Quote of the Day
The most important thing she'd learned over the years
was that there was no way to be a perfect mother
and a million ways to be a good one.
Jill Churchill
Donna Summer: RIP
The Queen of Disco died from lung cancer, which she reportedly attributed to the dust she inhaled on 9/11. For some reason, to me, Donna Summer made disco, which I otherwise consider the scourge of 70's music, listenable. I have chosen my two favorite Summer songs and her takes on two other favorite songs, "MacArthur Park" and "Could It Be Magic". (I can only imagine the possibilities if the two forces of the disco era, Donna Summer and the Bee Gees, had pooled their talents at the height of disco...) One can only imagine the heavenly duets of Whitney Houston and Donna Summer. Sleep in peace, sweet angel.
Romney Repudiates a Revisit of Rev. Wright:
Finally a Voice of Reason: Thumbs UP!
You know, when I read about these intellectually-challenged partisans thinking of revisiting the Rev. Wright issue, I have to seriously wonder if they are secretly being financed by the Obama reelection campaign to sabotage the Romney campaign.
I haven't listened to Fox News' prime-time lineup for months now, but Hannity was constantly harping on McCain's failure to use the Rev. Wright issue. (Just for grins, I did a simple search on "Hannity Rev. Wright" and out pops an RCP post entitled "Hannity To Romney: Do Not Ignore The Rev. Wright Audio.")
Hannity: McCain didn't lose because he didn't use the Rev. Wright tapes. He lost because of a bad economy and a change election; he also made a series of blunders starting with the choice of a running mate, essentially dealing away the experience angle he claimed over Obama, and bad campaign tactics, including his handling of the TARP crisis. The Rev. Wright issue fires up the base--but turns off independent and moderates. Romney needs independents and moderates.
So, Hannity, if you keep up this nonsense, I think we should exile you to a jail cell like Noriega and pipe Barack Obama speeches into your cell 24 hours a day. I realize that probably constitutes torture under the Geneva Convention, but so be it.
Obama Slaps Tariff on Chinese Solar Panels:
Thumbs DOWN!
The Difference Between an Idiot Savant and Barack Obama
According to Google Dictionary, an idiot savant is "a person who is considered to be mentally handicapped but displays brilliance in a specific area, esp. one involving memory."
According to my blog, Barack Obama is "a person who is considered to be brilliant, but displays a mental handicap in a specific area, especially one involving economics."
I do not understand how one American President can possibly be so consistently wrong about each and every economic decision he makes. It's like he's been cursed.
This blog is a believer in the free market and free trade, and Obama will achieve 2 things because of this measure: (1) raise the cost of solar cells to Americans (which actually works against Obama's green energy talking point--way to go, genius!); and (2) invite a retaliatory move by the Chinese in a mini-trade war.
Mark J. Perry of Carpe Diem does one of his signature markups of relevant tariff discussion here.
Julia: Towards a Future Free From Progressive Groupthink
The use of the name 'Julia' by the Obama campaign for its propaganda has personally irritated me for a couple of reasons, one for reasons I won't discuss here, and the second because it is the given name of one of my gorgeous young red-haired grand-nieces, a sweetheart and beautiful gift from God.
The real Julia surely must think the Era of Obama has stretched unbearably for too long already during her short life. Julia's mom, despite superb credentials. excellent academic record, and additional work to expand her credentials, still hasn't found a decent opportunity. One of her uncles and her paternal grandfather, an IT executive whom has worked for some of the largest telecommunications companies, have been unemployed for extended periods of time. Her grandparents used to live in a nice house near the state's capital when Obama took office; now they live in a small apartment, in one of the few states to have grown jobs over the past decade.
The real Julia probably could do without progressive "solutions".
Testify, My Libertarian Brother Nick!
While the last thing Wisconsin needs is a return to chronic tax-and-spenders like Doyle and Barrett, I made myself clear that I thought the state of Wisconsin tax burden was unacceptable during the 3 years I served on the UWM faculty, and nothing has changed since then. I had high hopes for the GOP governor and legislature to get down to some serious downsizing and reform of government: no more enabling the progressive addicts hooked on spending other people's money and regulatory burden weighing down on the shoulders of business and workers.
Don Boudreaux Day on the Blog
Okay, here comes another one of my boring sports anecdotes. I have so few memorable sports moments, so I relish the few I've had from my youth, like playing 4 positions in one baseball game, taking out the other side in a judo gauntlet match, and hitting half a dozen half-court basketball shots in a row (not under competitive circumstances, but how many people have done that in practice?) As I started my twenties I got more involved with church volleyball or university softball.
I think that most American boys grow up with dreams of being a sports star--in particular, being recognized as a gifted athlete, being an all-star, maybe one day being selected to some hall of fame. And we know in organized sports there's the additional criterion of being a team player: for example, I sacrifice my at bat to push the runner on first base to scoring position for a subsequent base hit. In football, it may be a running back or wide receiver throwing a block to free the runner. In basketball, I remember in one pickup game having a clear shot at a layup; out of the corner of my eye, I saw a teammate (no points at the time) left alone at the top of the key and whipped a pass to him, and he converted. In pickup football games behind the OLL men's dorm, when I did get my shot at playing quarterback, I always noticed and took advantage of things like a smaller receiver left unguarded at the line. I always saw myself as a "team player", but most people didn't recognize it. So I want to write a little background to explain why I was a little sensitive about the issue before going to playing volleyball while at Navy OIS (officer indoctrination school).
Like many kids, I had a dream of excelling at sports; but I'm within an inch of average height, left-handed, and at best average speed. I've mentioned before what got my high school coach pushing me to join the football team: I normally played the line in gym class touch football. To take an occasional breather I would sometimes play deep. On this one play, "Boner", a 6-foot, lean, strong rancher's son, had broken past our line on a dead run, and I was between him and the end zone. I was no match for his speed, so I figured my best shot to tag him down was to wait until he committed to breaking to either my left or right and use my angle to intercept him. Unfortunately, Boner thought that we were playing a game of chicken, and I would step aside rather than risk getting run over. What happened had to be among the most violent collisions ever in touch football history; I was actually airborne from the collision and Boner was knocked out cold: I could see his eyeballs roll back. I landed on my left wrist, badly spraining it. The high school coach, my gym teacher, did not see the incident first hand, but he was very impressed by my passion for touch football. (With him in attendance at an earlier scrimmage, I had gotten impatient with how the punter was taking advantage of a pass rush restriction rule, so I went in and blocked the punt, and the coach let it stand.)
The coach heavily pressured me to go out for the team, which meant I would have to give up my paper route, which was how I was saving for college. I knew I didn't have the physical attributes to get a football scholarship; he would probably have put me in on the line (more likely riding the bench), playing against guys 6 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier. I bought some cleats but changed my mind before practices ever really got underway, annoying my coach whom had promised to drive me home (to the base) after practices (since I would miss the school buses). The coaches reacted by blackballing me from the National Honor Society (until I was named valedictorian), claiming that I failed to demonstrate necessary teamwork and leadership and my representing the school in UIL science and number sense as little more than an indulgent, "selfish" endeavor.
As faithful readers may recall, I earned a teaching position at the Navy Nuclear Power School with my new Master's in math. Admiral Rickover, the "Father of the Nuclear Navy" could have subcontracted the teaching responsibilities out, but he liked controlling everything he could and reporting to Congress he personally interviewed all the officers serving in the program (yes, including yours truly). We had to go through officer indoctrination school in Newport before (in my case) heading down to Orlando. We did our classes (beyond the scope of this post), including famous "watches"; I would dutifully spend my nighttime shifts patrolling the upper-floor dorm halls, no doubt protecting the virtue of our Navy nurse maidens from nefarious Russian spies. (Unfortunately, I was less successful at protecting them from the clutches of married male Navy ensigns...)
For organized sports activities, we had coed volleyball teams. I play volleyball like a baseball outfielder super-aggressively. I've made some amazing saves, sometimes passing back errant balls yards out of bounds. But probably different than most servers today, whom seem to resort to rather boring spike serves, I would do old-fashioned underhand serves--really, really high serves (like almost kissing the gym ceiling high). I didn't think that they were particularly difficult to handle, but maybe people aren't used to playing against them.
Back at OIS, I came up to serve in a clutch game, and we are down something like 12-3. What happened next would have made for a fantastic Youtube video collage: the other team couldn't handle my booming serve. In some cases they completely missed the ball trying to set up the return; other times they did little more than deflect it to the ground. On at least 3 or 4 occasions they didn't even attempt a return, hoping the ball would fall out of bounds (but the serves always landed at least a foot inside the court). In fact, none of them even managed to pass the ball.
I would like to say I served out the rest of the game, but I had served us back into the lead before the other team finally stopped the run, and I think our next server closed out the victory. Other games were less dramatic, but whenever I served we had a decent run.
So for some reason near the end of OIS, the organizers decided to name an all-star team. Now, to be honest, being named to an OIS all-star team and $5 will get you a small coffee at Starbucks. I thought I would finally get my long-awaited all-star selection, maybe even MVP: I was the best server from all teams, hands down. How can you possibly leave the best server off a volleyball all-star team? But somehow they did. The fact that I was not selected says more about their selection procedure than my performance. I'm sure that not even one of the "all stars" even remembers the honor; being named would have been a nice touch, but I've never lost any sleep over it.
Now what does all of this have to do with Don Boudreaux and his short video explaining why he is a libertarian? I learned a long time ago there wasn't a lot I could do about other people's opinions. I have had my fair share of external validation: high school valedictorian, college salutatorian (photo finish behind first), Presidential scholarships, various dean awards and honor societies, a UH Cullen Ehrhardt fellowship, dissertation award, competitive selection to both ICIS and DSI doctoral consortia, etc.
There were other kinds of feedback that I've gotten which are more difficult to classify. I remember taking an upper division philosophy course at UT one summer which counted for my Master's minor. One day the professor announced that he wanted to see me after class. I wasn't sure what I had done and went to see him. He referenced a paper I wrote for the class and simply said, "What are you doing in this class? This is graduate school level work..." (There were no graduate classes available that session, and I wanted to make progress towards finishing the degree. But the basic point is that I didn't take the class with the idea of doing the minimum effort I needed to earn my A; when I turned in work, I wanted it to be worthy of my name.)
UH has an MIS research center; we would invite some well-known speakers and several corporations in the area were members. I was finishing up my dissertation. I remember after this presentation, this sharply dressed young man made a beeline straight for me. He asked me if I remembered him; in fact, he had attended one of my decision support systems classes. He told me that he was working for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture); he said that he based his employment decision based on practical advice I had given class members. I was humbled by a few thoughts: of all the people in that room, the one person he wanted to impress was me; second, I had no idea that students were really listening to anything I had to say; finally, I said something that influenced one of the biggest decisions a young college graduate will ever make.
There are other moments. I was only at UTEP one year, but I'll never forget this one graduating Mexican student who had me for just one class hand-delivered a personal invitation to his family's celebratory dinner. An Indian who had been accepted to the University of Virginia MBA program, also a one-class student, wanted to take a picture with me; he told me he kept a photo album of teachers whom had made a difference in his life.
There was the student in one of my final classes, at Illinois State; I had a personal habit when I review papers or projects of providing more than just a perfunctory letter grade and trite "well-done!" I would provide a personalized summary of specific things I liked and things that I thought would improve the paper. Unlike most students, this one student went past the letter grade and read my comments; he came to my desk and said, "I can't believe this! You really read this--you didn't give it to a grader." I was initially confused, because I really didn't use graders (except for PL/1 programming assignments). But the general gist of the conversation that followed was that he had put a lot of work into that paper, that my comments showed a strong conceptual grasp of what he was trying to get across, and that he felt his hard work had been worth it because I took him and his work seriously, thoughtfully and respectfully.
I also remember one of the final classes of COBOL (the general MIS undergraduate class at the time) I taught at UH. I had a middle-aged black woman as a student; every once in a while, I would check on my students working on their computer assignments. In this case, they were working on a control break program (difficult for many non-technical students). She couldn't figure out what was wrong with her program. I took one glance at her program and it was correct except for a cosmetic flaw: because the field in question was justified and how she was reporting the field contents, the report was printing spaces rather than characters. In other words, her program was correct; she just didn't know it. She quickly tweaked her code, and I'll never forget, she looked up at me smiling and softly said, "You're a great teacher!"
I would like to say these memories were representative, but my years in academia were hellish. I briefly mentioned some details in past posts but the major things I'll never post.
There are other things I don't miss about academia and especially UWM. Even something as innocuous as the men's restroom on my office floor. I often ate dinner at my apartment near campus and went back to my office to work on lecture notes and research papers. I had my hot pot and powdered coffee, so I would go to the bathroom to fill my hot pot. This one time I'll never forget for as long as I live; I went in and was nearly overcome with an unbearable stench. Don't ask me how it was done, but the entire bathroom was smeared with excrement.
Now the problem is--how do you report this? I was sure that people would never believe me--I had never even heard of such a thing, living a sheltered life. I think I called the university police, and I'm loosely paraphrasing the conversation: "I'm not sure how to report this; you'll never believe me." "Try me." I then go on to describe the bathroom. It's almost funny in retrospect, but I never would have guessed what he said next: "Yeah, they did that in the first floor restroom some time back. We figured that it was just a matter of time before they got to your floor. It's all about drugs."
I went home for the evening and was almost scared to go into the same bathroom the next morning--but you couldn't tell anything had happened. The maintenance staff must have hosed it down and did a good job.
Then there was the occasion I was at the sink (probably washing my hands), when two male students burst into the bathroom and headed into the same stall. Not sure what was going on in there, but I didn't want to know. At least they closed the door behind them.
I know I was just one faculty member. When I fought academic dishonesty, I found myself accused of trying to sabotage foreign student recruitment or privacy rights. When I used a textbook with a new standard COBOL, the business school administration attacked me for not using the obsoleted Microsoft COBOL compilers they had licensed. When I found out my UTEP database students didn't know what a linked list was despite having taken a core data structures course, I designed remedial data structures lectures. At ISU, I found myself attacked by senior faculty for allowing student to program their assignments in the computing language of their choice. I changed textbooks more often than any MIS professor I know (which meant new lecture preps).
And then I would go to job interviews where "teaching school" professors would look at my 18 articles, presentations and book chapters and say things like, "I could have publications, too, except I don't cut corners on my teaching and students." I would bite my tongue and smile, knowing these presumptuous scholars were typically teaching obsoleted material, and they, too, might be able to write articles if they needed to win tenure, had no social life and worked 70 hours a week. I'll never forget what one of my students at ISU, a proud teaching school, said: "Visiting Professor Guillemette is the only faculty member I've had here talking about object-oriented computing and other things I see when I crack upon a trade journal."
I just didn't get an offer from the right college from the start, I was a legitimate interdisciplinary researcher, and God knows what I was capable of doing in a better college with a less political environment and legitimate fellow researchers. Maybe one day the right college will approach me, but I'm not holding my breath.
Poor Don. The above has nothing to do so much with what he has to say here except reinforcing good old-fashioned American values: we refuse the pervasive victimization rhetoric; we believe that we have rights and responsibilities; and we think the fundamental problem of government is not insufficiency but excess.
A key takeaway from Boudreaux's talk below is the fact that the massive Obama deficits are made possible by foreign investment. Otherwise, profligate federal spending would choke out business investment.
Benjamin Franklin said, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." And as Blue Oyster Cult reminds us, "Don't Fear the Reaper".
Claire Lomas Does the London Marathon
Claire Lomas, once a show jumper, was paralyzed in a riding accident in 2007. She recently completed the London marathon over a period of 16 days on bionic legs designed by a paralyzed Israeli engineer, Dr. Amit Goffer. This technology uses a keypad. The Economist refers to new research from a professor at my alma mater José Contreras-Vidal (UH) whom uses traces of brain activity to guide bionic limb movements in early prototypes.
Political Humor
"A janitor has graduated from Columbia University with honors as a classics major. With his new degree in classics, he's now qualified to become a janitor." - Conan O'Brien
[Well, at least he now understands what's written on the bathroom walls. It's all Greek to me.]
"President Obama is calling for more government reform after JPMorgan's $2 billion loss. Really, is that what we need — the government stepping in? You know what's going to happen? The government's going to teach them how to lose $2 billion a DAY!" - Jay Leno
[What a coincidence: I've been calling for more government reform after Barack Obama's $5 trillion loss.
No doubt Obama feels that he has the benefit of a lot of experience in dealing with money-losing operations, like the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp,, the FHA, the GSE's, and of course, the crown jewels of Obama "investments": Solyndra et al.]
"According to a new book, Mick Jagger used prostitutes. But he always felt like he was being overcharged. He said he didn't like to pay them. That doesn't sound like a rock star, does it? It sounds more like a Secret Service agent." - Jay Leno
[No wonder the Secret Service agent was charged $800: he shouldn't have told the girl that he was Mick Jagger...]
A Republican official says that Mitt Romney should pick "an incredibly boring white guy as running mate." When he heard that, Joe Biden said, "Thanks, I've already got a gig." - Conan O'Brien
[I want to publicly thank that GOP official for taking the time to read one of my blog posts....If Mitt asks me, I'll accept...]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Rolling Stones, "Hot Stuff"
