[O]ne [new high school lacrosse player] was taken [by older teammates] to a remote area in the county when people appeared from the woods, dressed in black and armed with what appeared to be at least one handgun and at least one knife…

[They] put a pillowcase over that student’s head, then tied him up and threw him in the trunk of a car before he was left in a wooded area in the southern part of the county…

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

At least five new recruits were tortured.

Not only did the high school cancel this season’s lacrosse; the district attorney insists on prosecuting! Boooooooooo

Separate women-only hours, sheeting on the pool windows… And here’s another reason these are great ideas!

“I’m sure it’s not only Muslims, I think there’ll be a lot of female students that would benefit from it because not everyone is comfortable with all genders swimming (together),” [another student] said.

Hey now that you mention it a lot — a TON!! — of American women are uncomfortable swimming – hell, being in the same room – with men! Now we see what hijabs and long black coats are about. I think we’ll wear them too!

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

UD thanks Stephen.

Or rather – times being what they are – fifty thousand bullets.

Syracuse was lucky – a gun store owner reported the student; his landlord happened to enter his apartment and told police about his arsenal; he’s not an American and was rapidly deported.

What about your school? Are things going to break your way?

Now that the entirely random (all are called to cheat; few are chosen) Adzillatron of Fortune has swiveled its gigantic screen in the direction of Syracuse University, and now that the nation’s media is riveted to that school (you can’t buy this kind of publicity), it’s time for UD not only to remind you of her way-beyond-legendary column on the subject of professors and big-time sports; it’s also time to put in a word for the ladies.

The guys?  Sure, sure, the guys.  King Coach, the Coach God, with his massive salary and pep talks about character;  the “Vice Chancellor and Athletics Director” (think I’m kidding?  when you’re the absolute bottom of the barrel, you better believe you make your AD a chancellor);  the president of the university, docile, kittenish BFF of his coachly master… We’ve seen this adorable bumbling crowd so many times…

But without the receptionist in the background of all this high-profile bonding, athletes would never be able to stay eligible.  People forget that at schools like Chapel Hill and Syracuse, the entire elaborate system gets sacked and broken like Joe Theismann without those sweethearts over in the corner stamping AAAAAAA all day.

… (see the post directly below this one), its highest-profile honorary degree recipient, its 2010 commencement speaker, has been running one hell of a public relations campaign. Ask me anything! Ask my bank anything!

These are some of the tweets J.P. Morgan received (before hurriedly shutting the account):

“What’s your favorite type of whale? #AskJPM,” said The Atlantic’s Matt O’Brien.

“Is your “Chief Compliance Officer” alive? Has anyone checked to see if he’s in his office? #AskJPM,” said Salon’s David Dayen.

“Does Jamie Dimon pet a small cat and laugh ominously while he’s ruining poor people’s lives? #AskJPM,” said blogger Tim Donovan.

Some others:

Did you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success?

If it came out Jamie Dimon had a propensity for eating Irish children, would you fire him? What if he’s still “a good earner”?

Is it the ability to throw anyone out of their home that drives you, or just the satisfaction that you know you COULD do it?

How many homeless people did you create in ’08?

Will the firm explore new markets, like selling candy-backed securities to babies w/o disclosing the lack of chocolate in the bonds?

Did you not realize that The Smartest Guys In The Room was a cautionary tale, not a blueprint for mass theft?

Sure. There’s more.

Quick! You’re in a room with no key, a chair, two paper clips, and a lightbulb. How do you defraud investors?

Sorry we ruined your hashtag event, if you could just apologise for your plunder of the global economy, I think we’d be even.

Given the # of reg violations + scale of fines paid across the bank, please explain why the board hasn’t been replaced by livestock?

Enough already!

What’s it like working with Mexican drug cartels? Do they tip?

How do you decide who to foreclose on? Darts or a computer program?

As a young sociopath, how can I succeed in finance?

And:

why did u think this would be a good idea

It’s because of the intellectual luster he lends the place. Challenged on the pathetic graduation rates of the students for whose progress he’s responsible, he explains:

“If everybody stays, our graduation rate is great… But some guys just don’t stay. If somebody had an answer, I’d love to hear it.”

Boeheim earns close to two million dollars a year for his policy of saying

1. If they would graduate, they would graduate; and

2. Fuck if I know.

… got filmed – it’s alleged – by the director of media for that university’s athletic department – coming out of showers after games.

[He] made the recordings by positioning the camera at waist level and placing a piece of tape over the red light to conceal that it was recording. [Authorities] “quickly discounted” the possibility of that having been done accidentally.

He accidentally placed a camera at waist level hundreds of times?

Yes, I think we can quickly discount that.

No one goes to the games. The team teems with miscreants. Tons and tons and tons of them, so that the coach just presses this template each time shit goes down — really, always says pretty much verbatim the same thing: We are aware of the charges against X and Y and Z and A and we’ll you know handle it appropriately don’t worry…

So last night two of the guys got drunk and stood in the street shouting fuck this shit and getting arrested and all…

It’s really odd. I mean, maybe UD isn’t getting something here, but — the coach gets millions of dollars to stage games without spectators and, increasingly, without players.

We’ve got it all – the article written before the stabbing (one of several fights) at our first basketball event of the season (“We have the best fans in college basketball!”), and the article written after the place was evacuated and the stabbed guy was taken to the hospital (“We were saddened to learn…”).

Students and administration at Syracuse seem to be taking a lot of comfort from the fact that the guy who was stabbed, and the guys in all the other fights (“[The police] received multiple reports of fights breaking out in the concourse areas near the concession stands prior to receiving a report of the stabbing…”), weren’t students, but so what? If your university has created perfect conditions for riots (the event is free and open to the public and being shitfaced is de rigueur), you’re not going to be impervious to the weaponry by virtue of having a student i.d.

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

The solution won’t be to change the nature of the event. The event recruits fans who will purchase tickets, and the school needs the money. The solution – a familiar one, adding delight to these free-spirited celebrations – will be to turn the arena into a police state.

Commencement speaker, recipient of an honorary Doctor of Laws degree — Dimon’s the Joe Paterno of Syracuse. Let’s catch up with his latest accomplishment.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) had already lost more than $700 million on synthetic credit bets and Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon was told that number could climb to almost $1 billion when he dismissed press reports about the positions in April as a “tempest in a teapot.”

While JPMorgan booked a $718 million loss on the positions held by its chief investment office in the first quarter, it didn’t publicly specify the loss when releasing the results April 13. When an analyst asked Dimon that day about media coverage of the trades, he dismissed them as a minor issue.

!!!!!!!!!

… in the library. But at least they have a multimillion-dollar football coach whose games no one comes to see.

But if students from another university are within striking range, our students will attack them.

It’s true that we’ve had a field day with lacrosse and sadism on this blog. Far as I can figure, the deep alcoholism endemic to the sport, its privileged-folk provenance, and the near-universal tendency toward hazing in high school and college athletics, produces extreme specimens like George Huguely, and less extreme but still very dangerous people like the guys on the Syracuse high school team.

Huguely, currently rotting in jail, was a U Va lacrosse player who got drunk and beat his girlfriend to death:

In truth, there are many places in [lacrosse’s] culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008 – when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic – garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.

One thing to remember, as we talk a bit more about the latest degeneracy, is that the lads have guns now. When you add guns to alcoholism, entitlement, and sadism, you get what people refer to as extreme hazing, which is simply extreme sadism. Among the very young. Sixteen. Fifteen.

Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s [high school and] college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.

We’re into group psychopathy at this point, an unbounded Lord of the Flies viciousness. As a team you derive splendid new forms of human abuse and let their effects amuse you as you film your victims in order to share their agony with other sadists. (Sadism, you know, is very common.) Or just to watch your weeping pleading shrieking victims over and over in your bedroom. Lots of hazing – fraternity as well as sports – now involves threats with guns; but we can certainly anticipate actual killing with guns in the hazing setting quite soon.

Insisting that he was widely respected, Trump invoked the support of Viktor Orbán, the far-right prime minister of Hungary, who has dissented from Nato’s support for Ukraine in its war with Russia and shares much of the former president’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“Viktor Orbán is known for destroying Hungarian democracy using techniques Trump has tried to copy,” said David Driesen, a constitutional law professor at Syracuse University, who has written on the capture of democratic institutions by autocratic leaders. “It was surreal to hear Trump cite Orbán’s praise as validation of his own leadership.”