Good Friday was not so good
Winds Howling and Snow Swirling
March 21, 2008 on the summit of Mt. Washington
| Temp |
Wind |
Gust |
W. Chill |
| -8.9°F |
291° (W), 104.3 mph |
111.6 mph |
-53.0°F |
When we first moved to New Hampshire in 2005
we attended a tiny Episcopal church about a half-mile down the road that is only
open in the summer season. It has the distinction of being the most photographed
church in New England. Indeed it is at the height of its glory, along with the
surrounding fields, in our
June Lupin Festival. Afterwards we joined another church about a mile down
the road that has year-around services.


The blue jay above is sitting directly over our well head . He's watching and
waiting for springtime that will not arrive for a couple of months.
Taps are beginning to appear on the maple
trees of Sugar Hill. In the next edition of Tidbits I will talk about
sugaring in these hills. It's a sweet time of year even if the snow is still on
the ground.
Anything out of the ordinary seems much more ordinary when it happens to a
friend or relative. It sometimes broadens perspective and compassion and
empathy.
Since moving to New Hampshire, my wife and I feel more a part of the
community by joining in with our very small congregation at the Sugar Hill
Community Church. On any given Sunday we're doing well if twenty worshippers join
in the service. Two of our very active worshippers are Wendy Kern (former wife
of Randy Mitton) and Arwen Mitton (former husband of Wendy Kern). The two women
still live together when Arwen is not in college in Rhode Island, but both hope
to move on in their own ways and loves when Arwen finishes college. In fact
Arwen was home on spring break and came to church with Wendy last Sunday. Arwen
recently had three pins put in her hip as a result of an accident with her
sailing team on the college campus. That is the least of her problems as she
moves forward with her life.
Transgendering and
Disassociative Identity Disorder (DID) is something that I never anticipated
would directly touch upon my life, especially after I retired from teaching,
moved to the boondocks, and no longer encountered students from all walks in
life. But these conditions have touched upon my life because of two good
friends in our church.
On February 10, 2008 Arwen Mitton's story appeared in the Concord Monitor
newspaper. Below is a link to this very enlightening article. You will most
likely never meet Arwen or Wendy. But the article below will open your eyes to
the struggles faced by people with DID who took an enormous step to be
transgendered. I cannot really say more that will add value to the tremendous
article linked below. I wish I could do more for Arwen and Wendy, but I am and will
always be their friend. I might add that Arwen's a very good student, and
Wendy's a very good teacher.
Bob Jensen
For a short while you may read about Arwen at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Arwen.htm
March 18, 2008 reply from one reader
Thanks for sharing
this. Fascinating, scary, and heartbreaking. That other world that Arwen
describes living in before she appeared in this world is very similar to the
worlds that
Robert Monroe describes in his books about his out-of-body
experiments. Evidently, the mind (and the universe) contain much more than
we know about or can understand
March 18, 2008 reply from another reader
Very interesting
article, thanks Bob. On a similar topic, there was an article in this past
weekend’s New York Times magazine which focused on transgender students
feeling more room to experiment with their gender identity within women’s
colleges. You might want to have your
Judith Butler books handy for this
one.
Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/magazine/16students-t.html?_r=1&scp=4&sq=gender&st=nyt&oref=slogin
Tidbits on March 22, 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
Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter ---
Search Site.
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
Bob Jensen's blogs and various threads on many topics ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
(Also scroll down to the table at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ )
Global Incident Map ---
http://www.globalincidentmap.com/home.php
Set up free conference calls at
http://www.freeconference.com/
Also see
http://www.yackpack.com/uc/
Free Online Tutorials in Multiple Disciplines ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials
Google Maps Street View ---
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/
World Clock ---
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/WorldClock.php
Tips on computer and networking
security ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm
If you want to help our badly injured troops, please check out
Valour-IT: Voice-Activated Laptops for Our Injured Troops ---
http://www.valour-it.blogspot.com/
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
Going Boom in Dubai (Slide Show) ---
Click Here
Israeli-Arab conflict ---
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/what-really-happened/
Interactives: The Rock Cycle (as in geology) ---
http://www.learner.org/interactives/rockcycle/index.html
The Jewish Americans (includes four lesson plans) ---
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/index.html
Addictive Tic-Tac-Toe (interactive) ---
http://www.animaxinteractive.com/banana/Games/tictactoe.html
Dog, Cat, and Rat ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D85yrIgA4Nk
Arthur C. Clarke (renowned science fiction author) died this
week ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Clarke
Free music downloads ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm
SXSW 2008: The Whigs (full rock concert from
Austin, TX) ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88163137
Choro Ensemble: Brazil Before Bossa ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88102556
Before bossa nova and samba, Brazilian music was choro. Born in 19th-century Rio
de Janeiro, choro started when polkas and waltzes mixed with Afro-Brazilian
rhythms. Beginning in the early part of this decade, it has been heard weekly in
New York — thanks to a group called the Choro Ensemble.
When You're Running Down Our Country Man, You're
Walking on the Fighting Side of Me (Merle Haggard) ---
http://www.trdaniel.com/Take A Look America/index.htm
Shirley Bassey: New CD for 'Goldfinger' Diva ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88184207
Saxophone Giant Benny Golson ---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88237333
Things You Don't Hear Anymore ---
http://www.bentbay.dk/donthear_anymore.htm
Negro Spirituals
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
LibrarySpot (left column library finder
links) ---
http://www.libraryspot.com/
Scribd's 100 Top Novels ---
http://www.scribd.com/doc/275958/Top-100-Novels-of-All-Time-as-Voted-by-Regular-People
Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal (poetry about society) ---
http://fleursdumal.org/
The Jewish Americans (includes four lesson plans) ---
http://www.pbs.org/jewishamericans/index.html
Project Gutenberg Update ---
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
Other Free eBook Links:
You Can't Leave Education to A Few Theorists
Paul Volcker,
AccountingWeb, March 13, 2008 ---
Click Here
Sky-high oil prices are pumping tens of billions of
dollars into Iraq's coffers, reaping a windfall for a war-torn nation plagued by
unpassable roads, dilapidated hospitals and crumbling schools. Yet most of this
desperately needed cash is languishing in the bank. The reason: Iraq's
government is so ill-equipped to handle the basics of finance, it is having
trouble spending the money. In 2006, the Iraqi central government spent just 22%
of its $6 billion capital budget, which is aimed at improving Iraq's
infrastructure, while the oil ministry spent less than 3% of its reconstruction
money.
Gina Chon, "Baghdad's Strange
Dilemma: Flush With Oil Cash, Unable to Spend It," The Wall Street Journal,
March 17, 2008; Page A14 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120571072119840213.html?mod=todays_us_page_one
Question
Can J.P. Morgan wear a mask and ride a white horse for over 100 years? ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2218Btx3wY
Answer
As a matter of fact yes, but sometimes he mistakenly saves the bad guys that
buried themselves in kemosabi.
This week we continue our discussion of the Panic of
1907 and the man who, single-handedly, turned things around,
J.P. Morgan. As I wrote
last week, speculation in the early 1900s was rampant. The lack of a central
bank became a worrisome topic for many because the banks were intimately
involved in the market, either as underwriters or investors. This included the
trust banks, a group separate from commercial and investment banks. Trust banks
were administrators of trust funds, money invested on behalf of estates, wills,
and the like. They provided a tenuous link to the markets and many of them made
loans to market speculators, taking securities as collateral. Thus, if stocks
fell, the trust banks as well as other banks would be severely hurt, as would
their investors. Without a central bank, no one would loan them money if a
depositor's run developed or they needed cash to prop up their positions under
duress.
Brian Trumbore, "J.P. Morgan -
Savior -- The Panic of 1907," BuyAndHold, March 2008 ---
http://www.buyandhold.com/bh/en/education/history/2000/122499.html
Jim Mahar alerted me to this link.
In a dramatic move Friday,
J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York stepped in with emergency funds to keep
beleaguered investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. afloat. The move, during a week of
worry about whether Bear could continue to meet its obligations, took the credit
crisis to a new, more serious stage and was a reminder of how quickly an erosion
of confidence can undermine even leading financial institutions.
Kevin Kingsbury, Andrew Dowell, and Serena Ng,
"Bear Stearns to Get Backing From J.P. Morgan, N.Y. Fed," The Wall Street
Journal, March 14, 2008 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120550108028136579.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today
Bankers bet with their bank's capital, not their
own. If the bet goes right, they get a huge bonus; if it misfires, that's the
shareholders' problem.
Sebastian Mallaby. Council on Foreign Relations, as quoted by
Avital Louria Hahn, "Missing: How Poor Risk-Management Techniques
Contributed to the Subprime Mess," CFO Magazine, March 2008, Page 53 ---
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10755469/c_10788146?f=magazine_featured
Now that the Fed is going to bail out these crooks with taxpayer funds makes it
all the worse.
Bob Jensen's "Rotten to the Core" threads are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudRotten.htm
That some bankers have ended up in
prison is not a matter of scandal, but what is outrageous is the fact that all
the others are free.
Honoré
de Balzac
What if anything should governments do to help out
in this present financial crisis, mindful of the many kinds of moral hazard that
are lurking, but also mindful that the financial structure is delicately
balanced? Despite the moral hazard risks, interventionist policies might be
justified not because some borrowers or lenders were taken advantage of, but if
these interventions would help the economy recover more quickly, and insure that
the recession is neither prolonged nor deep. Still it is difficult to see the
merits in the Fed's efforts to help the sale of Bears Stearns to JPMorgan Chase
by guaranteeing many billions of mortgage and other assets of the company.
Nobel Laureate Gary Becker, "The
Erosion of Individual Responsibility," The Becker-Posner Blog, March 16,
2008 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Becker makes two principal points in his interesting
post: that free enterprise encourages people to take responsibility for their
actions and thereby make better decisions; and that there is "a strong trend
toward shifting responsibility to others." I would qualify these points as
follows. Free enterprise requires individuals to make a variety of decisions,
concerning both production and consumption, that in a socialist system is the
responsibility of government officials. It does not follow that people in
free-enterprise societies "take responsibility," in some psychological sense,
for their actions. The tendency to blame others when things go wrong is deeply
rooted in human nature and I imagine no less common in America than in any other
country. In fact, in a free-market system, competition places significant
limitations on the freedom of choice of consumers, investors, and workers . . .
As for the people who took out risky mortgages in the expectation that house
prices would continue to rise, they should not be bailed out (that is the moral
hazard problem) by government even, I think, if they were victims of fraud. But
if they were victims of fraud, they should have legal remedies against the
people who defrauded them. Of course, if there were no legal remedies against
fraud, people would be more careful--but they would be too careful; they would
incur high costs of self-protection. It is cheaper to punish fraud, just as it
is cheaper to punish burglary than to tell people to fortify their houses.
Richard Posner,
"The Erosion of Individual Responsibility," The Becker-Posner Blog, March
16, 2008 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois is a
big booster of Mr. Obama, but he declares himself "disappointed" in his Illinois
colleague's embrace of the (earmarks pork)
moratorium proposed by GOP Senator Jim DeMint. Similarly, New York Senator Chuck
Schumer has parted ways with Hillary Clinton over the proposed time-out on
earmarks. Mr. Schumer privately expressed disgust when Senator DeMint held a
news conference outside the Capitol building that featured a man in a
6-foot-tall pink pig suit ridiculing Congressional excess . . . For his part,
Mr. DeMint says his colleagues are acting like addicts who refuse to admit they
have a problem. He told Politico.com this week: "We need to go cold turkey."
Anything less would be "like telling an alcoholic, 'Don't drink as much.'"
John Fund, Wall Street Journal,
March 14, 2008
I met Eliot Spitzer during his first semester in law
school, my first year teaching criminal law at Harvard. He was smart and
ambitious, which certainly didn't set him apart from the rest of his classmates
at Harvard. What did, and what brought him to my door, was that he was
interested in a career in politics.... Maybe he was absent the day we discussed
the Mann Act. But I don't think so.... Eliot Spitzer knew better, but he clearly
forgot that the rules apply to everyone. Especially him. Now, the face in the
mirror is the one that did him in. Poor Eliot. I do feel sorry for him. But
there are some things you can't teach, some things that can only be learned
through painful experience. Hubris is what it's called.
Susan Estrich, former campaign
manager for Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988, reflecting on her time
teaching Eliot Spitzer at Harvard Law School.
Opinion Journal, The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2008
Jensen Comment
Hubriz is where brain surgeons first look when they cannot find a man’s brain
above his neck.
Sadly it's belatedly coming out that Spitzer's replacement as NY Governor, David
Paterson, and Paterson's wife cheated on each other with extra-marital affairs
---
http://cbs4.com/national/david.paterson.affair.2.679240.html
But the Kennedy Clan has repeatedly claimed this is all right as long as
politician's get it for free.
Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, a Republican,
grouses that the Senate Democrats' budget documents contain more than $100
billion of spending that is "paid for" only by budget tricks and gimmicks, such
as changing the timing of payments so they don't happen inside the budget
window. This doesn't save any money, it just camouflages the total spending
Congress is doing. An even taller tale concerns some of the Democrats' revenue
assumptions. They claim to be keeping the party's pledge of fiscal balance in
five years, but that's possible only by assuming that 30 million Americans will
pay the Alternative Minimum Tax in 2013. As Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin notes,
"There aren't 30 million rich people in America." That means a giant tax
increase on the middle class five years from now.
Opinion Journal, The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2008
Cambridge Health Alliance, a key part of the Boston
area's healthcare network, is facing a potentially "catastrophic" loss this year
and is looking to eliminate up to 300 jobs, or about 9 percent of its workforce,
in an effort to stabilize finances. The alliance, which includes Cambridge
Hospital, Somerville Hospital, and Whidden Hospital in Everett, says it is being
hit hard by the state's new healthcare reform law, which has left it responsible
for providing free care for those without insurance while reducing the
hospitals' compensation for such services. "A significant downturn in our volume
and the transition to the new free care pool reimbursement system created a
perfect storm for us," said Dennis D. Keefe, chief executive of the alliance.
Jeffry Krasner, "Health provider
predicts big loss," Boston Globe, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.boston.com/business/healthcare/articles/2008/03/17/health_provider_predicts_big_loss/
Jensen Comment
Massachusetts like all other states is just waiting for the Federal government
to pay the tab for free health care after November 2008.
Doctor shortage takes a toll in Japan Japan might
boast universal health cover and some of the world's best medical technology,
but an acute shortage of doctors is leaving some hospitals unable to treat even
car crash victims. Gruelling work hours are discouraging people from entering
the medical profession in a country where the population is rapidly ageing,
foreign doctors are barred and a swelling public debt caps doctors' salaries.
The strains are even being felt here at the Hyogo Brain and Heart Centre in the
western city of Himeji, one of Japan's best-known neurology and cardiology
hospitals. "We toil like workhorses," said Teishi Kajiya, the hospital's vice
director and a cardiologist, taking some time for an interview before heading to
the operation room. "It's become the norm for doctors to work 36 hours straight,
which is emotionally and physically exhausting. We never know when one of us
might collapse," he said, looking weary despite his tidy coat.
PhysOrg, March 16, 2008 ---
http://physorg.com/news124904935.html
"Last week, the University of Virginia's student
paper, The Cavalier Daily, ran a cartoon depicting a naked man smoking a
cigarette in bed. Standing beside the bed, a woman in her underwear buttons up
her shirt and asks, 'Come on God, be honest – Did you really get a vasectomy? I
can't let Joseph find out about this.' The man replies, 'Well, Mary, you're
f----d," the AFA said.
WorldNetDaily, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=59240
Jensen Comment
This comes on the heels after publishing a cartoon that appeared to make fun of
starving people in Africa ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/09/10/cartoon
The former treasurer of a Republican Congressional
fund-raising committee may have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars by
submitting elaborately forged audit reports for five years using the letterhead
of a legitimate auditing firm, a lawyer for the committee said Thursday. Robert
K. Kelner, a lawyer with Covington & Burling, who was brought in by the National
Republican Congressional Committee to investigate accounting irregularities,
said a new audit showed that the committee had $740,000 less on hand than it
believed. Mr. Kelner said it was unclear whether that amount represented money
siphoned off by the former treasurer, Christopher J. Ward. Mr. Ward, who is
under investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had the authority to
make transfers of committee money on his own, Mr. Kelner said . . .
Mr. Kelner lamented the fact that the finances of the
Republican committee had been set up to allow Mr. Ward to authorize wire
transfers of money unilaterally.
Neal A. Lewis, "Sham Audits May Have
Hid Theft by G.O.P. Committee Treasurer, Lawyer Says," The New York Times,
March 14, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14repubs.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Jensen Comment
The first line of defense against fraud is internal control. This committee had
no such control.
The state Legislature on Friday wrapped up its
second special session during the 2-month-old administration of Gov. Bobby
Jindal by completing a full sweep of the governor's proposed package of business
tax cuts and $1.1 billion in surplus spending priorities. Jindal and his
legislative allies won all the initiatives they set out to accomplish during the
six-day session, including a controversial bill to grant a partial tax deduction
for private school tuition . . . "This group should be proud of batting a
thousand," Jindal said. "The country's watching us . . . we know they'll like
what they see."
Ed Anderson, "Jindal 'bats a
thousand' at session," The Times-Picayune, March 15, 2008 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
I sure hope Maine, Michigan, Maryland, New Jersey, California, Taxachusetts, Vermont, and New York are watching.
This would be even better for Louisiana if it finds more cash stored in
freezers. Seriously, Jindal's move would really attract business to Louisiana if
there weren't so much Louisiana political corruption and crime (read that
extortion and kickbacks).
Proponents (of a computer services tax in
Maryland) say the $200 million in revenue the tax is
projected to garner is indispensable when Maryland is already facing a budget
shortfall. Senate President Mike Miller insists that "We can't afford to cede to
businesses $200 million in revenue without an alternative." Wait until they see
what happens to revenue when business begins to leave the state. Many Maryland
companies and small businesses say they could be forced to relocate if the tax
isn't repealed. And nearby states are courting potential departees: 70 Maryland
computer services firms got a letter last month from Delaware economic director
Judy McKinney-Cherry to encourage companies to "include Delaware when you are
contemplating an expansion." Other states have tried similar tax experiments --
with dismal results. In Pennsylvania, a 6% computer services tax was repealed
after it handicapped the state's ability to compete with other states for
business. Ditto Connecticut, which enacted a 6% computer consulting tax in the
late 1980s, only to walk it back in 1997 as the importance of the computer
industry became apparent, and business associations revolted.
"High Tech Tax," The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2008;
Page A10 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120553885222038237.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Ted Kennedy has called Nantucket Sound near his
Massachusetts estate “a national treasure” — but that didn’t stop the senator
from having oil dumped from his yacht into its waters. A local photographer
spotted an oil slick coming from Kennedy’s yacht Mya as Kennedy and his guests
left the vessel in a launch following a race that ended in Hyannis, the Cape Cod
Today newspaper reported. The lensman was so shocked that he rowed his dinghy
out to question the crew member left aboard the yacht. He asked the crewman,
“What the hell are you doing?” The crewman said that diesel fuel had gotten into
the bilge and he was told to dump it.
"Ted Kennedy Dumps Fuel into Nantucket Sound," Newsmax,
March 14, 2008 ---
Click Here
That's not the worst thing Ted's secretly dumped into the Atlantic Ocean.
At the tender age of 23 years, Yon Goicoechea is
arguably President Hugo Chávez's worst nightmare. Mr. Goicoechea is the retiring
secretary general of the university students' movement in Venezuela. Under his
leadership, hundreds of thousands of young people have come together to confront
the strongman's unchecked power. It is the first time in a decade of Chávez rule
that a countervailing force, legitimate in the eyes of society, has successfully
managed to challenge the president's authority.
Mary Anastasia O'Grady, "Student
Power," The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2008; Page A16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120571191315240267.html?mod=todays_us_opinion
Richard "Dickie" Scruggs, a founding father of the
modern mega-tort class-action industry, pleaded guilty yesterday to trying to
bribe a judge. It is notable but perhaps unsurprising in this particular week,
when we have already seen one famous figure, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer,
brought down by his own sense of invulnerability to the law or common sense. In
the 1990s, Mr. Scruggs famously got corporate defendants, and whole industries,
to make mammoth settlements in lieu of fighting the thousands of plaintiffs the
Mississippi tort lawyer had gathered into a class-action lawsuit. Mr. Scruggs
was a legal entrepreneur, who figured out that the combined weight of endless
plaintiffs and bad publicity would force even the richest corporations to plead
for a settlement. It was his further insight that his percentage of the take,
aka contingency fees, would make him and his associates rich as Croesus. The
trappings of wealth that attended the class-action plaintiffs bar are the stuff
of legend.
"Dickie's Plea," The Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2008;
Page A10 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120553770906338151.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
Jensen Comment
Dickie and his wife donated $25 million to the University of Mississippi. They
now request that their names be removed from the music building, following his
pleading guilty to charges of trying to bribe a judge. The couple did not ask
for funds to be returned. Musicians will still be required to wear
dickies at
some symphony performances.
Until recently, Obama's church website outlined a
controversial code of ethics written by blacks for blacks called the "Black
Value System." It asks members to commit their
time, money and talents to the black community, black businesses, black
institutions and black political leaders. The program also demands black members
disavow "the pursuit of (Bill Cosby's) middleclassness." The 160-word section has since been
deleted from the About Us
page, replaced by videotaped testimonials from church
members extolling the virtues of the church, including a white official from the
parent United Church of Christ who said she feels welcome at predominantly black
Trinity.
"Obama's preacher sanitizes website," WorldNetDaily, March 16,
2008 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=59169
What just got sanitized from Obama's church Website are many of the "Black
Value System" ideas borrowed from black theologian
James
Cone's Black Theology
"The time has come for white America to be silent
and listen to black people."
"All white men are responsible for white
oppression. "
"Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he
called the white man 'the devil.'"
"Any advice from whites to blacks on how to deal
with white oppression is automatically under suspicion as a clever device to
further enslavement."
"Black suffering is getting worse, not better. . .
. White supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it."
" Jesus Christ is black therefore not because of
some cultural or psychological need of black people, but because and only
because Christ really enters into our world where the poor were despised and
the black are, disclosing that he is with them enduring humiliation and pain
and transforming oppressed slaves into liberating servants."
"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not
identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for
us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill
him."
"The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do
not belong to the black community ...
Black theology will accept only the love of God
which participates in the destruction of the white enemy."
"What we need is the divine love as expressed in
Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors
here and now by any means at their disposal. "
Some ideas not found at that Website's former "Black Value System" are as
follows:
We must develop and maintain the capacity to
forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to
love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere
ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Through violence you may murder a murderer, but you
can't murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can't
establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can't murder
hate. Darkness cannot put out darkness.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can
do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
. . . the number of Hispanic and Asian high-school
students is already growing, and significant increases are expected over the
next decade. At the same time, white and black enrollment are each projected to
see double-digit-percentage drops, causing an overall decline in the number of
graduates.
Elyse Ashburn, "New Data Predict
Major Shifts in Student Population, Requiring Colleges to Change Strategies,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/03/2177n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
For black males the numbers of college graduates in the past decades are small.
I fear that we're seeing more and more of the shifts in "Black Value System"
away from a quest for Bill Cosby's "middleclassedness" in contrast to the Hispanic and Asian
minority students. I wonder how much a role hate-mongering Christian and Muslim
preachers like
Jeremiah
Wright,
Malcom X, and
Louis
Farrakhan have had is this phenomenon in the black community.
When Don Imus uttered his infamous slur on the radio
last year, Obama cut him no slack. Imus should be fired, he said. "There's
nobody on my staff who would still be working for me if they made a comment like
that about anybody of any ethnic group." When it came to Wright, however, he
wasn't nearly so categorical. Oh, he's "like an old uncle who says things I
don't always agree with," Obama indulgently explained to one interviewer. He's
just "trying to be provocative ," he told another. "I don't think my church is
actually particularly controversial," he said. Far from severing his ties to
Wright, Obama made him a member of his Religious Leadership Committee only four
days ago.
Jeff Jacoby, "It's Still a Question
of Wright Versus Wrong," The Boston Globe, March 19, 2008 ---
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles
Jesus Christ as a "black messiah" and blacks as "the
chosen people" who will only accept a god who assists their aim of destroying
the "white enemy" --As quoted in "Obama pastor's
theology: Destroy 'the white enemy': 'If God is not for us and against
whites ... we had better kill him'," WorldNetDaily, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=59230
Jensen Comment
What amazes me is racist hate mongering ministers like Jeremiah Wright and Al
Sharpton often imply that
power in the U.S. Government is reserved for the white race. They never once
mention that the most powerful Congressman controlling the purse strings of the
entire United States is a hard-nosed black liberal from Brooklyn --- Charlie
Rangel., Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Rangel
They never mention that our Secretary of State is both black and female ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condolezza_Rice
They never mention black executives in the Fortune 500 companies and black
billionaires like Oprah.
Bill Cosby became their enemy when he asserted that many
blacks, certainly no all, do not want to put in the effort for free education
and training in order to live the American dream.
Watch the video ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIVKbHZ8H3A
Another one is here ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm2DdzRq-lI
Bill Cosby was no doubt pained to see what's
happening today. Rather than have a role model like him or the character he
played on TV, a well-to-do physician, far more black youth today seem to emulate
the thugs who pose as music artists. What would have pained him more than this
is the apathy shown by black elders and the community as a whole. It doesn't
take years of research into society to figure out that something's not right
with the state of urban black youth today . . . . . Bill Cosby's harsh
words on the condition of many of today's black youth have evoked many
responses. I thought that I should get my two cents' worth on it as well. I
wholeheartedly applaud Bill Cosby for saying what he did, and I completely agree
with his views. I have felt for a long time the exact things that he expressed
in words in front of a group of black leaders a few weeks back.
Vivek Thuppil ---
Click Here
As Kaus notes, Obama's "explanations of white anger
seem distant and condescending." The same is often true when white liberals
proclaim their "understanding" of black anger--except that black anger is
invested with a certain nobility for its having originated in genuine
oppression. And Obama's agenda is not exactly bold ... What he seems to be
offering "working- and middle-class white Americans" is to label them
"resentful" rather than "misguided or even racist," in exchange for which they
are expected to support an expansion of left-liberal social programs. Will this
bargain appeal to voters any more than it has in the previous 10 elections?
Editors of The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2008 quoting
Mickey Kaus in Slate Magazine, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.slate.com/id/2186845/#obamaracespeech
Yes, I read the transcript of Mr. Obama's much
touted "great" speech. His heartfelt cry: " that investing in the health,
welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately
help all of America prosper," might tug at the heartstrings of Americans who
never heard of Lyndon Baines Johnson's "Great Society." Or "Project Headstart"
Well, I was a high school student then, and in the summer I went into a black
ghetto in Rockaway and picked up black pre-schoolers every morning to bring them
to a Federally-funded pre-school program which it was hoped would enrich their
educational experiences. I went to a public college in which Affirmative Action
gave preferential treatment for admissions and scholarships to minorities. That
is also part of America's "tragic past."
Naomi Regan (an influential and
prolific Jewish
writer who now lives in Israel). In a flurry of recent messages she's claimed
Jews are increasingly questioning the credibility of Obama's promises to Israel.
Jensen Comment
Most working and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been
particularly privileged by their race. In fact many feel that they've faced
unfair competition due to affirmative action hiring, scholarships, and
admissions to prestigious colleges and universities. Eventually it will be the
silent majority's proud Americans that decide who will be the next President of
the United States. The hate-America black preachers and showmen screaming James
Cone's "Black Value System" are shooting the Democratic Party in both feet in
ways never imagined by Karl Rove.
Most significantly, Mr. Obama asserted that race in
America has become a generational story. The original sin of slavery is a fact,
but the progress we have lived through the past 50 years means each generation
experiences race differently. Older blacks, like Mr. Wright, remember Jim Crow
and were left misshapen by it. Some rose anyway, some did not; of the latter, a
"legacy of defeat" went on to misshape another generation. The result:
destructive anger that is at times "exploited by politicians" and that can keep
African-Americans "from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition."
But "a similar anger exists within segments of the white community." He speaks
of working- and middle-class whites whose "experience is the immigrant
experience," who started with nothing. "As far as they're concerned, no one
handed them anything, they've built it from scratch." "So when they are told to
bus their children to a school across town," when they hear of someone receiving
preferences they never received, and "when they're told their fears about crime
in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced," they feel anger too.
Peggy Noonnan's favorable review of the March 18 Obama speech,
"A Thinking Man's Speech," The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2008; Page
W16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120604775960652829.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
"The New Austerity," by Justin Fox, Time Magazine, March 24,
2008, Page 26 ---
http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1720049_1720050_1721656,00.html
Journalists and others with a tendency to
see glasses as half empty have a long history of pronouncing the American
consumer maxed out. "Time for a New Frugality," this magazine declared in
1973. "Over the Ears in Debt," it chimed in again in 1987. It wasn't just
TIME. Historian of credit Lendol Calder has assembled a long list of worried
headlines through the decades: "Debt Threatens Democracy" (Harper's, 1940),
"Is the Country Swamped with Debt?" (Business Week, 1949), "Never Have So
Many Owed So Much" (U.S. News & World Report, 1959). And so on.
Amid all this hand-wringing, Americans
have kept piling on more and more debt. The last significant episode of
belt-tightening came during the recession of the early 1980s. But that
turned out to be just the prelude to a quarter-century of growing
profligacy, capped by a final half-decade of mostly mortgage-related fun
that will go down as one of the most reckless borrowing-and-lending binges
ever.
Now that particular binge has come to a
crashing end, and the credit worriers believe their moment may have finally
arrived. "I'm not saying we're going back to our parents' level of
frugality," says David Rosenberg, North American economist at Merrill Lynch.
"But what we have witnessed in the past 20 to 30 years — and especially the
parabolic credit growth of the last five years — is going to be bursting in
the next decade."
Americans simply don't have enough money
to pay back the mortgage and credit-card debt they've run up. That reality
is forcing banks to retrench as loans gone bad shrink their capital bases
and falling house prices shrink the collateral that homeowners can borrow
against. And it will presumably force chastened consumers to change their
ways as well. At least that's what Rosenberg is predicting. "It's an
entirely new attitude toward debt," he says. "It is the new four-letter
word."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
To top off the out-of-control consumer debt is the totally out-of-control
national debt of the Federal government itself. The last time I looked on
March 20, 2008 it was as follows at
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/
Watch the Video (CBS Sixty Minute Video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS2fI2p9iVs

Mr. Obama's villains, in other words, are the
standard-issue populist straw men of Wall Street and the GOP, and his candidacy
is a vessel for liberal policy orthodoxy -- raise taxes, "invest" more in social
programs, restrict trade, retreat from Iraq. Needless to say, this is not an
agenda rooted in bipartisanship or even one that has captured a national
Presidential majority in more than 40 years. It would be unfortunate if Mr.
Obama's candidacy were toppled by racial neuroses, and his speech yesterday may
have prevented that. But it also revealed the extent to which his ideas are
neither new nor transcendent.
"Discovering Obama," The Wall Street Journal, March 19,
2008; Page A16 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120588322321046835.html?mod=djemEditorialPage
The Surprise Quotation of the Week from the Liberal
Press
It would be dunderheaded to demand of our three
presidential candidates that they and their campaigns do what nobody else can.
We cannot expect them to offer a (financing)
program of action. But it is not asking too much of them to cut down on the
blue-sky promises and come on back down to reality. It would reassure some of
the voters if they would acknowledge that we are teetering on one helluva big
(sinking economy) problem. It's going to be
a bumpy night.
Nicholas von Hoffman, "Economic
Chaos, Political Consequences," The Nation, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/howl
Jensen Comment
If Barack Obama fails this year in his quest to become the first black President
of the United States, it should not be because of the racism, anti-Semitics, and
"damn America" speeches of his friend and pastor. I do blame Obama somewhat for his
lies to
Keith Olbermann about never having heard years of
hate sermons. When later confronted with the
text of many sermons and his attendance records at church, Senator Obama later confessed that he had listened to these
hate America and hate Jews sermons for years. He waited until March 18, 2008 to
own up to these embarrassing facts.
My own view is that Senator Obama should not be President
because of the
Zimbabwe-like inflation and job losses of his economic recklessness to spend
up to a
trillion dollars on "blue sky"
social and environmental programs this faltering nation can ill afford with
a faltering economic engine. The disastrous spendthrift ways of President Bush
and the war in Iraq pale in light of the unrealistic Great Society visions of
Barack Obama. Monumental increases in taxes are counter productive to raising
revenue of this magnitude and financing these social and environmental programs in a times of
soaring oil prices, a plunging dollar, and a National Debt this nation cannot
afford before the November 2008 election.
Liberals often argue that we should take from the military and
give to the poor. But they don't understand how the United States burdened
future generations with entitlements to pay for past wars. The lion's share of
the annual military budget is not discretionary due to entitlements for lifetime
pensions, medical care, and medicines for soldiers and staff that retired as
early as 40 years of age and have many more years to live. When these
entitlements
are carved out of the military budget there isn't near enough money reallocate
to Obama's Great Society dreams.
Instead the hope of this nation rides on large and small
business prosperity and anti-trust enforcement that does prevents big businesses
from monopoly abuses. Obama may well become the blue sky Captain of the USS
Titanic in a sea of national debt. Thus far Obama's avoided being specific about
how to finance his dreams for America. Let's hope he comes to his senses about
economics before we sink to a hopeless bottom. The social ills
of this nation cannot be solved with an economy in ruins.
Assuming that Hillary Clinton will remain a powerful senator
after McCain and Obama begin to slug it out for the presidency, it's high time
that both surviving presidential candidates commence to provide specifics on what they
plan to do to keep the United States from
sinking to the bottom. At the moment
all three are promising hot air balloons (read that
entitlements) in the
blue sky of false hopes instead of realistic programs to save this nation.
It was a delight and a surprise that the highly liberal
Nocholas von Hoffman
admitted this (that the presidential candidates are promising unrealistic "blue
sky") in the highly liberal news magazine called
The Nation. Our former enemies (Russia and China) and fickle allies in
the Middle East and South America now have us in frigid and bumpy waters where
they want us. Our plunging economy can do what al Qaeda never had a chance to do
with terror and bombs. The so-called poor of this nation don't know what it's
like to be really, really poor without a shred of hope from a bankrupt
government and no charities left to lean on. All is doomed unless we shore up
business performance and energy supplies.
Read about our biggest economic worry for future generations ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Entitlements.htm
We've reached a low point where politicians have to promise to literally give
away the farm to become president of the United States.
The problem with Obama's Great Society programs is that once enacted most of
them cannot be unwound because he's
proposing huge entitlements..
And John McCain may well be just as much of a spendthrift as
George Bush. The inability of George W. Bush to say no to lavish spending by
Congress over the past eight years has led us into much of the current mess.
It's long overdue that the two surviving presidential candidates begin proposing
realistic ways to change directions on our economy's descent in a sea of national debt.
Question
What former Andersen partner, who watched the Andersen accounting firm implode
alongside its client Enron, has been traveling for years around the United
States warning that the United States economy will implode unless we totally
come to our senses?
Hints:
David Walker is the top accountant, Controller General, of the United States
Government.
He was a featured plenary speaker a few years back at an annual meeting of the
American Accounting Association.
See his "State of the Profession of Accountancy"
piece in
the October 2005 edition of the Journal of Accountancy.
Also see
http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jul2006/walker.htm
Watch the Video of the non-sustainability of the U.S.
economy (CBS Sixty Minutes TV Show Video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OS2fI2p9iVs
Blue Sky Presidential Candidates
An old man, a boy & a donkey were going to town. The boy rode on the donkey &
the old man walked.
As they went along they passed some people who remarked it was a shame the
old man was walking and the boy was riding.
The man and boy thought maybe the critics were right so they changed
positions.
Then, later, they passed some people who remarked, "What a shame, he makes
that little boy walk."
So they then decided they'd both walk!
Soon they passed some more people who thought they were stupid to walk when
they had a decent donkey to ride.
So, they both rode the donkey.
Now they passed some people who shamed them by saying how awful to put such a
load on a poor donkey.
The boy and man figured they were probably right, so they decide to carry the
donkey..
As they crossed the bridge, they lost their grip on the animal and he fell
into the river and drowned.
The moral of the story?
If you try to please everyone, you might as well kiss your ass goodbye!
Question
How can you best publish books, including multimedia and user interactive books,
on the Web?
Note that interactive books may have quizzes and examinations where answers are
sent back for grading.My Answers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
Just wondering what the soaring price of gasoline will do for students'
choices between commuting campuses and distance education alternatives, often
from the same universities and colleges. There may be more open parking places
on some campuses.
Bob Jensen's threads on distance education alternatives
are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Crossborder.htm
Find home values, reverse phone numbers, animated population growth maps,
specialized research sites and more
More likely the reported home values are unrealistically high at the moment
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/2960878/999427/103876/2/
The above link was forwarded by Ed Scribner
March 18, 2008 (PC World) If
you dig around the Web long enough, you're bound to find
things somebody might not want you to know. (Maybe, like
me, you hang your laundry out in the backyard.) This
week I have a bunch of sites to help you dig up the dirt
and do some serious research.
Find the Dirt on Your Neighbor
With two free Web services, I found the address of a
neighbor, his first and last name, his phone number and
how much his home is worth. If
Zillow
would only update its images, I could even tell you if
he hangs his laundry out in the backyard.
met a
neighbor while walking the dogs, and we chatted a while.
When I got home, I decided to pop something in the mail.
(It was some census tract stuff if you must know.) He
lives about two blocks down the road, but for the life
of me, I couldn't remember the guy's name or his street
address. Okay, sure, I could've just dropped by his
house. But what would I have to write about today, eh?
I popped
open Zillow and searched on my neighborhood until I
found the image of his house, then clicked on it. Zillow
told me lots of stuff about the value of his home. What
I needed--and got--was his street address.
Now that I had his street address, I went to the Reverse
Lookup tab at
411Locate, entered info in the
Reverse Address Lookup section, and got lucky. In a
second, I had Jess's name. You might not be so
fortunate--411Locate doesn't always come up with the
right name.
Dig This: Tempted to buy a set of those newfangled
color-pencil input devices? Be sure to
read the review first--it
details advanced features, usability, and, no surprise,
bugs.
Trulia's Hindsight: Watch Cities Grow
If
you enjoyed Zillow, you might also like
Trulia.
But there's more to this
real-estate site than you might expect. I was poking
around the other day and discovered
Trulia Hindsight, which shows
annual population growth in most parts of the U.S.
Once
you're on Trulia Hindsight, click on Plano, Texas.
You'll see a city map paint on the screen and a timeline
at the bottom of the page will begin to advance. The map
begins to populate, showing how the area developed over
time.
Use the
contrast slider on the bottom right to adjust how much
of the background you want to see and the slider on the
bottom left to zoom in or out of the map.
Once you get your bearings, grab the timeline slider,
move it to the left, then slowly move it to the right.
Type a city and state into the search field at the top
to find your hometown. Unfortunately, the site doesn't
have data for every area. If your town isn't on Trulia's
radar, try
downtown Los Angeles.
Dig This: You've gotta watch
The Front Fell Off. My editor
started kvetching that while hilarious, it also looks
quite plausible. And she complained that the actors
aren't getting credit even though there are lots of
clips floating around the Internet. Okay, so here it
goes: The guys are Australian comedy team
Bruce and Dawe.
Top 5 Little-Known Research Web Sites
AskNow
lets you ask a librarian a
question. If they ask you where you live, say California.
OWL, the Online Writing Lab,
lets you look up the whys and wherefores of grammar. The
Phrase Finder is a handy
thesaurus for phrases. Need a fact checker?
Refdesk.com has all the
facts--or links to them--you'll ever need. Visiting the
LibrarySpot
is like walking into the local library and walking
into the reference room. The site's part of the
StartSpot Network, which includes HomeworkSpot and
MuseumSpot.
Dig This: Whenever I
go to CES in Las Vegas, my first stop is the craps table
for some fast action--and maybe a chance to make a
couple of bucks. Yet after watching these
videos of Texas Hold'em--the
game that "takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to
master"--I may have to find a low-stakes game.
Dig This, Too: Need a change of pace? Try
Reel Fishing. You'll need
patience and a steady hand.
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
Be on Your Guard
IRS 2008 'Dirty Dozen' Phishing Scams ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x61121.xml
Bob Jensen's threads on Phishing, Spoofing, Pharming, Slurping, and
Pretexting ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm#Phishing
Bob Jensen's threads on tax scams are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#TaxScams
"Survey Reveals Wackiest Job Interview Mistakes," SmartPros,
March 13, 2008 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x61115.xml
This
year's Top 10 list includes:
- Candidate answered cell phone and
asked the interviewer to leave her own office because it was a
"private" conversation.
- Candidate told the interviewer he
wouldn't be able to stay with the job long because he thought he
might get an inheritance if his uncle died -- and his uncle
wasn't "looking too good."
- Candidate asked the interviewer for a
ride home after the interview.
- Candidate smelled his armpits on the
way to the interview room.
- Candidate said she could not provide a
writing sample because all of her writing had been for the CIA
and it was "classified."
- Candidate told the interviewer he was
fired for beating up his last boss.
- When applicant was offered food before
the interview, he declined saying he didn't want to line his
stomach with grease before going out drinking.
- A candidate for an accounting position
said she was a "people person" not a "numbers person."
- Candidate flushed the toilet while
talking to interviewer during phone interview.
- Candidate took out a hair brush and
brushed her hair.
|
Bob Jensen's career helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#careers
"Research on Accounting Should Learn From the Past," by Michael H. Granof
and Stephen A. Zeff, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v54/i28/28a03401.htm?utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Starting in the 1960s, academic research on
accounting became methodologically supercharged — far more quantitative and
analytical than in previous decades. The results, however, have been
paradoxical. The new paradigms have greatly increased our understanding of
how financial information affects the decisions of investors as well as
managers. At the same time, those models have crowded out other forms of
investigation. The result is that professors of accounting have contributed
little to the establishment of new practices and standards, have failed to
perform a needed role as a watchdog of the profession, and have created a
disconnect between their teaching and their research.
Before the 1960s, accounting research was primarily
descriptive. Researchers described existing standards and practices and
suggested ways in which they could be improved. Their findings were taken
seriously by standard-setting boards, CPA's, and corporate officers.
A
confluence of developments in the 1960s markedly changed the nature of
research — and, as a consequence, its impact on practice. First,
computers emerged as a means of collecting and analyzing vast amounts of
information, especially stock prices and data drawn from corporate financial
statements. Second, academic accountants themselves recognized the
limitations of their methodologies. Argument, they realized, was no
substitute for empirical evidence. Third, owing to criticism that their
research was decidedly second rate because it was insufficiently analytical,
business faculties sought academic respectability by employing the methods
of disciplines like econometrics, psychology, statistics, and mathematics.
In response to those developments, professors of
accounting not only established new journals that were restricted to
metric-based research, but they limited existing academic publications to
that type of inquiry. The most influential of the new journals was the
Journal of Accounting Research, first published in 1963 and sponsored by the
University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.
Acknowledging the primacy of the journals,
business-school chairmen and deans increasingly confined the rewards of
publication exclusively to those publications' contributors. That policy was
applied initially at the business schools at private colleges that had the
strongest M.B.A. programs. Then ambitious business schools at public
institutions followed the lead of the private schools, even when the public
schools had strong undergraduate and master's programs in accounting with
successful traditions of practice-oriented research.
The unintended consequence has been that
interesting and researchable questions in accounting are essentially being
ignored. By confining the major thrust in research to phenomena that can be
mathematically modeled or derived from electronic databases, academic
accountants have failed to advance the profession in ways that are expected
of them and of which they are capable.
Academic research has unquestionably broadened the
views of standards setters as to the role of accounting information and how
it affects the decisions of individual investors as well as the capital
markets. Nevertheless, it has had scant influence on the standards
themselves.
The research is hamstrung by restrictive and
sometimes artificial assumptions. For example, researchers may construct
mathematical models of optimum compensation contracts between an owner and a
manager. But contrary to all that we know about human behavior, the models
typically posit each of the parties to the arrangement as a "rational"
economic being — one devoid of motivations other than to maximize pecuniary
returns.
Moreover, research is limited to the homogenized
content of electronic databases, which tell us, for example, the prices at
which shares were traded but give no insight into the decision processes of
either the buyers or the sellers. The research is thus unable to capture the
essence of the human behavior that is of interest to accountants and
standard setters.
Further, accounting researchers usually look
backward rather than forward. They examine the impact of a standard only
after it has been issued. And once a rule-making authority issues a
standard, that authority seldom modifies it. Accounting is probably the only
profession in which academic journals will publish empirical studies only if
they have statistical validity. Medical journals, for example, routinely
report on promising new procedures that have not yet withstood rigorous
statistical scrutiny.
Floyd Norris, the chief financial correspondent of
The New York Times, titled a 2006 speech to the American Accounting
Association "Where Is the Next Abe Briloff?" Abe Briloff is a rare academic
accountant. He has devoted his career to examining the financial statements
of publicly traded companies and censuring firms that he believes have
engaged in abusive accounting practices. Most of his work has been published
in Barron's and in several books — almost none in academic journals. An
accounting gadfly in the mold of Ralph Nader, he has criticized existing
accounting practices in a way that has not only embarrassed the miscreants
but has caused the rule-making authorities to issue new and more-rigorous
standards. As Norris correctly suggested in his talk, if the academic
community had produced more Abe Briloffs, there would have been fewer
corporate accounting meltdowns.
The narrow focus of today's research has also
resulted in a disconnect between research and teaching. Because of the
difficulty of conducting publishable research in certain areas — such as
taxation, managerial accounting, government accounting, and auditing — Ph.D.
candidates avoid choosing them as specialties. Thus, even though those areas
are central to any degree program in accounting, there is a shortage of
faculty members sufficiently knowledgeable to teach them.
To be sure, some accounting research, particularly
that pertaining to the efficiency of capital markets, has found its way into
both the classroom and textbooks — but mainly in select M.B.A. programs and
the textbooks used in those courses. There is little evidence that the
research has had more than a marginal influence on what is taught in
mainstream accounting courses.
What needs to be done? First, and most
significantly, journal editors, department chairs, business-school deans,
and promotion-and-tenure committees need to rethink the criteria for what
constitutes appropriate accounting research. That is not to suggest that
they should diminish the importance of the currently accepted modes or that
they should lower their standards. But they need to expand the set of
research methods to encompass those that, in other disciplines, are
respected for their scientific standing. The methods include historical and
field studies, policy analysis, surveys, and international comparisons when,
as with empirical and analytical research, they otherwise meet the tests of
sound scholarship.
Second, chairmen, deans, and promotion and
merit-review committees must expand the criteria they use in assessing the
research component of faculty performance. They must have the courage to
establish criteria for what constitutes meritorious research that are
consistent with their own institutions' unique characters and comparative
advantages, rather than imitating the norms believed to be used in schools
ranked higher in magazine and newspaper polls. In this regard, they must
acknowledge that accounting departments, unlike other business disciplines
such as finance and marketing, are associated with a well-defined and
recognized profession. Accounting faculties, therefore, have a special
obligation to conduct research that is of interest and relevance to the
profession. The current accounting model was designed mainly for the
industrial era, when property, plant, and equipment were companies' major
assets. Today, intangibles such as brand values and intellectual capital are
of overwhelming importance as assets, yet they are largely absent from
company balance sheets. Academics must play a role in reforming the
accounting model to fit the new postindustrial environment.
Third, Ph.D. programs must ensure that young
accounting researchers are conversant with the fundamental issues that have
arisen in the accounting discipline and with a broad range of research
methodologies. The accounting literature did not begin in the second half of
the 1960s. The books and articles written by accounting scholars from the
1920s through the 1960s can help to frame and put into perspective the
questions that researchers are now studying.
For example, W.A. Paton and A.C. Littleton's 1940
monograph, An Introduction to Corporate Accounting Standards, profoundly
shaped the debates of the day and greatly influenced how accounting was
taught at universities. Today, however, many, if not most, accounting
academics are ignorant of that literature. What they know of it is mainly
from textbooks, which themselves evince little knowledge of the
path-breaking work of earlier years. All of that leads to superficiality in
teaching and to research without a connection to the past.
We fervently hope that the research pendulum will
soon swing back from the narrow lines of inquiry that dominate today's
leading journals to a rediscovery of the richness of what accounting
research can be. For that to occur, deans and the current generation of
academic accountants must give it a push.
Michael H. Granof is a professor of accounting at the McCombs School
of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Stephen A. Zeff is a
professor of accounting at the Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management
at Rice University.
March 18, 2008 reply
from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Steve Zeff has
been saying this since his stint as editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR); nobody has listened. Zeff famously wrote at least two editorials
published in TAR over 30 years ago that lamented the colonization of the
accounting academy by the intellectually unwashed. He and Bill Cooper wrote
a comment on Kinney's tutorial on how to do accounting research and it was
rudely rejected by TAR. It gained a new life only when Tony Tinker published
it as part of an issue of Critical Perspectives in Accounting devoted
to the problem of dogma in accounting research.
It has only been since
less subdued voices have been raised (outright rudeness has been the
hallmark of those who transformed accounting into the empirical
sub-discipline of a sub-discipline for which empirical work is irrelevant)
that any movement has occurred. Judy Rayburn's diversity initiative and her
invitation for Anthony Hopwood to give the Presidential address at the D.C.
AAA meeting came only after many years of persistent unsubdued pointing out
of things that were uncomfortable for the comfortable to confront.
Paul Williams
paul_williams@ncsu.edu
(919)515-4436
Bob Jensen's threads on these matters are at the following links:
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AcademicsVersusProfession
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#DoctoralPrograms
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#Replication
“An Analysis of the Evolution of Research Contributions by The Accounting
Review: 1926-2005,” by Jean Heck and Robert E. Jensen, Accounting Historians
Journal, Volume 34, No. 2, December 2007, pp. 109-142.
This citation was forwarded by Don Ramsey
"Why business ignores the (research of) business schools," by
Michael Skapinker, Financial Times, January 7, 2008
Chief executives, on the other hand, pay little
attention to what business schools do or say. As long ago as 1993, Donald
Hambrick, then president of the US-based Academy of Management, described
the business academics' summer conference as "an incestuous closed loop", at
which professors "come to talk with each other". Not much has changed. In
the current edition of The Academy of Management Journal.
. . .
They have chosen an auspicious occasion on which to
beat themselves up: this year is The Academy of Management Journal's 50th
anniversary. A scroll through the most recent issues demonstrates why
managers may be giving the Journal a miss. "A multi-level investigation of
antecedents and consequences of team member boundary spanning behaviour" is
the title of one article.
Why do business academics write like this? The
academics themselves offer several reasons. First, to win tenure in a US
university, you need to publish in prestigious peer-reviewed journals.
Accessibility is not the key to academic advancement.
Similar pressures apply elsewhere. In France and
Australia, academics receive bonuses for placing articles in the top
academic publications. The UK's Research Assessment Exercise, which
evaluates university research and ties funding to the outcome, encourages
similarly arcane work.
But even without these incentives, many business
school faculty prefer to adorn their work with scholarly tables, statistics
and jargon because it makes them feel like real academics. Within the
university world, business schools suffer from a long-standing inferiority
complex.
The professors offer several remedies. Academic
business journals should accept fact-based articles, without demanding that
they propound a new theory. Professor Hambrick says that academics in other
fields "don't feel the need to sprinkle mentions of theory on every page,
like so much aromatic incense or holy water".
Others talk of the need for academics to spend more
time talking to managers about the kind of research they would find useful.
As well-meaning as these suggestions are, I suspect
the business school academics are missing something. Law, medical and
engineering schools are subject to the same academic pressures as business
schools - to publish in prestigious peer-reviewed journals and to buttress
their work with the expected academic vocabulary.
March 17, 2008 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
In response to Don Ramsay's quote from the
Skapinker article: "The reason that real-life lawyers, doctors and engineers
have no problem with their [respective academics'] research is not because
they are smarter than business people, but because their research assists
them in what they do" ---
So the problem is that business professors are not
publishing studies that are relevant to what the business practitioners
need? Our research doesn't assist our practitioners in what they do? Hmmmm.
Question: could the problem (IF it's a problem) be
traced back, beyond the business professors, to the "gatekeepers" (read:
reviewers and editors) who control the publishing arm of the field? Could it
be that professors really are interested in engaging in relevant and
applicable research, but this stuff never gets publishined in the "journals
that count" because the *criteria* used by reviewers (to judge whether the
work is acceptable for publication) is fatally flawed?
This is in the front of my mind because I am
revising one more time a paper in which the reviewers say the paper is
"interesting", "intriguing", "applicable", "enlightening","revelant to
practice", "could materially improve" accounting education, and even "is
well-written", ... but they then condemn the paper to rejection or revision
saying "it needs more thorough development of theoretical underpinnings", in
other words, more Greek letters and diagrams with arrows. The ideas in this
paper won a national award in a practitioner journal, but academic reviewers
repeatedly reject it, even when it's explained in a way designed to directly
assist educators.
My post here isn't the sour grapes it sounds
like... I don't mind playing the game now and then (and although I'm at the
point where one more pub isn't worth too much effort anymore, I honestly
enjoy the exercise). But I figured that perhaps flawed publication criteria
might indeed be responsible for the observed effect of business
practitioners (and accountants in particular) ignoring academic publishing.
Just another thought.
This begs the next question: what SHOULD be the
criteria used for academic publishing? (criteria is plural, by the way...)
Another paper tiger from...
David Fordham
James Madison University
White Collar Fraud Site ---
http://www.whitecollarfraud.com/
Note the column of links on the left.
Experts vs. Amateurs Searching the Web
The credibility war rages on in the world of Web 2.0.
Those who say information provided by Internet
research tools needs to be vetted have
made their case in several ways.
Knol, for example, appears to be Google's answer to
Wikipedia. And for now, while the project is under development, authors can
contribute content by invitation only. The plan is to let users rank the wheat
among the chaff; the highest-ranking articles would pop up first in a Google
search. A clear example is
Mahalo. It's essentially a search engine run by
staff members, who hand-pick links for popular search terms. That's a familiar
concept for
academic libraries. There
is resistance to the idea that experts have lost their place in the
indiscriminate, user-generated Web 2.0. John Connell, an education-business
manager at Cisco Systems, writes in his
blog that experts and laymen can coexist on the
Web: "We are not dealing with a zero-sum game of any kind -- the rise of one
source of information does not (necessarily) cause the dissipation of another.
Why then do those who espouse the ‘cult of the expert,’ for want of a better
term, feel it necessary not just to have access to the authoritative information
(in their terms) that they seek, but to deny those who want access to the ...
trivial information they want? "It is elitism, pure and simple." The question
is, do users need someone else to filter information for them? We know from past
reports that the
"Google Generation" has a hard time sorting the
relevant from the trivial. But isn't it better to teach them how?
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2818&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on how experts/scholars search the Web are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars
Subject:
Accountancy Business and the Public Interest Journal
I am writing to encourage you and your colleagues to
submit papers to “Accountancy Business and the Public Interest”. It is a
free online peer reviewed journal published by the Association for
Accountancy and Business Affairs (http://www.aabaglobal.org.
The journal is well established and publishes papers
on a variety of topics to stimulate debates and develop alternative public
policies.
Details of the editorial
policies, how to submit papers and previous editions are available on
http://visar.csustan.edu/aaba/aabajournalpage.html
I very much hope that you and
your friends will submit papers.
Regards
Prem Sikka
Professor of Accounting
University of Essex
Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ
UK
Office Tel: +44(0)1206 873773
Office Fax: +44 (01206) 873429
Mobile: 07866 139390
AABA Website:
http://www.aabaglobal.org
Tax Justice Network:
http://www.taxjustice.net
The Tribune - The Thinking Person's Paper:
http://www.tribweb.co.uk
On blogs and Web sites, by e-mail and video, the Iraq war is fought on the
Internet
U.S. soldiers return from battle to their rooms or
tents, boot up their laptops and log on to let their friends and family know
they've made it through another day. If their base is large enough, the Internet
service provider offers broadband, and they can make a video call home, watch
news reports on the war or post their own versions of life in Iraq to their
blogs. ''I blog for the same reasons soldiers wrote letters and diaries during
previous wars: to communicate with family and friends, (and) to maintain an
honest record of our daily existence,'' wrote 1st Lt. Matt Gallagher, in
response to an e-mail about his blog
http://kaboomwarjournal.blogspot.com . ''Blogging is simply a 21st century
tool for a new generation of soldiers to utilize.''
MIT's Technology Review, March 18, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/20427/?nlid=945
Bob Jensen's threads on listservs and blogs are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Chinook Salmon Vanish Without a Trace
The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the
fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost
complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon
south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable
explanations — and coming up dry. Whatever the cause, there was widespread
agreement among those attending a five-day meeting of the Pacific Fisheries
Management Council here last week that the regional $150 million fishery, which
usually opens for the four-month season on May 1, is almost certain to remain
closed this year from northern Oregon to the Mexican border. A final decision on
salmon fishing in the area is expected next month.
Felicity Barringer, The New York Times, March 16, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/17/science/earth/17salmon.html
OECD Statistics Portal ---
http://www.oecd.org/statsportal/0,2639,en_2825_293564_1_1_1_1_1,00.html
Bob Jensen's threads on economic statistics are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics
Rankings
of Finance Doctoral
(and other finance)
Programs
Because I'm one of the few bloggers who regularly write
about the life of a finance professor, I get about a
dozen questions a month from people considering a PhD in
finance (Note: if you're interested, you can read about
a finance professor's typical day
here and
here, and about what's
involved in getting a PhD in finance
here).
The emails are one of the more surprising and most
enjoyable things about writing the blog, and at least a
couple of the folks who've sent me questions are
currently in PhD programs. I look forward to seeing how
their careers progress, knowing I may have played some
small part it them.
Some of the most frequent questions I get are along the
lines of "How do I find out how well respected
University X's finance doctoral program is?" or
alternately, "Where can a get a list of rankings of
finance doctoral programs?"
I should have done this some time ago, but I'm a bit
slow at times. But, since Unknown Daughter and She Who
Must Be Obeyed are out to a classmate's birthday party,
and Unknown Son is entranced by a Harry Potter movie,
this seems like a good time to spent a little time on
the Almighty Google. Here are the results:
-
Karolyis and Silvestrini have
a piece on SSRN titled "Comparing the Research
Productivity of Finance PhD Program Graduates"
here
-
Jean Heck has a similar piece
titled "Establishing a Pecking Order for Finance
Academics: Ranking of U.S. Finance Doctoral Programs
here. Both it and the
Karolyi/Silvestrini piece analyze productivity on
the basis of the author's doctoral-granting program,
but this one lists a few more doctoral programs than
the other piece. So, it might yield some
possibilities for those looking for less selective
programs.
-
Finally, Arizona State has a
ranking of finance departments (which may or may not
have doctoral programs)
here, while EconPhD has a
similar one covering several finance areas
here.
Hopefully,
these will prove useful. If any of you are aware of any
other rankings that are relatively recent (i.e. done in
the last 4-5 years or so), let me know and I'll update
the list.
Do those dubious college rankings really matter?
"Resigned Over Rankings," by Rob Capriccioso, "Inside Higher Ed,
April 19, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/04/19/dean
In 2002, the University of Houston Law
Center was ranked 50th in the U.S. News & World Report annual law
school rankings.
Today, it’s ranked number 70.
Some faculty members and students at the
institution believe that the downward slide may have been the cause
of Monday’s resignation of Nancy Rapoport, the center’s dean since
2000. Others say that notion — and the rankings themselves — are
phooey.
“After six years as dean, I don’t think
this is a really big deal,” says Michael A. Olivas, a law professor
at Houston and director of the Institute for Higher Education Law
and Governance at the school. “There is a shelf life for deans, you
know. These rankings are definitely not how I measure the success of
a dean.”
But, according to students who attended a
faculty member meeting last