then it's war!

The "War on Terror" doesn't seem to have gone so well, after all. Whodathunkit?

No doubt, it's the wrong target. No, I don't mean that the US has bombed the wrong brown people, although in large part that's true. And I don't meant that bombing brown people isn't solving the problem, although that's true too. I also don't mean that there's no moral justification for the policy, although that's abundantly clear.

I mean "Terror." Maybe we can't really commit war against "Terror." Plus, I don't know, but isn't war itself kind of terrifying? It's certainly terrible.

Terror is paralyzing. So - follow me here - it's not the people in terror who are turning into terrorists. It's more like people who have something wrong with their lives, and they can think of no other way to solve it but to lash out violently against the supposed perpetrators, in an atavistic and doomed attempt to kill their way out of their problems.

To target the right affect, what we need, I've realized at last, is this: a War on Malaise.

error types

I don't know why Type I errors and Type II errors are called that. (Type I is incorrectly denying a null hypothesis that is true; Type II is incorrectly affirming a false null hypothesis. The null hypothesis is the opposite of what you believe is true. They are also called false positive and false negative. In either case, these errors involve believing something despite the evidence.) There have been various proposals for a Type III error -- for instance, cooking the evidence by setting up a trial that leads to a preordained conclusion, or misrepresenting the problem.

I can't keep them straight. I never have. "Type I" doesn't mean anything to me. Herewith, then, I propose an alternative error typology.

Dickhead Error. A Dickhead Error occurs when one continues to affirm a hypothesis that has been demonstrated to be false, often with increasing loudness. (The loudness can be vocal, but can also be expressed through revving a truck or SUV engine.)

Shithead Error. A Shithead Error occurs when one ignores all evidence contrary to a particular hypothesis, or contrary to any hypothesis whatsoever.

Asshole Error. An Asshole Error occurs when one formulates a hypothesis that serves to re-affirm the incorrigible certainty of one's perceptions, attitudes, orientations, goals, and even mood.

Fuckhead Error. A Fuckhead Error occurs when one ignores all perceptions, attitudes, orientations, goals, and even mood that are not one's own. (Fuckhead Error is often expressed loudly either vocally or through revving a truck or SUV engine.)

Making Shit Up Error. A Making Shit Up Error occurs when one invents, imagines, or indulges in fantasy of evidence. (Making Shit Up Error is often coincident with Shithead Error or Asshole Error.)

Wile E. Coyote Error. A Wile E. Coyote Error occurs when one formulates a hypothesis beyond one's capacity to test without causing oneself injury.

Oh, Right Error. An Oh, Right Error occurs when the probative evidence for or against a hypothesis is ignored until pointed out. (Often repeated ad nauseam.)

This error typology could have wide application, beyond scientific fields. For instance, during political debates, it's likely to come across instances of Dickhead, Shithead, Asshole, Making Shit Up, and even Fuckhead Error. Some political ideologies are composed of nothing else. I believe the typology could be handy in organizational governance meetings as well. How often have you observed your boss making an Asshole Error? With the proper terminology, you can clearly indicate the kind of error your boss has made, when you are in a job interview, answering a question about why you were fired.

The Wile E. Coyote type error is particularly useful for describing faulty reasoning by cats and skiers. Oh, Right Error, though ubiquitous, is still good to ascribe, in hopes that the faulty reasoning does not devolve into Shithead Error.

I'd like to see some publications adopting my improved error typology in the next few months, so get on it.

why I'm not running for Pope

I have decided that I will not give my name in consideration, and if elected will not serve, as the next Pope. (If you're wondering, I had settled on Extremely Guilty I as my pappellation. It just sounded right.) I am at peace with this decision, and in order to extend this gift of peace to others, thought I would explain briefly my reasons.

1. By long-standing tradition, no one officially runs for Pope. Popes are elected, but the events prior to the vote of the conclave of cardinals do not permit any electioneering. No cardinal may officially put his mitre in the ring or boost another cardinal's candidacy.

Well, there goes my primary advantage! Other candidates may be more knowledgeable of the policy issues or the inner workings of the Vatican, but my status, running as an outsider, could have given be tremendous leverage. I figured, it works so well in US Presidential elections, why not? I had already booked negative campaign ads.

2. Despite the fact that no one officially runs for Pope, the fact is that by the time the cardinals begin to convene to chat about the future of the Church, there are already known candidates. I was a bit behind on getting my name mentioned in those chats, so I have a huge name-recognition deficit. Frankly, I wasn't expecting Benny to step down. I blame my operatives on the ground in Rome. They're fired.

3. Despite the history of the Papacy, apparently nowadays the business about celibacy and bachelorhood is taken somewhat seriously.

4. Oh, and that whole faith thing, too. Damn these newfangled modern ideas creeping into orthodoxy! I ask these so-called cardinals, whither the Church?

fatal education

I could have typed that as "fetal," and said most of what I meant.

I teach a course I designed years ago about various political, pedagogical, epistemological, and ethical issues of life in the mediated, siliconized, affluent parts of the world. It's part of a pair of connected courses on the theme of human being in the information age. For several springs now I've used a book on post-structuralist thought and information technology - Mark Poster's Mode of Information. It's not easy reading, and every couple years I seek out an alternative, only to find that there's nothing else out there that does the philosophical heavy lifting and the concentrated concern with contemporary social life that Poster's book does.

Anyway, I go through this thing every year and do more work on Baudrillard, Foucault, and Lyotard (the three chapters in the book that I have my students read). Every year I write pages and pages of stuff that is somewhere between notes and an academic paper, and sometimes I share these with my class.

But what's really striking to me at this moment about the course is that nothing in my teaching life causes me more anxiety. This class is slowly, by degrees, killing me. I feel sick and panicky right now - half an hour before class, totally prepared, not only with a main agenda but several side trips we can go on, and no fewer than two backup plans in case the whole thing goes kablooey. My respiration is rapid and shallow, my pulse and blood pressure are elevated, my skin is clammy. (I am not hyperventilating, though if were to start, it's an interesting random fact about me that I am one of the best-performing hyperventilators on record. I figure this is because I am LungBoy [TM], with a lung capacity approximately 150% of normal adult males. Another story for another time, perhaps.)

Partly, this is because this course has provided me both some of the most rewarding and exhilarating, and some of the most dismal and soul-crushing, teaching experiences. I have succeeded and failed spectacularly in the course.

I never feel entirely confident handling this course material, which I know extremely well, because I can never tell how my students will respond, how they'll take it, whether they'll take it. I never actually feel like I've mastered the course material sufficiently (as though this was a necessary condition of teaching it, and as though teaching doesn't actively construct one's mastery on the fly, but ya know what I mean...).

I never walk into the class confident that all my students won't walk out. That's a weird feeling to have. Maybe today's the day?

another open letter

Dear Talentless Spam Email Marketers,

I really have no need for 74% 82% 80% 78% 83% 80% discounted Viagra. I'm not trying to brag, I'm really just tired of the spam. You could at least get your story straight on the discount.

Anyway, why do you figure I'm on the market? It's because I'm an avowed hockey fan, isn't it. Jerks.

Yours sincerely,

Exiled Nigerian Prince Martin Embegke

P.S. I have a special offer to tender only onto you, dear one...

why public higher education is a good ideaor not, depending

The CSU has been taken over by an administration that does not understand or care about the unique mission of public higher education. They see education as a privilege, and therefore see it as properly allocated according to who can pay more for it. Public higher education, on this view, is only worth whatever dregs the public deigns to spend on it. And if the public - like here in California - denies funding, this must mean that university funding isn't worth the public's money. Instead, public institutions should do more with less. The only educational value these administrators understand is the maximization of cost-efficiency.

First of all, maximum cost efficiency is not an educational value. The best education is neither the cheapest nor the one that generates the most graduates for the least cost. This is as useless a standard of education as overall grade-point average, because in either case, the outcome you're measuring has nothing to do with the quality of education.

But as a recent comment has it, quality of education is best determined not by standards of rigor established by faculty with field expertise. Quality of education is best determined by cost-efficiency. Let's recap that argument one more time: The appropriate way to judge the quality of university education is not to judge the quality of university education but to ask whether the university graduates people cheaply.

I won't belabor this point further, nor spend any more time unpacking the rest of this. It's making quite a stir among faculty across the CSU, because it basically explains the playbook for dismantling the CSU. This is why I wanted to have someone at the rally holding a sign that depicted one of our buildings burnt to the ground, with a Phoenix rising from its ashes. (I know - too conceptual. That's always been my fatal flaw as a creative artist.)

Maybe the question is more fundamental. On some level, what is being challenged is not just the way public education is done, but whether there should be any such thing as public university education.

The main reason I think public higher education is a right of citizens is because I believe in the social justice of equal opportunities for people to make good lives for themselves. The CSU was built to serve the educational needs of people who would never be able to afford private university education. The rationale for opening education to a larger populace made sense in 1960 and continues to do so now, I think: a well-educated public serves the public's interest.

One - indeed primary - way public university education serves the public's interest is economic. A well-educated worker generally earns more, and therefore contributes more to the economy through taxes, but in particular through spending. All told, we know, every dollar spent on the CSU is repaid to the state more than 4 times. It makes no economic sense at all not to fund public higher education. And yet, there is a large group of citizens in California and across the US who see public funding as government waste. I should hope more government programs would be as wasteful as one that generates a 400% return on investment.

On this basis, this narrow, mercenary, blinkeredly-fiscal basis, public funding for higher education is a benefit to the entire public. Current executive administration of the CSU basically denies this, for reasons they can't articulate, because they haven't got any. They don't make the case. They say, instead, that there's no money. When they are urged to pursue more public money, and use this argument to make the case, they say, instead, that there's no money. Funding to the CSU has been cut repeatedly this decade - in years of economic growth as well as decline - and every single time, CSU execs have shrugged and said there's just no money there.

The question that puzzles so many of us is, why? Why would you not fund a program that repays so handsomely? Why would our administrators fail to make this case?

I think the answer is implied in the comment linked above, in particular, the notion that higher education is a privilege, not a right. This basic denial of the social justice of public funding for higher education is the key to this. It's not a matter of serving the public good at all, but expressly of denying the public this good. Why do that, other than to redirect these economic goods into the hands of fewer and fewer people?

It may boil down to such a pecuniary interest. But the public's interest in education is not only economic. Public education serves a social and political good as well. It's true that educated people generate more economic activity, because of the economic value of their knowledge and skill. Educated people are more economically efficient, when considered solely as labor.

The "problem," from one group's standpoint at least, is that education has this side-effect, of helping people develop their own ideas and ways of thinking - critical skills and attitudes for active citizenship. Educated people ask uncomfortable questions about justice in their societies. Yes, so do less well educated people. The difference is that better educated people are also better at analyzing the problems, articulating what is wrong, reasoning out solutions, making the case for these solutions to the public at large. An educated public is socially and political dynamic. More to the point, education has the reputation of leading people to be more progressive politically.

The attack on the CSU is a two-pronged attack on the class of people who increasingly resemble peasants in our society: it undermines their opportunities for economic advancement (denying access, saddling them with school debt), and it undermines their opportunities for political and social understanding, activism, or resistance. De-funding public higher education is a terrific way to consolidate economic and political power for those who already have it.

And this gutting of the peasant class' last best hope for making their lives better is sold to them on the basis of the notion that they can't afford to fund it. It seems pretty obvious to me that we can't afford not to fund it.

job search begins

Having heard from my interim department chair that, by current plans handed down by college deans, there will be no work in the department for me next year. So I'm looking for work. I hate that.

I looked through the American Philosophical Association's Jobs for Philosophers publication this afternoon. It didn't take long. I found 5 jobs I have a reasonable fit for, and 4 of them where I might actually be considered, perhaps.

I never wanted to come to California. I didn't like the Central Valley when I got here, and, truth be told, there's a lot about it not to like. Some crappy things have happened to me here, too.

But through the years, especially the past 6 or so, I've fallen in love with my campus, and with California, and of course with Lauren, and this has made being here not merely tolerable, but a life worth living. Now, I don't want to leave California. I may not have the choice. In academia, you get to choose what you get your degree in, you get some choice of what you study, a little choice of what you teach, but virtually no choice where you live.

Dusted off my CV a bit this afternoon, too. Surprisingly, it's mainly up to date. I don't seem to have a letter of application anywhere, so tomorrow I'll be writing that up. Ugh.

everything must go!

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto

We ended up at the mall today, for no really good reason, other than already finding ourselves in Modesto, and thinking of a trip to Trader Joe's. We went to a closing sale at a local department store, a chain with stores mainly in the Central Valley, called Gottschalks. They tried to sell out to somebody last fall, and no one took them up on it. So they're clearing out everything.

And I mean everything: all the stuff on the floor, in warehouses, all the store furnishings and equipment, all the manikins, racks, display tables, fixtures - even the dollies the stock staff (in jeans and t-shirts) were using had price tags on them.

All the desperation of trying to sell the place past, all attempts at dignity, polish and shine ended, the store was reduced to dishevelment, or, to coin an appropriate term, disshelvement.

What was revealed by this series of events are the basic tricks of retail: controlling perception. Because, you see, they'd given up on it. The normal look of a retail department store, which prevents you from seeing in depth, which fills as much of every direction with images, words of inducement, merchandise displays, was gone. All the racks were at the same level, and there were items stacked on floors or behind counters where they didn't belong.

The staff were disgruntled, and joined by this invading army of overly-casual employees (in dress and in work status, no doubt), hired by a group a cashier identified as "the liquidators" to move stock around. The muzak was on a weirdly upbeat channel doing lots of late 70s, heavy on the disco.

Aside from the sudden elimination of the usual fetishization of commodities - the pornography that takes place routinely in retail - what struck me was that, with the pretense gone, the impoverishment, callousness, and shabbiness of it was impossible to deny. For instance, in the pile of cast-off and for-sale display tables and racks, without being covered with brightly colored stuff as was their function, you could see how poorly made, how scuffed, how tatty all of it is. The conceits of fashion and elegance, which is the basic come-on of retail seduction, no longer hide this.

Especially thrilling to me was that you could buy literally anything in the store, including giant cardboard hearts covered in red and pink tissue paper roses used as Valentine's Day decorations, metal sign frames with signs still in them, hat dummies, segments of manikins, and those weird partial manikins - just a torso, or just legs, or - the one I wanted most - just a butt (I thought it would make a nice gift). My loveliest (known today by one of my random endearments for her - Pinky) was looking for and buying ladies' unmentionables, and the racks they were on were on sale too. For some reason, the whole thing struck us as hilarious.

an open letter to Santa

Dear Mr. Claus,

I am writing you to request, as a Christmas gift, funding for the California State University in the amount of six bajillion dollars. It is my contention that this gift is well-deserved and needed, that the CSU collectively and I personally have met a reasonable standard of being good, and that supplying this gift will promote and provide the resources for the CSU and myself to continue being good.

First of all, it should be plain that the CSU is in dire need of six bajillion dollars. State funding has been decreasing in relation to real financial needs of the University for many years, due in part to the political climate in the legislature. Their intransigence and partisanship, clearly rising to naughty levels, have resulted in chronic underfunding of higher education.

Despite this, the faculty and staff of the CSU have continued to educate more students each year. Our dedication to students and to the cause of education are demonstrated by our efforts to support and defend the CSU. Personally, I have spoken out on numerous occasions and rallied with my colleagues in the California Faculty Association in protest against budget cuts and student fee increases. Meanwhile, I remain passionately devoted to teaching, as you are, no doubt, aware.

I freely grant that neither I nor the University are always at our best. I have made mistakes in the past year, but I maintain that at no time have I acted with malicious intent - not even that thing about the guy and the thing, you know what I'm alluding to. The truth is, I meant well.

Likewise, the CSU always aims at providing the best education it can. Some of our higher level administrators and executives act in ways that are hard to explain; however, I do not stipulate that these actions are in fact or intent naughty. Further, the University's overall level of niceness clearly and overwhelmingly outweighs the alleged naughtiness of a few (see Harper v. Delbon, Ca.Su.Ct. 2001-0104).

Six bajillion dollars is a very large gift, but it is neither excessive nor inappropriate. The University would use these funds to assure access to high-quality education for the public, and unused portions of the gift would be held in reserve to use for later needs. Apportionment and allocation of the gift would be regularly reported through the University's accounting firm, so there should be no question of the gift going to good use.

I advise you that the details, ways and means, and weights and measures of this request are still to be negotiated. I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,
Chris Nagel

business as usual for Dow

Dow chemical got out of a lawsuit today that accused them of selling a pesticide that they knew caused sterility. They knew of the problems since the 1950s, continued to sell the pesticide in the US until it was banned in 1979, and continued selling it overseas until the mid 1980s.

The suit charged Dow with genocide and crimes against humanity, and the federal court ruling basically says the case doesn't fit the description of those crimes. It does not say what Dow did was acceptable, just that it wasn't deliberately genocidal. Dow's attorney claimed the ruling meant that Dow "is completely blameless, both factually and legally." He did not add "... of a deliberate policy of genocide."

All of which adds up to a new corporate motto:

Dow Chemical: Not As Bad As Mengele