I posted a brief description of Erika's January 25 heart attack at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Erika2007.htm#HeartAttack2008
She's home now and doing better, although she's still very weak.

Question
What does the FBI consider its most successful operation in the FBI's 100-year history?
On January 27, 2008 the ever-popular television show Sixty Minutes on CBS had the most interesting television module I've ever watched. It's about the long-term interrogation of Saddam Hussein. What is most important in my viewpoint is the illustration of the trade-off between physical torture versus long-term interrogation where the interrogator becomes viewed as a friend by a prisoner who probably reveals far more over the course of time than could ever be elicited by torture, including the form of torture known as sleep deprivation. The FBI (in contrast to the CIA) claims to have never engaged in torture, although in the case of Saddam it might have been a different situation if Saddam posed an imminent threat of dire harm such using weapons of mass destruction in a matter of days on U.S. forces or cities, Israel, Iran, or other "enemies" of Saddam. Although the show does not mention this, torture is often used when time is of the essence and/or in a rage of vengeance.

There was only one interrogator across the many months of interrogation in Saddam's cell. His name was George Piro. Mr. Piro is a young and relatively inexperienced (five years) FBI agent who was chosen largely because of his fluency in the Arabic language. However, Mr. Piro turned out to be far more than an interrogator. He slowly and patiently became Saddam's friend to a point where Saddam pleaded to have Mr. Piro brought to the cell for long periods of time. Indeed Saddam became closer to George Piro than he did with his own sons.

Slowly over the course of many months bits and pieces of extremely revealing information leaked out to George Piro in long and rambling conversations. For example, we've always assumed that Saddam invaded Kuwait in order to control the vast oil fields of Kuwait. This of course is largely true, but the spark that set off the invasion was one short insult to the women of Iraq by the Emir of Kuwait. Saddam had a legendary and in retrospect a suicidal temper.

George Piro patiently waited over five months of interrogation before cleverly introducing a question about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Eventually Saddam claimed that he destroyed most of his WMDs that the United Nations inspectors had not already destroyed. But he did not seriously own up to this because it would be a sign of weakness, especially in the face of his dire enemy --- Iran.

There were many, many more important facts that emerged from these many months of interrogation. It turns out that most of what Saddam knew about the United States came from watching old Hollywood movies. He had almost zero knowledge of U.S. politics, governance, media, and power structures. What little he knew always amazed him because those in power were in power for such a short period of time.

Saddam considered Osama Bin Ladin to be a dangerous fanatic. He apparently wanted no relationship with Osama.

My friend Steve Zeff at Rice University raised a question Piro's use during the trial. But the trial was a farce anyway. Did anybody expect Saddam to be found innocent?

Guess what induced Saddam to end his hunger strike during the trial? Piro convinced Saddam that he (Piro) was in big trouble with Bush if Saddam continued the hunger strike. Saddam viewed his friendship with Piro as very solid. Without Piro during the trial Saddam may well have raised much more trouble in and out of court.

For a few days, you may be able to watch the CBS module from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/24/60minutes/main3749494.shtml
The transcript will probably be available for a longer period of time. My hat is off to a very articulate, intelligent, and likeable Agent George Piro.

"A Painful History:  Why have modern democracies been such important innovators of torture?"
by Darious Rejali, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, Volume 54, Issue 20, Page B7, January 25, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i20/20b00701.htm?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en 

Americans were shocked at the photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. They were horrified by the assault on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant molested with the broken end of a broomstick by New York City police officers in August 1997. A decade earlier, they were horrified by revelations that New York police officers had used stun guns to coerce confessions from young Hispanic and African-American suspects in 1985 and 1986.

Our outrage is predictable because we reject the idea that democracies engage in torture. That's something authoritarian states do — in the words of a World War II poster, "the method of the enemy." But torture has been documented in many modern democracies, not just our own.

So why is torture still occurring in democracies? Just bad people in power? Sadists in the police? Human nature? Think again: Whenever we ask ourselves why something is still happening, it's a sign that something's wrong with the way we understand our past.

It is tempting to think of democracies as inherently less likely to torture than authoritarian states are. After all, the people elect democratic governments, and the people don't want to be tortured themselves. Even if we view democracy cynically, as a game in which elites take turns running things, we believe that it has a quiet gentleman's agreement — we don't torture you when we are in power, you don't torture us, and we'll keep it all tidy. However you cut it, we think that democracies are bargains in leniency, and that until recently they had little to do with torture.

But that view is incorrect as a matter of historical record. Indeed, democracies often set the pace in torture innovation. Legalized torture was a standard part of Greek and Roman republics, our ancient models of democracy. Roman judges used various tortures, most famously the short whips, ferula and scutica, to coerce confessions and get information. Torture was also a standard part of Italian republics like Venice and Florence, our other historical models of democracy. Those city-states adopted some of the same techniques as the inquisitors of the Roman Catholic Church. They often used the strappado, a technique in which guards tied a victim's hands behind his back, hoisted him from the ground by means of a hook and pulley, and repeatedly dropped him to the floor. The political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was subjected to that process thrice. Before World War II, the British, the Americans, and the French all practiced torture: the French in Vietnam, the British in their mandate of Palestine, the Americans in the Philippines, not to mention what our police were doing in cities large and small. Police in democratic states used electrotorture, water torture, painful stress positions, drugs, and beatings. They did so sometimes on their own, sometimes in collusion with local citizens, and sometimes with the quiet approval, if not explicit authorization, of their governments. All this before the Central Intelligence Agency ever existed.

Our memory, however, usually starts with World War II. Torture was something done by the Nazis and then the Stalinists. The good news is that we made sincere and often effective efforts to prevent torture at home and to encourage human rights abroad — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. The bad news is that we came to believe that no one on our side was ever a torturer. Never had been. Being a winner was all about being morally pure.

By torture I mean the systematic infliction of physical torment on detained, helpless individuals by state officials for police purposes: that is, for confession, information, or intimidation. No doubt one could slice torture in other ways, but whatever you want to call these practices, they have a long history in the world's democracies.

Let me be clear: The democratic record of torture is not as bad as that of authoritarian states. Nevertheless, from a scholar's perspective, the relation of torture to democracy requires an explanation. The question is not, Is torture compatible with democracy? Obviously it has been for some time. The questions are: Under what circumstances is torture compatible with democracy? Why were democracies such powerful innovators of torture?

This isn't just an academic exercise. Torture represents a powerful danger to democracies: It creates conditions in which one human being gains absolute power over another, and democrats know that no society can tolerate giving anyone that power, legally or tacitly, without setting loose corruption. Torture destroys the lives of victims and torturers alike, and it sets into motion powerful corrupting forces that destroy the judicial, intelligence, and military institutions that use it. Entire organizations can operate as a state within a state, unaccountable to democratic oversight. When that happens, the slide to authoritarianism is almost inevitable.

But a people that can speak intelligently about cruelty can take steps to protect itself against tyranny. The first step is to recognize that torture has a demand side and a supply side. Consider the demand side first. What circumstances prompt the demand for torture in democracies? National emergencies are probably your first thought. It is easy to imagine that, in war or in the face of terrorism, an imminent threat might lead some people to endorse torture and many others to turn a blind eye. Numerous famous cases fit that pattern. The French turned to torture in a bitter war with Algerian nationalists in the 1950s; the British as they fought to retain control of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. And the Israelis turned to torture in their conflict with Palestinian organizations in the 1970s.

But there are many cases of persistent torture in democracies that don't fit the national-security model, because they occur in the absence of an objective or perceived national threat. Sometimes torture is a local arrangement, usually between the police and businessmen or property holders. The latter two want safer streets, so they don't look too closely at what the police do. Between 1973 and 1991, for example, the Chicago police used torture to extract confessions in high-publicity cases, like when they were hunting for the killer of a policeman. Police techniques included electrotorture, asphyxiation, suspension, and beating. Indeed, in 2006 two special prosecutors, who had spent millions on a report into the activities of the Chicago police, identified the torture of African-Americans, some of whom had confessed and been sentenced to be executed. Most alleged incidents implicated Commander Jon Burge, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and the detectives he supervised.

Another factor that triggers torture is a permissive judicial system. In the 1980s, for example, investigators for the Japanese Federation Bar Associations uncovered numerous cases of torture in Japan, in which police coerced confessions by beating suspects, punching them in the stomach, banging their heads against tables, and slapping them in the face. Many of the Japanese suspects had been accused of ordinary crimes and not held in emergency conditions. But wherever police have the power to detain suspects for long periods without justifying incarceration before a judge, torture will soon follow. And it is especially likely in a judicial system in which judges and juries value confessions. (In the Japanese case, human-rights investigators found that 86 percent of all convictions were based on confessions.)

Decommissioned soldiers can carry torture techniques to civilian jobs as policemen, just as police practices can find their way into military interrogation. That kind of transfer happened twice in American history in the last century. After the Philippine insurgency that followed the Spanish-American War, in the early 20th century, torture techniques used in the islands appeared in police stations throughout the United States, especially in the South, as well as in military prisons for conscientious objectors during World War I. Techniques that first appeared in the hands of soldiers in Vietnam later appeared in the hands of Chicago police. The world is a messy place, and the demands for torture can overlap.

Thus there is nothing special about American history. Torture occurs in old democracies and new, in New York in the 1920s and Johannesburg and São Paulo in the 1990s. The techniques of the current "war on terror" may yet appear in a neighborhood near you in the next 20 years. (As near as I can tell, such transference casts a 20-year shadow.)

While the factors I have described are not always sufficient to lead to torture in democracies, they also are not factors that democracies can do without — so democracies are always potentially vulnerable to torture. It would be difficult to imagine modern democracies without juries of the people. Nor could modern democracies function without bureaucracies to run elections and put laws into effect, and defend them against external threats. But relying on the judgment of ordinary citizens for justice has its dangers. Psychologists tell us that juries believe confessions, even when they know the confessions have been coerced. And bureaucracies are closed organizations of experts: When experts decide that legislatures don't have sufficient will or expertise to do the right thing during a political emergency, they may turn to torture.

Similarly, for various reasons, modern democracies give more weight to property holders, and not just because such states have free-market economies. A traditional argument heard in democracies is that homeowners care more about their neighborhood than renters and homeless people do. If the police use torture to protect them, the good citizens often don't want to hear about it. Indeed, in two trials in the 1980s, the citizens of Chicago failed to convict police officers accused of using torture.

All that tells us why the state, the judge, or the citizen may demand torture, but it doesn't explain what kind of techniques democracies use — call it the supply side of torture. I want to connect that to the second question I asked early in this essay: Why have modern democracies been such important innovators of torture?

We often think that the technique a torturer reaches for has something to do with his or her abnormal psychology. But most torturers are not sadomasochists — organizations try to weed out abnormal individuals who are likely to be disciplinary problems. What is crucial to understand is that most torturers have styles, and they pass those on to the next generation, just like tailors and massage therapists do. Torture is a craft, and, like all craftsmen who work with bodies, torturers are creatures of habit. They combine tortures in predictable ways, and every combination, every style, has a history.

Twelve years ago, I started the difficult project of mapping how torture technology spread around the globe over the course of the last 200 years. I mapped each technique as it changed over the decades, noting who used it, when, how it spread, and its effects. To be sure, it was unpleasant to map how leg clamps and other pressing devices used to squeeze muscles until bones broke appeared in Gestapo interrogations in the early 1940s, then spread in a broad arc from northern France, through Belgium, Holland, and northern Germany to Denmark and Norway, but didn't appear elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. Tracking that kind of trajectory is slow work, but the truth is that social scientists know more about how hybrid corn spreads in Iowa than about how torture techniques spread.

Tracking torture over 200 years yields a surprising conclusion: With some exceptions, very few modern techniques originated with the Nazis, the Stalinists, or the Inquisition. The pattern is weird and unexpected. What has driven torture technology turns out to be something that no one usually considers having anything to do with torture — namely, international monitoring and democracy.

Mapping torture techniques, one can immediately distinguish two kinds of intensely painful physical tortures: those that leave marks and those that do not. All the evidence suggests that the more-scarring techniques started to disappear over the course of the 20th century, as human-rights monitoring increased. Leg clamps, for example, are virtually unknown today.

On the other hand, "clean techniques" are spreading. Of those, the main styles are what I call French Modern and Anglo-Saxon Modern. French Modern is the classic combination of electricity and water; used properly, it leaves few marks. It appeared in French colonies in 1931 and spread across the world. (The Nazis picked it up from the Vichy police.)

Anglo-Saxon Modern is older, a combination of sleep deprivation, exhaustion exercises, and forced standing and other positional tortures, sometimes called "stress and duress" techniques. It has varied origins — some techniques came out of old (illegal) British and French military punishments, others from American police and prison practices, and yet others from the global slave trade. Most of the techniques used by American forces today, either at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq are part of this tradition.

These are painful forms of torture. Sleep deprivation isn't simply depriving Taliban of their naps. It reduces people's ability to tolerate musculoskeletal pain. It causes deep aches first in the legs and then in the upper body. Animal tests suggest that it makes people more sensitive to pain caused by heat, electricity, and punches. That makes it ideal as a supplement to other painful techniques. Clean torture is not simply a psychological tool, just because it does not leave marks. The history of modern torture tells us one more important point: Whenever we watch, torturers become sneaky. When the news media, the public, or politicians monitor what police are doing during interrogations, the interrogators literally pull their punches.

That makes clean techniques valuable: Allegations of torture are simply less credible when there is nothing to show. In the absence of visible wounds or photographs of actual torture, who is one to believe? Clean torture breaks down the ability to communicate between the victim and the wider community. Stealth tortures are unlike other tortures because they are calculated to subvert that relationship. And frankly, people judge more by what they see than by what they only hear about. Would Americans have been so outraged by Abu Ghraib without the pictures? In fact, the army released information to the news media and public about the abuses before the famous pictures became available, but the public barely took notice.

That is why clean coercive techniques typically show up in democratic states, where inquisitive reporters, active church groups, and human-rights organizations tend to exist in large numbers. And that is also why, as global human-rights monitoring developed in the 1960s, authoritarian states learned to use cleaner techniques.

Electrotorture, for example, was relatively unknown for much of the 20th century, and when it appeared, it was used first by democracies, especially in the United States between 1900 and 1930 and by France in Vietnam in the 1930s. It did not start spreading country to country until the 60s. The contagion effect was staggering after that, with the number of countries using electrotorture doubling almost every decade. The surge began in Latin America and soon spread to the Middle East and Asia, as prisoner reports indicate. In the 1980s, electrotorture reached Africa, and in the 1990s, Southern and, especially, Eastern Europe.

As the shift to clean styles reveals, torturers do pay attention to human-rights monitoring. If they did not, the shift to clean styles would be inexplicable. As would a few other things. Why, for example, do torturers often single out and kill doctors today? Maybe hunting doctors makes better sport than hunting lawyers, but it is more likely that those engaging in torture care about medical monitoring. Since the 1970s, doctors have been on the front line of deciphering how clean techniques work. And so doctors are a threat.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
It's fate that I should read the above article the morning after re-watching the movie Guarding Tess starring Shirley McLaine as the widow (Tess Carlisle) of a past U.S. President and Nicholas Cage as the Secret Service Agent (Doug Chesnic) assigned to protecting her. This is a wonderful movie mixed with comedy and terror. The widow is eventually kidnapped and buried underground on an abandoned farm. She will surely die if one of the captured kidnappers does not talk. He's lawyered up and refuses to reveal her whereabouts. Tess will surely die within a day. Agent Chenic in desperation tells that captured kidnapper (in a hospital bed) that he's going to shoot off one toe at a time until the kidnapper talks. The kidnapper scoffs at the idea and says that the Federal agents do not torture in such a manner. So Agent Chesnic shoots off the first toe. The kidnapper in a panic tells Agent Cage where to find the buried widow and all ends happily thereafter.

My point from Guarding Tess is that torture in democracies sometimes arises from a sense of urgency where there are only a few hours to save a child, a soldier, a company of soldiers, a battalion, a city, a nation, or the entire world. This urgency is compounded by fear of weapons of mass destruction such as biological poison, nerve gas, or nuclear radiation. In such instances rational people must weight the moral benefits against the moral costs in times of dire urgency. In my viewpoint the acceptability of torture depends upon the cost scale --- most of us who despise torture would condone torture if it's almost certain that torture is the only means of saving the entire world?

But at the same time there's human temperament that may interact in a negative way. At the critical moment in the movie Guarding Tess viewers sense that the urgency of the situation is compounded by Agent Chesnic's growing frustration and anger. It may well be that he would've shot off a toe or two even if he knew the buried kidnapping victim was already dead. This is the kind of torture that underlies Abu Ghraib and other instances of anger and vengeance. This is the kind of torture that arises when murders, sex offenders, and/or torturers show absolutely no remorse and even taunt the courts and the prison guards. This is the torture that the democratic state is morally bound to prevent whenever possible because such torture serves no higher purpose.

But how does the abhorred idea of torture as an act of vengeance differ from virtually every policy in nuclear-armed nations to retaliate if their nations are destroyed by an act of holocaust? Our nuclear submarine commanders are given some discretion if the U.S. is bombed to oblivion by the Soviets, but the general idea is that cheering throngs on Moscow streets are doomed as well. The justification of such a policy ex ante is that this vengeance policy is a deterrent preventing a nuclear power from initiating a first strike. The problem with this policy is that the first strike might be initiated by a madman (a raving mad Hitler or Saddam or Kim Jong Il) who is acting alone relative to the will of his people. The people on the streets of Moscow may not really be cheering. Instead they might be rising up in their own anger at the madman who pushed the red button entrusted to him.

Perhaps this is why nuclear submarine commanders are given an ounce of discretion under a retaliation policy.

More on torture and world efforts to prevent torture --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture

Tidbits on January 28, 2008
Bob Jensen

For earlier editions of Tidbits go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
For earlier editions of New Bookmarks go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

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For example if you want to know what Jensen documents have the term "Enron" enter the phrase Jensen AND Enron. Another search engine that covers Trinity and other universities is at http://www.searchedu.com/.

Bob Jensen's past presentations and lectures --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/resume.htm#Presentations   

Bob Jensen's Threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm

Bob Jensen's Home Page is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/

CPA Examination --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cpa_examination

On May 14, 2006 I retired from Trinity University after a long and wonderful career as an accounting professor in four universities. I was generously granted "Emeritus" status by the Trustees of Trinity University. My wife and I now live in a cottage in the White Mountains of New Hampshire --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/NHcottage.htm

Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Online Video, Slide Shows, and Audio
In the past I've provided links to various types of music and video available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Frontline: On Our Watch (Darfur Video) --- http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darfur/

Stanford Humanities Lab (includes video) http://shl.stanford.edu/

Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York (video in the multimedia section)  --- http://futureofny.org/home

Immigration Gumballs --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7WJeqxuOfQ

Wall Street Journal Video
Jon Friedman says Slate's Ron Rosenbaum is the classiest Web writer today. He says it would be nice if all Web writers cared about their readers as much as he does ---
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/8_0004.html?bcpid=86195573&bclid=212338097&bctid=1388808335

Fifty Years of History in Three Minutes --- http://yeli.us/Flash/Fire.html

Many of the workers on California's Mexican border fence were undocumented workers ---
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/8_0004.html?bcpid=86195573&bclid=212338097&bctid=1379238935

Bobby Fisher died in Iceland on January 17, 2008 --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Fischer
Also see http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18212968
In spite of his Jewish heritage, Fischer was openly anti-Semitic and paranoid. He viewed himself as a victim of an international Jewish conspiracy.

• Death Announcement (Gary Kasparov) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-vTSbWmlPs
• Bobby Fisher Tribute http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ctImhqpOg
• Bobby Fischer Tribute --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ht-OqiuWVMk
• Childhood --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cry_skzgMps
• Clip from Documentary --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6ctImhqpOg
• Self-Hating Jewish Chessmaster --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbtWuwQX8Is

The latest prodigy of the chess world is a fourteen-year-old Brooklyn boy named Robert Fischer, who a few weeks ago, at a tournament held in Cleveland, upset some two hundred of his elders and putative betters, including a number of the country’s top-ranking players, to win the United States Open Chess Championship. There have been chess prodigies in this country who flashed to prominence when considerably younger than Fischer, but none has ever captured a major title at such an early age. Honors are beginning to pile up for Robert. The United States Chess Federation has elevated him to the rank of master (some of the wits among his teen-age friends now address him as Master Master Fischer); he has been invited to be one of the ten distinguished players, from all over the world, who will participate in the highly regarded invitation tournament at Hastings, in England, this Christmas; and shortly after that he is scheduled, if the Chess Federation’s present plans work out, to visit the Soviet Union and show off his prowess before the world’s most discriminating mass audience, the Russians having been notorious chess addicts for centuries.
Bernard Taper, "Prodigy," The New Yorker, September 7, 1957 ---
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1957/09/07/1957_09_07_025_TNY_CARDS_000257152

Burns and Allen Humor and Nostalgia
George Burns --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Burns
Gracie Allen --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracie_Allen

• Gracie has tea with the tax accountant --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5uwPFvWwnQ8
• Let's Dance 32 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hJ85oO9qgI
• How George Met Gracie --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nAesuInmU0
• Gracie's undeveloped talent (better to be a wife than amount to anything) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW6GWEi3g3U
• Say Goodnight Gracie --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEHdvUHxYCU
• Happy Together (Slide Show) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vHNfqt7EvU
• On "What's My Line" --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uasS4Crr6Ic
• Gracie Learns French --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJqfD-tw_pc
• Creative Quotations --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwvYYlhJ29o
• 100 Years of Laughter Part 1 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smRTgBkgK94
• 100 Years of Laughter Part 2 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Fb3Itn6n1M
• 100 Years of Laughter Part 3 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKQR8Uw7Dpg
• 100 Years of Laughter Part 4 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkBxN8vUoWI
• 100 Years of Laughter Part 5 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAqcaGwi708
• I Wish I was Eighteen Again --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3c-WBn5cCg
• Old Bones --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh6saG57kPE
• Good Old Days Bad Old Days --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__1EtK0d8rg 

Carol Burnett Show- Bubba's Teacher (With Maggie Smith)
Carol Burnett --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Burnett

• Part 1 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK1JlZYYfek
• Part 2 --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbL0AmDd2as

Liza sings "I'm glad I'm not young anymore" on the David Letterman Show ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94XUFh7e-OM

Accounting and finance professors should use this video every semester in class!
The best explanation ever of the sub-prime (meaning lending to borrowers with much less than prime credit ratings) mortgage greed and fraud.
The best explanation ever about securitized financial instruments and worldwide banding frauds using such instruments.
The best explanation ever about how greedy employees will cheat on their employers and their customers.
"House Of Cards: The Mortgage Mess Steve Kroft Reports How The Mortgage Meltdown Is Shaking Markets Worldwide," Sixty Minutes Television on CBS, January 27, 2008 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/25/60minutes/main3752515.shtml
For a few days the video may be available free.
The transcript will probably be available for a longer period of time.
Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

Free music downloads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Classical pianist Jon Nakamatsu and clarinetist Jon Manasse perform in-studio --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17994676

Back to the Sixties (video) --- http://objflicks.com/TakeMeBackToTheSixties.htm

Her musical imagination is boundless,' said Juilliard dean Stephen Clapp, who described her as 'a musical artist with qualities of maturity far beyond her age.'
Sirena Huang: Dazzling set by 11-year-old violinist --- http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/45

Jazz Old Time Online --- http://www.jazz-on-line.com/index.htm
There's a vast collection here. Some choices are free; Others are not free.

Maria Elena Holly insists Peggy Sue Gerron's "Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue?" is unauthorised and will harm Holly's name, her reputation and that of her company. "It's very interesting that this woman makes up all these stories," Mrs Holly said from her home in Dallas, US. He never, never considered Peggy Sue a friend."
"Buddy Holly's Widow May Sue Peggy Sue," Sky News, January 12, 2008 --- http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0%2C%2C30200-1300355%2C00.html
Buddy Holly and The Crickets --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Holly
(Remember "Happiness is Lubbock in my rear view mirror.")
In 1955 Bob Jensen wore horn-rimmed glasses that had no prescription (clear glass).
Buddy Holly's plane crashed in Mason City  about 50 miles from my hometown in Algona, Iowa.

• Peggy Sue --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XccBx9rp4eo

• Buddy Holly Live --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3b3MINe5AZg

• That's be the Day --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9G-PL2BpOk

• Oh Boy! --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PYXZEkAC4E

• That's Be the Day --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pribHw93OPc

• Mike Berry Tribute --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDdn8000pAE

• Maybe Baby --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbcLhalxq_k

• The Day the Music Died --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkDAykXwO_Q

• The Crash Site --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKMDbQtRbXQ

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials) --- http://www.slacker.com/ 

Photographs and Art

Online Books, Poems, References, and Other Literature
In the past I've provided links to various types electronic literature available free on the Web. 
I created a page that summarizes those various links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Free Library (in topic categories) --- http://www.thefreelibrary.com/

Powell's Books --- http://www.powells.com/picks

Famous Quotes --- http://www.citate-celebre.com/famous-quotes/best-quotes-by-famous-people/

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest --- http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

Digital Library Books Page --- http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/

East of the Web Short Stories --- http://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/

East of the Web Interactive --- http://www.eastoftheweb.com/hyperfiction/index.html

George Burn's Creative Quotations (Video) --- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwvYYlhJ29o

Links by Logos --- http://www.allmyfaves.com/

Global Incident Map --- http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php

The map itself has a running default setting for the "last eight days." This may be an issue since even the many terror-prone parts of the world do not have reported incidents every week. Also in Africa many crimes like rape go unreported. I think the database depends heavily on police reports. Police reporting and record keeping in many corrupt parts of the world, especially in Africa, are highly limited and politically corrupted.

It is possible underneath the map to change the reporting period. The Sudan and Nigeria are not ignored entirely in longer time frames, but once again I think the police reporting problem is an issue in these nations. Chad in particular appears to be problematic.

I did find the map useful for certain levels of detail in nations with better police reporting. For example, I had no idea that on January 20, 2008 animal rights activists in Wellington, New Zealand are suspected of lethally poisoning the milk of two medical research workers.

Bob Jensen

One of Liberia's most notorious rebel commanders, known as Gen. Butt Naked, has returned to the nation his troops terrorized to confess, saying he is responsible for 20,000 deaths. Joshua Milton Blahyi, who now lives in Ghana, returned this week to face his homeland's truth and reconciliation commission, this time wearing a suit and tie. His nom de guerre is derived from his platoon's practice of charging naked into battle, a technique meant to terrify the enemy. Other warlords, though, have refused to ask forgiveness, dismissing a commission many in Liberia see as toothless.
"Ex-warlord Confesses to 20,000 Deaths," CNN, January 21, 2008 --- http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/africa/01/21/liberia.general.ap/index.html

"It's mostly a choice between Clinton and the other one --- Omega. I intend to vote for Clinton."
Nevada voter in Los Vegas in an interview with an ABC News crew, January 18, 2008. His statement was aired on ABC News that night. It appears that he seriously could not think of Obama's name. He planned to vote for Clinton.

A senior British diplomat has admitted that Polish immigration to Britain has spun out of control. Paul Fox, who is consul general at the British Embassy in Warsaw, said that the influx of Poles in the last three years was "one of the largest immigrations Britain has ever seen, in such a short time". . . More than two million Poles have left Poland since it joined the European Union in 2004, with up to one million heading to Britain and Ireland.
Harry de Quetteville, London Telegraph, January 19, 2008 --- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml

I'm sorry," Reyes said. "There is much that I regret. If I could turn back the clock, I would."
As pointed out in the Opinion Journal, January 18, 2008 Reyes' choice of words is truly ironic since he was convicted of options "backdating." When he committed the fraud he truly did turn the clock back. Now he would like to turn it back again since he got caught.

The antiquated Securities and Exchange Commission's computer system prevents investigators from safeguarding U.S. market integrity. "It's like working with one hand tied behind their backs," Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley commented about the Dec. 17 release of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report he'd initiated — "SEC: Opportunities Exist to Improve Oversight of Self-Regulatory Organizations." Why can't the government with the world's most advanced computer technology and capabilities equip its agencies with state-of-the-art systems allowing them to better monitor markets and transactions, including illegal activities? In response to the GAO criticism, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox acknowledged, "additional information-technology changes such as these may help the [SEC] enforcement staff to effectively analyze trends, manage current caseloads and focus areas of investigation." But all federal officials — not just at the SEC — should worry about much more than insider trading. Take terror financing. So far, no U.S. official at any level, including presidential candidates from both parties, has publicly addressed how radical Muslim groups and Islamic terror organizations raise major sums to facilitate the murder of Americans in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, among other things.
Rachel Ehrenfeld & Alyssa A. Lappen, "Terror's Financiers," The Washington Times via The New Media Journal, January 19, 2008 --- http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/ehrenfeld/2008/01192008.htm

Time Magazine's Person of the Year --- http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/
Time Magazine's account does not jive with the facts!
Many of Putin's defenders . . . contend that Russia's democratic retreat has enhanced the state's ability to provide for its citizens. The myth of Putinism is that Russians are safer, more secure, and generally living better than in the 1990s -- and that Putin himself deserves the credit. . . . [But] in terms of public safety, health, corruption, and the security of property rights, Russians are actually worse off today than they were a decade ago. The murder rate has . . . increased under Putin, according to data from Russia's Federal State Statistics Service. In the "anarchic" years of 1995-99, the average annual number of murders was 30,200; in the "orderly" years of 2000-2004, the number was 32,200. The death rate from fires is around 40 a day in Russia, roughly 10 times the average rate in western Europe. Nor has public health improved in the last eight years. Despite all the money in the Kremlin's coffers, health spending averaged 6% of GDP from 2000 to 2005, compared with 6.4% from 1996 to 1999. Russia's population has been shrinking since 1990, thanks to decreasing fertility and increasing mortality rates, but the decline has worsened since 1998. Noncommunicable diseases have become the leading cause of death (cardiovascular disease accounts for 52% of deaths, three times the figure for the United States), and alcoholism now accounts for 18% of deaths for men between the ages of 25 and 54. At the end of the 1990s, annual alcohol consumption per adult was 10.7 liters (compared with 8.6 liters in the United States and 9.7 in the United Kingdom); in 2004, this figure had increased to 14.5 liters. . . . Life expectancy in Russia rose between 1995 and 1998. Since 1999, however, it has declined to 59 years for Russian men and 72 for Russian women. At the same time that Russian society has become less secure and less healthy under Putin, Russia's international rankings for economic competitiveness, business friendliness, and transparency and corruption all have fallen. . . .
Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss in the January/February 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2008, Page A13 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120062520244399763.html

The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found. In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Previous research had found a similar bias toward reporting positive results for a variety of medications; and many researchers have questioned the reported effectiveness of antidepressants. But the new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. And it documents a large difference: while 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did.
Benedict Carey, "Antidepressant Studies Unpublished ," The New York Times, January 20, 2008 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/17/health/17depress.html 

Lawyer and women's rights activist Seyran Ates told me it is very difficult to reach women isolated behind their walls of silence. Contact is usually made only with the few who are brave enough to scale those walls and seek refuge in a woman's shelter. For Muslims in Europe, the main issues — discrimination by host societies, difficulty in finding jobs, and family conflicts — have remained more or less the same since I first started looking at immigrant communities in Europe. But with regard to Muslim women, I've seen changes — albeit in different directions and at different paces. It is still hard to say where these changes will lead. But at a time when Europeans are beginning to question the notion of multiculturalism that often leads to separate, parallel societies, authorities are now looking to Muslim women in the belief that their empowerment can facilitate their communities' integration into mainstream societies. And Muslim women themselves, better-educated and more experienced than their mothers and grandmothers, are beginning to grapple with the obstacles and abuse facing women in both their communities and in the broader society.
Sylvia Poggioli, "Issues for Muslim Women in Europe Evolve," NPR, January http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18226044

Have you been in an airport recently and maybe seen a gaggle of America's heroes returning from Iraq? And you've probably thought, "Ah, what a marvelous sight. Remind me to straighten up the old 'Support Our Troops' fridge magnet, which seems to have slipped down below the reminder to reschedule my acupuncturist. Maybe I should go over and thank them for their service." No, no, no, under no account approach them. Instead, try to avoid making eye contact and back away slowly toward the sign for the parking garage. You're in the presence of mentally damaged violent killers who could snap at any moment. You hadn't heard that? Well, it's in the New York Times: "a series of articles" – that's right, a whole series – "about veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who have committed killings, or been charged with them, after coming home." It's an epidemic, folks. As the Times put it: "Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: 'Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.' Pierre, S.D.: 'Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.' Colorado Springs: 'Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.'"
Mark Steyn, "Some fictional horrors of war," Orange County Register, January 19, 2008 --- http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/war-times-iraq-1962198-one-home

There is this whole business of the new politics. Well I got a taste of the new politics today. We need a new politics where we all love each other. You’ve heard all that. There’s a radio ad up in the northern part of Nevada telling Republicans that they ought to just register as Democrats for a day so they can beat Hillary and go out and be Republicans next week and vote in the primary. Doesn’t sound like the new politics to me. Today when my daughter and I were wandering through the hotel, and all these culinary workers were mobbing us telling us they didn’t care what the union told them to do, they were gonna caucus for Hillary. There was a representative of the organization following along behind us going up to everybody who said that, saying 'if you’re not gonna vote for our guy were gonna give you a schedule tomorrow so you can’t be there.' So, is this the new politics? I haven’t seen anything like that in America in 35 years. So I will say it again – they think they're better than you.
Bill Clinton complaining of Culinary Workers Union intimidation in the Nevada caucuses, as quoted by Ben Smith, Politico, January 19, 2008 ---  http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0108/Bill_Clinton_claims_he_witnessed_voter_suppression.html  

Bill Clinton today accused the union backing Barack Obama of illegally blocking its workers from backing his wife in an orchestrated campaign of "voter suppression" in Nevada's Democratic caucuses. Mr Clinton, who spent 90 minutes at the Mirage Casino in Las Vegas today shaking voters' hands, was told by several workers that their union, which has backed Mr Obama, has told them they could not register to vote unless they supported the Illinois senator.
"Bill Clinton accuses Obama-backed union of vote rigging," London Times, January 19, 2008 --- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3217097.ece

In American pop culture, the face of abortion is often a frightened teenager, nervously choosing to terminate an unexpected pregnancy. The numbers tell a far more complex story in which financial stress can play a pivotal role. Half of the roughly 1.2 million U.S. women who have abortions each year are 25 or older. Only about 17 percent are teens. About 60 percent have given birth to at least one child before getting an abortion. A disproportionately high number are black or Hispanic. And regardless of race, high abortion rates are linked to hard times.
David Crary, "Most women who abort are mothers Ability to care for kids a key factor," Seattlepi.com, January 18, 2008 --- http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/348000_abortion19.html

Barack Obama's real thinking about Israel and the Middle East continues to be an enigma. The words he chose  in an address to AIPAC create a different impression than the composition of his foreign policy advisory team.  Several advisors have evidenced a history of suspicion and worse toward Israel. One of his advisors in particular, Robert Malley, clearly warrants attention, as does the reasoning that led him to being chosen by Barack Obama . . . Simon Malley loathed Israel and anti-Israel activism became a crusade for him-as an internet search would easily show. He spent countless hours with Yasser Arafat and became a close friend of Arafat. He was, according to Daniel Pipes, a sympathizer of the Palestinian Liberation Organization --- and this was when it was at the height of its terrorism wave against the West . His efforts were so damaging to France that President Valerie d'Estaing expelled him from the country. Malley has seemingly followed in his father's footsteps: he represents the next generation of anti-Israel activism. Through his writings he has served as a willing propagandist, bending the truth (and more) to serve an agenda that is marked by anti-Israel bias; he heads a group of Middle East policy advisers for a think-tank funded (in part) by anti-Israel billionaire activist George Soros; and now is on the foreign policy staff of a leading Presidential contender. Each step up the ladder seems to be a step closer towards his goal of empowering radicals and weakening the ties between American and our ally Israel.
Ed Lasky, American Thinker, January 23, 2008 --- http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/01/barack_obamas_middle_east_expe.html

Eight years ago, in her first campaign for the Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton was scrambling to put out fires with a troublesome New York minority: Jewish voters. Now, she's emerged as the candidate with the bulk of establishment Jewish support as the presidential campaign moves to Nevada, home to Las Vegas and the fastest-growing Jewish community in the country.
Ben Smith, "Clinton besting Obama in bid for Jewish vote:  Six years of fence-mending begins to pay off," Twin Cities, January 18, 2008 --- http://www.twincities.com/ci_8015135?source=rss&nclick_check=1

Spain arrests 14 terror suspects Spain is still haunted by the Madrid bombings - carried out by Islamists Bomb-related material has been found during raids in Barcelona which led to the arrest of 14 people suspected of links with an Islamist terror network. Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the suspects included 12 from Pakistan and two from India. Local media reports that the Spanish intelligence agency had warned France, the UK and Portugal that a terror cell was preparing an imminent attack . . . Bomb-related material has been found during raids in Barcelona which led to the arrest of 14 people suspected of links with an Islamist terror network. Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said the suspects included 12 from Pakistan and two from India. Local media reports that the Spanish intelligence agency had warned France, the UK and Portugal that a terror cell was preparing an imminent attack.
"Spain arrests 14 terror suspects," BBC News, January 19, 2008 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7197562.stm

Pakistani police have arrested a teenager who was allegedly part of a five-man squad in the plot to kill opposition leader Benazir Bhutto last month, security officials said Saturday. The suspect, 15-year-old Aitezaz Shah, was arrested from the northwestern city of Dera Ismail Khan on Friday while planning a suicide bombing over the Muslim festival of Ashura, they said on condition of anonymity. Shah told interrogators he had been part of a back-up team of three bombers who were tasked with killing former premier Bhutto if the original December 27 attack by two men had failed, the officials added. ... He allegedly said the attackers in the team that killed Bhutto were called Bilal and Ikramullah -- the same names mentioned in an alleged telephone conversation between Mehsud and another militant the day after Bhutto's death.
Edward Morrisey, The Captain's Quarters, January 19, 2008 --- http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/016681.php 

Picture this: the electric plant which supplies 70% of electricity to the Palestinians in Gaza is in Ashkelon. The Palestinians in Gaza have been shooting kassam rockets at the plant ever since the "disengagement" i.e. the abandonment of Gush Katif. Now, Palestinians are crying that they don't have enough electricity. They are complaining about Israeli sanctions against them. They are going to the U.N. The truth is, Israel has not stopped supplying electricity to Gaza. Not only that, but Israeli electric company employees are risking their lives to do so.
January 20, 2008 email from naomiragen@mail-list.com

al Qaeda Hires Yale Law School Lawyers
War is a continuation of politics by other means, the German strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously observed in his 19th-century treatise, "On War." Clausewitz surely could never have imagined that politics, pursued through our own courts, would be the continuation of war. Last week, I (a former Bush administration official) was sued by José Padilla -- a 37-year-old al Qaeda operative convicted last summer of setting up a terrorist cell in Miami. Padilla wants a declaration that his detention by the U.S. government was unconstitutional, $1 in damages, and all of the fees charged by his own attorneys. The lawsuit by Padilla and his Yale Law School lawyers is an effort to open another front against U.S. anti-terrorism policies. If he succeeds, it won't be long before opponents of the war on terror use the courtroom to reverse the wartime measures needed to defeat those responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on 9/11 . . . Padilla's complaints mirror the left's campaign against the war. To them, the 9/11 attacks did not start a war, but instead were simply a catastrophe, like a crime or even a natural disaster. They would limit the U.S. response only to criminal law enforcement managed by courts, not the military. Every terrorist captured away from the Afghanistan battlefield would have the right to counsel, Miranda warnings, and a criminal trial that could force the government to reveal its vital intelligence secrets.
John Yoo, "Terrorist Tort Travesty," The Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2008; Page A13 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120070333580301911.html

Biased Media:  At the last minute in 1998 NEWSWEEK magazine killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation:
A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States! The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top NEWSWEEK suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the president's sexual preference. Reports of the relationship spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month.
"NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN, Drudge Report, January 17, 1998 --- http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2002/01/17/20020117_175502_ml.htm
Jensen Comment
I doubt that Newsweek would've killed this had it be President Bush. I've never seen a favorable article about President Bush in NBC's Newsweek Magazine. This is consistent with NBC's liberal bias. The DRUDGE REPORT has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist. I doubt that you will find these tapes for the historical record in the Clinton Library.

Bernanke, who came to the job with a refreshing humility — a desire to be less an oracle like Greenspan than a plain-speaking technocrat —faces exactly this sort of crisis now. Ever since last summer, a meltdown in financial markets has led to daunting losses in the banking industry and throughout Wall Street. Despite having written extensively on how to deal with such episodes, Bernanke has thus far been unable to reinstill a sense of confidence. His faith in modern forecasting models notwithstanding, he failed to foresee that the sudden rise in homeowner defaults, which triggered the crisis, would have such far-reaching effects. And the monetary medicine that he has prescribed, including some of the very tools that he lovingly detailed in his research, have yet to produce a turnaround.
Roger Lowenstein, "The Education of Ben Bernanke," The New York Times Magazine, January 20, 2008 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/magazine/20Ben-Bernanke-t.html

A real recession may have started, although in the fourth quarter of 2007, aggregate hours worked increased, as they did in the third quarter, and oil prices have declined. Economic fears can, however, become self-fulfilling by paralyzing decisions to consume and invest. Often, the wise response to an economic correction is "Don't just do something, stand there," because the market is doing the right things. But corrections provoke political competition to provide relief. And when government "fine-tunes" the economy with "demand management," it responds to economic conditions as they were, not as they have become. The ameliorative measures Congress will legislate, perhaps by March, will be responsive to economic conditions indicated by statistics collected many months before the measures will begin to affect economic behavior, if they do affect it.
George F. Will, "Stimulating Talk, Redux," Newsweek Magazine, January 28, 2008 --- http://www.newsweek.com/id/96369

Forget the glitzy restaurants of New York and London: only in Zimbabwe would a hamburger actually cost millions of dollars. The central bank of the southern African country has a issued a 10million Zimbabwe dollar note. The move increases the denomination of the nation's highest bank note more than tenfold. Even so, a hamburger in an ordinary cafe in Zimbabwe costs 15 million Zimbabwe dollars.
"Zimbabwe bank issues $10million bill - but it won't even buy you a hamburger in Harare," London Daily Mail, January 19, 2008 --- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/worldnews.html?in_article_id=508840
Jensen Comment
You chuckle, but the day is coming when the U.S. will print a $10 million U.S. dollar bill that won't buy a hamburger, because U.S. politicians from both parties no longer can say no to doomsday entitlements --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm 

Accounting and finance professors should use this video every semester in class!
The best explanation ever of the sub-prime (meaning lending to borrowers with much less than prime credit ratings) mortgage greed and fraud.
The best explanation ever about securitized financial instruments and worldwide banding frauds using such instruments.
The best explanation ever about how greedy employees will cheat on their employers and their customers.

"House Of Cards: The Mortgage Mess Steve Kroft Reports How The Mortgage Meltdown Is Shaking Markets Worldwide," Sixty Minutes Television on CBS, January 27, 2008 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/01/25/60minutes/main3752515.shtml
For a few days the video may be available free.
The transcript will probably be available for a longer period of time.

Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

January 29, 2008 reply from Jim Fuehrmeyer [jfuehrme@nd.edu]

Bob, you don’t know me, but I’m new to academia – I took early retirement from Deloitte & Touche in Chicago to teach accounting & auditing. I replied to the email, but it was rejected so I’m going to send you my two cents. It’s probably a bit naïve, but what the heck.

Two things:

First, when do we start asking “the question” about sub-prime lending in the first place? People who make the loans, sell the loans and invest in the loans are making money (and now losing money) off of folks who have no business being placed in a position to get easy credit to begin with. I’m sorry, but I find it disgusting. I have no sympathy for investors in these instruments and no sympathy for the lenders who originated the loans.

Second, whether the (SPE) standard is 10% or 3% or 0.01% so long as there’s a political process around that allows for the banks that have “no continuing involvement” with the loans to be in a position to amend them, we’re going to continue to live with the fiction that these financial instruments can be off balance sheet. If the QSPE purchaser of the loans doesn’t have the ability to amend them, I find it difficult to understand how one argues it truly owns them; that it has the risks and rewards of ownership. These securitized loans should be on balance sheet – and I think that would put the breaks on sub-prime lending.

Jim Fuehrmeyer

January 29, 2008 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Jim,

Thank you for the reply. May I share it with the AECM and in my SPE module?

Actually the Sixty Minutes show is very, very good with respect to your first question. The two main problems were as follows:

1. Too many employees all along the way wanted to make a quick buck even if it screwed their employers and customers.
2. Real estate valuation for lending purposes has always be ridden with fraud (remember the S&L fiasco back in the 1980s). The fraud simply heated up in the sub-prime bubble to a point where appraisers were valuing houses at 125% or more of any realistic market value. Buyers loved it because they could borrow more than value. Some borrowers took out second and third mortgages and pocketed the cash. Then when the real estate market took a nose dive, borrowers discovered that the value of their homes was way below what they owed on their property. They walked away from their homes rather than continue to pay off the debt.

What the Sixty Minutes show did not stress is the inadequate accounting internal controls all along this lending chain from a house in Stockton to a bundled securitized financial instrument sold to a European bank. Internal controls were either not put in place or ignored all along the chain. And the auditors themselves signed off on these bad internal controls just like they did in the S&L bubble.

Did the perpetrators all along the chain know the risks of these poor internal controls? Absolutely, at least up to the point where the final buyers of the financial instruments that thought mortgaged-backed securities had more value than the collateral itself. Was Merrill Lynch and the NYC banks parties to the fraud just as much as the crooks that originally brokered the fraudulent mortgages in Stockton --- Absolutely!!!!

Bob Jensen

"Creative Class, Dismissed:  Students take the arts' nobility as gospel until they meet a heretic named Jean-Jacques,"
by Laurie Fendich, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, Volume 54, Issue 20, Page B10, January 25, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i20/20b01001.htm?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

Recently I've been teaching, in a couple of undergraduate seminars, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre (1758), the most provocative essay on the arts ever written. It is about the unintended effects of theater — which, for Rousseau, stands in for all of the arts — on an audience. The essay is an impassioned rebuttal to the 1757 entry on Geneva, written by Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, in the huge Enlightenment project, Encyclopédie, in which d'Alembert says that Geneva would be an even finer city if only it didn't have laws banning theater. Rousseau says that, au contraire, theater would actually be harmful to the citizens of Calvinist Geneva and tries to prove that the prohibition is a good thing.

To my students, Rousseau's astonishing position collides head-on with the TV-drenched, movie-dependent, iPodified, grind-dancing world in which many of them spend a good part of their lives. The idea that their world of stories and entertainment — even in its more respectable precincts such as Masterpiece Theatre and U2 benefit concerts — could possibly be harmful to them is the furthest thing from their minds. In studying Rousseau's essay, my students directly confront their stormy love affair with mass culture. They learn the extent to which their youthful values are already in deep conflict with one another. They experience — albeit in fitful spasms — a sense of urgency about their lives, realizing with a kind of awe that their college years mark one of the most significant life passages they will ever face.

In the Letter, Rousseau's preoccupation is with how to sustain "virtue" in the face of modernity. "Virtue" is a word that nearly all of my students initially choke on, as its contemporary meaning applies mostly to anachronistic notions of female chastity. None of them have ever thought much about virtue, but Rousseau, drawing inspiration from ancient Greek political philosophy, is deeply attached to the idea. For him, virtue existed only in communities whose citizens knew how to put aside self-interest for the sake of the whole. The places where Rousseau could find virtue, alas, were confined to a few small, free republics scattered through history, such as ancient Sparta or 18th-century Geneva, and not in freewheeling metropolises such as Paris, awash in urban luxury. Rousseau's essay argues that the twin vices of vanity and competition, born when man left the "state of nature" and formed societies, inevitably destroy virtue and happiness.

Rousseau, the Enlightenment's party pooper, shocks college students by trashing education and reason, science and art, and the advancement of knowledge in general. Most students have come to college at least partly to "make themselves better." Rousseau seems to be telling them not to fool themselves. Their real motives, he implies, are vanity and ambition. And nothing fuels those two vices, Rousseau says, like the arts.

Such a counterintuitive attack on the arts jolts my art students in particular. Since their early childhoods, they've been taught that by making and showing off their finger paintings, class plays, and rhythm-band performances, they're somehow doing a very nice thing for themselves and everyone around them. Although my students readily concede Rousseau's initial premises that theater's purpose is to entertain (that is, to give pleasure) and that it's a luxury rather than a necessity, they have a hard time accepting the possibility that it might be truly deleterious.

Continued in article

"Blog Comments and Peer Review Go Head to Head to See Which Makes a Book Better," by Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1322n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

What if scholarly books were peer reviewed by anonymous blog comments rather than by traditional, selected peer reviewers?

That's the question being posed by an unusual experiment that begins today. It involves a scholar studying video games, a popular academic blog with the playful name Grand Text Auto, a nonprofit group designing blog tools for scholars, and MIT Press.

The idea took shape when Noah Wardrip-Fruin, an assistant professor of communication at the University of California at San Diego, was talking with his editor at the press about peer reviewers for the book he was finishing, The book, with the not-so-playful title Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, examines the importance of using both software design and traditional media-studies methods in the study of video games.

One group of reviewers jumped to his mind: "I immediately thought, you know it's the people on Grand Text Auto." The blog, which takes its moniker from the controversial video game Grand Theft Auto, is run by Mr. Wardrip-Fruin and five colleagues. It offers an academic take on interactive fiction and video games.

Inviting More Critics

The blog is read by many of the same scholars he sees at academic conferences, and also attracts readers from the video-game industry and teenagers who are hard-core video-game players. At its peak, the blog has had more than 200,000 visitors per month, he says.

"This is the community whose response I want, not just the small circle of academics," Mr. Wardrip-Fruin says.

So he called up the folks at the Institute for the Future of the Book, who developed CommentPress, a tool for adding digital margin notes to blogs (The Chronicle, September 28, 2007). Would they help out? He wondered if he could post sections of his book on Grand Text Auto and allow readers, using CommentPress, to add critiques right in the margins.

The idea was to tap the wisdom of his crowd. Visitors to the blog might not read the whole manuscript, as traditional reviewers do, but they might weigh in on a section in which they have some expertise.

The institute, an unusual academic center run by the University of Southern California but based in Brooklyn, N.Y., was game. So was Mr. Wardrip-Fruin's editor at MIT Press, Doug Sery, but with one important caveat. He insisted on running the manuscript through the traditional peer-review process as well. "We are a peer-review press—we're always going to want to have an honest peer review," says Mr. Sery, senior editor for new media and game studies. "The reputation of MIT Press, or any good academic press, is based on a peer-review model."

So the experiment will provide a side-by-side comparison of reviewing—old school versus new blog. Mr. Wardrip-Fruin calls the new method "blog-based peer review."

Each day he will post a new chunk of his draft to the blog, and readers will be invited to comment. That should open the floodgates of input, possibly generating thousands of responses by the time all 300-plus pages of the book are posted. "My plan is to respond to everything that seems substantial," says the author.

The institute is modifying its CommentPress software for the project, with the help of a $10,000 grant from San Diego's Academic Senate, to create a version that bloggers can more easily add to their existing academic blogs.

A Cautious Look Forward

Mr. Wardrip-Fruin's friends have warned him that sorting through all those comments will take over his life, or at least take far more time than he expects. "It's been said to me enough times by people who are not just naysayers that it is in the back of my mind," he acknowledges. Still, the book's review process "will pale in comparison to the work of writing it."

He expects the blog-based review to be more helpful than the traditional peer review because of the variety of voices contributing. "I am dead certain it will make the book better," he says.

Mr. Sery isn't so sure. "I don't know how this general peer review is going to help," the editor says, except maybe to catch small errors that have slipped through the cracks. Traditional peer review involves carefully chosen experts in the same subject area, who can point to big-picture issues as well as nitpick details. He bets that the blog reviews might merely spark flame wars or other unhelpful arguments about minor points. "I'm curious to see what kind of comments we get back," he says.

That probably "depends on what you're writing about," says Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, a group that supports the use of technology in scholarly communication. "If, God help you, you're writing about current religious or political issues, you're going to get a lot of people with agendas who aren't interested in having a rational discussion. Some of them are just psychos."

Even without flame wars, Mr. Sery equates the blog review with the kind of informal sharing of drafts that many academics do with close friends. It's useful, but it's still not formal peer review, he argues. Carefully choosing reviewers "really allows for the expression of their ideas on the book," he says. Scholars can say with authority, for instance, that a book just isn't worth publishing.

Ben Vershbow, editorial director at the Institute for the Future of the Book, concedes that comments on blogs are unlikely to fully replace peer review. But he says academic blogging can play a role in the publishing process.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This is one of those experiments that is impossible to extrapolate. Blog comments are totally voluntary and impulsive such that blog comments are going to be highly variable with respect to topics, errors in the original document, and extent of the readership in the blog. Few blog activists are going to give time and attention to reviews that are not going to be widely read.

Peer reviews are likely to be less impulsive since the reviewer generally agrees ahead of time to conduct a review. But they are more variable than blog comments. The reason is that peer reviewers spend less time reviewing manuscripts that are outliers (i.e., those that are so good that there are few recommendations for change or those that are so bad that there's little hope for a future positive recommendation to publish). More time may be spend on manuscripts that need a lot of repair but have high hopes.

The main problem with peer reviews is that there are so few reviewers. Much depends upon which two or three reviewers are assigned to review the manuscript. Three reviewers' garbage may be another three reviewers' treasure. Another problem is that peer reviews are seldom published in the name of the anonymous reviewers. Blog commentators generally do so in their own names and get some reputation enhancement among their blog peers, especially if their are praiseworthy replies on the blog to the blog review. Anonymous reviewers get little incremental reputation enhancement for their unpublished reviews.

Still another problem with peer reviews is that editors and their hand picked reviewers may be a biased subset of a scholarly community. Others in the community may be shut out, which is now a raging problem in academic accountancy --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

January 23, 2008 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]

Bob, I agree with you entirely, on numerous points. Reviewers usually take more care, and not only have some credentialed background/knowledge/experience, they also often have a stake (even if merely altruistic) which serves as an incentive for contributing a constructuve effect and arriving at a positive end result. All of these can be (and frequently are) completely lacking in open blogging and other totally-anonymous contributory-type sites.

And I agree that the downside is the limited (and potentially biased) input from "credentialed" reviewers.

But all in all, I agree that the credentialed reviewer is probably preferable.

Some day perhaps educated individuals will come to their senses and realize that pure anonymity has very little going for it. Even anonymous reviewers aren't truly anonymous -- someone somewhere knows who they are and has passed judgment that they are credentialed enough to serve in that capacity. I doubt seriously that the 14-year-old juvenile delinquent down the street from me would be allowed to review a paper submitted to the (*insert your favorite refereed pub here*), so why should he be able to pose anonymously online as someone whose comments would carry the same weight? And I agree entirely that those with axes to grind are probably more likely to contribute to open blogging but be barred from credentialed reviews.

The movie "Being There" starring Peter Sellers is my recommended viewing along these lines. (And Samuel Adams was my favorite founding father. I like his writings far more than Ghandi, Jefferson, or even Plato.)

As I read more and more stuff on Wikipedia, I become more and more convinced that allowing any yahoo (no offense intended to VaTech fans) regardless of qualifications (or lack thereof) the privilege of pretending to share "knowledge" ultimately decreases the quality of the product. I am starting to keep a list of the dozens of inaccuracies and blatant errors (falsehoods) in this supposedly-refereed-by-the-masses-and-therefore-reliable resource.

Just last night, for instance, less that 12 hours ago, I was mindlessly surfing around on the internet while on the phone to my daughter in Alaska. Our conversation about bush pilots wound its way over to my memories of a TV show named "Sky King" back in the late 1950's. For fun, I went to Wikipedia to look up Kirby Grant, star of the show. Under the "Kirby Grant" entry, it says, and I quote word for word, "Although it is often reported that Kirby Grant was an accomplished pilot in real life, he was not. ... no pilot's license was ever issued to him. The Cessna T-50 used in the first episodes of the series was provided by Paul Mantz Air Services and flown by several pilots, and the Cessna 310B used in later episodes was provided at no cost by Cessna and flown by Cessna employee Bill Fergusson."

Yet, under the "Sky King" entry in this same Wikipedia resource, under the production notes section, it says, and again I quote, "There were four of these aircraft. ... The Cessna T-50 and one of the 310Bs belonged to Kirby Grant, who did much of the flying himself. Legendary Hollywood pilot Paul Mantz flew the Songbird in other flying scenes." It also says that much of the show's budget went for aircraft.

I have no idea whether Kirby Grant flew or not, or owned airplanes or not, or whether Mantz flew or he had pilots that did, or whether Cessna provided the aircraft for free or whether the show had to pay for them. And in my particular case, it doesn't really matter to me. But the real important thing is that one of those two entries has to be incorrect. Yet if you looked at one entry and didn't stumble across the other, you have a 50% chance of getting a load of incorrect information from Wikipedia.

I am finding more and more of these as more and more people are allowed to drop their garbage into "open" resources.

Not to say that qualified peer review is blemish-free in this respect, just that I expect a higher quality product from non-anonymous (or even partially-anonymous) reviewers who have been credentialed than I will ever expect from completely open commentary by any anonymous and uncredentialed ...um, ... whatever.

David "I hate incompetent reviews as much as anybody"

Fordham
James Madison University

January 25, 2006 message from Dennis Beresford [dberesfo@terry.uga.edu]

Bob,

FYI. Congratulations on the publication of your very interesting paper.

Denny

January 27 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Denny,

 This December 2007 publication is receiving kudos from all over the world, including the latest from Lee Parker in Australia.

What's interesting to me is the flat out rejection of the paper by the editor of The Accounting Review and the referees who stated that it should never be published. One referee would not even put his rejection in writing.

The Journal of Accounting Historians reviews were quite helpful and encouraging, and the JAH editor Dick Fleischman was positive and very encouraging all the way --- http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/
(The December 2007 table of contents is not yet posted)

My conclusion is that accountics enthusiasts are not very open to criticism and almost never are open to debate. They live in their own well-paid artificial world immunizing their journals from that "vocational virus."

More importantly this is another illustration of the inequity of the journal refereeing process upon which careers must be built in today's world.
I'm glad I'm not young anymore ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94XUFh7e-OM  

Bob

 

Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Bob Jensen's threads on oligopoly abuse of scholarly publishing are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals

Potential Roles of ListServs and Blogs
Getting More Than We Give --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm

Report on the Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer 2007 ---
http://www.transparency.org/content/download/27256/410704/file/GCB_2007_report_en_02-12-2007.pdf

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY – GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER 2007...................2

PAYING BRIBES AROUND THE WORLD CONTINUES TO BE ALL TOO COMMON ......3

Figure 1. Demands for bribery, by region 3

Table 1. Countries most affected by bribery 4

Figure 2. Experience of bribery worldwide, selected services 5

Table 2. Percentage of respondents reporting that they paid a bribe to obtain a service 5

Figure 3. Experience with bribery, by service 6

Figure 4. Selected Services: Percentage of respondents who paid a bribe, by region 7

Figure 5. Comparing Bribery: 2006 and 2007 8

CORRUPTION IN KEY INSTITUTIONS: POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE

LEGISLATURE VIEWED AS MOST CORRUPT............................................................8

Figure 6. Perceived levels of corruption in key institutions, worldwide 9

Figure 7. Perceived levels of corruption in key institutions, comparing 2004 and 2007 10

EXPERIENCE V. PERCEPTIONS OF CORRUPTION – DO THEY ALIGN?...................10

Figure 8. Corruption Perceptions Index v. citizens’ experience with bribery 11

LEVELS OF CORRUPTION EXPECTED TO RISE OVER THE NEXT THREE YEARS....11

Figure 9. Corruption will get worse, worldwide 11

Figure 10. Expectations about the future: Comparing 2003 and 2007 12

PUBLIC SCEPTICISM OF GOVERNMENT EFFORTS TO FIGHT CORRUPTION – IN

MOST PLACES .......................................................................................................13

Table 3. How effectively is government fighting corruption? The country view 13

CONCLUSIONS ......................................................................................................13

APPENDIX 1: THE GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER 2007 QUESTIONNAIRE15

APPENDIX 2: THE GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER – ABOUT THE SURVEY17

APPENDIX 3: REGIONAL GROUPINGS..................................................................20

GLOBAL CORRUPTION BAROMETER 2007..........................................................20

APPENDIX 4: COUNTRY TABLES..........................................................................21

Table 4.1: Respondents who paid a bribe to obtain services 21

Table 4.2: Corruption’s impact on different sectors and institutions 22

Table 4.3: Views of corruption in the future 23

Table 4.4: Respondents' evaluation of their government's efforts to fight corruption 24

Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's Rotten to the Core threads are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm

CIA: Hackers demanding cash disrupted power utilities overseas
Hackers literally turned out the lights in multiple cities after breaking into electrical utilities and demanding extortion payments before disrupting the power, a senior CIA analyst told utility engineers at a trade conference. All the break-ins occurred outside the United States, said senior CIA analyst Tom Donahue. The U.S. government believes some of the hackers had inside knowledge to cause the outages. Donahue did not specify what countries were affected, when the outages occurred or how long the outages lasted. He said they happened in ''several regions outside the United States.'' ''In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities,'' Donahue said in a statement. ''We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.''
MIT's Technology Review, January 18, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20094/?nlid=824 

From Jim Mahar's blog on January 25, 2008 ---

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Kerviel joins ranks of master rogue traders:

"In being identified as the lone wolf behind French investment bank Société Générale's staggering $7.1-billion loss Thursday, Jérôme Kerviel joined the ranks of a rare and elite handful of rogue traders whose audacious transactions have single-handedly brought some of the world's financial powerhouses to their knees.

This notorious company includes Nick Leeson, who brought down Britain's Barings Bank in 1995 by blowing $1.4-billion, Yasuo Hamanaka, who squandered $2.6-billion on fraudulent copper deals for Sumitomo Corp. of Japan in 1998, John Rusnak, who frittered away $750-million through unauthorized currency trading for Allied Irish Bank in 2002 and Brian Hunter of Calgary, who oversaw the loss of $6-billion on hedge fund bets at Amaranth Advisors in 2006.

Bob Jensen's threads on trader frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm#InvestmentBanking

Barcode Yourself --- http://www.barcodeart.com/art/yourself/yourself.html

"NIH Doesn't Check Academics on Financial Conflicts of Interest, Auditors Say," by Jeffrey Brainard, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 21, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1308n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Bob Jensen's threads on college accountability are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Accountability

Beware of those bargain deals that companies offer
From hotels to cell phone bills, companies attach a barrage of hidden, extra charges. One reason is the Internet. Online shopping permits consumers to comparison shop for bargains. So companies are countering low prices with hefty fees. So if a $99 room is snagged at a nice hotel via Priceline.com, then the hotel tends to attach a "resort fee" for towels at the pool or removing something from the mini-bar – even it put back 60 seconds later. Bob Sullivan, author of Gotcha Capitalism, talks with Steve Inskeep about deceptive fees and why U.S. businesses are so dependent on them.
"Companies Use Fees to Counter Bargains," NPR, January 18, 2008 --- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18212223

Bob Jensen's threads on consumer frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

Diary of a Student at Patrick Henry College
The Nation's First College for Home-School Students
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/2001/03/23homeschool.html

Jensen Comment
Parts of this diary are funny.

North Carolina Student Wins Open-Access Video Contest
A library group that promotes open access to scholarly data today announced the winners of a contest that had students producing short videos that advocate sharing of ideas and information. Habib Yazdi, a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, won first place for this video called "Share." The first runner-up was a video by Tommy McCauley and Max Silver, of Carleton College, titled "Pri Vetai: Private Eye." And the second runner-up was "An Open Access Manifesto," by Romel Espinel and Josh Hardro of the Pratt Institute.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 22, 2008 --- Click Here

Bob Jensen's threads on open access are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Question
Is it hazardous to health to visit Italy?

"Garbage City," by Michael A. Ledeen, The Wall Street Journal, January 22, 2008; Page A18 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120096264239405083.html?mod=todays_us_opinion

Nobody knows how much garbage has been rotting in the streets of Naples for the past several weeks. It is several meters high in some places, and in total may be up to tens of thousands of tons. Naples has always been a doomed city (it is only a matter of time before Vesuvius erupts again), and the current crisis has provoked predictably grim headlines, such as "Naples Beneath an Eruption of Garbage."

The first "garbage crisis" was proclaimed 14 years ago, and a series of special commissioners has accomplished nothing. Corrupt and incompetent officials have made deals with local Mafiosi that guarantee maximum profits and payoffs and minimum help for the people and their land. Ever since the end of World War II, generations of journalists and intellectuals blamed such practices on the corrupt right-wing governments in Rome and Naples. But the left has proven even worse.

Naples and Campania have been in the hands of the left -- notably the colorful Campania president Antonio Bassolino -- for a good two decades now, while Romano Prodi leads a center-left government in Rome. Corruption and collaboration with the mob is rampant: The transcript of a three-year-old investigation showed that one of Mr. Bassolino's cronies paid himself 40,000 euros a year as a consultant to the consortium in charge of garbage treatment.

The garbage problems began in the 1980s, when the Florence incinerator broke down, leaving the Tuscan government in a jam. The Neapolitan Mafia, the camorra, solved it. They took the untreated waste to the south, and dumped it in caves, landfills, streams, lakes and craters. When local authorities raised questions about dangerous waste, the camorra created a network of laboratories to issue phony documents declaring toxic waste to be harmless. This enabled them to charge maximum fees for collection and minimal fees for disposal. Business boomed.

Business was so good that the network spread outside Italy. Tons of garbage were driven from the Swiss Red Cross to remote southern villages; in a single cave the authorities found the equivalent of 28,000 truckloads of waste. In the polluted areas the cancer rate is four times the national average, entire herds of cattle have had to be slaughtered, and many bodies of water have been declared off limits for public use.

One particularly dreadful example of the destruction of the people and the land is the town of Pianura, in a volcanic area where the magma bubbles just below the surface. A crater was used as an illegal dump and for years, all manner of filth simmered without any oversight from the authorities. It's been closed, but too late: The land and the people have been poisoned, which is why a citizens' group stands guard at the dump around the clock, fearing that it might be reopened.

There is no sign that the political class is inclined either to accept responsibility for the crisis, or to take effective measures to fix it. When 10,000 Neapolitans demanded the resignation of Mr. Bassolino and his cohorts, the politicians refused, because it would be "irresponsible" to abandon Naples at such a time.

Continued in article

Question
Does the University of Michigan Press really want to promote a conjecture that the creation of the State of Israel was a mistake?
Is eliminating the State of Israel now the politically correct position in academe?

Bob Jensen's threads on political correctness are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PoliticalCorrectness

The Formation of Scholars: Re-thinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century (Jossey-Bass, 2008) explores the current state of doctoral education in the United States and shows how practices and elements of doctoral programs can be made more powerful by relying on principles of progressive development, integration and collaboration. Written by George E. Walker, Chris M. Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel and Pat Hutchings, and derived from a five-year look at doctoral education by the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate, The Formation of Scholars urges educators to consider how graduate programs can constructively grapple with questions of purpose. The authors identify the need to create intellectual community as essential for high-quality graduate education; and underscore that knowledge-centered, multigenerational communities foster the development of new ideas and encourage intellectual risk taking.
George Walker, Chris M. Golde, Laura Jones, Andrea Conklin Bueschel, and Pat Hutchings, The Formation of Scholars: Rethinking Doctoral Education for the Twenty-First Century (Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2008, $40) ---
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/publications/pub.asp?key=43&subkey=712  
Also see http://www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470197439.html

Foreword by Lee S. Shulman. 1. Moving Doctoral Education into the Future. 2. Setting the Stage for Change. 3. Talking About Purpose: Mirrors, Lenses, and Windows. 4. From Experience to Expertise: Principles of Powerful Formation. 5. Apprenticeship Reconsidered. 6. Creating and Sustaining Intellectual Community. 7. A Call to Action. Appendix A: Summary Description of the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate. Appendix B: List of Participating Departments. Appendix C: Overview of the Surveys. Appendix D: Graduate Student Survey. Appendix E: Graduate Faculty Survey. References. Name Index. Subject Index. Related Titles More By These Authors The Advancement of Learning: Building the Teaching Commons (Hardcover) Changing Practices in Evaluating Teaching: A Practical Guide to Improved Faculty Performance and Promotion/Tenure Decisions (Hardcover) Envisioning the Future of Doctoral Education: Preparing Stewards of the Discipline - Carnegie Essays on the Doctorate (Hardcover) Administration & Policy On Becoming a Woman Leader: Learning from the Experiences of University Presidents (Hardcover) by Susan R. Madsen The Academic Chair's Handbook, 2nd Edition (Hardcover) by Daniel W. Wheeler, Alan T. Seagren, Linda Wysong Becker, Edward R. Kinley, Dara D. Mlinek, Kenneth J. Robson Faculty Incivility: The Rise of the Academic Bully Culture and What to Do About It (Hardcover) by Darla J. Twale, Barbara M. De Luca Assessment Update, Progress, Trends, and Practices in Higher Education, Volume 19, No. 4, July-August 2007 (Paperback) by AU, Trudy W. Banta and Associates (Editor) Economically and Educationally Challenged Students in Higher Education: Access to Outcomes: ASHE Higher Education Report, Volume 33, No. 3 (Paperback) by Marybeth Walpole

Bob Jensen's threads on the sad state of doctoral education in accountancy are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms

Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in doctoral education are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#DoctoralPrograms

Spatial News (GIS history and use) --- http://spatialnews.geocomm.com/
Note the Education section

Home and Student version of Office for Mac
Walter S. Mossberg, Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2008; Page B4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120053503736796333.html

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives to/for MS Office are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm#MSofficeAlternatives

Question
False Hopes:  Are there too many college graduates in the United States?

Despite the commission's careful distinction between "postsecondary education and training" and a college education, what we have here, from the conservative side of the aisle, is a fresh national commitment to "college for all," a populist promise to put a bookish chicken in every pot. The belief in "college for all" and its awkward country cousin "postsecondary education and training for all" is here to stay, because it is animated by a uniquely American mix of cultural and political biases that go deeper than political divisions. Public support for "college for all" unifies the aspiring middle class with those who have already arrived but have a fear of falling and a dread of downward mobility for their children.

The American belief in "college for all" arises from deep in our individualistic cultural bias. We welcome an increasing reliance on college as the arbiter of individual career opportunity since, in theory at least, using education to mediate opportunity allows us to expand merit-based success without surrendering individual responsibility. After all, we each have to do our own homework to make the grades and ace the tests that get us into college and in line for the good jobs.

The use of postsecondary education as the gateway to opportunity also complements our other key preferences for an open economy and a limited government. Education, as opposed to job-specific training, is supposed to develop the general metacognitive abilities necessary to keep up with the changing skill requirements of the contemporary workplace, and it thereby provides the economic self-reliance necessary to ward off public dependency and an expanding welfare state.

"College for all" also works as a public narrative, in part because high-school vocational alternatives are widely regarded as second best by the general public, if not by the elites. Even though polls show that most Americans agree that everyone doesn't need to go to college, most of them support alternatives to college for other people's children, but they want college for their own. Ultimately, of course, there are no "other people's children."

The Shifting Economy

But there's more to "college for all" than cultural bias, political positioning, and middle-class angst. The motto also resonates with our recent experience in the economy.

The historical increase in the workplace demand for postsecondary education is obvious in any analysis of the official government data. In 1973, only 28 percent of prime-age workers had any postsecondary education. Today, 59 percent have attended some type of postsecondary institution.

Postsecondary requirements are increasing partly because jobs that require postsecondary education are concentrated in the growth industries. Our increasing reliance on postsecondary education as the arbiter of opportunity is a direct result of the rise of the post-industrial service economy. Most new jobs that require postsecondary preparation are in offices, education, health care, and the high-tech sector—the signature occupations and industries in the "knowledge economy."

The share of white-collar office jobs, for instance, has risen from 30 to 40 percent of all jobs since 1973. In 1973, only 38 percent of office workers had some kind of postsecondary education. Today, 69 percent of them do, while 37 percent have at least a bachelor's degree, making offices one of the most highly educated workplaces in the country.

The health-care and education sectors also continue to grow, as developing and maintaining human capital becomes more important. Since the 1970s, education and health-care jobs have increased from 10 to almost 20 percent of all jobs. The share of these jobs requiring at least some college has increased from fewer than half in the '70s to more than three-quarters today, with more than 52 percent requiring baccalaureate or graduate degrees.

Meanwhile, the share of technology jobs, the core infrastructure in the post-industrial economy, has doubled from roughly 4 to 8 percent of all jobs. In 1973, 63 percent of technology workers had at least some college; now 86 percent do—and more than one-half have at least a bachelor's degree.

At the same time, the share and number of factory workers with high school or less is shrinking, as a result of productivity growth. These jobs have declined from more than 30 percent of all jobs to less than 17 percent. But even so, the share of manufacturing workers who are college educated is rising, as manufacturing goes high-tech and as the value added comes not so much from making things as from designing, financing, and selling them. In 1973, only 12 percent of workers in manufacturing had any college. That proportion has now increased to more than 36 percent.

Natural-resource jobs—including farming, fishing, forestry, and mining—are also in decline, even as their share of workers with college training keeps increasing. These jobs accounted for about 5 percent of all jobs in 1959 but have declined by more than two-thirds and now only account for about 1.5 percent of all jobs. In 1973, two-thirds of these workers were high-school dropouts, but now workers with at least some college hold 31 percent of those jobs.

Low-wage services jobs are a mixed bag of career and transitional jobs. Their share of the total has not grown since Ike was president in the 1950s, at 28 million workers or about one-fifth of the available work opportunities. Many of these employees are young, some are in school, some are in transition to something better, and some are older workers moving towards retirement.

The Wage Premium for College Graduates

The wage premium for college graduates relative to high-school graduates is the most significant signal that the economy is demanding more-educated workers. During the 1960s and 1970s, the combination of a dramatic increase in the number of baby-boom workers with at least some college and "stagflation" caused the postsecondary wage premium to decline: By 1979, prime-age workers with at least some college only earned about 43 percent more than high-school graduates. But after the 1980 recession, the restructuring of the economy from an industrial to post-industrial knowledge economy accelerated dramatically. As a result, the wage premium for workers with postsecondary education skyrocketed throughout the 1980s and 1990s, reaching 73 percent by 1999. The wage advantage of advanced degree-holders over high-school graduates was even higher, topping out at 124 percent.

And these wage advantages held up and improved in spite of a huge increase in the supply of college-educated workers. Since the 1970s, the share of workers with at least some college tripled, and just since the 1990s, the proportion of employees with at least some college increased by 32 percent. Since the 1990s there have been about 18,350,000 net new workers with at least some college, including 10,000,000 with a baccalaureate degree or better. But their wage advantages over high-school-educated workers still almost doubled over the same period. This is remarkable. Usually, as we all learned in Economics 101, when the supply of anything increases, the price goes down.

Continued in article

Note to Accounting Professors
The following may be useful to students learning FAS 133 and IAS 39.
Questions that might be asked are as follows:

• What’s the difference between a "long bet" from a "short bet?"
   
• What paragraphs of the standards on derivative financial instruments and hedge accounting exclude the following futures contracts from being covered by FAS 133 and IAS 39?
   
• Why, in theory, are the futures contracts described below not appropriate for FAS 133 and IAS 39?
   
• How should risks in the futures contracts below be recorded if they are speculations versus hedges?

Bob Jensen's threads on complying with FAS 133 and IAS 39 are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm

I'm sorry," Reyes said. "There is much that I regret. If I could turn back the clock, I would."
As pointed out in the Opinion Journal, January 18, 2008 Reyes' choice of words is truly ironic since he was convicted of options "backdating." When he committed the fraud he truly did turn the clock back. Now he would like to turn it back again since he got caught.

From The Wall Street Journal Accounting Weekly Review, January 18, 2008

Brocade Ex-CEO Gets 21 Months in Prison by Justin Scheck and Steve Stecklow The Wall Street Journal Jan 17, 2008 Page: A3 Click here to view the full article on WSJ.com --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120050817585095031.html?mod=djem_jiewr_ac   TOPICS: Accounting, Financial Accounting, Financial Reporting, Stock Options SUMMARY: Gregory Reyes, the former chief executive of Brocade Communications Systems Inc. was the first to go on trial and be convicted over the improper dating of stock-option awards. The backdating scandal came to light from academic accounting research that was brought to the attention of the WSJ. Executives committing this fraudulent activity were awarded stock options that were backdated to a point at which the companies' stock prices were lower, often the lowest of the year or quarter. The related article describes the practice as "illegal if not accounted for properly." Mr. Reyes had faced a potential 20 year sentence, but that "...was reduced late last year when Judge Breyer ruled there was no quantifiable loss of money to the company." CLASSROOM APPLICATION: Accounting for stock options and related disclosures QUESTIONS:  1.) Summarize the accounting and disclosure requirements for stock options. Refer to authoritative accounting literature and include a description of dates associated with stock option grants sufficient to discuss the issues in the article. 2.) What does it mean to "back date" a stock option award? 3.) The related article describes the practice of backdating stock options as "illegal if not accounted for properly." What accounting would have been appropriate? You may refer to your answer to question 1 as necessary. 4.) The potential sentence and fine to Mr. Reyes was reduced by the judge in the case because he "ruled there was no quantifiable loss of money to the company." What are the costs of stock option to the issuing company? To its shareholders? Support your answer.   Reviewed By: Judy Beckman, University of Rhode Island   RELATED ARTICLES:  Brocade Ex-CEO Seeks To Overturn Conviction by Justin Scheck Dec 13, 2007 Page: A15

Bob Jensen's threads on backdating frauds are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory/sfas123/jensen01.htm

There is something terribly wrong when the most influential financial publication in the country needs to devote an entire page to convince chief executive officers that honesty is good ("Why CEOs Need to Be Honest With Their Boards," Jan. 14).The Securities and Exchange Commission should require that all CEO contracts require absolute and complete honesty to boards of directors, with severe financial penalties for breaking the trust. Boards should be empowered and emboldened to say, "That little ethical lapse will cost you $10 million in options. Do it again and you are out of here with nothing." If we don't demand integrity from our most powerful and privileged, how can we expect it from our children?
Justin Starren, "Why Are We Even Talking About Honesty for CEOs?" The Wall Street Journal, January 19, 2008; Page A11 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120070775442502187.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

"Mixed Grades for Grads and Assessment," Inside Higher Ed, January 23, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/23/employers

Those conclusions come from a national survey of employers with at least 25 employees and significant hiring of recent college graduates, released Tuesday by the Association of American Colleges and Universities. Over all, 65 percent of those surveyed believe that new graduates of four-year colleges have most or all of the skills to succeed in entry-level positions, but only 40 percent believe that they have the skills to advance.

. . .

In terms of specific skills, the employers didn’t give many A’s or fail many either. The employers were asked to rank new graduates on 12 key areas, and the grads did best in teamwork, ethical judgments and intercultural work, and worst in global knowledge, self-direction and writing.

Employers Ratings of College Graduates Preparedness on 1-10 Scale

Category	Mean Rating	% giving high (8-10) rating	% giving low (1-5) rating
Teamwork	7.0	39%	17%
Ethical judgment	6.9	38%	19%
Intercultural skills	6.9	38%	19%
Social responsibility	6.7	35%	21%
Quantitative reasoning	6.7	32%	23%
Oral communication	6.6	30%	23%
Self-knowledge	6.5	28%	26%
Adaptability	6.3	24%	30%
Critical thinking	6.3	22%	31%
Writing	6.1	26%	37%
Self-direction	5.9	23%	42%
Global knowledge	5.7	18%	46%

To the extent that employers give graduates mixed grades, that raises the question of how they determine who is really prepared. Many of the existing tools appear to be insufficient, the poll found.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
This study is misleading in the sense that large employers generally hire above-average graduates. This skews the results upward with respect to the entire population of college graduates. Colleges have a long way to go in modern times.

Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm

Bob Jensen's threads higher education controversies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm

Baby Boomers Bed in the Boondocks
The word "gentrification" conjures up images of once-poor urban neighborhoods invaded by cappuccino bars and million-dollar condos. Now, broad swaths of rural America -- from New England to the Rocky Mountain West -- are being gussied up, too. Affluent retirees and other high-income types have descended on these remote areas, creating new demand for amenities like interior-design stores, spas and organic markets. For many communities, it's the biggest change since the interstate highway system came barreling through in the 1960s and 1970s. With the Internet allowing people to work from almost anywhere, the distinction between first and second homes has become blurred. Many people are buying retirement property while they're still employed. Millions of soon-to-retire baby boomers, say demographers, will propel this trend for years to come . . . One reason: baby boomers and the previous generation are moving to rural areas in increasing numbers. Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the University of New Hampshire's Carsey Institute, says 76% more people over age 50 moved to "recreation counties" -- places with lots of amenities and seasonal housing -- in the 1990s than in the 1980s. "This suggests that people who are now in their 50s and 60s are moving into these recreation counties more than in the past," he says.
Conor Dougherty, "The New American Gentry" Wealthy folks are colonizing rural areas, bringing cash, culture -- and controversy," The Wall Street Journal (with video clip), January 19, 2008; Page A1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120069319738001353.html?mod=todays_us_page_one

"Tech Ignorance Keeps Teens From Changing the World," by Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2676&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

America’s high-school students are confident they can solve the world’s most complex problems, such as climate change and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. However, more than half of them believe high schools aren’t giving them the science and technology background to take those problems on, according to survey results from MIT.
 

This year’s Lemelson-MIT Invention Index, a survey that indicates Americans’ attitudes toward invention and innovation, shows most high-school studnets (64 percent) believe they are capable of inventing scientific and technological solutions to global issues.
 

At the same time, 59 percent of the teenage respondents (13 to 18 years old) don’t think they are being adequately prepared in high school for science and technology careers.
 

That seems to mesh with yesterday’s Joint Information Systems Committee report that students can “google,” but not do research. The younger generation has a level of comfort with technology, but not necessarily an intimate understanding. The MIT study also indicates, apparently, that students are aware of that shortcoming.

I admit that our high schools could do a better job, especially in the areas of math and science. However, it is quite evident that the attitude of the students plays a substantial role in the learning process. If we address the attitude issues, we will open the door for improved learning processes. Many teachers are considered to be crazy and old (please see previous post), thus perpetuating the problem.

Facebook Is Passe
A Professor Says People tend to be loyal to one social-networking site, though that relationship is often fleeting, says Martin Weller, educational-technology Professor at the Britain-based Open University. He points to no particular reason for this -- just that one site will get old and people will move on to another. He asserts that this is happening to Facebook, but gives an analysis of the lessons academics can take away from the phenomenon. In particular, he writes: "...in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used." So, while librarians "chase the white whale" of social-networking with students, is Facebook old news now? Are academics too removed from Web 2.0 to really understand it?
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 18. 2008 --- Click Here

Education Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

Engineering, Science, and Medicine Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on free online science, engineering, and medicine tutorials are at --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Science

Social Science and Economics Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on Economics, Anthropology, Social Sciences, and Philosophy tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Social

Law and Legal Studies

Bob Jensen's threads on law and legal studies are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Law

Math Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on free online mathematics tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#050421Mathematics

History Tutorials

Bob Jensen's threads on history tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#History
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  

Language Tutorials

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Languages

Writing Tutorials

Purdue Online Writing Lab --- http://owl.english.purdue.edu/

Bob Jensen's helpers for writers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

From the Scout Report on January 18, 2008

ChatStat 3.1.6 --- http://www.chatstat.com/ 

If you have a website, there may have been times where you would have liked to talk with visitors who have browsed on in to say hello. ChatStat 3.16 offers users the ability to conduct live chat sessions with website visitors, along with free dynamic web analytic software. Visitors can also chat with other operators via instant message and even let visitors request a "call back". This application is compatible with computers running Windows NT and newer.

---

Paint.NET 3.2 --- http://www.getpaint.net/ 

If you have left over holiday photos that need editing and a bit of retouching, you may want to consider looking over the latest version of Paint.NET. This open source photo editing program comes with support for layers, special effects and essential tools that include a cropping feature and a resizing option. This version is compatible with computers running Windows XP and newer.

Updates from WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/

January 18, 2008

• Scientists Clone Embryos
• New Twist on Prednisone for RA
• Abortion Rate Drops
• Talk Therapy for Panic Disorder
• CDC: School Homicides Are Rare

January 21, 2008 

• Broccoli Protects the Heart
• A Cause for Chronic Fatigue?
• Nano Pollution Hurts Heart
• Rare Skin Problem: Is It Real?
• Scientists Clone Human Embryos

Features

• 9 Most Fattening Foods of Winter
• Make Your Husband Healthier
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• No Time to Work Out?
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News

• 'Cloverfield' Makes Some Queasy
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• Burger and Fries Diet Risky
• Nasal Wash Helps Kids' Colds
• Vitamin E Good for Vitality

January 27, 2008

• Salmonella Tied to Pet Turtles
• Job Stress Tough on Heart
• Blood Test Detects Colon Cancer
• Magnets Spur Toy Recall
• Green Tea for Weight Loss?

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• Lose 21 Pounds in 21 Days?
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