… of many on that campus about the academic difficulties of two students at the school.
We are hearing tonight that [University of Washington tailbacks] Brandon Johnson and David Freeman have flunked out of school according to the Seattle Times Bob Condotta.
Before you start to panic neither of these guys were in the four deeps after spring ball. Johnson was injury prone and wasn’t really into conditioning. He quit the team 4-5 times if memory serves me right since he has been here.
Freeman flashed a lot of potential early last year but congenital ankle problems plagued him for most of the season…
… from the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library — the library where, one afternoon long ago, UD glanced down from a balcony on the second floor to a big round table on the first floor and saw Karol Edward Soltan, a Polish graduate student she’d met once or twice at parties.
For the first time, she took a good look at him. And began to be smitten.
Here’s a sample of the graffiti.. Lots more here.
A suburban doctor who became tangled in the corruption investigation surrounding ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced Wednesday to 18 months in prison for hiding $3 million in income from a tax collector.
Dr. Robert Weinstein, 64, of Northbrook was also fined $75,000 for failing to report the income. He originally claimed it was a gift but later admitted it represented the proceeds of a scheme to siphon money out of a charitable organization.
Weinstein could have been sentenced up to 37 months in prison under federal sentencing guidelines, but U.S. District Judge Ruben Castillo took Weinstein’s age and an unspecified psychiatric condition into account in imposing his sentence. [What condition? Kleptomania? Isn’t that like giving a murderer a light sentence because he suffers from homicidal rage? Why don’t we get to know what the psychiatric condition is? Doesn’t it seem to you it’d be pretty easy for a doctor to get another doctor to make up a psychiatric condition for him? …And age? 64’s too old to risk putting him in jail for three years??]
… [Weinstein] withdrew $6 million from the Northshore Supporting Organization, a group established to raise money for the Finch College of Health Sciences-Chicago Medical School, now known as Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.
The school is based in North Chicago in Lake County.
[He was] able to withdraw the money in the form of loans because [he was a trustee of both] the supporting organization [and the school].
Yes, the patented Madoff/Merkin approach to university trusteeship. Get in there, get trusted, steal.
Did the university know about his psychiatric condition when it made him a trustee?
*****************
Oh. Okay. Here it says depression. He’s depressed! Who isn’t? What is it, twenty million Americans suffer from clinical depression? Psychiatrists are writing a new diagnostic manual, the DSM-V (and squabbling like babies over it, of course — psychiatrists are hopeless) — as soon as it’s released, it’ll turn out forty million Americans suffer from clinical depression. And because this guy has it too, and because he’s effing 64 years old, he gets to go to jail for 18 months for having stolen six million dollars … from a charity!
Alas, poor ghost!
Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
Speak; I am bound to hear.
So art thou to choler, when thou shalt hear.
What?
I am big pharma’s mouthpiece,
A paid tool of some drug’s maker,
A walking shadow, a money’d player
That smiles and signs his name upon a page.
I was forbid to tell the secrets of my counting-house,
But now good Grassley has them out. List, list, O, list!
O God!
From Minnpost.com:
According to writer Nicole Johns, certain [anorexia memoirs] romanticize the illness and actually encourage readers to develop or deepen an illness. In her own contribution to the genre, “Purge: Rehab Diaries,” Johns singles out Marya Hornbacher’s “Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia” as a problem book.
” ‘Wasted’ is rife with suggestions on how to develop an eating disorder and stay sick. It was obviously written while the author was in a disordered state of mind. During treatment, counselors confiscated worn copies of ‘Wasted’ from patients, because many patients were using it to trigger themselves and stay sick,” says Johns, who admits she herself used “Wasted” to “further my eating disorder.”
These are fighting words — especially considering that Johns and Hornbacher are both graduates of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, and Hornbacher lectured at the U while Johns was a student. “When I tried to discuss this with Ms. Hornbacher after her lecture, she claimed that ‘Wasted’ helped more people than it hurt,” says Johns.
This is shaping up to be a real battle of the books. Wasted partisans have now lined up against Purgers, with Hurl, Skeleton, and Trashed readers sure to join the fight.
The news out of the
University of Wisconsin
River Falls is all about
the Oreo Cows.
The Hudson Star-Observer
dutifully interviews Professor
Gary Onan (with
whom you can study Swine
Production) on the grass
versus cornfed experiment
he’s conducting with them,
but you and I know that
these cows are really
about just being incredibly
beautiful.
Who cares whether
they develop high
marbling in the muscle.
Who cares whether
they like feed more
than grass. These
cows exist to be
adored.
He’s a psychologist; his wife isn’t, but she plays one for the purposes of grand larceny.
He teaches Psychology of Personality at the Rochester Institute of Technology, but his main source of income is “allowing unqualified staff, including Esta Miran [she has an education degree], to perform therapy sessions, charging for longer sessions than were actually performed and billing for group therapy sessions when records show individual therapy sessions were occurring at that time.”
Along with grand larceny, they’re facing “scheme to defraud in the first degree, falsifying business records in the first degree, offering a false instrument for filing in the first degree and unauthorized practice.” They seem to have ripped Medicaid and Medicare off for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This should be a fun one to watch. The State Attorney General knows how to pick them. “Two married doctors are in jail Tuesday,” begins one local report, “accused of stealing close to $250,000 dollars. Neither of them would stop talking in court.” The roguish Mirons seem to have decided that the best way to evade their fate (about a decade in jail for both of them) is to pretend to be very old and very stupid. They nattered on during their arraignment, claiming to be confused about where they were and what was going on. Unfit for trial!
And yet so agile were these doctors that they sometimes needed only sixty seconds to provide therapy.
One of the charges accuses the Mirans of booking four to five intensive psychotherapy sessions in the same hour and conducting psychotherapy sessions from just one to 12 minutes at a time.
The Daily Telegraph, Australia.
A drug company is offering doctors who prescribe its medicines a 10-day Mediterranean cruise in a move that could breach a code of conduct.
And taxpayers will help subsidise the cruise – described as “the perfect mix of education and relaxation” – because doctors are being told they can claim it as a professional development program.
The cruise raises questions about drug company ethics and the Australian Medical Association and the peak pharmaceutical industry group have warned the offer could lead to the perception of a conflict of interest for doctors who take it up.
Sigma, a generic drug manufacturer and the third-biggest pharmaceutical company in the country, wants to take general practitioners on a luxury cruise visiting Italy, Malta, Corsica and Monte Carlo in October…
Machen’s obviously not fond of alcohol. Fine: as a dentist, he shouldn’t be. I am, and so are thousands of other people who will turn up in Jacksonville for the game this year and every year afterward. I don’t really remember all that much from my time as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, but I do remember enough statistics to remember that two [recent incidents] does not a trend make, and also enough from my econ classes elsewhere that if you restrict market access, you end up with people selling jello shooters out of coolers on the sidewalk in what is referred to as “a black market.” Most people get drunk at tailgates, anyway, meaning that unless Machen is willing to start trunk searches for 100,000 surly people in line to park at the game, he’s out of luck on breaking the enduring bond between booze and collegiate athletics.
A sharp rebuke, in Sporting News, to University of Florida president Bernard Machen’s dream of reducing the number of alcohol vendors at the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.
My July Fourth post on the burqa prompted thoughtful responses, one of which, from Anthony, I reproduce in full here, in order to try to respond to it in full.
As always, my comments are bracketed, and in blue.
Agreed on the duty of the state. [UD wrote, in answer to Dance, another commenter, that “The state is under no compulsion to uncover the true feelings of every covered woman in its borders. It has a duty, rather, to understand its own founding principles, and to recognize and protect itself from gross insults to them.”] France’s action, however, does nothing to accomplish that goal. [Au contraire: If the goal is for a state, and for citizens of a state, to understand more fully that state’s founding principles, then the French action so far — which involves strong statements against the burqa by the leader of the country, NOT its outlawing. Yet. — has, it seems to me, done wonders to energize and clarify the state’s efforts, and its citizens’ efforts, to recognize what it means to live in a secular democratic republic. If the burqa lies, as I believe it does, on the cutting edge of civic life; if it represents a line you do not cross if you are a democracy, then it’s very much to the good, very much accomplishing a great deal, that many people in France are talking about and taking negative positions on the burqa.] I’m not particularly persuaded by dueling NY Times op-ed pieces on the subject. Rather, I’d look to France’s own statements on what it stands for, and the effects of this policy on it, to determine how the current government is doing living up to the duty you correctly identify. [The commenter will now analyze various founding statements having to do with French political identity. This is an important feature of arguments about the burqa, but I would caution that much in global responses, not merely French, to the burqa, has to do with unwritten customs. Allow me to quote from an opinion piece in Forbes:
“What if we were confronted, in our cities, by a neo-pagan cult with passionately held views that required all their votaries to walk around naked in our streets? No doubt after a hubbub of debate, largely stoked by loony freedom-of-speechers, we would soon arrest the cultists, wrap them in blankets and throw them in jail for indecent exposure.
But the questions will remain: Where do we get these notions of decency? With what right do we impose them on others? Why should our standards of dress trump those of the cultists? We may not resolve the matter intellectually, but this much, we will conclude, is clear: We do espouse a coherent set of rules about such things–at least we consider them coherent–and we are prepared to support them with legal sanctions. They may not be written into the Constitution, being largely a matter of self-evident cultural or civic or even moral norms, but we do stand by them.
… Yes our political traditions allow all manner of variegated freedoms of speech and action, but we do differentiate between the barbaric and the civilized. We are not only political animals. Our values do not end with those laid out in constitutions and bills of rights. In fact, one can argue that the U.S. Constitution does not comprise a morality in itself but rather lays down a framework that allows our actual code of values to operate, whether it’s one based on the Bible or Cartesian empiricism or a host of inherited cultural traditions.”]
[Back to the commenter now, and to my responses.]
For starters, France’s motto is “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. This policy would seem in conflict with Liberty (as you’re removing the choice from the woman) and Equality (who else will be subject to similar attire-based restrictions?). [On liberty: I, and many people, believe that it is intellectually impossible to accept, outside of assuming a person is perverted, that the burqa is something a rational person, a citizen rather than a slave, freely chooses. So I believe that there is no choice, outside of a preference for perverting oneself, in the wearing of a burqa.] Fraternity (as long as we forgive the implicitly gendered language) is trickier. It will probably be a net win (greater sense of inclusion in the surrounding society), but don’t discount the effects of isolating the woman in question from her existing local/familial/religious community. [One of strongest arguments against the burqa points to the fact that all democracies are open societies, in which freedom of assembly, and freedom to speak and act in conditions of human equality, are profoundly engrained, the very substance of our daily lives. Total anonymity makes engagement in the civic realm largely impossible. Not entirely, of course. But largely. And if a woman (recall that only women wear burqas) lives in a community that shuns her because she will not wear a burqa (by the way, the burqa has no religious grounding, so we cannot describe her shunning community as shunning her on the basis of religious grounds that the state must respect), then she is in the unfortunate situation of living in a cult. Plenty of people in democracies live in cults of various sorts, and we respect all sorts of anti-democratic behaviors from them within their cults. We have, however, a lot to say about how they behave when they leave the compound gates.]
Okay, let’s set the catchy motto aside and look for something a bit more substantial. The relevant sections from Article 1 of France’s current constitution, as revised, read:
“[France] shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion. It shall respect all beliefs.”
This seems a pretty clear violation of respecting all beliefs, unless you’re going to assert that *no* woman wears the burqa by choice, which seems pretty bold. [I’ve always been bold. Note that the language says we must respect all beliefs. Not that we must respect all actions.] I think we’re also looking at a pretty pronounced violation of the equality of religion; are we going to look at Christian nun’s habits? Is it just the veil that matters? It’s noteworthy that culture is not explicitly protected; I’m not sure if the authors made the common mistake of equating race with culture (hey, it was 1958) or made a more conscious decision; either way, trying to squeeze this into a cultural determinant with no religious component seems pretty sleazy. [Once again, the full burqa has no religious component except perhaps in the minds of the people trying to enforce it. Here we must make a distinction, as all states must, between moral relativism and tolerance.]
We can find similar problems in Article 5.
In the United States, when evaluating laws that potentially run afoul of things like First Amendment protections, the courts use the Least Restrictive Means test: assuming the desired goal is valid (in this case, presumably, “liberating” women forced to wear the burqa, which I’d certainly agree is a valid goal), is the proposed law the least restrictive means of arriving at that goal? Yes, that’s US not French law, and I’m [not] fluent enough with French constitutional law to know if they have anything equivalent, but the idea holds up well: faced with conflicting principles, are we doing the least damage to them possible?
I think it’s clear that in this case the answer is a resounding “no”. The problem here is not the garment, it’s the culture of forced anonymity that frequently accompanies it. No woman should be forced to wear a burqa, but it’s the forcing, not the burqa, that’s the problem. A solution which targeted the correct half of the situation – the verb, not the noun – would be both less restrictive and more effective. [This would be very difficult to do, if I understand what the writer’s suggesting, since virtually all women in burqas will, when asked, assure an interviewer that they couldn’t be happier.]
I have absolutely no objection to the idea that many women are forced into clothing and lifestyle choices against their will. But where are the restrictions on stilettos and minis? I’ve heard more men tell their partners something akin to “wear something tight” than “wear this bed sheet”. Whereas the burqa can be (mis)used to anonymize, generalize, and neutralize a woman’s appearance and thus (arguably) a portion of her identity, the over-simplifying and hyper-sexualizing of her image caused by all manner of other fashion choices is no less damaging (arguably to herself and her peers). [Here we really part ways. Laws exist against nudity and offense to community values, etc. The idea that there could be any equivalence in terms of self-degradation between tight clothes that reveal a good deal and the burqa, explicitly designed to annihilate a person, is unpersuasive.]
Do you really want the state getting into those decisions? [Not necessarily. I agree that laws banning the burqa are not such a great idea. I do see them in play, however, in countries like Turkey, and they seem to work just fine. Yes, I’m aware Turkey has its traditions that make this law more easily assimilated into the population, perhaps. Yet as with many laws that people have argued against on the basis of the horrid things they’ll bring about — Plenty of people anticipated fatal mayhem on airplanes when frantic smokers went mad after three hours without nicotine. — it’s usually the case that the laws settle in pretty smoothly.]
So. I’ve done anonymity and perversion. Why death? Because I’ve noticed, reading through scads of opinion pieces and comments about the burqa, that people keep referring to it as a death shroud.
I think there are many reasons why people like me respond very strongly to the burqa — why the leader of France, when he announces it’s not welcome on French soil, gets almost total and enthusiastic approbation from the French people. The burqa disturbs us very, very deeply, and we shouldn’t shrink away from the fact of that deep disturbance to some bogus neutral statecrafty attitude. We should, as Michael Sandel urges, feel that emotion, experience that moral outrage, take it seriously, consider it from all sides. The burqa is appalling because it is a pall. Because it carries among us the animated corpses of women who deserved a life. That is extremely demoralizing to have around, especially to have around young women just beginning to get a sense of their own power and possibilities in a democratic society.
So no. I’m not at all sure about the idea of outlawing the burqa. But I am sure that we should, when confronted with it, understand that it is an obscenity.
“I love your peaceful setting,” said a man walking by my house a half hour ago. He meant the wide lawn with the little brown house in the middle of it; the fireflies flashing against the dark green of the forests on either side of the lot and the light green of the azaleas and hollies in the yard; and he meant the dreamsicle cat who appeared out of nowhere a week ago and put our house on its circuit.
The cat — a well-tended ‘thesdan — sat purring in my lap, and I thought, Yes, even a cat… As if the scene needs more icons of ease… Gray weathered Adirondack chairs and waves of pachysandra with topiary bulls. Almost no cars, because we’re close to the end of a dead-end street; a few trains, but not long freights with loud whistles. Little commuter trains that chuff in, pause to let people off in Garrett Park, and toot goodbye. Trains out of a children’s book.
Lots of walkers pass by, taking in the warm evening, listening to the wood thrush on Rokeby Avenue. They can’t see the sky. You can’t see the sky here for the trees. Sometimes it bothers me, and I wish I were at the beach, or at our little house in the mountains, where it’s all sky. But the peacefulness that man felt — it’s about enclosure. Our house is closed in by forest, by enormous trees that make us feel hidden, by a split rail fence. And all the absurd animals that dot the lawn — the cat, the rabbits at the hosta, the mourning doves and the robins — they add to this sense of self-containment, this Henri Rousseau simplicity and safety.
A piece of music played over and over in my mind as I sat in the chair holding the cat. Henry Purcell’s harpsichord ground in C minor, which I play a lot, and which I found on Youtube via this article in Harper’s about Purcell’s song Music for a While, my favorite piece of music. Either you like the messy heavy chords of Romanticism, or you like the highly clarified separate notes of the Baroque. I like the Baroque, and the simple self-contained motion of that ground curled up in me and purred.
… makes the same point I make at the beginning of my Teaching Company talk on how to write well. She headlines her post WE ARE ALL WRITERS NOW. Excerpts:
… [W]ith more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.
… My friends and I write more than we used to, often more than we talk. We correspond with each other and to colleagues, school teachers, utility companies. We send e-mails to our local newspaper reporters about their stories; we write to magazine editors to tell them what we think. And most of us do labour to write well: an e-mail to a potential romantic partner is laboriously revised and edited (no more waiting by the phone); a tweet to a prospective employer is painstakingly honed until its 140 characters convey an appropriate tone with the necessary information. A response to our supervisor’s clever status update on Facebook is written carefully, so to keep the repartee going. Concision and wit are privileged in these new forms. Who would not welcome shorter, funnier prose?
… [T]he quality of many blogs is high, indistinguishable in eloquence and intellect from many traditionally published works.
Our new forms of writing—blogs, Facebook, Twitter—all have precedents, analogue analogues: a notebook, a postcard, a jotting on the back of an envelope. They are exceedingly accessible. That it is easier to cultivate a wide audience for tossed off thoughts has meant a superfluity of mundane musings, to be sure. But it has also generated a democracy of ideas and quite a few rising stars, whose work we might never have been exposed to were we limited to conventional publishing channels…