A President for the rational and adult, not the childish or pathological

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“Cheating on a quiz show? That's sort of like plagiarizing a comic strip.”
     —Charles Van Doren’s patrician father speaking with his quiz show cheater son (“Quiz Show,” 1994)

     Today, the OC Reg reports a big win for a team of students at Chapman University: O.C. student team is national champs.
     Beating 120 competing schools, the Chapman team won the American Advertising Federation’s National Student Advertising Competition. See their winning commercial above.
     The Reg’s small business reporter, Jan Norman, explains the competitors’ task:

     Each year, NSAC partners with a corporate sponsor, which provides an assignment outlining the history of its product and current advertising situation. The assignment reflects a real-world situation, Chapman said. Students research the product and its competition, identify potential problem areas and devise a completely integrated communications campaign for the client. Each student team then “pitches” its campaign to a panel of judges.
     This year’s sponsor was State Farm Insurance, which gave the teams the task of creating a hypothetical $40 million media advertising campaign for auto and renters’ insurance targeting young adults, ages 18-25, according to Chapman. Three State Farm executives judged the national competition.

     I’m inclined to agree that there’s real skill, talent, and artistry involved in this sort of thing—successfully causing TV viewers to buy a product and trust the firm that offers it. But, from a philosopher’s perspective, these powers are like those that make for a really good confidence man. Never mind whether State Farm’s product, compared to its competitors’, is worth a damn. Don’t care about that. Just get people to want it.
     Can you do that? If so, we’ll give you fabulous prizes and the key to the freakin’ city!

     I’ve always been uncomfortable with admiration and celebration of skills that run contrary to honest and logical communication—and community. Especially at a college or university. Higher education ought to emphasize the "truth" thing, not the manipulation and flattery thing. That's why I am, um, unimpressed with "speech" instruction. To me, "speech" seems to teach effective bullshittery, flimflammery, hornswogglery. Leave that stuff (along with your clown shoes) down at the carnival, man. This is a college!

     Lately, lots of people have been carping about President Obama’s failure to hang around the oil-soaked gulf and “empathize” with the victims and, in general, with the frantic American people, who, evidently, need to be tucked in and given hot milk at night when things go wrong.
     (But none of that plugs the goddam leak or pays for the damage! It’s just making people “feel” that something is being done, whether or not it is! What’s the matter with ‘em, anyway? Are they children! Mental patients?)
     The philosopher part of me wants to say: Obama’s instinct was to say, “screw that sh*t”?
     Really? Then I say: he's my kind of guy.
     Barack Obama: a President for the rational and adult, not the childish or pathological.

Dan Enright: How much do they pay instructors up at Columbia?
Charles Van Doren: Eighty-six dollars a week.
Dan Enright: Do you have any idea how much Bozo the Clown makes?
Charles Van Doren: Well... we, we can't all be Bozo the Clown.

Point that finger anywhere

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     Unless you live in a cave, you know that we are living through an era of incompetence and corruption. It seemed to reach its peak (or nadir) during the Bush Administration, but don’t kid yourself. It’s still out there, dragging us all down into dire shittitude.
     I’ve long believed that you only need to point your finger somewhere and just move forward (where, for whatever reason, no spotlight has shone for a while) and you’ll run into some sort of scandal or outrage or absurdity. It doesn’t matter where you point. Just point.
     Right now, we’re all staring at the Gulf. It’s awful. Yeah, but don’t be an idiot. Shit is happening all over the place.
     One such place is the for-profit colleges like the U of Phoenix and their scam on the American taxpayer. Lots of these places provide questionable instruction and degrees but get lots of comers. And students typically take out huge federal loans—that they’ll not be able to pay back.
     There’ve been waves of scandal about these operations for twenty years. You can read about it. Do that.
     Well, the feds are once again supposed to be on the case. The long awaited “stricter rules” for for-profits have just been released, and there’ll be more to come on Friday.

Education Dept. Will Release Stricter Rules for For-Profits but Delays One on 'Gainful Employment'

     After an intense lobbying effort by for-profit colleges, the Education Department announced Tuesday that it will postpone the release of a rule that proprietary institutions said would shutter thousands of their programs.
     The rule, which would cut off federal student aid to programs whose graduates carry high student-loan debt relative to their incomes, is one of 14 that the department and college stakeholders have been negotiating over the past eight months. The other regulations, including one that would tighten a ban on incentive compensation for college recruiters, will be made public Friday.
     In a call with reporters Tuesday, an Education Department official said the agency still plans to hold for-profits accountable for preparing their graduates for "gainful employment," but needs more time to develop an appropriate measure of that outcome. The official said the proposal will be released later this summer, and will most likely be included in a package of final rules due out in November.
     "We have many areas of agreement where we can move forward," Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, said in a statement. "But some key issues around gainful employment are complicated, and we want to get it right, so we will be coming back with that shortly."
     The delay gives for-profit colleges more time to fight the department's proposal to bar aid for programs in which a majority of students' loan payments would exceed 8 percent of the lowest quarter of graduates' expected earnings, based on a 10-year repayment plan. The colleges have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars pushing an alternative that would require programs to provide prospective students with more information about their graduates' debt levels and salaries….