cheese it, the cops!

Do you think? Uhh, no...duh. That's for faculty...

From Crusader Mike -- While I should be working on a lesson plan for next week's class on the way that companies can increase earnings but cutting costs -- yah, yah, business grad school, using math to prove the self-evident -- I stumbled on this. Now, both the proprietor of this Blog, the immortal C. Sartwell, poet and philosopher-king and I - I'd be a diletante if I could find the energy and the interest, but instead, I'm a peripatetic scholar and wandering old soldier - owe some of our living to the academy. So, this piece from the AP on the Times site really made my evening.   Seems the great university of South Florida just found almost $300 grand sort of, well, lost internal distribution. "Three University of South Florida officials were fired after the school discovered $275,000 in misplaced checks and cash scattered throughout an office.Nearly half the money at the school's English Language Institute -- $133,647 -- was in checks up to 10 years old and could not be deposited, said university spokeswoman Michelle Carlyon.

The cash and checks Dec. 21 were found inside desks and underneath books and office machines, among other places, Carlyon said.The discovery comes about a month after a state audit of the university found lax financial controls. On Friday, the financial council reviewing the state audit recommended reducing the number of departments that collect money and training workers to keep better financial records."

Now, I've always wondered if the folks in the business offices were quite all there? I have to wonder which office it was...disbursing? Registrar? Sounds like registrar to me, but it could be payroll...who knows. Who cares...let's just raise tuition again! And, cut faculty salaries...

here's a classic: Pre-Human Child Eaten by an Eagle.

references

from the miami herald:   

After the U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to oust its Taliban rulers, authorities found a locker full of applications to join al Qaeda's holy war overseas. Among the alleged applicants: José Padilla, the former ''enemy combatant'' who once lived in Broward County.

i wonder what you put on your application to join al qaeda. hey: i wonder where you get the form. maybe you just print out a generic application form off the internet. i wonder what experience you list, and who your references would be. even your contact info might be a bit sticky: maybe it was at the address that padilla listed on his application that the mysterious minions of alberto gonzales picked him up and whisked him away. i wonder how many applicants they get for each suicide position, and what they're really looking for in a terrorist to join their entrepreneurial enterprise. it is cool that they keep such good records, though, in case of lawsuits later on. i heard that padilla didn't actually get the job and then filed suit on the grounds that al qaeda does not recruit aggressively enough among latinos. or maybe it's like a college application where you have to submit your terrorist aptitude scores and then write an essay.

Is Archer-Daniels Learning?...err, Cheating?

The news that the USDA is using satelite technology to seek out cheating, lying agriculturalists isn't initially troubling. However, on reflection, I find it scarey as hell. Sure, I admit this could lead to fears about "black helicoptes and the trilateral commission and the UN taking over and making us all wear mullets" or some similar fantasy, but seriously...

If they are going after fraudulent practices by big agri-business, cool. If they are going after Clem Klodidilhopper's 200 acre farm in east nowhere, I got issues. The coast benefit analysis just doesn't make sense. Same as sending the IRS to audit people with a gross income of under $200K a year...what are they going to make on the deal?

Except, we have an administration paranoid to extent of, well, clinical paranoia and we have a have a lot of big agricultural firms trying to eliminate the small farmer (yeah, I know, cue Willie and John Mellancamp, and maybe Steve Earle and the Dixie Chicks to do "what's so funnay about peace, love and understanding...wooooo) who make large donations to various politicians through various lobbyists...like Bob Dole.
Who was the Senator from Archer-Daniels-Midland...

The other thing that is amusing to Crusader AXE of the Lost Causes, to quote Bob Dole, is "where's the outrage?" Why did we have militias and various white supremicist nuts running around during the Clinton administration with this obsession about the government trying to spy on them when they really weren't, and where are they now when the government is really doing it? Could it possibly be that Janis Reno and Billy C and Big Al actually did a lot right with domestic terrorism? The Tim McVie wannabes said forget it! and are jacking off to pictures of the pregnant Britnay Spears...who could have been channeling Tiffany, now that I think of it. Anyway, is our right wing nuts not learning? they don't have to fear the liberals...they need to fear the Republicans.

the case of frey

let me say a bit about the frey thing. perhaps i should preface this by saying that several people whose opinion i respect have been pushing me to read "a million little pieces" for years, though others have said they thought it sucked. and i haven't read beyond the first few pages. but i just knew that the defense, from oprah and from frey himself, was going to be framed in terms of "emotional truth":

And in his appearance on Larry King last night he said the disputed passages of A Million Little Pieces made up just five per cent of the book. "The essential truth of (my) drug and alcohol addiction is there," he said. "The emotional truth is there... I think you will find people who will dispute every memoir ever written."

this misapprehends, i believe, the nature of human emotions. emotional states are not comprehensible in isolation from the real-world situations in which they arise. there's a certain "psychological" picture which we might call "internalism" in which the emotional states of a person are internal to that person. then one might invent external world situations that would represent those states: it's as if i ran over a cop, or started a riot, because that's how i felt about authority or something when i was all fucked up all the time. but the emotional truth of a situation consists of the emotional states that actually did arise in that situation. furthermore, the "emotionally true" but factually crap approach also (obviously) falsifies the person who is suppsedly having these emotional states: the kind of person whose emotions are captured by the fantasy of running over a cop is a far far different person than a person who would run over a cop. i should get this out at much more length. but in brief, to falsify the circumstances is to falsify the person and to falsify the person is to falsify the emotion: maybe that's what you wished you were, or were scared to be etc. you cannot isolate emotional from factual truth.

final thoughts

well, it's necessarily a bit amporphous. but i got a vibe i did not like as the grilling went on about alito on executive and legislative power, obviously as acute a problem right now as it has ever been. i just felt like with all the "pres isn't above the law" stuff, he was, in responding to feingold and leahy this morning, carving out potentially a very capacious range of exceptions, and i was surprised that he was not a bit more forthcoming. leahy asked him straight up (on another separation of powers question) whether the congress could strip the supreme court of jurisdiction in free speech cases. i cannot fathom why the answer to that would not be the merest no. but at any rate, then the stuff from feingold about who interviewed alito and prepared him for the hearings (erm, scooter libby, harriet miers, dick cheney and other folks: i guess who you'd expect) suddenly took on a  vaguely menacing quality.

dicktators

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- President Bush said Wednesday that congressional hearings to investigate his domestic eavesdropping program will be good for democracy.

so, bush must also believe that conducting this program in secrecy was bad for democracy. well he's right about that.

why, why in the world do feinstein and the rest of these folks want alito to say that the question of abortion is settled, once and for all? that's silly. the issue roils the whole society: it's up in the air politically and legally, obviously, right now. why would it be settled? how could it possibly be regarded as being settled? alito on the court is likely to heere a dozen or more abortion cases. of course.

sens contd

mike dewine is asking a wonderful series of important questions about anti-trust, disabilities, and freedom of speech. they are calculated to get general statements of alito's commitments on important matters. dewine, in other words, is not wasting time like grassley, just giving a speech repeating repeating repeating the same 3 reasons to vote yes, or biden getting entangled in another series of digressions from his digressions. dewine is one of the few people (and 2 reps) who have3 some notion of what this thing is for.

marshal tito puente

my own candidate for the deepest thing i ever wrote.

judicial comte contd

ok. we're in the midst of a constitutional crisis. we're in the midst of an administration with less respect for the constitution than any in our history. we're in the midst of an utter distortion of separation of powers. we're in the midst of a regime that systematically and explicitly violates and rejects the bill of rights. and you're going to spend your half hour hitting abortion, again and again and again in exactly the same terms as the last senator, in exactly the same terms as the issue has been framed for thirty years? it's not that abortion rights aren't important: it's that it's not part of our terminal crisis of democracy. if the law is changed, it will be changed bit by bit and at each step resistance will be possible. but right now, the bush administration is torturing and interning people and asserting its legal right to do so. it's engaged in massive increases in illegal surveillance. it's asserting that it is exempt from the laws passed by congress. and: it's  not at all clear where a "conservative" judge might stand on these matters. certainly an "originalist" or a "strict constructionist" cannot be anything but outraged. so for heaven's sake, ditch the 36th repetition of "is roe the settled law of the land" and ask fundamental questions of constitutional law raised in their most acute form at this precise moment.

keep it together

a big adhesives plant near my house (4 miles?) blew up last night. you know you're living the paradox when adhesives are blowing things apart. seems emblematic of the human condition, somehow.

schumer vs the constitution

ok. a couple of people have demanded that i document  my assertion that chuck schumer asserted at the hearings yesterday that prior precedents of the supreme court were of more authority in deciding cases that the constitution itself. it's certainly a bizarre assertion, and obviously (i say) schumer holds it only with regard to issues where he likes the precedents. specifically i'll bet he likes it only in the case of roe v wade. but to the extent that he asserts it with regard to roe v wade, he is obviously destroying his own argument; i.e. he is strongly implying that roe contradicts the constitution but should be upheld anyway, or rather that, regardless of its constitutional status it should be upheld.
at any rate, schumer started by attacking clarence thomas on stare decisis. he described thomas's position - which he was saying was repugnant - as follows:

And it's particularly relevant, because if you believe something is not in the Constitution, at least the way Justice Thomas talks about stare decisis, he'd let the Constitution overrule it and stare decisis would go by the wayside.

well, any justice in their right mind would agree with thomas on that, surely.
later:

Second, you've told us you respect precedent and stare decisis, but we have seen that the stated respect for stare decisis hardly determines whether a Supreme Court justice will vote to uphold precedents -- not because when they come here they're being disingenuous with us.
I don't think that at all. But because the concept is somewhat elastic, because it doesn't guarantee that you will uphold precedent, and particularly doesn't guarantee it when the Constitution conflicts with stare decisis, with the precedents of the court.

the argument here appears to be: alito will overturn roe v wade if he believes it conflicts with the constitution, despite his professed respect for stare decisis. this would be true of absolutely anyone suited to sit on the federal bench.
and finally:

ALITO: I don't agree with the theory that the Constitution always trumps stare decisis. There would be no room for the doctrine of stare decisis in constitutional law if that were the case.

SCHUMER: But, sir, it can trump stare decisis. It doesn't always, but can. Is that correct?

ALITO: It certainly can. And I think that's a good thing, because otherwise Plessy v. Ferguson would still be on the books.

 

red cheeks, red cheeks everywhere

i sort of collect dangling modifiers. this, from a sensational, though notably badly written, story in today's guardian: "Initially chubby and red cheeked, Rachel's old friends, shopkeepers and neighbours began to notice the change in her."

felonious

no doubt, the impulse to impose surveillance on americans with no oversight or accountability, and the impulse to continue abusing prisoners are totalitarian impulses. but another feature of these actions is worth noting: each prisoner thus abused, each person thus surveilled, constitutes a distinct felony. that is the basic reason why all the activity should be shrouded in secrecy: for one thing, to give no specific person a cause of action. but in authorizing all of these things in direct contradiction to legislation passed by congress and signed by the president, the administration has committed hundreds and hundreds of impeachable offenses.

and alito

if i was on that committee and if i wasn't, um, an anarchist, i believe i'd vote for him from what i saw today. lindsay graham, for example, pushed him and pushed him to say that the executive branch had unlimited power to detain enemy combatants and that people thus interned should have no recourse to habeus corpus etc. alito just wouldn't do it, and he seemed frankly sceptical of the whole thing. in fact, alito on executive power all day was extremely encouraging. at a minimum you can't come away from the day and not know that he sees the problem clearly. my vibe on alito on the nsa shit was, again, very positive. it just seemed evident that he saw the problem. and i also think he conveyed very nicely the "judicial temperament" (certainly the opposite of my temperament): thoughtful without being gratuitously evasive or needlessly ambiguous.

sens contd

and just to polish the day off with a few more senator reviews:
russ feingold is the best senator like, ever. and he pressed the right questions at first. i just wish he had not gone off on the "vanguard recusal" issue, which is just horeshit, if you ask me: just a mistake, and certainly not grounds for rejecting alito.
shumer tried to just kill him, with mixed results. i guess he did back alito into a corner on abortion. but he managed to say some ridiculous things, suggesting that a right to abortion is in the constitution in the same sense as the right of free speech, and saying over and over again, if you can believe this, that a true believer in stare decisis would be of the opinion that supreme court precedent is more important than the constitution in reaching decisions. really. watch the tape.
lindsay graham is interesting. i think a really thoughtful, independent minded man, with a very complex and perhaps constitutionally plausible view of the extent of executive power.
other than that the reps were all insanely redundant: cornyn, e.g., who just toes the party line as though he's chou en-lai and to bush's mao. there is no reason for a person like that to have the power of speech; his every whisper is a redundancy.
and i do think that it would be worthwhile and strategically effective for democrats, as a whole, to be a little less obsessed by abortion.

kill biden

it took biden literally 20 minutes to ask a single question. and in that twenty minutes he said absolutely nothing.

please

no one is more deeply annoying than biden, who tries to project this pleasant personality, but cannot stop yapping enough to formulate a coherent idea, much less formulate a question. he has a concerted policy of not allowing alito to take over even a few seconds of his time. we need, i guess, to hear biden's - i don't know - "views," again. but alito's are absolutely irrelevant to joe or, for joe, to us.

alito reviews

spending the day dealing with religious email and watching the alito hearings. i think that the questioning has been considerably sharper than with regard to roberts. the nsa wiretap/we love torture developments seem to have wokem some people up. kennedy - whose questioning of was entirely narcissistic speechifying - actually managed to ask important questions. leahy, who seemed a bit bewildered talking to roberts, spoke with great focus. grassley, who's going now, is a moron: "judge alito, do you think judges should kill small children and attempt to divine the future by their entrails?" even alito can't merely agree to these absolutely blank, meaningless "questions." i really want to see what feingold does. alito himself seems very bright and thoughtful; really he is attacking grassley's crazy generalities even now. i just pray that he means what he says when he says that the executive needs to be accountable to the laws.

cats!

truly, people are idjits.

ripley

believe it or not, the mighty john timpane at the philly inquirer actually ran my atheism column today. the inbox is already piling up. looking back on this column, i sound...angry. one time a therapist of mine asked me: why are you so angry at god? i would agree that i am...if i agreed there was someone to be angry at.

will to power

of all american newspaper columnists, the very best writer is george f. will. act like you know.

iraqis are idiots

if there one thing we know, it's that people believe whatever you want them to believe, particularly when the claptrap you feed them continually contradicts their experience. one important element of this admirable - if pitiful - effort to control the hearts and minds of the iraqi people is arresting journalists who try to expose the truth and destroying their documentation. "history" is indeed on our side, even if truth, decency, and freedom are on the other. btw, if i hear the phrase "hearts and minds" again, i will revert to my berserker frenzy and kill kill kill.

What made the shoe drop on his head?

Tom Delay is an exemplar of what's wrong with...well, what's wrong. From the smarmy smile to the greasy haircut, the Rotarian Handshake and the Babbit-like focus on ending regulation because it creates an onerous burden to business -- Note to self, check to see if any corporate executives have had to move into trailers because of said onerous burden -- to the corruption, stench and general hypocrisy, the guy is just a blight.

That said, the news that there had been a sorta-kinda revolt against the guy just broke yesterday; the revolt was in the form of a petition, which I find kind of quaint -- kind of 60ish stop the war, end poverty, abolish capitalism by signing here on your way to Lit 203 but what the hell, it worked. Or did it...

I want more indictments. I can think of a few Democrats who should probably go to, but for the most part, the Delay crew including the Speaker should be sweating bullets. And, what the hell are these set asides where Congressmen can control who gets contracts? Don't we have, I don't know, Federal fucking agencies designed to do contracting and such? If an elected official can throw $100M deal my way that easily, where should I send the money?

Scarier news was that China is drawing back on its investments in the US. This will drive the dollar way down, and thus enable our automakers to maybe sell a few cars at a profit, when they don't have to compete with people who design and build things we want to drive. Why are they drawing back on their investments? Oh, the deficit is worrisome - to anyone with any sense. Look, I liked the additional money in the paycheck -- but I'd really like some roads, some healthy job creation, some meaningful attempts to get rid of Bin Laden and gang while having a fighting force that is equipped and led well enough to maybe represent our interests. If the Chinese stop lending the feds money by buying bonds, notes and so on; if they stop investing in our whiney industries; if they stop sending their kids to our megaversities, we are in trouble. Can anyone say "malaise?"

So, send Delay and Hastert and anyone you can tie to the can to the can; raise taxes on anyone with a net income of over $250K and on corporations to what they were in 2000, and turn off W's microphone so we won't have to listen to him whine, boast and lie. The beautiful and brilliant Molly Ivins ( beauty being more than skin deep; I've seen pictures of her before the cancer and all that Lone Star) has a couple of great pieces this week on Creators, including some brilliant points. For example: " My theory is that they don't tell him anything, that's why the president keeps sounding like he doesn't know what he's talking about.

There he was at Brooke Army Medical Center over the weekend, once again getting it wrong: "I can say that if somebody from al-Qaida's calling you, we'd like to know why. In the meantime, this program is conscious of people's civil liberties, as am I. This is a limited program ... I repeat, limited. And it's limited to calls from outside the United States, to calls within the United States."

So then the White House had to go back and explain that, well, no, actually, the National Security Agency's domestic spying program is not limited to calls from outside the United States, or to calls from people known or even suspected of being with al-Qaida. Turns out thousands of Americans and resident foreigners have been or are being monitored and recorded by the NSA. It's more like information-mining, which is what, you may recall, the administration said it would not do. But now Bush has to investigate The New York Times because Bush has been breaking the law, you see?

I really don't think he'd sound like an idiot if they kept him informed. He would, however, still sound like a kid trying to get out of trouble by tattling on something Billy did..."

One the other hand, in her column on Thursday, she puts it all in a healthy perspective..."We live in a great nation. The police blotter of the Mill Valley Herald in California informs us that the constabulary there had to be called out on account of a citizen "dressed like a penguin" who was "standing on a street corner playing a ukulele." Makes me proud to be an American." Read and enjoy...

vs

disease vs disease / art vs art

herman

that thing from mike about albania prom pted me to do a touch of net research on my great grandfather, herman bernstein. this from the "political graveyard":

Bernstein, Herman (1876-1935) — Born in Russia, September 21, 1876. Founder and editor of The Day, Jewish daily newspaper. Published the "Willy-Nicky Correspondence," secret telegrams between the Kaiser and the Czar, 1918.; U.S. Minister to Albania, 1930-33. Jewish. Died in Sheffield, Berkshire County, Mass., August 31, 1935. Burial location unknown.

he also wrote for the nyt (sample here) and wrote the definitive destruction of the pathetic "protocols of the elders of zion." 

i'm off to pittsburgh

for the weekend, where the lovely but unproblematic marion winik is teaching in an mfa program. i'll leave you with this, year-end roundup #2:

2005: The Year in Anarchy
By Crispin Sartwell

Every year since 1648 has been a bad year for us, the anarchists. That was the year of the Peace of Westphalia, establishing the modern European nation-state. Since then history has been a long strange power trip: colonization, wars of incredible destructiveness, genocides: all the happy results of handing unlimited power of taxation and the wondrous weaponry that goes with it to human beings.
    Government separates the world into two sorts of people: those who long above all else to subordinate other people and those who long above all else to be subordinated by other people. The only folks who don't fall into either of these categories are us, the anarchists. By the beginning of 2005 there were six of us left.
     And 2005 was especially bad for us, the anarchists: easily the worst since the fall of communism. All over the world and in New Orleans, people blamed their problems on "failed states," i.e. on insufficient oppression.
    The United States bestrode the world like a brain-numb colossus, and reached a degree of authoritarianism that is the highest in its history. Our beloved government discovered and explored the universal human enthusiasm for internment without trial, torture, and universal surveillance, modeling its new form of government on the charming statecraft of Augusto Pinochet.
    Vlad Putin continued this year to write all the stories appearing in all the newspapers and magazines in Russian, to jail his opponents, and to slaughter the last few Chechens. The rest of the world's governments, as you can well imagine, greeted these developments with enthusiasm.
     The Chinese state, just to prove that it's still a true People's Republic, fired on dissatisfied peasants and repressed unhappy old women, while hiring American internet companies to prohibit their people from Googling "liberty."
    Officials of the New Iraq continued the happy traditions of the Old Iraq, flaying dissidents and calling it democracy.
    The government of Iran lurched into holocaust denial, nuclear armament, and other premonitions of genocide.
    In short, a bad year for us, the anarchists. But there was some encouraging news as well.
    The more moronic and counter-productive state power appears, the more obvious the need for immediate, complete anarchy. The public housing programs of New Orleans and the nimbleness of FEMA were demonstrations, if further demonstrations could possibly be needed, that all government should hang itself this afternoon to avoid further embarrassment.
     However, some perverse enthusiasts for hierarchy managed to conclude from such events that what we need is "more effective government," government capable of preventing natural disaster, curing the scourges of American poverty and racial division, and sending everyone large checks all the time. We, the anarchists, note that these are precisely the arguments that gave us public housing and FEMA in the first place, and we hope that 2006 brings these enthusiasts what they deserve.
      One undeniably encouraging development: in its desire to saturate every aspect of the life of every person entirely, the American government continued a cycle of deficit spending so extreme as to constitute an infinite abyss, a yawning pit into which everyone will one day tumble screaming and fall, fall forever. Except us, the anarchists.
     Scooter Libby got caught this year.
    And one thing that is extremely encouraging every year: there was no sign of an emerging world state, as the United Nations continued to be snickered at by all human beings the world over.
     What will 2006 bring for us, the anarchists? Prediction: a horde of liberty-loving berserkers in styling-salon dreadlocks will sweep implacably down from the Shenandoah National Park and sack Washington D.C..!
    The long nightmare of human enslavement to state power will be over! Or, maybe that will have to wait for 2007.

   
   

other things being equal

i'm in favor of voucher programs. unfortunately the fla supreme court just struck down that state's.

In its ruling, the Florida Supreme Court cited an article in the state's constitution that says, "Adequate provision shall be made by law for a uniform, efficient, safe, secure and high-quality system of free public schools."

The Opportunity Scholarships Program "violates this language," the Florida court said.

"It diverts public dollars into separate private systems parallel to and in competition with the free public schools that are the sole means set out in the constitution for the state to provide for the education of Florida's children," the ruling said. "This diversion not only reduces money available to the free schools, but also funds private schools that are not 'uniform' when compared with each other or the public system."

um, this reasoning is specious. the plain interpretation is this: the state government is obligated by its constitution to provide a system of public education. surely, outside this system it already funds all kinds of other programs that might be construed as educational, such as training its employees, or head start, or education in the context of detention, or internships etc etc. get me? the clause obviously does not prohibit the state from funding other programs. and that funding is being diverted from the public schools is again, obviously, no violation of that provision of the constitution. why would it be? as to "uniformity": what are you, kidding? no state does that or could do it, thank god. but since students are allowed to remove themselves only from "failing" schools, the voucher program of course increases uniformity. "uniformity" here means...uniformly public, i guess. it surely don't mean anything else, like uniformly good, uniformly safe etc. anyway, if it did mean anything else it would be wrong as well as impossible.

abut

might as well tell ya, apropos of the slogan, that "serving all your concrete slab and abutment needs" is a quotation from a truck i saw on the highway a few years ago.