The era of über-cluelessness: most voters have no clue how clueless they are

     In my view, the moral of the “Bell” scandal isn’t that greedy and unscrupulous creeps have bilked the taxpayer; the more important lesson here is that most citizens wrongly imagine that, if evil or corruption or mismanagement is afoot in government, the “system” will detect it and take steps to deal with it. And so people are stunned by this crazy Bell fubar.
     They shouldn’t be. Our system is now such that shit happens in their city, county, state and federal government all of the time about which they haven’t a solitary clue. It's still pretty easy to get clued in. But people don't make the effort. They don't think they need to. They even think they are knowledgeable.
     They're deeply, f*cking clueless. They're über-clueless!
     The prevailing cluelessness of voters—admittedly, also encouraged by the decline of local newsreporting—is well illustrated by the SOCCCD. Our seven elected trustees oversee the expenditure of hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. Do people understand this? Do they know who these trustees are and how they conduct themselves? Clearly not. Over and over again, trustee incumbents are reelected, even when they act badly and irresponsibly. Several of them have done so. For years.
     The SOCCCD comprises three campuses: Saddleback College, Irvine Valley College, and ATEP (the Advanced Technical and Education Park), in Tustin. Very big things have been promised at ATEP for many years—it’s the SOCCCD’s endlessly promised but albatrossian “Great Park”—and, despite the expenditure of many millions of dollars, all we have there so far is a dinky cluster of tin buildings, a few bewildered administrators, and a few hundred students.
     The board has been divided about ATEP, but its champions have generally prevailed, in part because of the ardent advocacy of former Chancellor Raghu Mathur, who saw the facility as his Mt. Rushmore. It seems to me that it was not unreasonable for trustees, all those many years ago, to pursue the property, which was part of the old Tustin Marine Corps Air Station, and to try to do something special with it. But, in part owing to some bad luck, things haven’t worked out.
     For several years now, it has seemed to many observers that we’re throwing good money after bad. In the meantime, money gets tighter and tighter, and important college services have been cut back or worse.
     Do citizens have any idea about this? Don’t think so.

* * *

     As it happens, one of our trustees, John Williams, is also the county’s Public Guardian/Public Administrator, a job that he has royally screwed up, or so said two Grand Jury reports and lots of unhappy people who work or have worked with the fellow.
     Williams eventually faced a kind of “day of reckoning” before the OC Board of Supervisors, but at least four of the five Supes are politically affiliated with Williams. Three of them decided essentially to leave Williams and his combined offices alone, despite the top-heavy management, the irregularities and unprofessionalism, the growing costs. It was outrageous and inexplicable (well, no, it was way explicable, I’m afraid).
     Does the community understand any of this? Clearly not. In the recent election, despite those “scathing” Grand Jury reports, Williams was reelected.

* * *

     Two important issues have come up in county politics very recently: redistricting and campaign finance restrictions. Things could have gone very badly, but that hasn’t happened yet. Do you think your neighbors know about this?
     Journalists do report these things. We’ve still got some excellent news media in this county. For instance, the Voice of OC seems so far to be doing a good job reporting on important local issues in politics. I've been a big fan from the start.
     Check out editor-in-chief Norberto Santana’s recent appearance on the Real Orange (KOCE). Again, important decisions are being made—or, more recently, have failed to be made—in county government. Santana lays it out.
     And don’t forget to read The Voice of OC online!

Clueless feds, clueless youth—clueless freakin' everybody

Puppies do not plagiarize; nor do they offer poor theistic arguments

FBI Admits It Tracked Howard Zinn (Inside Higher Ed)

     The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Friday admitted that it tracked Howard Zinn, the noted historian and political activist who died in January, from 1949 to 1974, and the bureau released 423 pages of records from the monitoring of Zinn. Salon noted that this monitoring took place "despite having apparently no evidence that he ever committed a crime." And TPM noted that the records indicate that a senior official at Boston University, where Zinn taught, tried to have him fired in 1970. (If you are wondering if that official might have been John Silber, the long-time BU president with whom Zinn had many disagreements, it wasn't, as Silber hadn't been hired at the time.)

Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age (Trip Gabriel, New York Times)

     At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.
     At DePaul University, the tip-off to one student’s copying was the purple shade of several paragraphs he had lifted from the Web; when confronted by a writing tutor his professor had sent him to, he was not defensive — he just wanted to know how to change purple text to black.
     And at the University of Maryland, a student reprimanded for copying from Wikipedia in a paper on the Great Depression said he thought its entries — unsigned and collectively written — did not need to be credited since they counted, essentially, as common knowledge.
. . .
     [T]hese cases — typical ones, according to writing tutors and officials responsible for discipline at the three schools who described the plagiarism — suggest that many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.
. . .
     “Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
. . .
     …[Th]e number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes “serious cheating” is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.
. . .
     A University of Notre Dame anthropologist, Susan D. Blum, disturbed by the high rates of reported plagiarism, set out to understand how students view authorship and the written word, or “texts” in Ms. Blum’s academic language.
     She conducted her ethnographic research among 234 Notre Dame undergraduates.
     “Today’s students stand at the crossroads of a new way of conceiving texts and the people who create them and who quote them,” she wrote last year in the book “My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture,” published by Cornell University Press.
     Ms. Blum argued that student writing exhibits some of the same qualities of pastiche that drive other creative endeavors today — TV shows that constantly reference other shows or rap music that samples from earlier songs.
     In an interview, she said the idea of an author whose singular effort creates an original work is rooted in Enlightenment ideas of the individual. It is buttressed by the Western concept of intellectual property rights as secured by copyright law. But both traditions are being challenged.
     “Our notion of authorship and originality was born, it flourished, and it may be waning,” Ms. Blum said.
. . .
     At the University of California, Davis, of the 196 plagiarism cases referred to the disciplinary office last year, a majority did not involve students ignorant of the need to credit the writing of others.
     Many times, said Donald J. Dudley, who oversees the discipline office on the campus of 32,000, it was students who intentionally copied — knowing it was wrong — who were “unwilling to engage the writing process.”….

Philosophy and Faith (Gary Gutting, New York Times)

     …The standard view is that philosophers’ disagreements over arguments about God make their views irrelevant to the faith of ordinary believers and non-believers. The claim seems obvious: if we professionals can’t agree among ourselves, what can we have to offer to non-professionals? An appeal to experts requires consensus among those experts, which philosophers don’t have.
     This line of thought ignores the fact that when philosophers’ disagree it is only about specific aspects of the most subtle and sophisticated versions of arguments for and against God’s existence…. There is no disagreement among philosophers about the more popular arguments to which theists and atheists typically appeal: as formulated, they do not prove (that is, logically derive from uncontroversial premises) what they claim to prove. They are clearly inadequate in the judgment of qualified professionals. Further, there are no more sophisticated formulations that theists or atheists can accept — the way we do scientific claims — on the authority of expert consensus.
     In these popular debates about God’s existence, the winners are neither theists nor atheists, but agnostics — the neglected step-children of religious controversy, who rightly point out that neither side in the debate has made its case. This is the position supported by the consensus of expert philosophical opinion.
     This conclusion should particularly discomfit popular proponents of atheism, such as Richard Dawkins, whose position is entirely based on demonstrably faulty arguments. Believers, of course, can fall back on the logically less rigorous support that they characterize as faith. But then they need to reflect on just what sort of support faith can give to religious belief. How are my students’ warm feelings of certainty as they hug one another at Sunday Mass in their dorm really any different from the trust they might experience while under the spell of a really plausible salesperson?
     What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher?. . .
     But how can religious experience sustain faith in a specific salvation narrative, particularly given the stark differences among the accounts of the great religious traditions? What sort of religious experience could support the claim that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and not just a great moral teacher? Or that the Bible rather than the Koran is the revelation of God’s own words? Believers may have strong feelings of certainty, but each religion rejects the certainty of all the others, which leaves us asking why they privilege their own faith….