ready to go

The CFA Budget summit is, as of now, prepared.

'tweren't easy. It seemed that, at every turn, one snafu or other emerged. For instance, there have been oodles of delicious bureaucratic madness, topped with whipped cream (okay, actually, it was CoolWhip ^TM - this is a bureaucracy, after all). There have also been overworked colleagues unable to participate in deliberative processes, essentially leaving me - a mere lecturer - in the uncomfortable position of deciding how my union will put on this function. There have also been the usual thousands of doubts, misplaced anxieties, and so forth, that make events like this, and my life in general, always a little uncomfortable.

But the planning is as done as it can get. After 1:30 tomorrow, by the time the dust has settled, for good or ill, no matter who I've pissed off or how much, the thing will be well and completely done.

Then the question will be whether it did any goddamn good at all. The answer to that won't come for at least a couple weeks, I surmise. Which means I'm not really done, because I can't really afford to stop organizing in whatever way I can. People's livelihoods, students' educations, and the university's future seem, to me, to be very much at stake, in how the budget crisis is handled.

I enjoy reading Marc Bousquet's blog about academic politics. I think, in the main, his analyses are spot on. Somehow, though, his post today didn't help.

party time for Arlen Specter

I'm not all that surprised.

Arlen Specter has never struck me as a particularly party-line kinda guy. He was a pro-choice Republican when Republicans routinely made anti-choice a national party platform plank. One year when Specter was up for re-election, pro-choice women in Pennsylvania (who'd normally swing liberal, hence Democratic) voted for him in droves.

He's always struck me as a bit of a flake, too.

But now he's a Democrat. So there you go.

Specter is losing to a right-wing-backed candidate in the Republican primary, Pat Toomey, so his party switch is clearly tied to his political ambitions. But as much as the Republicans are exaggerating this claim, Specter's own claim that the Republicans have moved too far to the right is also suspect.

What's really happened is that the Democrats have moved so far to the right that the party platform of the Republicans, circa 1984, now looks like the Democrats'. The Republicans may have left Specter behind, but the Democrats have moved right into his lane.

Which means that there's almost no discernible ideological divide between the parties. They vie for power, party power, and really, nothing else.

Coke or Pepsi?

word of the day

The word of the day is "boilerplate."

I subscribe to Merriam-Webster's word of the day email service, basically because it supplied me with wordplay fodder. I haven't done much with it for a while, for a number of reasons.

Beyond that, the service is pretty much useless. I don't mean that I already know what "boilerplate" means, so I don't need the M-W people to tell me it means a standard text that you repeat. I mean that the definitions and sample usage sentences they come up with are frequently so twisted as to render the word of the day unintelligible.

("Tartlets? Tartlets? Tartlets? No, the word's lost all meaning.")

Today, f'rinstance, the derivation of "boilerplate" included this gem:

In the days before computers, small, local newspapers around the U.S. relied heavily on feature stories, editorials, and other printed material supplied by large publishing syndicates.

(It goes on to tell us that the material was supplied on "boilerplates." In case you were wondering.)

Of course, this practice is no longer followed, now that there are computers. Nowadays, local newspapers consist of almost nothing but material supplied by large publishing syndicates. Just read the Modesto Bee some day. Better yet, don't.

you know, sometimes, I just don't know

My entry titles are getting more and more elliptical.

But that's beside the point.

I have been toying around with writing new news satire for a while. I last wrote stuff about the early days of the Bush administration and a series about the 2000 election. Then it seemed that the Bush people would be self-parodying. Then it all just got too depressing. I mean, I've been watching the Daily Show, but even that's pretty painful sometimes.

Now that Obama is president, for whatever reason a bunch of people have decided to convince themselves and others that he's a crazed socialist maniac, when in fact his actual policies are marginally different from Bush's on the economy and the middle east - a point that escapes most of what is sold as political commentary these days. Anyway, the level of unhingedness of these Obama-mad weirdos has got me writing a bit.

It started with Michele Bachmann (R - Crazyville), and I had to make up something about the "tea party" protests that have been referred to by Fox News commentators as "teabagging" - to the great delight of people who think that kind of thing is funny. Which I do.

Anyway, I followed the recipe for political satire type 3 (inflate cockamamie idea to the point of grotesque, absurd excess, for comedic effect and fun and profit) on the whole teabagging fiasco. Both these entries I've written as a blog that I'm calling "The Real Story." I think the conceit of it works pretty well. Lauren wants me to invent a history of the reporter, Neil "Red" Perskit, to explain that his previous blog was suddenly deleted under mysterious circs, etc., etc.

Read the comments on the teabagging story. Tell me I'm wrong: these people don't understand that it's a joke.

irksome

I'm grading a set of Professional Ethics papers. I have received about 10 from students who are not attending, or not attentive, and who evidently believe that they can write nonsense, throw in the word "ethical" a few times, along with the names of a couple authors they were required to read, and that I'll see those words and let it pass.

It's driving me a little crazy this evening, because these crappy papers were, randomly, predominant among the last 20 or so I graded.

And I don't mean these are papers by folks who tried and failed, because they don't understand the language or they can't wrap their minds around the concepts, or because they just blew it interpreting the question. These are people who have decided that they will sign up for the course, not come to class, not do the work, and then try to trick me by writing things they think I'll skate over or will flatter what they wrongly imagine to be my prejudices. I've given them grades like 29 and 38 out of 100, but frankly, I don't think that's quite low enough. They deserve grades in negative numbers.

It's strangely like the end of the Flyers-Penguins game tonight, which the Pens won 4-1. With the game out of hand, the Flyers did what the Flyers always do - take cheap shots to try to injure or just to vent. With less than 30 seconds in the game, two Flyers took penalties on the same play on the ice, and another took a penalty while sitting on the bench during that play. Right off the next faceoff, another Flyer took another penalty. All three on-ice penalties could easily have resulted in injuries. They somehow deserve to have their goal taken away, and another one for good measure. Final score: Penguins 4, Flyers -1.

And it's for the same reason, really: disrespect, manifested as an obvious, lame attempt to get away with whatever they can get away with.

It's also strangely like the neo-conservative political maniacs lately, but that's another story.

marriage fear, etc.

I have not had the stomach to watch any of the crazy people's ads about same-sex marriage. I didn't have the stomach to read all of this San Francisco Chronic op-ed piece about the ads.

However, I can inform all who blunder across this page about the homosexual agenda. You see, I've known several actual gay people. I know what the homosexual agenda is.

Ready? Sitting down? Seriously, I'm about to reveal the deep, hidden perversion of the homosexual agenda.

Okay, I warned you.

They want to lead their own lives and to be left alone by crazy intolerant people.

Disgusting, isn't it? Yucky yuck yuck!

Also in the news today: the shocking revelation that a woman from Tracy who has been arrested for murdering her daughter is a Christian who taught Bible study.

I believe these are related stories.

spring=broken

It's spring break.

I have, lessee... 120 papers to grade. The last regular-season NHL games happen tomorrow and Sunday, and the playoffs start Wednesday - during spring break, which is deeply weird to me.

It's also time for a bit of a break from this year's CSU Budget Crapfest, and all that comes along with it (just this week: lies from the administration about a CFA grievance, in an attempt to make it seem CFA is causing budget problems, when, obviously, CFA doesn't decide how to spend the CSU's money, the CSU does - [rant omitted]).

I'm gonna try to actually, you know, take a break. I played a couple guitars for about an hour this evening, and may hit a few others. Why not?

And at some point, I intend to get back to writing anything of substance. I'm just fresh out of substance at the moment.

further update, downdate, sidedate, whatever

I've spent some time this week informing students about the current state of the budget cut debate on our campus, and the double-dip of state cuts and the campus' own "budget gap" (used to be "structural deficit," but now we're not using that kind of talk). The dialog on campus has basically consisted of administrators telling people they have to cut part-time faculty down to just about zero. That might sound more like a monologue.

I also talked about the fact that after months of investigation and consideration, the University Budget Advisory Committee was finalizing its recommendations to the president about budget reductions this week, and that the only proposal that has apparently been given serious consideration has been the original proposal. That might sound more like non-consideration.

Anyway, this news displeased some of my students, some of them so much that they created a Facebook group to develop some organization and maybe do a little agit-prop. That group is here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=68856262140

I love agit-prop. I am trying very hard to avoid any feeling of nostalgia for the various rabble-rousings of my checkered past. Ah, them were them days, then.

busy

I'm in the throes of the university's budget catastrophe, trying to generate some awareness, publicity, activism, noise, etc.

brb

facebook spring

I've just returned tonight from the California Faculty Association's 70th Assembly.

The California State University is in peril. My own campus, Stanislaus, is at the precipice of catastrophe. Terrible economic times are only the beginning of the story, and anyone who has paid attention to the trends in public higher education in the US over the past 20 years or more would be able to tell you that this is no sudden crisis. Public higher education has been systematically de-funded all this time. Our current depress/recession has only brought the whole thing to its horrific climax.

For longer than I've taught at the CSU, the state budget has underfunded its mission. Considering that the CSU's mission is to educate the citizens of California so they become productive, tax-paying members of society, this clearly makes no sense... unless you believe public institutions are ipso facto essentially and irretrievably corrupt... and you believe that increasing state revenues only creates more of the same corruption.

Corruption: you know, like teachers, nurses, doctors, engineers, public servants.

This is not just a matter of the budget crisis that California, like every other state, is facing. This is what happens when a budget crisis hits an institution that has been fighting for its life for years.

Within the next 2 years, California will spend more on prisons than on all forms of public higher education.

The state's bizarre budget priorities are the major cause of the CSU's catastrophic condition. The CSU's astounding level of mismanagement is another.

So here's an interesting catch-22: The CSU desperately needs additional funding from the state. My colleagues' livelihoods, our students' educations, and the state's future economic health basically depend on better funding for this primary engine of California's economy. But CSU's management has demonstrated time and again that it is uninterested in either securing the CSU's future, or spending the ever-reduced funding the CSU receives wisely.

Nevertheless, the CFA works tirelessly to improve the standing of the CSU in the state, to make the case that the CSU contributes to, rather than costs, the state economy. We constantly seek new ways to send our message, to make our case, and to push the point.

This weekend, facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression (or maybe worse), facing the worst possible budget outlook for the CSU, and locally, facing a quintuple crisis from the state and campus budget crises, the CFA launched a new campaign.

Facebook. We've launched a campaign to fight the catastrophe of the CSU, on Facebook.

I'm not being critical. I think this is a smart move. I believe using Facebook will create an ongoing sense of virtual CFA community, and may extend our connections to students and staff, and the public we ultimately serve. As they told us at the Assembly, Barack Obama's campaign used Facebook. It seems to have helped.

Tonight, I friended a number of CFA colleagues on Facebook, and I now have many more friends. I'll diligently check in on Facebook to read their status updates, their notes on my wall or theirs, read what's on their minds (TM), and swap stories, links, and tactics. It will be a good tool, they told us, for organizing.

My question is: how many of them will disappear from CFA in the next year?

And many of these are not the Facebook kind of friend, but actual friends (no insult meant to Facebook friends), actual flesh, blood, brains, and heart friends that I've strategized with and talked late into the night with, and laughed with and eaten and drunk with, and argued with, and fought with, and fought alongside. And I am sore afraid, they will Facebook their fight, Youtube their dissent, email their legislators, flashmob their campuses, and then they will disappear.

I love my union siblings. I wish them better fates.

legal nooz

Also from the Chronic, renowned Roseville scholar Jeanne Caldwell and her husband Larry's lawsuit against UC Berkeley for hosting a web page (that's a page) noting that evolution could be compatible with religious beliefs was turned down without comment by the US Supremes.

The Caldwells are very disappointed. No word yet on whether they'll reconcile with reality at some point.

things that are unhealthy

A 4:30 am coughing fit left me unable to teach classes Monday morning. Luckily I had previously put together a group discussion that would run itself, so I set those classes to it. I came back to campus and taught my Contemporary Moral Issues class in mime. I had a brief text-to-speech discussion with my honors class, then came home, utterly exhausted.

This illness has a very strange rhythm. The mornings are terrible. I have a massive headache, I've been up since 6:30 (vast improvement over 4:30) drinking tea to keep the coughing down. By 5 pm I'll feel just about fine, but then by 10 pm I'll be back in hell. It's frustrating.

Anyway, I found an item of note this morning.

The San Francisco Chronic published a story from the Washington Post about the EPA sending a scientific finding to the Obama administration showing that global climate change does actually pose danger. The story is cast mainly in terms of the reversal of the Bush administration's environmental policy, which can be summed up briefly as: "just say no." (It's about time that slogan made a difference somewhere!)

But that wasn't the funny part. The funny part was this:

But business groups decried the move as an economic disaster.

"By moving forward with the endangerment finding on greenhouse gases, EPA is putting in motion a set of decisions that may have far-reaching unintended consequences," said Bill Kovacs, vice president of environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. "Specifically, once the finding is made, no matter how limited, some environmental groups will sue to make sure it is applied to all aspects of the Clean Air Act.

"This will mean that all infrastructure projects, including those under the president's stimulus initiative, will be subject to environmental review for greenhouse gases. Since not one of the projects has been subjected to that review, it is possible that the projects under the stimulus initiative will cease. This will be devastating to the economy."

Hi-Larious. That Ernie Kovacs!

Huh? Whazzat? Bill Kovacs? Never heard of him.

update; strange harmony

The hallucinations have stopped. The coughing fits have begun. I was forced from my cozy bed this morning by them, down the stairway and into two big mugs of tea. More of that to follow. I have things to get done this weekend, dammit.

Today is the birthday of both J.S. Bach and Modest Mussorgsky (or however one wants to spell it). That's pretty weird. I don't really know classical music, but I do love Bach, especially the Brandenburg Concertos, which I realize is overdone to death, but I just don't care. I still love them. I also love Pictures at an Exhibition - in particular, the 1950s Sofia concert performance by Sviatislav Richter, which crackles and zaps and gets silly and profound. Bach is 324, Mussorgsky is 170. Maybe we'll bake them a cake!

you give me fever...

... and, apparently, I hallucinate.

Tuesday night I really came down with teh Sick, and spent the better part of Lauren's annual St. Patrick's Day feast reclining, with a cool rag on my face, barely following conversation or events around me. Eventually, I had to leave altogether, and went upstairs to lie down in bed.

That night I didn't so much sleep as lose consciousness between bouts of delirium. The hallucinations went on for several hours, and as weird as it may sound, they felt absolutely real, as though I had made fundamental realizations about the nature of the world.

What happened was I lost entirely any sense of my personality or of having an ego or will. At first I struggled against this, and it was nauseating to feel - because it was a feeling, not an abstract idea.*

Instead, I was forced to recognize that I was a moving part, a necessary part that had to do its job, in a machine that makes illness. A machine part clearly has no ego or will, and although I had a bizarre memory of having once been rational and autonomous, I eventually became convinced this was a mistake, that I had always been a part in this machine, that this machine always was an illness-machine, and that I had somehow been wired up wrongly before. This convincing wasn't dialogical or logical, it was the convincing that happens as a result of a machine repeating the same mechanical motions over and over again.

Accepting that was strangely calming, and by around 2 or 3 in the morning (I guess), I was able to sleep.

By around noon, I started to feel human again. Last night I slept, not particularly well, and dreamed, rather than hallucinated. Much better.

* From what I've been able to gather, I'm a rare dreamer who dreams not only in color, but with all senses - particularly smell and taste. I also dream in abstract ideas, and once dreamt Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.

the sick, and more banishments

My loveliest has been battling Teh Sick for a couple weeks now. I've been trying to help out, but frankly, also doing a fair amount of gleefully-not-being-sick. Last night, after a loooong day, I was coughing a bit, and chalked it up to having talked all day. I was fooling myself. I woke up this morning feeling basically crappy.

And that's about it for now: basically crappy. That is my typical mode of illness going back many a year. I get all the annoying pain, exhaustion, and muddle-headedness of being properly sick, without any of the diverting sneezing, hacking, wheezing and drippiness. Few things are more frustrating to me than being useless, but there it is: basically crappy.

On another subject altogether, Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymous Bosch, and James Ensor (not to say especially James Ensor) are not allowed in the house.

pink, but no slip

I hope I see some people on campus wearing pink today in solidarity with public school teachers across the state. Today is Pink Friday, when 26,000 layoff notices are expected to be sent to teachers, due mainly to budget cuts.

Again and again the argument is made that everyone is hurting in this depression, so public employees shouldn't be immune. My response is that cuts to state budgets still represent political choices, and the choice being made is to cut education spending.

Granted, in some districts there are compound problems - Modesto's schools have lost enrollment because families with children are being forced out of town by the house price collapse and bad mortgage crisis, for instance. But overall, the state is basically reneging on agreements to fund education at a certain level, and with certain student-to-faculty ratios. It's not as though education stops being important when the economy tanks. Some might argue that it's most important precisely when the economy tanks.

So, I'm wearing pink high-tops and a pink vest today - more to express my sympathy than as an act of protest. However, I refuse to wear a slip.

unemployment

The story in the Modesto Bee was headlined Brutal.

Stanislaus County unemployment reached 16% in January. Merced County had 18.9%.

The kicker: Unemployment rates don't count seasonal work, for instance, farm labor. So how many people are actually unemployed right now in the Central Valley?

The second kicker: Unemployment rates don't count those who have used up all their eligibility, those who for whatever reason don't apply, or those who are under-employed rather than unemployed.

The third kicker: It doesn't count students, including those who are students because they lost their jobs.

In sum: Lots of people getting kicked.

is Bleak House Norm Coleman's favorite book?

The saga continues. Norm Coleman, who narrowly lost the Minnesota senate race to former comedian Al Franken, has proposed yet another bizarre legal challenge to Franken's election. After challenging absentee ballots (which resulted in an increase in Franken's margin), and after challenging the state's standard for legality of votes (double-cast ballots, ballots cast because someone miscast a first ballot, etc., etc., ad nauseam), Coleman now wants the court to throw the whole election out and start over.

In some circles, this would draw comparisons to George W. Bush's having been declared President by the Supreme Court in 2000. But I see something far more creative going on. Coleman obviously plans to continue challenge after challenge, effectively preventing Franken from being certified by Minnesota and taking his seat in the US Senate. He'll file any kind of lawsuit he can dream up, then challenge Franken's residency, then his citizenship, then his sanity (ironically enough), then his non-feloniousness - and then he'll take the gloves off. He'll just keep that up, for 6 years, and then run in 2014 on the platform that Franken never showed up for work in the Senate. It's totally insane, but it's also genius!

it's the economy, stupid

On my short drive home from campus today (I almost never drive, but it was raining and I'm exhausted), I heard a report on American Public Radio's show Marketplace about saving money and bartering will slow economic recovery because, as it was explained, if you have your friend cut your hair instead of going to a salon, and if you cook dinner for your friend in exchange, instead of your friend going out to a restaurant, you reduce economic activity, because you reduce the demand for goods and services.

Wrongo! Bartering is economic activity! The Missourian they discussed on the program had a demand for a service, and produced a good in exchange. In fact, I had a friend cut my hair in exchange for a dinner once in graduate school, and we constantly bartered to one another our goods and services - growing food, brewing beer, moving, pet care, child care, even construction, plumbing, electrical work, mechanics. None of us had any cash, because we were impoverished grad students. We had no lack of demand for goods and services, and we engaged in a great deal of economic, productive activity to meet our own and one another's needs. I spent several summers during grad school "unemployed," but without collecting unemployment or welfare. I didn't try to set a dollar value on the amount of my productivity and how much I "earned" in that way, but I do know I rarely needed to buy vegetables, for instance.

What they mean to say, properly put, is that the more we produce for ourselves rather than consume from another source, and the more we exchange with one another rather than purchase, the less monetary activity there is. Money is not equal to economy.

Amazing how easily these ideological words and ideas about economy are rolled out in our culture, and how easily we forget, or neglect that the basis for economy is production and exchange, not just money or share prices.

two days in the life of a conference-goer

I'm taking a couple moments to note that academic conferences make for terrific arm-chair sociology and cultural anthropology, by which I really mean terrific arm-chair psychoanalysis. Here at the 11th annual conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Media, there are about as many such opportunities per capita as one might expect, but maybe somewhat less.

I was scheduled for first thing Thursday morning. On the way here, I finally returned a message to the conference organizer, who asked if I would be willing to present later that day. I said I was, and I was grateful, because my loveliest and I had been up since before 4 am, and would be traveling for more than 12 hours, etc., etc. (it's not longer from Turlock to DC than from Helsinki - where our furthest-flung participant comes from -, but you can't get anywhere from Turlock). I was shifted to Thursday afternoon sometime. That didn't sort out, by the time we arrived at the conference, so I was put in a slot Friday over lunch at a café where they do poetry readings and such, as a weird addendum to a panel my theme didn't fit. The problem there was that I wouldn't be able to connect my laptop's audio jack to their sound system to play the ads that are central to my presentation (on political campaign ads and news coverage).

So I would be "sometime in the afternoon," which turned out to be right after a paper, without any warning. I was a little flustered, but got Yaptop (my laptop's nickname) up and running without too much ado. I felt like I was visibly shaking. It took all of my introduction, and showing the first ad and news piece before I settled into the stuff I was doing and could relax (this same thing happens before every single class session, with the significant difference that I usually know when class starts). The ads and coverage went over well. The ads were from the Elizabeth Dole-Kay Hagan NC senate race from 2008, in which Dole, in the final days of a losing campaign (she had to explain why she supported the Bush agenda, which was unpopular even in NC), disseminated ads on TV that insinuated some connection between Hagan and a group called Godless Americans.

The whole trip is pretty insane, and can be seen (along with another, randomly selected news story montage about atheist ads) in a youtube playlist I put together (I can't seem to get youtube to save them in order, so it's not in the order I presented them).

I won't get into the analysis here. It seemed to go over pretty well, too, and generated some good questions and feedback, for which there wasn't time to discuss.

Then we went to a brew pub so loud it was difficult to hear the person sitting right next to you, and which was gigantic in every way - the size of the store, the size of the kettles behind the bar (no doubt as props), the size of the portions and prices, the faces of patrons, the TVs above their heads tuned to various sports and newz channels. It struck me, at the time, as incredibly oppressive. I didn't want to be in noise after my two days.

Whew.

I'm also thinking about the difference in the way I prepare for a day of teaching and the way I prepare for a day of conference-going - the kinds and levels of tension I feel, where it locates in my body, how it focuses attention, how I dress, how I arrive (walking in both cases, thankfully), and what my expectations are.