Part Time Person

the USGS to blame?

2009-09-20T14:30:00.001-07:00

As any geologist will tell you, it's a bad idea to put houses on the southeast side of the Big Island of Hawaii, where active lava flows have been moving since 1984, resulting in the destruction of one entire subdivision, the Royal Gardens.

Yet who is the blame for the insurance premium increases, according to homeowners? The USGS, of course.

An article discusses the situation of one homeowner:

"...her premiums are skyrocketing now even though her neighborhood hasn't seen new lava since 1790. 'I just keep looking and looking at these maps and (they don't) make any sense.'"

The maps "don't make any sense"?

What part of:

1) lava is flowing uphill from you right now,

2) lava has flowed where your house is as recently as 1790,

3) therefore, there is a high risk lava will do so again in the next few years

does not make any sense?

This is another example of the inability of the public to acknowledge that science actually means something more than guesswork and mystical beliefs.

2009-07-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

David Brooks proposes this question:

"What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun?"

His answer predicts the breakdown of civilization on the sterile half of the planet, due to a "cataclysmic spiritual crisis," involving the lack of a legacy, the desolation of a future without children. Brooks maintains, "We don't live individualistic lives," and that much of our current happiness results from thinking about the success of future generations.

Nonsense.

What Brooks misses is that for many people, being childless is a perfectly happy existence--in fact, far happier than dealing with the myriad problems of parenting. As for our long-term historical legacy, I think Brooks overestimates the importance of such thoughts for the average person. People are motivated by immediate, individual gratification--the long-term consequences be damned. This attitude is prevalent in much of our actions regarding the environment.

The environment would be a great beneficiary of this thought-experiment. While we can strive to reduce our footprint, and in individual steps contribute less to destroying our planet, by far the biggest savings in environmental terms would result from population stability. In other words, if you change your incandescent lights to fluorescent, this saves a little energy. If you decide not to have a third child, this saves a great deal more.

Everywhere, in everything we do, we are faced by the crush of people--parking spaces virtually impossible to find, lines at the ATM, lines to get on the subway, lines to get in line on the freeway. Parts of this planet are virtually choking on the masses of people trying to eek out an existence. How like a breath of fresh air it would be to find the lines at the supermarket a little shorter, to find the lines at the DMV manageable.

Brooks envisions Mad Max-style apocalypse. I think another vision is of a population much better suited for our lifestyles.

Apollo 11

2009-07-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

Today is the 40th anniversary of the most significant day in human history.

In her 1958 book The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt noted that the greatest event of the 20th century up to that point, was the escape of Earth by the Sputnik satellite, and that the glory and accomplishment of this event was almost completely overshadowed by the Cold War paranoia that dominate coverage of this Soviet triumph.

Eleven years later the crew of Apollo 11 would settle gently onto the surface of the moon. What transpired between Sputnik and Apollo 11 was a cooperative human endeavor unparalleled in history. Up to 400,000 people were employed in a variety of ways in the effort to achieve the lunar landing. It was an effort infinitely more complicated and risky than the building of the pyramids.

Many people during Apollo, and many people afterwards, bemoaned the money spent, and in their myopic view squandered, in putting men on the moon. However, in total NASA spent less than $20 billion dollars, which in today's terms would come to a little over $80 billion. The Bush administration routinely wrote $80 billion checks to fund oil-rich Iraq, yet somehow this expenditure raised not a fraction of the uproar that the Apollo budgets caused. Walter Mondale, who would later serve as Carter's vice president, made his political name in attacking Apollo spending.

The Apollo missions were not created by mysticism or superstition; Apollo achieved its victory because of science, reason, testing, and math. Apollo-do, the way of Apollo, like its mythical namesake, the bringer of light, can be a beacon for how we as a species might think and behave if we are to survive and prosper.

We humans need a goal, a task. Our spirit requires a quest. Without this necessity, we wander aimless, like a hound without a chase. Some ask why we should go back to the moon, why we should go to Mars. As an answer, simply look at the listless and disaffected youth who plague this country, so divorced from any goal that weekends are spent "cruising"--driving around and around aimlessly--while listening to toxic music blaring from speakers.

Imagine instead that the youth of this nation were set upon a goal, instructed from an early age they they must work to learn science and math, and given the pedagogical tools to enable them to reach their potential. As it stands now, most American students are lost to science, their potential squandered to their toxic "friends," with whom they mutually self-destruct in an indifferent orgy of excess and self-gratification. Imagine instead that the youth of our country were tasked with learning enough math and physics that they might make a serious attempt to solve a major problem.

As has become apparent over the course of the last few years, our petroleum lifestyle is unsustainable. Not only is peak oil production eminent, but the carbon dioxide waste of this energy source is rapidly changing our climate in unpredictable, but throughly negative, ways. Even worse, because of the grim irony that the world's oil reserves sit under nations that hate us, we prop up dictatorships--Saudi Arabia, Putin's Russia, Chavez's Venezuela, the Shah's Iran--with our money, making us complicit in funding regimes with terrible human rights records. We need a cleaner, more moral source of energy: fusion.

The science behind fusion is very complicated and the achievement of fusion will be a feat comparable with the Manhattan Project and Apollo. Imagine the benefits if we committed our nation to educating all of our children to learn enough math and physics that they could make a serious contribution to this problem. Most would not achieve this; but eventually a child would be born--an Einstein who would be squandered otherwise--who would have the insight to solve the problem of fusion. The benefits of having so many citizens so well educated would be astounding. It would cost money to educate children to this level, but education is now so terribly underfunded that perhaps only such a national mission could bring education funding up to a reasonable level. The benefits of achieving fusion would be practically unlimited, clean energy.

Apollo showed us what humans can achieve when the political will relaxes its death grip upon scientific innovation for a few years. The 20 July 1969 Apollo 11 may come to be regarded by historians as the first of many such human triumphs. Or perhaps the first lunar landing will mark the high water spot, when mankind's potential reached its apex, and then slid back into darkness, ignorance, and mysticism.

The Death of a Salesman

2009-06-25T18:52:00.001-07:00

Michael Jackson is dead--not soon enough. Not before he used his money and fame to hurt unknown numbers of children.

In the midst of the adulation surrounding his death, there seems to be little talk of what this man did between his scarce, mediocre recordings. As The Smoking Gun has detailed, Jackson was a textbook molester, using power, intimidation, and psychological manipulation to sexually violate his victims.

There can be no factual doubt that Jackson was a child molester. Identification of markings on his body by the 1993 victim would only have been visible if the then-13 year-old had seen Jackson nude at close proximity. Items recovered from a "secret room" at Neverland Ranch further connected Jackson with his 2003 victim. In the first instance, Jackson purchased the silence of his victim; in the second, Jackson's purchased enough legal ammunition to distort justice. The deposition of the 1993 victim, as he detailed how Jackson manipulated him into ever-increasing sexual contact through shame and guilt makes harrowing reading.

Fans protested then and now that Jackson's behavior was offset by the inspiration of his music and his dancing. Nonsense. This is like saying Hitler's crimes are ameliorated by the fact that he painted a few pretty watercolors. Jackson's music was trite pop; no Tcshaikovsky he. What about his dancing--did it rise to the discipline and art of Baryshnikov? Even if one accepts the premise that some artistic achievement can offset the crime of hurting children, then Jackson's schtick hardly qualifies.

Jackson is gone. I fear that in the distance of memory, people will come to regard him higher than he deserves. Already he has been hailed as someone who healed the racial divide in America. Some may forget the monster that lurked behind the self-mutilated face. One thing is sure--he victims will never forget the horror.

Tweeting the Revolution

2009-06-16T23:40:00.000-07:00

"Today, there is a social media revolution in Iran, whereby Twitter, Facebook and similar sites are serving as the vehicles by which those who reject the apparent election coup are assembling and disseminating valuable information in real time." --the New York Times

Historians note that the recent events in Iran are not the first time that social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook have played a part in major world revolutions.

Philadelphia, 1776.
GeorgeWashto69: Lol, their totally going 2 sign.
JimMad14: Sing?
GeorgeWashto69: sign some Dec of Indentpence. 2 booring to 2 read
LexHam: @Jim, dude, ware R u? we're signnng the Declaration now. get yer ass in here.
FrankBen29: Yo dogz, were U all be at? were dun signing
JimMad14: lol, missd it
GeorgeWashto69: wutz it say?
LexHam: dude, we were so stoned when we wrote it
FrankBen29: total 4:20

St. Petersburg, 1917
VladLen: lol@JoseStalin! dat tsarina skank is a total ho
HotToTrotsky8: i'd tap dat ass
JoseStalin: i kno
VladLen: bitter cold Russian winter make nip hard
JoseStalin: headlights
HotToTrotsky8: what is hedlight?
JoseStalin: lol@Trot. what R U, a peasant serf?
VladLen: lol@Trot, dude seriously, U need to get out more. Y dunt u come to Petrograd & hang wid us?
HotToTrotsky8: I dunno. I iz chillin were i iz at
JoseStalin: dude, totally come hang wid us.
HotToTrosky8: iz der anything 2 do thare?
VladLen: you know, fight the Tsar. foment demagoguery. seize means of production.
JoseStalin: totally easy to get the proletariat pissed off.
HotToTrotsky8: I dunno. Maybe I'll get a chance to come that way around November.

The Power of One

2009-06-05T18:35:00.000-07:00

Twenty years ago today, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, one anonymous man stood in a street, alone and unarmed, before a column of approaching tanks. We don't know what he had witnessed in the previous day, when the student-led, pro-democracy revolution taking place in Tiananmen was put down by indiscriminate machine gun fire into crowds and the use of tanks as steamrollers to crush people. Almost certainly the man had seen tanks rolling full speed into the crowds of protestors.

And yet, he chose to make a stand in the street, utterly alone.

Some historians, especially those influenced by Marx, posit that individuals do not much matter to the progress of history. We are told that if Hitler had not risen to power, then some other radical would have exploited the post-war chaos of Germany in the same way. And had Churchill not marshaled Britain to stay in the war during the darkest days, then some other politician would have. This Marxist view of history is, of course, speculative and cannot be disproven--a fact which hardly supports its thesis. The Marxist Chinese authorities must have philosophically assumed that an individual could not make a revolution.

But those who understand the deeper flow of history know that individuals do matter. It mattered that Churchill and Hitler, as persons, engaged each other rather than other players. Almost any other politician would have settled with Hitler rather than continue what seemed like a hopeless war; almost any other tyrant would have had the sense of self-preservation not to invade Russia with the western front still unsettled. Individuals, it turns out, matter more than the masses.

It mattered that this unknown man found the suicidal courage to halt a column of tanks. For when revolution eventually comes to the tyrants who still rule China, as it inevitably must, then I think this man will stand again as the symbol of the democratic hope that was tragically crushed on that day twenty years ago.

We have the Statue of Liberty. China will have one man before a tank.

Obama's health care planning

2009-06-03T22:05:00.001-07:00

According to the New York Times:

"President Obama said Wednesday that he was receptive to Congressional proposals that would require Americans to have health insurance and oblige employers to share in the cost. But he said there should be exemptions for people who cannot afford insurance and for small businesses in general.

Despite the panoply of problems facing the new president, he has rightly decreed that health care must, because of its tremendous costs to businesses and productivity, not be deferred while other, seemingly-more urgent problems are addressed. This is the correct, long-term thinking that we need.

However, as the quote above reveals, President Obama may be willing to settle for something less than a true fix for the health care crisis. Such a half-measure at this time would be a tragic decision.

Our health care system is deeply broken. The majority of Americans favor a nationalized, single-payer system. The benefits of such a system, to both individuals, families, and businesses, are manifest and undeniable. To enact something less than full, universal, simplified health care would squander this unique moment in American history where, for the first time since Truman, Americans seem ready to join the rest of the civilized world in terms of caring for its citizens.

"Requiring" individuals who are uninsured to purchase insurance is the wrong approach. This will be a crushing burden on the young, the unmarried, and those just starting out in life. Imagine barely scraping by, barely paying the bills, then suddenly being saddled with a new monthly premium bill in the range, depending on one's health, of $500-$700. Few uninsured individuals will be able to make an adjustment of that magnitude. Under this plan, however, those who cannot afford this new bill will be outlaws and subject to punishment. This is no way to reform health care.

Allowing exemptions for small businesses and those who cannot afford coverage is essentially no change from the present problem. Right now everyone is technically free to buy insurance; in reality, pre-existing conditions and high premiums are an insurmountable barrier for many.

The burden of premiums is particularly harsh on small businesses. The majority of jobs in America, and what will be the majority of new jobs if/when an economic recovery occurs, will be in small businesses. So rather than simply sweeping small businesses and individuals under the rug, these are the primary issues of health care reform.

If the president allows these groups to fall through the cracks of health care reform, if "reform" somehow bypasses the very groups it most needs to address, then this hollow health care fix will be a lasting shame to the Obama legacy.

America needs and wants not simply a larger bandaid, but radical surgery to extract the cancer that is rotting our economy.

Feynman lectures online

2009-04-02T14:46:00.000-07:00

Vega has posted a set of Richard Feynman lectures at http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8.
Feynman, one of the great scientific geniuses of all time, also had an remarkable talent for explaining the complex to layman. Well worth a view.

Elie Wiesel

2009-03-01T23:08:00.001-08:00

Elie Wiesel has known horrors none of us can imagine. Through his life's work and especially books such as Night, those of us born post-Holocaust can perhaps achieve some measure of understanding about that darkest moment in humankind's history. Wiesel, and his fellow survivor Primo Levi, bear un-silenceable witness to unspeakable crimes.

Another crime has just occured. Wiesel has lost his entire life's savings, and all the money of his Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, in the Bernie Madoff scandal. Instead of investing his client's money, Madoff spent it in a Ponzi scheme. The money is gone.

Surely many of Madoff's clients are equally hurt, but the great injustice here is the loss of funds for the Foundation for Humanity. Their important work in Darfur is a necessary reminder for the world that genocide is happening right now, this very day, far away from the world's attention. Everyone who feels outrage over the possibility of the Foundation for Humanity closing because of the greed of one man should donate now, in order to demonstrate that Madoff's malice cannot snuff out Wiesel's good work.

Last year a mentally-disturbed Holocaust denier--a redundancy if ever there were one--attacked Wiesel at a hotel in San Francisco.

Yet I suspect that despite being physically attacked at an advanced age, despite being left penniless in the wake of Madoff's obscene betrayal, Elie Wiesel--winner of the Nobel Prize and one of the most influential persons of the 20th century--has a sense of perspective about these hardships that few of us will ever have. He knows just how bad things can really become.

Bad Craziness

2008-12-03T12:29:00.000-08:00

In my years of teaching, I've come across many students who were creationists. I've even come across one who outright refused to believe in plate tectonics. But this video shows someone even crazier:

It's hard to know where to start with such extreme anti-scientific craziness.

Scientology & Swordsmanship

2008-11-25T19:33:00.000-08:00

A man was recently shot at the Scientology Celebrity Centre in Los Angeles while approaching with two samurai swords. It was a good effort, although it is a shame he was put down before he did any real mischief. In a just world, Scientology centers would be under daily assaults of this nature.

Scientology is not only a cult, but a particularly nasty and vicious cult that gives false hope to thousands while sucking their money into its ravenous maw. Scientology takes advantage of vulnerable people in the worst ways.

While assuming the trappings of science--Hubbard claimed he invented a "science of the mind"--Scientology practices none of the methods or skepticism of real science. Its bizarre mixture of "e-meters" and "engrams" and aliens seems like a laughable parody of a cult--until one sees the the grim seriousness of its proponents.

In civilized parts of the world, Scientology is recognized as a cult, and taxed appropriately. However, in the United States, the Church of Scientology is afforded a religious exemption from taxation. We Americans go to extreme lengths to defer to religion of any conceivable form. In this case, and in the case of the Mormon Church--which directly intervened in politics by financing California's Proposition 8--their tax-exempt status should be revoked.

If people really want to believe crazy things, fine. But does their folly have to be subsidized by everyone else? As the great P.Z. Myers so frequently points out, "Religion poisons everything."

Michael Crichton Has Died

2008-11-05T21:30:00.000-08:00

Not soon enough.

Crichton was trained as a medical doctor; although he was not a research scientist, he had at least taken a great number of science classes. His pseudoscientific writings, however, disparaged and distorted science at every opportunity.

In Crichton’s 1969 novel The Andromeda Strain, a NASA probe returns to Earth tainted by extraterrestrial germs, which then spark a deadly pandemic. The widespread success of this book sparked fears among the public about the upcoming Apollo 11 lunar mission, and caused the protocols for returning astronauts to change. According to Apollo 11 capsule commander Michael Collins, the lengthy quarantine and isolation protocols the astronauts experienced after returning to Earth were a direct result of public fears stoked by The Andromeda Strain, rather than by NASA’s assessment of the real danger of “space bugs.”

In Crichton’s 1990 book Jurassic Park, rogue geneticists recreate dinosaurs in the eponymous theme park. Although it is possible to extract short, fragmented segments of DNA from recently-dead animals, the scenario of resurrecting dinosaurs by such methods is laughably implausible. One can see the science of Jurassic Park as merely literary device in order to have dinosaur-human interactions. However, Crichton’s real theme in Jurassic Park was science out of control, science playing God, science in the service of profit rather than the benefit of mankind. These views are profoundly anti-science.

In the 2002 Prey, Crichton’s paranoia about science extends to nanotechnology. Prey tells the story of an evil nanotechnology company whose now-sentient product escapes the confines of its lab and evolves deadly traits. Those mad scientists are off again, ruining the world for everyone else.

All this could be forgiven and dramatic devices for selling novels. However, in State of Fear, Crichton misrepresents the science of global warming. State of Fear describes environmentalism—which Crichton calls a religion—as a dangerous and fanatical belief system held by terrorists bent on mass murder. In what one reviewer called a “postmodern view of science,” Crichton implies that science exists only in the service of partisan ideology. State of Fear involves plots by environmental terrorists to manufacture what seem to be natural disasters in order to advance the cause of global warming. Crichton’s novel used footnotes, two appendixes, and a twenty-page bibliography to promote fringe ideas about global warming.

Rather than earning Crichton universal ridicule, State of Fear garnered Crichton an hour-long, one-on-one conversation with President Bush. This time dwarfed the attention given by Bush to the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; they did not earn an hour’s audience, yet a novelist who distorted scientific research to advance a fringe agenda did. This fact is a sorry commentary on the importance given by the Bush administration to ideas generated in the “reality-based community.”

The Text Message of Obama

2008-08-23T20:50:00.000-07:00

This morning, 23 August 2008, at 1:03 am, I had the following exchange via text message:

Obama: Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3pm ET on www.barackobama.com. Spread the word!

Me: k, lol

Obama: Um… why do you find Biden funny?

Me: nOOb. jK.

Obama: I’m afraid I don’t…

Me: MacCne pwns Obma

Obama: Look, if you, as a voter, have something constructive to say about my vice-presidential choice…

Me: Zzzz. YGTbKm? Biden = old, wrkly

Obama: I was hoping that Senator Biden’s experience would add gravitas, especially in the realm of foreign affairs.

Me: |-O. W/evr.

Obama: Frankly, I was anticipating this reaction from some of my supporters. However, polling data indicate that Biden will complement what the public perceives as my vulnerabilities vis-a-vis John McCain.

Me: Hold on, need WC.

Obama: If you want to continue your critique of Senator Biden later, at a more convenient time for you…?

Me: NP, just #1. Does Bdn 4:20?

Obama: Excuse me?

Me: lmao! w33d!

Obama: I’m not sure this is going in a productive direction.

Me: Yr br8kng up w/me?

Obama: jK.

Blogging That Matters

2008-08-16T15:09:00.001-07:00

Most blogs are bullshit.* Although most people tend to think highly of their uninformed opinions, the reality is that almost no one is interested in other people's thoughts, experiences, observations, or insights. Even in conversation, Americans don't listen to other people; they just wait until it is their turn to talk.

So it is refreshing when a blog actually does something good.

The New York Times recently profiled Karen Gadbois, a women who moved to New Orleans in 2002. Ms. Gadbois came up with a brilliant idea: Why not drive around New Orleans to see if the houses that city hall claims have been restored from Hurricane Katrina actually have been fixed?

It should surprise no one that very few of the homes she inspected actually received reconstruction work. Houses claimed to have been renovated were later demolished as uninhabitable. In one case, an entire city block that city hall claimed had been restored did not even exist. Money had, of course, been spent. $1.8 million. Federal funds have been distributed for work that was never done. A good place to look for it might be in the bank accounts of the city leadership.

Rarely does blogging have any real effect. But this time it has: The FBI has raided the offices of the reconstruction agency, and Mayor Nagin is being investigated for possible corruption charges. Someone, after all, received the money that has gone missing.

Karen Gadbois has done a great job and a great service to New Orleans. It is shameful, however, that the local mainstream journalists seem so unable to do such a basic thing as their jobs.

*including, of course, this blog

Dream of the HIdden

2008-08-16T14:55:00.000-07:00

In my dream, I'm crawling through an old, abandoned military fort. It reminded of Battery Mendell, in the Marin Headlands north of San Francisco, where once I engaged in an epic hide-and-seek game with schoolmates. We seemed to spend hours hiding and hunting among the crumbling concrete bunkers, probing the dark recesses with flashlights in search of giggling friends.

In this dream, I am alone in this empty fort. I am searching for something, but I don't know what it is. As I dig in the darkness among the rubble and exposed wires, I find an opening and crawl through. It is a completely dark. But as I crawl through it, I find that I am descending into a water. I can see light through the water, and against better judgment, I dive into the water to see what I can find. This is still part of the fort, and there is an open door I can swim through into a pocket of air.

As I surface, I realize that I have found a completely new part of the fort, one that is isolated from the rest. There is a gigantic bedroom, with 4-post canopy bed. Everything is wet and moldy. The high walls are covered floor-to-ceiling in antiquarian books. I pull off a few titles and examine their moldy, smelly pages.

I discover that I am not alone. There are a few other people there, but strangely I do not feel threatened. I suspect that they are trying to steal souveniors and are not much concerned by my presence.

As I leave this strange area, I see dozens of blue-shirted people descending upon me. They grab me under water and pull me to the surface, where I am placed under arrest for trespassing.

The Value of a Whiner's Life

2008-07-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

It was recently revealed that the EPA has discounted the value of an American life by nearly $1 million. While this move does not have an immediate, practical effect--your boss isn't going to cut your salary because of this--it does have a longer term effect of reducing the amount of environmental protections available to Americans.

According to the macabre calculations of the Bush-era EPA, if a new environmental regulation is going to save lives, then the value of these lives must be assessed against economic losses to businesses. A similar grim arithmetic was part of Fight Club; if recalling a dangerous part on a car will cost more than paying out damages to the likely number of victims, then car companies prefer to pay damages rather than prevent the injuries.

This mentality mirrors that of Sen. Phil Gramm, a McCain advisor, who also recently complained that Americans had become "a nation of whiners" suffering not from a real economic downturn, but only from a "mental recession."

What these ideas have in common is a rejection of the nature of reality. In Sen. Gramm's world, thinking positive has the effect of making the world positive. It's as if our thoughts have the ability to reshape reality. Among many religious people, of course, this thought is common; prayer to a diety for intercession is a common way of imagining that our mental energies have the ability to transform reality.

According to Sen. Gramm, if our economy is in a nosedive, this is only because so many people think negatively. For instance, if you are laid off, then it's your fault for bringing down your comapny with your negative energy. If your mortgage payment or rent goes up 25% in one month, the blame lies with you and your bad chi, not with your avaricious landlord.

Imagining that environmental regulations can be rewritten according to an arbitrary recalculation of the value of a human life is likewise a fantasy, a profound divorcement from reality. Environmental regulations getting you down? Just say that the people the regulations are protecting are worth less, and--poof!--the regulations evaporate.

There can be legitimate arguments about the economy and about the balance of regulation and business interests. But what these two items show is that America has lost its collective mind and entered into a dangerous zone of fantasy.

Moving On

2008-06-26T19:57:00.000-07:00

A recent NYT article revealed a major reason why so much of the debate over public education in this country is so utterly divorced from the realities of the classroom.

In urban school districts, typically 30-50% of the school population changes schools per year. In economically-devastated cities such as Flint, Michigan, the percentage is closer to 75%. That's right--teachers in Flint see only one out of four of the same students from one year to the next. One Flint school had 300 of its 500 students switch in a single year.

The effects on students who change schools are clear: trouble assimilating with a new set of peers, trouble with starting curriculum midway, trouble with not being at grade level and having unfamiliar problems in an unfamiliar setting thrust upon them.

The effects on the classroom from such a high turnover are also clear: teacher time sapped to help new students catch up, experience working with individual students and gaining their trust wiped away, instability of the classroom group.

These problems are largely economic; Flint, Michigan, for example, was so annihilated by GM plant closings that it might simply be better for parents to relocate out of an area that does not have nearly the jobs to support its current population.

However, a large part of the problem is the way students are assigned to schools. In the current system, what matters most for school assignment is the location of the parent's home. The student is treated as a population statistic rather than as a learner.

The structure of this system guarantees failure, for it mandates that poor students attend schools with other poor peers, while wealthier kids segregate into schools with wealthier peers. Any attempt to integrate schools in terms of economics will meet with howls of resistance from parents in gated communities, decrying that their children shouldn't have to mingle with "undesirables." Any attempt to assign students in a stable way to schools or teachers who best meet their individual needs will elicit cries of student tracking.

The 4th season of The Wire followed a group of students/drug hoppers and a new teacher through a year of their trials and tribulations on and off the mean corners of Baltimore. The Wire--perhaps one of the greatest television series ever--made clear just how unrealistic the goals of No Child Left Behind are when confronted by the crucible of the streets. By the end of the season, and the school year, viewers felt like they had followed these students through a war. The reality is, though, that within that year most of the students would have switched schools.

Rachel Ray, Terrorist

2008-06-01T14:47:00.000-07:00

The Devil and John McCain

2008-03-28T19:29:00.000-07:00

Senator Clinton's Islam Update

2008-03-28T01:11:00.001-07:00

Games of Life & Death

2008-03-13T14:09:00.000-07:00

Today's NYT had an article about a strange, grim lottery taking place in Oregon.

Ninety-one thousand Oregon residents have put forth their names into this lottery in order to win health care. The state lottery has slots for only 7,000 Oregonians. Those aren't good odds.

Many people visit the area around Bend, Oregon, for recreation, for Bend is unusually-blessed with volcanoes and forests and wild rivers. What these vacationers don't realize is that almost 20% of the people living in the region do not have health care.

What does it mean to not have health care in modern America?

Not so long ago, Mr. Bush proclaimed, “I mean, people have access to health care in America. After all, you just go to an emergency room.”

What this misstatement ignores is the fact that once an emergency room saves your life, you still get the bill. Even a brief hospitalization can quickly accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars. For many people in the income brackets that tend to not have health care, such a bill is so far beyond their ability to ever pay that might as well be for a trillion dollars. A sickness then, even if one recovers, becomes a life-ending event.

What Mr. Bush's statement also misses is the fact that by waiting until the last minute to go to an emergency room, by waiting until the pain is unbearable, or the victim has lost consciousness, diseases that were easily treatable become untreatable. Diagnoses that could stave off later problems are not made. People die because they do not have health insurance, despite Mr. Bush's snide assurances.

Oregon's lottery is about more than just getting health care. It is literally a matter of life and death.

What kind of society decides the life and death of its citizens by chance?

Shirley Jackson answered this question in her famous story, "The Lottery." (Although everyone knows "The Lottery," I think Shirley Jackson's book We Have Always Lived in the Castle is even more worthwhile.)

In "The Lottery," a small-town meeting turns out to be a gathering for human sacrifice, the victim of which is selected by lot. There is never any reason stated for the murder in this town; it is simply tradition. And this is the real meaning for modern America: There is no rational reason for people in Oregon to have to wager for their lives. There is no rationale, no defensible argument one can make, for Americans not to have universal health care.

We Americans now are as superstitious as the Shirley Jackson's villagers. As long as we cling, through tradition and fear, to our dangerous and cruel practices, we are no better than savages cutting-out human hearts to appease a blood-thirsty god--in fact, we are worse, because we know there is no such god and yet still perform the sacrifice.

Teaching Opportunity: Violence Required

2008-03-03T21:01:00.000-08:00

I am an alumnus of Cal State Hayward, which is now officially known as Cal State East Bay, although no alumni call it by that name. As an alumnus, today I feel quite ashamed of the actions of CSUH in regards to one of its teachers, Marianne Kearney-Brown.

Ms. Kearney-Brown is a veteran math teacher--a instructor, in other words, in a field in which everyone seems to agree there is a desperate shortage of qualified teachers. But rather than encouraging her academic pursuits, CSUH fired her for inserting the word "non-violent" in her loyalty oath.

Loyalty oaths?

Weren't those something out of the McCarthy era? Well, yes. What possible reason could there be for a loyalty oath today? Well, none, of course. But once bureaucratic instruments are in place, they have a strange longevity; perhaps this is because administrators fiercely defend their work. If they didn't have forms to fill-out and loyalty oaths to collect, why would a school need to have petty administrators on the payroll? Therefore, the forms and oaths must stay so that they can keep their jobs. None of this, of course, has anything to do with the business of running a university, and constitutes a steady and completely-unnecessary drain on school resources and the time of of those teachers who actually do the work of the school.

You would think that, in 2008, loyalty oaths would be a thing of the past, if for no other reason than the publication of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, one of the greatest books of the 20th century. (I also think Heller's Something Happened deserves similar accolades, although this book is far less read, perhaps because it is so tragic, so heart-rending, and so true that few readers can stand its bleak portrait of the meaningless suffering of life.)

In Catch-22, Heller skewers military and bureaucratic life. This book is so good that during Vietnam soldiers had their copies of Catch-22 confiscated; there probably is no higher praise for an intellectual than to be banned by the American military. In Catch-22, one of the legion of petty bureaucrats governing the lives of Air Force men comes up with the idea of making all the men sign loyalty oaths.

Almost overnight the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was in full flower, and Captain Black was enraptured to discovering himself spearheading it. He had really hit on something. All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for Lieutenant Balkington, the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Each time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay form the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers ... When other officers had followed his urging and introduced loyalty oaths of their own, he went them one better by making every son of a bitch who came to his intelligence tent sign two loyalty oaths, then three, then four; then he introduced a pledge of allegiance, and after that 'The Star-Spangled Banner," one chorus, two choruses, three choruses, four choruses."

"Without realizing how it had come about, the combat men in the squadron discovered themselves dominated by the administrators appointed to serve them. They were bullied, insulted, harassed and shoved about all day long by one after the other. When they voiced objection, Captain Black replied that people who were loyal would not mind signing all the loyalty oaths they had to. To anyone who questioned the effectiveness of the loyalty oaths, he replied that ... the more loyalty oaths a person signed, the more loyal he was."

"...he returned and found his way blocked by a wall of officers waiting in line to sign loyalty oaths. At the far end of the food counter, a group of men who had arrived earlier were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays of food balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. Already at the tables, a group of that arrived still earlier was singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there."

One of the more depressing things in life for me is that fact that even when someone like Heller so brilliantly flays open ludicrous incompetence, that ludicrous incompetence pops up in another form, another way, another time. Liberal education posits that by reading great literature or seeing great art, people will become educated, changed for the better. This is true in some cases. But most people do not listen; they merely wait until it is their turn to talk. People do not learn; they merely read the required material in order to pass the test, hating every minute of it, and absorb none of its truths. The idea of "speaking truth to power" is doomed because administrative power is deaf.

In the case of Marianne Kearney-Brown, she did not refuse to sign the loyalty oath. She merely followed her religious convictions by altering the oath to specify non-violence as her form of protecting the Constitution. Ms. Kearney-Brown is a Quaker, a pacifist group whose non-violent ways were respected even during WWII (although not WWI). But now we have the War of Terror. Religious pacifism isn't patriotic enough for post-9/11 CSUH. Violence is required, even of math teachers.

When scientists went to war in the Manhattan Project, the military was concerned that they were insufficiently ready to defend their country by physical force. It never came to Nobel-laureate physicists being forced to do push-ups in the mud at Los Alamos, but it nearly did. Richard Feynman recalls a mock calisthenic/calculus drill where the physicists were harangued with, "Men! Pencils out! Pencils at the ready! On the mark, integrate!"

One hopes that Ms. Kearney-Brown will settle with CSUH for a large sum of money. However, only someone who has not read Catch-22 thinks that anything will actually change.

Torquemada on the Potomac

2008-02-14T22:47:00.000-08:00

Mr. Bush would like you to know that America does not torture.

You might hear a different story, though, if you ask the journalist Sami al-Hajj, also known as Internee #345. Al-Hajj is a Sudanese national currently being held in Guantanamo, which has been his home since being arrested by the US in December 2001. Mr. Al-Hajj is a journalist with the Al Jazeera network.

While being held in Guantanamo, Mr. Al-Hajj has been beaten, starved, and sexually tortured. Because of the physical abuse he has received at the hands of United States interrogators, he can no longer flex his knees. A doctor prescribed a special toilet seat for this condition, but officials have now removed it in order to humiliate him. According to Reporters Without Borders, Mr. Al-Hajj’s throat cancer, in remission since 1998, has returned, but he is being denied medical treatment.

It may surprise you to learn that no one thinks Mr. Al-Hajj is a terrorist. He has never been charged with terrorism. The Bush administration does not believe him to be in any way involved with terrorism or pose a risk. We know this because the administration has already promised him immediate release on one condition—if he were to spy on Al Jazeera. It is unclear how, even in a misreading of the Constitution worthy of Scalia, the United States can assert the right to detain and torture a foreign national for not being a spy.

According to Clive Stafford’s book on Guantanamo, Mr. Al-Hajj was not picked up by mistake, but rather for the express purpose of turning him into an informant against a television network Mr. Bush deemed hostile. Mr. Al-Hajj actually asked to be interrogated about what he was accused of having done.

To protest, and perhaps to end, his 6-year incarceration in this Kafkaesque nightmare, Mr. Al-Hajj is engaging in a hunger strike. The US now roughly and forcibly inserts a feeding into his nose daily and force-feeds Mr. Al-Hajj in order to avoid the embarrassment of having a Guantanamo prisoner starve to death. According to Mr. Al-Hajj’s lawyer, this tube sometimes is smeared with the blood of other Guantanamo inmates also being force fed.

This is what the United States has become.

The roots of torture in America are a deep part of our culture. Even before we were a nation, the Salem Witch Trials provided an outlet for American sexual sadists to strip, hurt, and torture women while pretending to protect the security of their neighbors. The DSM-IV defines sexual sadism as a replacement of normal sexual gratification with pleasure derived only by the infliction of pain; put simply, sexual sadists can only become aroused by cries of pain rather than passion, by hitting rather than fucking. Make no mistake about it--what happened in Abu Ghraib has deep psychological roots in our culture.

What is happening this very day in Guantanamo is part of this American sickness. Everyone else in the world see us for what we truly are; most Americans, as repressed and incurious as ever, have little idea what is being done in their name. Ask yourself this question, and answer honestly: Had you ever heard of Sami Al-Hajj before reading this?

It is all well and good to say that when those who authorized and operated Guantanamo become prisoners themselves, in US prisons facing charges with lawyers at their sides, then justice will be done. It is all well and good to say that when the cowardly judges who have abdicated their duties and their souls by deferring in every way to the evils of the Bush administration are removed from their positions and disbarred, then justice will be done.

But in reality, it is already too late. The new face of Uncle Sam is the hood of the torturer.

The Great Crash

2008-02-14T22:46:00.000-08:00

Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor, sees the recent American economic downturn as a long-delayed symptom of underlying economic disease afflicting this country.

Reich brilliantly explains how the upcoming tax “rebates” will do nothing to slow America’s spiraling descent into, possibly, Argentine-style economic chaos. The problem, as Reich sees it, is that we Americans have finally run out of ways to spend more than we earn.

The first problem is the decline in real wages—that is, wages adjusted for inflation. Wages have been flat over the last 35 years; although actual dollar amounts have increased, because of inflation the purchasing power of these dollars is the same as if was 35 years ago.

Compounded on this problem is the fact that average wages are falling; the "middle mark" is sliding toward the poverty end of the income scale. Thirty years ago, the median male worker in his 30’s earned 12% more than he does today. This is largely the result of the migration of high-paying manufacturing jobs, and their replacement by no-skill, no-benefit retail work.

To maintain “middle class” lifestyles amid this decay, American families have increasingly relied on women to work outside the home. This trend began in earnest in the 1970s, and resulted in a terrible personal time deficit for many women. Arlene Hochschild has written eloquently about the deleterious effects of this in her book “The Second Shift.”

Having both parents work soon became not enough in the face of declining wages, Reich writes. The next stage involved increasing working hours, both within one job and by the addition of other jobs. Americans now work 350 more hours/year than Europeans.

This trend, too, had a limit; one cannot work more hours than there are in the day. So how to maintain lifestyles in the face of declining wages? In the 1990s a trend began for large numbers of workers to take out home equity loans, using their still-mortgaged houses as collateral. This is a like taking out a new credit card to pay minimum payments on another maxed credit card. And now, of course, with the collapse of the housing market, this last aspect has hit Americans like a freight train.

Even those of us who rent are being affected; increasing numbers of apartment dwellers across the country are arriving home to find 72-hour eviction notices because their landlord cannot make minimum mortgage payments. One thing woefully lacking from proposed congressional legislation protecting home owners from foreclosure is some manner of protection to renters—who have paid on-time and in good faith, and yet through no fault of their own find themselves homeless at a few day’s notice.

This crisis is long in coming.

Since the 1960s, manufacturing in America has been in precipitous decline. There have been several plateaus—the 1990s Internet Boom, the 2000s housing boom—but the long-term trend is dismal. We are going broke.

To understanding just how bankrupt America actually is, consider our $9 trillion national debt. With a population of 300 million Americans, this $9 trillion debt saddles every man, woman, and child in America with a $30,000 payment. However, this number does not consider that we pay interest on this $9 trillion debt; this interest effectively doubles the national debt burden.

Congress can pass a balanced budget, and this would reap lower interest rates, as we saw during the Clinton years. However, even a balanced budget does not begin to pay down this vast national debt, a burden which makes balanced budgets difficult because of the interest which must be paid right now. As our interest payments balloon, the funds available for everything else the government does must inevitably suffer. Soon our federal budget will fund unnecessary wars, Social Security payments, and little else.

How did it come to this?

Roar for Entitlement

2008-01-19T18:22:00.000-08:00

Just when everyone thought Mark Geragos could not possibly find a client more odious than the child molester Michael Jackson or the wife killer Scott Peterson, Geragos decided to represent Amritpal and Kulbir Dhaliwal. The reckless actions of these drunken jackasses led to the destruction of Tatiana, a beautiful 4-year old Siberian tiger.

Now that the Dhaliwal brothers have confessed to provoking the tiger who attacked them on Christmas Day, the transcripts of the 911 call from the SF Zoo shed further light into the unsavory character of these individuals.

Kulbir Dhaliwal placed the first call at 5:16 pm from in front of the cafeteria at the SF Zoo. He was apparently having an argument with the manager of the cafe:

Kulbir: I'm talking to the manager here, the stupid a- doesn't want to get me a towel ...

The towel was presumably to staunch bleeding. Of course, in Kulbir's thinking, the manager should have exposed himself and his employees at the cafeteria to the danger of a prowling tiger, despite the Zoo's policy of locking down buildings during an escape.

911: The ambulance, the police are at the front.
Kulbir: Get them out here already!

He was apparently quite impatient with the response time, which was on the order of 10 minutes. This is a fairly quick response time in SF for a life and death emergency; times in East Bay cities such as Oakland and Richmond can be twice that, and there are instances where dispatched ambulances and police do not arrive at all to crime scenes. In other words, if you live in underfunded cities such as SF or Oakland, which have about half the police force of comparable cities in other states, then you should be thankful if you can just get through to 911 without being put on hold.

911: OK, the ambulance is staging. I need you to understand. That if the ambulance people, paramedics ...

Kulbir: What do you mean? ... My brother's going to die out here!

911: I'll stay on the line with you. If the paramedics get hurt they cannot help your brother, so you need to calm down and ...

Kulbir: Send more paramedics then!

Lovely. Kulbir thinks he is a general ordering more troops into the breach, damn the danger. No one else's life matters except his brother's. It does not matter to him if a paramedic is killed as a result of his stupidity in taunting the tiger.

Kulbir: Can you fly a helicopter right here? Because I don't see no f- ambulance here.

What a sense of entitlement! He screws up and now he thinks he deserves helicopter attention. Helicopter "Life Flights" are not usual for SF because no hospital in SF has helicopter landing facilities. Life Flights are more of an East Bay phenomenon.

These transcripts, the refusal of these brothers to cooperate with police, their documented effort to conceal what occurred that day, all speak to egomania and a prince-like expectation of entitlement.

What a pity Tatiana was not allowed time to finish her snack.

Take the poll

Free Poll by Blog Flux

Obama & Race

2008-01-16T12:56:00.001-08:00

Some have said that the seriousness of the candidacy of Barack Obama is a sign that American culture is now ready to consider a black man for the post of first citizen.

Consider, however, the recent WST op-ed piece by Karl Rove. Rove criticized Obama's rhetoric, claiming that it was, "an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard."

Or consider Andrew Cuomo's recent criticism of Obama. Cuomo stated that Obama could not "shuck and jive" his way to the White House.

Such blatantly racist statements, even from Democrats like Cuomo, should not startle us. These remarks remind me of Lenny Bruce's famous sketch, "How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties," in which a well-intentioned liberal, trying to "mingle" during the civil rights era, degenerates into crass stereotypes.

Clearly, we have a long way to go.

Brit Brit's Suicide Note

2008-01-15T18:05:00.000-08:00

Ding-dang, y'all.

According to Perez Hilton, Britney Spears recently wrote a suicide note:

"The letter was very sad," says a friend. "It was filled with reasons why she shouldn't live, included lines from poems about death."

Wonder what it said? What literary allusions did Unfitney conjure in her thanatopsis? Well, wait no more: My secret sources have found a copy of this note! I reproduce it here:

'Sup y'all, So I'm like dead or whatev' So like Sylvia Plath wrout it rite :

The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell, the dead bell,
Somebody's done for.

And she was all like:

The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over

So like when the pap-paps all take my pikture, I'm all like

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wire.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

I'm like exactly like Sylvia Plath, y'all. Here's my poetry

Gimme gimme more, gimme more
Gimme gimme more, gimme gimme more
Gimme more more

You see? That's like litachur an shit.

As my last well and testimoney, I leave all my mony and worldly posesions to Leona Helmsley's dog. Piece out, Brit Brit X(

Take the poll

Free Poll by Blog Flux

The End of TV-Links and the Fate of the Internet

2007-10-27T20:54:00.001-07:00

On 18 October 2007, British police arrested the owner of TV-Links[1] and shut down his website, www.tv-links.co.uk. This popular site[2] had provided links to a variety of copyrighted programs. If one missed an episode of The Sopranos or LOST, TV-Links would have it. One could watch programs, cartoons, documentaries. Some of this material was not copyrighted; some of the material came from mainstream sites such as videos.google.com. If one didn’t feel like going out to the movies, many current releases were available. If TV-Links had actually hosted the material, then it would be in clear violation of copyright laws; however, TV-Links scrupulously avoided hosting any material, and only provided links to other websites. Many of these other websites, such as http://www.ouou.com/, are located in Asia. The countries hosting the offending material may include countries which have not signed intellectual property treaties, and hence are not subject to draconian laws such as the DMCA. America’s DMCA is not a world-wide law, yet.

The end of TV-Links brings up disturbing questions. The Internet is based on upon links of information to other information. If police action infringes upon this structure, the Internet will alter beyond recognition. Imagine a web page that had no links to any other information, for fear of being sued if one of those other sites put up copyright infringing material.

Is it a crime to merely link to information? Can a person be put in jail for making a link of his website to another page that shows content which, in its home country, is legal? Would it be illegal then to put the web address of a copyright-infringing site on a t-shirt? In a painting? Anti-Internet extremists would insist that, yes, this would be the case. The situation would be no different than a person offering information on how to kill; even if that person did not personally murder, he encouraged others to do this illegal act. This example seems extreme, but the strange reasoning of the DMCA makes committing a crime and making a few clicks on a blog equivalent in the eyes of the law.

The case of TV-Links is cause for pause among many bloggers and site owners. Imagine that you make a link to a video on YouTube. Much of the content on YouTube violates the DMCA; YouTube quickly removes infringing content that is brought to its attention, but some companies do not protest, happy for the added exposure on this site. You might imagine that if a video is allowed on YouTube, then you can make a link to it; however, under the logic of the attack on TV-Links, you are a violator as well. Will the police come knocking on your door, instead of YouTube’s?

When you make a search on Google, this search engine will return many sites that contain copyrighted material. Is Google violating the law? One might argue that the primary purpose of Google is not copyright infringement, while the primary purpose of TV-Links was copyright infringement. However, this gray distinction would require a case-by-case determination of which sites were in compliance of the law based on a fuzzy “intent” standard.

The Wayback Machine, www.archive.org/index.php, is a site that caches old website and is very useful for research. The Wayback Machine could therefore be in violation of the law if any of its cached information violated copyright law. And, in fact, The Wayback Machine had old pages of TV-Links, including the working links from that page, archived after TV-Links was shut down. For the sake of fairness, then, the operators of The Wayback Machine should have been arrested as well.

[1] Sheriff, Lucy, 2007. “TV-Links man was arrested under trademark laws.” The Register, 23 October 2007. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/23/tv_links_trademark_law/ Retrieved 27 October 2007.

[2] According to Alexa, http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?url=tv-links.co.uk, in the three months before its closure, TV-Links was ranked in the top 200 sites on the Internet, and was viewed by 0.293% of all Internet users.

Leave Britney ALONE!!!

2007-10-07T21:40:00.000-07:00

Ok ... I thought I had no energy left to keep hating on BritBrit, but this video is too funny not to share. Enjoy. :)

Um, if you're easy offended, don't click on this. :)

The Praetorians of Blackwater

2007-09-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

The Iraqi Interior Ministry has just issued an order that may become the most important turning point in relations between the United States and the Maliki government. The Interior Ministry has ordered private Blackwater contractors to leave Iraq.

Why should the presence or absence of private contractors affect relations between nations? The answer lies in what Blackwater does for the United States.

Blackwater is a private security firm based in North Carolina. Founded in 1998 and composed primarily of ex-SEALS, Blackwater has worked in Iraq as the personal guards of Viceroy Paul Bremer and a number of other security details. As Jeremy Scahill has reported, Blackwater has become, in essence, a Praetorian Guard, an army within an army.

Blackwater does many things. In addition to guarding VIP;s, the mercenaries assist in the delivery of supplies into dangerous areas. It was on one of these missions that four Blackwater employees were killed, burned, and hanged from a bridge in Falluja in 2004. Blackwater was also used to defend federal buildings in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Why American troops in Iraq were deemed insufficient for such tasks, as was past procedure, has never been fully explained.

This war has used private mercenaries like no other war before it. There are almost 50,000 private security employees in Iraq, spread among 180 different companies. Blackwater is the largest. During the first Iraq War, the ratio of private contractors to soldiers was 1:60; in the current war, the ratio is 1:3.

Although Blackwater employees do not get health benefits or retirement (they are 1099 independent contractors), they are paid handsomely, between $600 to $1500 per day, seven days a week. At the high end, in other words, they're making SAG union scale. Compare this with the average pay for US Army personnel: $1500-1800 per month, or $50-$60 per day. The work is essentially the same.

Blackwater has its own guns, its own helicopters and Humvees. It is a private army for hire. And it is answerable to no one.

Blackwater employees are immune from either Iraqi or American law in the course of the jobs, per the infamous Order No. 17. They operate in a Kafkaesque legal limbo.

The legal status of operations in Iraq has always been nebulous. As Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports in one of the most important books to come out of the war, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Americans in Iraq operated in a Helleresque environment, where they could not drink alcohol or smoke indoors or lift boxes without back braces, per strictly enforced OSHA regulations, while mortar shells rained down and fires raged through buildings amid the smoke, chaos, and uncontrolled looting.

If Blackwater stays, and the Interior Ministry's order is nullified by their American masters, then the last shred of independence of the Maliki government will be ripped away. Malaki will then simply be seen as an employee of George Bush, rather than a head of state. If Blackwater leaves, this will radically change the way this war is conducted. This could be the beginning of the end.

Crunch

2007-09-12T13:21:00.001-07:00

When I was young, teachers in home economics advised me that one should budget no more than 30% of one's gross income (before taxes) on housing.

How do things stand today? Statistics just released by the Census Bureau show that in 2006, a significant portion of the US population spent more than 30% on housing.

California, not surprisingly, led the pack: Fully 52% of Californians spent more than the 30% benchmark. In fact, 22% of homeowners and 27% of renters spent more than 50% of their total income (before taxes) on housing.

The state with the lowest percentage of people spending above the 30% benchmark was, dontchaknow, North Dakota (23%), followed by West Virginia (25%).

The states with the highest percentage of people spending above the 30% benchmark were Florida (45%), New Jersey (45%), Connecticut (44%); for the western United States, Nevada came in at 46%, Washington at 40%, and Oregon and Colorado both at 39%. According to my high school home economics teachers, these states should receive failing grades.

Free market theory dictates that the high prices in these areas will affect peoples' decisions about where they live, and those of lower incomes will flock to the Midwest; this migration will lower prices on the coasts, and raise demand in the Midwest. . But the flaw in this theory is that it assumes living locations are fluid; few people are psychologically ready to shift their homes as easily as they would shift which gas station to choose. Are Californians thinking about moving back to Oklahoma, in a reverse Dustbowl migration? The idea is laughable.

What we need to realize is this: The "free market" does not follow theory in matters of housing, and we need to think about structuring our cities in different ways. Single family homes, with a detached house and large back yard, should be the rarity rather than the standard abode. At present, California is building legions of new suburban homes to meet the alleged "demand," but what is missed is that these styles of homes will remain unaffordable to the majority of people. We need a different architecture. We need to build up, not out.

I would write more, but I have to go work now to pay my rent. :)

Enforced Uninsurance

2007-08-21T23:43:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times had a front-page article about efforts of the Bush administration to prevent states such as California from insuring children with medical care.

New federal regulations, released last Friday, require that certain children moving from private plans to state-sponsored programs must have at least a one-year period of uninsurance. Also, to prevent parents from trying to substitute public programs for private insurance, the Bush administration requires that copayments and premiums should be equivalent to private insurance.

These limits kick in if states wish to provide funding with the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), a law passed in 1997 to help low-income children have health care. States such as California and New York have tried to expand this coverage option to those of incomes above the federal poverty level, and herein lies the rub.

The federal poverty level for a family of four is $20,650. Everyone agrees that this number is based upon faulty calculations, and comes from an earlier era in which housing cost a much lower percentage of income, while food cost substantially higher. We're living in a different time, and the poverty level calculation now vastly understates true purchasing power. However, no president wants to be the one to revise this poverty level and produce perhaps as much as a doubling of the poverty rate under his administration. So the fiction of this poverty rate calculation continues, even though all parties know it is a fraud.

The federal poverty rate doesn't take into account the vast regional differences in the cost of living. I have some friends living in Ohio who want to move back here, but cannot sell their beautiful 3 bedroom house for their asking price of $168,000. The median housing price in the Bay Area in April 2007 was $720,000. And if you're thinking that salaries in the Bay Area compensate for this difference, their move will involve a pay cut.

New York recently tried to allow children to enroll in the CHIP if their families earned as much as 400% of the federal poverty level. While this may seem like a circumvention of the point of CHIP--helping low-income kids--the level of qualification for enrolling in CHIP is based on the fiction of the federal poverty level.

The Bush administration now wants to force any child coming from a family with an income 250% of the federal poverty level to 1) wait one year before being enrolled, and 2) pay private insurance-equivalent copayments and premiums.

As an added catch, states wishing to enroll any children above 200% of the poverty level must prove they have enrolled 95% of below 200% children in the state. Not one state has achieved this to date, and according a Professor Cindy Mann of Georgetown, no state can achieve such an unrealistically high goal. Setting these pie-in-the-sky goals, such as the fantasy in No Child Left Behind of 100% of children performing at grade level by the 2013-14 school year--even if they are developmentally delayed, even if school rooms are falling apart, while school budgets are slashed--is endemic to an administration divorced from what is mocking calls "the reality-based community."

All this is just another sordid, embarrassing episode in the long national disgrace of our health care system. This byzantine, Kafkaesque labyrinth of regulations is well-designed to do one thing: To punish sick children for being poor. What kind of a president does that, and what sort of country are we if we allow it?

Potter Predictions

2007-07-21T00:30:00.000-07:00

Ok, I know that I am technically posting this at 12:30 am on 21 July, so the book has been on sale for half an hour, and there have been numerous spoilers flitting around the Internets. However, I was out drinking tonight, and am only just now back at my computer. For my own embarrassment, I'm putting it on the line and making some predictions, based on my exhaustive, erudite, and encyclopedic study of the Harry Potter series:

1. Snape will die.
Harry will come to understand that Snape was acting on Dumbledore's orders when Snape killed Dumbledore. Harry will recognize that he had been wrong about Snape all along.

2. Malfoy will die, but with his death help Harry greatly. Malfoy will betray the Dark Lord.

3. Dudley Dursley will perform magic.
Rowling has hinted that a character will perform magic who has never performed magic before. Dudley has Petunia's bloodline, which is magical, even if Petunia is a squib.

4. There will be a Deatheater attack at the wedding of Fleur and Bill.

5. Harry will discover something related to the Horcruxes at Godric's Hollow, where his parents were killed.

6. Neither Harry nor Ron nor Hermione will die.

7. Neville Longbottom will become a Herbology teacher at Hogwarts later in his life.

8. The locked room in the Department of Mysteries contains the source of magic itself--and Harry will either lose his own ability to do magic, or cause magic to cease from the world.

So there it is. By the time you're reading this, you'll know how many (if any) of these I got right. :)

the rich and the poor

2007-07-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times reported on a new policy in San Diego which requires those applying for or receiving public benefits to submit to unannounced visits from investigators looking for welfare fraud.

Anyone who has ever dealt with the welfare system knows that, even if one is applying for something as common as unemployment insurance, the invasions of privacy are onerous and purposefully humiliating. Lose a job, and you'll have to stand in line for hours, yelling your very personal information over a crowded desk. Giving up your privacy is an intentional aspect of a system designed to save money by scaring or confusing people away. As Ayn Rand noted, the hallmark of civilization is its degree of individual privacy--and it seems San Diego is slithering backwards into a tribal, paranoid culture.

We Americans do not care about much except money. Those who travel abroad often note that people in other counties do not incessantly compare their salaries or job prospects. Americans are like annoying couples who talk about nothing except about their children. It is no surprise then that San Diego is willing to sacrifice privacy in order to save a little bit of money.

Our American obsession with spending is, literally, driving us to bankruptcy. In 2006, Americans spent $42 billion more than they earned. American spending increases even as the value of our dollar nosedives. Our economic growth is so sluggish that by 2027 the People's Republic of China is expected to surpass our GDP. About 70% of our GDP is fueled by consumer spending, compared to 43% in Norway. Norway, of course, is the best place in the world to live, according to the United Nations--even with the weather. So much for the world's superpower.

The Last

2007-06-12T16:14:00.000-07:00

Two pieces of news today:

The last two white rhinos in Zambia were shot last week. One of these died, and her horn was cut off for sale by poachers.

A whale killed off Alaska contained fragments of a harpoon shot into it sometime around 1890. These antique fragments were discovered when the whale was killed and harvested.

The real question to ask of these news items is: Why, in 2007, are whales and rhinos still being killed by people? There are a multitude of possible answers, but the one that speaks to me is this: People are inherently evil, and we have failed as a species. If in a hundred years of knowing about this problem we have not come up with the political will to stop this madness, then I can think of no hope for us in the longer term. Perhaps it is now time for the rats and weeds to take over.

California Emissions Standards

2007-06-05T15:14:00.001-07:00

Many years ago, former California Governor Gray Davis attempted to phase out the possible carcinogen MTBE from California gasoline. He encountered legal trouble when a Canadian firm sued to block California's MTBE regulations from going into effect. The basis of the suit was that because they manufactured MTBE, their profits would be hurt if California banned MTBE; under the rules of NAFTA, Canadian courts had jurisdiction to speak upon California laws. "Free trade"--in this as in other respects--is an Orwellian phrase that really meant a series of restrictions. MTBE seeped into our water supply for years as lawyers talked to each other.

Now both Democrats and Republicans in California have tried over the last year to implement a tougher emissions standard for cars sold in California. This is a rare case of bipartisan cooperation on an important issue.

However, the EPA has refused to allow California's new regulations to go into effect on the basis that auto emissions are a federal, not state, matter. And under the Bush administration, the EPA refuses to require higher auto emissions. When the regulatory authority refuses to act, can other agencies step into fill the gap? This issue is currently being legislated and litigated.

Lost in this problem is the important question: Why should the EPA have jurisdiction over California's air? Certainly if a state did not want to protect its citizens to the minimum required at the federal level, that would be an issue--but what is happening here is a greater protection. Car manufacturers argue that if a state as populous as California implements more restrictive standards, then they will be forced to obey these guidelines in order not to lose the California market; if it were a smaller state, this might not be such an issue. Therefore, restrictions in California become--in their eyes--a backdoor way to set national car emission standards. Lost is the idea that if those who believe absolutely in the free market were true to their ideals, it would work fine to have California cut out of the new car market if it were not profitable for car companies.

The EPA refusing to allow this is like the feds stepping into say that California cannot have a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum wage. California does have a higher minimum wage, and it should be allowed to have higher emissions standards if that is what the voters of California desire.

Now Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher, of Virginia, has introduced legislation that would stop California's efforts entirely. To wit, his bill would forbid the EPA from allowing exemptions if "such state standards are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." By definition, increasing gas mileage standards is designed to do this.

This is Act II of the betrayal by the Democrats. The first act was the recent authorization of the spending bill for the Iraq war without inclusion of timetables; this basically gave Bush everything he wanted from the negotiation. Now, if this bill is passed, California will be betrayed and its desire to lead in environmental issues curtailed.

However, even if this proposal fails, the Democratic Congress has still reneged on its duty to California by not ordering the EPA to grant California a waiver in order to implement higher emissions standards.

Kristof on Health Care

2007-05-21T12:17:00.000-07:00

The always-interesting Nicholas Kristof had some disturbing numbers regarding American health care in his NYT column today:

a person without health insurance is 25% more likely to die prematurely
a child born today in the United States has a lower life expectancy than a child born today in Costa Rica
our infant mortality, maternal mortality, and longevity numbers are the worst in the industrialized world
on average, we in the US spend $7000 per person per year for health care, far more than any other nation
if our infant mortality rates dropped to the levels of France, Germany, and Italy, this would result in 12,000 fewer babies dying (somehow, the religious right doesn't seem as concerned about these babies as those who might be aborted)
the infant mortality rate in the US is three times higher than in the Czech Republic
a US woman compared to a European woman is 50% more likely to die in childbirth
by 2008, the average Fortune 500 company will spend more on health care for its employees than its entire net income, crippling the international competitiveness of our major companies
the head of Safeway, Steve Burd, formed the Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform in order to lobby Congress for national health care on behalf of corporations
31% of US health spending goes to management; can you imagine investing in a mutual fund that had a 31% load?
in terms of lives saved, the two biggest recent events have not been medical; they are anti-smoking laws and mandated air bags

One argument often floating to explain this is that the US is absorbing a flood of immigration from 3rd world countries; in other words, our population is becoming sicker by immigration of the poor than by a decay of our system. This comparison is wrong because European countries are simultaneously absorbing a flood of immigration themselves.

Some other stats from http://www.joepaduda.com/archives/000243.html:

despite waiting lists in other countries, US citizens have per-capita access to fewer beds, doctors, an equipment such as MRI's
although the US has more malpractice suits, awards in the US are 14-36% lower than in other industrialized nations
malpractice costs as a percentage of health care spending: 0.5%

And, of course, this from a study by the Commonwealth Fund, http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20070515/hl_afp/ushealthgovernmentpolitics_070515045735:

"The US ranked last in most areas, including access to health care, patient safety, timeliness of care, efficiency and equity. Americans were also last in terms of whether they had a regular physician."

Have a nice day. Don't get sick. ;)

Annihilation From Within

2007-05-11T22:06:00.000-07:00

A disturbing article from today's San Francisco Chronicle on preparations to suspend civil liberties in the wake of terrorist attack:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/11/TERROR.TMP

If Al Qaeda succeeds in a nuclear attack, we lose the Bill of Rights. Of course, we've already effectively lost the 4th Amendment. It's shocking to me, though, to read about about people meeting to actually plan what rights to take away in the wake of an attack.

If such a bomb does go off ... how can we be sure it wasn't intentionally set by those who stand to gain from the loss of our civil rights?

It took Winston Smith a while to figure out that the rocket bombs falling on the cities of Oceania were launched from within Oceania. Let's hope we learn from this.

Scientology Strikes Again

2007-05-11T12:56:00.000-07:00

In case you needed another reason to loathe extremist religions: John Travolta is denying proper medical care to his son, Jett, because of his religious beliefs.

According to sources close to the family, Jett suffers from symptoms consistent with autism. Scientology considers any mental disorder to be a result of uncleared "engrams," a phenomenon never established by any medical research. L. Ron Hubbard was very clear in his writings that he thought mental illness did not actually exist. No doubt Jett is being subjected to Scientology practices, consistent with his parents' religion, and entirely at odds with medical science.

Belief means that you continue to do something in the face of evidence against it. But how far does a parent take this position? To the point of hurting your child? Even faith-healer and charlatan Pat Robertson went begging to those Darwinist, science-practicing surgeons when he was diagnosed with cancer; he wasn't about to stake his life on his "personal relationship with Christ" and rely on prayer to heal him.

Should any parent have the right to endanger their children's health and happiness for the sake of a fairy tale fantasy?

Vonnegut II

2007-05-06T22:29:00.000-07:00

Vonnegut was also able to mock himself to great effect. He joked that smoking was a sexy way to commit suicide. He appeared as himself in a Rodney Dangerfield movie. He wrote about the fictional character Kilgore Trout, who appears in many of his books, then surprised everyone when Venus on the Half-Shell was published under the name of Kilgore Trout, leading to confusion as to whether Kilgore Trout actually existed. Vonnegut added fuel to this confusion by declaring that Kilgore Trout killed himself by drinking Drano in October 2004, after learning from a psychic that George Bush would win reelection. It's a messy, funny, weird farce--just as Vonnegut meant it to be, and just as life is.

But now Vonnegut's life is no more. We the living go on... busy, busy, busy.

I think Vonnegut wrote his own epitaph with these words from Cat's Cradle:
"If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who."

So It Goes

2007-05-06T22:20:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut is dead. So it goes. Poo-tee-weet.

I have always felt a connection to Vonnegut, and in no small part this connection stems from the fact that my middle name comes directly from one of his books, which my father was reading while I was pushed, howling and crying, into this mad world.

Vonnegut will always be inexorably linked in my mind to his peer, Joseph Heller, author of Catch-22 and Something Happened. Both Heller and Vonnegut distilled in comic perfection the absurdity of life. While Sartre and Camus viewed the madness of existence through a somewhat grim lens, Heller and Vonnegut made it clear that in the modern world the inhabitants of the lunatic asylum have taken over. To paraphrase Whittaker Chambers, when we've moved beyond a 19th century world and done away with the fiction of God, to a 20th century world where one cannot have faith in man, there is nothing left but unendurable pain, suffering, and comedy.

One of Vonnegut's funniest and most profound inventions was the fictional religion of Bokononism, in which the founder, Bokonon, declares that everything in the religion is a lie. It is only by believing untruths that one can find happiness. The Book of Bokonon, in which the text is in the form of calypsos, opens by warning the reader to close it at once, because everything in it is lies. If only other relgious texts were as honest. ;)

Vonnegut was able to skewer contemporary ideas (religion, the Cold War, Bushism) with wit and humor, in a way that brings Mark Twain to mind. Vonnegut knew instinctively that people react better to farce than ad hominem attacks, that honey is sweeter than piss and vinegar. He was misattributed with the famous "wear sunscreen" commencement address, and although these weren't his words, that message of humor, despair, and hope resonated because it was so much like his own writing.

The High Cost

2007-04-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

Today's New York Times Science Times section had an intersting set of statistics about sexual attraction. The statistics came from a study of 20,000 online profiles and participants who ranked the profiles in terms of attractiveness.

Not surprisingly, height in males was considered a major factor in attractiveness to females. Height and attractiveness were ranked with reference to height as 6'0" and an average income of $62,500 per year. Short stature could be overcome in terms of luring mates, and one's attractiveness score increased, by financial success.

5'10" just as attractive as 6'0" if income $32,000 more than 6'0"
5'8" just as attractive as 6'0" if income $146,000 more than 6'0"
5'2" just as attractive as 6'0" if income $277,000 more than 6'0"
5'0" just as attractive as 6'0" if income $325,000 more than 6'0"

This isn't the end of the story, because the 6'0" candidates still had to contend with those taller. To be found as attractive as someone 6'4", a 6'0" male would have to make $43,000 more.

Another interesting number: less than 1% of online profiles self-reported as "less than average" attractiveness. Go figure.

For the record, I'm 5'10". :)

3d art & Bosch

2007-03-04T01:10:00.000-08:00

I've often thought of how 2d works of art could be brought into 3 dimensions. Many years ago I saw an exhibit at SFMOMA of a series of small figures, like children's action figures, that had been crafted by body scans of actual people. These scans were then turned into sculptures by a 3-dimensional printing technique, such as rapid protyping. Very interesting stuff, but I haven't heard a lot more about it since then.

Now it seems a company has taken it a step further. Talaria Enterprises, http://www.talariaenterprises.com/index.html, sells a variety of sculptures based on paintings. This is exactly what I've been looking for.

I'm a big fan of Bosch--his stuff is what my nightmares are made of. Now you too can get a figure directly from the Garden of Earthly Delights or another of Bosch's psychodelic 15th century musings.

I'd love to see them do this work Brueghel. Oy, to have a miniature set of the characters from The Triumph of Death! :)

From Philadelphia to Room 101

2006-11-05T23:21:00.000-08:00

from the Washington Post, 4 Nov 06:
"The Bush administration has told a federal judge that terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed to reveal details of the 'alternative interrogation methods' that their captors used to get them to talk. The government says in new court filings that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most sensitive national secrets and that their release--even to the detainee's own attorneys--'could reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave damage.'"

"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you know the answer already. Everybody knows. The thing in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world."

Let us recap the story thus far:
1. The President reserves the right to jail, without due process of trial or even contact with attorneys, anyone in the world, including United States citizens (for example, Jose Padilla), whom he deems to be "enemy combatants."
2. The determination of who is and who is not an "enemy combatant" is soley the jurisdiction of the President, without appeal or judicial oversight. No evidence need be presented. The criteria upon which the President makes this determination are secret. The sources of the information are classified.
3. Even if contact with an attorney is approved, one may not communicate information about one's detention, though the conditions of the detention might themselves constitute a crime. Imagine that if you are picked up by the police and beaten, then try to tell an someone about the violence, you will be charged with revealing police department secrets, while the officers will remain unpunished.

We are at war with terrorism. We have always been at war with terrorism.

hit me

2006-10-05T22:24:00.000-07:00

I never know when it's going to hit me--but today it did, while standing in line at a clothes store. It staggered me so bad that when I returned home I felt so drained I immediately launched into a 3 hour nap, not that I could afford the time, but I had nothing left. I drifted off into deep sleep, where I imagined myself driving up and down 680 and 24, trying in vain to find a particular rock outcrop.

In this case, the cause of my funk was an obese woman trying to purchase $211 in clothes. It's hard to find clothes when you're fat--I should know. I had just spent a half hour flipping through clothes I liked, but which were made for someone just a fraction of me. When you're fat like me there's not much choice; you look first not at the price or at the style, but at the size. I suppose most people first look for a style they like, then try to find a size that fits. But everything is reversed for the obese.

This woman had a lot of clothes. It had probably taken her a long time to find them. But as the cashier rang her up, he politely informed her that her card had been declined.

Ouch. Embarassment. I shifted on my feet and considered finding another register, but there were no others available. I tried to avert my gaze. A few more people came into the line. And then it hit.

I was overwhelmed with empathy for this woman. I considered, for a fleeting moment, paying for her clothes, but I am unsure how the gesture would have been interpreted. I felt myself transported from where I was standing into her, feeling her anger and humiliation. I know on an intellectual level that the brain can easily be stimulated into faux out-of-body experiences, and that these moments I have of extreme empathy are just a manifestation of some deeper psychological complex. I remember though, as a child, how it would feel to look at myself through someone else's eyes and to feel their thoughts and emotions. I suppose that this is one reason why I've always felt so disconnected from myself--sometimes I scarcely recognize my face in a mirror. Nor do I easily recognize the faces of those I know; perhaps this is some minor form of agnosia

Images of the woman flash back to me even now. There was a time when these images would be overwhelming to me, when I would literally crowd out every other thought in my mind thinking about this, over and over. Now I've learned to control this better.

America worships the skinny and the rich. Paris Hilton, then, is the apogee of everything American, and that's why I so frequently mention her. America has no place for the fat or poor. You find whatever clothes you can in the reject pile. America has devolved into the fascist Abercrombie & Fitch ideal--everyone is beautiful, white, skinny, and posed in overexposed black and white photos right out of a Leni Reifenstahl film. Those who don't fit this mold--off to the camps with them. This is what America has become.

Sometimes I wish I could not feel the empathy, that I could somehow block it out. My years of flirtation with conservative views were, I think, just an attempt to block out the feelings of the raging, howling sorrow of the world that crashes uncontrollably at me in every direction all day long. When I was at Berkeley, in order to walk to class I literally had to step over unconscious homeless and ignore beggars. Every day I would pretend that many of the people around me were not people. I had to close my heart to the suffering as a defense. How much easier it would be to see the misery as the fault of the homeless, blame the sick for their sickness; how much easier it is to blame the poor for being poor, even though in the back of my mind I have never forgotten that I was a welfare baby.

I suppose that these thoughts are what lead me to Steinbeck, and Hemingway, and Faulkner, and help me understand how their work defines the inevitable suffering of life. I've been listening to Hemingway on CD in my car this last week, and his raw humanity has touched me. If I were not an atheist I would be a Buddhist, for the Buddha teaches that all life is suffering, and the biggest cause of suffering is the false expectation that you will somehow be immune to the pain.

Matthew Barney

2006-09-20T01:16:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Matthew Barney:

I recently had the opportunity to see the new Matthew Barney exhibit at the SFMOMA. I had missed his previous Cremaster Cycle exhibit, much to my regret, and was excited that this had come to San Francisco.

This multimedia exhibit was called “Drawing Restraint,” and involved a feature length film and several rooms filled with plastic castings, with drawings and short videos. Barney’s theme again derives from his experience with sports: Restraint on muscles affect and shapes them. Exercise transforms the body. And as always, Barney uses his body directly as part of the art.

At the opening Barney climbed up the 100+ foot atrium at SFMOMA, using a climbing rope and clipping himself on anchors along the wall. He climbed underneath a walkway and hanging suspended by the rope, began to draw on a high wall. He has done an original drawing in a similar way at each Restraint exhibition. This climbing also reminded me of the five levels of climbing from Cremaster 3, where Barney also employed a harness and climbing equipment as he scaled levels in the Guggenheim.

One of his works echoed the idea of drawing with encumbrance. He combined several heavy free weight plates with a pen, then evidently tried to make a drawing by pushing the weights.

The theme of transformation was echoed in a sculpture of ambergris. Ambergris is regurgitated Sperm whale digestive material. It is thought that it may help passage of hard squid skeletons out of the whale. Ambergris is highly prized in the perfume industry; in fact, beachcombers can expect to reap about $8000 per pound of the rare substance.

Ambergris must remain at sea for approximately a decade to be valuable. During this time it loses its initial fecal odor and develops a sweet fragrance. So Barney’s theme of transformation is echoed in a huge, 20 foot+ sculpture of faux ambergris using glued squid shells. This sculpture also plays a role in the film Restraint 9.

No Matthew Barney exhibit would be complete without something made with petroleum jelly. In this case, Barney filled an enormous mold with petroleum jelly and allowed it to settle once solidified. The resulting shape was then cast in white plastic. The textures and fractures on this were very interesting.

For the mold form Barney used the symbol of The Field, a personal symbol for him that occurs in all his work. The Field in some ways reflects his sports background, however in Restraint seems to emphasize transformation. Each left/right side can be seen as one of the two Occidental guests featured in the film, who when joined on a Japanese whaling vessel are transformed. The Field also has the gross outline of a ship.

The Japanese whaling ship featured in the film is the Nisshin Maru, which in 1999 was involved in a collision with a Greenpeace vessel. This event is mentioned in one of the rare moments of dialogue in Barney’s film, in which a member of the crew discusses the mark (both literal and figurative) left by the collision. The collision can therefore be seen as itself a kind of transformative event, altering the shape of the boat and bringing to worldwide attention in a dramatic way the fact that the Japanese still practice whaling, an unnecessary and barbaric fact that should be a source of great shame to the Japanese naton.

Barney chooses not to address the whaling issue. However, as the film progresses The Field sculpture dissolves on the deck of the Nisshin Maru, looking remarkably like a whale being cut apart by flensing knifes. Flensing also takes place in the scene between Barney and his wife Björk.

Barney and Björk arrive on the ship separately, and are immediately cleaned in preparation for a tea ceremony; Barney’s scraggly beard is shaven and Björk is bathed, and they are each dressed in elaborate costumes, transforming them. Following the ceremony, they embrace and lovingly cut each other with flensing knives until they are transformed into whales. Indeed, this very act is happening on a whaling ship which transforms whales into oil—much like the petroleum jelly that gradually fills the room until Barney and Björk are swimming in it.

In sum, this was a very thought-provoking exhibition by that most rare and unique of persons: An important contemporary artist.

the hedgehog

2006-08-01T23:01:00.000-07:00

ron jeremy (runner0555@yahoo.com) writes:

Newton,
Dude... how long does it take to put some scan trons through the machine and read the short answer questions. all my other teachers had my grades in yesterday! you said they would be in on Monday. it's Tuesday night and there are no grades. get off your fat ass and put in the goddamn grades!!! Jesus Christ. if you stopped drinking sodas and slurpies, maybe you would be able to see your dick without having to look in the mirror. do your job and submit the fucking grades!

_____

Well. Ironic--considering that I had alread turned in grades. :)

In response, I think of the famous Chris Rock Horoscope bit: "Taurus...you're gonna die. Virgo ... you're gonna die. Gemini... you're gonna die _twice_." If you're this concerned about a grade, you didn't pass. If you need to know this bad, you flunked.

Now the real Ron Jeremy has an MA in Special Education. This means he's taken and passed a lot of classes. And I'm quite sure that the Hedgehog was never quite that rude to any of his instructors. :)

when the levee breaks...

2006-07-26T16:30:00.000-07:00

A recent article, deeply buried, said:

US CORPS FINDS SOME SAACRAMENTO LEVEES NOT UP TO STANDARD

BY SAMANTHA YOUNG, Associated Press Writer

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has withdrawn its endorsement of levees protecting parts of Sacramento, reversing a 1998 evaluation that has facilitated a construction boom in the Natomas area.

In a letter released Tuesday to The Associated Press, the Corps' chief engineer in Sacramento attributed the decision to local and federal studies that have unearthed levee vulnerabilities.

"Based on this information, we can no longer support our original position regarding certification of the levee system surrounding the Natomas area," wrote Thomas E. Trainer, chief of the engineering division.

The letter was forwarded to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which certified the Natomas levees in light of the Corps' 1998 finding the levees provided 100-year flood protection.

The certification led to skyrocketing development of the Natomas area — a section of the state capital north of downtown that flood experts now say could be submerged by at least 13 feet of water if the levees failed.

An area with 100-year protection has a one chance in 100 of flooding in any given year.

If Natomas were to lose its 100-year designation, flood insurance would become mandatory for people with federally insured mortgages, insurance rates would increase, and building restrictions could be implemented.

But local officials described the Corps letter as an expected formality, which they have been told should not change FEMA's current assessment of Natomas.

That's because the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency, which commissioned a March study that first identified the gapping weaknesses in the levees, has already begun a $370 million project to upgrade the system to 200-year flood protection. That is twice the protection required by FEMA.

"We're not going to wait for FEMA to act, we're got to act to resolve this," said Pete Ghelfi, director of engineering for the Sacramento flood agency.

He said construction should begin next year to fortify the Natomas levees over the next five years.

In total, 20 of the 26 miles of levees surrounding Natomas need some kind of work, including erosion protection, deeper walls to prevent seepage and greater height to withstand bigger floods.

FEMA spokeswoman Kim Walz confirmed that the agency would not re-evaluate the Natomas area if Sacramento officials fix the levee problem.

Jeffrey Mount, a professor at the University of California, Davis, said local planners now face a real decision about whether to temporarily curb construction behind levees that will not be strengthened for another five years.

"The politically difficult question is whether you continue to put people at risk," Mount said. "Is there the political will to halt development out on the flood plain until they've got this worked out?"

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/07/25/state/n151231D44.DTL&hw=levee&sn=001&sc=1000

______________

Jeff Mount is a great geologist, who has done a lot of work in rocks near and dear to my heart (the White Mountains and the Poleta Formation, in particular). He was also fired from a flood advisory position by Schwarzenegger for daring to suggest that Sacramento could face a Katrina-like disaster because of its weak levees.

Now we see the Army Corps retreated, trying to shift blame away from itself before all hell breaks loose. Remember that the levees in the Delta are even more dangerous; a breach in them will flood the California Aqueduct, and cause SoCal to lose half its water. No one wants to talk much about this, no one wants to spend the money now to shore up the weak levees.

I find it grimly funny that the Natomas area of Sacramento, built in such a bad place only because of the assurances of the Corps, now finds itself abandonned and subject to increased mandatory flood insurance. Could this get any worse? Yes--when the levees fail.

field trip complaint

2006-07-14T23:20:00.000-07:00

A student writes (in text exactly as I received it):

“So let me get this strait. We have to go on field trips that are really far away. The field trip on Sunday is going to be close to a 4 hour round trip. That is going to cost 40 dollars for gas, 3 dollars for toll, time spent off work,wear and tear on my vehicle, and a waste of a weekend. And your telling me that isn't enough to get the extra credit? We have to do a write up on top of that? I figure dishing out all this money and eating up my weekend should be enough. And Why are the Field trips so far away? There are rocks everywhere! I don't understand your reasoning for this.
And about your tests. I think we should be aloud to bring in a note card of some type. There are way to many weird definitions to remember. All this information is really just going to be to memorize for the test and then brain dump. We just want to fur fill a science requirement. We don't want to devote our lives to rocks.”

----------------

Because this missive expresses concerns that many students have, although do not articulate to me, let me respond issue by issue.

> That is going to cost 40 dollars for gas, 3 dollars for toll
Some students have this idea that tuition is the only cost of going to college. I don’t know who told them this idea, but in my experience the tuition is about half of the accrued expenditures of going to college.

Consider books. Many students are outraged at paying $100 or more for textbooks. But as instructors, we regularly observe students chatting away on cell phones, a luxury that for some people produces a bill far in excess of this. Fashionable clothes, iPods, movies—all of these things cost money, but for this spending there seems to be no regret. It is comic to hear students complain about buying books or paying tolls as they spend greater sums on frivolous pleasures and socializing. They seem to expect that going to college should not necessitate a reduction in living standards.

> time spent off work
More and more colleges are changing their schedules to allow gaps of hours between classes, stretching the classes out over the course of the entire day, in order to prevent students from going to part-time jobs. These colleges find that students who are also working are distracted from their studies and achieve poorer grades.

While this will not, of course, happen at the JC level, any student transferring to a 4-year school will get a very rude shock if he or she expects accommodation because of a work schedule.

> a waste of a weekend
Or was it just one day?

What rubs me wrong is this sense of an entitlement to a “weekend.” Only people with union jobs are guaranteed weekends. All other employees dread the Friday afternoon request by a boss to work the weekend; this was perfectly parodied in the film “Office Space.”

More and more, 4-year schools are finding that they can put more instruction in a semester if they schedule midterms on weekends, outside of classtime. In my experience, there is very little flexibility with this—you either show up to the midterm at the time scheduled, or you flunk the class. So expect that if you are transferring, you may not get class time off in order to take a test, but will have it scheduled during a Sat or Sun, presumably “wasting” a weekend.

> We have to do a write up on top of that?
You will be hard pressed to find a science course at a 4-year school that does not require a write-up in order to get credit for a field trip. And as this class is required to be equivalent of a university course in order to qualify for transferablility, I feel I should follow this standard.

> And Why are the Field trips so far away? There are rocks everywhere!
Of all the comments in this email, this is the one that get to me the most. It reminds me of the biology instructors who, when arguing for splitting up funds between bio and geology, say that they should get more money because “You can just go pick up a rock anywhere.”

I really feel like I’m not getting through to a person who thinks this. But I’ve come to expect that with some minds there is only so much I can do to reach them.

> There are way to many weird definitions to remember
Yes, indeed. If you already knew the vocabulary, then there wouldn’t be any challenge to the class, would there?

> All this information is really just going to be to memorize for the test and then brain dump.

I know what you mean. The analogy I always made when I was a student was to shitting. You eat all this food, digest it a bit, trying to extract something useful from it, then in one cataclysmic moment, you blow it all out, using the paper of the final test as toilet paper. Of course, this is hardly an original thought; students have probably been noting the brain dump as long as there have been universities.

> We don't want to devote our lives to rocks
Is one field trip a lifelong devotion to rocks? And why not, anyway? :)

Gollum

2006-07-14T23:16:00.000-07:00

In my dream my parents live in an enlarged, vertical version of their real house, with an ornate rococo roof, replete with gables and terraces. And scampering around on this roof I see a small humanoid. It pounces with Gollum-like ease over the roof, and as it rushes toward me, screeching, I see that it does indeed resemble Gollum, although the face looks like Macaulay Culkin with large eyes.

I try to alert my father to this thing I have seen, but no matter how many times I explain it, he refuses to believe it. There are other people in the house, however, and they are curious. They open windows and peer out trying to see this monster.

It is then that I understand the monster had planned this all along. As people lean out to look, a cold, muscular hand reaches from above and yanks them headfirst out the window. They die as they hit the ground far below.

As I pass a window, desperately trying to shut it, I find myself face to face with this monster, which growls at me between yellowed fangs. I awake screaming.

Fox's John Gibson

2006-06-29T20:42:00.000-07:00

Normally, the quality of what passes as "news" on Fox News is such an affront to journalism, good taste, and a fact-based perspective on the world that criticizing Fox News becomes an exercise in arguing against a lunatic. A good rule of thumb: Don't argue with a fool, because people won't know the difference.

However, recently John Gibson, one of the Fox talking heads, made a statement that bears examination.

On 11 May 2006, as part of his show The Big Picture, John Gibson made the following pronouncement, in response to demographic data showing high birth rates among Hispanics:

"By far, the greatest number [of children under five] are Hispanic. You know what that means? Twenty-five years and the majority of the population is Hispanic. To put it bluntly, we need more babies."

When I studied eugenics (back in another life, when I was a history major at Cal) I came across innumerable such statements expressing white fear in the early twentieth century of a creeping "ethnic" population takeover. This fear was, in part, responsible for atrocities such as California's forced sterilization programs. California's aggressive sterilization of those "unfit" to breed in the early twentieth century was later used as a model for Nazi sterilization efforts, which were planned on a scale that would allow the Nazis to use the entire population of the Soviet Union as slaves, yet make that generation the last generation of Soviets, because these workers would be sterilized en masse.

Here's another quote:

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind."

This isn't from some raving Fox News talking head, but from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Oliver Holmes, writing in the infamous 1927 Buck v. Bell decision.

I had thought that such pseudoscientific nonsense had long since passed into the region where only ignorant rednecks espoused such views as they denied the Holocaust, argued that mercury in their fillings was poisoning them, and feared the Trilateral Commission.

Sadly, I now see, eugenic views have crept back into the public discourse, and hardly a peep of protest is heard. Score: Fox News 1, America 0.

Six Feet Under and Clawing My Way Up

2006-06-26T00:11:00.000-07:00

I don’t get HBO, so I have to wait for the shows I love to come out on DVD, and still it takes a long time for me to see them. So it was only yesterday that I saw the series finale of 6 Feet Under.

I was deeply jarred and disturbed. I cried continuously through the finale, and then intermittently for the next hour. Even today I find myself tearing up. Every time I hear the Sia song Breathe Me I start weeping anew. My throat is so choked up now that I can barely swallow. The final sequence, where Claire drives away from the Fisher home to start her new life in New York, while she has visions of the deaths of all her family, including herself, collapsed something inside my heart. I just lost it—and I can’t find “it” again.

Why did this disturb me so profoundly? Granted, the final four minutes showed how each of these characters I had come to know and love met their demise. Such a wrap-up was expected from a show in which every episode dealt with a death and its aftermath. I think what got to me so much was Claire’s story.

Claire accepts a job in New York to pursue a career in photography. At the last minute the job falls through, but her dead brother Nate advises her to not tell anyone and just go anyhow, banking that she will find something else soon enough. This is perhaps the point where Claire pushes through and I have failed. I am so overwhelmed by my anxieties and fears that unless a job is 100% secure, and I have an apartment lined up in a good neighborhood, and all this incredible bullshit list of worries is satisfied, then I can’t go. Perhaps these fears will never end, never be satisfied, and I’ll never go.

I’ve thought as I’m driving to teach some class that I should just keep driving past the college, past the Central Valley, past the Sierras, out of the suffocating claustrophobia of California, and be well into Nevada before I get out of the car. John Kennedy Toole, after he wrote Confederacy of Dunces, drove all around the country, aimlessly, going to the houses of famous writers, going to the coast, before he stopped on lonely road and directed a hose from his tailpipe into his sealed car. I feel as if I should cut myself off from everything I’m doing now. Start a new life. Get another chance. Have an adventure. Fall in love. Raise a family. Buy a house. Start my life. Feel, in some small corner of my heart, a measure of happiness. Yet, I know that none of these things will ever, ever happen for me if I continue like this.

Am I David then? David keeps the family business going when while Nate goes off to Seattle. He’s playing the father role even before his father dies (episode 1). Is this responsibility such a bad thing? Or do I feel drawn to responsibility as an escape from fear?

Recently I explained to a friend how little I’ve traveled, how I’ve never been to Europe or New York for example, because I figure that if a trip is going to cost me $2k, then I should really pay off $2k of debt before I incur that sum in debt again. Responsible, she judged—but boring.

Why do I feel such overwhelming fear over imaginary problems, and yet so little trepidation over real dangers? When that punk popped my tire on Telegraph while my brother-in-law and I were sitting in the car, and we confronted him and ran him down in the street, my pulse didn’t even rise. I see how my life is spiraling downward and yet I don’t feel an impetus to act, to do something, anything. I don’t know what to do. This isn’t the life I hoped for, yet I have no idea how to change it, or where it went wrong.

I thought graduating from Berkeley would help me find some sort of future, but there are just no jobs anymore, no real jobs with benefits and a livable wage. There are plenty of part-time, no benefit, no advancement dead ends. In theory there are real jobs, but I never got the offer, I never got the entry-level position I needed to move away from jobs where I ran a cash register. How many times after I graduated did I break down crying and think that I had it all completely backwards, that I should have studied a trade like plumbing? That I should join the military? When I was a student I imagined that the years of scraping money and worrying about how I was going to pay rent were only temporary, that this would change after I had a degree. If I could go back, would I tell my younger self that this was only the beginning? That a dozen years later I would still struggle to pay rent, be far in debt, never have enough money, never take vacations, always be scratching just to live and not have a hope of any financial security. That I still wouldn’t have health care? Maybe I wouldn’t tell my younger self how life was going to turn out—at least back then false hope kept me going.

So why do I keep going now? I really cannot say. Claire’s death scene involved her lying in bed, at 102, surrounded by photographs spanning her illustrious career. I suppose that on some level I still hope for success, I hope for love, though my experience so far suggests that these won’t be mine. I have hope that somehow the gnawing, terrible hunger will go away and I’ll lose weight before I go crazy and cut off my excess rolls of fat with a knife, claw the skin off my fat face.

Why do I get up in the morning? As Beckett said, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Why don’t I give in to the dark, melodramatic, self-pitying urge take that last, final stroll over the Golden Gate? I can’t say why, but I won’t give up, not yet, even though I feel I have failed so miserably in so many ways, that I am such a disappointment to myself and to my family, that I cannot form even a basic human connection other than to tell trite, meaningless jokes and perform mediocre impersonations. Perhaps this is the core of why I feel so inspired by Claire’s departure to New York. Perhaps it is not too late for me yet. Here Tolkien speaks to me: Despair is a theological error, as one does not know how the story ends, so the hobbits struggle on, without hope but without despair.

matthew barney

2006-06-22T00:49:00.000-07:00

I dreamt I was in a Matthew Barney movie, the sculptor who works in giant blobs of Vaseline.

I was touring a college campus, being introduced to the rooms where I would teach. One was a giant amphitheatre, such as the ones at Cal that accommodate 1000 students. But this auditorium was slanted oddly. The podium was the highest point, and all the students’ seats descended downwards, so that they would look up at me. As I was touring, a class in criminology began, and I was handed a test. I struggled but couldn’t answer any of the questions.

Then as I tried to leave, I found it impossible. Stairways turned me back into the auditorium. I waited for elevators, but they were too small for me to fit in. Finally I emerged o the outside, where it was not night. As people milled about, I saw strange flashes. I looked at a homeless man on the ground in a sleeping bag, and FLASH! I saw that he was some sort of grotesque demon.

This happened on the sidewalk too. As I wandered around, FLASH, and the people would reveal themselves as monsters.

Far, far away from the classroom, on the summit of a grassy hill, was a set of elevators that would take me to another part of the campus. I was very angry at having to walk through mud and grass just to get to where I was going.

A constant feeling throughout this dream was the Americans with Disabilities Act, and my anger that this campus was not built to ADA standards. Sure—I could walk through mud now, and jump fences to get to where I needed to go, but what if I broke a leg? None of the elevators connected to where I had t go. I was walked, walking around this campus until I was quite tired.

I had an argument in a hallway with a student about gangs. I told her she need not worry about minor street gangs, as they were small time. I suggested that she should instead be worried about gangs such as the IRS, because they had so much more power.

As I wandered, I found myself swimming, then diving into mucky, distasteful water. I saw a car submerged. It looked old, grown over with weeds, as if it bad been there a long time. Yet there was pounding coming from inside the car, as if someone were trapped there.

FLASH—I would see a man and a woman making love, then FLASH! I saw that it was actually a demon, a small blue demon, forcing himself into her mouth. She could not see what I saw.

Blobs of Vaseline became more and more part of the landscape. Soon I was wading through Vaseline as I solidified. I sought escape, but there were only the elevators that led no where.

from Thomas Hart Benton

2006-06-11T19:20:00.000-07:00

I think this says what I feel especially well. The name is a pseudonym, of course, for fear of retaliation for speaking the truth. :)
__________________________

http://chronicle. com/jobs/ news/2006/ 06/2006060901c/ careers.html
Friday, June 9, 2006
A Tough-Love Manifesto for Professors
By Thomas H. Benton

An Academic in America
"Thomas H. Benton," an assistant professor of English, offers his take on academic work and life.

Ask any older employer of recent graduates and you'll hear that most bachelor's degrees are inferior to the high-school diplomas of a generation ago, and, what's more, there is a gross sense of entitlement among today's students, even after they become employees. Somehow they think their employers exist to serve them.

"How much do you pay? Is this interview over, or what?"

One reason for that is obvious enough. Those job applicants just spent the last four years regarding highly educated adults as customer-service representatives. Why? An entire generation of professors has been weakened by the transformation of higher education into a part-time, no-benefit operation. The steady erosion of tenure and the use of student evaluations as a faculty-culling device are turning college teachers into spineless crowd pleasers.

"Please, please hire me! I'll do anything! I'll keep the students entertained and give them all high grades because everyone's special and who am I to judge anyway?"

The last two months I wrote about the relationship between the "7 Deadly Sins of Students" and the "7 Deadly Sins of Professors."

My argument is that a student culture of self-indulgence is enabled by the failure of professors to maintain expectations in the classroom. At many institutions, courses have been gutted to the point that students receive high grades for minimal effort, and the lowest grade many professors can risk assigning is a "B+." Even that will produce imperious complaints from students who think they are destined for greatness: "I worked really hard. Your class is not fair. Raise my grade or I'm taking it to the provost. Just wait till you get your evaluation!"

The consumer mentality of students results in their desiring less rigorous instruction because they are paying more for it. They use the cost of tuition -- which I acknowledge, is far too high -- as a justification for lowering standards. So they will pay again later when they discover that their degrees are a form of inflated currency and that employers will not treat them like little geniuses but expect them to actually work without complaining. Even if one accepts the instrumentalist view of education, we do our students no favors by letting them leave with so little knowledge and so much attitude.

Students, even if they are paying tuition, are not "customers" because, at most institutions, their tuition covers only a fraction of the total cost of their education, which is paid for by the state, donors, and accumulated institutional capital. The professors are also making a major contribution by working for far less than comparably educated professionals.

Nevertheless, students think they are customers because the majority of college teachers know they are "employees" who will be fired for displeasing those customers. The 2005-6 version of the American Association of University Professor's "Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession" shows that in the last generation or so the proportion of faculty members teaching part time has doubled. It was 23 percent in 1971; it was 46 percent in 2003. It's probably more than 50 percent now.

That percentage does not include all of the teaching assistants who log most of the student contact hours at large universities. It's probably safe to say that more than two-thirds of college teaching is now done by people who are routinely punished for maintaining standards. The professional survival of untenured faculty members depends on processing large numbers of students without making waves.

After at least 10 years of trying to balance idealism and reality, I am finally one of the faculty members in a position to fight the trend: I was awarded tenure this spring. And already I see that my perspective on the teacher-student relationship is shifting as a result of having job security.

So I am tinkering with a list of things that will structure my relations with students in the coming years. It's my "Tough-Love Manifesto," and I am thinking about putting it on my syllabi:

I. Students are not customers. Teachers are not employees.
II. Students and teachers have obligations to each other.
III. Here is what I expect from students:

a.. You will treat everyone in the class, including the professor, with the respect due to all human beings.
b.. You will attend every class, give your full attention to the material, and conduct yourself in an appropriate manner.
c.. You will agree to do the work outlined in the syllabus on time.
d.. You will acknowledge that previous academic preparation (e.g., writing skills) will affect your performance in this course.
e.. You will acknowledge that your perception of effort, by itself, is not enough to justify a distinguished grade.
f.. You will not plagiarize or otherwise steal the work of others.
g.. You will not make excuses for your failure to do what you ought.
h.. You will accept the consequences -- good and bad -- of your actions.

IV. Here is what students can expect from me:
a.. I will treat you with the respect due to all human beings.
b.. I will know your name and treat you as an individual.
c.. I will not discriminate against you on the basis of your identity or your well-informed viewpoints.
d.. I will manage the class in a professional manner. That may include educating you in appropriate behavior.
e.. I will prepare carefully for every class.
f.. I will begin and end class on time.
g.. I will teach only in areas of my professional expertise. If I do not know something, I will say so.
h.. I will conduct scholarly research and publication with the aim of making myself a more informed teacher.
i.. I will return your assignments quickly with detailed feedback.
j.. I will pursue the maximum punishment for plagiarism, cheating, and other violations of academic integrity.
k.. I will keep careful records of your attendance, performance, and progress.
l.. I will investigate every excuse for nonattendance of classes and noncompletion of assignments.
m.. I will make myself available to you for advising.
n.. I will maintain confidentiality concerning your performance.
o.. I will provide you with professional support and write recommendations for you if appropriate.
p.. I will be honest with you
q.. Your grade will reflect the quality of your work and nothing else.
r.. I am interested in your feedback about the class, but I am more interested in what you learned than how you feel.

If you are going to be tough on students, you have to be much tougher on yourself. Your autonomy as a professor comes from having the strength to stand for something more than keeping your job for just one more semester.

Begin with small steps. Cut and paste the Tough-Love Manifesto into your syllabi with, perhaps, some customized modifications. Now, repeat after me: "I have principles. I demand respect. I have high expectations. I am a professor." Say that 10 times a day, at least. Can you handle that?

In one semester, I predict, you will begin to feel your educational biceps growing. In two semesters you will have six-pack academic abs. But you have to stay on the program, even when the grade-grubbers and accidental plagiarists start to line up outside your office.

Students and professors have entered into a mutual pact of low expectations, and somebody has to be the first to re-arm. The popularity of programs like American Idol in the college-student demographic shows how hungry they are for honest criticism. On some level, they want the hard truth instead of the "everybody is a winner" nonsense. They will rise to high expectations if teachers are firm and resist sending mixed messages. And we teachers should want, most of all, to be respected rather than liked, even if that means having to grow some backbone and take some risks.

It is absolutely true that I can act with authority because I have tenure, though, of course, the scope of that authority is limited to the classroom. Most untenured faculty members who maintain high expectations are eventually unemployed faculty members. There is such a thing as duty to one's students regardless of consequences, but untenured professors also have obligations to their families not to lose their jobs.

College students seem more immature than ever before, and, as a consequence, more likely to bring disgrace upon themselves and their institutions. Tom Wolfe was not exaggerating in I Am Charlotte Simmons. You just have to watch the news to know how serious the problem of character has become at American universities. Maybe it's time to restore in loco parentis? I believe most parents would support that, even if it meant granting more authority and protection to the faculty members who would have to fill that role.

Parents, legislators, administrators -- are you reading this? If you want educated, disciplined graduates who are willing to work hard and become productive citizens -- who will not disgrace you -- then you have to reverse the de-professionalizat ion of college faculty members. And that means saving tenure before it is downsized out of existence for the sake of bigger athletic facilities, fancier dining halls, and better campus landscaping.

This is not a partisan issue. Yes, tenure also protects a small percentage of highly visible, career-driven, ideological extremists. But they are disdained by the majority of moderate professors. Freedom of speech sometimes means letting the Klan demonstrate. And education with character means giving teachers the protection they need to uphold standards. Otherwise, you might as well send your children on a four-year cruise.

It's time to restore tough-love to higher education or just call the whole thing off.

Night

2006-06-01T00:59:00.000-07:00

I was flipping channels the other day when I recognized a voice. It stopped me cold and I spent twenty minutes transfixed. My embarrassing discovery: I had stumbled into Oprah's show.

The voice was that of Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and survivor of Auschwitz. Oprah had featured his magnum opus, Night, in her book of the month thing, but this tv program showed Oprah walking with Wiesel through Auschwitz, past the glass-encased displays of mounds of hair, shoes, pictures, childrens' clothes. It was deeply moving to see Wiesel talk about this, my own personal Virgil guiding a tour of Hell. His low, steady voice was firm that others should know what happened there.

After this show, I felt moved. I went to the framed, signed letter from Elie Wiesel that I have (on loan from a close friend, to whom he sent it). I started listening to a reading of Night in my car as I drive.

The question Oprah did not ask, and the question that has haunted me ever since reading Night at about age 12, was this: How do you leave? How do you leave the exhibits at Auschwitz and go on with the rest of your life? How do you ever smile or laugh again? I got a Bachelor's degree in German history trying (unsuccessfully) to answer these questions.

Every time I feel some bit of joy, I also feel a bit of guilt. Perhaps this comes from the Puritan roots of America. But I rather think it's a reminder to me not to live trivially, to live and think and write as if it mattered.

I was an atheist long before reading Night, but I think it was this book in particular, and Primo Levi's autobiography Survival in Auschwitz, that made me understand that the Holocaust disproves even the possibility of a benevolent God. I think of that scene where the young boy is being hanged by the Nazis, and the other prisoners are made to watch; the hanging doesn't go right, and the boy is held by the rope for 10 minutes, kicking and choking, 20 minutes, swinging and gasping, and it just will never end. And the cry goes up among the prisoners: Where is God?

I don't want to imagine a God who would allow the Holocaust to happen. I don't want to imagine the God who gave my cousin leukemia. Don't get me started on pediatric brain cancer. If there were such a God, then I would hope that upon death I could have the opportunity to express my feelings with my fists, against the bridge of His nose. Perhaps the Gnostics were right: We're not going to Hell, this world is Hell.

I once told my friend, from whom I have Wiesel's letter, of Wiesel's importance for my atheism. She replied that even though Wiesel remains religious, he would understand. Here's a man who remembers as a teenager standing before Dr. Mengele, and yet continues to write, to live, to teach. Such is the greatness of the man from whom we all have something to learn.

how i spent my summer vacation

2006-06-01T00:46:00.000-07:00

I know how to work, but I never learned how to enjoy time off. I finished grading finals early this term, because I wanted to make the very most of the time I have off. But now that I'm off, I find it's very hard to get anything done, and I'm beating myself up over not doing it.

I feel this constant, nagging voice telling me to leave, to go somewhere. It's as if the "down time" I get during the term is no longer valid. Now every second is ticking, ticking. I try to pack in so much fun that I'm not having any fun. If I'm shopping too slowly, I feel the pull of the clock. If I'm sleeping, I feel an urge to get up and prepare for a trip.

Planning and preparing for trips causes me anxiety; I always worry and over-pack. But once I'm on the road, my anxieties melt away. Only once in my life did I feel a sense of utter abandon, where I could just pick up and leave without guilt. This was immediately after my summer field geology course, where I had been living in tents for 6 weeks. Once the class was over, it was another two weeks before I slept in a bed regularly, because I felt such an impetus to just _not be home_. Having running water and electricity didn't seem right anymore. It was a wonderful feeling of freedom to grab my tent and sleeping bag and just go.

The trips I'm planning are all solo. I think that is the root of some of my anxiety. It's not particularly dangerous to backpack alone, but I have on one occassion shifted a rock by standing on it so that I was pinned. Luckily, I had a partner that time who helped free me. Otherwise ... I guess it would have been time to sever my foot. :) This isn't what worries me, though.

What worries me is the long days and nights alone, without distraction, with only the poor company of my thoughts. Sometimes I feel distressed if I drive even a short distance without the radio playing. I need something in the background to keep the thoughts at bay.

Of course, having these long periods of silence is what appeals to me. I have spent days where I haven't spoken a single word. I have spent days where I haven't seen another human being. I have gotten to know myself better, and what I know is that I would be much happier with company. :)

a barbecue

2006-05-21T16:05:00.000-07:00

It begins with a barbeque. I’m at a park with an old friend of mine and we need to clean a grill in order o barbeque. So I suggest that we take the grill to a building close by. We try a couple of locked doors before one finally opens.

Inside there are long rows of paintings. This is some sort of art gallery, although there are not visitors milling about. We ask someone who looks like a staff member where we can clean this grill, and he directs us to the other side, where we exit into a large industrial yard, with welding and activity going on. We enter another building, which is a warehouse, and are then directed by another staff member further away to a concert hall. We have to climb through a broken window to go between the buildings. Then there is a very narrow elevator with three floors. We try in vain to find the floor with a cleaning sink, and finally end back up where we first entered the building. The worker who had helped us then walks us down the hall to a large kitchen, which is filled with activity. My friend cleans the grill.

By now, however, I am feeling a growing rage, an insane anger. It’s not directed at her, but at everything around me. I can feel my heart pounding and my pulse quickening. I don’t know why I feel so upset. I feel like I’m going to explode. So I duck out of the kitchen to try to walk about a bit to calm myself down.

This hallway has painting as well. They are almost all portraits, nineteenth century portraits of well-dressed people. Now something is different about them. I had missed it before. Now I can see that every few paintings, the eyes in a painting come alive. They move, follow me. And they glow. Most paintings have dead, painted eyes. But inexplicably every third or fourth painting stares at me.

I find myself in the concert hall, which is empty except for a television. I click it on and see the middle of the movie Jaws. I watch it for quite some time, because I am relaxed and surprised when one of the original workers who directed me here bursts into the auditorium and orders me out.

Now the halls are bustling with activity, and I try to warn every one I see about the eyes in the paintings. No one listens. I am becoming very frustrated at my utter inability to spread the word of this menace. Then a very tall, elderly black man grabs me by the arm and pulls me aside.

He announces that he is a paleontologist for the Smithsonian, which is evidently where I’ve been wandering about. He directs me to a cluttered alcove and together we remove crates and boxes in order to access a locked cabinet tucked far in the back.

This cabinet is full of fossils of oviraptors—dinosaurs who ate eggs—and fossils of dinosaur eggs. As the paleontologist leaves me to explore this cabinet, he explains that as a child in Haiti his mother had laid an extensive curse on him because he had stolen some chicken eggs. It was this curse he had also put on the paintings, and this was why some of them were coming alive now, infecting visitors, and reaching out from the paintings themselves to grab and strangle people.

I find myself out on an airport tarmac. A continuous stream of jets lands close to me. People are assembled, awaiting the arrival of some VIP. I am fearful that whoever it is will visit the portraits and hence become infected with rage, as I have been, but looking into the eyes of the portraits. I have to stop the plane from landing.

Nothing I say or do has any affect. I am distraught with frustration. Then out of the plane comes a female singer, whom the crowd identifies as my wife. She is very famous. I am continuously complimented by the crowd for being married to her, but as I look at these sycophants in the eyes, then I see that they too have become infected by the paintings.

I have no idea what this dream means, but it disturbed me greatly.

tachyon tableaux

2006-05-12T19:46:00.000-07:00

It was recently proven that light can be made to run in reverse:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/05/060511185537.htm

This is a startling concept, especially in that in seems to violate the law against speeds faster than light. You inject a beam of light into a fiber optic cable, but the instant that it begins to move into the cable, it is greeted by the same beam travelling out in reverse from the cable. One resolution is that the lightbeam moves backwards in time, as is thought to be the case with the elusive class of particles called tachyons. Clearly something is at work here.

After I read this I had a dream. I was invited to a special Kripalu yoga group, in which about twenty other people had previously participted. It was my first time, so everything was explained to me. We stood at random intervals throughout the room and were not to move from our spot as we struck various poses. A large cardboard sheet was randomly thrown in the air, and as it sailed, we would attempt to catch it while not deviating from a pose. Each time the cardboard landed near one, you were supposed to pick it up and write something personal on it. You then flung it around the room again. This was a mixed nudity class, and the thought occurred to me as we conducted our poses and tossed the cardboard, that we were creating a performance art piece, both written and physical, in the style of Vanessa Beecroft.

However, the writing on the cardboard means something else to me now that I have thought about the dream. The prohibition against faster than speed of light travel most accurately stated says that information cannot move faster than C. Was the group poem we composed meant to represent information itself?

After the session ended, one of the participants, an elderly man, invited me to look out a window, and as he pulled back the drapes, I saw the vastness of space--utterly dark, punctuated only by specks of light. The man told me that something was wrong. Our ship had stopped moving. We should have thought ahead and placed rescue stations along the way. I told him I didn't understand.

Outside in the parking lot it was night, although it had been day when I entered. The parking lot was barren, just a few cars that looked as if they had not moved in a long time. A high chain link/barbed wire fence surrounded the parking lot. I was alone, and of course, my car wouldn't start.

And it was then that I realized that there was no wind, no sound. Birds hung in the air, midflight. Time itself had stopped.

This is how it must be, I realized, this is how it must feel the moment that a beam of light travelling backwards through time meets its own beam tunneling foward through time.

the bear in the forest

2006-05-07T15:57:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I ran a very fulfilling field trip to Salt Point State Park. I had never run this trip before, although I had been there numerous times before. I was filled with anxiety: a big component of the trip was tide pool marine biology, and I ain't no marine biologist. I was worried that people would get lost on the long road to Salt Point, or that no one would show up. I was worried that I was misreading the tide charts and that the water would be too high to see anything interesting.

All of these fears turned out to be unjustified. As Mark Twain said, "I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened."

And it was very good for my head to have a few hours away from my troubles here. I actually forgot, for perhaps six or seven continuous hours, that because of my career troubles this might in fact be the very last field trip I ever lead. I hope, I dearly hope, this isn't the case, but if this was to be my last trip, then I'm glad that it went off with such a good sendoff.

In some ways, returning to Salt Pont completes a cycle for me which began so many years ago. Perhaps my earliest clear memory, when I was 5 or 6, was camping with my family at Salt Point. My memory is this: looking down from the campground into the canopy of trees and ferns and seeing a bear standing among the plants. I alerted my parents, who assured me that it was only a tree.

I was so insistent about what I saw, however, that I cajoled them into walking with me down the hill to where I had seen the bear. I saw the old tree stump they were referring to, but no bear. We hiked back up the hill to our campsight. Then I looked down again and saw the bear.

I found it hard to believe that my eyes were playing tricks on me. Yet the core of science is seeing the world despite our preconceptions and agenda; to see things as they actually are is more difficult than the non-scientist might imagine. I could go down and touch this tree stump, examine the minutae of its bark in as much detail as I pleased, but when I went back up the hill it would still look to me like a bear standing on its hindlegs. I learned something about the need for proper perspective that day.

For years I didn't know where this had happened. We camped at so many places when I was a child that my parents didn't recall this incident. Indeed, so malleable is a child's memory that I wasn't even quite sure it had even happened. I have many false memories, lying somewhere between a dream or a wish and the ooze of the juvenile brain.

When I was in junior high school my classmates took a weekend trip to Salt Point. Chance would have it that we camped in the same spot. And as I sat alone from my peers (as was my habit) meditating in the stillness of the woods, my eyes abruptly came upon the very same tree/bear that had intrigued me so many years before. The vision and recollection hit me like a lightningbolt.

It was a moment of enlightenment. Not, of course, full enlightenment but perhaps a tiny, baby step in that direction. I found it interesting to learn later of the long history of sylvian associations with enlightenment (Osiris trapped in a tree-coffin, Jesus and his tree-cross of olive, Buddha and the Bo Tree, Tolkein and his forest-consciousness).

Even as I write this, the fog shrowding my path is lifting. My mind is shifting through the morass of my thoughts, trying to tell me something. These examples come from Joseph Campbell. I recall his injunction that all people must first learn what is their passion, and then passionately pursue it, though it might well cost them everything. To do less is to sell one's soul at a discount rate.

LOST and found

2006-05-06T00:07:00.000-07:00

Perhaps it is a sign of the state of my head right now, but I find it hard not to think constantly about the tv show LOST.

This last Weds--like, oh my God! I was jolted, I was gasping. I mean, I suspected that Michael's story was false: He was in very bad shape for just having been on his own, scouting out The Others. If the jungle was taking so much out of him that he drops unconscious at their feet, then it didn't make sense that Michael would have the wherewithal to stalk people as adept in the jungle as The Others. It didn't make sense that The Others would be as weak as Michael described and yet able to do so much evil. Considering Henry's earlier taunt about leading people into traps, Michael's story sounded like maybe he was setting his people up. In any event, things just didn't seem right.

The "line in the sand" was probably close to some structure, perhaps another hatch, that The Others occupy, and they simply released Michael when Kate and Jack came close. Remember that Claire met, and scratched, Rousseau in a similar way after Ethan kidnapped Claire.

Although I suspected there was more to Michael's story, it was still a shock when he turned the gun on Ana-Lucia. Pisser. Michele Rodriquez is a great actress; I was inspired by her in Girl Fight. I think about that movie when I'm working out.

Could it really be a coincidence that both Ana-Lucia and Libby were shot within seconds of each other when in real life they were pulled over for DUI's within minutes of each other? Most studios insist that they be able to carry insurance on the actors, so that if some important actor dies in real life and they need to reshoot an entire big segment, the insurance will cover that cost. This is why Robert Downey Jr. isn't working any more--he's had such a bad drug arrest record that no insurance company will allow him on the policy, and without all the actors covered by the policy, no studio will financially support a project. Ya kinda gotta be on good behavior. Hollywood doesn't have "morals" clauses in contracts any more--they don't need to because it's been replaced by insurance requirements. So I think that the LOST producers just killed off Ana-Lucia and Libby to guarantee that future DUI problems wouldn't affect the show.

As you can see, I spend _way_ too much mental energy on this show. :)

Years ago I had a similar affinity for the movie Titanic. I admit that I really liked it. I confess that I saw it three or four times in the theatre. I mean, everyone thinks about the Titanic when they're a kid, asking themselves what they would do as the ship slowly sank beneath them, but that movie just brought out in me a longing for genuine experience. I found myself wishing that I could be on that deck that night, though it would mean my end, because the realness of those two hours would be more genuine than all my years of waking up too early/rushing to work/struggling against deadlines/fighting through commute traffic/crashing alone in my pad and starting that process over again each day. I think it was Eliot who said that the person waiting on a train platform to go to work dies inside a little each day.

validate your ticket here

2006-05-05T23:47:00.000-07:00

Thanks to "anon" for those comments... you're right in so many respects. :) I don't need personal validation from the admins, who with the exception of the odd hour or two of observation, have no idea what actually goes in my classroom. When I am periodically evaluated, the response is glowing with praise.

The response from most students, however, is what really count for me, and what validates my work. The comments I get are so positive that I know I'm doing something right.

Because of the quickly-deteriotating state of the school--the poorly constructed concrete literally dissolving before our eyes--it is probably a blessing in disguise to be done with it. Chances are that the Big One will happen at 5 am, when no one is around. But if the Big One does happen to occur when that school is full, there's a likelihood of terrible casualties.

When did colleges become businesses?

It seems obvious to me that the product (classes) should come first, that everything should be directed toward having the best teachers with the optimal facilities. I really don't understand the need for all this administrative overhead. If this truly were a business, then it would be a situation where half of the employees are running around trying to hinder the other half from getting any work done. Meanwhile, the customers (students, in this metaphor) are left at the cash register wondering if the employees behind the counter will stop yelling at each other long enough to ring them up. I don't blame, and could only expect, that customers in such a situation would take their money elsewhere.

Students are going elsewhere in droves. Enrollment is dropping by double-digits. Since enrollment is tied to the money schools receives, the vicious cycle has begun: Classes get cut, you can't find a class you want at the time you want it, you go to another school, enrollment drops, so money drops, so classes get cut, et cetera.

We need an earthquake. We need a huge earthquake. We need an earthquake that shakes California colleges to their foundations and sweeps the bullshit away in a tsunami. This is what California colleges need, but I'm not holding my breath.

blinded by ingratitude

2006-05-05T14:29:00.000-07:00

Well, it's official: my jobs at the Peralta District, College of Alameda and Laney, are over. I've been there over four years and come to rely on these sections for steady work. This is a devastating blow to me.

An administrator was recently fired in the district. Admins have a "return to teaching" clause in their contract. This guy is exercising this right, even though he has never taught before, and is not a geologist. He gets my job, nonetheless.

Peralta to Steve: So long, and thanks for all the hard work!

Just so you all know: As America's science education continues its precipitous decline, as other competitor nations produce legions of skilled workers, we are mired in this kind of bureacratic bullshit, tangled in technicalities, unable even to fire someone cleanly. How did it come to this?

I just wish that somewhere, someday, I would receive a phone call or a letter that actually contained good news. I dread listening to my answering machine or opening my mailbox. Will this flurry of bad tidings ever cease? Can there really be no single thing for me that is going in the right direction?

I had meant to spend this afternoon working on a field trip for tomorrow. I have to create the trip and all its stops and information from scratch. I will probably work until around midnight; this is how I spend my Friday nights this term. I want to go out and celebrate Cindo de Mayo, but I simply have too much work to do. What am I doing all this work for? Does it get me promoted? No, I get fired. Does it yield me a pay raise? No, DVC cuts everyone's salary 7%. Can colleges sustain themselves when their every action annihilates the hopes of all who work for them?

It's a wonder to me that higher education in this country functions at all.

no rest for the wicked

2006-05-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

Despite having 12 hour+ sleep sessions this weekend, I cannot shake this fatigue. Usually one 12 hour binge is enough to recharge me for a week of 5 hour nights, but something seems off. It feels as if I cannot wake up these last two days. Perhaps sleep apnea, if I indeed have it, is becoming more acute; several times in the last week I've woken up gasping for air, feeling as if I've just had the wind knocked out of me. I used to hate that feeling when I played soccer and took a ball to the chest so hard I couldn't breathe for a minute afterwards. There's nothing like the panic of not being able to breathe. Of course, my asthma has made me very used to the sensation of suffocation.

Feeling better: A recent email has improved my head a lot. Also got a good classroom review from a teacher I respect, and that is the sort of positive feedback I rarely get. It's so hard to know how my lectures come across, how effectively the information is actually transmitted, that it is very helpful to know what people think.

Weight: Stubbornly the same. Despite trying, per my doctor's instructions, to increase protein in the diet, I still have no feeling of satiation. I must be firmer with myself about not eating even when I'm hungry. Light-headedness: increasing. No discernable cause. I wonder if my body, like some perverse food addict, isn't making these fainting spells up psychosomatically, so that I will eat to try to stop the shaking/light-headedness. Humph.

Your tired working boy,
Tad

eating glass

2006-04-23T23:18:00.000-07:00

I'm walking through a country valley sometime in the early 19th century. There are no cars and only a few horses ambling through fields of green grass. I seem to be an investigator of sorts, trying to collect recipes from the famous glass eaters of this valley.

I observe as an eldery matron demonstrates how she bakes glass in her open until it is hot and snappish. It breaks apart in my mouth as I bite it and burns me with its searing hot shards.

An older gentleman explains his technique for sauteeing glass in a fying pan with soy sauce. The glass is stained brown, and the salt of the soy sauce finds every cut crevice in my mouth. The glass breaks just the same and cuts my throat as I devour it.

I can feel the glass working its way through my guts. It catches and cuts, bloating me with gas and blood. My stomach protrudes in its fullness yet I hunger for more because of the lack of nutrition. I am starving to death with a full stomach. I think of those poor birds who starve because of ingested plastic.

When I wake up, my stomach is twisted in knots. I think the dream caused the ache rather than the ache the dream.

mine was 97 percentile verbal

2006-04-23T22:58:00.000-07:00

Today the Educational Testing Service announced additional errors in this year's scores for the SAT. The number of test-takers involved: a perfect 1600.

You couldn't make this stuff up. :)

Eurypterids and sharks

2006-04-23T22:57:00.000-07:00

So the dream goes like this:

There is an amusement park, like Marine World, that has rides and animals intermixed. One of the rides is available only to people with amputations. They swim in a large tank while a Great White shark is introduced. The shark doesn't eat them--to the contrary, they are harassing it.

But even stranger is the petting zoo. For there, intermixed with running children, are extinct animals. Eurypterids, sometimes called sea scorpions, were a fearsome predator of the Permian. They grew up to six feet in length, were armored, and bristled with stingers and spines.

In the petting zoo, a large eurypterid scuttles along snapping its claws at the children. It is a pale brown; color is always a difficult question in paleontology, and I'm quite pleased to now know the color of a living specimen. I let it touch my leg, which it does as if trying to get my attention.

I am not as scared as I should be.

Later I am in another part of the park, where a Great White is nuzzling up to a whale. They are both in shallow water below a bridge. My sister and I can reach down from the bridge and touch them, and we do, although my sister is much less fearful than I. I have touched the dried skin of a Great White before, but in my dream I forget this and think that this is the very first time.

The skin of the shark is sticky and laden with mucus. As I am touching it, the shark transforms. It is now no longer a Great White, but another kind of shark that looks like a Goblin shark.

It wasn't quite a Goblin shark, as it had several noses on the top of its head, flapping wetly as the shark breathed in and out with great effort. Was it breathing air? It could have been.

Its head became triangular as I touched it. It reminded my of those Star Destroyers from the Star Wars movies.

I have no idea what this dream means. :|

Fear and Self-Loathing

2006-04-23T22:56:00.001-07:00

There is a tacit agreement: You work at a place part-time and temporary for less than half the wages of a full-timer, no benefits, and they might reward this loyal internship with at least an interview when a full-time position does open. Alas, the community college system continues to shock with its betrayal and treachery.

So I've been working at this school for three years. Steadily. Every term getting work, as if they think I'm doing a decent job. After all, with zero semester-to-semester security, they can fire you by simply not hiring you. If you raise a complaint--fired. If you protest some decision--fired. You glance at an administrator the wrong way--fired. So my continued work from term to term made me think that I was actually doing something The Powers That Be liked, such as showing up on time and not taking sick days.

A full-time, permanent position came up. I figured that after teaching there three years, I would have some sort of leg-up for getting an interview, if not the job itself. After all, I've always been told that you cannot get a job at place where you do not already work.

Once I received some sage advice from an old geologist. He told me that not until he was 65 did he actually win a job that he had applied for cold--meaning, he didn't already work for the company, didn't know someone on the inside. By the age of 65, he had earned the reputation that allowed him to actually win a job cold. Otherwise, he said, you have to already work at a place in order to work there.

I have gotten a number of interviews at other community colleges, and have scored second interviews at all of them. But not the final offer.

At the school where I'm working, I don't even get an interview.

I am, therefore, completely fucked. It's like some vicious game designed to be impossible for me to win. Where I am not working, I can interview, but not get the job. Where I am already working, and could get the job, I cannot get an interview. Is this system designed to make my mind crack, to push me over the edge?

Oh, God, why the hell do I feel drawn to this terrible "profession" of teaching? Why can't I feel a similar passion for something such as accounting, where this sort of unbelievable bullshit wouldn't happen? I'm wasting my life, one day at a time. I am still waiting, after all these years, to begin my life. Everything is on hold. I can't buy a house, I don't know where I'm going to live. I'm in this sick limbo...and it looks like it's destined to continue longer.

I am such a fucking waste. I'm a reverse Midas--everything I do turns to shit. I know what I must do...but I don't have the courage to do it. I don't know where I got so far off track. This is just a complete mystery to me. I'll never understand the failure of my life.

The People's Republic of Google

2006-04-23T22:56:00.000-07:00

Google's recent decision to offer a censored search engine to the government of the People's Republic of China is only the latest in a shameful procession of American companies eagerly participating in political and social repression.

Google's ostensible reason justification is that local Chinese law prohibits discussion of certain topics, such as 1989 Tiannamen Square massacre, the bloody and horrific Cultural Revolution, and Mao's murder of perhaps as many as 70 million of his countrymen during his long reign. If Chinese law forbids discussion of this, Google argues, then who are they to violate Chinese law?

Let me argue with an example from the past. In September 1935 Germany imposed the Law for Protection of German Blood and German Honor. This entirely legal statue, put into place by the legitimately-elected Chancellor Hitler, barred Jews and non-Jews from marrying. It banned sex between Jews and non-Jews. The Nuremberg Laws, which were imposed on the same day as the German Blood decree, stripped Jews of citizenship and the right to vote.

Would Google comply with these laws if such an act were put into place today? If their standard is to obey all local laws, then logic dictates that they would.

Google's complicity with the PRC government is morally bankrupt. Google has done many great things in the Internet Revolution--this is not one of them. Let us hope that Google someday provides a "backdoor" in its engine that will allow information to flow into China right under the noses of the authorities.

Driving in Sand

2006-04-23T22:55:00.000-07:00

This is how paranoid I am about my car:

I had the car in for a minor alignment check, but the dealership screwed me and couldn't finish it that day, so I was without it for a night. All last night I'm having dreams about driving. As I race down steep curves, I find myself unable to make the turn. Again and again I have that rush of fear when you realize that you're not going to make it, that you're going to go off the road.

No matter how hard I pulled on the wheel, I couldn't turn properly. It was like driving in sand. Perhaps this is a metaphor for my life right now.