… enters the Meat Industry Hall of Fame.

“I get credit for inventing the McRib fairly often,” [Roger] Mandigo conceded in an interview earlier this week… “We played an important role in the technology to bind pieces of meat to each other. I didn’t invent the McRib sandwich,” he said. “McDonald’s did that.”

… our stupidest state (just as she has long called the University of Georgia the worst university in America). But Florida has always been a major stupidest state contender, and now their incoming Senate president has, I think, tipped things over so that, yes, Florida is the stupidest state.

University of Florida professor Mike Haridopolos (here’s his appropriately shady-looking faculty page) is an absolutely stunning idiot. His idiocy is as stunning as the sun right in your eyes at the tip of Key West at noon.

The faculty didn’t want him appointed, but it’s an old Southern tradition to put politicians – and their wives – in universities so they can pocket money and throw their weight around.

[Haridopolos was hired at the] University of Florida as a guest lecturer in their Department of Political Science at a starting salary of $75,000, nearly double the $40,000 average for the position. UF faculty and the Democratic Party of Florida cited his lack of academic credentials or input by faculty prior to his hiring, as well as perceived conflict between his obligations as a state senator and an employee of the university.

And now a course wouldn’t ya know it! The ol’ boy “failed to disclose on required state forms that he was paid thousands of dollars by the marketing arm of one of the state’s largest appliance retailers for two years.”

Haridopolos told state ethics investigators he didn’t read the directions for filling out a financial disclosure form in 2004, then repeated his mistakes year after year — assuming he was doing it correctly.

“And I feel pretty silly,” he said, according to files released Wednesday. “I mean, I’m a college professor and I didn’t do it right.”

HYUK! And Isa professor and everything!

“I think what I did is I didn’t read the directions that well to start, and I just kept doing the same things year in-year out,” Haridolopos told the investigator, adding he spent no more than an hour filling out the forms.

He also said that he hadn’t read the separate instruction sheet and overlooked the notice that a specific description of assets over $1,000 was required, along with the name and address of his creditors.

Sue Marcum, an accounting professor at American University here in DC, has been found dead in her Bethesda house; police are calling it a probable homicide.

The comment about her in my headline – taken from Rate My Professors – is typical. She was apparently able to make a pretty dull subject interesting. Almost everyone agrees that she was a great teacher.

The few details about her death that have been released suggest a robbery that turned deadly — a shocking event for her safe, affluent neighborhood.

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The AU newspaper describes her students, some of them in tears, leaving her empty classroom this afternoon.

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Update: A break in the case.

… as Nina Martyris nicely calls it, in an article about censorship at an Indian university, always identifies intellectuality as the enemy. Reflective people who value unemotional deliberation and an openness to the complexity of human life and thought are intellectual snobs – as Michael Gerson calls President Obama in a recent opinion piece – unable to appreciate the higher wisdom of plain-spoken people. Gerson joins Sarah Palin here, who in her speeches relentlessly uses the word professor to condemn Obama.

In his response to the scandal of the University of Mumbai having dropped a novel from its syllabus in response to political pressure, the author of The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay reminds us that “it’s one thing to be scandalous but quite another to be scandalously stupid.” Stupid is influential people in the world’s largest democracy choosing repressive parochialism over free thought.

In response to Sarah Palin and Michael Gerson and others, who insist that a president who openly values ambiguity, intellectual depth, and the free play of the mind — a president who voices his belief that there are stronger and weaker uses of reason in thinking about civic life — threatens the country, Michael Kinsley writes:

If an intellectual snob is someone who secretly thinks he’s smarter than the average Joe, we’ve probably never had a president — even Harry Truman — who wasn’t one. It’s true, I think, that Obama hides it worse than most. But having a president who thinks he’s smart, and shows it, is a small price to pay for having a president who really is smart. Or would people really rather have a stupid president?

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UD thanks Jack, a reader in Ontario.

Excerpts from a 2008 interview with Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals — rough mathematical shapes “whose uneven contours … mimic the irregularities found in nature” — who died today at 85.

I can stand loneliness. In fact, I’m rarely comfortable in a big crowd, because big crowds automatically are very specifically organized by dates, by tradition, by training. And I don’t sound like a mathematician. I don’t sound like a physicist either. Nor do I sound like an art critic. There’s very great strength in being a stranger, if one brings something new.

… Perhaps my early rootlessness gave me an awareness that one can live without being so completely specified.

… [A] large number of truths that I discovered did not result from purely mathematical deduction but from skilled examination of mathematical pictures.

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I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes…

… and smarts” suddenly dies.

Richard Nagareda, professor of law at Vanderbilt, has died at the age of 47.

Not long ago, Vanderbilt featured him in a slide show series called A Day in the Life of…

By all accounts, he was a great teacher, a wit, and a sweet man. His work on mass torts – “allegations of tortious misconduct affecting large numbers of broadly dispersed persons” – was enormously influential.

Robert Klose on the eccentric professor.

Rupert Vallentine, an Australian professor of engineering, dies.

At war he discovered teaching – ad hoc talks to troops and chess to Japanese POWs… At home, he listened to music, smoked from a stubby white cigarette holder and developed from first principles a way of cleaning the pool by swimming with one leg straight which drew leaves into the centre by centrifugal force. He sang his children to sleep with a mouth organ and when they were asked at school to nominate a religion he suggested: “Theodolite”. It worked.

In blocking Diamond’s nomination, Shelby said:

“I do not believe he’s ready to be a member of the Federal Reserve Board,” Shelby said in August. “I do not believe that the current environment of uncertainty would benefit from monetary policy decisions made by board members who are learning on the job.”

Not many days later, Diamond gets the Nobel Prize for economics. (Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides also won.)

Talk about a fast learner! I guess Shelby’s diss really made Diamond hit the books.

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Ezra Klein comments.

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UD hears Shelby’s working with consultants from the Chinese government to figure out how to respond to Diamond’s award.

… has died, age ninety. UD didn’t know, until she read some obituaries, that she was Grover Cleveland’s granddaughter…

TPM, The Philosopher’s Magazine, republishes a 2003 interview with her. Excerpts:

… [Foot’s] view can be summed up in the idea that moral reasoning is about practical rationality that recognises the existence of objective human needs as reasons for action. What Foot thinks most significant about this is that it stands opposed to what she calls speaker-relative accounts of ethics found in theories such as emotivism, prescriptivism and subjectivism. She explains the contrast between her view and the speaker-relative one in some detail.

“Emotivism, expressivism and so on (all of them I lump together) think that there is something special in a moral judgement in the way that there is something special about an order. It’s a special bit of language, like an avowal or a wish, or a greeting, although it isn’t any of those. These philosophers all ask what must the circumstances be for a moral word to be used by a speaker? What must he desire, what must he want others to do, what must he feel; all of which are questions about the speaker. That is the right kind of question to ask about an order or a greeting, but I don’t think that that sort of account is right for morality at all. I say that what we’ve got to dig out in order to understand a moral judgement is a particular use of the word ‘good’, and that is nothing to do with what the speaker wants. It’s not dependent on conditions in the speaker, so mine is not a speaker-relative account.

“So I’m really talking about a general concept of ‘good’ that applies to plants, animals and human beings. You can’t understand what I mean when I say I think it is acting badly to break a promise until you first understand that ‘good’ is used of living things in a particular way…”

… “People want different things and there are different cultures. But that is not in favour of subjectivity at all. It only means that you’ve got to differentiate. Certain things are absolutely certain – that the young are helpless and so are the old – they don’t just die suddenly, they get ill and infirm and need help. These are facts for all human beings. They don’t do well being very lonely. When Freud said that love and work are the only two real therapies I think that he said something quite generally true about human beings…”

…”The idea that because people have different preferences you can move to the conclusion that there must be a radical breakdown of discussion about good and bad action – that’s exactly what I deny and can’t let past. Some people care about art and some people don’t. Some people want public money spent one way and some people don’t. You don’t conclude ‘so subjectivism’.” …

UD supposes that in a rather wide range of instances that feature blatant cruelty — consider two much-discussed recent cases, Tyler Clementi and Westboro Church — Foot must be right. It’s absolutely certain that the most vulnerable and private aspects of individual human lives should not be trashed. We can argue about legal responses to their having been trashed, but I don’t think many people would argue the morality of the matter.

… for what sounds like erotic behavior at a university residence hall — palladium-catalyzed cross coupling.

… a economist already featured in these pages, has won a MacArthur.

The greatest contribution of Saez? He helps us understand why Todd Henderson thinks he’s just getting by.

… on its faculty bios: INDICATORS OF ESTEEM. Of which Professor H M Evans has many.

He’s a medical ethicist, and has written papers with intriguing titles like Madness, medicine and creativity in Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

And speaking of wonderful: Here’s a wonderful photo of Professor Evans holding his Advanced Purchase First Class train ticket.

A university professor who alighted his train one stop before his final destination was stunned when he was asked to pay £155 to leave the station.

Martyn Evans was told he would have to pay up after leaving the train at Darlington, near his home, rather than wait until Durham where he works at the university’s philosophy department.

… Station staff said his ticket was invalid because he had left the train too early, and was told he would have to pay some £155 – the price of the same ticket from Birmingham to Darlington.

Ethicists tend to be particularly prickly.

“The whole process made me feel like a wrongdoer from the beginning and that disgusted me more than just the money itself.”

He’s made such a stink, the trains have said okay, forget about the money.

The President’s threats to increase the taxes of Americans who make more than $250,000 a year have exposed the ugly underbelly of the shame of a nation: Law professors.

Already, under pressure of budget cuts at the University of California, law professors have gone public with their working conditions ($200,000 to $300,000 a year, tenure, light teaching loads) and argued that the best way to save money would be to lay off, as Kristin Luker points out, “anyone but professors.”

Now, the proposed tax increase has brought more suffering out of the shadows. A University of Chicago law professor with a household income of $400,000 has sketched so powerful a portrait of what John Edwards called The Two Americas that his testimony has been picked up by the New York Times’ Paul Krugman. Krugman quotes from a post about this professor written by Brad DeLong.

[Todd Henderson] knows of one person with 20 times his income. He knows who the really rich are, and they have ten times his income: They have not $450,000 a year. They have $4.5 million a year. And, to him, they are in a different world.

And so he is sad. He and his wife deserve to be successful. And he knows people who are successful. But he is not one of them–widening income inequality over the past generation has excluded him from the rich who truly have money.

Is this America? I’ve searched my library for any account of degradation in this country comparable to what we’re beginning to glimpse in these testimonials. I had to go to Italy — to Danilo Dolci’s 1959 Report from Palermo — to remind myself what Henderson and his family must be undergoing.

I read Krugman’s account of Henderson’s situation to Mr UD. He shook his head. “He’s fallen so low,” he finally said, “he thinks 4.5 million is rich…”

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In a dark and drear room on the quad
Sits a man quite abandoned by God:
“We make half a million
But not a gazillion.
Dear Lord, can you hear me? It’s Todd.”

Surviving a gunshot wound to the stomach.