Who could have suspected?

Dave Morris's Frankenstein app, via The Guardian.

Mr. Bill Gates in the Washington Post!!!

Efforts are being made to define effective teaching and give teachers the support they need to be as effective as possible. But as states and districts rush to implement new teacher development and evaluation systems, there is a risk they’ll use hastily contrived, unproven measures. One glaring example is the rush to develop new assessments in grades and subjects not currently covered by state tests. Some states and districts are talking about developing tests for all subjects, including choir and gym, just so they have something to measure.

In one Midwestern state, for example, a 166-page Physical Education Evaluation Instrument holds teachers accountable for ensuring that students meet state-defined targets for physical education, such as consistently demonstrating “correct skipping technique with a smooth and effortless rhythm” and “strike consistently a ball with a paddle to a target area with accuracy and good technique.” I’m not making this up!

This is one reason there is a backlash against standardized tests — in particular, using student test scores as the primary basis for making decisions about firing, promoting and compensating teachers. I’m all for accountability, but I understand teachers’ concerns and frustrations.

Well, I have to say this makes me feel a lot better, about humanity in general and about Barack Obama in particular. Neither Obama nor Gates is a vile union-hating blood-sucking thug with a secret plan to turn America's public-school children into soulless factory robots. Au contraire! If their ideas about educational reform (not to be confused with rephorm) could be implemented, it might well be an on-the-whole okay thing.

But will somebody kindly tell me how the blessed fuck such smart guys have managed to be so blindingly stupid? Will you please explain to me how they have gotten themselves associated with plans that are clearly designed to turn America's public-school children into soulless factory robots? Can you give me one good reason why they should be working with fools, liars, and incompetents like Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and Thomas P. Friedman (better known as Thomas L. Friedman, the Schnurrbart des Ewig-Daseins), while ignoring Diane Ravitch as a Dirty Fucking Hippy? Just asking.

From Charfade at DeviantArt.

In other news, Dr. Victor Frankenstein published an op-ed piece in the Geneva Villager:

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure may be the best mountain climber in town, but you'd hardly guess that from watching him tooling his way up Mont Blanc: he seems totally distracted, stopping every two or three minutes to examine a bug or a striation in the rock. If you were scouting for mountain climbers, he'd be your last choice, alongside Ferdinand the Bull. But you'd be making a mistake.

Just as today's sports coaches have recognized that supreme athletic ability is a highly complex phenomenon and developed whole batteries of tests to help them identify promising young talents, so have biologists in nearby Germany come to understand the complexity of life itself—pretty deft segue, huh?—, and learned how to take a Raggedy Ann or Andy of scavenged corpse parts and literally reanimate it through the miracle of electromagnetism, turning it into a living, breathing Creature, capable of reason, passion, and reverence for its Creator (that would be yours truly).

But you can't just turn such a thing on and then duck out the lab window and take off for Geneva, marry your fiancée, and forget the whole thing. A Creature is a big responsibility, capable of great goodness and great harm. You have to take care of it in a holistic way, feeding and clothing it, showing it affection, cultivating its strength and grace as well as its intellect, artistic sensibilities, and emotions. You have to—Aargh, I hear its fiendish footsteps! Tell Elisabeth I may be late for dinner!

But then everybody has to sacrifice

Like, my boss had to sacrifice me.

Via Passim inter al.—can't find a credited version.

From NPR:

The cuts in the budget for long-term unemployment benefits are not big; about 10 percent. Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project says the actual reductions in people's checks will be bigger than that, at least over the next few months.

"Because the sequester is calculated on a fiscal year, which started in October, the amount of the cut has to be condensed into a much shorter time period," Emsellem says. "So they have until the end of September to implement a year's worth of cuts in benefits."

And if you lose $30 off that $300 a week,

That $30 might not seem like a lot, but Joan Cirillo says it is when you've been out of work a long time and are just scraping by.

Gosh, do ya think so? 

You don't have to make a federal case

ABC News:

Sequester Furloughs Start… With a Whisper - Parts of the federal government are finally showing the effects of the furloughs prescribed by sequestration — one month and four days after the law went into effect. The Northern Division of Maryland’s Federal Public Defender’s office was closed all day today, with only one assistant federal public defender on hand. Upon calling the office, a message attributed the closure to “furloughs,” which Katherine Newberger, the one lawyer on duty, confirmed were because of sequestration.

They're all guilty anyway, right? From Paulo Gabriel.

Post that, austerian swine!

Huffington Post:

March's jobs numbers did not yet reflect much of the "sequester," the across-the-board federal budget cuts that will slowly take effect throughout the year, resulting in less hiring and fewer hours worked by government employees. Nevertheless, austerity is already pinching job growth in other ways. The federal government shed 14,000 jobs in March, almost all of which were accounted for by the U.S. Postal Service.

Union buster. Just kidding.

Cheap shots: Does Priebus favor molesting 15-year-old girls?

Updated 4/7

Reince Priebus at RedState (via Talking Points Memo):

The President, the Senate Majority Leader, the House Democratic Leader, and the Chair of the Democratic National Committee (in whose home state this hearing occurred) made funding Planned Parenthood an issue in the 2012 campaign. They should now all be held to account for that outspoken support. If the media won’t, then voters must ask the pressing questions: Do these Democrats also believe a newborn has no rights? Do they also endorse infanticide?

I certainly hope not. I hope this is a place where we can all find common ground. Surely, all Americans can agree that a newborn deserves immediate medical care—and, if necessary, emergency care—regardless of the circumstances of birth.

Ooh, you know what, Reincy old top? See you and call you! You think there are born people who have a right to health care? So do I!

So where do you Republicans draw the line? I don't draw it at all—I think all born people have a right to health care and I've been making it an issue for a very long time. If the media won't, then voters must ask the pressing question: When do Republicans think a person loses her or his right to health? On weaning? When they enter the terrible twos? Sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one? Retirement? Do they also endorse abandoning toddlers to die?

Why do you hate these kids, Mr. Chairman?

Irresistible chain of item theft from Pharyngula via Substance McGravitas:

From The Mirror: Gideon Strumpet, Whory Tory

He's snatched millions of pounds in benefits from those in most need – and it seems that George Osborne could not care less about anyone else.

Tonight he was branded selfish and arrogant after allowing his chauffeur to park his £50,000 Land Rover in a space reserved for the disabled.

There were plenty of other places available just a few yards away as the Tory Chancellor was dropped off for a burger at an M4 service station.

But Mr Osborne was obviously far too important to waste valuable seconds – and the bright-yellow markings on the restricted bay were brazenly ignored.

Richard Hawkes, chief executive of the disability charity Scope claimed the incident “shows how wildly out of touch the Chancellor is with disabled people in the UK”.

He said: “They will see this as rubbing salt in their wounds.

"Many are already struggling to make ends meet, yet the Chancellor’s response has been to cut vital financial support and squeeze local care budgets.”

So a 47-year-old Virginia chap gets a 17-year-old girl to give him a blow job, which in most states constitutes statutory rape and is harshly punished. According to Virginia statute, however, this is only a misdemeanor if the girl is 15 or up, which is dissatisfying to attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, and why?

Would it be because Virginia law thinks sexually molesting a minor isn't serious enough to be a felony? No way! It's because the guy is doing it in an un-Christian, sodomitical way!!

From Reality Bong.

So instead of asking Virginia to revisit the statute on molestation, Cuccinelli takes Virginia's plainly unconstitutional old anti-sodomy law out of the mothballs, and uses it against our vile old reprobate, and the federal court throws out the case, and then he starts complaining.

So tell us about this one, Priebus: If the media won't, then voters must ask the pressing question: do these Republicans believe it's OK for 50-year-old men to have sex with 15-year-old girls, as long as it is in a Levitically approved genital-genital style? Do they also endorse flashing?

And also from The Mirror:

They'd be marrying their daughters, only one wouldn't like them to get the estate, I mean it wouldn't be traditional, would it? Salic law and all, don't you know.

Update: See Whiskey Fire, especially comments. You know why it's always conservatives who come up with these ideas? Yes, you do. Not so much that they're anxious to try out man on dog relationships, though that must be part of it, but that the decision to get married belongs for them to the general category of tax issues.

Choice cuts

From CBS News:

Meat Power. From Papergreat.

• Furlough notices have been sent out at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), proposing furloughs of 13 days or less for employees over the next seven months as a result of sequestration.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture will furlough 6,200 food inspectors for 11 days this summer, starting in July, according to the Iowa Farmer Today. The USDA says that would disrupt meat exports to the tune of $8 billion. A spending bill passed in the Senate Wednesday would provide $55 million to the USDA through September to help avoid these furloughs. The money will be allocated if the House passes the bill today and then gets signed into law by the president.

Of course the inspectors themselves won't be eating meat for a while, will that cover it?

Sludge report

Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post:

Stephens said that he doesn't pay much attention to politics, but he does know the regular budgeting process has been dysfunctional during the years of Barack Obama's presidency and that sequestration is a symptom of that dysfunction. The cuts kicked in last month and forced the federal government to find $85 billion worth of savings this year. Now Stephens is out of a job.

Stephens, a 32-year-old father of two who lives in Richland, Wash., spent several years as a radiological control technician for one of several companies tasked by the U.S. Department of Energy with cleaning up nuclear waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state. The biggest challenge at the site is dealing with 53 million gallons of nuclear sludge stored in leaky underground tanks.

Of the 9,000 workers at the site, more than 200 members of the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council like Stephens received layoff notices last month, and more than 2,000 non-union workers will have to take unpaid days off this year.

Photo by US Department of Energy via WorldCrunch/Le Monde.

It holds two thirds of the nuclear waste in the United States, or did until it started leaking (378 million liters so far, a record, and less than 10 kilometers from the Columbia River, which is uncontaminated as yet). My maternal grandparents both worked here in the Manhattan Project, as it happened, and there is some family romance connected with it, because they had been divorced (from each other) for a long time, and now remarried, shortly before my grandfather's death. The Department of Energy promises that the layoffs will not  cause any risk to the workforce or to the general public. Oh, good.

See you in Sequester

I think I'm going to start posting these as I see them, maybe even Tweeting them if I can be arsed, on the model of David Waldman with the gun violence incidents (see #gunfail).

The Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff reports that even the sequester’s relatively mild two percent cut to Medicare is forcing clinics to choose between providing care to patients, absorbing debilitating financial losses, or downsizing medical staff. Faced with those unsavory choices, clinics like North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York are refusing to see as many as 5,000 of their Medicare patients. (Think Progress)

How to handle hair loss from chemotherapy.

How stupid do I think you are?

Svaneke Harbor, Bornholm, Denmark. Phil Degginger, Mira.

This is Mr. Haven Pell, retired naval officer and investment banker, and doubtless a dab hand at tying a bow tie. Apparently between the 19th hole and cocktail hour back at the old hovel, he finds time to maintain a blog called LibertyPell, maybe while dressing for dinner. It's his trophy career.

Late last February he predicted that the dread sequester was not likely to end up pooping anybody's party, given that the federal government already has far more money than it really knows what to do with from its ridiculously persistent taxation of the Pells and the Havenses and all their in-laws and fraternity brothers and dance partners and bridge companions, and offered the following as a way of keeping tabs on the issue:

As a public service, here are 10 questions you can ask to anyone who suggests plagues of locusts or frogs because of the sequester.

1.  How many White House staff personnel will be furloughed?
2.  How many Congressional staff personnel will be furloughed?
3.  If a departmental budget reverts to the level of 2007 or 2008 (when that level of spending was presumably satisfactory) is that a problem?
4.  Is anything useful found in any part of a budget other than the top line?
5.  Has any elected official given up even one of his earmarks?
6.  If you had to bet your own personal funds on the threatened outcome actually happening, would you do so?
7.  Are you telling the truth or is it time to bring back Congressman Joe “you lie” Wilson of South Carolina who shouted those words at the President?
8.  Would you be willing to tender your resignation if your statements about the effects of sequestration proved to be hyped or indeed false?
9.  If this tiny percentage is so important, why don’t we spend that and cut all the rest?
10.  How stupid do you think we are?

Whatever the actual impact of this political silliness, be assured those whose job it was to avoid it will feel it least.

So, hm?

1. So far 480 staffers at OMB, plus slowed hiring and refilling of vacant positions, with more pay cuts and furloughs possible.  President Obama has given himself a five percent pay cut. All 60,000 employees at Customs and Border Services have received furlough notices, almost all 47,000 of the Federal Aviation Administration's personnel will be on furlough one or two days per pay period, 20,000 federal court employees will be furloughed for 16 days, 4,700 employees of the Labor Department will be furloughed between April and September, 20,500 NASA contractors may lose their jobs, and so on. For a detailed idea of how ongoing cuts affect every aspect of government work see the list of 100 prepared by Sam Stein and Amanda Terkel for Huffington Post (via Ed Kilgore).

2. With the exception, of course, of the Congress. With the sure instinct that has made them the least popular institution since the disbanding of the International Brotherhood of Public Executioners, they exempted themselves. As a matter of fact they were required to, by law. But they are going to lose staff and support, they just aren't talking about it. That's because Congress is run by Republicans who say that the sequester is no big deal.

3. The levels of spending were not satisfactory in 2007 and 2008, unless you were in war propaganda. They were already staggering under a decade of ruthless cuts, first to balance the budget (Clinton), then to unbalance it beyond anyone's wildest dreams (Bush). Does that answer your question?

4. Yes. That is why they consist of more than one line. Did you say you used to work as an investment banker?

5. Earmarks were banned two years ago. (Now they have something else which may be considerably worse, but I've made the point I wanted to make.)

6. Ooh, shall we say $10,000?

7. It is never time to bring back ex-Congressman Wilson, if you've been brought up properly.

8. Are you sure you used to work as an investment banker?

9. Huh? How about we do that with your tax bill? Since you're so desperate to hold on to that additional 4.6% on income over $450,000, which I'm sure you're out there creating jobs with, why don't you just keep it and let the government take the rest of your income in exchange?

10. Explain how question 9 is supposed to work and we'll talk.

Seal Harbor, Maine, Greg A. Hartford.

Freedom is Slavery

Shorter David Brooks,  "Freedom Loses One", New York Times, 2 April 2013:

So, Sodomites, you really want to get married? How very Burkean of you. Join the PTA and Opus Dei while you're up, too. And a bowling league. Won't you be the hip little things.

I know, I know, I used to wonder why they wanted to be allowed to be generals and archbishops. It's really all about the drag, I suppose. Nothing whatever to do with human dignity or asserting an actual social existence as opposed to just being part of the Brooksian decor, or any of that Jacobin stuff.

"The Regent [Prime Minister Archbishop Nascimos on his visit to C-in-C General Padgett] was supposed to be coming with a retinue of 30 at the most. In fact he arrived with an entourage of perhaps 100, including staff, boy scouts, journalists and a personal bodyguard of 28 Evzones, very picturesque in their quaint skirts, white tights, and shoes with huge black pom-poms. The regent impressed everyone by his bearing, charm, shrewdness and knowledge. Not so his staff who, to put it mildly, were 'sloppy'." (John Dearfield)

I was thinking of doing another post about this insane column, but Matt Taibbi has dealt with it pretty aptly, if earnestly, and I'd like to go think about something else.

Housekeeping

If anybody's wondering about the Dynamic View out the window here, that's a Blogger alternative that has not been adopted by any of the bloggers I read—I have a hard time finding any at all—that has some childish and perhaps not so childish advantages over the normal formats.

One thing is that it blows one's reader numbers sky high, at least in its own Blogger world. I do not actually believe I have that many readers (normal blog statistics counters indicate that it has a real effect,  but not like this). But even though I think the charts must be fictional I love looking at them. The other is writerly vanity: I like the display of old posts all the way back to forever—the little literary bits that could have had a better audience than they did at the time they were written and are now more accessible to rediscovery.

The last time I tried it, though, it would not work with the StatCounter device (which gives me a truer picture of what a tiny, select crew you really are) and I hated the way the individual posts looked, with a wide page and tons of white space, like twee remarks on very expensive notepaper, simultaneously amateurish and unbloggy. But the StatCounter problem has now been resolved and I find that this particular Sidebar view narrows the page to make it look more like a blog in the traditional sense, so I'm trying it again.

If you hate it, you know where you can say so—here's some thread:

Aaron Swartz Memorial Library of the News

Uncredited photo from Our Daily Bleed.

This is a pretty serious idea. I started thinking about it while reading my paper New York Times, which ran a story this morning on page 1 below the fold, while it's somewhat buried in the online edition, claiming that all newspapers are retreating behind paywalls and before you know it there'll be nothing left but the Guardian.

So, I'm not merely willing for newspapers to make lots of money, I really want them to (though when I say that I mean writers and editors, not shareholders demanding a psychopathic 20% ROI), but: only under the condition that there's a public library of some kind. That is, there needs to be an online public library, a virtual place where you might put yourself to some inconvenience to go and where reading your Washington Post or your Haaretz or your Welt am Sonntag is perhaps not as comfy as reading your subscription copy, but where this essential citizenship information can be found without too much difficulty and with no expenditure beyond that of getting online in the first place.

What I thought in the first place is that all of us—bloggers and commenters—could be contributing to the construction of a volunteer periodicals collection.

Everybody could belong to some bibliography-sharing program like Zotero; then, whenever you read an article from a subscribers-only source, you copy its metadata into the Zotero-like program: title, author, date, publication name, and permanent URL; along with a few index keywords, or maybe even a 20-word abstract of the article.

Then, all these accounts would be synced with a central account from which a newspaper-like front page can be published as with paper.li (or for that matter RawStory, but better if it's laid out more or less automatically), but with archive and search boxes.

Stories ranked as with HuffPost, but on the basis of how many readers have submitted them.

And topical subject front pages (business, sports, international...) or self-generated front pages out of the keywords (France, Vietnam, tar sands, baking...).

Perhaps it could be done through Twitter, though 140 characters isn't enough for bibliographically good entries, I wouldn't think.

Or on the other end of elaborateness it could be a Wikimedia project: the idea has a lot of Wiki ethos to it, I think, the reverence for text edited by somebody else. Remember, it's not a publication, just a catalogue of URLs. Or the door to a library that already exists, though in fantastical concealment like a virtual Easter egg hunt, in the cloud. Above all it's a volunteer thing, an opportunity for everybody to participate in making our imaginary environment a better and friendlier place, which is what makes me so bold as to suggest naming it after everybody's dear lost friend, the good, mourned, Aaron Swartz.

I wouldn't have the time or the techitude or indeed the leadership quality (i.e. sociopathy) required to plan and implement such a thing, but I'd certainly give it some grunt time. I hope some smarter body will see this and think about making it happen—I'm going to post it chez Booman and Kos, and you readers should feel free to copy and paste it wherever you see fit, or for that matter rewrite the whole thing if you like (be nice and link me though).

Can't credit this--dead link to the UK Independent.

There's something about an Aqua Buddha man

Mr. Pierce quotes from Time:

Ron Paul had a mystifying knack for whipping college-age audiences into a frenzy with dry observations about, say, raw milk or Austrian economics. He won a fervent following partly because he didn't much care about winning anything. His son has a different talent. In a few short years in Washington, Rand - who came of age on the libertarian fringe and ran under the Tea Party banner - has become a skillful political salesman, with a feel for marketing his views to match his audience. (Esquire)

I know what that talent is: convincing the political horse race journalists, like this Time writer, that you are "serious" without doing any of those icky serious things, like talking about economics. No troublesome beliefs about right or wrong, just in it to win it. Ooh, it's the New McCain!

Only with much more interesting hair: this is not your grandfather's senator.

(Whereas this is your grandfather's cult leader.)

Small world iftar all.

Thanks, Google, for making it a proper April 1.

He is leavened!

Gingerbread Jesus by MewMint.

Correction

You: A couple of moderately old folks going uptown on the no. 5 bus having an animated conversation about Dinah Washington.

Me: An unnecessary third party old folk who insisted for some reason that this song was by Rogers & Hart rather than the Gershwins. I was wrong. I believe the band here is Count Basie's.

And here's another version, stunning in a different way. I'm not quite sure why I stopped putting up music a while back, but I'm starting again. Hope you all like it.

CBS Studios, Paris, France on May 23, 1963. Originally released on Blue Note (4146).
Dexter Gordon (tenor saxophone); Bud Powell (piano); Pierre Michelot (bass); Kenny Clarke (drums).

Who cares about the deficit?

Pretty porky putti! From Christopher at ReptileMind.

The answer could be a lot simpler than you think: rich people are overwhelmingly terribly, terribly concerned about our burgeoning annual budget deficits—and nobody else is.

That's the indication of an ongoing study conducted by Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University, a survey of "Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good". [jump]

Inside the mind of Dana Loesch

Bayonet*. Image from Get Stuffed.

Penis. Image from HealthTap.

Are we starting to see a pattern here?

*She doesn't actually say "bayonet"—just "assault weapon", with the stipulation that it's used for "stabbing". She didn't say "penis" either, come to think of it, but rather an unnamed something that "resulted in... pregnancy". So I'm just clarifying here.

Cheap shots and fancy love

From Scotthouse Hotel, Rome.

Rhetorical questions that will stay that way:

Why wouldn’t we want a further unpacking of the teachings of Pope John Paul II on human sexuality? (Kathryn Jean Lopez, via House of Substance)

I'll tell you why I wouldn't want one if you'll tell me why you wouldn't.

Still from Mysteries of a Barbershop by Erich Engel, 1923, concept by Bertolt Brecht. Image from Wikipedia.

Please don't explain:

The interview being aired by NBC as news content is part of a larger documentary called “The Framing of Joe Paterno.” On his website, Ziegler lambasts the Freeh Report of the Penn State scandal, which concluded [jump]

Pragmatic sanctioned

I hear the Man Called Petraeus has resurfaced, embarking on his redemption tour with a dinner address to the ROTC of USC in which he may have mentioned his "extremely poor judgment". I think we can expect to see him engaged to Mother Kardashian before too long. It gives me pride to note here that my hometown newspaper, the New York Times, has declined to headline this story, and I had to Google to find a paper that did (one of the Posts, Washington or Sideboob).

Image from Cafe Press.

Anyway, it's given me a sort of disquieting thought. I've been telling myself this pleasing story about Obama choosing Father Brennan to lead the CIA so as to take away their drones and generally reconvert them from their current status as presidential secret army to the good old conventional role of central intelligence agency for which they were originally named. ("I think I'll call you 'Central Intelligence Agency'," beamed President Truman as he tickled the infant outfit behind its ear.)

The disquieting thought is this: if it weren't for the extremely poor judgment of the Man Called Petraeus and the Woman Called Broadwell and their email habits, to say nothing of the sex part, an unforgivable breach of biographer ethics—if not for that, the militarization of the CIA would be carrying on apace while Obama and Brennan sat in the Situation Room chatting about Niebuhr, wouldn't it?

So which does Obama actually support? When the General was running the Company like the Petraerian Guard, did Obama agree with that and then change his mind, or did it just take him five years to get the CIA director he wanted? Or is it not important? Is the program simply to make the agency go, regardless of where it goes in particular?

Does he pick people for jobs and then ask them, "Well, what would you like the CIA to do?" "Jeez, Arne, I can't stand high-stakes testing, but you're the boss." "Golly, Eric, you don't have to indict any bankers if you don't want to, I just thought you might enjoy it."