Immigration officer fired after putting wife on list of terrorists to stop her flying home:

An immigration officer tried to rid himself of his wife by adding her name to a list of terrorist suspects.

He used his access to security databases to include his wife on a watch list of people banned from boarding flights into Britain because their presence in the country is ‘not conducive to the public good’.

As a result the woman was unable for three years to return from Pakistan after travelling to the county to visit family.

The tampering went undetected until the immigration officer was selected for promotion and his wife name was found on the suspects’ list during a vetting inquiry.

The Home Office confirmed today that the officer has been sacked for gross misconduct.

Doesn’t that rise above the level of fireable offense? Isn’t there an “abuse of authority” or “manipulating public records” charge in there somewhere?

Provided by Jaybird from The League:

Well, once upon a time, marriage was, in theory, a bargain.

The man would trade some amount of food and shelter in exchange for sex and reasonable assumptions of paternity of any children born. Love wasn’t really that much of an issue to the point where marriages were as likely as not to be arranged by parents (see, for example, Fiddler on the Roof for the dynamic that existed between Tzeitel, Motel, and Lazar Wolf… we, being modern folks post 60′s know that Tzeitel and Motel ought to get married!!! *dUh*). Divorce was damn near unheard of… only the French got divorced. There was a *HUGE* stigma to divorce. Huge. Like, you got divorced? You have to move because you’d be otherwise shunned. If you were lucky, you could move somewhere and claim to be a widow and MAYBE accepted by the new community. Maybe. The stigma was just that great.

Well, the personhood of women happened and that screwed everything up. Well, as society evolved and absorbed the lessons of feminism, marriage stopped being *PURELY* an economic bargain made by parents pimping out daughters to the best available John (will she be fed? housed? rarely beaten? Listen to the matchmaker song!) but an economic bargain made by the women themselves in response to the most skilled suitors. Divorce still carried a *HUGE* stigma… but folks got married, had children, and discovered that, for better or worse, parents were somewhat more dispassionate when it came to making these economic decisions…

Which brings us to 99.44% effective birth control.

Once children were no longer certain to happen when a woman married a man, the economic bargain became exceptionally moot for *HUGE* swathes of the “respectable” community. Hell, even if you *HAD* kids, you no longer had seven. You had two if you were Protestant and three if you were Catholic. This changed the dynamic and potential costs of divorce enormously and once we reached a tipping point where everybody knew someone who got divorced (and was better off for doing so), the stigma pretty much evaporated entirely.

Which brings us to the 80′s when it seemed like everybody’s parents were getting divorced. (I was in Middle and High school… it felt like every freakin’ month someone would come in absolutely wrecked.)

Marriage stopped being an economic bargain and became something that two people who loved each other and wanted to have children did and that became something that two people who loved each other and if kids happened, great!, did and *THAT* became something that two people who loved each other did.

And seeing soooooo many marriages end in screaming fights taught a lot of kids a lot of lessons about being a lot wiser about making the devil’s bargain of marriage. Ubiquitous birth control (and abortion) gave an out for a huge number of folks when, in the past, they’d have had a hasty elopement followed by the first baby being born two or three months “premature” (but still full weight! It’s a miracle!) and people who once would have gotten married at 19 were allowed to be people who just broke up at 20. No kids, no foul. Hell, there are even “starter marriages” now. People get married, figure out that 20 year-olds aren’t very good at making long-term predictions, get divorced, no kids, no foul… and, from what I’ve seen, a lot less acrimony than we saw in the 70′s and 80′s. (Seriously, hearing the grown-ups talk about their exes was like listening to New Atheists talk about Christianity.)

And now that marriage is pretty much a “no kids, no foul” kind of relationship, it only makes sense to extend it to homosexuals and, having done so, it *STRENGTHENS* the idea of marriage as a “no kids, no foul” long-term commitment. Indeed, even as the kids of divorce from the 70′s and 80′s are getting married, many are making different mistakes than their parents… and, when it comes to marriage, they’re better at getting out before they wreck the lives of their kids.

Or something like that.

Many years ago, when I went up to Canada for an acquaintance’s wedding, I had prepared myself to get an earful about America and Americans. My experiences with Canadians online told me that I was probably going to hear all about how they do everything better than we do. Apparently, Canadians (like most people) are much nicer in person. I did get a fair amount of ribbing, though. Interesting, not about our health care system. Not about our lack of a safety net. Nor how we’re less committed to world peace. Nor the death penalty (which more than one told me they wish Canada had). No doubt many of them thought Americans are crazy about these things, but almost all of them devoted their energy to two topics: American attachment to the American flag, and… more on this and on Canada in a minute.

The last couple times I was in Deseret, dropping off and picking up the dog, I went to the neighborhood of some friends I have out there. The GPS was flawed, and as a result I took a scenic detour trying to find my way back to the highway. Part of the difficulty was navigating my way around a whole bunch of cars that were parked around… what? I could figure it out. Then, finally there was a break between them and I looked down and saw that there was this huge crater thing in the ground. Everyone was sledding to the bottom, walking back to the top, and sledding again. It looked awesome.

All fun things must come to an end, however. At least in New Jersey:

Lawsuits filed by injured sledders, it seems, have struck fear in the hearts of municipal and county government officials, prompting them to simply ban sledding at some of the state’s erstwhile sledding meccas. On today’s webcast, we look at two of them - Galloping Hill Golf Course in Kenilworth and Camp Dawson in Montville Township - and compare two childhood sledding crashes, decades apart, that ended in two very different ways, shedding some light on how we got to a point where some of the best sledding hills in the state sit snow covered and silent. {h/t}

Yeah, that was the other thing. The lawsuits. This was back when being on a jury that awarded bazillions of dollars to somebody got you a spot on the Oprah Winfrey show. The time of the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit that made it forever difficult to get a really hot cup of coffee on the go. They just commented with amazement at how crazy American juries and our civil litigation system.

Meanwhile, the state of Texas is considering going to a loser-pays system, where if you sue someone and lose you have to pay the legal costs of your adversary. For my part, that’s one thing that you can get very, very wrong if you don’t implement the right way and Texas’s governor does not strike me as the type of person that is going to get that right. Be that as it may, I was not remotely surprised to read the third comment:

I’ve commented on it before, but it bears repeating again: to any opponents of this rule, it’s actually NOT crazy. For real. We have it up here in Canada and it seems to work pretty well. {…}

And, as always, nuance is important. There are different schedules of costs that are ordered depending on a variety of factors – merit, complexity, etc. – and they’re left to the discretion of the judge as an extra tool to encourage good behaviour and discourage bad. Waste 10% of a trial with nonsense? Pay the other side’s legal costs for that 10%. Were you a jackass? No costs for you. Cause a delay? Front the other side’s bills for anything caused by the delay. It’s easy and effective. Even people who are suspicious of leaving too much power to judicial discretion don’t seem to care much about it from anything more than a theoretical standpoint.

Sounds pretty Canadian in its straight-forwardness and sensibility, though I have little doubt that we would screw it up somehow. This isn’t the only thing that Canadians do differently. The perils of law school are commented upon here with regularity, and the Canadians have a straight-forwardly, sensible Canadian approach to that, too:

Having already figured out how to provide health care to all of its citizens, Canada seems to have also come up with a system of legal education that doesn’t hobble its young lawyers before they even start practice.

Canada’s key to success seems to be actually regulating its law schools and assuring a basic level of high quality across the board. There are only 20 law schools in Canada, which means that (gasp) not everybody who wants to go can go. Yet despite demand, Canadian law schools also cost less than their American counterparts.

It appears that much like their health care system, not every Canadian gets exactly what they want precisely when they want it. But their magical ability to behave like adults when faced with delayed gratification somehow makes things better for everybody. Chant “U.S.A., U.S.A.,” all the way to debtor’s prison if you like, but clearly the Canadians are doing something right — and maybe we could learn from them here in the States…

As a general rule, I try to respond to most comments and all comments that ask me a question. I missed a comment by Nanani and I’ve been missing a few lately due to increased posting volume. Any time I have not responded to your comment and it’s a couple days old, you’re welcome to follow up and point out that I missed something. I do not take offense.

Any of my northeastern readers have any experience (or hear of others’ experiences) with them? I am apparently a customer of theirs now.

Also, for anyone looking for a TV, Woot is hawking the model I own. I think. The specs appear to be the same. They’re offering it for a $100 less than I paid for it eight months ago. It’s been a pretty good TV. Not nearly as nice as my parents’ Samsung, but a few hundred dollars less expensive. The non-HD stuff isn’t terrific, unfortunately. That and the lack of PnP are my only two complaints. But you can’t beat their pricing. With the other cheap brands, Philips and Sanyo, you can see why they’re so cheap. Less so with Vizio.

Mamapundit raises objection to a proposed Florida law grading parents as well as the kids. She comments thusly:

Parental involvement in children’s education is important, yes. However, the expectations of parents (read: mothers) in this regard have become increasingly burdensome in recent decades. When I was a third grader, my parents helped me with big projects, and they occasionally attended a school function. Today, however, “good” parents are expected to make involvement with their children’s school and classroom a kind of second job. I see many moms who volunteer at school several days per week. When they aren’t actually AT the school, they are selling candy bars and wrapping paper to raise money for the school. These moms know more about the minutiae of their kids’ classwork than the kids themselves, and they expect to spend hours each night sitting next to their children as they complete their homework. Prep for a school project – like the annual science fair – is a major family undertaking requiring intensive maternal involvement at every turn, as well as expensive and fancy supplies.

Sometimes it really does feel like we live in two countries. As often as I hear complaints about this, I also hear complaints from others (including educators) about how school is viewed as daycare and it’s the lack of parental involvement that is to blame for our education system’s failures. While some of that is passing the buck (educators have an incentive for parents to be blamed) and some of it is smug superiority (parents have an incentive to feel superior to other parents and none of them are going to think that they are the problem, it still rings true. Perhaps by sheer repetition.

Granju, though, is making the other argument. Never has more been expected of parents. And you hear these complaints, too. So-called “helicopter parents.” Ironically, these complaints also come from educators, though more of the upper level variety. Perhaps some of this is coming from parents that are resentful about being “judged” by having a job and therefore not being willing to work for the school district 40 hours a week, there is an element of truth to it.

These two ideas are not mutually exclusive. It’s more than possible to have one set of parents that won’t let go and another set of parents that simply doesn’t have time to care. It does make it, however, difficult to really approach from any sort of policy or public meme perspective. Talk about how parents should be more involved, and it’s those that are already involved that are most likely to listen. Talk about how parents need to be more laid back, and those same parents are not going to want to sacrifice any perceived edge that their involvement gives their kids while others may (to the extent that they’re listening) take it as a pat on the back for doing something right (if only by default and circumstance).

What this gets me thinking about, though, is the degree to which, if this continues, it will further create a disparity (along economic lines) among the youth. Maybe not, if the helicoptering actually doesn’t do any good. In the Sigmoid view of the world, though, it’s that sort of hyperinvolvement that gets kids to do the right things to get into the right college and avoid the abject failure that occurs with regard to anybody that doesn’t go to an Ivy League (or perhaps Public Ivy) institution. As with most things, while dramatically overstated and false in scope, it’s hard to deny there being some truth there. You may not have to go to an Ivy League of Public Ivy, but it sure is helpful to have a degree of direction and if you go to a commoner university to get into the honors college or have a realistic game plan to get into a good field upon graduation.

I am an example of how having on-guard parents can make a real difference. Academically, I was headed absolutely nowhere until my parents put their foot down and my father watched over me to make sure that I was going what I needed to be doing. Had I been raised by another set of parents that didn’t do that, it’s likely I would have ended up a college dropout and in a much worse situation than I ended up in. Mom would later put the foot down when I started making noise about going to trade school instead of college. Well, she wouldn’t have stopped me, but she urged me strongly not to and had the moral authority for me to listen. On the other hand, in an alternative Sigmoidian view, my experience is irrelevant because the entirety of my failure or success is due to my genes.

Anyhow, all of this is the long way around saying that if competition between upper class (and upper middle class) parents has never been greater and more and more is expected of the parents, while it becomes increasingly common among working class families and below to let the school districts (inadequately) raise their children, this portends bad things for the future of equality. I know that this is hardly an original thought, but considering all of the objective factors that make it harder for people from poor families to get ahead, the consideration of the additional layers added by hyperparents who believe that their livelihood exists in the success of their parents and that State College is death, is pretty depressing.

On the other hand, Granju’s kids attend Episcopal schools, which are both private and Episcopalian. It’s not hard to imagine that her experiences are not universal. I went to a very strong public high school, which followed a moderately strong middle school, which followed a pretty strong elementary school. Past grade school, the expectation of parental involvement was pretty slight.

The whole discussion about Taco Bell’s 36% beef made me hungry for Taco Bell, so I stopped by one on my way back from Redstone yesterday. It was yummy.

But was it also… beef?!

According to Taco Bell, it mostly was:

Our beef is 100% USDA inspected, just like the quality beef you would buy in a supermarket and prepare in your home. It then is slow-cooked and simmered with proprietary seasonings and spices to provide Taco Bell’s signature taste and texture. Our seasoned beef recipe contains 88% quality USDA-inspected beef and 12% seasonings, spices, water and other ingredients that provide taste, texture and moisture. The lawyers got their facts wrong. We take this attack on our quality very seriously and plan to take legal action against them for making false statements about our products. There is no basis in fact or reality for this suit and we will vigorously defend the quality of our products from frivolous and misleading claims such as this.

Now I feel kinda cheated.

As anyone who follows food will doubtless be aware, the nightly news is a terrible thing. Scares over “this food”, “that food”, “that other food”… you name it, there’s probably been a scare over it at some point or another.

And yet, for some reason, an oddity persists in that people - or should I say, Americans - have been taught over the years to treat the word “fat” as if it were the devil incarnate, something to be driven away with pitchforks and torches. Now, certainly, there are definitely some things that if eaten every day can cause you problems.

But then again, the second link I just posted is a combination of HFCS and water… no fat at all. Tricky, aren’t I? Of course, sugar is something that it’s been argued Americans eat (or drink) way too much of, and the argument over sugar is nothing new.

To his credit, Mr. LaLanne doesn’t tell people they “can’t” eat sugar, just that hey, they should watch how much of it they eat. And his selling of a juicer in his later years (fruit juices are mostly sugar) may seem slightly hypocritical, but I’d still rather see people having fresh grapefruit juice than HFCS-laden sodas, and he himself was in dang good shape right until his final days.

The joke of the graph above is rather obvious. If you - as a “scientist” (I use quotes for a reason, since cherry-picking data isn’t science) - were to take a large number of data points and throw out anything that disagrees with a foregone conclusion, you’d be laughed at. Yet somehow, Encel Keys, the guy who is also the father of the Meal Rejected by Everyone (then called “K-rations”), and who along with his wife was relentless in pushing the “Mediterranean Diet” later in life, got away with this. The graph at the top of this blogpost is important for a reason; on the left side is Keys’ “research” graph, while on the right is a graph putting back in all the data Keys just threw out.

Notice the difference. If you plot “Japan vs USA” on the “Fat vs Heart Disease” curve, you get this wonderful, sky-is-falling, “correlation” between fat intake and heart disease. But if you start putting other nations in… the French, despite eating an “alarming” amount of fat, have no greater heart disease risk than the Japanese. The Swedes eat as much fat as the US, yet have 1/3 the risk of heart disease. Plot the data another way, cherry-picking a different 7 countries, and you could easily come up with the Atkins Diet.

Go further and widen the study, and you wind up with other studies… the most credible of which, the Framingham Study, concluded after 22 years of observation of a wide variety of subjects: “There is, in short, no suggestion of any relation between diet and the subsequent development of CHD in the study group.” The World Health Organization in 1983 came to the same conclusion in the European Coronary Prevention Study.

So why the deal with food in the US? Fishy and/or stupid health claims on the label of a “food” seem to draw people in. Candies that are essentially 100% refined sugar label themselves as fat free in order to sucker people in. A rush of shoddy studies regarding fish oil led to everyone labeling their products as “enhanced with omega-3″, “high in omega-3 oils”… you get the idea.

Chasing a particular nutrient, avoiding a particular nutrient or food, is the result of fads. Eating according to fad isn’t going to help you.

In the end it comes down to… well… the same old story. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”

So the iPhone is finally coming to Verizon. I have to confess, one of the thoughts that crossed my mind is that I stand a chance to be proven entirely wrong by something I have been saying (usually with the “it’s quite possible that…” or “I suspect that…” without a firm commitment of knowledge that I do not have) for quite some time now. AT&T’s network doesn’t suck so much as the iPhone sucks as a phone (you know those famous dropped calls? Never happened to me… but I never had an iPhone) and/or consumes so much data that it would be hard for any network to keep up. If the Verizon iPhone seriously outperforms the AT&T iPhone, I will be proven wrong.

Apparently, some people on the other side of the debate - those that believe that Apple can do no wrong and every problem that the iPhone has is AT&T’s fault - are going through similar second thoughts.

Granted, most of this doesn’t actually address the dropped call issue. Even so, suddenly The World’s Worst Carrier is having upsides when compared to The World’s Best Carrier. AT&T offers simultaneous voice and data, which Verizon doesn’t. Verizon’s plans are more expensive. AT&T’s tiered data plan - which was previously proof that AT&T was evil - can save you even more money vis-a-vis Verizon unless you’re a hard-core user*. Verizon doesn’t do international well (and won’t at all with the iPhone) And, of course, Verizon’s network isn’t perfect, though only Manjoo will come out and say so.

I carry no brief for AT&T. I was a satisfied customer for many years, but now I am a satisfied Verizon customer. Because of the deal we get through Clancy’s work, we don’t even pay more for Verizon than I would through AT&T. Truth be told, when our contract is up and AT&T is in the area (which they should be soon and almost certainly will be a year from April), I don’t know whether we will stay or switch. I had considered switching back to AT&T as soon as they came to town and simply paying the early-termination fee, but at this point I am skeptical that we will.

All of that being said, both AT&T and Verizon have their plusses and minuses. It’s Verizon, not AT&T, that refuses to activate any phone that isn’t theirs. It’s Verizon, not AT&T, that mandated data plans first (and AT&T’s has huge loophole that they don’t seem to have any interest in closing). But it’s Verizon and not AT&T that works out a lot of deals with employers and the like for better prices.

AT&T took a lot of flack when they sued over Verizon’s commercial with the maps. And Verizon’s maps were entirely accurate. However, they were also misleading. AT&T’s 3G coverage isn’t remarkably wide, but the map leads one to the impression that AT&T’s data coverage is weak. It’s not. The main difference is that with AT&T, a whole lot of those areas not covered by 3G are covered by slower data service. With Verizon, it’s 3G or nothing. Any place you don’t see on the map, the best you can ask for is “1X” which means that you can text message but that’s about it. AT&T was stupid about suing over a (technically) accurate ad, but their claims about being misleading were not entirely false. Speaking is misleading, though, AT&T’s ads about being the “fastest 3G network” are technically accurate, but are also misleading in the sense that they assume a completely wide and free network. With all of those iPhone users (and perhaps even if you discount them) the average user, unless they’re alone and beside a tower, is going to get slower speeds with AT&T than with Verizon.

In any event, if Verizon’s adoption of the iPhone goes off without a hitch and all of those people complaining about dropped calls start talking about how much greater Verizon is, I pledge to post that I was indeed wrong. It’s been known to happen, from time to time.

* - The author of the first piece (courtesy Wesley) actually says something incorrect. You can’t get $15/mo from Verizon unless you have a web phone, which is dumber than a smartphone but smarter than a regular phone. There was a brief window where they offered a tier as an “introductory” sort of thing, but that was discontinued and current users will not be grandfathered in when their contract expires. Regarding the tiers, I use web on my phone with regularity and I have yet to cross the 200mb barrier. Only about a third of users do. Besides which, even if you stay within the 2GB barrier, which all but less than 5% do, you’re still saving $5 a month. It’s only those that go over that are paying ($10) more. On the other hand, Verizon is planning to switch to AT&T-style tiered pricing.

Per the Wall Street Journal, Y is for citY:

Much of this week’s National Association of Home Builders conference has dwelled on the housing needs of an aging baby boomer population. But their children actually represent an even larger demographic. An estimated 80 million people comprise the category known as “Gen Y,” youth born roughly between 1980 and the early 2000s. The boomers, meanwhile, boast 76 million.

Gen Y housing preferences are the subject of at least two panels at this week’s convention. A key finding: They want to walk everywhere. Surveys show that 13% carpool to work, while 7% walk, said Melina Duggal, a principal with Orlando-based real estate adviser RCLCO. A whopping 88% want to be in an urban setting, but since cities themselves can be so expensive, places with shopping, dining and transit such as Bethesda and Arlington in the Washington suburbs will do just fine.

“One-third are willing to pay for the ability to walk,” Ms. Duggal said. “They don’t want to be in a cookie-cutter type of development. …The suburbs will need to evolve to be attractive to Gen Y.”

This would be more impressive if we weren’t talking about ages 11-31 (or so). Priorities change over time. What seems cool and convenient when you’re young and healthy (and childless) are unnecessary luxuries when you’re older. Having a club house is great when you’re young and single, but it loses its appeal when you get older. Particularly with kids. Visiting with Hubert and Laurie over the holidays, it’s hard not to appreciate the degree to which lifestyle wants surrenders to practical needs. Heck, when I was in my early twenties I liked having a roommate. It seems that the older you get, the more personal space you want and need. And it’s hard to have personal space when you’re surrounded by people and living in the sort of density required for improved walkability and the like.

It’s not unlike my genesis with cars. I’ve always been a small car guy. I like the maneuverability, the cheapness, and mileage of small cars. I thought that I would drive a small car for the rest of my life. With time, though, I have found myself increasingly aggravated with not having a car that I can easily move stuff around in. Yes, I can rent a UHaul. Yes, Clancy’s car has a hitch. But our new car is a crossover SUV. Even without a pending family, we would have gotten a capacity car. And even though we could probably make due with her Camry if we had to with a family, at some point I just started wanting to be able to put stuff in the car without having to spend time perfectly situating everything so it will fit or worrying that the new chair I bought won’t fit in the trunk (it didn’t, but Staples was awesome about shipping it for free). And with houses, I think that making due with smaller space is something that starts getting old faster than you do.

If I had to make due with another small car, I most assuredly would. But I’m not at that stage in my life anymore. It makes me wonder a bit about vans, which I have for many years hoped that I would avoid. Right now I think it preferable to try to make due with something a little smaller even if it means putting clothes in a car-top carrier and the like. Our next vehicle will likely be larger than our current ones (for a full family-size car), but maybe or maybe not a van. But maybe ten years from now, I will look back and say “I loved that crossover, but I’m really at the time in my life where I need a van.” Or maybe we’ll simply be shoehorning everything into a Highlander.

Note to self: if you ever find yourself thinking “I am at a BMW time in my life…” no you are not.

One of my earliest crushes was a pretty little girl named Clementine Giovanni. The earliest rejection I got was - as politely and kindly as imaginable - at her hands. She grew from a pretty little girl to an attractive woman. When she added me on Facebook, I was only surprised that she was engaged insofar as that meant that she had not yet married. I was a bit surprised when I saw the guy she was engaged to. As I always do when posting “real” pictures, this one will be obscured or removed in a week or two.

I don’t know the chap. But I have no doubt that he is a pretty awesome guy. He has to be.

I visited with two sets of kids during my trip to Colosse. The first was my college roommate Hubert’s twins. The second was the three kids of my other college friend, Al Cavanaugh. Hugh (re-)introduced me to his daughters as “Will” while Al went with “Mr Truman.” I’m not at all offended with the former, but the traditionalist in me prefers the latter. It was how I was raised to refer to people my parent’s age. But these days, even if a parent wants to go that route it can be problematic because a lot of adults insist on being called by their first name with children. So it might not be a tide worth fighting.

I am getting older and more and more of my friends have kids. We were all raised with Mr and Mrs, but their kids haven’t been. So an age-peer will refer to my mother and father as Mr or Mrs Truman, but their toddler kids go with Bill or Susan.

I’m too lazy to look it up, but a couple of blog posts have been written on the subject. James Joyner (or one of his professorial co-bloggers at Outside The Beltway) spoke disapprovingly of the trend of college professors either wanting to or being encouraged to go by their first names with their students. The idea behind this trend being that you don’t want hierarchial relationships and it should be considered a relationship among equals. Joyner, a former professor, pushes back against this because teachers and students are not equals and it does nobody any justice to assume otherwise. Heebie-Geebie from Unfogged, a mathematics professor, expressed appreciation that a former student referred to her as doctor rather than shifting towards a first-name reference.

In the student-teacher relationship, I am more of the same mind of Joyner and Geebie. One of the irritating things about college was when students would challenge professors as presumptive equals. My friend Karl was - until the professor finally lost patience and put him in his place - so bad about this he almost ruined the class we took together. That’s not to say that what professors say should go completely unchallenged, and questions should definitely be asked (”Have you considered this?”), but by and large they are there to teach and you are there to learn. Any questions and challenges ought to be in an effort to better understand what they are trying to say. Not to prove that you, and undergraduate student, know more than they do. First-name bases - to the extent that they make a difference - seem to encourage the latter behavior.

Yesterday I went to orientation to be a substitute teacher. This was for the Redstone elementary schools. One of the things they kept harping on was dress code (which essentially boiled down to “no t-shirts or jeans”) and the insistence that, whether you prefer it or not, you are to be addressed as Mr or Mrs. The point being to establish authority. I’m not entirely sure how necessary this is with elementary school kids, though. Don’t get me wrong, I approve of both (preferring the Mr and Mrs and being a fan of non-casual dress codes generally), but it strikes me as the area where it makes the least amount of difference.

There is no orientation for the secondary schools, but it came up that (while presumably the Mr and Mrs honorifics are still required) they are much less worried about dress codes. That struck me as odd since that’s the place (in K-12 at any rate) where kids are most likely to challenge the adult-kid nature of the relationship. That strikes me as where it would be most important to draw every distinction you can.

{Editor’s warning: the topic of discussion here is in regard to the “third rail” and the popularity, and possible implications thereof, for Joel Osteen and other new-agey type preachers. Despite the particular rail in question being homosexuality, in keeping with Hit Coffee’s continuing guidelines, please do not feel this is an excuse to write anything that is heavily derogatory towards homosexuals, heterosexuals, or persons on either side of the argument concerning the moral or ethical status thereof.

Our friend Wesley occasionally sends in some tip stories; today’s brings up a nationally famous pastor whose congregation lives in his city, a televangelist-type by the name of Joel Osteen. The last time he made big national news, his wife was having a few issues regarding her enormous ego.

Part of the discussion of what makes Osteen so popular is that, until this point, he’s basically stayed well under the radar when it comes to anything controversial. Rather than being a hellfire-and-brimstone hardcore Baptist-type, a “follow the rules” Catholic type, Osteen is very much a new-agey, “do what feels good”, “peace love dope=god”, welcome to the Bible TV Hour type pastor, the kind of man who wouldn’t be out of place making a cameo on quite possibly the worst TV show that has ever been made.

That being said, apparently Osteen has had a change of heart, or else he’s decided he has a big enough flock to take the risk of going into some third-rail topics, and so he is openly switching away from his previous “I don’t talk about sin” stance into beginning to say, on the air, that certain things are in fact sinful. On the other hand, apparently this stems at least partially from a lower-profile altercation back in November in which Osteen got into it with Joy Behar; then again, Behar seems to have an ongoing need to generate “controversy” to keep View viewership up, and she definitely isn’t above engineering a segment where she’s trying to put words in someone’s mouth while not letting them get in a word of their own edgewise.

Popularity is a hard thing to follow. Someone can be very popular, and then do something incredibly stupid, and turn most of their fanbase against them in one fell swoop. Osteen’s carefully crafted public image is about avoiding that if at all possible; certainly, he tried to sweep his wife’s temper tantrum under the rug, and he’s been very circumspect about discussing other “third rail” issues - divorce (then again his own father had been divorced, politics, or many other controversial topics. Even in the Behar transcript, he seems to be trying to get to a “well we believe homosexuality is a sin but we don’t condemn people for it or kick them out of church for it” stance, while Behar’s very hung up on berating him for using “homosexuality” and “sin” in the same sentence.

At the end of the day, it’s going to be interesting to see where this one goes. Osteen may very well go quickly into the new-agey, self-help-book writing, “Stuart Smalley“-style preacher he’s been to this point, or maybe he’ll start getting a little more into “well this is what the book says, we would love to help you stop sinning” territory. Only time will tell.

I don’t know what it says about me that…

Alabama law firm Beasley Allen has filed a class action lawsuit against Taco Bell that claims the chain is falsely calling its taco filling “seasoned beef” and “seasoned ground beef” when allegedly the mixture, which would be more properly called “Taco Meat Filling,” only contains 36% beef. The firm is not asking for money, but is instead asking the chain to make changes to their menu to reflect the food they are serving.

… makes me hanker for some processed taco beef product.

Archie Comics is ditching the Comics Code Authority:

Next month, Archie Comics will no longer carry the Comics Code Authority seal of approval.

“We’re officially dropping it with books on sale in February,” Archie Comics President Mike Pellerito told Newsarama Friday afternoon.

The Archie news comes after DC Comics announced yesterday that it would be replacing the Comics Code approval with its own rating system.

The Comics Code Authority was established in 1954 in response to a public outcry over violence in comics, including Congressional hearings about the bad influence the industry had on American kids. After the creation of the CCA “seal,” major outlets wouldn’t carry a comic unless it had the Code on the front.

The seal became the standard in the comics publishing industry for decades. But that changed in 2001, when Marvel Comics stopped using the CCA and implemented its own ratings system in response to one of its comics being denied approval.

Even the “mature” Archie Comics are unlikely to run afoul of the CCA, which makes this move quite interesting. I wonder if there is some sort of “reviewing fee” involved that they’re saving a few dollars on?

The CCA is a holdover to the days when comics were largely sold at convenience stores and the like. The convenience stores didn’t want to sell comics that might be unsuitable for younger viewers. You had to go to a comic shop to get anything more “adult.” Most people forgot about the CCA and so its badge meant less as time went by. And those (non hobby shop) places that did continue to sell comics weren’t going to forgo Marvel on this basis. So even though Archie is one of the only publishers (perhaps the only, except when some independent company teams up with a market property like the Power Rangers) to rely primarily on non-direct outlets, I can’t imagine that anyone will care. Safeway and the like will continue to put them in their check-out lane.

In some ways, this is representative of the failure of the comic book industry as a whole to care about younger readers. Even the CCA-approved titles from DC tended towards older audiences with more complicated plots spanning over different issues and titles. With the exception of Archie, there were few titles dedicated towards spontaneous purchasing while their kids were in the convenience store, grocery store, or pharmacy. When I was a kid, they were placed rather prominently near the entrance. These sales don’t tend to generate much in the way of sales and money, which I think is why they were forsaken, but they are rather crucial in bringing in new readers. Something the industry as a whole has suffered greatly for lack of.

One of the things I used to get a kick out of with Anime what whenever they would portray America and Americans. Here is a video of their portrayal of our legal system. The first thirty seconds are a bit hard to bear if you’re a cat-lover, but I nonetheless found it amusing. Particularly with the National Anthem playing at the end.

One of the most outrageous series was something called Mad Bull 34, which takes place in New York City and follows the adventures of John Estes and Daizaburo Ban (the latter an “American Born Japanese”). It’s ridiculously over the top in a number of respects, but it’s portrayal of NYC as an utterly lawless culture is absolutely hilarious. It’s easy to chalk it up to being a cartoon, but I don’t think I ever saw the Japanese police portrayed in quite this manner. Anyway, below is a condensed version of the first episode of the series. {Note: Pretty graphic imagery, both violent and sexual}

There are a few other shows I’ve seen that take place in the US, including Gunsmith Cats and Riding Bean. Both take place in Chicago with the latter being something of a spin-off of the former. The portrayal there was fairly staid as apparently they made a real effort to portray the US accurately. Boooo-ring. It’s actually a fair, if somewhat-by-the-numbers productions. However, it’s worth pointing out that they did something I don’t think that an American TV show would ever do: they made a politician who strongly advocates gun control the villain. If they ever made a US version of it, I’m sure they would turn it around and make the gun manufacturers the bad guys.

When Econoholic sent me this Near York Times article on law school, I wondered if Half Sigma had already commented on it:

In reality, and based on every other source of information, Mr. Wallerstein and a generation of J.D.’s face the grimmest job market in decades. Since 2008, some 15,000 attorney and legal-staff jobs at large firms have vanished, according to a Northwestern Law study. Associates have been laid off, partners nudged out the door and recruitment programs have been scaled back or eliminated.

And with corporations scrutinizing their legal expenses as never before, more entry-level legal work is now outsourced to contract temporary employees, both in the United States and in countries like India. It’s common to hear lawyers fret about the sort of tectonic shift that crushed the domestic steel industry decades ago.

But improbably enough, law schools have concluded that life for newly minted grads is getting sweeter, at least by one crucial measure. In 1997, when U.S. News first published a statistic called “graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation,” law schools reported an average employment rate of 84 percent. In the most recent U.S. News rankings, 93 percent of grads were working — nearly a 10-point jump.

In the Wonderland of these statistics, a remarkable number of law school grads are not just busy — they are raking it in. Many schools, even those that have failed to break into the U.S. News top 40, state that the median starting salary of graduates in the private sector is $160,000. That seems highly unlikely, given that Harvard and Yale, at the top of the pile, list the exact same figure.

He had. To his credit, he was sounding off this warning years ago. Not just about law school being a scam for anybody that doesn’t get into the Top-14 schools (an argument I think he takes a few steps too far), but about the statistics the law schools put out more generally.

Slate has a similar article from last year:

The students might be litigious—no surprise there—and overwrought. But they’ve got a point. The demand for lawyers has fallen off a cliff, both due to the short-term crisis of the recession and long-term changes to the industry, and is only starting to rebound. The lawyers that do have jobs are making less than they used to. At the same time, universities seeking revenue have tacked on law schools, minting more lawyers every year.

That has caused some concern among lawyers who think the accrediting organization, the American Bar Association, is doing the profession a disservice by approving so many new schools. (Contrast that with medical schools. They come with much higher startup costs and tend not to be money-makers. Relatively few students get medical degrees every year, and demand far outstrips supply.)

The job market for lawyers is terrible, full stop—and that hits young lawyers, without professional track records and in need of training, worst. Though the National Association for Law Placement, an industry nonprofit group, reports that employment for the class of 2009 was 88.3 percent, about a quarter of those jobs were temporary gigs, without the salaries needed by most new lawyers to pay off crushing debts. Another 10 percent were part-time. And thousands of jobs were actually fellowships or grants provided by the new lawyers’ law schools.

Relatedly, we have this:

Guy goes to law school, guy racks up a huge amount of debt, guy has no idea how he’ll pay off his debts. Sound familiar? Okay, here’s the twist: the guy failed the “character and fitness” component of the Ohio bar because he has no plan to pay off his loans.

What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?

Because it’s not like Hassan Jonathan Griffin was in a particularly unique situation when he went before the Ohio bar. A year and a half ago, we wrote about a man who was dinged on his character and fitness review because he was $400,000 in debt. That’s an extraordinary case. Hassan Jonathan Griffin owes around $170,000. He has a part-time job as a public defender. He used to be a stockbroker. He’s got as much a chance of figuring out a way to pay off his loans as most people from the Lost Generation.

If Griffin can’t pass C&F, Ohio might as well say that half of the recent graduates in the state don’t have the “character and fitness” to be a lawyer…

There’s something ironic about making the choice of representing those that cannot afford their own representation as causing someone to fail a “character and fitness test”.

Whole Foods they are not, but some interesting maneuvering regardless:

Of the “key elements” Walmart announced, several are ones I reported on last March: shorten travel distances between farm and distribution centers, support smaller farmers than it had previously bought from, bring back staple crops to areas where they had vanished because of competition from California and Florida, and bring fresh food into “food deserts” both in cities and, importantly, rural areas without supermarkets. {…}

But the company did give a timeline for the main news: reformulating its private-label “Great Value” foods over the next five years to reduce sodium by 25 percent, added sugars by 10 percent, and removing “all industrially produced trans fats.” This is what the nutrition community will be parsing for months, and where Walmart can preempt, and even help, industry initiatives like ConAgra’s announcement that it will reduce sodium in its foods by 20 percent over the same period, or the New York City health department’s National Salt Reduction Initiative, which is building public awareness of hidden sodium and trying to coordinate industry to reduce it voluntarily. The long timelines for sodium reduction are a recognition of how hard it can be to make lower-sodium foods taste “good” to people used to high sodium: unlike trans fats and sugars, where there are easy or easyish substitutes, lowering sodium really does change familiar packaged-food flavors. {…}

The announced target for added sugars will disappoint many who would like sodas and soft drinks abolished, and the soft-drink question came up immediately (okay, I was the first question on the first conference call, and I brought it up). Sodas are turning into a third rail, and her reply deftly avoided it. Consumers already know they can buy diet soda, she said. When they buy candy or cake (she didn’t mention soda—that came under “choices” they know are already available), they want to have an occasional indulgence. “Our focus,” she told me, “is where the customer doesn’t expect added sugar: flavored milks and puddings, fruit juice and canned fruit, breakfast items like muffins, granola, and French toast.” In a second conference call she ticked off more items, and added that breakfast pastries, breads, crackers, cottage cheese, and yogurts are often sources of hidden sodium and sugars. Dr. John Agwunobi, the company’s vice president of health and wellness added that another of the company’s promises this morning is to eliminate the price difference in reduced-fat, reduced-sugar, and whole-grain items, so that these will not cost more more than ones with higher fat and sodium, as is often the case now. (This equaling of price does not mean, as some have hopefully thought, that Walmart will make healthier options less expensive than less-healthy ones. Dream on!)

ESPN signed a huge mega-deal with the University of Texas for $300 million dollars over 20 years. I’m not sure I see the logic behind this, from ESPN’s perspective. They are guaranteed one football game a year, which is likely going to be a game against an FCS opponent that’s not worth televising on ESPN or Fox. Eight basketball games, which may be a little more useful but not much. The rest are going to be reruns of games already played and sports that ordinarily don’t get televised. The other material, such as college lectures and the like, may be interesting but are not exactly in ESPN’s target audience and are unlikely to get subscribers.

The University of Texas is the flagship university of a large state. It’s one of the few schools in the country that could pull something like this off. There are also, I would imagine, a lot of UT alumni spread around the country. But enough to warrant a cable carrier in San Diego or Chicago to pick up the channel? For a football game against East Podunk State, a handful of basketball games, and Longhorn rowing team action? How much do we expect Comcast of Seattle to pay for this? Even Dish Network and DirecTV probably couldn’t justify putting it anywhere except on their cross-regional sports packs (like Fox Sports Wherever) outside of Texas.

And for this ESPN is buying into a 20-year commitment and putting down $300,000,000? That’s what I find most baffling. Giving them a network, like BYU has, makes some sense. You could probably do it with a handful of schools (Florida, UCLA, Notre Dame, …?). But making $15,000,000 a year doing it? BYUtv is primarily about exposure and is non-commercial.

There are really only two explanations I have for this. First, they’re afraid that if Texas does this on their own that they’re going to seriously lose out. But there’s only so much they can lose with one school. Even the Big Ten hands their marquee games to ESPN (instead of running them on the Big Ten Network) because that’s where the money is. They’ve lost Mountain West and Conference USA games, but those aren’t exactly big losses. The SEC is a bigger deal, but they’ve managed to share it with CBS. The second is that perhaps this is part of a larger plan to strike similar deals with the other big name schools so that they can cut their smaller conference-mates (the Iowa States and Arizonas of the world). The problem with that is that UT is in a conference with a special arrangement. The other major conferences have rejected the Big 12 model of unequal revenue-sharing. So not only does it seem unlikely that they would be able to do this, but there is little fear of other big schools like Florida following their lead unless there is a mass exodus of top teams from their conferences. Or a realistic enough threat of that happening that they can leverage it into independent deals like Texas. Texas, though, blackmailed a very vulnerable conference, and it was the existence of unequal revenue-sharing that made the conference vulnerable to begin with.

So anyway, while this sounds like a great deal for the University of Texas, it’s quite a puzzling one by ESPN. At the very least, you would think that they would want to test the waters first before making such a tremendous gamble. This type of thing hasn’t been done before and the ESPN just bet a whole lot of money that it will work. The last time that happened was with NBC and Notre Dame, and that didn’t exactly work out.

Before they moved to Delosa, my family lived in Vandalia, a state in the Appalachians. I recently discovered that Dad was pretty miserable there. He didn’t like the relative isolation, but his biggest problem was the weather. He hated shoveling snow. And whenever I complained about the Delosa weather, one thing I was told by northerners was that at least I never had to shovel snow.

Now I know what they mean.

I never thought shoveling snow was easy, but I never appreciated how hard it is. Not so much it being hard work (I had kind of figured that, but I also figured I was young and in decent shape) but that it’s actually difficult to do. And it’s something you have to do constantly, or it shifts from being difficult to impossible.

I had a pretty ugly surprise when I got back from my Christmas homecoming tour. All of the snow I had shoveled had been replaced by new snow and adjacent snow that Arapaho’s significant winds so generously spread around. Further, we had a car with a dead battery in the garage that had a door that needed repair on account of the fact that it wouldn’t close. Getting back to two working vehicles, with one refusing to drive in the super-cold weather and the other stuck in the garage with a broken door latch, depended on my ability to shovel out the driveway.

I gave myself a couple of days, given that it had never taken more than that. That was… overly optomistic. The problem wasn’t the action of picking snow up on the shovel and tossing it aside, but rather that it had two weeks to pack in. There is only so much a shovel can really do. And the melting salts were of pretty limited utility, taking care of only one layer at a time. You can drive on a layer of ice (particularly since the trapped car has studded tires), but even then you need to keep it all even so that the car doesn’t get stuck and dig itself a hole.

At maximum, I had four days (to get the car out to make my appointment with the mechanic). I wouldn’t have even been able to accomplish that had Mother Nature not intervened. Warm weather, plus salt, plus diligent work was fortunately enough.

If we stick around in Arapaho and particularly if we have such a long driveway as this house, we’re definitely getting an ATV or mower plow.