Serious Business: A preemptive eulogy for UCB? No one’s listening.

Two days ago, my favorite source of sudoku puzzles ran an article where Birgeneau responded to the allegedly “widely-circulated blog post on the Atlantic Magazine Web site.” Man, I can’t believe I missed seeing that! Maybe I should check out the Atlantic site more often, or maybe read the Daily Cal Blog regularly for Berkeley-related internet news.

Dickish sarcasm aside, I’m sure I would have caught this blog post if I bothered to check Twitter, ever.

Here’s the blog post in question. Here is an excerpt:

The damage to the university is likely to be irreversible. It will be less able to compete with other institutions in the hiring of distinguished faculty. Funding for complex research will be less accessible. Tuition fees will inevitably rise, as they’ve already risen, putting the place out of reach for the underprivileged. Staff will be let go. Programs will be zeroed out. No doubt Berkeley will remain an estimable institution, and a significant player in the intellectual and economic life of the state. But its days as one of the very greatest universities in the country are clearly numbered.

Birgeneau’s solution? More private funding!

Daily Cal commenters band together to make me agree with them, and therefore feel bad about myself:

As long as the Top Cop at Cal hauls in a cool $200k per year *I* will not give one blue dime to this school.

This is the wrong path to go down. A lot of our brightest students (those in the middle to upper middle income range) turn down top privates in order to go here because they can save tens of thousands of dollars a year. Once that incentive is gone, you may well see a brain drain on our university. Who wants to go to a school that can’t retain top profs and offers few student services? If Birgenau actually wants to make this work he needs to increase Berkeley’s appeal FIRST. If you’re going to ask for market value, you need to make sure that market value is high and increasing not plummeting as it currently is.

My advice to students: graduate quickly because soon the diploma will be about as meaningful as one from CSU.

But then again, the Daily Cal comments section is still the Daily Cal comments section:

I would also like to point out, if it were not for those hippies, the draft would still be around and you would probably be overseas being shot at.

Moreso than the budget crisis, etcetera, etcetera, the Daily Cal comments section gives me anxiety about getting a degree from Berkeley, out of all institutions.

On the other hand, I shouldn’t worry too much about it. It’s a small minority of the campus that bothers to comment on dailycal.org. (Sometimes I like to imagine what their lives are like. *thoughtful silence*)

In reality, no one else is listening. This is because students are stupid and pretty much useless. Good riddance, I say.

*takes a dump on a student’s chest; increases pay for UC execs*

Ding-dong, the witch is sentenced to 150 years in prison

Remember how you had to look up “Ponzi Scheme” on wikipedia a few months ago?

Well, Bernie Madoff has been sentenced to 150 years– one hundred and fifty years– in prison.

In pronouncing the sentence — the maximum he could have handed down — Judge Denny Chin turned aside Mr. Madoff’s own assertions of remorse and rejected the suggestion from Mr. Madoff’s lawyers that there was a sense of “mob vengeance” surrounding calls for a long prison term. Mr. Madoff’s crimes, the judge said, were “extraordinarily evil.”

The Internet in Brief + IRL News: 6/09/09

• Good news! You know how your mental and physical health has been completely compromised by the past couple of years? Well, it wasn’t in vain– the degree does matter, despite the doomsaying. (link originally found through Daily Dish).

College graduates have definitely been hurt by the current recession. Thousands find themselves out of work, and many of those newly unemployed will struggle to find a job that paid as well as their last one. Still, on a relative basis, a college education has never been more valuable.

The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else, for instance, reached a record high last year. Four-year-college graduates made 54 percent more, on average, than people who attended college but did not graduate. Fifty-four percent!

If you’re a college student trying to decide whether to get your degree, I would urge you to remember that number — rather than anecdotes about unemployed college graduates.

• CNN foreign correspondent Michael Ware viciously pwns some fat neocon turd while Campbell Brown desperately tries to ruin our fun.

• Old, but I just saw this: the entirety of Robocop in a ten minute rap.

• NPR finally finds out what all those young peoples are up to

• An awesome process (??? does this count as process ???) story from the NY Times here. Some great quotes:

As I listened to Biden talk about his Senate career, nearly uninterrupted, for half an hour, I was reminded that leaving any job after 36 years presents, psychologically, a difficult adjustment; at times, the vice president sounded a little like the high-school football star who has received his diploma but can’t help hanging around practice anyway, throwing imaginary passes on the sideline. Biden described for me working out at the Senate gym as vice president and stopping into the Senate dining room alone for a bowl of soup. He was amazed, he said, when his former colleagues lined up to say hello.

More Biden hilariousness:

Having served under seven commanders in chief during his time in the Senate, Biden understands as well as anyone the pervasive fear in Congress that presidents are out only for themselves. “I’ve had presidents who say to me, ‘Hey, Joe, get out on that limb for me,’ ” Biden told me. At this, he rose from his chair and began acting out the metaphor, half-crouching as he glanced at the limb behind him. “And I’m out there. I’m out on that limb. And then you hear this shew shew shew” — he nicely approximated the noise of a saw rasping back and forth — “and you look back, and the limb’s being sawed off.

“I’ve been there with these other presidents,” he said, returning to his seat. “I’ve been there when they said later, ‘Well, you know, things change.’ ” He leaned forward and touched my knee, in a way that I imagined he might while making the very same case to one of his former colleagues. “Not this guy,” Biden said, pointing toward the Oval Office. “And they know that not over my dead body would it be that way with me.”

And also:

OBAMA’S AGGRESSIVE COURTSHIP of Congress is plotted and directed by Emanuel, who despite his legendary personality flaws — his penchant for profane mockery is now so well documented that you sometimes have the sense he’s cursing at you so as not to disappoint — is freakishly well suited to the job.

In short, the vice president is a dork, and the White House Chief of Staff is a caricature of himself.

• The New York Times has a hard time with meta!

• American Journalists captured in North Korea; sentenced to prison camps– these two are basically destined to go through Cheneyesque torture. I wish this were a bigger deal: I have a sneaking suspicion that if these were white girls, it would be a bigger deal.

The Internet in Brief: 6/08/09

• Woooooooooooooooooooooo

• Lots of great reading material here at xpostfactoid, and I’m not just saying that because xpostfactoid seems to love Obama almost as much as I do. If we were characters in The West Wing, I would be Toby and he would be Josh. He’s Josh because he left the White House to run Santos’s campaign, and ergo loves Bartlett less than I do. (That plot twist with Toby in Season 7 never happened).

• In case my last post wasn’t sad enough already, The Daily Dish has an incredible collection of anonymous, personal posts on abortion here (although I’ve noticed that quite a few posts from the series are missing from this round up). The series gets scooped here, where Kate Dailey points out how the very Catholic Sullivan goes from “I still cannot in good conscience support these abortions” to “I have to say I am beginning to believe that these abortions, given their excruciating moral and personal choices, may be the most defensible in context of all abortions” within a matter of days. I have to say, a few days on the Daily Dish equates to about a month of absolutely readable content on any other blog. Here are a few more posts I liked. This one was the one that sent me bawling.

• Wonkette makes a breakthrough discovery.

• Bruno. will. be. ausgezeichnet.

• In other news, today is my birthday :3. Thanks to all y’all who read the Sqlog, even the ones who come here looking for “kkids fucking” or “cartoon skunk farts”.

Internet in Brief + IRL News: 6/06/09

• UC Berkeley’s very own Purple Guy (aka Gregory McGarry) spotted on Look at this fucking hipster.

• Church of Scientology = Wikipedia trolls.

• I write up on a post where Vivianblog writes up on a video found on Megan McArdle’s blog, only to add that I have seen 80s harem pantsuits with more of a striking resemblance, but since this isn’t BARE blog, I have absolutely no need to turn this into a fashion post.

• Creepy Commie Bullshit. Eat it up, Hollingsworth!

• I don’t see why this is a challenge. (link from MarginalRevolution). The answers are: 1) P/F; 2) F/P; 3) P/F; 4) F/P; 5) P/F; 6) F/P; 7) P/F; 8) P/F; 9) F/P; 10) F/P

The trick is to see which guy looks like he has a sense of humor. Hint: not the French one.

My comp sci/physics boyfriend finds these pictures confusing. Perhaps he should have taken more classes with that one philosophy professor rumored to be Foucault’s last lover?* (*the answer is: no, not majoring in philosophy is superior to all other outcomes).

• Wells Fargo hates black people. No really, they do:

Former loan officer Tony Paschal said Wells Fargo targeted black communities for bad loans by focusing on African-American churches, using black employees as its public face, and using software to translate marketing materials into various languages, including something called “African American.”

He also said that other employees called subprime loans in predominantly minority neighborhoods “ghetto loans” and used racial slurs, including “mud people.”

• A lama leaves his Buddhist order! “They took me away from my family and stuck me in a medieval situation in which I suffered a great deal,” said Torres, 24, describing how he was whisked from obscurity in Granada to a monastery in southern India. “It was like living a lie.” He says this, but is currently studying film in Spain. (from MarginalRevolution)

• This is late, but the embarrassment factor of David Carradine’s death isn’t old just quite yet. Hopefully his people will be able to do a good job burying it? I’m rather fond of David Carradine, and would like to watch his movies in the future without people constantly making jokes about him strangling his own nuts.

• Was that an earthquake? Maybe just a big truck.