Captain Kristallnacht kills Pete.

… prompted a New York University freshman to jump off the roof of his high-rise dorm.

Sad details about him, and his family back in Trinidad, are here.

In response to the Tom Perkins Kristallnacht letter (go here for details), a Fortune writer asks us not to judge his investment firm just because it happens to have been founded by the dude.

KPCB has been subject of numerous media brickbats over the past few years (including some from yours truly), for issues related to both its investment strategy and firm management. Depending on your perspective, most of it either has been deserved or most of it has been overkill by a media that likes to tear down those it first builds up. But no matter your general feelings toward KPCB, the firm in no way deserves to be tarred with the spuriousness sentiments of its co-founder. Hopefully it will not be.

Gevalt. Where to start?

KPCB has been subject of numerous [Use “many”; it’s simpler, less pretentious.] media brickbats over the past few years [Drop “over the past few years”; it’s unnecessary.] (including some from yours truly), for issues related to both its investment strategy and firm management. [Drop “both its.”] Depending on your perspective, most of it either has been deserved or most of it [Get rid of the repetition of “most of it.” And by the way, notice how many of the words in this short paragraph are the deadly ‘it’?] has been overkill by a media that likes to tear down those it first builds up. But no matter your general feelings toward KPCB, the firm in no way deserves to be tarred with the spuriousness sentiments [Right – “spuriousness” makes no sense here. And even if he’d used “spurious,” it would designate exactly the opposite of the Perkins letter. There was nothing fake in the writing – it was a model of sincerity.] of its co-founder. Hopefully it will not be. [The final sentence is classic vacuousness, the equivalent of “Only the future will tell.”]

[A]fter the [Governor Bob] McDonnell family had spent a vacation at Williams’ lake house, the McDonnells’ sons had driven Williams’ Range Rover home. Maureen McDonnell subsequently asked Williams if the boys could take the vehicle back to the University of Virginia. Williams said no. Not long after that, Maureen McDonnell called Williams with another idea: could he give her money to buy another of her children a used Ford Explorer. Again, Williams said no.

Conformist Without a Cause.

I mean, beyond calling university researchers liars.

Nicely put.

There they sit together, the state of Montana’s two university systems, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, both ranked #201 on the higher ed hit parade at US News.

201! You really have to give it the old college try to do that poorly. There really isn’t much lower you can go.

And, as is always the case, talking to the people in charge – particularly the trustees – grants insight into the grit, determination, and developmental delay that make Montana what it is.

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So this here reporter points out that Montana State and the University of Montana bleed students and taxpayers dry via immense subsidies for sports, and that of course all the money that goes to sports is money that doesn’t go to, you know, educating people. A thunderingly obvious point.

A guy who used to be a UM economics professor and is now a state senator has really “irked” one of the regents by making this point.

[Dick] Barrett … was reacting to news reports that inaccurately characterized the Montana University System’s college athletics as showing a $571,331 “profit.”

The word profit suggests the programs are self-supporting, Barrett said, and they are not.

“People shouldn’t operate under the misperception they support themselves,” Barrett said. When people attend games they should realize, he said, “Taxpayers are giving them a hand.

“My point is simple — that we should understand what it is, particularly at a time when resources are limited.”

At a time when UM faculty are arguing about budget priorities – when some professors assert the university has disproportionately cut the humanities while funding top-heavy administration — “it struck me as odd,” Barrett said, “that funding for athletics has not become part of the discussion.”

Barrett called “bogus” the regents’ argument that millions of dollars in tuition waivers for athletes shouldn’t be counted as subsidies because no cash changes hands.

Tuition waivers for athletics totaled $8 million last year for all campuses, including $2.8 million at MSU, according to Frieda Houser, University System director of accounting and budget.

The university could have decided to “sacrifice revenue” in other ways, Barrett said. “It could decide not to charge other students as high a tuition.

“Students are subsidizing athletics, not just in their (athletics) fee, but they have to pay higher tuition so athletes can pay lower tuition,” he said.

That’s not the only bogus regents’ argument.

The regents … argued that the dollar amount listed on Montana’s NCAA reports as “direct state or other government support” for athletics programs is zero.

It’s zero, one administrator explained later, because under the Montana Constitution, the Legislature doesn’t approve money for specific university programs like athletics, but instead sends a lump sum to the Board of Regents.

Oh. Alright then.

PLUS, the whole other defense of athletics is, hell, you know, it just generates one heck of a great atmosphere …

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has had to occasion to caution you about your comparisons, and – given the now-notorious Tom Perkins letter to the Wall Street Journal – she sees she’ll need to do that again.

Before we quote from the Perkins epistle, let’s review some SOS rules for making comparisons by considering two pieces of writing she’s recently cited on this blog.

Example I: Shall I Compare Thee to a Pus Pocket?

The UNC academic fraud scandal is like a pesky staph infection that just won’t go away for university officials — nor should it. As reporters at the Raleigh News and Observer continue to dig, they uncover more and more dirty little secrets. The latest problems swirl around a pus pocket called the Academic Support Program.

SOS grants points here for an admirable extension of the staph comparison (writing like this often, er, amplifies into mixed metaphors); but she immediately takes the points back when she finds herself, at the end of the paragraph, throwing up. In an effort to find an image worthy of his disgust, this writer burrowed a little too deeply in the bacillus. Ick.

Example II: Ronald Pol Pot McDonald

We all live in a murderous world, as the events in Norway have shown, with 97 dead. Though that is nothing compared to what happens in McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried [Chicken] every day.

This is Morrissey putting Crispy McNuggets in historical perspective. I think we can all agree that there is a difference of scale and value between eating meat and slaughtering children. The comparison therefore accomplishes only two things: It puts the fanaticism of Morrissey in extreme and repellent relief; and it reveals his hopeless narcissism.

Okay, so here’s the world according to Perkins:

… I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”

Let’s pause there, before attempting to assimilate the comparison between anti-rich sentiments in America and slaughtering Jews. Can you make sense of the sentence? All those tos:

to the parallels
to its war
to the progressive war

Me no get it. Can we rewrite?

I would call attention to the parallels between the Nazi war on the Jews and the progressives’ war on America’s rich.

Something like that? Note that SOS has taken out tons of words – you want to simplify, especially in your opening sentence. You also want to remove quotation marks around words when the marks deny that you’re referring to something you are indeed actually referring to. The “rich”? The quote unquote rich? Does Perkins mean that the Occupy people and the like are in fact attacking a group of people who are not rich? Perkins himself is a billionaire. Does that make him “rich” or rich?

SOS has not been able to clarify whether Perkins believes that the German Jews were all rich – this is something the sentence seems to imply, or at least to have room for…

Okay, next:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent. There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these “techno geeks” can pay. We have, for example, libelous and cruel attacks in the Chronicle on our number-one celebrity, the author Danielle Steel, alleging that she is a “snob” despite the millions she has spent on our city’s homeless and mentally ill over the past decades.

“Rising tide” is a cliche; “virtually every word” is hyperbole. (You call this demonization of the rich? )

This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

Ends with a challenging, scary, question… But are you hyperventilating, or laughing?

Right. Because, like Morrissey, this is a human being some of whose views are so extraordinarily grotesque that we do not need to take them seriously.

If you are chained to extraordinarily grotesque views and you still wish to urge them on other people via prose, take this further counsel from SOS: Don’t try for comparisons at all. Go in some other direction.

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UPDATE: Il miglior fabbro.

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Update: Tom Perkins.

For a man convicted of involuntary manslaughter with his yacht, life imitates art.

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things.”

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They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

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The attempt to make Horthy a worthy meets some resistance.

… … A wondrous land where professors of psychiatry hide their financial involvement in companies that promote new diagnostic techniques these same psychiatry professors have promoted in seemingly neutral scientific publications … You’ve just crossed over into … The conflict of interest twilight zone…

[The] fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was …published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in May 2013… [O]ne of the main claimed innovations in the DSM-5 is that it promotes the use of ‘dimensional‘ or quantitative measures of symptoms... [Why] is the DSM promoting symptom scales? Or more to the point, why is it suddenly promoting them now, given that dimensional measures have been used in psychiatry for 60 years? This is where it gets interesting.

The head of the [American Psychiatric Association’s] DSM-5 task force, David Kupfer, stands accused of failing to disclose a conflict of interest which – arguably – means that he has a financial stake in the concept of dimensional assessment.

It all started with a paper in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry (now JAMA Psychiatry) called Development of a computerized adaptive test for depression. The first author was statistician Robert. D. Gibbons of the University of Chicago (a veteran of psychiatric statistics). The last (senior) author was David Kupfer.

The Gibbons et al paper presents a software program to help rate the severity of depression, an ‘adaptive’ questionnaire. Whereas a normal questionnaire is just a fixed list of items, the new system chooses which questions to ask next based on your responses to previous ones (drawing questions from a bank of items adapted from existing depression scales). The authors say this provides precise measurement of depression across the full continuum of severity.

… He (and Gibbons and colleagues) seem to be preparing to sell their computerized adaptive test (CAT). They have incorporated a company, Psychiatric Assessment Inc. (PAI).

This raises the disturbing notion that Kupfer, in his capacity as computerized dimensional product seller, could benefit financially from his prior championing of dimensional assessment in his capacity as DSM-5 head.

Or, as UD’s blogpal Allen Frances puts it, more succinctly:

While using his DSM 5 pulpit to strongly promote the value of dimensional diagnosis, the DSM 5 Chair (and several associates also working on DSM 5) were secretly forming a company that would profit from the development of commercially available dimensional instruments. And unaccountably, he failed to disclose this most obvious of conflicts of interest while simultaneously lauding the DSM 5 conflict of interest policy.

Or, as UD‘s blogpal Bernard Carroll puts it, more colorfully:

Peddle unproven psychiatric screening scales backed up by black box statistics (a distressing specialty of Dr. Gibbons); publish a glowing report in JAMA Psychiatry, which you have infiltrated (Ellen Frank and Robert Gibbons are on the editorial board); get your corporate people inside the DSM-5 process (David Kupfer, Robert Gibbons, Paul Pilkonis); slant the DSM-5 process to endorse, however weakly, the kind of products you intend to market; start a corporation without telling anybody and establish a website with advance marketing that touts your new academic publication in JAMA Psychiatry while highlighting Dr. Kupfer’s key role in DSM-5; loudly proclaim … the advent of population-wide screening but before doing any serious field trials or acknowledging that most positive screens will be false positives. This is the usual dodgy hand waving of wannabe entrepreneurs, whose vision is obscured by dollar signs. Oh, and did I mention regulatory capture of NIMH for over $11 million in funding while not producing a product worth a tinker’s damn?

The only thing this group seems to have failed to do is get Virginia’s Governor Bob McDonnell in on it.

… Rapture.

The fish rots from the top.

Enter the University of Nevada Las Vegas board of regents warily.

It is as Freud wrote of entering the darkness of the soul:

No one who, like me, conjures up the most evil of those half-tamed demons that inhabit the human beast, and seeks to wrestle with them, can expect to come through the struggle unscathed.

It is as Joyce wrote of the obstetrical theater:

Enter that antechamber of birth where the studious are assembled and note their faces. Nothing, as it seems, there of rash or violent. Quietude of custody, rather, befitting their station in that house, the vigilant watch of shepherds…

The psychoanalyst conjures what is darkest in us; the obstetrician conjures the violence of the birth trauma. Yet both are shepherds, custodians, healers …

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art…

You see the paradox…

And, in some similar sense, to enter that antechamber wherein reside the darkest, most primitive forces of the American university, and then to enter into what Blake called Mental Fight with them, is to emerge scathed. To read – to try to understand – the words and acts of the most primal energies at work in that bastion of enlightenment, the university, is to sense what Marlow must have felt in the forest of shrunken heads.

Let us then in studious quietude listen to them, the trustees of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, as they give a football coach with a 12-37 record a vast raise; as they build for a university community that does not attend football games a vast new football stadium; as they generate a $2.7 million athletics program deficit and make students and taxpayers deal with it… Let us hear their words.

“Maybe we’re being a little generous, but I thought about some of the other factors that were occurring,” Regent Robert Blakely said. “We’re in the process of trying to build a stadium. Having a successful football team is the biggest linchpin. Giving the football coach more of an incentive probably isn’t a bad plan.”

“I’m not enamored with the contract either,” Regent Michael Wixom said. “But I don’t want to jeopardize the momentum (Hauck) has created. [The coach’s most recent season was 7-6!] If we reject the contract, I’m afraid it will do immense harm.”

Regents directed Chancellor Dan Klaich to form a committee to look at best practices in contract negotiations with athletic coaches. However, Regent Allison Stephens said she wanted to see fair-market value and adequate compensation for coaches.

“I just fundamentally disagree that our role in fiscal management means that we have to nickle and dime and negotiate down people working in our institutions,” she said.

Some in the public, who came to support [the coach’s] contract renewal, agreed.

A $200,000 annual salary increase “is peanuts in the long run,” Rich Abajian, general manager for Findlay Toyota’s board of governors, told regents. “Football is the program that can pull you out of budget problems. … You’ve got to pay money to make money.”

It’s official.

Other blogs recommend YouTubes; here, for what it’s worth, is UD‘s idea of an entertaining YouTube.

… of the Boston Globe.

Wallack has way-doggedly gone after greed in academia and environs. When greedy academia and environs snarls back at Wallack with lawyers and public relations, Wallack just keeps going, publishing story after story until the truth is accepted by everyone except those whose livelihood depends on continuing to lie for greedy a&e.

And speaking of greed: Understanding postmodern American levels of greed is key to understanding Wallack’s latest story, about the ex-president of Brandeis University.

People are trying to explain the downfall of Virginia’s governor in terms of the insane disparity between the wealth of his fundraisers (with whom he and his wife hobnobbed) and the wealth of the guv and the missus. These two had to destroy their lives and make Virginia a laughingstock because of their need to keep up not with the Joneses but with people at the level of Jamie Dimon.

And speaking of Dimon, you cannot understand his just-announced 74% raise unless you understand that he operates within the same painful income-inequality-in-America reality. The gap between Bob McDonnell and other millionaires was as unconscionable as the gap between Jamie Dimon and other billionaires. One of these two was able to find justice legally; the other seems to have been driven to a life of crime.

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Ainsi, once you grasp the levels of greed-jockeying we are now, Year 2014, talking about, little in the story of sadly undercompensated Jehuda Reinharz will surprise you.

… Reinharz earned more than $600,000 in 2011 to serve as president emeritus, a part-time advisory role, in addition to receiving $800,000 that year in his new job for a Cleveland philanthropy.

But when you throw everything else in

… Reinharz is expected to collect roughly $8 million from Brandeis after stepping down as president…

Pretty much everyone at the school except the trustees is outraged. Because

… the school has long claimed social justice as one of its core values. Reinharz’s pay also came at a time of rising tuition and as the university was facing steep budget cuts that forced it to slash employee benefits, lay off staff members, and even explore the idea of shutting down a beloved campus museum.

In response to the outrage, Brandeis has graciously decided to

… include a faculty representative on the committee that sets executive pay …

which means that right now they’re racing desperately around the business school looking for the richest b-school professor on the faculty. Only a professor also running a hedge fund can understand executive compensation at these levels.