Other law enforcement officials who have received ethics training through Hopkins described it as largely classroom-based — and intense. The classes begin with a foundation in ethics, including a primer on Aristotle, then move on to modern applications of those ancient lessons.

Johns Hopkins University is teaching Secret Service guys not to fuck prostitutes.

—————–

UD thanks David.

I disturbed, while gardening,
a fucking big snake.

My foot was right on the fucker.

Looked like this:

I’m still trembling a bit.

**************************

Went back out there.

To face my fears, baby!

And there it was, just
like that picture up there.

So I looked at it for awhile.
It didn’t move.

Then I came back in.

**********************

8:09 PM.

I’m in the front garden – it’s still light out, and the birds are making an absolutely insane racket. (I’m here for the wood thrushes.)

Suddenly one of our orange foxes races across the lawn right in front of me – frightened, maybe, by a train.

The fox was a bright slender flash against the dark green.

Students at Syria’s Aleppo University are being killed for protesting against the government.

Judith Warner maps a comeback strategy for Dominique Strauss-Kahn which includes writing a memoir:

Possible title: “From J’Accuse to J’Accepte.”

Donna Shalala’s University of Miami certainly knows how to keep it coming. They know if you want your sports program to be number one on the disgust parade, things have to keep happening. We all know the history:

In 1994 there were allegations that Miami-based rapper Luther Campbell and former Miami players performing in the NFL were offering cash for big hits—50 bucks a fumble, 200 bucks an interception.

In May 1995 an NCAA investigation found that positive drug tests of various Hurricane players had been withheld by the football program a week before the January Orange Bowl. Later in 1995, the NCAA found Miami guilty of eight different categories of rules violations. Among them: excessive financial awards, Pell Grant fraud, pay-for-play payouts, and failure to follow its own drug-testing policy. In 2006 Miami football players were involved in two brawls, one with LSU in the Peach Bowl and the other during the regular season with Florida International, in which safety Anthony Reddick was said to have used his helmet as a weapon.

More recently, the Nevin Shapiro scandal wiped all other sports stories off the pages for weeks. And just yesterday some ex-football coach sued the school for mucho money.

Can you imagine how much all this shit is costing the school? I’m not talking reputation costs. UM went into the reputation toilet long ago. I’m talking dollars. How much of this university’s budget goes for sports pay-offs?

I suppose it’s all, at bottom, a category error; but UD is enjoying following the Krauss/Albert fulminating dust-up about science and philosophy.

I’ll admit I’ve never gotten far beyond scaring myself when thinking with any depth about why there’s something rather than nothing…

Not really scaring myself… Feeling very sharply the impossibility of moving my mind to the cosmological back-of-beyond.

As a literary type, though, I’ve loved nothingness poems and prose all my life. I’ve loved writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything. Everything depends on the nothing you are talking about, and I’m not talking about the nothingness that a field without particles might represent; I’m talking about the “death in the soul” Albert Camus felt in Prague. What Don DeLillo in Libra imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling in Texas:

He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.

What James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, felt, also on a Sunday, in Alabama:

… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…

In my next Faculty Project Lecture, I’m talking about three great nothingness poems – Auden’s Brussels in Winter, and Larkin’s Absences, as well as his Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. And of course there’s Elizabeth Bishop’s Cape Breton.

I find a curious reassurance in these evocations of … psychic vastation? What to call it without sounding pretentious, ponderous? Everyone laughs when people say things like If you remember the ‘sixties, you weren’t there. But, you know, the business of not being there… that sense of suspension from yourself, the world, everything… It feels like a serious business, one with insights in it that might compete with quantum field theory.

… about the new Harvard/MIT MOOC venture:

Online courses with thousands of students give researchers the ability to monitor students’ progress, they said, identifying what they click on and where they have trouble. Already, a researcher from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, using the M.I.T. Circuits course, found that students overwhelmingly preferred to read the handwritten notes of [MIT MOOC lecturer] Professor [Anant] Agarwal rather than the same notes presented on PowerPoint.

… was swept up in a drug raid. Innocent of any charges, he was nonetheless held in a DEA cell for five days with no food or water; for two days, he was in total darkness.

The UCSD engineering student said he missed several midterm exams last week. Attorney Eugene Iredale said he hoped university officials would allow his client time to make up the missed school work.

I think UCSD will find this an acceptable excuse.

Via Inside Higher Education: Harvard has just announced it’s collaborating with MIT to offer its own MOOCs.

UD‘s MOOC now has four hundred and thirty students. So it’s not “massive” (Massive Open Online Courses) yet – as in some MOOCs that have tens of thousands of students. Maybe she should call her poetry course a BOOC (Big Open Online Course) until it’s truly massive.

… with the joke I’ve been holding on to about joint appointments?

It’s that time of year.

———————–

UD thanks Wendy.

… fox barking just outside our bedroom window this morning.

… At the Fishhouses, is now available.

… but there’s one more in the clearly infinite line of plagiarizing German politicians – Florian Graf, Christian Democratic Union parliamentary leader, seems to have plagiarized his doctorate.

This is becoming so routine a story, so utterly predictable a series of events, that Graf has chosen to skip the traditional discovery-of-plagiarism steps —

1: Outright, outraged denial.

2: Insistence that whatever’s in the thesis, it was approved by a university committee, so any mistakes are the fault of the reviewing faculty.

3: Acknowledgment that one was very busy pursuing one’s political and family life while writing the thesis, so corners might have been cut.

4: Explanation that your work for the parliament (or wherever) doesn’t require a higher degree, so the whole thing is irrelevant.

5: Offer to rewrite the thesis.

6: In light of the university’s decision to review the thesis (the plagiarism was discovered by a website specializing in running theses through plagiarism-discovery software), a statement welcoming the review, since you are confident the thesis is absolutely fine.

7: In light of the university having discovered flagrant, blatant, omnipresent plagiarism, a statement that you are stepping down from your position.

— and has instead asked that his thesis be withdrawn. Perhaps he is hoping that this straightforward acceptance of the situation will play as dignified and reality-based, and his colleagues in the CDU will leave him alone.

********************

UD thanks Chris.

… writes an amusing and enlightening opinion piece in the Washington Post, about the Cartagena scandal. Roberto used to be a merchant seaman:

When I worked on ships, seamen were a superstitious lot. When there was a bad storm, while the ship pitched and rolled, the crew, unable to eat or sleep, would gather in the messroom and grumble. Anyone who remembers Coleridge’s ancient mariner knows that seamen don’t blame the wind and tides for bad weather and rough seas. Rather, they blame a fellow member of the crew — someone who has, say, killed an albatross. During storms, they’d mumble darkly that a crew member had “Jonah’d” the ship — done something wicked, while ashore, that caused the seas to rise up and take revenge.

Inevitably, someone would point out that the likely cause of the foul weather was that one of our crew had committed the worst sin of all: not paying a whore. All would nod gravely. In my day, seamen were convinced that this was such a serious infraction it could threaten a ship’s survival. More than once I saw fellow crew members, who’d come back to the ship so drunk they couldn’t remember where they’d been, make superhuman efforts to send money to a woman ashore in a desperate attempt to avoid the curse of the unpaid prostitute.