- 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!!!!
This blog has featured some less than ideal places to attend college or university, places that seem to UD not optimal if you’d like a little peace and quiet and not too much gun-play to go with your studies. Trigger-mad Waco, Texas, for instance, with its breastaurant-biker riots/mass killings, rape- friendly university (Baylor) and good ol’ boy judges (most of them Baylor grads) does not seem to UD to shout pursue a higher education here. Unless you already know you want to study American cults up close and personal (the Branch Davidians raped their children here) you might want to look elsewhere.
Similarly, Huntington, West Virginia, home of appalling Marshall University, might not be the best place for you to study. Folks there saw in 2020 by shooting everybody up at a bar that calls itself Kulture Hookah and has a very strange, uh, provenance.
Back in July the city approved the place because its owner was a fine lass struggling to raise drug-free kids and she was fervently opposed to alcohol and any form of acting up in the joint. This would be a quiet, strictly private refuge full of oldies. Profits from the place, she told the unanimously-impressed Board of Zoning Appeals, would go toward the eradication of the town’s well-known drug problem.
One sharp-eyed commenter on the story about this in a local paper asked
Is the owner the same person convicted of operating a heroin distribution house in Huntington in 2016?
but the Huntington zoners got all choked up at her sob story and didn’t see any need to check newspaper articles or court records about how the hookah bar owner
pleaded guilty in 2016 to maintaining a residence for the purpose of distributing heroin.
[She] was sentenced to 15 months in prison.
They musta been mighty surprised to find out, day after the mass shooting, that
The bar advertised their New Year’s Eve party via social media and left an aftermath of drinks, party favors, and blood on the floor.
I mean. How can UD say this politely? Some places are just too stupid for you to go to school there.
*****************
Update. When asked if [the bar owner] would have been given a business permit given her criminal history, [Huntington’s mayor] said it’s important to have all the information when making those decisions.
Yeah, it’s important but we’re too dumb to have it… I mean, we’re too high to have it… And yeah, I hear you: The state with the nation’s highest overdose death rate should maybe keep a bit of an eye on heroin distributors and maybe not give them permits to open bars, but … uh… (nods off)…
*********************
Second Update: Getting better and better.
The flier for Wednesday morning’s party included a picture of a woman holding an assault weapon.
**********************
Third Update: Just before she was given her certificate of occupancy for the retail shop, court papers reveal [Kulture Hookah’s owner] was cited for shoplifting at Walmart.
*************
Dunno. At this point there are two distinct possibilities: Huntington West Virginia is actually this stupid; or everyone in the government is getting huge sums of money to coordinate running the city with the best interests of the well-established Huntington/Detroit drug cartel in mind.
Get to know the inside of Waco Texas, the reason its rapists and illegal-weapon-brandishing killers get off scot-free, where everyone’s a Baylor University graduate.
Baylor – whose mix of ostentatious Christianity and de Sadeian degeneracy gives the Catholic priesthood a run for its money – generates the judges and DAs who ensure that good ol’ boys don’t get convicted of their crimes, while … uh … others…
Branch Davidians, Breastaurants, Bikers, and a bevy of weapons you will not believe: What better place for your college education?
Ol’ Baylor grad Judge Ralphie Strother
Frees one Baylor boy after another.
“Hell them thangs ain’t rapes.
They jest got into some scrapes.
In Waco you look after yer brother.”
***************************
And good lord! It’s hard to keep up with all the Baylor raping. Here’s a handy timeline, just to get you started.
… reminds ol’ UD to talk about a trend among prospective students and faculty at our country’s universities.
Krugman points out that
our madness over guns [is] just one aspect of the drive to turn us into what Thomas Hobbes described long ago: a society “wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them.” And Hobbes famously told us what life in such a society is like: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
There are larger and larger areas of this country where
[people regard any] public action for the public good, no matter how justified, as part of a conspiracy to destroy our freedom.
This paranoia strikes both deep and wide. Does anyone remember George Will declaring that liberals like trains, not because they make sense for urban transport, but because they serve the “goal of diminishing Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism”? And it goes along with basically infantile fantasies about individual action — the “good guy with a gun” — taking the place of such fundamentally public functions as policing.
Anyway, this political faction is doing all it can to push us toward becoming a society in which individuals can’t count on the community to provide them with even the most basic guarantees of security — [including] security from crazed gunmen…
We’re beginning to see evidence of some faculty leaving, and some students not applying, to universities in these frontier settings. Bullets, rapists, and riots, oh my…
Many such locations are already cultural wastelands; some are also beginning to look like shooting galleries.
Why, for instance, would anyone with a choice want to live – even for a few years – in Waco, Texas, home of armed cults, armed motorcycle gangs, and Baylor University? Why would a non-Hobbesian want to work there, live there, go to school there, teach there? It’s not as if there’s any cultural compensation to living in the Wild West. It’s guns and strip malls and megachurches where you beg divine protection.
Why would you go to Hammond, Louisiana and attend Southeastern Louisiana University, famous for being the last school in America willing to take Jonathan Taylor? Can anyone be surprised that at 3 AM yesterday a fight broke out on campus and a bunch of people got shot?
These schools are part of America’s Hobbesian wastelands, where you grabs your AR-15 and you takes your chances. The idea that a university could thrive under these conditions is hilarious.
Trying to teach or learn in these settings is like deciding to take your family vacation in Beach Blanket Bloodbath Myrtle Beach. Why? Unless you’re a Hobbesian and you enjoy that sort of thing?
UD anticipates a militarization of certain campuses – having been abandoned by civilization, they will become weedy tracts patrolled by open-carry paranoids offering Active Shooter Response seminars.
If you’re in the wasteland, and you can leave, you should. Get out while the getting’s good.
If I may quote myself. I was listing the certified Grade A sexist hypocrites (Art Briles, Ken Starr, Buddy Jones) who made possible ongoing events at Baylor University, America’s current rapeabilliest campus. Now we need to add yet another layer to the cake: interim president David Garland.
A court filing this week reveals that the former interim president of Baylor University referred to some women who said they had been sexually assaulted as willing victims… [David] Garland also said in [an] email that he had heard a radio interview with an author who chronicled her alcoholism at college, the Waco Tribune-Herald reports. He wrote in the email that the interview “added another perspective for me of what is going on in the heads of some women who may seem willingly to make themselves victims.” … He then cited verses in the New Testament referring to God’s wrath on those who commit sexual sin.
Woe until thee Jezebels who seduceth our wide receivers into the very web of Satan! God will smite thee and all thy lawyers.
*****************
UD prefers the theology of Art Briles, who when told of multiple rape allegations by female students against multiple heavily recruited football players of his, said of one of the complainants: “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”
The Lord brought those guys to Baylor. Who knows why? The ways of the Lord are strange. We knew they were bad dudes but they were a gift from God.
The chair of the board of trustees at Baylor University who wrote a now nationally notorious email calling women students who drink alcohol “perverted little tarts” has done his bit to help Baylor know when to fold ’em. Why bother resisting the zillion sex discrimination lawsuits from women students with which that school is now dealing, when every day another high-ranking sexist asshole on campus gets, er, exposed?
People like good ol’ boy Buddy Jones are making these women’s arguments for them, and ain’t nothin Baylor can do but cough up the cash. Again and again and again. There are many of these lawsuits, and Baylor’s almost certainly going to have to settle every one of them.
Why?
Because the claims in them are jaw-droppingly legitimate. And because even if they’re not, Baylor University can’t afford the optics of going to court.
“Perverted little tarts” revisited.
[O]ther emails by [Baylor University regent Buddy] Jones … show him calling the fiercely independent Baylor Alumni Association “terrorists” and enlisting BU administrators in devious schemes to break the BAA… [One wonders] if fellow regents … were aware of such [comments] in closed-door meetings — whether about “tarts” or “terrorists” — and why some might have chosen to tolerate such behavior, given [that] it strikes us as less than Christian, which is what Baylor is supposed to be all about. Indeed, the [Jones] emails attached to [a current] Title IX lawsuit [against Baylor] are from 2009 — and BU regents nonetheless elevated Jones to board chair in 2011.
But ol’ Buddy ol’ pal — echt Wacoan, echt Baylor trustee, echt pious hypocrite (“[Ken] Starr … chronicled frustration with Jones in a recent book. Starr almost resigned in 2011 after Jones made a crude remark about the Baylor Alumni Association at a Baylor football game…”) — inexplicably restricted himself to calling female Baylor students who drank at a party (none, apparently, were underage) “perverted little tarts.”
Then-Baylor University Regent Neal “Buddy” Jones referred to female students he suspected of drinking alcohol as “perverted little tarts,” “very bad apples,” “insidious and inbred” and “the vilest and most despicable of girls” in 2009 emails to a faculty adviser, according to documents filed in a Title IX lawsuit against the university.
Ten alleged sexual assault victims suing Baylor attached the emails in a Friday legal filing to show a culture “using the alcohol policy as a pretext to shame, silence and threaten to expel a female student.”
Cunt and tart are both monosyllabic, and both end in T, but if you want to be president of the United States, not just a former Baylor trustee and current national laughingstock, you’re going to have to go all the way, like Mr. Trump.
****************
Buddy Jones – Bobby Lowder reincarnate – is Baylor. Know what I mean? You wanna know the deep structure, the god’s own truth, of a university, you take a good look at Buddy Jones, moral scold, sexist pig, and his state’s third-biggest water hog. Just like Ken Starr, he’s a walking talking religious hypocrisy doll; and boy do he sure hate women.
Buddy ain’t too bright when it comes to committing his thoughts to email. I mean, he knows enough to ask his correspondents to keep the emails private, but he doesn’t seem to understand the unlikelihood of this approach to privacy working.
In the 2009 correspondence, Jones also asked Davis to remove his name and comments from the email and wrote that his comments “are meant solely for you,” adding that at least one of the women should face expulsion.
Davis responded to Jones that day, saying the photos chronicling an engagement party did not include minors.
**************
So here comes all that correspondence for all of us to read – onaccounta oodles of never-ending Baylor rape trials and their evidence – and we get a good look at what we already knew: Southern sports factories are typically run by endless layers of assholes. The management structure of these schools is like that dim sum dish, thousand layer cake, only here it’s thousand layer assholes. Art Briles, Ken Starr, Buddy Jones – a whole royal asshole family ran Baylor, and now the place is trying to replace them with less assholery, but we’ve got a tradition here, people.
**************
For earlier posts on the asshole triumvirate, go here.
***************
NEW BAYLOR FIGHT SONG
(sing it with me)
Perverted Little Tarts!
Perverted Little Tarts!
Drunk and slutty through the years
Seducing with their arts!
They tempt our jocks and bring them low
Then claim that they were raped
Lord guide us as we courtward go
And pray that nothing got taped.
Latest headline:
Three shootings in 8 hours. Eight wounded. Some tourists say they won’t be back.
Others, however – bikers, boozers, gunnies – are beginning to think their usual vacation spot – Panama City Beach – lacks the je ne sais quoi of the pride of South Carolina.
Ladies, UD can’t think of a more perfect synergy than taking your semesters at rape-friendly Baylor (located in biker-friendly Waco) and your semester breaks at pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-POPPIN’!!! (watch that way-viral video NOW – start at 1:44 to go RIGHT to the fun stuff – for the amazing spray of bullets!) Myrtle Beach.
Or you could skip the long trip and just attend Coastal Carolina University.
**********************
“We’re gonna send a message to do everything that’s humanly possible to stop this violence in our city,” [the city’s Mayor] said.
But you’re not going to, are you? Because the simple stuff you have to do in order to stop attracting large numbers of violent criminals to your beach involves getting merchants to stop pandering to them. But this is America, and we don’t fuck with the free market.
“[A] multitude of ads [in Myrtle Beach] tout the excitement of shooting machine guns in nearby Conway…”
The thing you do, which is turn the city into a police state during the warm months, doesn’t seem to be interrupting the flow of bullets.
*****************
WOW! Myrtle Beach managed to find time to squeeze in a fourth shooting on Sunday night!
******************
SUPER wow! A fifth one!!
After a fifth shooting Monday night, Gov. Henry McMaster also asked State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel to meet with local law enforcement and address the spate of violence.
With five, you get a concerned governor thrown in.
I felt dirty and gross for going to football games or supporting the school; I stopped going to games after my junior year.
****************
When it started to come out, some of my professors would [make] little sacrilegious jokes; they’d say things like “our good Baptist institution,” and there was just a level of acrimony to it.
****************
[T]he law students felt like their law degree was being cheapened by the scandal. It’s frustrating to be tied to a school that’s so obviously misogynistic. A lot of it was us being like, ‘Are you serious? It’s 2015, ‘16, ‘17; it’s an actual joke that people still think we can favor football over the safety of women on campus.’
****************
Football was fun, and it’s not as much fun anymore because it’s like, look at what some members of the football team have been accused of doing. For me there’s also some frustration there because we have a really good product in the education we offer our students, and it’s like, ‘You all tarnished that.’ When people hear ‘Baylor,’ they think about the football team. Our reputation has been tarnished, and it shouldn’t be.
*****************
None of the women interviewed above mentions Waco’s great bar scene, so UD will. Those who think the Twin Peaks shootout was the only opportunity for Baylor women to get shot as well as raped need to know that the fun continues.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm sees it all the time: When people find their beloved institution – with which they strongly identify themselves – in the swill, they defend it by turning on their grandest, haughtiest, most auspicious, rhetoric. Our Glorious Penn State is a Bright and Shining Light! We must do battle with the barbarians who distort the record of our heroic coaches! That sort of thing.
The problem is that this approach makes you look like Blanche DuBois defending her virtue and rhapsodizing about Belle Reve.
Grand and glorious Baylor University has fallen on hard times. It sold its soul to football victory at any cost (just like Penn State) and is currently, er, reaping the whirlwind. There’s a new gang rape allegation almost every week. What to do? What to say?
Well, this is what people are saying. Many people are saying that Baylor is a solid candidate for the death penalty. Some say the regents should resign. Some say Baylor should be kicked out of its conference. Some say withhold federal funds. Here’s a typical comment:
Shelving the football program for a few years would send a needed message in college athletics that enabling criminal behavior for the sake of maintaining a program’s national ranking and economic power won’t be tolerated.
And then there’s C. Stephen Evans, a Baylor professor who grandly implores people in and around Baylor to shut up.
I implore those continually criticizing Baylor in a public way to cease and desist. You are doing serious damage to Baylor’s reputation and demoralizing those of us who work to make Baylor a great place for students. Perhaps those of you who are not on campus every day do not realize how dispiriting it is to read such diatribes in the daily paper several times a week.
The reason this sort of writing makes you a laughingstock is that now everyone knows precisely how great a place Baylor has been for students.
[A] student-athlete told her coach that five football players had raped her at an off-campus party. The coach then took a list of names to [football coach Art] Briles, who said, “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”
Baylor’s the kind of place where students need to know before they get there that there are bad dudes on the football team and that it is the student’s responsibility to stay out of their way. There’s Belle Reve, and there’s reality. That’s the Baylor reality.
Critics of Baylor’s criminal disregard of its students are not doing damage to Baylor’s reputation. The regents, the president, the people with power at Baylor who paid Art Briles six million dollars a year to protect very dangerous people who could catch footballs did the damage.
Baylor University’s director of sports ministry will leave the school this summer…
[Wes] Yeary testified in defense of former football player Sam Ukwuachu, who was later convicted of sexual assault. Yeary said he would be comfortable with Ukwuachu returning to his home and being around his children.
Yeary also testified that Ukwuachu’s victim told him about the assault. He said he told her that if she would have called him on the night of the rape, he would have given her a ride home.
Yeary was allegedly involved in a separate case involving former Baylor football player Devin Chafin, who was dismissed from the football team June 1.
In a Title IX lawsuit against the university, Dolores Lozano accuses Baylor officials of not adequately responding to her claims of domestic violence against Chafin.
Lozano reported an assault to Yeary, the suit alleges, and Yeary then gave her literature to assist her in spiritual self-worth and preservation.
It Never Rains but it Whores
[Singalong.]
Did y’ever wake up in the morning
And grumble as you tumble out of bed?
Your strength coach arrested — solicitation.
You might lose SAC accreditation.
The school of Ken Starr and Art Briles
Is drowning in lawsuits and trials
Your regents are vile but they won’t do town halls
You’re out of compliance with Big 12 by-laws
Yes, all day long,
Everything you touch goes wrong.
Teacher told us, when this happens, never to whine or wail;
The same things happen at other schools, but on a much smaller scale!
It never rains but what it whores;
If lady luck should happen to desert you,
Some gang rape’s never gonna hurt you,
So wait and the skies will all be blue.
It never rains but what it whores;
So what if all your troubles come in bunches,
Keep sticking to your silly little coaches,
And the sun will come shining through.
Bide your time and keep on hummin’,
Don’t you frown and sit around and weep.
Wait your turn, your day is comin’,
And you’ll be there on top of the heap!
It never rains but what it whores;
You may as well get all your worries over,
From then on you’re gonna be in clover!
Smile when you should cry,
For every cloud there’ll be a rainbow,
There’ll be a sunbeam for every raindrop by and by!
*************************
[UD thanks many readers who have sent her Baylor updates.]
There’s always a country or state or institution pretty nearby that looms as the embodiment of your fear that your proud local culture is just this far away from sinking into the depravity of that other place.
[M]any in Paris [anxiously note the] “Italianization” of French life — the descent into what might become an unseemly round of [Silvio] Berlusconian squalor…
As in – France got this close to electing President Dominique Strauss-Kahn. (Dom and Don would have been great friends.)
Leave aside the details of the [rape and pimping] allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.
Money and sex sleaze is all over, of course (hence widespread Italianization fears), but let’s consider this warning to the University of Kansas (a public university) in the specific context of global elites and public money/general sleaze.
*****************
First: The problem besetting Francois Fillon today is exactly DSK’s problem, minus the raping: Greed + Hypocrisy. Fillon is just as stern about austerity (for the common French; not for him and his family) as was DSK’s IMF. Now his decade-long extraction of roughly a million euros from the public purse – like DSK’s use of global taxpayer money for his hotel room and flight – has the French joking about le million de Fillon and referring to François Million.
Maybe the world should establish special austerity guidelines for elites: Spain’s Princess Cristina may soon be sent to prison for a few years – she’s accused of being her husband’s accomplice in taking six million public euros (he faces twenty years confinement)… Which really when you think about it makes Fillon’s takings seem very small indeed (one v. six million), and maybe they weren’t even illegal! DSK’s takings were even less (he wasn’t head of IMF long enough to raid it), and almost certainly they followed the letter of the law.
One reason to let most of the elites get away with it is that elite corruption that gets discovered begets much more corruption. Cristina’s father – the King of Spain when her story broke – apparently offered a two million euro bribe to some people to make her trial go away.
Having to deal with corruption is bad enough. Having to deal with corruption involving very rich and powerful people is a serious nuisance.
*****************
Which brings me to the kings of America: our football coaches. It is they who assemble and – er – stabilize a roster of university or professional players, they who – at universities – command the highest public employee salary in twenty-seven of our states. (In other states, it’s basketball coaches.) They’re making scads more than the terrified president of their university, and, like Art Briles, they really get free rein. Everyone moves out of their way or enables them – campus police, town police, alumni, trustees, administrators, professors, presidents, chancellors, legislators… hell, governors — not a peep out of them. As for female students who may get beaten or raped by some of the players the coach has expensively recruited … Baylor’s football coach, Briles, allegedly “questioned why a woman was with ‘bad dudes’ from his football team after [he was told about] a gang rape accusation.” What kind of a dummy comes to a school that represents itself in this way and doesn’t know to expect gang rapes from bad dudes? Don’t women applicants read our admissions information? Baylor University seeks out bad dudes and deifies them.
Okay, so that’s the way of life. Like most corruption, it tends to feature elements of sex, money, and cover-up. I’ve always found it pretty remarkable that it thrives at universities, of all places – that bad dudes and even worse coaches dominate life on many campuses. But as with the Spanish monarchy, it takes far more than one disgusting eruption to bury the crown. You dump your current regent (he gets another job right away, maybe again at a noisily self-righteous Christian campus), take down his statue, and install a new royal house.
**********************
So okay this article. This article is about what its author daintily refers to as “the situation in Lawrence.” He’s not very specific about it, but all of the links in this sentence begin to scratch the surface. He’s worried about Baylor-corruption contagion; he uses the fate of Baylor as a cautionary tale for Kansas.
Many universities have an alarming tendency of allowing sports-related problems to fester because they won’t deal with them head-on. Coaches become too powerful and too autonomous to challenge. Image protection overwhelms honesty and transparency. A toxic tolerance level for bad behavior and bad students builds up.
At Baylor, a basketball player murdered his teammate in 2003, and the coach at the time (Dave Bliss) maliciously smeared the dead man in order to cover up NCAA violations. Within the football program, the [last coach,] (Art Briles, may he never coach again) expended quite a bit of energy keeping accusations about his players from going public or reaching the school’s judicial affairs office, and in obtaining special treatment from the administration. Briles had allies above him in athletic director Ian McCaw and school president Kenneth Starr.
The writer urges Kansas – which, remarkably even by university athletics standards, boasts “six incidents involving Kansas basketball players, in some form or fashion, that have come to light within the past two weeks,” not to deepen its institutional corruption by acting like Baylor (he could have chosen Florida State etc. etc., but Baylor’s the most recent) and adding cover-up to corruption.
If the Kansas trustees are smart and conscientious and concerned about the university as a whole and not just as a basketball power, they’re pushing hard for all the facts – and, if warranted, for immediate and significant action. Public action.
Don’t spend more energy trying to hide problems than fix problems. Don’t, at any cost, follow the Baylor blueprint.
But of course it isn’t just the trustees, and anyway we have no reason to think that the same trustees who let KU turn into dreck will reverse course. (And look who’s running the place.)
And speaking of reversals – given the history, over the last decade or so, of the University of Kansas, I’m afraid the corruption-contagion arguably goes the other way: Kansas has stunk to high heaven for a long time.
*****************
Update, Fillon:
[I]nvestigators [are] now also probing whether Mr Fillon awarded the highest French state honour – the Grand Croix de la Légion d’Honneur – to the wealthy owner of a literary review in return for giving his wife a well-paid sinecure.
