Those who know him well say that he weighs his words carefully before he speaks.

I’ll say.

… this is about, right? Seems the Hardin County (Texas) GOP treasurer wants to secede from us maggots – them’s the word he used – what done elected Barack Hussein Obama. The Hardin County GOP seems to have rustled itself up a new treasurer real quick.

Morrison was recently “chosen by former State Board of Education Chairman Don McLeroy to help screen Texas public school textbooks,” but look on the bright side. He can’t do any more damage than has already been done to Texas public school students.

UD‘s pretty sure she’s on the side of Green Mountain College in this dispute about whether to slaughter and then sustainably eat two oxen who’ve had to be retired from the fields.

But she knows she’s enjoying some of the things people on and off campus are saying.

Off-campus enemies of the slaughter and eat approach are, say the provost, “at war, and they don’t take prisoners.”

A student notes: “It’s funny that it’s blown up in such a way, because on any other farm anywhere, this isn’t even a conversation that you would begin to have. It’s something that animals get to a certain point in their lives and they become food. And that’s just how it’s been for years, you know, decades.” Millennia, actually.

It’s Haleem Jubilee College! The place to be if you’re a girl who wants to be protected from molestation and from the “evil things” that phones make happen.

2010 was quite a year for St John’s University.

First there was this guy, St. John’s 2008 Alumni Outstanding Achievement Award winner. So proud was he of this achievement that he wore a big red sweatshirt emblazoned with ST JOHN’S UNIVERSITY to his first TARP fraud court appearance.

Then the dean of their Asian studies school and vp of international affairs had the following federal charges brought against her:

She faces a 10-count indictment including bribery, forced labor [of graduate students] and tax charges. The most serious charge, forced labor, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.

The mainstream as well as tabloid press is going to town over Cecilia Chang, an out of control person who has already imploded in court, testifying (against legal advice) on her own behalf.

… after they’ve seen … college?

… the farce was just beginning.

Bear-bolstering at the University of Colorado.

Not knowing you don’t have a PhD is the academic equivalent of not being able to find your ass with both hands, thinks ol’ UD.

It’s not as if you can overlook having to write a long manuscript over a number of years and then go to a room full of people and defend its arguments over a number of hours. It tends to concentrate the mind.

Yet the University of Pennsylvania has (had) a dean, a vice-dean of education, who (see this post’s title) has made just this claim. He’s been calling himself doctor for years based on his incorrect assumption that he has a PhD.

It’s like all those German politicians (and one Hungarian) (and millions of Korean) assuring us that they didn’t know they plagiarized their dissertations. It’s just really odd.

Anyway, Penn has put this guy on leave while they untangle the web he weaves.

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UD thanks Ian.

Millburn Police arrested two Kean University students who said they were playing a scavenger hunt game that involved taking as many house number signs from Short Hills as possible.

This story combines drug smuggling with academic point scoring – a new combination, I think.

A professor of physics at the University of North Carolina is in an Argentine jail because Buenos Aires airport police discovered an elaborate compartment in his luggage into which a lot of cocaine had been placed.

[Paul] Frampton says the cocaine had been cleverly built into a piece of his luggage without his knowledge, but he declined to say how it might have gotten there, saying that revealing details might harm his defense.

Frampton says the UNC provost has done little to help him, and has in fact stopped his pay. Why?

[Bruce] Carney had long been jealous, he said, because Frampton had earned tenure much more quickly and because Carney’s academic accomplishments were paltry compared to his own.

“I am one of the most published physicists, and really he hasn’t done much that is of interest,” Frampton said.

The provost is sorry he’s in jail … and is also sorry “to hear that Frampton had been missing the meetings of the general relativity class he was supposed to be teaching.”

Frampton responds that only one student signed up for it. Possible reason here.

Fear of money drives the current presidential scene, here and in France. Panicked flight from your hundreds of millions of dollars has taken hold of two leading politicians, each of whom has palmed the problem off to a surrogate – the Missus. Carla Sarkozy calls herself and her husband “modest simple folk,” and Ann Romney doesn’t consider herself wealthy. Their comments have set off a laff riot.

There are a couple of other ways of approaching this problem. One is to assert that any allusion to money is déclassé, vulgar, beneath one, beneath everyone. Refuse to talk about it.

Another – the Eric Cantor thing – is to assert that any allusion to money is a sign of petty envy on the part of the mentioner.

Both of these approaches are preferable to the business of pretending you’re not rich.

The University of Georgia is a strange sad place on the best of days, a sports- and booze-sodden universe, its lawns scattered with the remains of the last tailgate… But even by its own surreal standards, the theft of a forklift kind of pushes the envelope…

They’ve been looking for the thing for a month… It weighs 22,000 pounds and was, the university announced today, stolen by a university employee. (What’d he do? Drive it out?)

The article doesn’t say whether the university recovered the forklift…

How do you hide a forklift? Did he sell it?

Karimov’s Kommandments.

[I]n April 2010, Romney gave a speech at Claremont McKenna College, one of America’s great undergraduate institutions. [The speech was titled No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.] The only item of interest is that Romney accepted payment from them: an $11,475 honorarium. There’s nothing wrong with Romney accepting such payment from a non-profit institution, and it was clearly a bargain rate when compared with some of his other gigs. But it makes you wonder why he didn’t do it for free. He also accepted payment from the non-profit Quest Educational Foundation. Quest provides tutoring and mentoring to high-school students in Florida and Romney spoke at their annual fundraiser (Gingrich was a speaker at the 1999 event) for a $35,771 fee.

Romney, this Weekly Standard writer points out, is worth $250 million. The writer clearly has in mind the suggestion that extremely rich people might want to support worthy non-profit causes rather than drain them of scarce funds – might want to support them not merely by accepting invitations to give speeches, and by bringing star power to their fund raising events, but by waiving any fee.

Can we make the case for accepting a fee under these circumstances?

Well, plenty of people will make the none of your effing business argument. It’s a private transaction, our economic system is called capitalism, the guy’s free to accumulate capital. Blow it out your ass.

There’s also the nothing is valued unless it costs something argument. Placebos cost almost nothing to make and for millions of people probably relieve their depression as effectively as expensive anti-depressant pills. But if you knew you were taking a free pill for your depression, that would depress you more! Free means worthless! Or it means you’re not really clinically depressed, which is also depressing.

For many commodities, the magic seems to reside in their price.

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Or, you know, in their pain. Why would you want to join a university marching band if you weren’t first beaten almost to death before you were allowed to join? The pain of hazing confers value on the group. In a similar way, the problem with placebos is that they have no side effects. If weird unpleasant shit isn’t happening to you, you can’t be treating your depression.