… 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!

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

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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?

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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.

UD began university life, as some of her readers know, at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

She hadn’t been there long before she felt the seductive pull of simply making up people and quotations for her stories. Listen to any radio call-in show to grasp how dumb and halting most real people are. Much better to use your literary talents to fashion Wildean bon mots in the mouths of unique and deeply moving human specimens.

Journalists who do this long enough, like this one from the Cape Cod Times, may eventually get caught. She has been fired.

“He hasn’t felt the need for our advice,” Allan Stam, a political science professor and [University of Michigan Advisory Board on Intercollegiate Athletics] committee member, said of [UM athletics director Dave] Brandon. “We don’t have a role, in that if our role is simply to provide advice for the athletic director when he chooses to ask for it.”

Well, it’s a tricky formulation as expressed, but you can understand Stam’s difficulty. He sits on an advisory committee that does nothing and knows nothing. Its function is to give institutional legitimacy to Michigan’s rancid sports program. And most of the committee members are happy to play along:

“It’s not our job to micromanage the athletic department,” offered Michael Imperiale, a microbiology professor and committee member. “Really, this is an athletic department. It’s not an academic unit.”

I mean, it doesn’t have students or anything; it has no impact on the academic life or reputation of the university… It’s just, you know, an athletic department.

That being the case, though, why is Imperiale on the committee? Shouldn’t he be working to abolish it?

A good reason to take up smoking.

Serbia’s ambassador to NATO had reportedly been “chatting and joking with colleagues” at Brussels Airport when he “suddenly strolled to a barrier, climbed over and jumped over, one diplomat said.” Apparently no one saw any evidence of depression or anxiety.

In “The Judgment,” George Bendemann has an upsetting conversation with his elderly father, after which

He leapt out the front door, driven across the roadway to the water. He was already clutching the railings the way a starving man grasps his food. He swung himself over, like the outstanding gymnast he had been in his youth, to his parents’ pride. He was still holding on, his grip weakening, when between the railings he caught sight of a motor coach which would easily drown out the noise of his fall. He called out quietly, “Dear parents, I have always loved you nonetheless” and let himself drop.

The suddenness, and of course the phrase the way a starving man grasps his food, account for the disturbing surreality of the passage. With his other story, “The Hunger Artist,” in mind, one is brought to consider the possibility that it’s death after which one hungers. Paul Valery, in his poem, “Graveyard by the Sea,” talks about “the wild addiction not to be.” There are more of these seemingly motiveless suicides than you might think.

In the case of Branislav Milinkovic, as in many other such cases, something will perhaps emerge: A hopeless alcohol addiction; looming bankruptcy or other even worse legal problems; the recent loss of someone deeply loved; having recently been told that you’re suffering from a terrible disease… Or a sudden overwhelming psychotic break, whatever that might mean…

There’s one other possibility, and this goes to the way he chose (if we can speak of choosing) to kill himself: In front of his colleagues, including senior colleagues. Had one of them just told him he was fired?

Obviously, to traumatize the people you’re standing with suggests hostility, vengeance…

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UPDATE: He had just been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness.

… law professor.