Via UD‘s friend James, another – yes – heartening recruitment story, this one out of the University of Illinois. Christopher Jones is a freshman football player.

Assistant State’s Attorney Scott Larson said [two] men were walking in the 600 block of East Daniel Street holding hands when Jones drove by in a car.

He and others in the car taunted the pedestrians by calling them derogatory names, Larson said. The car stopped, Jones got out and called the men more names, Larson said.

He then hit each of them in the head with a fist. One sustained a cut to the inside of his mouth and the other had swelling around his eyes, he said.

Jones, convicted last year of cocaine possession, is now in jail for aggravated assault.

Jones said he attacked the guys because one of them jumped him last week.

“Jones weighs 320 pounds while the alleged victims weigh 140 and 165 pounds.”

The attack was recorded on a security camera.

Coach Zook was recently rewarded with a raise for being such a heartening recruiter.

He’s the highest paid public university employee in the state.

Real reason?

Because they’re hilarious.

An excerpt:

Coaches and administrators have forgotten how to cheat. These things used to be taken care of with a few hundreds rolled into a handshake and a job for mom at the tractor factory down the road from the school. Now, it’s amateur hour.

This isn’t rocket science, people. The NCAA has what amounts to subpoena power over current athletes and current university employees. That’s it. The NCAA’s rules don’t apply to anyone else. That opens an almost infinite array of cheating opportunities completely undetectable by the NCAA’s enforcement cops. If you get caught cheating, you got caught because you’re incredibly stupid.

What Harvard expert have the Australians been relying on to set their ADHD diagnosis / Ritalin use national standards?

WHOOPS. Monsieur Multiple Sanctions himself, Joseph Biederman.

Now what to do?

Nothing. In fact the committee has all this time just been sitting around waiting for the results of Harvard’s investigation into You mean I was supposed to tell you that the firms who make the drugs I research give me millions of dollars? Biederman.

And meanwhile the Australian committee had to toss its chair because “his ties with pharmaceutical companies that produce ADHD drugs were exposed.”

Yes indeed. Fellow psychiatrists rely on Biederman for more than his research results. There’s an entire ethos to be emulated here. After all, he’s the leader in the field.

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Will this committee assemble itself and get serious about protecting the health of young Australians?

I’d say the outlook is grim. There they sit, the provincials, waiting for big fancy Americans at Harvard to tell them what to do. Tsk.

UD‘s friend Philip alerts her to the emergence of a Swiss political party whose platform is simply the effort to eliminate psychologically crushing, time and money wasting, PowerPoint use as much as possible around the world.

Turns out “anyone in the world can become a member of a Swiss party.” Who knew?

Here’s where you can join (the page features Horror Slides of the Month).

Many university students are brutalized by PowerPoint on a daily basis.

PowerPoint-abusing professors tend to be described by students as boring lazy tyrants.

Other abusers may not be tyrannical so much as cowardly. They may be people who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into hauling PowerPoint into class by the tech weenies in administration.

Join the Anti PowerPoint Party. Be the change.

“The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.”

David Brooks on the new Know-Nothings.

It is pretty remarkable: Vegetarians, health food faddists, digestive obsessives of all sorts, blithely toss powerful anti-psychotics and anti-depressants down their gullets (and their children’s gullets) without knowing shit about what’s in them.

UD could understand it if these people were heroin addicts past caring about the ingredients of the compound someone’s handing them. But these are intelligent, watchful Americans, and it’s Down the hatch, baby!

Take the wildly popular, constantly advertised anti-psychotic Abilify, which you absolutely must try with your anti-depressant, darling. Two professors of medicine at Dartmouth write:

[Versus a placebo, Abilify scored] only three points lower on a 60-point scale, and it resolved depression for only 10 percent of patients — that is, 25 percent with Abilify versus 15 percent with just the placebo…

Abilify [caused] 21 percent of patients in the trials to develop akathisia, or severe restlessness, and 4 percent to gain a substantial amount of weight. And, as with all anti-depressants, there is a small increase in suicidal thoughts and behavior among many young adults.

The writers point out that we know far more about our sun screens than about these powerful manipulators of our brain chemistry.

More here. And here.

UC Berkeley says don’t worry: Our “new Pac-12 Media Rights Package” will make us ever so much money.

A Berkeley computer science professor responds:

[S]ince money will be distributed to all teams in the Pac-12, there will be pressure on intercollegiate athletics at UC Berkeley to continue the spiral of increased spending so that it can keep up with the other Pac-12 teams in what is a fiscal ‘arms race.’

… piercing. And it ain’t pretty.

Last summer, at just this time, my freedom to blog ended.

I lay next to my husband in bed one afternoon and said to him:

I’m going to stop. I’m going to shut the whole thing down and not write another word. This firm that has sued me – Righthaven – they could sue me again, for something else I’ve excerpted from a newspaper. Any other firm with the Righthaven business model could also sue me. Righthaven is seeking damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars from us. They’re going to take my domain name. All because I excerpted part of a newspaper article. I named and linked back to the source of that excerpt, the way millions of bloggers do every day. I got no commercial benefit from it, because my blog has no advertising. But a man just came to our door and served me with legal papers that say that if I lose this copyright infringement case they’ve filed against me we will be ruined. I don’t have any choice. I have to shut down University Diaries.

My husband looked at me and said

No you don’t. No you won’t. Do some research. Find out about Righthaven. What they’re doing sounds completely nuts. We’re talking about a total – and seemingly unfounded – threat to your freedom to express yourself. Calm down. Keep a cool head. Call a lawyer who knows something about this.

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Now that the Righthaven enterprise is collapsing – now that they’re losing all of their cases (I turned out to be one of hundreds of American bloggers carpet-bombed by Righthaven), now that their legal staff is abandoning them (The Righthaven lawyer who sued me has expressed regrets about having worked for Righthaven. If I were facing the possibility of lawsuits and sanctions because of my association with Righthaven, I’d say the same thing. Yet in our phone chats, this person was thrilled with his job. Quite the eager beaver.), now that numerous judges have said that Righthaven never had standing to sue in the first place, I can look back on this experience and see that it was a lesson, a hard lesson, for UD, in American freedom, and in the rule of law that sustains American freedom.

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It was also a lesson in trust. Having decided to settle with Righthaven rather than pay who knows how much and suffer how much protracted misery to defend myself, I could have become cynical about a legal system that can prey on people like me and chill their speech.

Instead, I’ve watched one judge after another express rage against Righthaven for what it’s done. I’ve watched public interest outfits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation take on pro bono cases for Righthaven targets and win them big. I’ve watched legal and free speech groups all over the country respond aggressively and successfully to this threat.

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

Back to last summer. I talked to a lawyer – a wonderful man who told me exactly how to get Righthaven out of my life right away, which is all I wanted.

Throw money at them. They only want money. They have zero interest in going to court. Tell them you’ll give them this much (He named an amount.) and they’ll take it. Or they’ll ask for a little more…. But are you sure you don’t want to litigate? We’re eager to defend you. We’re eager to shut Righthaven down. You will without question win the case.

What would it entail?

Well, first we’d have to depose you… How much experience have you had of the law?

Okay. Send them an email. Remember to say (He told me exactly how to word it.). And if you have any questions or concerns at all as this moves forward, I want you to call me.

What do I owe you?

Nothing.

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A day later I’m at a doctor’s appointment and my cell phone rings and it’s eager beaver. We begin negotiating. I say to my doctor

I know how obnoxious it is for someone to interrupt what’s going on and talk on their cell phone. I’d never think of doing this ordinarily; but I’ve simply got to get through this conversation now.

He nodded and said he’d be back in a few minutes.

And that was it. The rest was signing and faxing and scanning, end of story.

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

Of course they’d frightened me right down to the ground. Of course I was very angry. But I had the money to make Righthaven go away very fast. Many of its other targets don’t, and it’s been painful to follow their stories.

Like me, most of these people write non-commercial blogs with an interest in – as UD‘s tagline goes – changing things in American political and social life. Many are retirees, veterans, disabled people. For months now, their lives have been nightmarish, filled with fear that they will lose everything they own because they quoted a few lines from a newspaper story.

That’s pretty much over now. Although things are still ugly, and Righthaven, cornered, continues to snarl, it’s gradually being put down. Beset by people fighting back and draining the firm’s resources, and, again, currently facing sanction, Righthaven seems to have stopped filing new cases. Already filed cases are being dismissed en masse.

Yet a lot of damage has been done, and that’s damage that you don’t ever really undo, even if you compensate people.

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

The upside (UD, a ridiculously obstinate optimist, always looks on the bright side) of this experience, viewed now from the distance of a year and from the knowledge of Righthaven’s likely collapse, is pretty obvious. This Fourth of July, none of it is abstract. None of it is patriotic bromides. I’ve had my run-in with unfreedom, and I’ve watched the institutions of my country take firm action against unfreedom.

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

UPDATE.

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Another update.

… has been arrested for forgery of a prescription drug. Oxycontin, of course.

Bradley H. Jack was at Lehman Brothers before it went bankrupt; he left in 2005 with an $80 million severance. He owns the most expensive house in Fairfield, Connecticut.

Guess you can’t call it hillbilly heroin anymore.

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“Had Brad Jack worked for a culture that supported rather than culled illness, maybe we would not be reading today’s headlines [about his drugs arrest].”

Boo hoo. A new form of sympathy for our times. Vicky Ward argues that Bradley Jack’s fate had nothing to do with Jack’s own ability to discern that his bottomless greed kept him working at greedy evil sicko Lehman Brothers. Noooo. Lehman Brothers was supposed to be Ben & Jerry’s – a soft, supportive environment – and its failure to be this put Jack in jail.

A law professor uses one of UD‘s favorite university-sports adjectives (she’s probably used sordid almost as much as squalid in writing about big-time football and basketball) to describe Rich Rodriguez’s contract dealings with the University of West Virginia. (Background – including his subsequent experience at the University of Michigan – here. Scroll down.) But he does more than that. He proves that what sports boosters always say is true: Sports contribute a huge amount to the university.

Bambauer said the heated dispute [between Rodriguez and UWV] worked “wonderfully well” for his Contracts B class, a second semester contract law class he was teaching in the winter and spring of 2008.

“It was a nice teaching moment because it showed that you threaten a lot and then, eventually, the parties sit down and negotiate. This is the norm.”

Yes. That is the norm in the big bad world, and it’s the norm in our big sports universities. They’re every bit as sordid as the big bad world.

As Philip Larkin would say, useful to get that learnt.

Response to the Disciplinary Committee

Say Biederman, Wilens, and Spencer:
“Ah hell, we just do what we can, sir.
You can’t avoid sleaze
When you’ve got our disease:
The absence of all moral sensors.”

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(UD thanks B. for the link.)

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Update:

“You could have made more nice statements about the drug.’’

More on the culture of academic psychiatry in the United States.

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Lest we forget.

… Biederman is a leading proponent of the off-label use of antipsychotic drugs to treat bipolar illness in children. His work is widely seen as contributing to an explosive growth in such prescriptions, and much of his support came from companies that benefited from his research.

… to highly specialized writing — writing that has one, and only one, quite narrow, interest. This sort of writing is the very definition of monoculture. It is the essence of one dimensionality, the pure beating heart of the provincial.

This writing is But is it Good for the Jews? writing.

And you gotta love it. Who wouldn’t want the thick, murky world distilled to one obsession? Everything in the vast globe understood in terms of one mania?

Here’s a good example of the form. A Forbes writer takes on the epidemic of mental illness and psychotropic drug taking in the United States today. But exclusively from the point of view of people who invest their money in pharma stocks.

Let’s take a look.

He begins with the nightmare story of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old killed with prescription drugs by her parents and the doctor who just kept throwing drugs at the family (her parents’ other two children were similarly medicated). The parents were both found guilty of murder. This murder, which riveted national attention to the depraved overprescription of powerful drugs in America, “may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks,” warns the Forbes columnist.

“[P]harmaceutical marketing executives are evidently undeterred by the law,” he goes on to note (they routinely market drugs for off-label use and routinely have to settle federal charges in the hundreds of millions of dollars — just the price of doing business for them). If they keep this up for much longer, and if nasty stories like the Riley thing keep making headlines, you might see a total ban on off-label use, and that would “cut into a major growth area for pharmaceutical companies.”

And what a growth area! “[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” Think of the investment possibilities here! Figure you can convince say twenty percent of the population that they and their children need lifelong powerful psychoactive drugs to function! I mean, there’s no physical basis for the diagnosis, so you can go to town! It’s a can’t lose proposition.

Unless! Unless party poopers like Marcia Angell keep making noise:

Dr. Angell links the astonishing rise in diagnoses of certain mental disorders to the huge financial stakes of physicians, pharmaceutical companies and SSI recipients.

Keep talking about this, the writer warns, and there could be a “public opinion backlash” that might affect your profit margin.

But — probably not. The writer concludes on a reassuring note. We’ll probably see increases in dependency on psychotropic drugs throughout the population, thank goodness.

There’s a kind of moral hierarchy when it comes to the legitimacy of your university’s advanced degrees.

At the very top you find degrees conferred by professors who have themselves earned advanced degrees as result of doing first-rate work at excellent universities. These professors have read your thesis.

This is the model that prevails, with exceptions, in the United States of America. Most of our professors graduated from legitimate schools; most take seriously the job of reading, critiquing, and grading theses. Sometimes they send theses back for revision before passing them. Sometimes they fail them.

Below this high point lie countries like Germany, where no doubt legit professors are too busy or important or whatever to read some of the theses they pass. Hence the big, ongoing scandal of German politicians found to have plagiarized their dissertations. (One of them seems to have earned a sabbatical.)

A notch further down is today’s news story: The Czech Republic.

The law faculty of the University of West Bohemia (ZČU) in Plzeň has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons — accused of acting like a diploma mill for Czech politicians and entrepreneurs looking to advance their careers (or massage their egos) by obtaining academic titles without actually attending classes or doing any original research. Now, its recognition of degrees from Ukraine is drawing fire from the Supreme Prosecution Service (NSZ).

NSZ chief Pavel Zeman has revealed that the courts have annulled 25 decisions by the university to recognize degrees from the Carpathian State University of Ukraine…

Here you have a systemic practice of handing out (actually, probably selling) degrees to anyone who shows up.

Shocked by all of this naughtiness, the education ministry has been checking the status of “more than 315,000 people who graduated from Czech intuitions [sic].”

Somewhere way below this is Italy, with its nattering nabobs of nepotism.

When you get to the very bottom, you hit Pakistan, whose entire political class seems to have purchased their degrees from diploma mills.

… the filthiest of all the Bowls, the very deepest bowel of the Bowls (scroll down for BCS details), has sent a letter out to a bunch of politicians. Over the past few years, the Fiesta people have given these politicians free game tickets.

The letter asks the politicians why they – the Fiesta people – did that.

You read that right. It’s a letter that says you tell us why we bribed you. Turns out it wasn’t a tax exempt sort of thing to do! Who knew? … But … well … maybe it was a tax exempt sort of thing to do only we’re too stupid to figure out how it was tax exempt. Will you tell us?…

Or… maybe if we write this letter to you we’ll transfer the guilt to you! You took the money after all! It wasn’t me, Mom! It was him!

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Answers to the Fiesta letter are starting to trickle in, and so far it doesn’t look good.

Senator Rich Crandall:

“I don’t have to prove to you it was a benefit. …Your board and directors said it was a benefit… You need to go back to them and ask them how they felt it was a benefit. I don’t have to justify anything to you.”

Senate President Russell Pearce:

The request is “outrageous.”

Looks like the Fiesta guys might have to go back to the drawing board and figure out all by themselves why they’re a tax-exempt organization. For some reason, the beneficiaries of their payoffs aren’t cooperating.