Self inflicted pain indeud

Out-of-touch professors + Debt-ridden students = Bad combination

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Sacramento State professor George Parrott walked out of his Psychology 101 lab class Thursday morning because his students didn’t bring any snacks.

Instead, he says, he went to breakfast with his teaching assistant.

The professor said students are told of the requirement to bring snacks on the first day of class. A handout from the teacher is clear – “Not having a snack = no Dr. Parrott or TAs. Now you are responsible for your own lab assignment.”

He said the snack obligation is his way of encouraging students to work collectively. It connects students who might not otherwise interact on a commuter campus, said the professor.

“Having these goodies in the class breaks down some of the formality and some of the rigidity in the class, which is one of the most stressful for students,” Parrott said.

But students are crying foul, saying the teacher left before a review for a midterm to be given Monday. The test accounts for a good portion of their grade.

“Our education isn’t worth food, it’s for us,” said Francisco Chavez, a student in the class.

It’s also not clear why homemade baked goods would teach teamwork better than a box of Oreos. The handout offers suggestions and pictures of which snacks are preferred. It lists homemade or bakery items and vegetable or fruit platters under “Good Ideas” and Nabisco products or pre-packaged items under “Bad Ideas.”

It also suggests that two people take responsibility for each day’s snack – in case one forgets – and that they should avoid bringing the same thing every week.

The professor said he has required classes to bring snacks for at least 39 years.

His afternoon lab class brought pizza Friday, he said. But they haven’t always followed instructions either. “The afternoon lab had an externally similar failure to be collectively involved a month ago,” Parrott said, adding that he left that class, too. “They were taken aback. Their collective involvement has been more cooperative since.”

Parrott listed additional benefits of requiring “goodies” in an email to The Bee. He said the snacks maintain glucose levels that affect mental sharpness, keep students from leaving class to find food and alleviate stress in what he calls one of the most difficult courses in the department.

But the goodies aren’t just for the students. The teacher and his teaching assistants eat, but don’t contribute, according to students.

“I’m not always observing how much the TAs eat,” Parrott said Friday. “In the last month I’ve had one mini cupcake and maybe six or eight carrot sticks.”

Parrott said he doesn’t feel bad about asking college students to bring food to class. The cost, he says, is offset by savings – about $200 – which students realize by not having to buy a textbook for the course.

“This is also designed to relieve financially strained CSUS students from typical costs for texts and to provide each student the token resources to buy, bake, or otherwise access the snacks/goodies when their once per semester turn would occur,” he said in an email to The Bee.

The professor, who is 67 and retired in 2006, works part time at the university. His salary for 2010 was $44,000, according to state data.

Parrott doesn’t regret his decision to walk out Thursday. “I can understand the immediate frustration,” he said. “I’m sympathetic, but I’m absolutely comfortable with the conclusion. The ethos I’m trying to promote is incredibly important. It may not be appreciated, and that’s even more unfortunate. It speaks to their lack of understanding of higher education.”

University officials, contacted Thursday, said they take the allegations seriously and will investigate.
Read more: http://trade.cc/gtm

+4% to 6.1%.

Europe has a problem.

Some revealing courthouse news is out on BP and their behaviors

ECB purchase a little over 4 billion euros worth of debt last week

Occupy Portland Overdoses and Public Safety Information – 11/12/11
On November 11, 2011, Portland Police officers assigned to the Occupy Portland encampments were contacted by people inside the camps about improvised weapons being found. Officers also received information that a man was going to damage police cars parked outside the encampments.

Officers made contact with the man and he relinquished his six foot long bamboo pole. No damage was done to any patrol cars and no arrests were necessary.

The Portland Police Bureau appreciates the ongoing efforts of people within the encampments to share information with officers about people committing crimes and stockpiling improvised weapons. Anyone with this kind of information should immediately share it with a police officer. Attached are two photos of items turned over to police from people within the Occupy Portland encampments.

Officers continue to see people packing up and leaving the encampments and officers are sharing information about shelter options with people in the encampments.

Teams of outreach workers continue to walk through the encampments and are providing information and assistance to homeless adults and youth in locating safe shelter space. Groups from Janus Youth Programs, JOIN, Transition Projects, Yellow Brick Road, Cascadia, and Can We Help have all been actively working with city officials and police to insure that people in need of services know where to go and how to obtain them.

The Portland Police Bureau anticipates that cooperation will continue with many people at the encampments and is encouraged by efforts to have a peaceful transition out of Chapman and Lownsdale Square parks. The Portland Parks Bureau is onsite and assisting people with clean up efforts of debris and unwanted property.

Friday afternoon at approximately 4:30 p.m., officers and medical personnel assisted a man suffering from a drug overdose in the middle of Lownsdale Square. The man was revived and transported to an area hospital for treatment.

This morning, Saturday November 12, at approximately 8:30 a.m., officers and medical personnel assisted a young woman suffering from a drug overdose. The woman, believed to be in her 20s, was revived and has been transported to an area hospital for treatment.

Attached are updated crime stats for the police patrol districts around the Occupy Portland encampments.

Source

Clients of MF Global still do not have access to their money and thanks to sloppy record keeping the missing money remains a mystery.

Full article

Nov 9 2011, 4:38 PM ET 575

When I was a young and naive economics writer, I used to write about developing countries a fair amount.  Time and again they would make these bizarre and pointless moves, like suddenly and for no apparent reason defaulting on a bunch of debt.  They would engage in obviously, stupidly unsustainable fiscal practices that caused recurring crises.  They would divert critical investment funds into social spendingwhich was going to become unsustainable when underinvestment reduced government revenue.  And the other journalists and I would cluck our tongues and say “Why can’t they do the right thing when it’s so . . . bleeding . . . obvious?”

Then we had our own financial crisis and it became suddenly, vividly clear: democratic governments cannot do even obvious right things if the public will not tolerate it.  Even dictators have interest groups whose support they must buy.

This has come home to me forcefully several times over the last few years, but never more than now.  The leaders of the eurozone have a dual mandate to keep the euro intact, and to not do the things which could keep the euro intact.  They cannot fiscally integrate to the extent necessary because, as I wrote for the Daily the other day, the Greeks do not want to act like Germans, and the Germans do not want to share their credit rating with anyone who won’t.

It is obvious that either Germany is going to have to guarantee massive ongoing fiscal transfers to the PIIGS, or Greece and probably Italy are going to have to undergo a massively contractionary austerity program, or they will have to leave the euro.  Yet in the face of these three choice–which exclude both each other, and any other mathematically possible outcome–their governments have chosen d: half measures.  No, half-measures is too generous.  Quarter measures.  Window dressing that only covers a single pane.

With Berlusconi’s obviously counterproductive antics tanking markets worldwide, the sort of hopeful pessimism that has pervaded the economic commentariat has now turned to open despair.  Their cri de coeur is ably summed up by Brad DeLong:

I have been complaining for some time now that Reinhart and Rogoff think that the time is always 1931 and that we are always Austria–that the great fiscal crisis is about to erupt and send us lurching down toward Great Depression II. Well, right now guess what? The time is 1931, and we are Austria. The Federal Reserve needs to buy up every single European bond owned by every single American financial institution for cash before the increase in eurorisk leads American finance to tighten credit again and send us down into the double dip. The Federal Reserve Needs to do so now. Paul Krugman: >This Is The Way The Euro Ends: Not with a Bang, But with a Bunga-Bunga: [W]ith Italian 10-years now well above 7 percent, we’re now in territory where all the vicious circles get into gear — and European leaders seem like deer caught in the headlights. And as Martin Wolf says today, the unthinkable — a euro breakup — has become all too thinkable: >>A eurozone built on one-sided deflationary adjustment will fail. That seems certain. If the leaders of the eurozone insist on that policy, they will have to accept the result. >Every even halfway plausible route to euro salvation now depends on a radical change in policy by the European Central Bank. Yet as John Quiggin says in today’s Times, the ECB has instead been part of the problem. >I believe that the ECB rate hike earlier this year will go down in history as a classic example of policy idiocy… the sheer stupidity of obsessing over inflation when the euro was obviously at risk boggles the mind. I still find it hard to believe that the euro will fail; but it seems equally hard to believe that Europe will do what’s needed to avoid that failure.

For all my cynicism, I too want to cray [sic] out, “For the love of Mike, why?”

Why can’t they do the any of the obvious things–not even necessarily the right ones?  Why are they picking the only path that is obviously not going to work?

But I come back to the answer above: they can’t.  Government, like soylent green, is people. And people are not always rational.

Read the rest here.

Please

In April, Pittsburgh radio host Mark Madden wrote a story revealing Penn State for much of the cover-up ofJerry Sandusky‘s alleged child rape that has been exposed in the past week. While it didn’t raise many eyebrows back then, six months later it looks to be incredibly accurate.

On Thursday morning, just hours after legendary head coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier were fired by the school’s board of trustees, Madden was asked on The Dennis and Callahan Show what he believes the next piece of news will be.

What he said was twice as shocking as anything that’s been released thus far.

“I can give you a rumor and I can give you something I think might happen,” Madden told John Dennis andGerry Callahan. “I hear there’s a rumor that there will be a more shocking development from the Second Mile Foundation — and hold on to your stomachs, boys, this is gross, I will use the only language I can — that Jerry Sandusky and Second Mile were pimping out young boys to rich donors. That was being investigated by two prominent columnists even as I speak.”

After the news spread, Madden later explained via Twitter why he went public with the rumors.

“I normally abhor giving RUMORS credence,” Madden wrote. “But whole Sandusky scandal started out as a RUMOR. It gets deeper and more disgusting all the time. One of state’s top columnists investigating. That adds credence. I am NOT rumor’s original source. [Why does] Sandusky deserve benefit of doubt?”

Madden also spoke more definitively on Dennis and Callahan to the cover-up efforts at the school and beyond that he expects will be made public soon.

“The other thing I think that may eventually become uncovered, and I talked about this in my original article back in April, is that I think they’ll find out that Jerry Sandusky was told that he had to retire in exchange for a cover-up,” Madden said. “If you look at the timeline, that makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?

“My opinion is when Sandusky quit, everybody knew — not just at Penn State,” Madden added. “I think it was a very poorly kept secret about college football in general, and that is why he never coached in college football again and retired at the relatively young age of 55. [That’s] young for a coach, certainly.”

SOURCE 

Anti fraud laws were broken time and again, but so long as they can pay a measly fine it is business as usual.

Full article

The Federal Railroad Administration opened an investigation on Burlington after a report of a unlocked car of sulfuric acid was unguarded. Passengers were not informed and were allowed to board the train without a warning notice.

Full article

Now hitting 3.2%, record levels versus Germany.

This will upset the turkey gods indeud….

10 yr yields blew out this morning, now at 7.5%. Italian markets are down 4%+.

Surprising turn of events 

“Such is the severity of the situation in Italy.

Here’s Deutsche Bank’s Colin Tan talking about the same thing that everyone else is talking about:

Its not inconceivable that we could be in full crisis mode by the end of this week. The situation  with Italy feels increasingly like one that has little chance of materially improving until some
extreme pressure is put on someone to act. It may not come to a head this week but the signs are not good that we can avoid an extreme situation emerging soon.

The big problem: Berlusconi doesn’t seem like he’s in an urgent mood to make reforms, the ECB isn’t doing much, and China and Brazil have dropped out of the picture.

Hence we could get a big bustup: …”

Fun times ahead…Full article

Fun times