mystery thrillers ain't what they used to be

While wondering why oh why an Afghan would want to kill an American, NTY mentions that it was the 62nd such "insider killing" of the year.  Since they're so curious about the mysterious motives of the 62nd insider killer, you think they'd explore the motives of the other 61 insider killers from this year, right?  Or at least the 12 other insider killings from this week alone, right?  Nah, they're probably not related. I bet Iran might have something to do with it.  We'll probably have to nuke their Persian asses to get to the bottom of this mystery.   

Why do they hate us?

and so this is christmas?

I saw the message below posted by an acquaintance on facebook.

While driving around doing last-minute Christmas errands this morning - carols blasting in my car and Littles laughing in the back seat - I drove by a woman, who was alone in her car, sobbing. My heart stopped. My perspective changed in an instant. I felt desperately for that woman. Obviously, I don't know her, or her circumstances, but I know what it feels like to be heart-broken; especially in the midst of what is supposed to be a blissfully happy holiday season. And then I remembered. That woman IS the very reason we have a holiday season. Christmas, Jesus' Birthday, is the REASON for the season. God saw how hard this life was for us, that no matter how much we tried to make everything "merry and bright," we still experience pain and suffering. He knew how desperately we needed a Savior - someone who could offer us a gift unlike anything this World could ever provide - a home with no more tears, no more suffering or pain. He offered us Heaven through the hope of His son, Jesus Christ. I'm SO thankful that I have the hope of Heaven to look forward to. I pray this woman would understand the hope that Christ offers her this Christmas. And I pray for every other individual who is suffering this Christmas season - the families in CT, those who have lost, separated/divorced families, the unemployed, the sick, the lonely, the list goes on - that the hope of Christ would shine bright and bring true peace this season. Merry Christmas to all, and to all, a GOOD night!

This has the start of a very nice story:  upon encountering a down-on-her-luck stranger, a privileged protagonist feels compassion and rethinks her worldview. 

Unfortunately, the rest of the story is a disaster. The weeping woman seemed like she'd be a character in the story, and I expected that by the end she'd have received some useful assistance.  Instead, weeping woman isn't really a character and her eventual plight is completely ignored.  Rather than help weeping woman, the protagonist continues on her way like a bizarro Good Samaritan, more convinced than ever that there's some magical force that will make everything better.  Well aware of 2,000 years of human suffering since the arrival of the magic "savior," the protagonist is still somehow expecting results.  Contrary to her claim, there's no change of perspective here; the protagonist's preexisting perspective illogically becomes more entrenched. 

I don't think it would do much good to say any of that in her facebook comments, so I've buried it here instead.  I should also say that despite her superstition, dogma, and clumsy trivialization of human suffering, I think there's a basically decent message underneath, and hopefully that is what large numbers of her facebook friends are "liking" about it.  Sometimes I forget how much pain is in the world and how little I can do about it.  Luckily, I have a community of helpful people I can turn to when times are tough, and I hope that everyone else who is suffering can find help too.

youthful athleticism vs. veteran savvy

i been listening to the orioles-yankees playoff series on the radio.  i just heard the broadcasters going on about how cool it is that the orioles pitcher is a 28 year old rookie.  "in other sports you never see that!  you never see a 28 year old rookie center dominating basketball games."  i think they were suggesting that late-blooming talent is a peculiar quirk of baseball.  i'm not sure.  couldn't it suggest poor talent evaluation in baseball?  shouldn't the big league scouts have realized that guy was good when he was 19?  23?

i'm fairly convinced that basketball performance peaks around 25 years old, based on meaningful data.  look up "wages of wins" if you're curious.  i have the impression that tennis performance also peaks in the early 20s, but that's just my anecdotal notion.  so i'm on board with the premise that athleticism peaks in the early 20s, but learn continues beyond that, so that depending on the sport you might have peak performance after peak athleticism.  it could be that baseball is such a sport.

haven't done this in a while

#1 The Wire, #2 Sopranos, #3 Deadwood.

Those are elite shows that reward repeated viewings seemingly without limit, as do Game of Thrones, Arrested Development and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The first half of Season 5 of Breaking Bad was good enough that I went back and rewatched the rest of it, wondering if it was better than I'd remembered. It wasn't. It's a fine show but I doubt I'll watch it again, putting it in roughly the same company as Weeds, Mad Men, Lost, and Dexter. I might rewatch Parks & Rec, Community, Rome, Sherlock and 6 Feet Under, but doubt I'll ever consider them elite. Boardwalk Empire is enjoyable but I don't see it landing in the elite category.

welcome, neighbor!

About a year ago, my research group moved our operations to a different lab. Our new space has a door that opens directly into adjoining office space. They aren't our offices, but after several weeks without seeing anyone in there, I began using the space when I needed someplace to sit and work on my laptop when I need to leave the lab to afford some privacy to participants in my experiments. I'd just let myself in through the unlocked door and sit in there at a table, leaving no trace of my presence, aside from a hand-written note introducing myself, explaining when and why I let myself in, and asking them to contact me if there was any problem at all.  I arrived one day to find the door locked for the first time. I went out through the hallway and spoke to an administration person who happened to be there. She explained that they'd just finished changing the locks on the door in response to security complaints from the "occupants," and that I'd no longer be able to use the space. The hallway door to those offices has a glass window. I check sometimes and have still never seen anyone in there.

The incident is fairly representative of my experience at this particular institution.

Ballin' with The Boss

A big part of being a high profile politician is being a good actor.  You have to be able to say all kinds of absurd things with total sincerity.  The story here is that Obama is good at acting because he practices, and he's athletic and likes sports so they like to cast him in roles in movies like "Ballin' with The Boss."  Naturally, NYT perpetuates the theatre instead of reporting, administering a slobbery tongue bath to the narcissistic asshole they describe. 

He preemptively blames his staff for problems by claiming his superiority to them at their jobs.  So confident!  My favorite part is Obama whining ("in his darker days" ha!) about how he should be judged against the accomplishments of the hypothetical Republican alternative rather than on his own record.  Dude is the exact same as them!  What, he's pissed off that we don't care that Bush didn't even bother to work hard at the acting while basically doing all the same dirt?  Dude pardoned Bush and his accomplices for their crimes and continued and escalated those crimes in between his golf lessons with PGA pros.  NYT focuses on the golf.  Dude got his Grammy and his 2008 Marketer of the Year.  He isn't satisfied with those performance awards and wants voters to give him credit for it too?  Seems kinda greedy, dude.  NYT ignores that Obama can't go all-out against the Republicans because he's complicit in all of their crimes.  So competitive!  Bullshit!  So cooperative.  So compliant.

By the way, here's the plot of Ballin' with The Boss, which won 25 Oscars, 56 Golden Globes and 3 Nobel Peace Prizes.  Once upon a time Obama called in a "double tap" drone strike on a bunch of Pakistani "militants," knowing full well the NYT would comply with his directive that all young men killed will be called militants.  A few minutes later, while he lectured a very special group of underprivileged teens how anything is possible, the first tap killed 9 members of a wedding party. A few minutes after that, the second tap killed 8 would-be rescuers and 16 survivors of the first attack.  A few days later, Obama talked a bunch of shit while slacking off on defense, then demanded the ball on offense, knowing his White House staff league basketball opponents would never risk challenging his drive to the basket.  The one time a brash young intern plays tough defense on Obama, the ref calls a highly questionable foul.  After the game, Obama teammates laud his accomplishments.  He's so smart and talented and his close friend says he tries to do his best!!  The next day the intern is fired. About a decade later, 50% of the long forgotten very special underprivileged audience have been killed or incarcerated in the war on drugs, 90% have received inadequate medical care, and the few who made it to post-secondary education are an average of $79,00 in debt with no job prospects. Meanwhile Obama basks in the luxury and prestige of the post-Presidential speaking circuit, collecting unimaginable speaking fees from all his partners who profit from the destruction of the lives of inconsequential losers.   Obama plays to win!

man avoids being anywhere near a mass murderer: controversial?

As a personal strategy for dealing with brutal evil, Chris Floyd often endorses the words of Thoreau: “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

Today Floyd and others highlight Desmond Tutu's embrace of this approach in his shunning of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Tutu refused to speak at a conference at which Blair was paid $238,000 to speak, and asked why African and Asian mass-murdering war criminals are held accountable for their crimes at the international criminal court while Blair and George W. Bush (and the elder Bush and Clinton and Obama and Powell and Cheney and Rice) scamper around the world collecting fat speaking fees, book deals, and peace prizes.

Floyd's other favourite American poet has the answer:  

Democracy don’t rule the world 
You’d better get that in your head 
This world is ruled by violence 
But I guess that’s better left unsaid

Coach K loves the chuckers

My die-hard Terp days are long behind me, but if any of that spirit remains, it delights in today's message: Coach K sucks.  Burying Harden and Love behind the inferior Bryant, Westbrook, Williams, and Anthony was bad.  Instead of going small, why not go big?  Chandler and Love are both awesome, and James is awesome at the 3.  You can play Chandler, Love, and James in the frontcourt, and then Durant/Harden and Paul in the backcourt.  That lineup plays amazing defense, giving up nothing easy inside and still having huge size and speed on the perimeter.  They get every rebound.  And the efficiency of that lineup on offense would be spectacular!  Instead we get all those chuckers.

cringe and then chuckle

I've read almost everything Glenn Greenwald has written since the Unclaimed Territory days.  He's great.  I had to say those nice things because I was starting to complain about something he does every once in a while that makes me cringe.  A throw-away line he used a few days ago was sticking in my craw, something like "the founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves!"  Come on, Glenn! Fuck the founding fathers, man!  They openly sought to design a system to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority!"  They were the original 1%, ruthless exploiters of the working man, and they wanted to keep it that way!  Those rich fucks!  This whole fucking thing! That's what bugs me a little; Greenwald often seems too reverent to the mythology of The Founders, those glorious secular saints who gave us The Holy Document. But then again I refuse to acknowledge other people's sneezes lest I encourage superstition, so maybe I'm overly sensitive. 

Now I see that the piece I'm remembering was shorter than his usual, and the tone more exasperated.  I shouldn't take it especially seriously, and I certainly don't begrudge him the occasional outburst amidst his typically meticulous and methodical work.  In fact, I admit this one is pretty entertaining.  How about that next-day-update where he actually laid down some fucking scripture on us, from the 1777 Epistles of St. John!  (He's the patron saint of the 1% because when he recognized that the dependence caused by extreme inequality compromises the political autonomy of the poor, his solution was that the poor wouldn't have any formal political power in his shiny new democratic nation!)  Anyway, is Glenn making fun of himself?  Either way it is funny, and dark.

BO sez urrybody wants to be like USA USA USA USA!!

I dunno dude, Canada laughs at you pretty hard.

BO sez like whatever, they're totally jealous.

pondering this plague of pervasive plagiarism

My TA responsibilities recently included marking an assignment for a 2nd year research methods course.  119 students read the same paper and answered the same questions about it (e.g. What were the hypotheses?  What were the dependent and independent variables? etc.)  A significant majority plagiarized.  I was instructed to give them zeros on questions for which their answers were plagiarized, which is a fairly light penalty under the university's plagiarism standards.  Still, the net effect was that the class average was close to failing.

I mention this because I've been fascinated by student response to accusations of violations of academic integrity.  I got many emails from students who plagiarized, and there were several very common responses:

• I am very upset
• I worked very hard
• I did not plagiarize
• I did the same thing on the last assignment and got a good grade
• I don't know how else to say what the authors said

 The first two seem to reveal feelings of entitlement.  If I work hard, I deserve a good grade regardless of the quality of my work.  If I don't get what I want, that makes me upset; if I'm upset, you better fix it.  These people have a very different idea of what "higher education" is supposed to be about than I do, but I'd have a hard time saying they're wrong about what it actually is.

Denial is fascinating to me, because it was clear that most of the deniers didn't even understand what they were accused of.  They just denied as their first instinct.  I'd already sent most of them a link to a university site that explains plagiarism quite thoroughly, which they seem to have completely ignored.  Often denials were accompanied by lame "proof" of their innocence, unambiguous and perfectly preserved electronic evidence notwithstanding.  Once I directed them to the specific section of the website that dealt with their specific form of plagiarism and showed them examples of how what they did is a perfect example, they usually stopped denying and switched to other tactics.  It was especially interesting when the strategy shifted from denial to the 4th response and/or 5th response.  "I didn't plagiarize... I always plagiarize... I don't know how to do anything other than plagiarize."

It became clear while I was marking these that the standard strategy employed by most students was to find the sentences or paragraphs in the paper where the authors came closest to answering each question and just copy what the authors wrote, despite instructions to "use your own words" and despite the general warning issued to the class after the previous assignment to familiarize themselves with university plagiarism guidelines..  Some especially inept students just straight-up copy and pasted words from the paper to their assignment, but most made at least a shitty effort to paraphrase.  (Closely paraphrasing without quoting is a form of plagiarism.)  That's generally a good strategy.  Unless the person marking the assignment knows the original paper inside and out (which starts to happen when you have to mark 119 assignments about it), it is difficult to detect paraphrased plagiarism.  I did find quite a bit of it on their first assignment, but I suspect I overlooked the vast majority.  So they generally face low risk of detection for this form of cheating, and they don't have to do all the hard work of fully understanding the research and expressing ideas in their own words.

This is all consistent with what I've observed for quite a while: undergraduate students are generally terrible at writing and critical thinking, and go to great lengths to avoid both.  And I can't really blame them, because that's a fairly rational response to the incentive structures they typically face.

The law requires insurers to give out annual rebates ... if less than 80 percent of the premium dollars they collect go toward medical care. For insurers covering large employers, the threshold is 85 percent.

So insurance companies have to give rebates if they aren't spending much of their customer's premiums on medical care.  Sound reasonable?

“It does make sense,” Ms. Wagner, 29, said of the rebate rule. “Why should they get to spend all this money on advertising and lining the pockets of people who own the company and make me pay more?” 

 Agreed.

Insurance companies say the rebate requirement does not address swiftly rising medical costs, which they say are the main reason premiums keep going up.

“Placing an arbitrary cap on administrative costs is going to do nothing to make health care more affordable,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the industry trade group. “There’s a lot of misinformation out there." 

So "insurance companies say" (what human being said it?) that they shouldn't have to give back money they don't spend on medical care because they have to spend a lot of money on medical care.  Good argument.  Also, a insurance company spokesmodel administrator says that paying lots of money to administrators is crucial to affordable healthcare, and then implies that someone other than him is trying to confuse people. 

Naturally the titans of journalism at the NYT make no effort to clarify anything.

So we're not going to admit we ripped you off.  But here's some of your money back, and a coupon.

the story i see

rich white men who profit from the physical labor of (mostly) black men say that young (mostly) black men should perform more free labour, because that way the rich white men have to pay their (mostly) black workers less

right?

occupy facebook!

go trolling through the archives, you creeper, and you might find some tales about my early adult experience with letting rich corporations make massive amounts of money by organizing my time and effort.  short version: it sucked hard.  so i was very reluctant to join facebook, but eventually was lured in by access to a communication network of most of the people i interact with in real life.  i've been on it almost a year now, and it does involve quite a bit of my time and effort.  it seems to me that the basic service they provide me, which i see as organizing my online communication, could be done much better.  

this is of course to be expected under the theory that if you want to use the "free" service of a for-profit corporation that is making people super fucking rich, expect that it will still cost you somehow, whether directly (e.g. exposure to manipulative advertising, addiction, people like this getting your data) or as part of the public effects (the long list of harmful effects of inequality). 

i suggest that a way organizing online communication could be done better is by a non-profit cooperative network of users who acknowledge those costs up front and instead invest them in a bit of effort towards controlling their own affairs by paying small costs time towards organizing.  so a time "cost" of using their interface could maybe be "paid" by participating in elections, or helping with programming, or maybe user-voted real life charitable work.  perhaps modestly greater privileges could accompany greater contribution, as decided democratically.

having now expunged my thoughts on the matter, i should process to investigate what groups are already working on this.  stay tuned!

view from my window

view from my window

flaky wet snow
  coming down for hours
  covering everything in several fresh inches
tall slim golden retriever
  tearing around park across street
  treeing very conspicuous squirrel
  checking back on her between
    maniacal laps around the park
    dutiful visits with his humans
      smaller one also gleefully enjoying her snow
black squirrel & large human
  giving impression of
    deals of serious business
      the worse end hers
    being annoyed & being happy

keep our evil overlords away from the internet!

that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from

y'all knew me when