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Delivering lives of quiet desperation, one sucker at a time

Thursday, March 24, 2011

Today, as I was rambling through the internet, I came upon an advertisement for an institution of higher learning: Walden University.

At first I thought it must be a joke. Isn’t Walden the college for slackers made famous in Doonesbury? Indeed, it is, though in the comics the institution is, if I’m not mistaken, a humble college rather than a mighty university. And then, of course, there’s the connection to a former resident of Concord, Massachusetts.

I followed the link (which I will not provide here, so as not to increase their traffic) and found that, indeed, this learned institution does exist, it being one of corporate America’s latest devices to undermine the American way of life: the for-profit “educational” institution, designed to siphon off the maximum amount of federal student loans for the least amount of value in return. Naturally, this institution, like all such institutions, despite the fact that its name evokes the memory of the first American hippie, touts its MBA program.

In a just world, Henry’s literary executors would be able to step in and enjoin this perversion or Garry Trudeau would sue for trademark infringement. But alas, Walden University will be allowed to besmirch the pond, the poet and the comic college unmolested. But perhaps Henry should stop spinning in his grave. After all, the institution that stole his thunder may very well be responsible for creating hosts of ex-students who will, willingly or not, have to adopt his simple life style, as they labor to pay off the loans their former university was so helpful in helping them obtain.

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Report from Boston

Wednesday, March 23, 2011

We are in Boston at the moment. Some friends of ours got tickets to Hair, and we joined them here to see the show last night. We got here early yesterday, so I did a little exploring in the environs. The old Town Hall is across the street from our hotel, and I came across this two part sculpture in the forecourt. You can interpret it as you will, but to me there is only one reasonable interpretation.

The piece consists of this sculpture of a donkey:


Now, directly in front of the donkey a plaque is embedded in the ground. You can see a bit of it in the picture above. Here’s the whole thing:


So here we have, as always, the plodding donkey trying to get its work accomplished, impeded always by the trumpeting elephant, who, taking literally the Groucho Marx jest, announces “whatever it is, I’m against it.” The political message is obvious, to this politically obsessed mind at least. How this salutary message came to be erected on what I assume is a public space, I do not know, but I heartily approve.

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A bit of good legal news

Monday, March 21, 2011

Some good news to partially offset the fact that this allegedly bankrupt country is now raining expensive missiles on yet another country, with no clear explanation of what we expect to accomplish or how we know we’ve done so.

On Monday, a federal appeals court reinstated a key legal challenge to that surveillance: a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and others within hours of the FISA Amendments Act (.pdf) being signed into law. The lawsuit attacks the constitutionality of the legislation, which allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans without a probable-cause warrant, so long as one of the parties to the communication resides outside the United States, and is suspected of a link to terrorism.

Folks with memories might recall that Obama’s vote in favor of those Amendments was perhaps the first indication of the kind of president he would eventually be. He voted in favor, thereby giving the government and telephone companies carte blanche authority to spy on us without governmental accountability. The bill represented precisely the kind of compromise Obama seems to love. It was marginally better than the alternative, but not enough to really matter. As with so many of the compromises that Obama has arranged since, it started with the Democrats conceding almost everything as an opening gambit. I am not, by the way, saying that Obama was responsible for this compromise. He wasn’t-and he was. He didn’t negotiate it, but he backed off his promise to oppose it at a time (the summer of 2008, when he was already the party’s candidate) that his fellow Democrats might have followed his lead.

Getting back to the court’s decision, it is especially heartwarming to report that it is our own Second Circuit Court of Appeals that reinstated the ACLU’s case against the FISA Amendments. The case was thrown out by the lower court because the plaintiffs could not prove they had standing.

Standing is yet another of those legal concepts that make sense in the real world but become instruments of oppression when put to the service of the national security state. A person has “standing” to sue if he or she has suffered a legal injury as a result of the challenged conduct. To take an absurdly simple case: If John Doe slips and falls on my sidewalk, he can sue me, because he has been hurt as a result of my negligence. If Jane Roe, who wasn’t even there, but hears about the fall, decides to sue me, she lacks standing as she has not been harmed by my negligence. In the case of the wiretaps, of course, those who have standing may never know it. The court bought into the plaintiffs’ arguments that they were harmed because their justified fear that they were targets forced them to engage in expensive, evasive maneuvering to avoid the spies.

So, some good news, though the odds are good that the Supreme Court will reverse, or eventually agree with the government that if it claims it suspects someone is a terrorist, or knows a terrorist, or knows someone who knows a terrorist, or has heard of someone who knows someone who knows a terrorist, then it has sufficient cause to spy on them in every way it can conceive.


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A sign of hope

Friday, March 18, 2011

A bit of controversy about an SAT question, that read as follows:

Reality television programs, which feature real people engaged in real activities rather than professional actors performing scripted scenes, are increasingly popular. These shows depict ordinary people competing in everything from singing and dancing to losing weight, or just living their everyday lives. Most people believe that the reality these shows portray is authentic, but they are being misled. How authentic can these shows be when producers design challenges for the participants and then editors alter filmed scenes?

Do people benefit from forms of entertainment that show so-called reality, or are such forms of entertainment harmful?

When I read that many students considered this question unfair, I am somewhat ashamed to say that I figured it was because they thought the premise was unfair. But, much to my surprise and delight, the students weren’t upset because their misconceptions had been shattered, they were upset because the only test takers that could intelligently answer the questions were the very dolts that watched the shows. The question, in other words, was unfair because it was biased against students who had the good sense to read books, or at least watch more intelligent mass market offerings, instead of the dreck passed off as reality.

If it’s any comfort, and I know that it’s not, these students (at least the white ones), now know what it’s like to have to deal with a test that imposes cultural assumptions while allegedly objectively measuring intelligence or ability.

I remember reading about a test that was given to students in the state of New York that included a question that presumed a fairly high level of familiarity with the game of tennis, a familiarity that does not by any means cut across racial and class lines evenly, the Williams sisters notwithstanding.

Anyway, it is a sign of hope that so many students took exception to this question for all the right reasons.


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Sign me up!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

The same folks who launched a laughable effort to get Michelle Bachmann elected speaker of the House (a bit premature, but given the trends, her time will come) have now started a movement to draft her to run for President. Well, I just couldn’t get worked up about making her Speaker, but I’m 100% behind this effort.

Never in the history of this formerly great Republic have so many potential candidates been so obviously unqualified for the office they seek. Every mother’s son and daughter of them should run, and we can watch the spectacle of them all trying to out-crazy the other. With Michelle in the race, the bar will be set higher than even Sarah could manage. Pity poor Tom Pawlenty having to compete with those two! Obama may not be a great president, or even, alas, a good one, but he’s even luckier than his predecessor. When was the last time a president looked like a lock for re-election at the same time he was taking a do-nothing approach to dealing with a crushing Depression?


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Republicans don’t need no education

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Reality intrudes again. On yet another issue, the Republicans are wrong on each and every point they are making about one of their ginned up issues:

To improve its public schools, the United States should raise the status of the teaching profession by recruiting more qualified candidates, training them better and paying them more, according to a new report on comparative educational systems.

Andreas Schleicher, who oversees the international achievement test known by its acronym Pisa, says in his report that top-scoring countries like Korea, Singapore and Finland recruit only high-performing college graduates for teaching positions, support them with mentoring and other help in the classroom, and take steps to raise respect for the profession.

“Teaching in the U.S. is unfortunately no longer a high-status occupation,” Mr. Schleicher says in the report, prepared in advance of an educational conference that opens in New York on Wednesday. “Despite the characterization of some that teaching is an easy job, with short hours and summers off, the fact is that successful, dedicated teachers in the U.S. work long hours for little pay and, in many cases, insufficient support from their leadership.”

Anyone who has ever sent their kids to school, and paid any attention to what teaching actually entails, knows all this is true. And yet, we are hearing on television, and from our politicians from the dark side, that it is all untrue, except that they agree that teachers are and should be treated like the scum of the earth. No small part of what is going on at the moment involves not just imposing financial harm. It goes beyond that, to humiliation. The goal is to render them powerless and to make sure that they know it. Of course, the ultimate objective is to destroy the public school system, so I guess it all makes sense. If you can’t afford to educate your child, why should the rest of us pay for it? What could go wrong if we create an uneducated generation or two?


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Our nuclear future

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

As recent events have demonstrated, one of Obama’s more dubious energy proposals has been a reinvigoration of the nuclear power industry. Mother Jones reports that he, along with a number of other politicians in the tank for the industry, have held up Japan as an example of nuclear power’s safety. In general, they have all asked, “What could go wrong?”.

Now we know. And we may continue to know, for as long as our attention spans will permit.

We can only hope that the Republicans will reflexively oppose expanding nuclear power for the all justifying reason that if Obama is for it, they must be against it. As a stopped clock is right twice a day, the Republican Party is right twice an eon, and if they chose to go that route on the nuclear issue, they would use up half an eon’s ration.

Not likely though. My guess is that they’ll go with Obama on this one, more likely one upping him by removing all those darn regulations that hamper the industry. People in general have short memories, but here in America we have no historical memory at all. Just as so many politicians and other folks of no brain are wondering why we aren’t drilling all over the Gulf with all indeliberate speed, so we’ll be back to planning a nuclear future once Charlie Sheen distracts us sufficiently so that we forget about Japan. I give the process three weeks max.


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Spaceman

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Keith Olbermann posts a picture of himself with the great Bill Lee.


I recognized him right away, “though years have rolled over [his] head” and pounds have descended into his belly. It has always been my firm belief that Bucky Dent would never have had a chance to earn his eternal infamy had Don Zimmer (a/k/a the gerbil) not benched Lee late in the season for annoying Zimmer. Lee was probably the only guy on the team that was loose during that historic September swoon (historic even by Red Sox standards). He was the only guy who might have turned it around early enough to avoid the bitter proof that, if there is a God, he is pitiless and cruel.

The Red Sox, by the way, could do themselves a favor by hiring Lee to do radio play by play, with a contract guaranteeing he could say anything he wants.

Anyway, it’s good to see that Keith is hangin’ out with the right team, and the right hangers on.

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For Ipad fans only

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

If you’re on Ipad fan like I am, you may also have been frustrated, as I have been, by the lack of a way to save web pages and other documents as PDFs. It’s one of the great things about the Mac-PDF capability is built into the print dialog for every piece of software. Well, today, via MacWorld, I found Save2PDF, available at the App Store for both the Ipad and the Iphone. The ten dollar price is a bit steep, but, as far as I’m concerned, absolutely worth it. Of course I downloaded it as soon as I heard about it. You can save anything as a PDF from any app that supports Airprint, and you don’t have to be connected to a network to do so. If you don’t have that option, you can open almost any document in Save2PDF from the “Open With” dialog box and convert the file to a PDF from within the app itself. Not as good as if Apple just built it in, like in the MacOS, but still a great app.


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Rapid Response

Sunday, March 13, 2011

I am in receipt of an email from Nancy Pelosi. She is, she says, absolutely irate about what happened in Wisconsin, and would Iike me to help her do something about it. Specifically, she would like me to hand over some cash to the Rapid Response Fund, another name for the DCCC, apparently.

The email is short on specifics about the nature of the intended response, nor does it explain how it can be rapid, considering that the Wisconsin events began some time ago. Nor is it clear why money is needed more than the voices of some Washington Democrats raised in actual response to the lies spread about state workers by the Republicans and the media.

It would seem after all, that for a very small amount of money, Congressional Democrats and Obama could have rapidly responded rhetorically, preferably in both Washington and Madison. Why isn’t Nancy in this crowd, or Obama addressing it?

Alas, their most vigorous response comes in the form of an outreached hand. As always, the Republicans are far more proficient in cynically draining the funds of their supporters, but, in this case at least, it’s not for the Democrats lack of trying.

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