… a patron saint of the armed survivalists.

I had no idea she was one.

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Next up: Brace yourself for the drug story. If this story doesn’t have a drug angle, I’ll be very surprised.

Of course I’m talking about prescription drugs. I’m going to guess that toxicology reports will show both mother and son coked to the gills with mood-altering meds.

She had “at least a dozen” firearms [in her house] — mainly larger rifles,” [a friend of the shooter’s mother] said. He said [he] didn’t know anything about the pistols [also in the shooter’s possession].

… “Nancy was a responsible gun owner,” the friend said.

At least a dozen rifles in your house, all of them accessible to your insane twenty-year-old son. The very model of responsibility.

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Another responsible gun owner, this one harassed by the police.

The lone survivor of her class tricked the gunman by playing dead, the girl’s pastor told ABC News, before running out of the school covered in the blood of her classmates.

“She ran out of the school building covered from head to toe with blood…”

Pretending to be dead in the slaughterhouse of our latest massacre … Lifting yourself from the bloody pile and going home..

As I’ve said before, this is Babi Yar. “[Lanza] moved to a classroom where he systematically shot all those inside – 14 children whom the Courant reported were huddled and clutching each other in terror …” This is piles of bleeding bodies among which has now emerged our own Dina Pronicheva, the woman who survived Babi Yar in the same way — by playing dead.

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But America, with its massive, easily gotten arsenal of top of the line people-killers, has made Babi Yars much easier. One skinny little kid can butcher a village in seconds.

Adam Lanza had hundreds of rounds and used multiple high capacity magazines when he went on a rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing 20 first graders and six adults, Connecticut State Police said today.

After shooting at victims in two classrooms and a hallway with a high-powered semi-automatic rifle, he put a bullet into his own head with a handgun.

Quick and easy. I trust our technicians are working on yet quicker, more powerful models.

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… tweeting.

A shared fascination.

After fatally shooting his mother in the face, investigators say [Adam Lanza] took three of his mother’s legally-owned weapons that he used in the assault, including a Glock, a SIG Sauer, and a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle. In addition to those three weapons, cops also recovered a .45-caliber Henry repeating rifle, a .22-caliber Marlin rifle, and a .30-caliber Enfield rifle…

… According to the Post, Nancy Lanza was a gun enthusiast who often took her son shooting with her. “She’d take them to the range a lot … Nancy was an enthusiast — so much so that she wanted to pass it on to her kids,” said her former landscaper and “occasional drinking buddy” Dan Holmes. “She took her two sons to the gun ranges quite a bit to practice their aim. She was a really great shot from what she told me. Whenever I finished work and went inside to chit chat, she spoke often about her fascination with firearms. Nancy had an extensive gun collection and she was really quite proud of it.”

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Why would she have three powerful guns in the house when she knew her son was so deeply disturbed?

It sounds as though she had quite a lot more than three.

And “powerful” doesn’t say it. You use these guns when you’re pinned down in Helmand Province.

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It defies logic … that an average citizen with a gun is going to disarm a crazed killer.

All those guns all over the house, and herself a very good shot. Yet when it came to it, Nancy Lanza was unable to defend herself from one of the most notorious mass murderers in American history stepping up to shoot her face off.

But then, she’d devoted herself to training and arming him.

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“She prepared for the worst,” [a relative of Lanza’s] told [a] newspaper. “I didn’t know that they [the guns] would be used on her.”

Yes. She was prepared for a firefight in Kunar Province.

As for this woman not knowing the guns would be used on her relative – try reading some statistics.

Did it occur to you – or anyone in the family – that a paranoid family member living alone in a hidden-from-the-road, closed-off house, with an insane twenty-year-old and a military arsenal in it, might be something to keep your eye on?

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Prepare for Nancy Lanza to become a patron saint of the armed survivalists.

While he appeared a grandfatherly academic, Dr. [Sidney] Gilman, 80, was living a parallel life, one in which he regularly advised a wide network of Wall Street traders through a professional matchmaking system. Those relationships afforded him payments of $100,000 or more a year — on top of his $258,000 pay from the University of Michigan — and travels with limousines, luxury hotels and private jets. … Dr. Gilman made a sharp shift in his late 60s, from a life dedicated to academic research to one in which he accumulated a growing list of financial firms willing to pay him $1,000 an hour for his medical expertise, while he was overseeing drug trials for various pharmaceutical makers. … Colleagues now say Dr. Gilman’s story is a reminder of the corrupting influence of money. The University of Michigan, where he was a professor for decades, has erased any trace of him on its Web sites, and is now reviewing its consulting policy for employees, a spokesman said.

[Gilman] has been ostracized by the university, and the consequences are broader still as a debate over the propriety of professors’ receiving payments from financial firms has been rekindled.

“What is the argument for sanctioning your full-time faculty, using your brand name, to advise the financial sector?” said Dr. Garret A. FitzGerald, a cardiovascular researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who has been outspoken about conflicts of interest. “What’s the public good there?”

Oh pish posh. What’s the public good of Michigan’s president, Mary Sue Coleman, collecting huge sums from corporate boards for doing little other than attending meetings that cut into the time she can devote to the university? Was she distracted by her corporate boarding when she insisted on the catastrophic hiring of Rich Rodriguez?

Colleagues can nod their heads sagely about the corrupting influence of money, but really. When the president of Gilman’s university is as subject to greed as Goldman Sachs executive compensation rubber-stamper Ruth Simmons was, why should Gilman have felt uneasy about his own acquisitiveness?

LOL. Even their public relations firm has had it with the new Texas cancer research agency! It’s like You paid us to handle  this much shit, but your agency has already produced THIS much shit, so we’re outta here.

Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, its billions in dollars funded by taxpayers, has only been around a couple of years, and already its corruption stinks to high heaven. The latest: A criminal probe of the organization.

Hill and Knowlton should have seen it coming. This is Texas! You don’t mess with Texans making money!

CPRIT: Where our profit margin, and your metastasis, meet.

… places like Texas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and of course Montana, where the University of Montana’s football team seems to have a wee rape problem.

The ongoing controversy began in late 2010 when several sexual assault allegations, including two women who said they were drugged and gang raped by members of the football team, spurred a local investigation of the school. Last month, University President Royce Engstrom fired the football team’s head coach and athletic director. One member of the team, Beau Donaldson, was charged with rape and has pleaded not guilty.

It’s so bad, the feds have come in to investigate; and you know how much they appreciate the federal government in those parts. They don’t need some guy from Washington to tell them how to handle the fact that players on their football team – including the quarterback – keep getting accused of rape. But the Justice Department points out that it’s not “the number of allegations,” but precisely “the response” on the part of the university that has drawn its attention. When you’ve got so many people charging rape, perhaps something’s wrong internally. Perhaps your school doesn’t take rape seriously enough.

Anyway, I’m just moseying toward my main point here, about the coverage of another problem at UM – a massive budget deficit.

The University of Montana is facing budget cuts across campus because of a significant drop in enrollment, and most departments are being asked to help shore up a $5.7 million deficit.

726 fewer students than last year have enrolled this year, and plenty of people think it has something to do with all the bad publicity. Parents might not, for instance, want their kids to go to a school which seems to be the main reason Missoula is called the The Rape Capital of America.

That deficit isn’t just about the students who aren’t there to pay tuition. Ask Penn State how much money athletic scandals cost.

So… What’s UM’s athletic department doing to help out with the deficit it almost certainly had a great deal to do with creating?

A local reporter, who breathes not a word of the rape scandal, explains:

Athletic director Kent Haslam told us that his department will curtail some maintenance on facilities to help with the cost-cutting, saving about $150,000.

They’re on the case!

Pushed by primal instincts. Such a strange way of being for a university. You’d think even a wretched university would at the very least understand its identity in terms of the civilizing of primal instincts. NASCAR – that’s primal instincts. But a university? A university allows itself to be “overshadowed” by the “unassailable fortress” of football?

What are those instincts? Can we be precise about the nature of the basic instinctual energies that Americans think belong on college campuses? That they think are the center of campuses, so that coaches get statues and millions of dollars and pretty much unsupervised power?

Here’s one paean to big-time university sports. And here’s an excerpt from it.

If you want your alumni to give, you first have to make them fall in love with your school. This is not about having better chemistry programs or more faculty with higher name recognition than the school up the road. It is not about scoring higher on world indices of university quality. It is about competition, drama, intensity, about hope and fear, collective celebrations or collective disasters, seared into young and impressionable hearts where they will never be forgotten — and where they will be annually renewed as each sport in its season produces new highs and lows, new hopes and fears.

Note the Wide World of Sports script: competition, drama, intensity, hope, fear… But these aren’t really primal, are they? Fear – maybe fear’s primal. But hope? Drama?

What is the primal instinct that doesn’t appear on this list?

Here’s what we say to athletes from a very young age: Here’s a scholarship for excelling at a violent game, here’s fame for excelling at a violent game, here’s a chance at millions for excelling at a violent game. We reward young, immature people for excelling at a violent game and then, when that violence crosses over the constantly moving line of what’s socially accepted, we all jump back and gasp in faux horror like total phonies and call for drastic action.

Oh right! This guy forgot… violence! He overlooked all the ancillary sports stuff on campus – hazing that kills, players killing each other with guns, coaches beating up players… He overlooked the fact that people like football because it’s incredibly violent.

Rich Cohen, in the New Republic, talks about “the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel.” Now that’s primal, baby! Watching men get all torn up and concussed on the field!

Just the thing for the university.

Western Kentucky University basks in the academic splendor of the most important person on campus, Coach Bobby Petrino.

Petrino may well be the least ethically whole man in the, ahem, ethically whole-deprived world of Division I collegiate sports… Western Kentucky, a school with mediocre athletics and apparently, sub-mediocre standards, has turned to a person who lied to his last employer about the nature of an accident involving the mistress he allegedly hired to a university position she was unqualified to hold. Please, if you must, take a second to read that again. And again. And again.

Bobby Petrino, holder of a Ph.D. in the Deceptive Arts (he also ditched the University of Louisville shortly after signing a long-term extension in 2007, and quit as coach of the Atlanta Falcons 13 game into his first season later that year. He informed his players via a note atop their lockers), will be the one charged with teaching the 17- and 18-year-old boys who decide to come to Bowling Green about not merely football, but life. He will be their guide. Their compass. Their role model.

UD’s heart goes out to Robert Dietel. Though here’s hoping that in the years since he tried to stop WKU from turning into a sewer he’s found a respectable place to work.

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.

The nitty-gritty at the University of Massachusetts.