He begins his more-guns-are-needed response to the massacre in Connecticut by quoting William Burroughs:
“After a shooting spree,” author William Burroughs once said, “they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.” Burroughs continued: “I sure as hell wouldn’t want to live in a society where the only people allowed guns are the police and the military.”
William Burroughs was a madman who killed his wife with a gun.
Thank you, Glenn Reynolds, for championing the thought of William Burroughs. And for helping to keep guns in the hands of madmen like him. I await your next column on the wit and wisdom of Timothy McVeigh.
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UD thanks a reader for linking her to this remarkable piece of writing.
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Here’s something humane and non-insidious on the subject, written after the Virginia Tech massacre.
We’re on our way to one mass killing by a crazy person with guns every day.
The death toll is the highest from a school shooting in U.S. history since a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007.
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Comment from an Andrew Sullivan reader:
I could never feel anything but contempt for the asshole who did this, but the truth is we are a nation of assholes. I include myself in that. Most radio stations I heard could only be bothered to touch on this massacre of children for a moment or two before getting back to the critical topic of football. That wonderful game full of violence that has no regard for the well being of the young men who play it.
… feature endemic cheating. Big deal. If someone says of Brown University’s highest-profile trustee that “you have to wonder whether his returns have been generated not only through his trading brilliance but also through a culture of cutting corners and pushing employees to the point where they break the law,” you’re not exactly going to pee your pants.
If someone says of his investors that
There is a point where willful blindness turns to complicity. Investors profit from any added juice that SAC might gain, whatever its source. And if Mr. Cohen were to face charges, they would pay no price.
Major banks and investors around the world shoveled money to Bernard L. Madoff despite doubts about his purity. Some thought that Mr. Madoff was using his brokerage firm to front-run. In other words, they thought he was cheating on their behalf, not ripping them off. And that was an enticement.
you’re not going to get all amazed that the writer cites Bernard Madoff – a Yeshiva University trustee – right after talking about Brown University’s highest-profile trustee.
Still – Brown itself, especially given this background and this background, might want to start reviewing its relationship with Steven Cohen. So far, the university won’t even comment to the Brown Daily Herald about the situation. Most unwise.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm realizes how difficult it is to fashion a statement under these circumstances. Cohen is in a position to give the university not millions, but billions. OTOH, some people and institutions are beginning to pull their money out of SAC Capital Advisors, because there’s too much noise in the press about insider trading, and the possibility of the SEC actually collaring Cohen. What to do?
Brown could of course ask Cohen to leave the board of trustees. No one in the money world cares about this sort of thing, so it wouldn’t hurt SAC. Or Brown could issue something like this:
We are aware of the insider trading allegations against some SAC employees. We also believe that SAC continues to have among the highest standards for compliance in the industry. Steven Cohen remains a great asset to Brown.
… so UD has called Adcock’s Trapping (its url sounds kinky: adcockstrapping.com).
Beasts are in the walls and they’re in the attic and they make a huge racket at night. Scritch scratch, raceabout raceabout. Are they squirrels, raccoons, rats? Groundhogs, opossums, bats? Could be foxes, I suppose.
Tomorrow a guy in a white truck with cages in the back shows up around noon to do something about this. While Les UDs work their way through papers and final exams, he will head up the little foldaway ladder to the attic and then come down and tell us the worst.
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UPDATE: Nothing more exciting than mice.
[I]n some instances our academic standards are higher than Vanderbilts. That’s right[: We] had a player be ineligible to play this year that would have been good to go at 13 other SEC schools and I know of at least one more who was cleared to play by the NCAA but not by [the] academic arsehole[s] at Tennessee.
When it comes to university sports, it doesn’t get any more pathological than the University of Kentucky, a perennially corrupt player constantly featured on this blog.
These details from the Eric Smart scientific misconduct scandal on that campus round out the picture of UK as one of America’s most third-world universities, featuring not only an intensely corrupt athletics division, but a high-profile research lab whose now-disgraced director seems to have been protected by people in the administration.
Tim Bricker, the former chair of pediatrics, wrote [Smart] a recommendation letter to the state’s teacher certification agency, calling him “an outstanding teacher.” Bricker is thought to have also removed a letter of reprimand from Smart’s personnel file that detailed his yearlong probation for sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment in his lab.
… I’ve wanted the University of Southern Mississippi (you owe it to yourself to read the entire article, plus the letter at the end) to be stupider than the University of Massachusetts. I’ve assumed that that deep south school would obviously be dumber than a school in my enlightened part of the country.
Yet they’re actually neck and neck. They’re actually destroying themselves at the same rate, for the same reason. They’re both sports fuck-ups.
6,385 people showed up for U Mass’s most recent football game — played far from campus in Gillette Stadium (where the big boys play!), which offers 68,756 seats.
So let’s see. UD stinks at math, but… 6,385 / 68,756… That’s, uh (pause for phone call to Mr UD) … 9.3%!!!
OR (pause for visit to Percentage Calculator) … that’s 9.2864622723835%!!!!
Of course, “students and taxpayers [are] picking up the tab.”
General Subbaswamy has announced from his bunker that “we haven’t completely mobilized the alumni yet.” His last job was at the University of Kentucky, so he knows university sports.
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UD thanks Andre.
“I don’t know if it approaches crisis [with the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide]; perhaps it does, but it’s at a crossroads because there’s an issue about the fundamental nature of the game. It’s so popular and so profitable, but it takes a tremendous toll on many of those who play it. Not just body, but as we’re now learning, mind and emotions,” Costas said on “Piers Morgan Tonight.”
“And it’s a legitimate question to ask whether, for some players at least, the toll that the game takes, brain trauma, medications that they may take, enhance performance or deal with pain, all those things. The culture of the league increases the likelihood of abhorrent behavior. It’s possible.”
It’s a comfort to know that the same culture pertains at quite a few of our university football and basketball programs.
… This week, I stopped by St. Andrews Plaza in Lower Manhattan to see Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his deputy, Richard Zabel, the former head of the criminal division. Both said they couldn’t discuss any pending cases. But many people who work in financial markets “are highly skilled at cost-benefit analysis,” Mr. Bharara told me. “They’re highly intelligent. They’ve been to the best schools. They weigh the risk of getting caught against the potential reward, and they decide it’s worth the risk. We’re trying to tilt that equation.”
… For the most part, inside traders aren’t hardened criminals but rational decision-makers. When confronted by an F.B.I. agent in his front yard, [Mathew] Martoma fainted.
So what we’ve created with our best schools is a class of sensitive, rational, ethically keen criminals who do not think of themselves as criminals. They faint when they see the FBI coming.
I suppose it’s a sort of cultural accomplishment. Me, I prefer the old school.
The Wharton School of Business. UD has lost count of how many graduates, just this year, have been indicted for incredibly high-level fraud.
[Craig] Toll … [is] charged with defrauding … investors out of $40 million, and scamming the federal government out of … $10 million [he was] given to help finance construction of a Haitian factory to build homes for hurricane victims.
Toll, 64, is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business.
… [He is charged with] 23 counts of fraud and money laundering
Do you suppose anyone at Wharton notices how many of their graduates are criminals, or are under indictment? Or are, like Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, getting buzzed by the SEC an awful lot?
Hell, maybe Wharton’s proud of it. You have to figure there are tons more graduates out there successfully defrauding people.
… has been suspended without pay because of plagiarism.
That’s it. That’s all the school will say, and no journalist has anything to add so far.
This is a pity. It’s actually kind of irresponsible. Students and colleagues have a right to know how extensively he plagiarized, what in particular he plagiarized, etc. This sort of non-announcement leaves us uncertain whether Clinton Beckford has plagiarized everything he’s written, or just a few things. A lot of his publications are co-authored. Did his associates also plagiarize?