… she often assigns David Mamet’s play (it’s also a film), Glengarry Glen Ross, all about slimy businessmen.

She’s delighted to see attorneys in one of the many Righthaven suits (for UD‘s involvement in this sorry story, go here) turning to literature to encompass the specific unpleasantness of the Righthaven scandal (for details of this filing, go here):

In Glengarry Glen Ross, Ricky Roma says to George Aaronow, “Always tell the truth – It’s the easiest thing to remember.” Had Righthaven followed this simple bit of wisdom, it would not find itself in its current thicket of predicament in Nevada, and it might find its fortune in Colorado to be more promising.

Righthaven’s scheme is based upon “Assignments” of copyrights from news entities to itself. When such assignments are honest and bona fide transfers of rights, they are remarkably simple – the copyright owner simply transfers all title to the copyright to the new owner. Righthaven’s scheme is much more complex, because there is so much dishonesty to obfuscate. In 1992, Glengarry Glen Ross was made into a film with the tagline “Lie. Cheat. Steal. All In A Day’s Work.” Righthaven should have watched the entire film and learned from Ricky Roma; instead it relied upon the tagline and has lied, cheated, and stolen from dozens of hapless defendants in Nevada and in Colorado. That conduct ends in Colorado with this Reply Brief.

More on Righthaven here.

Sometimes a simple little sentence says it all.

As the corrupt people who brought you the situation this sentence describes go on their summer retreat and do some really intense reposeful thinking about how they can unfuck their entirely fucked system — a system that directly benefits every one of the retreatants — they might give a thought to this sentence.

It appears in an article about one of the more notorious forms of money whoring sports universities do – selling beer to students at games.

Doesn’t always seem to work very well. One of the commenters reports from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

UNLV sells beer at basketball and football games. It’s generally not a problem at the basketball games from what I can tell (I go to nearly every home game), but the football games are completely different. There are numerous incidents at each game because of the alcohol being sold inside the stadium. Students/young-adults are binge drinking in the parking lot at tail-gate parties and then coming in and getting more drunk. It requires a very strong police/security presence in the stands just to keep order in Sam Boyd Stadium.

And this is a UNLV game, so we’re talking only 10,000 people at most at a game (unless it’s Wisconsin and the Badger fans sell it out). Usually it’s less than that, maybe 6,000 to 8,000 people. Imagine a stadium packed with 80,000, it would be nuts. Actually just last season the university made the paid tail-gate lot go dry because of the incidents that occurred during the UNLV/UNR game. I think the universities considering selling beer just to make a few extra bucks are greatly underestimating the problems that accompany it.

Great synergy. Your team sucks, so no one comes to the games. You figure plying students with drink might bring them in, but it doesn’t because your team sucks. Meanwhile your school (and it’s not a very good school to start with – UNLV I mean) has no budget because the state (Nevada I mean) doesn’t care about education, and because you’re in hock for all the big-time athletics stuff you thought was such a great idea.

So sucky team plus you don’t even make the money on booze you thought you’d make because … what did the commenter say? Six thousand a game? Six thousand pissed losers? Watched over by a “very strong police/security presence”? (That costs money too.)

I’m not sure even Samuel Beckett could sketch so arid a scenario.

And why don’t they ever learn?

Because they don’t care.

After all, it’s only your tax money.

Still.

You’d think that just one person at NASA might do a quick check of the universities from which their employees graduate, and the kinds of degrees they’re earning. After all, NASA pays their tuition.

The Office of the Inspector General has found that NASA misused $1.4 million in tax money by reimbursing dozens of its employees who pursued degrees outside NASA’s established programs at for-profit colleges, such as the University of Phoenix (the subject of an ABC News 2010 investigation) and Strayer University.

Now notice the non-reimbursable schools. They’re not diploma mills; they’re our old friends the scandalous tax-syphoning for-profits… So … Écoute: The beauty here is that you, the American taxpayer, are getting your ass whipped in two different ways:

1.) Your taxes pay tuition for the aggressively recruited flunkies at the for-profits;

2.) and your taxes pay for the compensation federal employees (like the NASA people) receive for illegitimately attending (not really attending, of course; everything’s online) the same for-profits.

[B]ecause this $1.4 million represents tuition payments for only a sample of employees at the four Centers and Headquarters where we conducted detailed audit work, we concluded that an examination across all NASA Centers likely would result in substantially higher questioned costs.

This is from the NASA Office of Inspector General. Great to know there are probably lots more cases.

The OIG found that 11 of the top 20 universities NASA employees attended were private or for-profit institutions that are on average 3.6 times and 1.6 times, respectively, more expensive than public universities.

So much for the argument that the for-profits make college affordable for poorer people. Of course you knew already – didn’t you? – that for-profits are extremely expensive? I mean, why wouldn’t they be? It’s only your tax money.

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You think this will change? This won’t change.

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Don’t enough people in this country hate the federal government? I guess not.

… basks on the balcony; hummingbirds buzz the feeders. Time for Les UDs to head back down to the flatlands. They go home today.

Their visit yesterday to White House Farm was spectacular, especially their walk through the haunted old white house itself, its flooring gone through generations of Shenandoah River floods, but the beauty of its fireplaces and windows still there, under the dust, after 250 years. Chris Anderson, the foundation’s executive director, narrated the history of the house (it has seen, among other things, Stonewall Jackson burn the adjacent White House Bridge in 1862, blocking the progress of Union forces), and talked about the foundation’s plans to restore it.

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Large prints of Thomas Jefferson and John James Audubon on the upper landing of the farmhouse reflect the new owner’s engagements in the civic and natural worlds.

We met the owner, Scott Plein, as we walked through the house to its open kitchen; he sat at a table set beside long windows that overlooked sunflowers and karst ponds and heirloom tomato plants and black cattle. The whole property is surrounded – sheltered; made somehow beautifully self-contained by – the vast Appalachian range.

The place was a perfect utopia of yellows and blues. The blue of the sky and the range, the yellow of the sun and the cornfields. It was dreamy – a dream of river and land and harvest and house. The wind rippled the soybeans and made a green ocean.

“Everybody is going to come to these games,” [Florida Atlantic University Mary Jane] Saunders said last week during the ceremonial first lighting event at the $70 million stadium on the north end of campus. “You go to one game and you are going to be want to be part of the whole thing.”

Even if the team goes 1-11? 3-9? Everybody’s gonna wanna be part of that whole thing?

Now this here sports writer in Florida, he’s warning FAU that well you take a place like Akron. They bought a big new stadium and not everybody came to the games.

Akron planned on an average attendance of 15,000 a game when creating its financial plan for the stadium, and the sagging attendance is what created the shortfall in the budget.

And that’s just Akron. You read this blog, you know about tons of other examples of schools that just felt sure their team would win every game so they’d triple that hundred million investment in no time.

See, it’s real simple. You know how your sports team wins every game and packs ’em in? It’ll be just like that for FAU.

Todd Nelson heads for-profit colleges. As head of the University of Phoenix, he “signed a $9.8 million settlement with the Department of Education, which had found that Phoenix had ‘systematically and intentionally’ violated federal rules against paying recruiters for students.”

Competitor Education Management Corporation snapped Nelson right up, and now he’s overseeing a similar federal and state lawsuit which, one amazed observer notes, “spans the entire company — from the ground level in over 100 separate institutions up to the most senior management — and accounts for nearly all the revenues the company has realized since 2003.” The suit wants $11 billion in state and federal financial aid back from Nelson’s ed biz. Wow.

What’s next for this financial genius? He led Phoenix through a loss of almost ten million dollars; Education Management will certainly settle for around… let’s say one billion. Time to jump to Kaplan, where he can maybe work his magic on even bigger numbers.

… Harvard had to pay to settle fraud charges against Andrei Shleifer, one of its professors; but then the University of Florida doesn’t play in Harvard’s big-money, big-influence league.

Still, $435,000 ain’t chopped liver; and thanks to the very similar criminal mischief (it also involved federal contracts) of one of its former professors, UF may well have to pay that amount to the government.

Ginther also happens to be a former math professor with a Ph. D. from Stanford University who just happened to specialize in… statistics.

I’m telling you. Life is better in Washington. In UD‘s city, if you can just keep talking for seven, eight minutes tops, you can earn twenty to forty thousand dollars!

And it gets better. You probably don’t even have to write the speech! At these rates, you can be generous with your speech writer. Show up, stand up, mouth some words somebody else wrote, grab the check.

Here, for instance, are some notes from recent DC speeches on behalf of an Iranian group.

Gen. [Anthony] Zinni’s speaker agent confirmed that Zinni was… paid his “standard speaking fee” for an eight-minute address at an MEK-related conference in January — between $20,000 and $30,000… As for whether he had any qualms about how much the speakers were compensated for addressing the groups, [John] Sano, who delivered [one conference’s] longest remarks with a 14 minute speech, paused and thought…

Yeah, there’s the whole pause and think option… which some have taken:

Despite offers of up to $40,000 for notably brief remarks, sources with knowledge of speaker negotiations said at least four invited speakers have declined this year because they had questions about the [group’s] ultimate goals…

Clear up the questions about your goals and I’d be delighted to be limo’ed to your feast, say out loud like a good boy the eight minutes’ worth of words my speech writer wrote, take a check from you for forty thousand dollars and be driven home. That’d be great.

The author of the article from which I’ve been quoting cautions the reader:

Unless a speaker has a can’t-lose stock tip, nobody is inherently worth $20,000 for a six-minute speech…

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The author of the article questions this Harvard professor, who along with Zinni and Sano has made a killing this way. She responds with some major backoffology:

“I was invited to speak at a conference on the Arab Spring and I received a speaker fee… My remarks were aimed at an Iranian American audience that was concerned about Camp Ashraf. I, too, am concerned about the ongoing humanitarian situation there. But I would not want my presence at the conference to be equated with a position on the delisting of the MEK.”

Well, instead of taking nothing for the speech (you were motivated to give it, you say, by humanitarian rather than material concerns), you took tens of thousands of dollars from the group sponsoring it. So it doesn’t really look as if you have no position on the delisting of this organization.

Delisting from what, by the way? From our country’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations.

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Throw this professor in with the Monitor Group, Lawrence Summers, Andrei Shleifer, and the rest of the Harvard crew, and you understand why Frank Rich and UD laugh so heartily when the New York Times publishes opinion pieces by Ma Ingalls about the evils of materialism.

One of our fellow guests asked Christa, our innkeeper, this as we all ate breakfast this morning.

Well, there was one time… I knew it would be bad, so I told my guests – a young couple – they should leave one day early, before the big snow hit. “No,” they said; “we have an SUV. We’ll be fine.” So down came the snow and that SUV wasn’t going anywhere… I knew we’d be in for a few rough days, but I had some food in my freezer and I was able to cook simple meals.

We spent a lot of time chatting at the fireplace, and one evening I mentioned that I was going to miss an opera in Charlottesville and the young man says “You like opera?” And I said “I love opera.” And he said, “Well, we can sing for our supper.”

And his girlfriend turned out to be an opera singer! Her name is Hyunah Yu, and … well I’ll put on one of her cds.

So now there’s this strong melancholy soprano wafting a Bach cantata through the mountain house, and Christa tells us her story. “She was going to be a doctor…”

You can read the harrowing story here.

Here’s a YouTube that features her singing Amazing Grace.

… means waking to the hoots of the Great Horned Owl.

Hoo hoo huh-hoo. Hooo… Hoo.

We’re still in Shenandoah, spending mornings underground with stalactites and evenings high up in Skyland. Last night’s sunset was so spectacular that we took our beach chairs out of the trunk, planted them at the Jewell Hollow Overlook, and sat there for an hour.

(Found here.)

This wasn’t only about the last moments of a small bright orange sun behind a mountain; it was about the vast wash of blue and pink and white as the sky settled down at half past eight. We were alone except for a man with an easel a few yards out on a path in front of us.

Painting a sunset in the mountains is about as trite, I figure, as sharing a kiss in front of the same sunset. But who’s gonna stop us?

… Moo: the lost chapter.

Five Truman University students who thought they were going to spend the summer measuring hog odors in northern Missouri have lost their jobs because of a long running dispute between the hog farm operators, nearby residents and state politicians.

For those collecting UD‘s press clippings, here she is back in 2009 (I hadn’t seen it; UD thanks Shane for telling her about it) playing a condescending liberal in the Wall Street Journal.

What’s funny about the UD excerpt the author cites as evidence of liberal snobbery is that it’s an extremely close paraphrase of something his hero, Allan Bloom, wrote in the chapter Students, from The Closing of the American Mind. In fact, all over that book Bloom writes exactly what UD wrote – that a liberal arts education is high culture’s one big chance to catch you and save you from narrow provincialism.

Like UD, Bloom was attacking there not “an American upbringing,” as the author of the Wall Street Journal article claims, but any upbringing hampered by provinciality… which is to say almost any upbringing anywhere in the world at any time. Education is an obvious good, Bloom and I are claiming, because it offers to lead you out, into a larger world, from where you rather arbitrarily began.

In no way does education want to make you reject your roots or feel contempt for the smaller world in which you inevitably grew up. It wants to introduce you to a larger one.

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I mean, look at old UD, reviler of American roots. Look closely. Do you live three doors down from the house you grew up in? UD does.

Now look at Sarah Palin, the WSJ writer’s home and hearth American roots heroine, preparing to move to … Scottsdale? What the fuck is she doing buying a house in go-go new-town Scottsdale? (Her daughter’s also bought a place in Arizona.) Doesn’t she share UD‘s love of her own deep American roots?

It’s just as stupid for the WSJ writer to conflate cultural broadening with anti-American snobbery as it is for UD to conflate buying a second home a great distance from your “rooted” home with a betrayal of your roots.

In fact Bloom’s famous book is largely about questioning roots. It’s about asking whether everything about the “American upbringing” the WSJ writer uncritically invokes is an obvious good. Bloom’s autobiographical essay in Closing, in which he recalls his amazement and excitement at seeing the University of Chicago for the first time, is moving precisely because, like so many writers of autobiographies on the verge of university, he is recording the moment when he glimpsed in himself the possibility of profound self-transformation – aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual broadening – through a serious liberal arts education.

Bloom is absolutely right that although life may provide other broadening experiences – travel, etc. – nothing is like the (to varying degrees at different schools) coherent four-year curricular discipline of the liberal arts degree. Nothing is like encountering professors who … well, remember, for instance, what Tony Judt wrote in his autobiography about the professor who

broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect. That is teaching.

Judt’s provincialism was Marxism; the university introduced him to a person able and willing to go back and forth and back and forth on the subject with seriousness and with respect for Judt in order to transform him. Liberal education takes a certain setting; it takes a certain patience; it takes a lot of seriousness. It has nothing at all to do with snobbery or condescension. In fact it is the opposite of those.

… the Morrissey fanatic. Morrissey gave a London concert tonight, during which a riot broke out in Brixton, which was near the venue.

While escaping the mayhem, my sister’s friend took pictures.

Up to the minute details here.

UD‘s nature adventure gets better and better. From our balcony, we just watched a flock of turkey – complete with poults – cross from Open Field Stage Left to Open Field Stage Right. Slowly. One even gobbled.