer welcome at Mr. Epstein’s gatherings.
Then there was Mr. Epstein’s interest in eugenics.
On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies, according to two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals, all of whom Mr. Epstein told about it… Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe.
[He was also interested in] cryonics, an unproven science in which people’s bodies are frozen to be brought back to life in the future. Mr. Epstein told [one] person that he wanted his head and penis to be frozen.
************
A sweet and amusing 1940 short story, “Inflexible Logic,” features a very rich dilettante, Mr Bainbridge, with an interest in ideas who, overhearing mathematicians talking about the infinite monkey theorem, decides to fill his house with monkeys and typewriters and see how long it might take for one of them to write a Shakespeare play or whatever. As it happens, all of the monkeys immediately start producing, without a single error, the world’s great literature.
Mr. Bainbridge led Professor Mallard downstairs, along a corridor, through a disused music room, and into a large conservatory. The middle of the floor had been cleared of plants and was occupied by a row of six typewriter tables, each one supporting a hooded machine. At the left of each typewriter was a neat stack of yellow copy paper. Empty wastebaskets were under each table. The chairs were the unpadded, spring-backed kind favored by experienced stenographers. A large bunch of ripe bananas was hanging in one corner, and in another stood a Great Bear water-cooler and a rack of Lily cups. Six piles of typescript, each about a foot high, were ranged along the wall on an improvised shelf. Mr. Bainbridge picked up one of the piles, which he could just conveniently lift, and set it on a table before Professor Mallard. “The output to date of Chimpanzee A, known as Bill,” he said simply.
“‘”Oliver Twist,” by Charles Dickens,’ ” Professor Mallard read out. He read the first and second pages of the manuscript, then feverishly leafed through to the end. “You mean to tell me,” he said, “that this chimpanzee has written–“
“Word for word and comma for comma,” said Mr. Bainbridge. “Young, my butler, and I took turns comparing it with the edition I own. Having finished ‘Oliver Twist,’ Bill is, as you see, starting the sociological works of Vilfredo Pareto, in Italian. At the rate he has been going, it should keep him busy for the rest of the month.”
“And all the chimpanzees”–Professor Mallard was pale, and enunciated with difficulty–“they aren’t all–“
“Oh, yes, all writing books which I have every reason to believe are in the British Museum. The prose of John Donne, some Anatole France, Conan Doyle, Galen, the collected plays of Somerset Maugham, Marcel Proust, the memoirs of the late Marie of Rumania, and a monograph by a Dr. Wiley on the marsh grasses of Maine and Massachusetts. I can sum it up for you, Mallard, by telling you that since I started this experiment, four weeks and some days ago, none of the chimpanzees has spoiled a single sheet of paper.”
Innocent days, huh? Daft, obsessed billionaires concocted harmless (well, the story does end in a bloodbath…) experiments then; but coming up on 2020, we’re in DeLilloland, and things have taken a rather insidious turn.
Can we still laugh at Jeffrey Epstein and his buddies like Alan Dershowitz, with their own demented grandiosity?
Of course we can. Nothing is funnier than a good Kafka short story, and that’s what we’ve got unfolding in front of us – Kafkan absurdity with a postmodern twist. To be sure, the insidious thing is absolutely there – as in, you probably don’t want to be a woman around Dersh or Ep. But Dersh is going down in flames, and Ep, well…
Very simple principle, simply stated. You can add that criminal schools in deeply corrupt states attract lots of, er, bad actors, and indeed accumulate long non-glorious histories of the corrupt and criminal.
You’re thinking of the U of Smell — Louisville — I know, cuz we spend a lot of time on that swamp on this blog; but don’t forget its smelliforous competitor, the University of New Mexico. Read through these posts for the narrative of that school’s greedy-dolt presidents, sticky-finger ADs, lazy-dolt trustees, and desperately enraged students and faculty. Short version – jest ’bout anybody who attains a position of responsibility at UNM (i.e. access to funds) steals.
What’s truly distinctive about New Mexico is the stupidity of their academic removalists. Former vastly paid AD Paul Krebs not only robbed the school blind; he wrote about it in university-account emails to his fellow-traveler and current UNM professor wife. He took what some chump thought was a donation to the athletic department and instructed his wife — again, in an email – to put the check where the sun don’t shine.
[The] $25,000 check … “should not be traceable …” Authorities say his wife received these instructions on her university email: “delete everything I sent when done so nothing discoverable in IPRA (public records) request. Including your delete file. Thanks.”
Thanks? Not love? Not even a heart emoji?
If you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know that the University of New Mexico is among the lowest of the low, not merely in terms of sports, but in terms of academic standards. (Feast your eyes. Skip over the New Mexico State posts, which also come up when you put UNIVERSITY NEW MEXICO in the search engine.). People pretend to be shocked when The Next Thing happens, but if you know UNM, the fact that they’ve just suspended their $800,000 a year football coach for – it’s alleged – racism, abuse of players, and, in the case of this post’s headline, not really dealing very well with rape allegations against his players – you ain’t shocked.
UNM has placed Davie on unpaid leave for 30 days and says he will have to take mandatory trainings, including on cultural sensitivity.
You bet.
************
Update: Sports journalism’s best commenters are just getting started over at Deadspin, but there are already a few gems. Like this one:
The judges will need a moment to consider whether Dave Bliss’s post-UNM career should be taken into consideration when deciding the title of “biggest asshole to coach for the Lobos.”
So pause a moment to think what University of New Mexico instructor Daniel Barto’s daily life at that benighted school (in a benighted state) is like. He opens the paper and reads the following opening paragraphs:
University of New Mexico athletics has projected ticket revenue for the current 2017-18 fiscal year that it didn’t come close to reaching this past season.
And this comes after the recent retirement of its athletic director, the launch of two state investigations related to … possible fiscal mismanagement and the reality of failing to balance eight of the department’s past 10 budgets.
In fact, UNM has budgeted to spend about $1 million more from ticket sales this year than it actually brought in last year from its three revenue generating sports of football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball.
Read the whole thing. It gets more delusional with every paragraph. Barto reads things like this every day.
This blog has spent years documenting wild wacko wastrel UNM. (The link includes non UNM posts – jump around.). If you want to know what its like to actually belong to the UNM community, read Barto’s letter in the student newspaper. After reviewing the serious financial difficulties of many people on campus, he notes:
This [financial difficulty] pertains to us all — except one certain delusional department that seems to think that the hard math of budgeting does not apply to them.
I am talking about the Athletics Department, the department that has the most paid administrators of any other on main campus.
This department was headed by director Paul Krebs (salary $319,262) until he “resigned” after committing fraud. Paul used UNM money to fund a personal golfing trip to Scotland. This trip ended up costing New Mexico taxpayers even more, because Paul failed to get enough people to lock in for the discount group travel rate.
Pathetic Paul, so much money to embezzle but too few friends to even embezzle with.
Of course the Athletics Department claims, “We bring in the most money!”
But this is a lie of omission. The department wastes more money than it brings in. According to the ABQ Journal, since 2007 the Athletics Department’s expenses have exceed[ed] their revenue every year except two. As of 2016, the department has a $1,525,257 deficit that the University must cover.
Barto is angry. Of course he concedes that the state of New Mexico itself is one of the most dissolute in the nation; he understands that public universities in our most corrupt states are royally screwed. But he still can’t help hoping for things to change.
His letter hasn’t yet attracted any comments. If it does, UD feels pretty certain they’ll be abusive, semi-literate, and deeply deluded.
Anyone who blogs about universities – ‘specially university athletics – has the very same task Samuel Beckett describes. How do you make room for – make sense of – the mess? For the theater of the absurd production that schools like New Mexico State (and let NMSU stand for myriad others like it) stage every single day? Go here for background on this clown school with its budget-killing big sports program and its vast empty stadium. Then go here for an update, as the state of New Mexico pulls funding from the school and lets the big thinkers on campus figure out how to keep their players rolling around in a huge vacant shell.
But that’s just one state school, from a notoriously anti-intellectual state. Consider the sporty devolution of the University of Minnesota, of all places, where they pay coaches millions of dollars to preside over endless sickening drug and sex scandals. People are now officially worried that the state legislature might be too grossed out to approve UMN’s funding requests. You’ve even got some restive citizens wondering about – wait for it – whether athletics might compromise a university’s mission. They seem particularly upset about coaches’ salaries.
But UMN to the rescue! They’re about to appoint this guy as one of their regents. Good optics.
*************
The Washington state senate shows you what can happen to a university’s autonomy when it keeps fucking up its athletic budget.
*************
At least we’ve got the very top of university football, with packed stadiums and plentiful revenues, to admire. Dave Zirin describes these lucky schools.
[Clemson’s] head coach in 1981, Danny Ford made $50,000 that year (adjusted for inflation, that would be $140,000 today). Dabo Swinney takes home a base salary of $4.55 million. He also made $1.4 million in bonuses for a total salary of just under $6 million. As for players, their lot in life is the same as in 1981, except now they receive a $388-a-month stipend.
[Clemson coach Dabo] Swinney was asked about the idea of actually paying players, given the dramatically transformed economic landscape of the game, and he said that if players are ever paid, “I’ll go do something else because there’s enough entitlement in this world as there is.” To call the desire to end this rank exploitation “entitlement” is Orwellian in the extreme. He might as well write “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” on the locker-room walls.
If anyone has expressed an obscene amount of entitlement, it’s Swinney. Here is someone working on a refurbished plantation who makes millions of dollars off the sweat and head injuries of overwhelmingly black, unpaid labor, and yet when asked about the Black Lives Matter movement in September, he said, ”Some of these people need to move to another country.”
… College football is a septic tank of entitlement. It’s a fungal culture created by the head coaches of Big Football. Dabo Swinney is the very embodiment of that culture: adrift, clueless, and filthy rich.
Yuck. Another fine mess.
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UD thanks John and Carl.
… and there’s nothing more scatheable than the surrealistic boxing with shadows that occurs when a local team booster, distraught that no one attends his university’s football games, troubles deaf heaven with his cries. SOS is particularly fond of this form of the persuasive essay and is always delighted to find a new one. So let’s go!
HEADLINE: UNM Football Has Earned the Right to Expect More Filled Seats
The University of New Mexico sports program is your typical farce/horror, with years of scumminess and scandals to its name. Because of this history, and for all of the other reasons students and others are staying home or leaving the stands early, few people attend Lobos games. Even when they’ve got a winning record.
The New Mexico football program has pulled a 180 since hiring a new head coach five seasons ago. But despite putting a winning product on the field, attendance has inexplicably continued a downward trend.
See, that’s why he says in his headline that the team “has earned” butts in the seats; they’re winning games. They got them an incredibly expensive coach who’s doing what he was hired for!
But the little shits complain about the expense.
Several readers have expressed dissatisfaction this semester with the perceived high price tag of the football coach, questioning how someone in his position could justify such a high salary.
And you know what else? The writer doesn’t mention it, but given that most of them don’t attend games, they’re also pissed that their student activity fee is insanely high, meaning they’re paying the dude’s ridiculous salary.
Even though no school in the Mountain West had a better conference record, no team had worse attendance …
Inexplicable. How can this be? Don’t all our students live for a winning football team? Where the fuck are they?
Some might argue the reduced attendance is due to a struggling economy that leaves no additional money for entertainment, but that doesn’t appear true as other schools have no problem filling [their] stands.
Additionally, package deals were available at the beginning of the season — some offering tickets for less than $6 per person.
Less than six bucks! That seems a pretty compelling piece of evidence that you couldn’t pay most UNM students to go to the football games. What might be behind this?
New Mexico has tried to lure in fans this season by revamping its concessions, offering free fan giveaways and introducing alcohol sales. It even opened up the field to the public after the game in an effort to give fans a better game day experience, to no avail.
With no professional sports teams, it seems odd that Albuquerque and the metro area don’t turn out in better numbers, especially for a local product that many have a direct connection to.
Yeah. Well. The beauty of the booze solution is that it makes an already pretty gruesome social scene a good deal more gruesome. You might not know this, but a lot of people dislike being around loud belligerent drunks. People with children, in particular, seem to object. Universities try to deal with this problem by stationing tons of police everywhere (thus adding to the expense of the enterprise); but again, inexplicably, the more an event looks like an encounter with a police state, the less people want to attend it.
The fans that do show up deserve a lot of credit as they likely supported the team even when it was down, but it still seems like the team has earned the right to expect more. Is it too much to ask the community to show student-athletes who proudly represent the name on the front of their jerseys that it cares?
If so, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise when coaches start to jump ship to pursue vacancies in places where it is not.
Now it’s getting desperate. And, as I say, surreal. For what can be the point of this writing? Are we trying to guilt-trip people into having fun? (Or scare them: You might lose your million-dollar coach!) UD has read versions of this essay in which the writer instructs the local gentry that it’s their responsibility to attend football games. A civic duty, like voting. But voting is over in an instant; here’s the deal with football games.
Attending football games is boring. Plays take a matter of seconds, there’s an endless amount of time between plays when nothing happens, and the replays are limited. You can’t change the channel if the game’s lousy. The weather conditions are usually crappy, and the seating sucks unless you’re in a suite. You’re often clueless about injuries. I sit in a press box with replays and constant players updates and I get bored, so I can’t really blame students for staying home and watching on TV under greater/cheaper conditions.
To be sure, the boredom is occasionally broken by watching someone get severely concussed; but the drama is over in a second. Plus a lot of people don’t like watching young men get severely concussed.
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Now SOS will let you in on the real reason a lot of students ignore your football team.
They are ashamed of the school. They don’t want to be seen publicly associating with it, and they’re certainly not going to cheer for it.
Why?
Well, you just type university new mexico in this blog’s search and engine and start reading.
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And I just know you’re not interested in the one way you might actually be able to turn this around.
Try giving some money to the (get ready for it) academic side of your university.