My thoughts exactly

The media (well, at least the ones I attend to) are all talking about how “only” four in 10 Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties to fight terrorism.

Only four? I think that 40 percent is a terrible number. I would frame that survey response differently. I think that 40 percent of Americans willing to allow government intrusions into our privacy is a sad statement.

Despite the vividness of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings, getting caught in a terrorist attack is pretty unlikely. Some information I have gathered from a web search:

• The odds of an individual dying during a terrorist attack: 20 million to 1
• The odds of being killed by lightning are about 10.5 million to 1, making it much more dangerous than terror attacks
• Despite the large number of deaths during the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, both the number of terrorist attacks and the number of people killed by terrorists have fallen drastically since 1970

And so on. I worry that technology is advancing (if it hasn’t already) to the point where our privacy is limited. I don’t like all the cameras pointed at me from the corner of buildings in downtowns, and I am not happy about cell phone and email monitoring. I would rather I be left alone by the government and take my chances than have governmental intrusions into my life continue to grow.

Apparently I am not alone in this. Six in 10 people in the survey say they are more worried about government restricting their civil liberties than they are that government won’t enact new anti-terrorist policies. That’s good, but the number is still too low for me.

I am happy that fewer people today would gladly trade their privacy for more stringent anti-terror policies than 12 years ago, but I am appalled that a high number still would make that deal. Television and the Internet already have delivered bread and circuses to us. Is that to keep us distracted, making us okay with further intrusions?

When will GPS/ID chips under our skin at birth happen? You know, just to keep us safe.

I have threatened retirement before, but it’s never stuck. My students call me the Bret Favre of professors. Like Bret, I announce my retirement, then the siren song of the teachable moment draws me back, and I un-retire.

The main problem with this is that there are fewer and fewer true teachable moments with my students today. They are too busy with their lives and almost totally disengaged from their education. I realize that not every single one of my students is this way, but a heck of a lot are.

A few of them appear to be totally incapable of putting away their cell phones for 70 minutes and engaging with their classmates in a discussion of the material.

So I am going to try something new in the fall, something I am not convinced is going to work all that well: I am going to teach three online-only classes.

On the minus side, I won’t have any of the human, real-time “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other” kind of moments. But then, do I have any now? Few students come to see me outside of class. I sit in my office, as alone as the Maytag repairman. I can’t recall if any came to see me because they were struggling with the material or because they wanted to learn more, but I don’t think so.

On the plus side, with an online class, I won’t have to look at the tops of their heads as they concentrate on those text messages from their pals. I won’t have to watch them sneak peeks at their phones now hidden on their laps after I told them to put their phones away.

I’ll just have to live with their disengagement and multi-tasking from afar and out of sight. Maybe the asynchronicity will allow them the opportunity to think and write a little bit better.

If not, that’s it. I’m retiring. Again.

I can’t believe it has been since early October that I have posted here. This after promising myself I would post 1-2 times a week.

I think the main trouble — aside teaching my classes, grading papers, working out, training/walking my dog, grocery shopping, running errands, house searching, doing research on any number of topics, etc. — is that I don’t think my thoughts are worth sharing. I mean who would want to read this stuff?

I love to read the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. Now those people have something to say — Dionne, Krugman, Collins, Dowd — and they say it so well. Would that I could….

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I heard on Morning Edition today that the U.S. is still doing poorly in terms of educating our young. I think we ranked 10th or so in 8th grade math proficiency.

College students were shocked to find that they didn’t do well on basic math pre-tests when they arrived at college. They don’t seem to understand that modern education has adopted what I call the “youth soccer” mentality.

In youth soccer, every kid on every team, no matter how pedestrian their skills, gets a trophy. If every kid in the league gets a trophy, then what’s their value?

In my college-level journalism classes, I have a few students each semester who simply don’t belong in college. Period. They can’t rub two words together to make a sentence.

When I point this out to them, instead of talking about making a renewed effort to correct their errors, they whine and fuss about how hard their lives are now and refuse to do the work necessary to get it right.

But I don’t blame them. They are used to gaming the system. It’s kind of “what you do” as a teenager in high school.

I blame their teachers for not having the courage to look them in the eye and tell them, “Sorry, it wasn’t good enough.” Too few are afraid to say that.

The Muse is at it again. Instead of inspiring me and guiding me in my search for that perfect story idea, that perfect word, she extended her own contract between me and the temp agency and now she is running for President.

Of the condo board.

She had started out aiming for the top office in the land, but her feasibility committee, which was really just a bunch of her ginned up-cronies, decided it would be in her best interests to aim low: the apparent motto to her life.

“Yeah, I always aim low,” she explained one memorable day. “That way it’s hard to be disappointed. That’s why I picked you, a journalist. Being with a real writer is hard work.”

So after quickly dismissing the POTUS and the VOTUS, they kept going downlist until they reached POTAC, or President of the Alhambra Condos. The feasibility committee felt as if The Muse was at her proper level of incompetence, so they had a toast, followed by several more. I had to go out and buy another bottle of gin.

“You gonna work today?” I asked when the giggles and guffaws subsided after I walked into the room. I swear I heard disdainful whispers of “journalist” and “hack” as I entered.

“Nah,” she said. “I have to put together a strategic plan for my campaign.”

“Why?” I asked. “There is no campaign. You’re running unopposed.” I was struggling with a story I was writing, and a competent muse would not only be a wonderful benefit, it would be one I had already paid for.

“Oh, there’s a campaign,” she said, “and a strategic plan. Play your cards right, and you can be my veep.”

Joy. Second in command, a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Of the Alhambra Condos. Be still my pounding heart…

I left the crones, who were working on the strategic plan while playing their own version of Gin, You Rummy and giggling. More than I could take. I repaired to the deck with my laptop. Fingers on the keyboard, I waited for inspiration to arrive like a Polish farmer in the rain.

(To Be Continued)

I can’t help myself, but every time I see Paul Ryan’s big, soft-boiled eyes and his cheek-puffed smile I think of Fozzie bear

Fozzie was the one who ran a marathon in two fifty something. Ryan’s time was two fifty plus seventy or so….

 

I have been getting more and more ticked off about spam in my inbox, unwanted text messages (I have one loser who keeps changing his/her phone number to avoid the block on my phone, all to send me a “Hey-y-y” text), and robo-calls. Gads people, leave me alone. WTH?

I use Norton anti-virus, so I have been free from viruses and worms, though my computer has been attacked. I use Ad-Aware and occasionally have to remove something. So with all this hoo-hah about Facebook’s new privacy guidelines, I got fired up about being followed online.

This brought me to Ghostery. Ghostery is a browser-based plug-in tool (I use it with Firefox, but it also works with IE, Chrome, Safari and Opera). It scans each page before loading and looks for scripts and other elements, such as tracking cookies and even iframes.

The neat thing is that you can customize what you want to block and what you want accept, down to individual companies and/or web sites. For instance, you could allow Google Analytics or AdSense to run while totally blocking ad-tracking sites.

It does slow down some page loads while it sifts through the list of what you allow and what you want blocked. But we are talking a half-second at most. I can live with that for feeling a little safer online.

All in all I am happy with it, but then again, I seem to be the only one I know who is happy with Norton. Your mileage may vary.

Ghostery can be found here

“If it’s free, then you are the product being sold.”

I have said before that the media don’t sell time or space to advertisers, they sell eyeballs. Our eyeballs. And the attention we give to their advertising.

Level 1 is when people make “things,” such as furniture, automobiles or food. In economics, I have heard this referred to as “use value.” In other words, people produced items that had value because they used it.

Level 2 is when people work for someone or a company and receive money for it, their labor has “exchange value.” This is at the heart of the capitalist system. This holds true even in the current Information Age in which people move ideas from place to place instead of physical items.

Level 3 brings us to Facebook. How in the world is Facebook worth $1 billion? It’s free. Facebook sells some ads, but $1bn? Level 3 is when a company sells US, or rather sells information about our online behavior. So people aren’t doing any kind of work. Their mere existence and day-to-day activities are what produces value, BUT they themselves don’t get any value from it.

It is a B2B money-making situation using people — us — as the method. I suppose you could argue that we do get some value out of using Facebook, connecting with friends through posts or messaging. But is it worth selling a record of your behavior by a company who is in it only for the money.

But I find it most distressing, almost as in the film The Matrix, that we are being used by a large corporate entity to make it money. Google is kind of the same situation. If you are still allowing Google to track your searches, then it is selling information about you and your interests and making good money by watching you and what you do online.

It’s kind of creepy if you ask me. I may have to opt out. If that’s even possible in today’s world.

Christianity, in [Rev. James W.] Fifield’s interpretation, closely resembled capitalism, as both were systems in which individuals rose or fell on their own.

This quote came from a NYTimes opinion piece by Kevin M. Kruse. I think it accurately exemplifies hegemony in action.

Hegemony, a term coined by Antonio Gramsci, refers to the various ways that a dominant ideology maintains its dominance. It largely operates under our radar, if you will, but its message is broadcast through the media (entertainment as well as news), through social groups, through education and religious leaders.

In this way, the belief system of the elite in power becomes the belief system of the powerless, even though it is not in the best interest of the latter.

It ties in well to the concept of cultural memes, but I am going to let you look up both (once Wikipedia comes back online…).

Anyway, it struck me as interesting that winner-take-all capitalism and Christianity, especially as practiced by social conservatives, have so much in common. Some forms of Christianity practice a sort of winner-take-all approach, allowing some people into heaven while condemning the fallen to eternal hell.

Even some people who have not even been exposed to Christianity: I win and you lose. This is how conservative economic theory works.

Kind of like the economic 99-1 split. The rich get richer (hey, I did it so everyone can do it — kind of like Lake Woebegone, where all kids are above average) and more and more people are slipping into poverty, living through their own kind of hell. The Republican presidential candidates — especially the patrician Romney — could probably benefit from learning about the Mahayana Buddhist concept of the bodhisattva.

A bodhisattva is a person who refuses his spot in heaven out of compassion for others who won’t make the last bus to Nirvana. He or she says, “I won’t go until all can go. If one person is still suffering, then I am suffering, too.”

A better story than making more than $40K per one-hour speaking engagements and referring to it as “not very much,” while paying about 15% in taxes. And to say it is not very much in South Carolina, where the average yearly salary is less than Romney makes for one speech, simply shows how out of touch he is.

But then he is going to heaven.

The Republican primaries for President are a joke, but at least all that spending is helping the economy – especially for media companies.

I could have told you six months ago that Mitt Romney would be the front-runner by now and the eventual nominee. The American people like to play around a bit, but they always end the love affair and come back from the political plaything to the political spouse. Ultimately, the edges of the continuum are more frightening than someone a bit closer to center. Kind of political entropy.

Willard M. Romney is fooling no one with his johnny-come-lately conversion to conservatism. He has all the qualifying characteristics the American voter likes to see in a President: tall, not bald, great smile, genial loquaciousness and comfortable on television. Left or right? Stance on issues? Doesn’t matter. He’s “electable.”

A story in the WSJ Saturday, January 14, pointed out that Romney is doing better in the “monied ‘burbs” than he is in other parts of America. The monied burbs are where, generally speaking, the stakes are highest, the desire to hold on to what they have the strongest. Conservatives, or even sham conservatives, always do well with haves who don’t want to share with (or become) have-nots.

It is also easy to be politically liberal when you are young because you don’t own enough or make enough money. When you get older, making more money, are paying a mortgage, are married with kids, and so on, you don’t want to share. Taxes suddenly are onerous and government intrusions into your life, although you likely benefitted from tax breaks and other “intrusions” to get you where you are. Now that you have “stuff” you don’t want to be told you have to share. So you pout like a 3-year-old and say that you want a new daddy.

Of course Obama is evil and must be defeated: he is currently steering the boat. Let’s blame him for the bad weather. Let’s elect another captain, one who will promise we won’t have to share our blankets with other passengers, the ones shivering and alone in the wind and rain.

While the Pew Center for Research’s recent survey about the cost/benefit of attending college is interesting, I think it fails to address some of the hidden issues.

The truth is that while students are amassing a staggering amount of debt while attending classes, much of that debt comes from educationally unnecessary expenditures. Today, students want to enjoy the fruits of their college labors while they are attending college, not wait until afterward. These are the critical expenses in their debt amount, not the tuition, room and board that many students claim they are still paying for years after they graduate.

They are just like the normal American who uses tomorrow’s debt to finance today’s frills.

At the risk of sounding like a crotchety old man lamenting that the world has actually changed in the last 40 years, it wasn’t like that back in the 1960s and 1970s, when I was in college.

I, and most of my friends, suffered in poverty to attend college. We worked random jobs that allowed us time for a decent class schedule, we lived in sub-standard housing, we did without cars, and we did without a lot of the social events that today’s pop-culture obsessed students go to on a regular basis.

Seventy five dollar concert ticket? I was happy if I could buy food. Occasionally all I ate in a day was oatmeal because it was heavy and made me feel full. For several years I couldn’t afford a car because I had no money for car insurance. Riding a bike or a motorcycle is not fun in the rain or snow. But it is cheap.

Most of my students have expensive laptops (I had to go to the labs on campus even to use a typewriter back in the day), smartphones (if you were really concerned about expenses, why wouldn’t you go with a regular phone and save money?), and are always talking before class about the latest concert they went to. Many are dressed in the latest fashions.

These are the same students who tell me they can’t afford a $50 textbook. These are the same students who tell me they have to leave early for spring break because they are going to Cancun, and it was the only time they could get a plane ticket. These are the same students I see leaving campus in shiny new cars. They want it all, and they want it NOW.

I realize that students are paying more today in tuition, even in inflation adjusted dollars, than I had to in the late 60s. That’s a fact. (Tuition is up 50% in the last decade.) But wait, what about the net cost of attending college? According to the College Board, the average U.S. college student gets about $3,100 in financial aid from federal and state governments.

In fact, in my home state of Florida (which consistently ranks among the lowest tuition costs in the country – the national average is $6,257 and Florida’s is $4,373, ahead of only Wyoming), most college students are eligible for “Bright Futures” scholarships when they graduate from high school. This amounts to $126 per credit hour for high-level students with a 3.5 GPA and high 1200 SAT scores. There are also lower levels of support for lower levels of achievement: $95 per credit hour for vocational students and those who could muster only a 3.0 GPA in high school.

The cost for classes at my university? $163 per. That means that even mediocre students have to pay only $68 per credit hour. That’s $945 in tuition per 15-hour semester. Another interesting factoid: 91 percent of freshman entering my university last year had a Bright Futures scholarship at one level or another. All you need to maintain the scholarship is a 3.0 GPA, 2.75 for the lower level funding.

So four and one-half years adds up to $10,395, without anticipated increases. Granted, room and board and books add to that cost, but you would have to pay room and board even if you didn’t go to school. And you don’t have to live in luxury and drive a newer car and then complain that college is so-o-o expensive.

I think that surveys such as the one by The Pew Center ought to include questions about what students are spending their money on and why they are going to school. This would cast a better light on why students are in such great debt.

I also guess that students in the liberal arts tradition, those who are taking classes meant to increase the student’s sense of self and purpose in the world, are going to have different attitudes about finances and outside activities than those using college as a steppingstone to a career.

Clearly, I need to give this more thought. There are a lot of variables that need to be part of this equation; I realize that it is not as simple as it is being presented. But it is interesting. Maybe I will run a survey of students at my university to see if any of this holds up under closer scrutiny. It just seems to me that much of the debt racked up by today’s college students is avoidable.

What do you think?