“The officers made a good faith, but mistaken, effort to enforce an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol. The policy and procedures were too vague,” Gainer said. “The failure to adequately prepare the officers is mine.”
This is a con and a misuse of the language, just like the latest state of the union load, whose use of words fails to point to things that are real in the world. Again, the opposite of poetry.
From the Houston Chronicle:
Based on the latest budget cuts voted in Congress, federal spending to support college loans is scheduled to drop $12.7 billion in the five years beginning July 1, which is almost a third of the nearly $40 billion in deficit-reduction spending cuts. Lawmakers still must cast a final vote on the changes when Congress returns to work this month.
I’m sure that those who think about long term stuff are weighing options carefully, based on data crunching by Sandia-like computers, and thinking hard about the importance of an educated future. Or maybe not.
Touchy, touchy. But at the moment I and others of my colleagues are dealing with the consequences of political corruption. Good things are happening at SixnuT, but when governors and others do things that are never necessary, the results will eventually work their way into the everyday life of people who “need” to get things done. What effort we must waste to make up for selfish and prideful acts.
From the CSM
In reaching its determination, the high court said former Attorney General John Ashcroft overstepped his authority in November 2001 when he rewrote regulations under the federal Controlled Substances Act (CSA) making it illegal for Oregon doctors to prescribe drugs to help a patient die.
“The authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise and incongruous with the statutory purposes and design,” wrote Justice Anthony Kennedy for the majority. “The idea that Congress gave the attorney general such broad and unusual authority through an implicit delegation in the [Controlled Substances Act’s] registration provision is not sustainable.”
Mr. Ashcroft said that federally controlled drugs could be prescribed only for a “legitimate medical purpose,” and that helping someone to end his or her life was contrary to the healing mission of physicians.
Justice Antonin Scalia said in a dissent that Ashcroft’s directive should be accorded deference by the courts and allowed to stand. He added that he found reasonable the former attorney general’s conclusion that helping someone die was not a “legitimate medical purpose.”
“Virtually every medical authority from Hippocrates to the current American Medical Association confirms that assisting suicide … is not a ‘legitimate’ branch of that science and art,” Justice Scalia wrote. “If the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.”
Scalia was joined in his dissent by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas.
In rejecting the so-called Ashcroft directive, the majority justices said the CSA is aimed at policing drug abuse, addiction, and narcotics trafficking rather than providing an avenue for federal micromanagement of state efforts to regulate healthcare and end-of-life issues.
This part–“The authority claimed by the attorney general is both beyond his expertise”–is the pattern.
The Eagle Forum’s Constitution Watch (I believe written by Virginia Armstrong Ph.D) writes this as a Fact vs. Fiction clarification for us dummies
Fact v. Fiction #2: Evolutionists claim that their battle against creation-science is primarily a “scientific” issue, not a constitutional question. But our treasured U. S. Constitution is written by persons and for persons. If man is an animal, the Constitution was written by animals and for animals. This preposterous conclusion destroys the Constitution. The Aguillard Humanists leave us with no Constitution and no constitutional rights of any kind if they allow us to teach only that man is an animal.
Well, garsh. Now that this has been cleared up, I can die.
Ryan Moeller has added further comments to this entry on consumerism and Katamari Damacy. In addition to his comments, he points to the Learning Games Initiative, in whose work, and other initiatives like it, I have lots of interest.
But I want limit my use of the term consumerism to its pejorative context: in this sense, generally speaking, consumerism points to a direct connection between purchase and happiness and other related issues. This is what I meant by the allure and want comment in modern magazines. Fads, looks, styles, and poses–all these generate in an audience a want of those things for their own sake. “I want that lipstick,” Marv says, without knowing why, and having no other alternatives. But what does Marv himself produce or create?
In this sense, consumerism also infects education, in that people will take course after course only if they think it will get them a job (the job for its own sake is the key). Yes, we all need jobs, but the point is made regardless because we don’t often think about the undertow.
I am a consumer myself. I wanted Gran Turismo 4 no matter what. I played GT3 and had to have the next version because it had to be bigger, better, and badder. So I purchased it and it gave me a sense of “electricty” just to hold it. I know now that I had been taken for a ride: yeah, the physics had been improved, but nothing about the overall stimulus changed. The world of Gran Turismo just isn’t that interesting.
It’s a different story with Syberia. I wanted the next version to finish the story begun in the first. Was I satisfied? Sure. I wanted the story not the game for many reasons. I find that Katamri delights at many complex levels, one being the experience and design possibilities of its spaces. Delight in Katamari may be triggered by the desire to get more, but I disagree that this is a specific consumerist desire or impulse. Then again, I am also open to counter claims. Very much open.
My personal view is that we live in age of viscious consumerism (Christmas anyone?). I got an earful of this from students the other day as they detailed their complicated woes with the financial aid process, text books, and the future.
Joe Lieberman thinks everyone else is the problem.
These days we’re seeing the kind of politics and the kind of political cynicism that gets people killed for all the wrong reasons (a politics of frivolity). I’ve suspected, as did many others, ever since the invasion of Iraq that the current administration as well Congress knew that the stated reasons for going into Iraq were bunk (bunk qualified as not good enough to act on): the counter-evidence concerning Hussein’s weapons, future intent, and links to al-Qaeda were all matters for dispute: there was never any proof of nukes, never any proof of a program, and never any evidence of terrorist support. The evidence that I saw in 2001 and 2002 was either suspect, illogical, and evasive at the time and is now blown to pieces. The lie is that “everyone was convinced” and “that everyone had the same intelligence.”
We know that the administration knew that the evidence about Iraq programs was in detailed disruption and was inferential, in enough dis(re)pute to encourage measured reconsideration of war plans. In this I refer to the strange 2002 NIE (strange because it is disturbingly confident and disturbingly evasive and disturbingly unsure of itself and disturbingly useless). As the Waxman Report puts it
Prior to the war, there were questions within the intelligence community about whether Iraq in fact possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Because Iraq previously had such stockpiles, had used them in the past, and had not adequately demonstrated that all previously produced stockpiles had been destroyed, the intelligence community made an assessment in the October NIE that it was likely that Iraq continued to possess them. Because intelligence agencies had no direct evidence of such stockpiles, however, the conclusions in the October NIE were cast in the context of an intelligence “estimate.†The NIE began its sections on chemical and biological weapons with the phrases “we
assess†and “we judge.†The NIE concluded that Iraq “probably†had stockpiled chemicals and “probably†had genetically engineered biological agents. The NIE also included major qualifiers, such as: “We lack specific information on many key aspects of Iraq’s WMD programs.â€
I have to admit to being sick of it all, especially the politics over war debate, and sorry that we’re in our present positions.
Standard 3 under Life Science of the new Kansas science standards goes like the following block. Those familiar with the writing of institutional academic standards will recognize the outcomes language. Read it this way:
The student:
understands biological evolution, descent with modification, is a scientific explanation for the history of the diversification of organisms from common ancestors.
The specified standards that accompany this go
1. a Biological evolution postulates an unguided natural process that has no discernable direction or goal.
and
f. The view that living things in all the major kingdoms are modified
descendants of a common ancestor (described in the pattern of a branching tree) has been challenged in recent years by:i. Discrepancies in the molecular evidence (e.g., differences in relatedness inferred from sequence studies of different proteins) previously thought to support that view.
ii. A fossil record that shows sudden bursts of increased complexity the Cambrian Explosion), long periods of stasis and the absence of abundant transitional forms rather than steady gradual increases in complexity, and
iii. Studies that show animals follow different rather than identical early stages of embryological development.
Standards writing is a delicate process. One of the hardest things to do is to adhere to a standard for standard writing because the standards reflect a host of institutional values, expectations, and the realities of a given area of study. I believe that outcomes should reflect a respect for students. What I read in the above is an almost unbelieveable cynicism, ignorance, and disrespect for real debate.
Biological evo postulates unguided:
challenged in recent years
previously thought
Huh?
Looks like the next deficit reduction go-round will include further cuts to student loans. In the context of this article, such a decision won’t be good news for college students. Most of the students I work with plan on seeking bachelor’s degrees after completing the associates. After leaving with degrees or quicker tranfer they will, of course, have to pay more than what they’ve become used to paying. What does a tuition crisis mean for students and their families and the intellectual health of a country? Doom in the clouds. But what to do? What is the economic dynamic of access to knowledge and knowledge creation?
I’ve seen lots of people squander their time at the college. Another form of waste. They pay for something they don’t really want. These students could do lots of good with their time. But is doing good reserved only for classroom work and furture study? Of course not.
What will happen if the idea behind a college-bound future becomes less important or less affordable. I see this as similar to the health care question, where relatively common hospital procedures are pretty much out of everyone’s price range. Will people simply stop seeking out care?
This morning I read that two Connecticut principles have submitted pleas of guilt
Peter N. Ellef, 61, and William Tomasso, 40, entered guilty pleas before U.S. District Judge Peter Dorsey to conspiring to commit bribery and conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service.
Ellef, who was Rowland’s co-chief of staff, admitted using his position to make sure Tomasso got the contract to build the $57 million Connecticut Juvenile Training School in Middletown.
We know what happened here. The principles knew they had done wrong but, when caught, maintained innocence until the right deal could be made. Just once I’d love to see a criminal step up and say, “Okay, I did it.”