Evidently, the shaping of a future Andrew Fastow or Kenneth Lay starts in school, business school that is. A recent study by Donald McCabe of Rutgers University found that 56% of business grad students fessed up to cheating (and most of those admitted to cheating three or more times in the previous year - evidently, crime does pay). Lest you start thinking better of the pocket protectors located across the street from the business school, engineering grad students admitted to cheating 54% of the time and physical sciences grad students said they cheated 50% of the time. The Leaning Tower of Pisa is starting to make corner-cutting sense now.
What about the most hallowed profession of medicine? A not so hallowed 49% admitted to cheating. Evidently, the Histology for Dummies books don’t help much. And our children - the future of America - will be happy to note that 48% of education grad students cheat, if only so that they can have ammo to win a potential plagiarism argument with their high school English teacher, thereby spawning a yearning interest in law school, where only 45% of the students cheat. That’s veritably saintly compared to those MBA pukes. And finally, the least likely to cheat, the repository of ethics in a cruel and shallow world? Humanities and social sciences grad students. As Mr. Slave would say, “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Friday, September 22, 2006
A Tale of Two Credits
Credit reports are strange beasties. They are individualized reports of financial worthiness run by private companies who don’t know you from Adam (or Eve or Steve), yet these faceless monoliths of corporate culture can keep you from getting a job, a car, or a house. Well, unless you want to get around that by paying 25-30% interest. Trust me...I’ve been there and it sucketh mightily. Thanks in part to a horrid upbringing on the cost of real items in the “real” world and to the non-existence of laws keeping vultures (aka college credit card representatives) away from college campuses, I got a front row seat to a morality play about the horrors of fucking up one’s credit and the long path of redemption necessary to restore it.
It starts with a long fall from the grace of seeming financial equanimity, a journey through the wastelands of high interest rates with your BFFs, Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, the climax of your 25-year-old self attacking you late at night with a large hatchet and threatening to beat you silly if you don’t get your head out of your arse so that your 30-year-old self might have a shot at home ownership and respectability someday, and then the less-than-climactic denouement of paying off all your bills at once (thanks to your loan-happy fairy aunt). The play closes with a shot of you checking in with your BFFs every 3-6 months to make sure that they are reporting accurate info, because, like a lot of friends, they are prone to holding grudges and making up exaggerated stories about you.
Some of the various lies that my BFFs have said about me include reporting that I was dead (thanks, TransUnion! I love you too!), reporting that I had a spouse named John (not bloody likely), reporting accounts that were closed as open and accounts that were paid as unpaid. My BFFs’ really suck at accounting. Luckily, though, they are prone to the art of persuasion...if you argue with them enough, and for long enough, eventually they’ll pretty much back the hell down and start telling the truth and nothing but the truth. Well...sometimes they get a little ahead of themselves, like this year...my BFF Experian (whom I now only check in with once a year, as we’ve grown apart somewhat), was reporting that my spouse’s name was “Scooter.” (Okay, well, it reported her real name, but you get the idea.) Dude - either wait until I actually pop the question or move to Massachusetts, mmmkay? One joint Storehouse credit card does not a marriage make!
(By the way, everyone can pull free credit reports for themselves yearly at www.annualcreditreport.com . Just do it.)
It starts with a long fall from the grace of seeming financial equanimity, a journey through the wastelands of high interest rates with your BFFs, Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax, the climax of your 25-year-old self attacking you late at night with a large hatchet and threatening to beat you silly if you don’t get your head out of your arse so that your 30-year-old self might have a shot at home ownership and respectability someday, and then the less-than-climactic denouement of paying off all your bills at once (thanks to your loan-happy fairy aunt). The play closes with a shot of you checking in with your BFFs every 3-6 months to make sure that they are reporting accurate info, because, like a lot of friends, they are prone to holding grudges and making up exaggerated stories about you.
Some of the various lies that my BFFs have said about me include reporting that I was dead (thanks, TransUnion! I love you too!), reporting that I had a spouse named John (not bloody likely), reporting accounts that were closed as open and accounts that were paid as unpaid. My BFFs’ really suck at accounting. Luckily, though, they are prone to the art of persuasion...if you argue with them enough, and for long enough, eventually they’ll pretty much back the hell down and start telling the truth and nothing but the truth. Well...sometimes they get a little ahead of themselves, like this year...my BFF Experian (whom I now only check in with once a year, as we’ve grown apart somewhat), was reporting that my spouse’s name was “Scooter.” (Okay, well, it reported her real name, but you get the idea.) Dude - either wait until I actually pop the question or move to Massachusetts, mmmkay? One joint Storehouse credit card does not a marriage make!
(By the way, everyone can pull free credit reports for themselves yearly at www.annualcreditreport.com . Just do it.)
Monday, September 11, 2006
The Values of Freedom
I love it when the administration gets on its hobby horse and starts telling the American public that they’re a bunch of Benedict Arnolds for opposing (or even questioning), the administration’s Iraq policy. Even the very suggestion that America should withdraw its troops from Iraq “validates the strategy of the terrorists,” according to Cheney. Evidently, Cheney gives greater weight to the terrorists going “nanny nanny boo boo” to our governmental ideals (the ability to have a debate on whether a war is justified - shocking!) and its possible side-effects than he does to the possibility of America becoming a communist-like regime where freedom of speech and of the press is only tolerated to the extent that it pats the current administration on its ass and says “Good job, boys!”
It is our government’s responsibility not only to protect the bodily integrity of its citizens, but to protect the constitutional freedoms and liberties that are the essential building blocks of a just society. The denigration of these building blocks are not only an affront to the great men and women who founded this nation, but to the memory of every individual whose life has been lost in serving this nation or at the hands of terrorists. A life lost on behalf of America means little if we allow the presence of terrorism to close our eyes, ears, and mouth. We endure because we see, because we discuss, because we listen. Ignorance is the heart of terrorism and we lose the war on terror when we allow it to pervade our government and citizenry. Precaution in an age of terror is a social good (please - take my liquids before I board that 747!), but our government’s insistence that its methods are not to be openly questioned is a sign that they no longer deserve us as citizens and that we, as citizens, deserve much better than them.
It is our government’s responsibility not only to protect the bodily integrity of its citizens, but to protect the constitutional freedoms and liberties that are the essential building blocks of a just society. The denigration of these building blocks are not only an affront to the great men and women who founded this nation, but to the memory of every individual whose life has been lost in serving this nation or at the hands of terrorists. A life lost on behalf of America means little if we allow the presence of terrorism to close our eyes, ears, and mouth. We endure because we see, because we discuss, because we listen. Ignorance is the heart of terrorism and we lose the war on terror when we allow it to pervade our government and citizenry. Precaution in an age of terror is a social good (please - take my liquids before I board that 747!), but our government’s insistence that its methods are not to be openly questioned is a sign that they no longer deserve us as citizens and that we, as citizens, deserve much better than them.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
America the Beautiful
It’s good to see that America. is much the same as I left it - the Potomac River is as polluted as ever and spawning intersexed fish (a whole new meaning of “it’s in the water” is soon to follow); Bush’s interest in human rights has shot up markedly given the impending election season, and the relative idiocy levels of Florida Republicans is intact. Oh America, how I missed thee!
Evidently, America missed me too, or at least that small sub-section of America known as my co-workers and bosses. I arrived at work yesterday after a wonderful month of steadfastly ignoring time, date, and responsibility to find hundreds of e-mail messages in my inbox, a thick stack of papers on my desk, and my calendar filled with depositions that my co-counsel had scheduled for me in my absence. It’s nice to have been missed, but even better to be ignored. Ignorance of my general existence in my office would be bliss - the kind of bliss that would allow for all kinds of time to pleasure read, write, pontificate, and make bikini waxing appointments. You know...the important things in life.
Speaking of pleasure reading, I did plenty of that on vacation. In the total absence of legal briefs and Westlaw (and in the absence of my usual panoply of magazines), it’s amazing how many books one can plow through. I managed to knock out “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser (yes, I will still eat McDonalds on rare occasions, but I’m off the non-free range beef for the foreseeable future), “1984" by George Orwell (which tied in nicely with my trip to the Museum of Communism in Prague), and “A Long Way Down” by Nick Hornby (which led to my overuse of the British insults “tosser” and “git”). I also started “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, but my prospects of finishing it have been lessened by the approximately 50 magazines and catalogs that were delivered to my residence during my month-long absence (evidently, Pottery Barn is not sufficient with four seasons, but must have both an early Fall and a regular Fall catalog...tossers). It’s ever so hard to choose between a Booker Award-winning author and finding out the details of Kate Hudson’s adulterous fling with Owen Wilson, dont' you think?
Evidently, America missed me too, or at least that small sub-section of America known as my co-workers and bosses. I arrived at work yesterday after a wonderful month of steadfastly ignoring time, date, and responsibility to find hundreds of e-mail messages in my inbox, a thick stack of papers on my desk, and my calendar filled with depositions that my co-counsel had scheduled for me in my absence. It’s nice to have been missed, but even better to be ignored. Ignorance of my general existence in my office would be bliss - the kind of bliss that would allow for all kinds of time to pleasure read, write, pontificate, and make bikini waxing appointments. You know...the important things in life.
Speaking of pleasure reading, I did plenty of that on vacation. In the total absence of legal briefs and Westlaw (and in the absence of my usual panoply of magazines), it’s amazing how many books one can plow through. I managed to knock out “Fast Food Nation” by Eric Schlosser (yes, I will still eat McDonalds on rare occasions, but I’m off the non-free range beef for the foreseeable future), “1984" by George Orwell (which tied in nicely with my trip to the Museum of Communism in Prague), and “A Long Way Down” by Nick Hornby (which led to my overuse of the British insults “tosser” and “git”). I also started “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro, but my prospects of finishing it have been lessened by the approximately 50 magazines and catalogs that were delivered to my residence during my month-long absence (evidently, Pottery Barn is not sufficient with four seasons, but must have both an early Fall and a regular Fall catalog...tossers). It’s ever so hard to choose between a Booker Award-winning author and finding out the details of Kate Hudson’s adulterous fling with Owen Wilson, dont' you think?
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