Hey congress & med schools - when students do it it's called plagiarism - so why are you doing it?

Statements by more than a dozen lawmakers were ghostwritten, in whole or in part, by Washington lobbyists working for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies.

In House, Many Spoke With One Voice - Lobbyists’ - nytimes.com

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Senator Charles E. Grassley wrote to 10 top medical schools Tuesday to ask what they are doing about professors who put their names on ghostwritten articles in medical journals — and why that practice was any different from plagiarism by students.

Med Schools Quizzed on Medical Ghostwriting - nytimes.com

You know your country is in trouble when med schools act like congress.

Kettle calls pot black! Afghanistan will form major anti-corruption unit!

The Afghan government says it will form a major anti-corruption unit to investigate graft among senior officials.

Afghanistan to Form Major Anti-Corruption Unit - voanews.com

I read that first sentence and then I started laughing so hard I started shaking. Good grief.

In seriousness - if Obama starts doing unintentional Dubya impressions every time he uses the word "freedom" or "democracy" - I'm going to want to scream.

[T]he Afghan government should address the task of reducing corruption within the next six months.

Oh yeah, timeline: in the next six months. That's amusing.

[Afghanistan's Interior Minister] said that Afghan ministers must examine all of their employees in that time to determine whether they were hired based on merit or cronyism.

If so, do they get a (secret) bonus?

We need to leave Afghanistan.

I guess Clinton will be tv fairly soon giving some mumbo-jumbo like "Concrete steps are now being taken to address problems in in the Afghan government..." Oh, yes - address the corrupt-, um, I mean problems. But why give them six months? Why not six days? Or six hours. It's a joke. We need to leave.

The bizarre "FED" death in Kentucky and politicized yelling

In September Bill Sparkman was found in a remote area of rural Kentucky. He had a rope around his neck, he was tied to a tree, his arms and legs were bound, he had a blind-fold over his eyes, and the word "Fed" was written on his chest.

Death of Bill Sparkman - wikipedia.org
"Bill Sparkman" - Google News [sorted by date]

In older articles - I don't know what to believe - he was described as being naked. Beyond the very strange details of this case - is something else entirely: political yelling.

The case can serve as a sort of litmus test for overly passionate political beliefs. Passionate people on the right seek out the details they think show that he killed himself while their counterparts on the left look for details that show suicide was impossible. I'm not sure of the passionate libertarian position. Is it that people should have the right to kill themselves in bizarre ways?

The political dimension disturbs me. We don't have enough information - yet people are screaming that they know what happened. I wonder if a couple years from now it will have become "normal" for people with opposing political viewpoints to be looked at as one step below child molesters.

All the brouhaha reminds me of the Obama "Should Obama be killed?" Facebook poll - also from September. Thomas Friedman even jumped into the fray and did so before more details were known:

What kind of madness is it that someone would create a poll on Facebook asking respondents, “Should Obama be killed?” The choices were: “No, Maybe, Yes, and Yes if he cuts my health care.” The Secret Service is now investigating.

Where Did ‘We’ Go? - nytimes.com

I couldn't believe he wrote that. When I read those lines my immediate thought was "How does he know a kid didn't create the poll?". And it turned out a kid was involved and the Secret Service closed their investigation.

Some possible scenarios in the death of Bill Sparkman come to mind.

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There's the "he committed suicide for the insurance money" explanation. The idea being that - despite the bizarreness of it all - he was able to commit suicide in a plausible enough way that the police had to proceed slowly over months until they started to see the evidence in a different way.

Well - I don't buy that. I don't buy that at all.

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There's the "he committed suicide for the insurance money and he had help" explanation.

Hmm...

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He was murdered for the insurance money.

Hmm...

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A nut job murdered him for another reason. And the killer has an odd mental process.


Hmm... well it's possible.

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He was murdered - and there was a cover up.

Reality usually doesn't mimic comic book plots - so I doubt it. Then again - I've never been to Kentucky.

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There's the genius who is suicidal explanation.

And I mean a real genius, somebody with the mental powers of Richard Feynman. Somebody that smart could figure out a way to:

• write 'FED' on his chest in way that would entirely hide the fact that he wrote it himself
• bind his hands
• bind his feet
• tie himself to a tree
• blindfold himself
• hang himself
• do all of the above in a way that was (nearly) foolproof and manage to keep a relaxed mental state and not make mistakes despite the desired endgame being his own death

Calling this "unlikely" is a vast understatement.

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There's the beyond-the-grave explanation:

• he hung himself and his ghost did all those things

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There's the absolutely incompetent police investigation explanation:

• all the things he did could easily be explained - there was something that he stood on to hang himself, there was a marker was in his pocket, etc - and they couldn't figure things out for months and months.

A murder investigation is hardly a minor crime. CSI Kentucky might (easily?) botch the analysis of a simple local robbery - but a suspicious death that generates nationwide coverage is another thing entirely.

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If you use Occam's razor - it seems to me that the most likely explanations from the ones I listed are:

1. He had help in committing suicide for the insurance money.
2. He was murdered for the insurance money.
3. He was murdered by a nut job.

The police have gone public with the theory that suicide is possible so number one gets my, um, vote.

News Corp. to Google "Piss off"

Okay, I have to admit that Rupert Murdoch didn't actually say it. But he sure is thinking it.

In an Sky News interview, the crotchety old man of News Corp. said that he's thinking of removing his websites from Google's indexes.

The interview is 37 minute long and is up on Youtube. I listened to it, but I didn't watch it. Murdoch in high defintion is something I want to avoid.

I read a few articles - but nothing worth linking to. Here's a Google news search link (sorted by date): intitle:"news corp" google.

In the interview he calls himself an "environmentalist". I think he's getting loopy.

He also says "I've never fired an editor for disagreeing with me on politics." I find that absolutely impossible to believe.

75% of kids can't join military - are fat, have health problems, have no diploma or have a criminal history

In a study it calls "Ready, Willing and Unable to Serve," the group says Pentagon analysts have concluded that 75 percent of people ages 17 to 24 could not qualify for military service because they are obese or have some other health problem, lack a high school diploma or have a serious criminal history.

Military finds 75 percent of today's youth can't serve - mcclatchydc.com

Hey, Pentagon how about sending a few billion (or better yet more) over to education? That would help the kids and maybe some of them would even join up.

It seems pretty ominous when the military starts to complain that three out of four kids can't even join the military. It's not as if military is med school.

I am considering starting up a brand new blog with a single theme: "You know your country is in trouble when...".

California "burns" and CA politicians fiddle

If California were a business - it would have gone bankrupt already.

California politicians should be busy, very busy, making efforts to fix their economy, fix their tax revenue system and making efforts at bipartisan reconciliation.

Is that what they are doing? No.

I think Nero was born a couple thousand years too early.

Tacitus said that Nero's playing his lyre and singing while the city burned was only a rumor. Popular legend remembers Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burned, but this is an anachronism as the instrument was invented a thousand years later.

Great Fire of Rome > The fire and Rome's reconstruction - wikipedia.org

Well, Wikipedia, "Nero did nothing as Rome burned." is missing something. And "Nero played his lyre while Rome burned" doesn't have any zing.

California politicians have been doing their own version of fiddling. Although this mouthful "The California governor sent a 'fuck you' message and other politicians were fixated on cat declawing as their state fell into economic ruin." defies being made into a saying.

What will the politicians in that state next focus on? Hemlines?

Variations on "lipstick on a pig"

The image is from an interactive Flash thing at memetracker.org. The quotes are here: Variants of the "lipstick on a pig" quote. And there's The top phrases from last month.

If you want to see an example (and you may not) of how the memetracker was used to help create a lengthy data-filed article here's a link - Covering the Great Recession from journalism.org.

spinn3r.com was also used in the making of the journalism.org article. The homepage title is "Spinn3r: RSS Content, News Feeds, News Content, News Crawler and Web Crawler APIs".

The article has no neato flash interactive things. It's a mass of data, graphs and charts spread out over seven pages. There's no way to put everything on a single page (The print link only allows you to print the current page).

I made it to the middle of page six before I experienced massive data overload. If I was getting paid and this was a column - I'd still provide you with summaries. But I'm not so for this you are on your own.

The site is fond - in fact very fond - of the nasty sounding term "newshole". The following definition is from way back in the net dark ages of 2001. Yet the word never caught on. I can't imagine why.

Newshole
A newshole is the amount of print-space or air-time available to report the news. The size of the newshole is affected by the amount of advertising, which not only takes up print-space, but also determines the number of pages in the paper (how much the news organization can afford). At a daily newspaper, the newshole changes each day, and editors and their reporters are given a certain number of column inches to fill. The articles that are printed are prioritized according to newsworthiness. Thus, reporters not only attempt to complete a story by the press deadline, but they also compete with other reporters to have their stories printed.

Learning the Culture and Language of the Media - ericdigests.org

Newshole seems to me to be the sort of word that isn't quite apt for what it describes. To my ears it has a ring that matches a subset of the tabloid-like (i.e. mainstream) news realm - junky video based tv news coverage.

• How we gonna fill up the newshole at the end of the show?
• Easy. Just jam the hole with that "dog that can climb trees" story.
• You can't go wrong with a feel good animal story at the end.
• Nope. You sure can't.