La Kid, in Galway, with
a pinkhaired Irish friend.

La Kid is apparently a bat.
But I also think she looks
a little like Amy Winehouse.

[Steven] Cohen’s fund, SAC Capital Advisors, has reached a deal with the government to plead guilty to securities fraud.

That simple sentence, in today’s New York Times, says it all.

One of this nation’s great Ivy League universities has cleaved to and passionately defended its highest-profile trustee, Steven Cohen, ever since people began asking why this massive cheater, this embodiment of everything that’s wrong with America’s rancid hedge funds, sits in a position of influence and respect on a great university’s board of trustees.

If this were Yeshiva University, currently seeking trustee replacements for Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, UD could understand. But although Brown’s last president was one of the Goldman Sachs trustees who approved Lloyd Blankfein’s breath-taking bonuses, it has not, until now, looked like ridiculously corrupt YU.

And speaking of Merkin: UD can only assume Cohen is consulting with him on how to unload your art when your stink bomb of an investment fund implodes. Today’s New York Times article on Cohen is mainly about his having to sell some of his more significant pieces to pay off the billion plus fines he’s got coming from the SEC. Which brings back memories of Merkin – also pursued for hundreds of millions by all sorts of private and government entities – dismantling his Rothko room.

It’s a poignant picture for sure – these art lovers sitting among the ruins of their collections while awaiting the collection agents from the government. But while Merkin has lost his university trusteeship, Cohen still sits among those women and men tasked with the moral welfare of one of America’s most prominent sites of higher learning. At least he’s got that.

Yes, test taking in the era of online courses is just like being in a classroom with a professor on exam day. Only the person quoted in my headline forgot to fill in the online anti-cheating picture:

Having a camera watch you;

having to answer a series of personal questions before you can begin writing.

And the good news is that as cheating becomes big business (there are now firms that will simply take entire courses for you; I gotta believe there’s money to be made in faking the work of the online professor, so she fills up her semester’s roster of courses while snorkeling in Cancun — I remind you that I can already outsource all my grading), anti-cheating technologies continue to evolve. We’ve rigged up the eye and the hand… surely our authentication techniques can become more … intimate. I mean, not just in the sense of asking probing questions, but… probing other body parts…

And yes, it’s really impossible to detect any difference – though this does rather smack of Big Brother – between this 1984 scenario and the totalitarian nightmare I lay on my students at the end of every semester, while I sit in the front of the room during the time that they write their final exam…

Although… here’s one difference! Students are permitted to approach me in all my Stalinist splendor — IF THEY DARE — and ask how to spell words or ask to be reminded of the full names of characters or whatever… And I guess it’s that whole he loved Big Brother thing, because they DO approach me… THEY DO NOT SEEM TO FEAR THE CRUSHING REPRESSION I AM CAPABLE OF UNLEASHING UPON THEM …

Yes, there’s no doubting it. Getting your body rigged up, getting fingerprinted, getting tracked, and getting surveilled by a camera inches from your mug is not only an ideal scenario for the act of independent thought that constitutes education, but is in fact superior to face to face. Game, set, and match.

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And why would our students complain? After all, this is their world:

I called Kevin Haggerty, a criminologist at the University of Alberta, to learn about “surveillance creep,” the gradual expansion of the zone of scrutiny. We started, he explained, by electronically tracking the dangerous and the vulnerable — inmates, terrorists, Alzheimer’s patients, pets, and our own children — and we’ve wound up putting radio-frequency chips in students’ and employees’ IDs. Haggerty and I didn’t discuss the pernicious activities of the National Security Agency, which evolved over the same period of time, but the scariest endpoint of surveillance creep, it seems to me, will have been reached when the government’s yottabyte farms no longer strike us as sinister or illegal.

And there’s another, possibly even more insidious, consequence of eavesdropping on our offspring. It sends the message that nothing and no one is to be trusted: not them, not us, and especially not the rest of the world. This is no way to live, but it is a way to destroy the bonds of mutual toleration that our children will need to keep our democracy limping along.

… frightens us with a robotic future.

Leana Wen, a doctor at George Washington University Hospital, introduces herself to patients like this:

“I’m Dr. Leana Wen. I’m your doctor. I belong to an initiative called ‘Who’s My Doctor?’ that aims for transparency in medicine. I accept no money from drug companies or device companies.

“I do not make any more from ordering more tests or procedures on you, and I also don’t make more for ordering less. I’m telling you this so that you can be sure that everything I do for you is in your best interest.”

A bit awkward as an opening gambit, to be sure, but part of the anti-conflict of interest, full disclosure movement of which Wen has been a part since med school (Wen was president of the indispensable AMSA). As a faculty member at a university whose hospital was recently so rife with conflict of interest at the top that it became a national scandal – it was even put on probation for reasons probably related to its distracted-by-money managers – Wen could not be better placed to draw attention to the still COI-mad profession of medicine.

The major power players of Washington DC are of course particularly prone to market corruptions, as in the latest case of a high-ranking professor/FDA chairwoman having to be pulled back from an embrace with industry:

Dr. Lynn Drake, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and current chairwoman of the panel that advises the FDA on drugs to treat skin and eye conditions, is scheduled to speak at a conference whose stated aim is to help companies “walk away with strategies to successfully present before a committee and avoid potential roadblocks.”

In a letter sent on Thursday to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, Dr. Sidney Wolfe, founder of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, called on the agency to either require that Drake not attend the meeting, or remove her from her position as chairwoman of the Dermatologic and Ophthalmic Drugs Advisory Committee.

… Wolfe said Drake’s participation in the conference, which is being sponsored by PharmApprove, a consulting company, and costs up to $2,199 to attend, “raises concerns that the advisory committee member is approaching the work of the committee from a pro-industry perspective.”

… It is urgent that the FDA develop and articulate a written policy applicable to all advisory committee members to avoid repetition of this type of shameful episode, which could undermine public confidence in FDA advisory committees and in the agency itself,” he said.

Wolfe also drew attention to Drake’s curriculum vita, which is posted on the FDA’s website and which he said contains 32 items that are redacted under an exemption designed to protect trade secrets and other confidential business information. He said he has made a Freedom of Information request for an unredacted copy of the CV, “because the full CV may further elucidate Drake’s background and relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.”

Drake says she had no idea what she was signing up for.

“Either she is naive and signs up for things without knowing very much about them or she actually didn’t know the title of the session she was going to be a speaker on,” [Wolfe] said. “Those things are not really very likely.”

I mean, it’s pretty clear she got caught because Wolfe happened to read a promotional brochure for the conference (which will cost you two thou to attend… or maybe less now…)…

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UPDATE: Things don’t look much better these days at GWU’s med school.

Among schools with the weakest [Clinical Conflict of Interest] policies: Saint Louis University School of Medicine, George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Weill Cornell Medical College, University of Nebraska College of Medicine, and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

Yeshiva University. A gem of a place. Once again it is fighting with all its might against doing the decent thing: Offering a reasonable settlement to the 31 men sexually abused as boys by its educator of the year, under the watch of its president.

— Putting Syracuse University’s Orange Madness to shame.

It’s a little over the top, but there’s a basically well-written take down of a popular band by Chris Richards in The Washington Post.

[T]his is rock music that lazily presumes life on the digital plane has made us so numb, so unable to feel for ourselves, that the only way to reach our hearts is by applying a pneumatic hammer to our classic rock pleasure centers. Bowie! Springsteen! Talking Heads! Blam-blam-blam! Bludgeoning and vacant, “Reflektor” is an album that both condescends and sells itself short, over and over again, for 76 insufferable minutes.

Again, this is pretty good, but editing it down to make it tighter – and its emotion of disappointment and contempt more focused – would have helped:

This is music that presumes digital life has made us so numb we can only be reached via pneumatic hammer. Bowie, Springsteen, Talking Heads: Blam, blam, blam! Bludgeoning and vacant, “Reflektor” condescends and sells itself short, over and over again, for 76 insufferable minutes.

Yet better examples of the absolute dump review are two from the New York Times that Scathing Online Schoolmarm has already featured on this blog: A 2008 Jon Pareles description of a Sarah Brightman concert, and, in 2012, Alastair Macaulay reviewing Russia’s Eifman Ballet. Click here for hilarious details.

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UD thanks her sister for
the link to the Post review.

Maybe they’re waiting for a less corrupt, violent, and generally disgusting program with which to affiliate themselves. UD finds it strange that local booster-journalists think everyone will come out to celebrate morally despicable teams. Because, you know, often they won’t.

Click on the images
for a good view.

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[Courtesy UD‘s sister.]

The Rand Paul Plagiarized Speech Song

That speech:
Isn’t it Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Isn’t it… plagiarized…

Isn’t it, Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Nowadays…

… that the government pay them tens of thousands of dollars every day as punishment for having mandated that they teach their children the country’s core curriculum, a court in Atwerp has not only refused to pay them anything, but has reiterated that they must teach their children that curriculum.

UD‘s poetry MOOC now has more than four thousand students. She’s thrilled. Not just by that number, but by the thoughtful questions and comments her students regularly add to the course’s main page.

[Perhaps] reading Kafka or Woolf or Naipaul does make you a better, more empathic person. (Though what about your hardline literary misanthropes, by the way — your Bernhards, your Houellebecqs, your Célines? Do we gain anything in moral aptitude by reading these dreadful old bastards, and, if we don’t, is doing so somehow less worthy of our time?) But even if it didn’t, even if reading made you a worse person … reading would be no less vital an activity. I don’t know whether all those boxes full of books have made me any kind of better person; I don’t know whether they’ve made me kinder and more perceptive, or whether they’ve made me more introspective and detached and self-absorbed. Most likely it’s some combination of all these characteristics, perhaps canceling each other out. But I do know that I wouldn’t want to be without those books or my having read them, and that their importance to me is mostly unrelated to any power they might have to make me a more considerate person.

UD said something similar, a few weeks back, to what Mark O’Connell says. (“Reading novels like Lolita and The Tropic of Cancer and The Elementary Particles will have God knows what impact on your personal morality and your engagement as a citizen. These are funny, nihilistic, cynical works, and I’d hate to have to be the one to determine their moral or character-building potential. As Georg Lukacs long ago pointed out about Kafka – and what serious education in the humanities is without Kafka? – great writers of our time have a tendency to maunder on inconclusively about the hopelessly alienated consciousness; or they sketch a world with very little collective action in it… Writers like Don DeLillo, America’s greatest living novelist, routinely get called bad citizens.”) O’Connell’s responding to the same thing UD was – yet another report or study proving scientifically that reading serious literature makes you a better person. There’s always another such study coming down the pike, and they’re all silly things, attracting yet sillier self-aggrandizing commentary from teachers and writers.

August Kleinzahler points out that “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.” The same is true – maybe even truer – of serious non-poetic literature. Reading this sort of stuff is, as O’Connell writes, an intense and “vital” experience. Its language tends to excite us in rather obscure ways; its disclosure of usually hidden human depths may thrill us. Perhaps we want to say that great literature tends to reconcile us to the truths of our shared condition. But force feeding yourself George Eliot because you want to be a more empathetic person will only make you hate George Eliot.

It’s cold and sunny on the hot tub deck of our hotel. Les UDs are swinging gently on a padded porch swing overlooking the boardwalk. Across from us, on the other side of the boardwalk, people have lined up plaid, hunter green, and American flag-lined folding chairs. Directly across from me, a beefy sixtyish man with a face red from the wind off the ocean is clutching a tiny white dog and wearing a baseball hat that says somethingsomethingsomething (this part is in small letters and I can’t make it out) and then (in very big letters) SHIT. The parade begins in ten minutes.

The event is overseen by friendly people wearing orange vests that read MONSTER POLICE.

“I think it’s coming! I see a banner!” UD‘s sister gets excited.

Here comes a phalanx of people in maroon jerseys. The Rehoboth Beach Animal Hospital brigade.

Now – uh – men wearing yellow cardboard hats? The effect is knights-who-say-ni-ish. Fronted by a banjo player and then by a crazed old drunk who might or might not be part of their group. He engages parade-viewers in surrealistic conversation. “AH SEE YOU AH LOVE YOU AH LOVE YOU AH SEE YOU.”

Now human jesters lead bull dogs done as devils through the throng.

Irish setters as bumblebees. Yorkies as witches. A strange female humanoid all in white – polar bear?

VIVA DOGS VEGAS is an elaborate float with bad sequined dogs; the Miley Cyrus float features a dog with a chained naked Barbie on its back. The Miley Cyrus float is a huge hit when people finally figure it out.

Many pirate dogs; many skeleton dogs. CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS DOGBONI. What does it mean?

Extremely beautiful Collie Zorro; extremely beautiful large white poodle on which gray circles have been charcoaled. Really nice effect.

“A predominance of micro-dogs,” says Mr UD, disapprovingly.

RETIRED HOOTERS DOGS. No one really gets it, but the word hooters is always a guaranteed laugh-getter.

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