…nothing to celibrate.
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Update: They fixed it.
Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley suggested that AIG executives should accept responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.
“I suggest, you know, obviously, maybe they ought to be removed,” Grassley said. “But I would suggest the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they’d follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I’m sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.”
… Dove — a bird all over Key West, and currently sitting in my terminalia catappa — is exactly the hoo – HOOO – hoo Mick Jagger does toward the end of Sympathy for the Devil (the hoos start after he takes off his shirt).
Hoo HOOO Hoo.
How could this:
sound like this:
…voices against greed and corruption in American medical schools, will be speaking at George Washington University tomorrow.
Wednesday, March 18, 4:30pm
GWU-SPHHS Health Policy Department
2021 K St. NW, Ste. 800, Washington, DC
Bass understands the complex, far-reaching conflict of interest scandal as well as anyone, and writes compellingly about it. If I were in DC, I’d take the middle seat in the front row.
…HURTS.
University Diaries has covered chlamydia and colonoscopy poetry contests on this blog; now there’s one for migraines.
MyMigraineConnection.com and Teri Robert, patient advocate and Migraine expert on MyMigraineConnection.com, have kicked off their popular annual “Putting Our Heads Together” Poetry Contest. The contest, in its ninth year, seeks the most creative and influential pieces of poetry on how Migraine disease and/or headache disorders affect each entrant’s life.
… [A scientist who pointed out a conflict of interest at the Journal of the American Medical Association] says he received an angry call from JAMA executive deputy editor Phil Fontanarosa last week, shortly after Leo’s article was published on the BMJ Web site. “He said, ‘Who do you think you are,’ ” says Leo. “He then said, ‘You are banned from JAMA for life. You will be sorry. Your school will be sorry. Your students will be sorry.” Fontanarosa referred a call for comment to a JAMA spokeswoman, who said Leo’s retelling of the conversation was “inaccurate.”
“He did talk to the guy, but he said he didn’t threaten him,” the spokeswoman said. “It was something along the lines of not setting a good example for students. He didn’t say he would be banned. He didn’t think Leo was taking a very good approach by taking this confidential process within JAMA out to media and another medical journal. It’s just not the way things are handled here.”
The call from Fontanarosa was followed up by ones from JAMA editor-in-chief Catherine DeAngelis to Leo’s superiors, Leo says. He said she asked his superiors to get him to retract his article in the BMJ. Leo says he decided to call DeAngelis directly to find out what, in particular, she might be objecting to. He said she was “very upset” but didn’t make specific complaints about the article.
In a conversation with us, DeAngelis was none too happy to be questioned about the dust-up with Leo.
“This guy is a nobody and a nothing” she said of Leo. “He is trying to make a name for himself. Please call me about something important.” She added that Leo “should be spending time with his students instead of doing this.”
When asked if she called his superiors and what she said to them, DeAngelis said “it is none of your business.” She added that she did not threaten Leo or anyone at the school.
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The lady who’s editing JAMA
Is one hell of a big red hot mama.
Fontanarosa?
He’s Mafiosa.
DeAngelis looks like Osama.
Attention has shifted to its medical school, but George Washington University’s basketball program, as a Washington Times columnist points out, also looks a bit gruesome close up.
I’ve got a short post up at Inside Higher Ed about this year’s recipient of the Templeton Prize; otherwise, I’ve spent today working on stuff for that anonymous agency (I mentioned it in an earlier post) that has asked me to write about writing for them. If anything dramatic comes of this agency’s overtures to UD, you’ll be the first to know.
Meanwhile, Les UDs are about to walk north to see the sunset. They have heard from La Kid, who is on the beach in Negril. She is very happy, and quite certain that her setting is even more beautiful than her parents’ setting.
Or maybe we’ll take a drive. In our Chrysler Sebring convertible! Along with the Mini Cooper, the Smart Car, and the Prius, it’s a majorly popular car down here.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think UD just saw the Space Shuttle!
Yes, laugh if you like and as I say please correct her if this is impossible, but UD was a moment ago sitting on her balcony enjoying the evening breeze when she saw in the distance, low on the horizon, a huge long pinkish flame that just seemed to stay in one place in the sky.
I mean, it didn’t look like something coming out of a jet, because the flames were too big, and anyway the aircraft didn’t seem to be moving in the sky the way a jet moves…
“Whazat?” UD asked herself out loud. (Mr UD had gone up to Mallory Square to see the sunset.)
Then she went inside and idly turned on the television, which informed her that, seconds ago, the Shuttle had taken off from Cape Canaveral…………………………………
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update:
F – U- U- U- CK.
The brilliant light emitted by the two solid rocket boosters will be visible for the first 2 minutes and 4 seconds of the launch out to a radius of some 520 statute miles from the Kennedy Space Center.
Depending on where you are located relative to Cape Canaveral, Discovery will become visible anywhere from a few seconds to just over 2 minutes after it leaves Pad 39-A.
… when under his watch, in 2003, two Harvard money managers each took home $35 million in bonuses?
I mean, now, sure, he’s tossing the word around like confetti. But where was outrageous then?
New York Times.
… For universities, business education is a kind of cash cow. Business schools are less expensive to operate than graduate schools with elaborate labs and research facilities, and alumni tend to be generous with donations.
Business education is big business, too. Some 146,000 graduate degrees in business were awarded in 2005-06, roughly one-fourth of the 594,000 graduate degrees awarded that school year, according to the Education Department.
Still, there have been signs that all is not well in business education. A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly — more than in any other discipline…
More mumbling about trying to make MBA spell ETHICAL.
New York Times money columnist on Yeshiva trustee Elie Wiesel, and other cargo cultists:
[They] entrusted their life savings to a man they thought “was God,” as Elie Wiesel put it not long ago….
It [is] hard not to feel sad for … all the victims of Mr. Madoff’s evil-doing. But one also has to wonder: what were they thinking?
At a panel a month ago, put together by Portfolio magazine, Mr. Wiesel expressed, better than I’ve ever heard it, why people gave Mr. Madoff their money. “I remember that it was a myth that he created around him,” Mr. Wiesel said, “that everything was so special, so unique, that it had to be secret. It was like a mystical mythology that nobody could understand.” Mr. Wiesel added: “He gave the impression that maybe 100 people belonged to the club. Now we know thousands of them were cheated by him.”
… People did abdicate responsibility — and now, rather than face that fact, many of them are blaming the government for not, in effect, saving them from themselves…
From a New York Times article:
…Dave Maggard, the University of Houston’s athletic director, predicted “a lot more scrutiny” for public universities that make expensive coaching changes. He said that the use of state money would come under increasing scrutiny, especially considering that many universities, even the larger and more visible ones, lose money on their athletic programs.
“A lot of places, even the big places, are running deficit budgets today,” Maggard said. “I think you’re going to see some real pulling back and I think some real effort to economize in every way possible. I just don’t think you can be flippant with the public today because it’s just not going to play well.”…
Can’t be flippant with students either. They’ve had it with athletics fees.
A reeling economy and student concerns over rising fees overwhelmingly sent the Beach Legacy Referendum that would have benefited Long Beach State athletics to defeat Friday.
By a vote of 3,912-2,615 over two days of voting on the Internet and campus, students defeated the referendum that would have added $95 a semester to student fees beginning in the fall of 2010. The proposal was designed to raise $7 million annually in new revenue for the department.
The referendum was intended to cover an expected 10 percent increase in scholarship tuition costs, a large increase in the cost of student housing, state budget cuts that could be as high as 10 percent and capital improvements for campus facilities.
The proposal included plans to build a combined soccer and track stadium, new practice field for the baseball team and a clubhouse for spring and aquatic teams…
UD wants to pause on that well-known, much-used phrase, intellectual snob. A columnist at the Jewish Telegraph Agency uses it in this instance, but everyone uses it — here’s the Google page for intellectual snob. It goes on and on.
Intellectual snob is a subset of snob. Rather than express a sense of superiority to other people based on wealth or family, the intellectual snob condescends to others based upon her appraisal of herself as having started off genetically smarter, and having then been better educated, than you.
UD doesn’t have anything earth-shattering to contribute to the rich literature on snobbery in general, and intellectual snobbery in particular. (She’s very fond of Judith Shklar’s chapter on snobbery in her book Ordinary Vices. Peter Berkowitz praises Shklar’s “delightful exploration of the psychology of the snob,” correctly noting, as does she, that snobbery is one of the great illiberal vices, a sign that one’s civic instincts are out of order, since, as Berkowitz writes, “the disposition to recognize the equality of your fellow human beings and treat them accordingly” is central to liberal democracy.)
But UD will say three things about intellectual snobbery — things she’s learned from being around a lot of professors and a lot of intellectuals.
1.) Her experience certainly confirms what the literature says about snobbery and its intellectual form: Intellectual snobs among her acquaintance are strikingly insecure — about everything, but particularly about their intellect. They regard virtually all human encounters – in classrooms, at conferences, at the supermarket – as the debate club’s televised finals, in which all eyes rivet to them for their ability to undercut the claims or belittle the ignorance of anyone who happens to address them.
Hair-trigger tempers, narcissistic irritabilities, and theatrical umbrages are the hallmarks of intellectual snobs.
2.) Intellectual snobs are extreme pedants. They know a lot about specific narrow fields, and they use this hyperspecialized knowledge in order constantly to denounce errors in other people.
Intellectual snobs are particularly fond of history and linguistics, for these fields allow error-spotting infinite scope. You can get dates wrong, battles wrong, treaties wrong, the language of treaties wrong. You can fail to list all of the salient theories about the onset of the American Civil War. You can fail to take into sufficient account the Hitler/Stalin Pact.
Language use is even better for snob purposes, because our deployment of language is so personal, goes so deep… Which brings me to
3.) For the intellectual snob, the purpose of drawing your attention to your errors is to make you feel very, very bad. When the snob witnesses just how bad — how abashed and off-balance — she has made you feel, she tingles with a sense of her exceptionality.
This sensation reassures her (but not for long; she has to keep provoking it) that despite her various failures in life, she’s still the smartest kid in the room.
From New York magazine:
… Ezra [Merkin] had served as chairman of Yeshiva’s investment committee since about 1994. Not long after that, the committee directed $14.5 million of Yeshiva’s endowment to Ascot, which Ezra passed along to Madoff, collecting his usual fee, initially one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers.
Yeshiva saw no conflict of interest or, if it did, didn’t mind. The university required nothing more than that those who served on the investment committee disclose that they were doing business with the university. The 2003 disclosure to the board, a copy of which was obtained by New York Magazine, reported that Ezra was managing about 10 percent of Yeshiva’s endowment through four different funds. For his efforts, he collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone.
That 2003 memo stated that Madoff was Ascot’s “executing broker,” a term that means he was executing buy and sell orders, supposedly those dictated by Ascot. In fact, though Merkin looked at Madoff’s statements every month, and they were detailed and thorough, and questioned him about his accounts, he left the trading—or, as we now know, lack thereof—to Madoff.
Some now wonder about the propriety of the chairman of the investment committee’s taking fees for simply passing along money to Bernie—especially since Bernie was elected to Yeshiva’s board of trustees in 1996, when Hermann served as vice-chairman. Why not just give the money directly to Bernie and save Yeshiva the fee? To some, it seemed like Ezra was skimming profits, and from an institution he loved…
Yeshiva University: Dollar for dollar, more conflict of interest than all other American universities combined. And there’s absolutely no indication that it’s operating any differently now.