If Newt Gingrich, then why not Charlie Sheen for President? :)

A beauty from Bill Maher (ht) who doesn't think actual newts are this slimy :)

Problems with football--both college and NFL

It simply baffles me that we are unable to do anything about the ultra-wasteful NCAA football, despite any number of reports and analyses that detail how much it screws up higher education and, more importantly, the life of the typical students who are increasingly finding it difficult to stay financially afloat.

Last night, PBS' "Need to Know" had a pretty good segment on NCAA football, by focusing its lens on Ohio University. 

In New York, the governor is proposing a 10 percent reduction in funding to higher education. In Michigan, it’s 15 percent. And in California, almost 16 percent. Last month, the president of the University of Nevada Las Vegas announced that the school may end up in the academic equivalent of bankruptcy. Tenured faculty could lose jobs, and entire departments may be closed.

But on many campuses, spending on intercollegiate athletics is growing, even though most sports programs run up millions of dollars a year in annual deficits. That means that while public universities are cutting in classrooms, your tuition dollars — and maybe even your tax dollars — are subsidizing big-time college sports.

It is depressing that we can have any number of such reports, but NCAA sports, especially football, apparently has even better a teflon coating that Reagan had during his presidency.  Simply depressing.

It is atrocious that faculty in higher education overtly, and covertly, encourage and support, and quite maniacally, college sports.  I fault even more the liberal faculty who waste not a second in complaining about fat cats in the corporate world and even in college administration and rally up students in these causes.  Quite a contrast it is when it comes to NCAA football and sports--not only do they rarely critique them, they are big time fans to boot (pun intended!)  And then their misguided defense of sports as an avenue to providing access to higher education for the poor and minority students.  Gimme a break!

As I have blogged before, even the small little university where I work is not exempt from wasteful spending on football. Of course, the "radical" faculty and their union has not bothered even to whimper about this.

One of the many reasons why higher education is academically adrift!

As if this sucking of blood money from students and taxpayers is not enough, the NFL goes even further.  Let us leave it to Reason to explain how the NFL owners, players, and the feds are all taking us for a very expensive ride:



I feel terrible for the youth in this country who don't realize how much they are being screwed :(

Twitter followers are ok, but stalkers?

Hey, my first ever Twitter warning ... Somebody thinks I am significant enough to tweet a warning to me :)

Hey, thanks for letting me know.  I will watch out for that earthquake.

Why school teachers are like Wall Street fat cats?

The Daily Show - Crisis in Dairyland - For Richer and Poorer - Teachers and Wall Street
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

Poem for the day: Pasternak's "After the Storm"

The strange combination of electronics and moving parts came alive a couple of days ago when the music turntable I have at home started functioning again, after playing dead for quite a few months.  Excited I was, therefore, to head to the Goodwill Store nearby in order to scan through the LPs and add to what is becoming an interesting hobby/collection.

One of the five I bought--these valuable LPs are selling at 99 cents each!--was the original music from David Lean's Dr. Zhivago.  After reaching home, I promptly played that while I worked.

But, I couldn't do anything constructive while Lara's Theme was filling the room--I was simultaneously transported back in time when I was a teenager, which was when I read Dr. Zhivago.  It was during my "Russophile" days.  I recalled skipping through the lines because, well, they were too heavy and/or abstract for my teeny teenage brain.  And, thus, my decision to re-read Dr. Zhivago over the spring break.

Zhivago and Pasternak have been haunting me since, and then I read this essay today.  So, I put my office hours to use (no students!) by reading a few of Pasternak's poems.

The following one fits in well with the weather today--the sun is shining brightly after rains.  Metaphorically as well, as I feel my internal storms clearing, even if only temporarily.

After the Storm

The air is full of after-thunder freshness,
And everything rejoices and revives.
With the whole outburst of its purple clusters
The lilac drinks the air of paradise.

The gutters overflow; the change of weather
Makes all you see appear alive and new.
Meanwhile the shades of sky are growing lighter,
Beyond the blackest cloud the height is blue.

An artist's hand, with mastery still greater
Wipes dirt and dust off objects in his path.
Reality and life, the past and present,
Emerge transformed out of his colour-bath.

The memory of over half a lifetime
Like swiftly passing thunder dies away.
The century is no more under wardship:
High time to let the future have its say.

It is not revolutions and upheavals
That clear the road to new and better days,
But revelations, lavishness and torments
Of someone's soul, inspired and ablaze.

1958
                 Translated by Lydia Pasternak Slater 

How do you get rid of an incompetent teacher? Like so :(

No, this is is not about me! (editor: do you have a death-wish or something? Awshutup! It is not about them)

Remember the special room that New York has for its incompetent teachers who have tenure?  No? The "Rubber Room" remember?

The Rubber Rooms house only a fraction of the 1.8 per cent who have been rated unsatisfactory. The rest still teach. There are fifty Rubber Roomers—a twentieth of one per cent of all New York City teachers*—awaiting removal proceedings because of alleged incompetence, as opposed to those who have been accused of misconduct.

What goes on this Rubber Room? Ahem ...

[There] are fifteen people in the room, four of them fast asleep, their heads lying on a card table. Three are playing a board game. Most of the others stand around chatting. Two are arguing over one of the folding chairs. But there are no children here. The inhabitants are all New York City schoolteachers who have been sent to what is officially called a Temporary Reassignment Center but which everyone calls the Rubber Room.
These fifteen teachers, along with about six hundred others, in six larger Rubber Rooms in the city’s five boroughs, have been accused of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or, in some cases, of incompetence, in a system that rarely calls anyone incompetent.
The teachers have been in the Rubber Room for an average of about three years, doing the same thing every day—which is pretty much nothing at all. Watched over by two private security guards and two city Department of Education supervisors, they punch a time clock for the same hours that they would have kept at school—typically, eight-fifteen to three-fifteen. Like all teachers, they have the summer off. The city’s contract with their union, the United Federation of Teachers, requires that charges against them be heard by an arbitrator, and until the charges are resolved—the process is often endless—they will continue to draw their salaries and accrue pensions and other benefits.

Well, looks like the Windy City can put up a good competition (ht)--click on the image for larger and clearer text/graphic

America, what a country! Glad to be here edition

The US Supreme Court provided yet another evidence for me as to why I continue to place my long-term bets on America, and not on any other country, and gives me an opportunity then to follow-up on my earlier post on freedom. 

The Court ruled that the Constitution protects hateful, bigoted, speech, in the case of those awful people who go to funerals of American soldiers and chant anti-gay and anti-other-religion slogans:

“Speech is powerful,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “It can stir people to action, move them to tears of both joy and sorrow, and — as it did here — inflict great pain.”
But under the First Amendment, he went on, “we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker.” Instead, the national commitment to free speech, he said, requires protection of “even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

What a wonderful contrast in how we in America handle expression, against a background of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa standing up, perhaps for the first times in their lives, to gain at least a little bit of this kind of freedom, and are even ready to give up their lives for it.

The chief justice wrote

the protesters’ speech “cannot be restricted simply because it is upsetting or arouses contempt.”

I cannot begin to understand how any person will be that much full of bigotry in order to be able to go picket at funerals of soldiers.  I am sure they fully understand that they are able to do what they do only because they are in this good ol' US of A.

The times when this immigrant gets all emotional about his adopted home country! 
Let us rope in another immigrant, from another country, to explain "freedom" in America ... yes, even in this kind of a situation, I have to fall back on humor--maybe to hide the love for USA? :)



Well, it is of course true that I don't have any free expression on campus here.  A few years ago, the faculty union's president wrote in an email to me:

join the union and go through the Bargaining Team.  If not, then please shut up 

I suppose we ought to appreciate the politeness in "please shut up" and not merely "shut up" :)

The in-coming union president at that time wrote in an email to me:

I think you should apologize for your self-serving attempt to mislead the faculty

Guess what?  I am still here!!!

A horrible student, and even worse patron faculty

As I reminded students about the upcoming presentations of their final projects, a silence descended upon the classroom, which, until then, had been overly energetic.  When I remarked on the sudden change, a student playfully remarked that my description of the protocols for the presentations made it sound intimidatory and cold.

And chuckles.

While I knew exactly what they meant--after all, not too long ago I was one nervous student who hated public speaking--my mind raced back a few years when in that very classroom I was subject to an academic version of the Spanish Inquisition. 

Thus, even as conversations resumed, I was still struggling to disconnect that old image from my mind.  There was only one way for me to work it out.  As we reached a pause in the topic we were discussing, I told the class that not too long ago, when I was the director of the Honors Program, a student had complained that I was intimidating students, and that in a different context, a faculty had complained that I have no sense of humor either.  And thus I wanted to make sure there wasn't that interpretation of "initimidatory."

Promptly, and without missing a beat, one student said, "is that why you now say jokes in class?"  Haha all around ... Yes, this is a very different set of students. Thankfully!

As I was driving back, my usual unwinding time, my mind drifted back to those incidents from a few years ago.

A student, "D," had complained to her advising faculty, "Professor A," that I resorted to intimidatory tactics with students, and that students were terrified of me.  This professor decided that the best course of action was to take it up with the faculty committee--without bothering to check with me first.  Which is why I now picture him as the notorious Torquemada :)

The faculty committee, in their infinite wisdom (or lack of) decided that they should allow "Prof. A" to conduct the inquisition.  Fun times!

Very much like a former colleague back in California, who remarked often that she didn't suffer fools well, I decided it was not worth my time to work with the likes of Prof. A and his ill-informed associates, and ended my directorial responsibilities for the program and returned to my full-time faculty responsibilities.

At a later meeting of the faculty committee, they motioned an apology for their actions.  Of course, Torquemada wasn't at the meeting!  At that time, "apologize" didn't exist for me to use, so I simply blew their apology off :)

Anyway, those were the years that I took home-baked cookies, brownies, and cakes to classes and meetings.  Thanks to these characters, I stopped doing that--why spend time and energy on faculty and students who behave so unprofessionally and discourteously even as they were eating the stuff I had taken, right?

But, this class is restoring my hope in students. Maybe I will take them cookies next meeting.

How about the faculty you ask? Ha, screw 'em--well, many of 'em! Not worth the crumbs.
The few who are worth my time, hey, you know who you are; thank you.

Here is that wonderful "Apologize"

Lack of freedom in the Middle East--I have tasted it :(

Back in 2004, I went to Dubai during a trip to India.  No, I didn't stay at the Burj Al Arab--I merely stood outside the gates and took the photo on the right.  They don't pay me enough to have even a cup of coffee there!

I stayed at a decent hotel that was a couple of blocks away from my brother's apartment.  A few hours after checking in, I went downstairs to check my email from the computers in the lobby.

I typed in www.wou.edu and waited for the university's home page to load up so that I could get to the email.  Boy was I shocked when instead of the familiar page, the monitor displayed in big, bold, bright red colors "Site Banned."

It was one hell of a shock that completely rattled me.  My immediate thoughts were along the lines of, "if I can't access my university email, then what are the other ways in which anybody might be watching my moves?"  My next thought was whether I should hide my American passport and identity, and kind of merge in with the huge Indian population there.  Particularly because my trip there was soon after the American invasion of Iraq, which wasn't favorably viewed especially in the Middle East.

For the rest of the four days that I was there, I hid my American identity as much as I could.  I couldn't wait to get the heck out of Dubai and the UAE.

I couldn't understand then, nor can I even now, how people continue to live in societies where simple freedoms are circumscribed by big brother governments.  My brother suggested that I find a university job in Dubai or anywhere in the Middle East because they paid American faculty a whole lot of money.  I laughed it off--I didn't want to offend him by describing the "site banned" incident and how I way prefer to be a pauper in a freer society than otherwise.

Do I think that freedom is a universal right?  I am not ready for that leap of faith. All I know is that I prefer freedom and, as I tell students, I would take America any day over any of the countries that I have visited or read about.  The primacy of freedom is also why I am a card-carrying member of the ACLU--you should too.

I do wish for a world without authoritarian regimes, and for people to have the option to choose freedom.

The benefits of dating (much) older women!

You might be in for a pleasant shock when you find out who gave the following advice on "the advantages of an older mistress"

[In] all your Amours you should prefer old Women to young ones. You call this a Paradox, and demand my Reasons. They are these:

1. Because as they have more Knowledge of the World and their Minds are better stor’d with Observations, their Conversation is more improving and more lastingly agreable.

2. Because when Women cease to be handsome, they study to be good. To maintain their Influence over Men, they supply the Diminution of Beauty by an Augmentation of Utility. They learn to do a 1000 Services small and great, and are the most tender and useful of all Friends when you are sick. Thus they continue amiable. And hence there is hardly such a thing to be found as an old Woman who is not a good Woman.

3. Because there is no hazard of Children, which irregularly produc’d may be attended with much Inconvenience.

4. Because thro’ more Experience, they are more prudent and discreet in conducting an Intrigue to prevent Suspicion. The Commerce with them is therefore safer with regard to your Reputation. And with regard to theirs, if the Affair should happen to be known, considerate People might be rather inclin’d to excuse an old Woman who would kindly take care of a young Man, form his Manners by her good Counsels, and prevent his ruining his Health and Fortune among mercenary Prostitutes.

5. Because in every Animal that walks upright, the Deficiency of the Fluids that fill the Muscles appears first in the highest Part: The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement.

6. Because the Sin is less. The debauching a Virgin may be her Ruin, and make her for Life unhappy.

7. Because the Compunction is less. The having made a young Girl miserable may give you frequent bitter Reflections; none of which can attend the making an old Woman happy.

8. They are so grateful!!

I wonder if David Letterman might make a "Top Ten" out of this :)

Oh, so who gave that advice?

He was no Hugh Hefner, but was quite "an electrifying flier" who managed to fit his face into a few greenbacks!!! Click here to find out (ht)

Talk about "cougars" when that word meant only the animal, and nothing else!

More inconvenient truths: this time from Ron Paul!

I would love to have Ralph Nader and Ron Paul as members of every possible committee (too bad Nader isn't in Congress) because, then from totally different ideological ends of the spectrum, both these old guys will keep needling the politicos with all kinds of inconvenient truths.  (Full disclosure: I voted for Nader in 2000 and 2008.  2004 is all foggy in my mind)

In the video blow (I can't recall how I ended up here) Paul points out the horrendous American foreign policy history

“A lot of people in this country have come to the conclusion that our policy overhaul has been inconsistent; that sometimes we support the bad guys and the bad guys become our enemies,” Paul told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Rep. Paul pointed to America’s support for Osama bin Laden when he was fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, its collaboration with Saddam Hussein against Iran in the 1980s, and its propping up the Shah in Iran for decades before that.
“But we keep supporting Algeria, Morocco, Yemen, all these dictators, and yet we pretend that as soon as, well, it looks like the dictator might fall, we're all for democracy and we're for freedom and we're against these dictators,” he said.

 Watch it because the video is far more effective than the mere text, and listen to Clinton's response:



But, here is the question: what percentage of the American electorate will be able to understand what Paul talks about, versus the percentage as convinced with the Iraqi links to the 9/11 attacks?

Cartoons of the day: oil, America and dictators

Yes, denial helps!
Anyway, oil ... comes from ...

And the US response?

Where are oil and gas prices now?

the price of light sweet crude rose more than 2 percent to $98.99 a barrel while Brent crude rose 2.5 percent to $111.94. Oil jumped above $100 a barrel in after-hours trading in New York. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline rose by nearly a penny on Tuesday to just over $3.37, which is 20 cents higher than a week ago.

I would rather pay more at the pump than to keep in power the maniacal authoritarian regimes.
Update:

On March 11, a "day of rage" is scheduled in Saudi Arabia. In all likelihood the Saudis will keep a tight lid on it. If they don't, the result could be the Mideast's most astonishing stride yet toward individual freedom and democracy. But a sudden, uncontrollable popular uprising in Saudi Arabia would likely be catastrophic, economically, for the rest of us. Perhaps it's just as well that we have little ability to influence the outcome one way or another.

So, what exactly does a university system chancellor do?

What does the chancellor do anyway?

The following comment (with the typo!) at Jack Bog's Blog sets it up well:

Does he have the power to hire and fire the presidents of the universities, or people that report to the presidents? Does he have authority over the budgets of the universities? Does he have authority to establish levels of tuition and fees? Does he have authority to approve capital projects? How about cirriculum? If he does these things, he's probably paid fairly. If he doesn't, then what exactly does he do?

To which this follow-up comment is hilarious:

A lot of chancelling is involved

Is it a big deal at all?  Yes, it is.

To begin with, a few years ago, then chancellor, Richard Jarvis, was sent off packing because the governor in his infinite wisdom decided to try a different approach in managing higher education in the state.  Jarvis, who grew up in the faculty ranks, was replaced by George Pernsteiner, who is the current chancellor (via this comment):

Pernsteiner was an inside appointment by Neil Goldschmidt, just before the sex scandal broke. George Pernsteiner is pretty much unique among university chancellors in not having a PhD. The RG editorial board wrote:
Pernsteiner was chosen without any of the hallmarks of a chancellor's hiring - no nationwide search, no interviews, no public process.
Then in 2005, the new OUS Board President made it permanent - again, no search or public process.

The chancellor, in this new arrangement, has become a highly paid liaison between the legislative and executive branches of Oregon.  Or perhaps even like a lobbyist for the Oregon University System!

Oh well ...

BTW, one term Jarvis taught an introductory freshman course in geography here at my university.  A funny incident he told us--when the geography faculty got together with him for coffee--was this: the first day of classes, apparently a student walked up to him and complained about the large class size (may have been about 45 students) which was a contrast to the "low average class size" the university's brochure had advertised.  Jarvis response was something like this: "I am just an adjunct faculty here.  It is the administrators who make these decisions."

The unemployment situation is grim.

A couple of weeks ago Robert Reich wrote:

125,000 are needed just to keep up with the increase in the population of Americans wanting and needing work. And 300,000 a month are needed — continuously, for five years — if we’re to get back to anything like the employment we had before the Great Recession.

This is simply awful. Just awful.  I can't begin to understand how the unemployed are dealing with this situation:

• There are 7.7 million fewer payroll jobs now than before the recession started in December 2007.
• Almost 14 million Americans are unemployed.
• Of those unemployed, 6.2 million have been unemployed for six months or more.
• Another 8.4 million are working part time for economic reasons, 
• About 4 million more have left the labor force since the start of the recession (we can see this in the dramatic drop in the labor force participation rate), 
• of those who have left the labor force, about 1 million are available for work, but are discouraged and have given up.

Gaddafi says Libyans love him. Evita singing "you must love me"

So, the maniacal Gawdawful Gaddafi asserts in an interview with the BBC that Libyans love him.  Boy, this guy is even better than Baghdad Bob.

Gaddafi: "They are not against us. No-one is against us. Against us for what? Because I'm not a president. They love me. All my people are with me, they love me all. They will die to protect me, my people."
Christiane Amanpour: "If you say they do love you, then why are they capturing Benghazi and saying they're against you?"
Gaddafi: "It's al-Qaeda. It's not my people. They came from outside."

The US ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, says Gaddafi is "delusional:"

 Ms Rice said the fact he was laughing at questions while "slaughtering his own people" showed that he was disconnected from reality.

Watching him say that his people love him reminded me of the evil genius Evita's song:

Nine billion by 2050: Can we feed 'em all?

That is the focus of the special report that the Economist has.  But, first, I need to highlight the dry humor that I have come to expect in any report from this newspaper:

For years some of the most popular television programmes in English-speaking countries have been cooking shows. That may point to a healthy interest in food, but then again it may not. The historian Livy thought the Roman empire started to decay when cooks acquired celebrity status.

Well, but on to serious discussions then ...

It is one tough question.  Even this ill-informed blogger has often commented about the world's rather lackadaisical approach to the food issue, and the recent spikes in food prices.  But then when even my students don't listen to what I have to say, why should the world!

the fact that agriculture has experienced two big price spikes in under four years suggests that something serious is rattling the world’s food chain. ...
An era of cheap food has come to an end. A combination of factors—rising demand in India and China, a dietary shift away from cereals towards meat and vegetables, the increasing use of maize as a fuel, and developments outside agriculture, such as the fall in the dollar—have brought to a close a period starting in the early 1970s in which the real price of staple crops (rice, wheat and maize) fell year after year.

There are a couple of things happening: First, in the developed world, the fluctuations in raw grain prices do not affect us that much because the prices we pay for food are dependent more on costs of preparation, packaging, etc.  But, in a poor country, the population depends on that raw staple, which they meticulously cook and consume.  They feel the price hikes, and find it awfully difficult.  And we have the arrogance to blame them for wanting more food!

Second, we have come to believe that India and China and many other countries have become our competitors and, therefore, we have started discounting the magnitude of global poverty.  The reality is far from the truth.

So, where do we go from here?

it is not surprising that the food crisis has produced contradictory accounts of the main problem and radically different proposals for solving it. One group is concerned mainly about feeding the world’s growing population. It argues that high and volatile prices will make the job harder and that more needs to be done to boost supplies through the spread of modern farming, plant research and food processing in poor countries. For those in this group—food companies, plant breeders and international development agencies—the Green Revolution was a stunning success and needs to be followed by a second one now.

The alternative view is sceptical of, or even downright hostile to, the modern food business. This group, influential among non-governmental organisations and some consumers, concentrates more on the food problems of richer countries, such as concerns about animal welfare and obesity. It argues that modern agriculture produces food that is tasteless, nutritionally inadequate and environmentally disastrous. It thinks the Green Revolution has been a failure, or at least that it has done more environmental damage and brought fewer benefits than anyone expected.

So, what is the bottom line?

although the concerns of the critics of modern agriculture may be understandable, the reaction against intensive farming is a luxury of the rich. Traditional and organic farming could feed Europeans and Americans well. It cannot feed the world.

I have been preaching this same bottom line for years in my classes.  But then, to some extent, it is not kosher to make such statements anymore given the irrational penchant for locavore and organic eating, which, we forget, is a luxury that only the rich countries can afford.  It is like how one student a few years ago remarked in a class about the simple pleasures of boating--she loves to take her paddle boat to the river and spend hours floating by.  But, to the youth of her age in a poor country, that boating--on a rudimentary catamaran, for instance--will be the daily chore, for hours on, in a fishermen community that barely subsists.

I leave it to the Economist for the last words ...

There are plenty of reasons to worry about food: uncertain politics, volatile prices, hunger amid plenty. Yet when all is said and done, the world is at the start of a new agricultural revolution that could, for the first time ever, feed all mankind adequately. The genomes of most major crops have been sequenced and the benefits of that are starting to appear. Countries from Brazil to Vietnam have shown that, given the right technology, sensible policies and a bit of luck, they can transform themselves from basket cases to bread baskets. That, surely, is cause for optimism.

Here is to hoping that we, across the planet, will start doing the right things.

The good men haven't gone anywhere--they are having a great time :)

So, a few days ago I blogged about a WSJ article that was about the perception that young men increasingly don't "man up" ... Because my students had made similar remarks in class weeks ago, I had emailed that article to them and they are continuing to discuss it even a week later, and the educator in me is having a great time that students are passionately arguing. (Note to concerned taxpayers and partisans: the discussions on this topic have been happening in cyberspace, and we don't waste the contracted class time for it. So, there!) Hey students, are you reading this?

But, all we are doing--in class and in society--is just about beginning to wake up to a new reality. A reality in which women, who now have freedoms that even our grandmothers could not have imagined it in their wildest dreams (creepy to think of my grandma having wild dreams!) are beginning to mean it when they say "anything you do, I can do better"

If we keep thinking along these lines, then a question arises: why do young men seem to have the upper hand even whey are failing in life?

while young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex. Today's young men, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.

That is right: if men are slacking off, it is women's fault!

Yes, sex is clearly cheap for men. Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market. It's no surprise that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who are married has shrunk by an average of 1 percent each year this past decade.

Leave it to academics and researchers and their highfalutin language to make even sex a boring topic :)

Save academic freedom ... by killing it first

[Academe] has far fewer checks and balances than other peer review professions. Doctors can lose their licenses. Lawyers can be disbarred. But incompetent or dishonest professors are often forever. If they have tenure, they are very hard to fire, and just about impossible to retire.How did such a sorry state of affairs arise?

As a tenured faculty member, I am in agreement with that excerpt (editor: how did your colleagues make the mistake of granting you indefinite tenure? Awshutupalready!  It is their problem now, isn't it?)

Anyway, back to the question that Erin O'Connor and Maurice Black raise: "How did such a sorry state of affairs arise?"

Back in the days when at least a few faculty bothered to chat with me and ask for my opinions, I shared with them my worries that we are screwing things up big time in higher education.  And that we are violating the contract we have with society--that they should leave us alone and we will deliver the best service ever.  Now, it is becoming clearer to the public that we are not delivering anywhere near what we promised and, predictably, they don't want to leave us alone. 

O'Connor and Black write that:

Nearly a century ago, the AAUP predicted that failure to ensure professional integrity would license the regulatory intrusions of trustees, legislators, and others. Now that is happening. And while the professoriate’s collective abdication of responsibility is not the sole explanation for these intrusions, it is a shamefully neglected piece of the puzzle.
Academic freedom belongs to the public — it is not the property of academics. Professors must explain why academic freedom is vital to our democracy — and prove that they deserve it.

Unfortunately, we didn't explain and prove.  And they are coming after us, and not merely in Wisconsin.  The AAUP's leader is upset:

Cary R. Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, believes higher education will see more legislative attacks on matters that colleges themselves should regulate, and questions whether lawmakers are right to micromanage campus policies: "Do we really need legislators deciding if Sally should get a sabbatical next year?"

Sally would have had hers without any interference if we had been doing the job well, Professor Nelson.  (editor: ahem, full disclosure? yes, I will on sabbatical in winter 2012.)

If only I didn't know about the harm from oil and natural gas ...

The morbid curiosity that has been a consistent and strong feature of who I am--right from when I was a kid--means that often I think life will be wonderful if only I were not curious. I wish for that blissful ignorance sometimes.  Those occasions when I think that Socrates was being hyperbolic about a life not examined.  That charlatan ought to have tried before he figured out anything--if only humans had Philip K. Dick's "precogs" who would have zoomed into Socrates' "precrimes."

Can't undo any damn thing, and I am stuck.  So are you, if you are reading this--the joke is on you now, isn't it!  Ha!!!  At least there are a few fellow travelers in this misery from knowing something.  Or, maybe that is the problem--knowing something about a lot, as opposed to knowing something only about a little bit.   

So, why all this you ask?  Watch this:



As always, the question this time of the year, when an academic term comes to a close which is when I discuss the environmental impacts of everything that we discuss throughout the term, well, the question is how much should I take my own emotions and pessimism to the classroom?  It can be so easy to become unhinged and rant like a bloody lunatic--after all, these are awfully important issues.  But then so are the events in Libya. In Pakistan. The veterans with PTSD in town. .... the list is endless.

There is only one way out of this--watch it:


In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

Yes, laughter is the best, maybe the only, way out!

More videos: The Libyan "mad dog" Gaddafi and "Singing in the Rain"

Yes, democracy seems to be coming to the Middle East--what can be more evidence than hilarious remixing like this of Gaddafi's rambling rants and "Hey Baby" :)



Or, how about this one that plays on the crazy video of Gaddafi and his umbrella when he confirmed to this people he hadn't fled the country, and was in Libya:



Of course, it was not too long before the Rihanna umbrella theme took off to make fun of this crazy dictator:



Ok, enough with this, I say ... it is "time to muzzle the mad dog of Libya"!

The international community also has a responsibility to ensure that humanitarian assistance reaches the Libyan population. Corridors should be opened from Tunisia and Egypt down which such aid can be funnelled. The UN should be ready to protect the oil installations if Col Gaddafi starts to destroy them.
Col Gaddafi’s misrule is surely coming to an end thanks to the bravery of the Libyans. While the wider world cannot do their fighting for them, it must do what it can to stem the dictator’s capacity for mayhem in what are hopefully his last days.

For now, let's get under Rihanna's umbrella!

Life, from a comforting old movie song

I suppose one would need to know Tamil to understand why this song here is appropriate in my life now :)



Wonderful lyrics by the poet Kannadasan, this includes the following lines:

வாழ்க்கை என்றால் ஆயிரம் இருக்கும்
வாசல்தோறும் வேதனை இருக்கும்
வந்த துன்பம் எது என்றலும்
வாடி நின்றால் ஓய்வதில்லை
உனக்கும் கிழே உள்ளவர் கோடி
நினைத்து பார்த்து நிம்மதி தேடு

Easier said than done, buddy!  (editor: why don't you translate it as best as you can? Nope, am not keen on screwing it up)

P.B. Srinivas is the male "playback" voice here.  Growing up, I was a big time Srinivas fan--his voice was/is simply awesome, and is so smooth.

Never on Sunday--the crazy Bollywood style!

Melina Mercouri gave us 'Never on Sunday" ... that tune has been used in so many ways, like this one.

But, until today I didn't know that there is a version of Never on Sunday in a black/white Hindi film.  Kind of an interesting irony that I should find this on a Sunday!

As with many Hindi movie songs, this one is awfully crazy. Not just crazy and not just awful, but awfully crazy! 
It starts as if the song were a variation of Harry Belafotnte's coconut woman .... But then it becomes a variation of Never on Sunday.  The only saving grace is the dancer, Helen, with her charming looks and fluid movements--she would have been in her mid-twenties when this movie was made. 



I certainly do wish that they hadn't messed up the delightful Never on Sunday :(
To rid myself of the atrocious Hindi version, well, the best antidote is the original:

Waiting for a Jasmine Revolution in China

I have never been a fan of the Chinese model of development; having grown up in India, and then life in America means that I have been mostly free than otherwise.  Those two awful years under Indira Gandhi's "emergency rule" were when I experienced government controls on expression.  One of my favorite Tamil magazines, Thuglak, used to have blank spaces in the commentaries--the sentences that were nuked by the censors.  Even as a kid--I was a pre-teen when all hell broke loose after the Supreme Court verdict in the case that Raj Narain had filed--I was highly uncomfortable with that political development, which all of a sudden muted India.

Of course, when we look beyond political freedom, onto issues of daily existence--from food to water to sanitation--the Chinese model has delivered a lot more than what India's government has given its people.

Kevin Hassett, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, explained that evidence is emerging that developing “countries that are economically and politically free are underperforming the countries that are economically but not politically free.” China, of course, is in the lead of the economically free but politically unfree nations. Hassett wrote, “The unfree governments now understand that they have to provide a good economy to keep citizens happy, and they understand that free-market economies work best.... Being unfree may be an economic advantage. Dictatorships are not hamstrung by the preference of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state. So the future may look something like the 20th century in reverse. The unfree nations will grow so quickly that they will overwhelm free nations with their economic might.”
The kleptocrats who have ruled many developing countries in past decades have tended to come unstuck when Western aid dwindles, their own economies falter and then fall backward, and all too often rivals emerge within their armies. The China Model presents the possibility that such rulers can gain access to immense wealth through creaming off rents while at the same time their broader populations become content, and probably supportive, because their living standards also are leaping ahead.

The fascination to implement the Chinese model is, therefore, not difficult to understand.  Examples are a plenty, from Singapore which is geographically and culturally close to India and China, to Rwanda, which is in a completely different cultural and geopolitical context.

The China Model is, of course, admired in the West, too, with business leaders’ words (at platforms such as Forbes magazine conferences and the World Economic Forum, which has just instituted an annual summer session in China) providing great reinforcement for Chinese leaders. The World Bank is just one of the international institutions that champion China (its greatest client and in some ways its boss) as a paradigm for the developing world. Also fascinating is the appeal of the China Model to Russia, which as Azar Gat, professor of national security at Tel Aviv University, writes in Foreign Affairs, “is retreating from its post-communist liberalism and assuming an increasingly authoritarian character as its economic clout grows.”

Can this model last, not only in China itself but also its variations throughout the world?  Just as the world was beginning to erroneously conclude that perhaps even people prefer the Chinese model, well,

The example of Tunisia raises a related question, equally awkward. For China’s rulers, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the ousted dictator, would have been seen as following their own approach—the so-called “Chinese model” of economic growth combined with political repression—and having much success with it, or so it was assumed for many years. But the Tunisian people took to the streets to overthrow him. Did the people want something more than the Chinese model? How could that be?

One hell of a tough question, which all the dictatorial and authoritarian regimes now have to deal with.  Even in China:

evidence is strong and growing that the top leaders have become extremely nervous about the current situation, as they watch people rising up in country after country in North Africa and the Middle East, assisted by social media and the Internet. No doubt China’s leaders fear what would happen if jasmine ferment really did spread to their own masses—many of whom already harbor a lengthy list of grievances over corruption, bullying, land seizures, environmental destruction, and other items of unjust treatment. 

So, what did the Chinese government do?  Held special politburo meetings, and ...

On the morning of February 19, President Hu Jintao went to the Central Party School to deliver a speech to an audience of provincial governors and central government ministers on maintaining social stability. The speech stressed the glorious achievements of the Communist Party, emphasized the correctness of Party ideology, and in other ways bristled with unenlightening jargon. Its purpose seems to have been to present a public version of the policies decided at the secret Politburo meeting of a week earlier. Without directly mentioning the Middle East or any of the events in China that were making authorities so nervous, Hu made three basic points: one, we need to greatly strengthen control of information on the Internet; two, we need to regulate the “virtual society” that it has given rise to; and three, we need to guide public opinion in this society in “healthy directions.”

I cannot imagine this crazy system continuing on for a long time.  "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  I hope this news is only the beginning of the end of the Chinese model:

Online calls for peaceful Chinese protests to resemble Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" have ended with a number of reporters and citizens being bundled into Chinese security vehicles.
The protests had been planned via anonymous messages left on a U.S. website in China, and called for people to rally against the government in 13 cities including in Beijing and Shanghai to mirror the ongoing Mideast democracy movement.