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.
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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.
… all stand steadfastly with their much-admired Rudy Giuliani, a man so fine as to have been given honorary degrees from them.
Three of these schools are Catholic, and Catholics tend to be YUGE Trump supporters, so don’t hold your breath waiting for them to revoke the honor, even after he’s disbarred in total disgrace, imprisoned, etc., etc.
Middlebury College in Vermont, Drexel University in Pennsylvania, and the University of Rhode Island have all revoked honorary degrees that each school, in a moment of madness, conferred upon America’s close-to-highest-profile anti-semitic (Look ye to Soros, oh Blind Ones!) insurrectionist. These are godless public or private schools, lacking the spiritual perspicacity to see the Christlike miracle that is America’s Mayor.
And then there’s godless Syracuse, which is as we speak attempting to work RG out of its system. That school, too, fails to perceive the way in which Rudy acts as a vessel of the lord. The three Catholic schools sure as hell do, though, and when Rudy’s carted off to jail they will speak of his having been burned at the stake just like Saint Joan.
Figure it this way: If, for decades and decades, the most laureled person on your campus was Theodore McCarrick, ol’ Rudy don’t look too bad.
‘[A] distinct feature of the current protests is the presence of very young women at the forefront. In many of the protests, women appear to outnumber men and do not seem afraid of being seen without hijab, even in the presence of security forces…
As evinced by the outburst of public indignation triggered by [Mahsa] Amini’s death, her case is not seen as an isolated incident but the visible tip of an iceberg of injustice, humiliation, indignity, and oppression routinely felt by countless Iranian women intercepted by the so-called guidance patrols charged with enforcing Article 638 of the Islamic Penal Code: refusing to comply with state’s conception of “Islamic hijab” in public spaces is a criminal offense punishable by flogging, incarceration, or a fine…
More than four decades after the Islamic Republic embarked on the Sisyphean enterprise of bureaucratizing a very narrow definition of Islamic morality, with an almost obsessive focus on women’s appearance in public, mandatory hijab as well as the institutions set up to enforce it have failed veritably at forcing the state’s interpretation of “Islamic hijab” on Iranian women.
Instead, this encroachment on women’s liberty has gradually sown resentment in the hearts of millions of Iranian women and their families—resentment not only toward a dehumanizing law but also toward the state as a whole. Countless videos now course through social media showing the humiliating way Iranian police officers routinely manhandle women into vans before they are taken to detention centers to be “guided” and “educated.” Such encounters are at best stressful and patronizing, and at worst lethally brutal.
It is also counterproductive. In the face of such repression, women’s voluntary adherence to the state’s ideal hijab has not increased but drastically decreased over the last few decades, something even authorities openly acknowledge. Support for the hijab law and the morality police is even lower than the rates of public compliance…’
Sajjad Safaei, Foreign Policy
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Injustice, humiliation, indignity, and oppression: It’s important to think hard about the micro-phenomenology of all the heavy black coverups – of face and mouth and breast and head and hands – reserved for the world’s women.
Now, the Syracuse University pool-drapers (see this post) will say the following: We love God, and we know that the right way to humble ourselves before our loved one is to hide from men, because above all God asks that we do not allow our female sexuality to tempt man to sin.
We can point out all we like that there’s no scriptural warrant for self-demeaning behavior whose roots lie above all, obviously, in fear – a fear of exposure and engagement and visibility that must be instilled in women at a very young age. Hijabs are something you put on your eight-year-old.
Its roots lie also in repression and self-hatred — from a young age you regard yourself as a vessel of sin that must be put away. Any stray hair may lead an innocent man to perdition. You must police your hoods and robes constantly, as do the Iranian morality police, for the slightest betrayal of your atrocious allure. It is hard to think of anything more purely, more deeply, more thoroughly, more malignantly, misogynistic.
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Who can be surprised that Iran’s women have correctly identified the state’s “obsessive focus” on… the economy? education?… no – on the perverted and violent erasure of women – as intimately and unacceptably humiliating every single moment of their lives? Who can have failed to grasp the self-annihilating stupidity of a state that thinks tickling the dicks of morality boys is more important than statecraft? It was always a matter of time before the lascivious/homicidal energy against women implicit in Islamic Iran’s twisted founding principle destroyed enough women and girls to detonate a populace enraged by daily sexual degradation.
All of this makes the work of Western hijabis – who disseminate material like this to free women who might be persuadable to be unfree – much, much, harder. Good.
The West’s idiot fashion enthusiasm for the hijab is due for a takedown. Here’s one.
[P]eople in the West continued to regurgitate the Islamist propaganda, insisting to we who know better that wearing hijab is simply “an empowering choice.” … You continued to parade the hijab on the cover of your magazines and books as if it was nothing more than benign cultural dress…
You actively supported extremists who encouraged you to make child-size hijabs in the name of inclusion and diversity.
Endorsing hijab on children is endorsing child abuse and gender segregation. Those are not cultural values; those are toxic misogynist ideals.
Here’s another:
When I see non-Muslim western women donning a hijab in so-called solidarity with Muslim women, I wonder if they take into consideration the oppression of women in Iran. For many, the hijab has become an odd sort of feminist symbol, but they do not take into account that the majority of women in the Muslim world only wear a hijab when they are forced to do so.
We’re still far away from actual head-clearing, but there’s reason to hope.
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But don’t get too excited.
“[9/11 was] an attack on the heteropatriarchal capitalistic systems that America relies upon to wrangle other countries into passivity. It was an attack on the systems many white Americans fight to protect.”
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Good time, by the way, to revisit William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race.