… from the collective “rich, fat, tired” mind of America is about to released. The most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – a megaton Memories of Overdevelopment, As I Lay Diagnosing, and Diazepam Comes for the Archbishop – will soon hit the shelves.

Stephen Dedalus, in Ulysses, called Irish art “the cracked looking-glass of a servant.” The DSM is the cracked looking-glass of a master. It is our pill-dependent, Alexandrine culture’s most soul-searching, compendious, self-expression yet.

Allen Frances, who was there when the DSM started to explode, has consistently warned against pathologizing an entire country. Many other people – and many mental health organizations – have done the same. But our family practitioners remain weirdly dependent upon this obese mashup, this encyclical of enervation.

The best that can be said about it is that it adequately conveys what we have become.

… exiting the National Building Museum after performing in Christmas in Washington:

Everyone went absolutely nuts for Psy – we were all doing Gangnam Style dancing. He wasn’t very friendly though. Just kind of nodded to the chorus. I think he’s under a lot of strain because of his anti-American thing!

We sang with Diana Ross and they put me in the front row … So I was singing with Diana Ross, just behind her, and looking at the President just a few feet away from me. I was practically crying. I was crying, at the end of the song.

I think you’ll be able to see me when it airs – but only during the Diana Ross. The final medley was with the two other choruses, and I was standing way back.

The food at the reception was amazing.

Just because Ellis Johnson has landed on his feet with an $800,000 per-year contract at Auburn University doesn’t mean that Southern Miss is off the hook for any of his $2.1 million buyout.

… [At a faculty meeting, Aubrey] Lucas affirmed that contracts are being examined more carefully, though he did not elaborate in what ways. He also stated that he intends to put a better payout clause in the contract of the next head football coach.

Thanks to a report on a national sports website called Deadspin, it has become commonplace to assume that Johnson’s buyout will be paid with the $2.125 million that Southern Miss will receive for its football game in 2013 with the University of Nebraska.

In fact, Lucas said school officials aren’t planning to pay any of it with the game revenue, stating that other pressing issues will require the money, such as the ongoing athletic department debt and the loss of revenue from the steep decline in ticket sales throughout the year.

As for the buyout, it’s actually greater than $2.1 million when you take into account the assistant coaches that will need to be bought out once a new coach brings in his staff.

Lucas said that school is on the hook for $1.1 million for this fiscal year (ending July 1, 2013) for the contracts of Johnson and his assistant coaches…

Then the school will have to foot an additional $1.95 million for the next three fiscal years for Johnson and the assistants that remain under contract.

… What’s really surprising me are those who believe as I do that two players on the [football] team have committed serious criminal acts – sexual assault in one case, and rape in another — but assumed that I’d support the team anyway, just as they are.

[A]s a thought exercise, how many predators would have to be on the team before you’d no longer feel like cheering?

… [T]he man Lizzy accused had a history of behavior that should have kept him from being recruited in the first place.

… “I’ve watched almost every game this season and there’s not a single time that I don’t feel extreme anger when I see [the accused] on the field,” said Kaliegh Fields, a Saint Mary’s junior who went with Lizzy to the police station. “Once I start thinking about the people who put the school’s success in a sport over the life of a young woman, I can’t help but feel disgust. Everyone’s always saying how God’s on Notre Dame’s side,” she added. “And I think, ‘How could he be?’”

Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

One of UD‘s many Turkish MOOC students (check out her poetry MOOC here) comments that she’s “very bored.”

UD now has 1,702 students. She hopes not all are bored.

… in which a student, having taken LSD and been violent all night, showed up at campus police headquarters and apparently acted so threateningly that a policeman shot and killed him, San Bernardino city police have shot and killed a Cal State San Bernardino student who also apparently threatened them. Responding to a report of a disturbance, they confronted the student in a dorm hallway.

[T]here was an altercation in which the student became violent toward officers, who shot the student in the torso.

Obviously, there will be an investigation and a review of any security footage.

The parents of the South Alabama student – who was not only unarmed, but apparently naked – are suing.

… is carrying too much weight?

… a tragic saga of violence, fraud, loss, and birtherism, now draws to a close.

Having been abandoned by its dark lover, who now for America’s pain slut university? Who will not only coach the imminent Meineke Car Care Bowl, but keep Texas Tech University in the golden shackles it loves so well? The school has gone through Mike Leach, Bobby Knight, Billy Gillispie (the last two in basketball) and Tommy Tuberville. Who’s left?

Who’s left to slap the coaching staff, concuss players, force the team into illegal practice hours? You can get trash-talking coaches – trash-talking coaches are a dime a dozen – but TTU’s standard of torture is higher than that. TTU never forgets that

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…

TTU doesn’t recoil. They go for it, man!

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

UD proposes Rocco Siffredi. Has any Texas Tech coach forced a player’s head down a toilet while sodomizing him? It’s time.

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

UD thanks John.

… to the Psy controversy.

The mega-hot Mr Gangnam Style will perform on Sunday (the show will air later on TNT) WITH MY KID at the annual Christmas in Washington concert at the National Building Museum here in DC. (La Kid is in the chorus.)

Now it turns out that eight years ago Psy sang disgusting anti-American lyrics in a concert in Seoul protesting the American military. There’s been an effort to have him taken off the show, but apparently it will go on as planned with the President in attendance.

Since you ask, here’s what I think: He should have apologized long ago. He certainly should have told people about it and apologized as soon as his Gangnam thing went cosmic. He has to have known the earlier performance would come out.

In any event, he has in fact issued a long and serious apology, and unless we want to be the sort of people who issue fatwas in response to verbal attacks, the grown-up thing to do is accept it and move on.

I also think that security at this already tight-security event (La Kid has had to fill out forms for the Secret Service, etc.) will now go through the roof. And I think that tons more people will view the show than would have otherwise.

Maybe there will be pickets?

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

Comments at Lucianne.com, UD‘s go-to source for the Tea Party brew, are somewhat surprisingly mixed.

… for insider trading (“Among researchers, physicians, government officials and corporate executives, the lure of easy money in health-care insider trading has become epidemic.”), you might want to pay attention to the sort of people likely to get arrested and embarrass you the way Sid Gilman has embarrassed the University of Michigan. I hate to be the one to tell you, but the endless futzing you’ve been doing with your conflict of interest forms for professors ain’t gonna cut it. You need to be able to see these guys coming.

The Gilman/Martoma story, and the related Benhamou/Skowron story, reveal, for those who wish to see, “the deeply compromised, fundamentally flawed research system in which academic figureheads serve as puppets for industry interests.” Of course, these two are just the really big money stories – hundreds of millions in profit, or avoidance of loss; Gilman’s $1,000 an hour fee for the care and feeding of his hedgie. If you want to be reminded of the zillions of smaller stories (these aren’t always about insider trading; they’re about mercenary professors as other sorts of corporate puppets), click on this blog’s conflict of interest category.

So – how do you see ’em coming?

First: Here’s what you shouldn’t do. Don’t do this retrospectively. Don’t think that by reviewing the traumatic life stories, and the pleading-for-mercy-in-front-of-a-judge statements, of people already in jail you can detect who among your faculty is, even as we speak, breaking insider trading laws. They all say the same thing. They have no idea how they lost their moral compass but they’re sure it’s around here somewhere. They thought they were dealing pretty well with their mother’s death but actually it turned them into bitter twisted nihilists. Don’t bother with this.

Instead, gaze about you at your medical faculty and ask the following question: Who’s the greediest of them all? The very greediest? I’m not talking about people who want to live well. Everyone wants to live well, and long may we prosper. I’m talking about faculty members whose acquisitiveness, ostentation, and status anxiety are notorious — the subject of jokes and stories and general incredulity. These guys are liable to be deeply in debt as they buy more and more and more and more. You want to have them in for a chat about their corporate ties.

Good news from Belgium, whose constitutional court has upheld the constitutionality of that country’s burqa ban. There are of course questions of public safety, the court noted. Beyond that, in democratic societies we need to be able to see one another.

Having spent years at the University of Chicago, I can confirm this University of Rochester student’s observation. Chicago’s lack of serious sports teams means a lack of school spirit, which means, well, dudsville.

Pretty much the only thing Ada Yonath, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Gary Becker, Saul Bellow, and eighty or so other Chicago faculty and alumni have been able to rouse themselves to do over the last few decades is win Nobel prizes.

Psy – Mister Gangnam Style – visits a Florida shopping mall today.

UD reminds her readers that he has a date with UD‘s daughter (known here as La Kid), this weekend, where on Saturday she will rehearse with him, and on Sunday perform with him, in the annual Christmas in Washington event.

Program director Tommy Chuck said the singer’s appearance in Tampa was almost cancelled.

Psy was booked to perform Sunday during the station’s annual Jingle Ball concert at the Tampa Bay Times Forum, Chuck said. Sunday’s concert features pop singers Justin Bieber, Ke$ha, One Republic and others.

But Psy received an invitation from President Barack Obama to perform at the White House on the same day.

“When the president of the United States asks you to perform at the White House, well, you have to go,” Chuck said.

Chuck said he was able to work a deal to have the singer instead appear at the station’s Jingle All the Way event at University Mall.

Actually, unless he has a smaller, extra concert, in mind, Psy will be appearing not at the White House but at the National Building Museum.

La Kid, who has performed with Bruce Springsteen (at Obama’s first inauguration, and at the Super Bowl), Justin Bieber, Sting, Jennifer Hudson (La Kid‘s the blond who shows up at 0:37) and other dignitaries, is perhaps not all that star-struck at this point…

I just woke her up to ask how she feels about performing with Psy.

“Fine.”

She also said: “I don’t know if I’ll be performing with him. It’s not clear that the chorus will be on the stage when he’s performing. I don’t think it’s been decided yet.”

She went back to sleep.

… keeps a close eye on Brown’s highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, and his unlucky-in-love hedge fund, which keeps hiring people who betray the firm’s passionate commitment to the highest business ethics.

It’s hard to account for this betrayal. Six traders charged with insider trading! Freud would call it repetition compulsion. You keep falling for people who break your heart. Who knows why? I guess Steve Cohen is naive.

But Brown isn’t.

Marisa Quinn, vice president for public affairs and University relations, had not returned multiple requests for comment on the developments as of Wednesday night.

Talk to the press? Are you fucking kidding me?

True, and a new study suggests that changing coaches constantly does no good in terms of your win/loss record.

But that’s the thing about university sports. Decisions aren’t made with deliberation. They’re made according to the Baying Hounds Principle. When the hounds start baying so loudly it scares you, get another coach.