NYT on the arrest of suspect in Annie Le’s killing:

Chief Lewis would not provide a motive beyond saying: “It is important to note that this is not about urban crime, university crime, domestic crime but an issue of workplace violence, which is becoming a growing concern around the country.”

Why is it so important that this was related to a workplace? What difference does it make? Does that change how the criminal is punished? Would it be more severe if someone concluded it was a “hate crime?”

Remember back in grade school when the teacher would address the entire class as one and say you need to work harder, you didn’t do well on a test, you did wonderfully on a test, you make him/her proud, you’re a disappointment? It’s a challenge to effectively work with a group of students, each of whom is unique, thinks differently, and performs differently. I’m sure all of my past teachers would acknowledge each student’s individuality, but many of them frequently assessed the entire class as one, as its average. It pissed me off.

A single classroom was bad enough. Now Obama’s doing it to the entire nation. The prepared text of today’s speech is here.

My favorite bits:

And no matter what you want to do with your life — I guarantee that you’ll need an education to do it. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You’re going to need a good education for every single one of those careers. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You’ve got to work for it and train for it and learn for it.

What if a kid isn’t interested in Obama’s idea of a good job? I certainly wasn’t thinking of anything he just mentioned after age 8. (Roark made me want to study architecture.)

You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that — if you quit on school — you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

You can go play if you want, little Johnny, just remember your country is counting on you to do your homework. Is there any easier way to teach a kid to say “fuck this shit”?

I know that sometimes, you get the sense from TV that you can be rich and successful without any hard work — that your ticket to success is through rapping or basketball or being a reality TV star, when chances are, you’re not going to be any of those things.

Forget your passions and dreams. Get back to work. Keep doign what your public school system tells you to do.

And even when you’re struggling, even when you’re discouraged, and you feel like other people have given up on you — don’t ever give up on yourself. Because when you give up on yourself, you give up on your country.

Barf.

Aside from the “do your duty” parts, it might make a great speech to a struggling kid, one on one. But millions, as their average? It doesn’t make a bit of difference anyway. Kansas City Shuffle.

Looks like I just missed a big rally against the SDSU budget cuts yesterday. I might not have fit in, protesting against all the funding they still get.

From a student:

“The human carnage from this fiscal train wreck will be felt in this state for a generation.”

Human carnage? Dear. Sounds awful.

“Higher education, and the things that it represents, are worth fighting for.”

But certainly not worth paying for. Higher education will still be around no matter how far they cut the budget. This guy’s just fighting for the opportunity to get his at other people’s expense.

Here’s a trailer for Michael Moore’s new movie, Capitalism: A Love Story.

This guy’s occasionally pissed about the same things that I’m pissed about. This one looks like it might actually be good, save one small but critical error: he’s not talking about capitalism.

The premise of the movie (call it a documentary if you want; I won’t) is summed up in the YouTube page description:

Michael Moore’s next film explores the root causes of the global economic meltdown and takes a comical look at the corporate and political shenanigans that culminated in what Moore has described as the biggest robbery in the history of this country the massive transfer of U.S. taxpayer money to private financial institutions.

As for the root causes, I bet he doesn’t mention 1913. As for the biggest robbery in the nation’s history, I might agree with him there.

The problem is that this transfer of wealth from taxpayers to private institutions is exactly not capitalism. Here‘s what dictionary.com says about it:

[A]n economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, esp. as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth. [. . .]

An economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market. [. . .]

An economic and political system characterized by a free market for goods and services and private control of production and consumption. [. . .]

An economic system based on a free market, open competition, profit motive and private ownership of the means of production. Capitalism encourages private investment and business, compared to a government-controlled economy. Investors in these private companies (i.e. shareholders) also own the firms and are known as capitalists. [. . .]

In such a system, individuals and firms have the right to own and use wealth to earn income and to sell and purchase labor for wages with little or no government control. The function of regulating the economy is then achieved mainly through the operation of market forces where prices and profit dictate where and how resources are used and allocated. The U.S. is a capitalistic system.

Tweak. Correction. The U.S. is was a capitalistic system.

Nothing in the above definitions, except for that last little blunder, suggests that trillions of dollars of taxpayer-funded bailouts of private corporations has anything to do with capitalism. Just as Obama saying he’s not proposing socialism doesn’t mean he isn’t, Bush saying this is capitalism doesn’t mean it is.

I just read a great article by Daniel Krawisz, making a case against intellectual property. Read the whole thing here. Intellectual property has always given me a weird feeling. It seemed to me that something was wrong there, but I could never figure it out. This article got me to look at it from a new, much clearer perspective, so I’ll be thinking hard about this for a while.

The main point is that owning intellectual property is not a right to an idea, but some small amount of ownership and control over all the physical objects that could possibly be used to recreate that idea.

If you have an intellectual property right to your monograph, you may prevent me from copying it, thereby limiting the physical property right I have in my ink, pen, and paper.

Similarly, if I record an original song, I now have some small ownership of all speakers everywhere in the universe, enough to prevent them from reproducing my recording.