I had emailed the CEO of the company regarding the east bay express claim and got responses from him denying the claim but using quite possibly the worst logic imaginable and making me more suspicious of yelp after talking to him.  It turns out that yelp is getting sued over their extortion racket.  They deny the charge and say that they will fight it in court.  I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

For girls: For those of you who are unfamiliar with ghetto chicks-Ghetto chicks usually have gold teeth, start fights and drama, and wear cheap clothes … have short, nappy hair, and usually wear cheap weave, usually in bad colors…Ghetto chicks have a very limited vocabulary, and attempt to make up for it, by forming new words, such as “constipulated”, or simply cursing persistently, or using other types of vulgarities, and making noises, such as “hmmg!”, or smacking their lips, and making other angry noises,grunts, and faces. The objective is for all you lovely ladies to look, act, and essentially take on these “respectable” qualities throughout the day.

The person taking claim for the party is someone calling himself Jiggaboo Jones (shown below).

If you don’t mind heavy amounts of swearing then you can watch two youtube videos where he takes credit for and also defends his actions for the Compton cookout:

http://www.youtube.com/user/jigga2jones#p/a/u/1/iGfFSZ2kcRg

You can see the display behind him freeze part way through his second speech:

http://www.youtube.com/user/jigga2jones#p/a/u/0/y95G-LH885Y

Sine there were a bunch of Pi Kappa Alpha frat members in attendance, it was assumed to be a frat event.  They denied that they organized it, but did not deny that frat members were there.  Just to show that free speech is alive and well, another person decided to fan the flames of racial hatred by throwing another racially insensitive party soon after the first one.  Yes you have the right to be an ass, but that still makes you an ass.

So there was an administration organized teach in at UCSD which a bunch of students left half way through.  There have been promises by the UCSD administration to increase funding for diversity outreach and promises of an investigation into the event along with an investigation of the student run TV station that aired video in support of the party.  Part of the response to the student run TV station has been to cut funds to the station which some argue is limiting free speech.  To top off everything else that has happened, a noose was found in the library.

UCSD has the lowest percentage of African American students out of all of the UC campuses and the result of parties such as the Compton cookout will be to further discourage African American students from applying and accepting admission to UCSD.

For the most part the official administrative response would be great and highly commendable if you view it without the knowledge of recent budget cuts or with the view that money does not grow on trees.

The UC budget crisis has meant that there have been many cuts to various programs throughout the UC.  Although all programs have felt the pain of the cuts, many of the programs that were cut first or have been cut the most are now the programs that UCSD administrators say they will now pour money into.  Programs such as EOP, education opportunity program, help students who are the first in their family to attend college make the transition smoothly.  Scholarships have been cut as well.  If UCSD decides to return funding to levels that UCSD gave out a few years ago, it would mean that UCSD only makes diversity a priority when racist parties occur.  The messed up part of the situation occurs when it is in the financial interest of diversity programs to increase racist parties in the surrounding communities because that is the only way to secure funding for the programs from the administration.

At the same time the funds that can now so easily move into programs that had originally been slated to be cut (EOP, scholarships etc.) have to come from somewhere.  I will bet you my next paycheck that they will not cut or furlough any administrative positions in order to come up with the funds.  The money will come from the lowest paid staff on campus (janitors cafeteria staff etc.).  Of course all of this will be buried in a long budget report where nobody will find it.

I would talk more about this, but there is a strike coming up on the 4th and there was a riot in Berkeley along with some yelp news that I want to post about as well.

Garrison Keillor recently wrote an opinion article in which he wished everyone a Merry Christmas and got into a bit of trouble for it.  Now why would he be in trouble for wishing people a Merry Christmas you might ask?  Well it was probably because he said Merry Christmas after penning a big F U to Unitarians, Jews, and anyone else that even thinks about participating in the Holidays from a non conservative Christian perspective:

“Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.”

The full article can be read here.

Garrison Keillor’s show on NPR is quite popular, and having a popular personality ranting about Jews and Unitarians can have a corrosive effect –specifically it make listeners feel free to express and act upon their own bigotries.  I firmly believe in freedom of speech, so I think everyone should be allowed to spew whatever venomous and irrational fears they have, I just don’t think Garrison Keillor is telling the truth when he ends his article with “Merry Christmas, my dears”.

So should Garrison Keillor’s tirade against all those who believe in Jesus less than him bother people?  I’ll go with no.  His show is wildly popular with a specific crowd, seen in the background when he speaks in the video below, which include older generations and their grandparents:

His influence on younger generations is inconsequential meaning that his audience is literally dying off.  His ability to influence a demographic that will have little influence in the future gives me hope.  I really want NPR to release an official response so that I could tell if they distance themselves from his writing, or if they defend it (and thus which demographic they are targeting the most.

——————

Of all the responses I’ve read so far I think Debbie Schlussel’s is the funniest.  It’s funny not because she was trying to be funny however.  She mostly has a point that Garrison Keillor was being an insensitive  ass, but at the end she says “this isn’t a Christan-on-Jew attack, but rather a Marxist-posing-as-a-Christian-on-Jew attack.”  How she got from what Garrison Keillor said to Marxism can only be uncoded after one learns the following:

Debbie Schlussel is a conservative (her about page talks about her following being similar to Ann Coulter’s and how she has appeared on the O’Reilley actor).  Most conservatives will help hoist the defense of Christmas flag that Garrison Keillor is raising, but Debbie is a Conservative Jew.  Conservatives are known for lumping all their fears into one basket, hence peace protesters often get labeled as hippie, communist, anti-American, Atheist, Muslim, jobless, gun hating, Gay, Demon worshipers.  This tactic of demonizing ones enemy is how Garrison Keillor gets called a Marxist.

———

Garrison Keillor apparently doesn’t like Gay people too: http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/03/14/keillor/

Researchers at Beckman Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL,  found that “Expert gamers and non-gamers differed on a number of basic cognitive skills: experts could track objects moving at greater speeds, better detected changes to objects stored in visual short-term memory, switched more quickly from one task to another, and mentally rotated objects more efficiently.”  I’m probably not allowed to repost sections of the body of the article, but the abstract sums up the findings nicely.

When I go home I think I’ll have to work on improving my cognitive skills.

The UCSC Academic Senate operates as a legislative body and as a system of committees run by and for the faculty. The University of California has a dual-track system of authority and responsibility which presumes that faculty are best qualified to chart the University’s educational course, while the administrators are most competent to direct its finances and organization. In practice, these domains overlap and are interdependent. To function successfully, faculty and administrators depend on a high level of consultation, trust, mutual respect and a tradition of collegial collaboration.

So right from the get go there is a problem.  If you want to get something done through proper and official channels, which of this dual-track authority and responsibility tree do you navigate to get to a solution.  Do you attempt to take up your cause and petition the Academic Senate, or do you go to the Administration?  Obviously the Senate is the preferred authority track for a student.  It contains professors who see the effects of budget cuts in their day to day work and are more connected to the decisions being made.  However the description above suggest that if your problem is budget related, those decisions fall mostly under “finances” and would thus be an administrative decision.  To look at how this system works in practice, and not in theory, it is helpful to look at the minutes from the Academic Senate.

From time to time, budget decisions come up in Academic senate meetings (these meetings are held in Kerr hall which is the building that was occupied).  Below is a quote from the minutes between a member of the Senate and the EVC, EVC stands for Executive Vice Chancellor and is a member of the Administrative arm of the dual track authority system:

From the February Minutes:
Professor Kevin Karplus, Biomolecular Engineering, asked why, given the budget situation, is the campus paying for a security guard in an inactive parking lot. The EVC responded that he assumed Professor Karplus is talking about the future site of the biomedical building and the former site of the tree sit and the EVC does not want the fence torn down or any more destruction at the site. Professor Karplus asked if replacing a fence would cost less than security guards. The EVC said he will take that into consideration.

This request, made in February, seems reasonable.  Why pay for a more expensive guard if repairing a fence is cheaper.  Karplus, seeing wasted funds, tells those in charge of finances to quit wasting money.  I’ve seen the guard in question (actually I’ve seen 2 guards, possibly during a change in shift). I know that there was a private security guard at the construction site last month (I’ll check again next time I go by the site).  At a minimum there have been private security guards, protecting a fenced in parking lot from February till at least last month, if not to this day.  What the EVC meant when he said he would take Kevin Karplus’ comments into consideration is that he hoped that nobody would look into it when he promptly ignored this concern.  This is a minor budget issue.  More serious budget concerns were brought up in May.  Please note that Chancellors fall under the administrative arm:

From the May Minutes:
Professor Onuttom Narayan, Physics, provided a chart showing the that (sic.) at UCSC the growth in faculty has slightly lagged behind that of students; that there has been essentially no growth in clerical staff, and rising above them all is the increase in senior management group (SMG) and management and service professionals (MSP). The difference between the growth rate of the curves is six percent. Each data set is normalized to one at its lowest point, and plotted on a log scale. After explaining the chart Professor Narayan asked the chancellor to explain this apparent increase in amount of senior management on campus, and why, at a time of furloughs, salary reductions, laying off lecturers and staff, we should ignore such a number.

Chancellor Blumenthal responded that he thinks the chart raises a good point, and one of the things he and the EVC are doing is trying to reduce the costs of the administration.

He does think that most of the growth is in MSP, and not senior management. Chancellor Blumenthal said that he is looking at ways to consolidate the positions within senior management and MSPs on this campus. A number of positions over the last year have remained unfilled at the senior level. If you look at current numbers it will be less.

Professor Narayan said the information came from UCOP data, which is available on the UCOP web site, and the two divisions (senior management and MSP) are listed together. Professor Narayan has no idea how to disentangle them, but would agree that probably the most growth has been in MSP.

EVC Kliger said the data should be looked at in more detail. He does not know whether this means a lot of clerical people were reclassified because of change in job duties, and the clerical and MSP people may need to be added together to make sense of the chart. The EVC also said there has been a huge increase in the reporting that the campus has to do; that brings up compliance issues, and that takes many people to get it done. The EVC added that if people look at the budget reductions web site, they will see that the biggest reduction in any unit on campus over the last two years has been in the EVC’s office, and that has resulted in major changes in the way the campus does business. The EVC thinks it is important to note that the administration is leading from the top, and not just assuming that all the cuts need to be made at the lowest level.

The response to evidence that UCSC is not reducing its administration at the same rate as instruction and staff is similar to the earlier case of the security guard.  Administrative officials promise to look into it, but I’m guessing it’s not high on their priority list.  It looks like the administration uses the same tactics when dealing with the Academic Senate as were used with the treesit and GSC occupation: wait it out, hope that memories fade, and completely ignore concerns.  I think the physics professor had a different graph, but the one below shows the same problem (from here:http://keepcaliforniaspromise.org/?p=469):

The trend above shows that very soon, for every professor in the UC system there will be 1 manager of the UC.  The quote from the head of the Academic Senate below is quite revealing (found here:http://senate.ucsc.edu/meetings/09Oct19/ChairLetter.pdf):

the ill-considered implementation of furloughs, joins two extraordinary challenges to UC’s historic strength – the unacceptable decline in public financial support and the deterioration of a strong faculty voice in governance. Both must be restored.

That statement shows that the Academic Senate, which is supposed to have a “dual-track system of authority and responsibility”, is really subordinate to the administration.  The board of regents of the UC are appointed to 12 year terms and these appointees in turn appoint others (the president, the general counsel, treasurer, chief compliance and audit officer and secretary).  All of this is depressing so I will move on to the positive.  The superhuman blogger that I am, I will now SOLVE THE UC BUDGET CRISIS OF 2010/11.

Most of the solutions to this year’s budget problems at the UC were solved with 1 year band aids.  What that means is many of the “solutions” to the budget are setting things up for more cuts and fee hikes next year.  I have the solution!  Unfortunately solving the future budget crisis requires one to actually look at the UC budgets, which can be found here:

http://budget.ucop.edu/pubs.html

On pages 104 to 106 of the 10/11 UC system’s budget is the section on Institutional Support, which is where the administration is paid.  You cannot read this section without running into the greatly publicized cost savings of $62.2 million realized by firing about 631 people at the office of the president (UCOP).  That means that every person fired was costing the UC system roughly $100,000 a year.  This might sound bad, but the UCOP still has a budget of $293.3 million with 1,439 employees with an average cost of $203,822 per year per employee.  So it looks like the UCOP was actually cutting employees from the bottom.  One would expect that with a $62.2 million dollar reduction in the UCOP from academic years 07/08 to 09/10, the costs for institutional support, which funds the total administration, should have gone down.  Here is what happened in each of those years budgets (numbers are in millions of dollars and are found on some of the last pages of the budget):

Academic Year      IS Expenditures    next years projected Expenditures
07/08               $651.421                     $666.303
08/09               $725.329                     $744.846
09/10               $721.806                     $775.904

As is evident, in the 3 years when this great leap of savings occurred, Institutional Support increased its budget by 10.8%.  The budget also plans for administrative spending to increase next year.   I don’t care if individual departments within the Institutional support mechanism are able to reduce their budget, when the whole block as a whole grows, and Institutional Support is not involved in instruction or research you have to ask questions.  The UCOP will have a reduced budget, if those employees are moved to a different department under Instructional Support.  I’m not saying that is what happened, but where the hell are the budget reductions?  If they weren’t rehired under Administrative Support then while the UCOP reduced their spending by $62 million, Instructional Support ballooned in size by  $132.585 million.

Of course there are other fun parts of the UC budget.  I will highlight my favorite: Provisions for Allocation.  Now what the hell is that?  According to the 2010/11 budget on page 145:

“Provisions for allocation serve as a temporary repository for certain funds until final allocation decisions are made.  For instance, funds allocated for fixed cost increases, such as salary adjustments, employee benefit increases, and price increases, are held in provision accounts pending final allocation.”

Awesome!  It’s a fund where temporary salary increase and bonuses can sit without being part of Institutional Support.  Bonuses benefiting those who messed up are all the rage on wall street, now they can come to a public university near you!  The explanation of how the funds were spent in this section is non-existent.  There is no breakdown whatsoever of how this pile of money is spent.  If there was any place where shady and corrupt spending is happening in the UC budget, this is the place.  And by year (again with the dollar in millions):

Academic year    Provisions for allocation      projected Next year
08/09                     99.940                      95.418
09/10                     90.993                     101.192
10/11                    120.301                     592.142

Yes you read that right, next year the administration is increasing its fund for salary adjustments, and employee benefits by over $400 million.  You just have to look at the minutes from a random UC regents meeting (see the September minutes here) on compensation to know that the UC isn’t hiring janitors with that money.  The administration also uses the private HR firm, Mercer, to tell them what a reasonable salary is, instead of peer reviewed research (a problem looked into in this article: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/05/14/MNGEKIRLKU1.DTL).  I can’t find a single person in the Regent’s meeting minutes with a salary under $100,000.

This all leads to a presentation made to the Regents on the 18th where a projected budget gap of $607.5 million will occur next year.  What this will mean is that using the budget crisis as an excuse, students and faculty should expect another round of cuts and fee increases next year.  A combination of reducing the Provisions for allocation to 08/09 levels and Institutional support to 08/09 levels will result in savings of $616.685 million.  Future budget crisis solved with over $10 million to spare.

The main entrance to campus (with this and the west entrance blocked, no traffic can enter or leave campus)

A meeting at the Kresge town hall after the initial protests

Before addressing the new manifesto and the New occupation, I would like to point out briefly some other recent events.  At UCSC there was a semi occupation of the Science Library that started on Friday the 13th.  I’m not 100% sure when it ended, but I didn’t see much if any of it still there on Monday.  I call it a semi occupation because there are apparently library staff participating and University officials retained control of the doors.  Postings regarding this action can be found here:

http://thenewuc.wordpress.com/

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/11/14/18628646.php

Being unsure of the specifics of the Science library occupation I cannot comment with any detail beyond what is posted by others.  I do, however, want to pour over the latest manifesto by the occupiers entitled “occupation: a do-it-yourself guide“.  This is a blueprint as well as a philosophical justification for occupying buildings

The Manifest gets going under the heading Why Occupy? First it tells the reader what other actions have been attempted, and how they have failed to achieve their goals.  Specifically:

-The strike on September the 24th had a picket line that did not block traffic.  Although not stated in the manifesto, the strike failed to achieve a rollback of budget cuts or a decrease in student fees.

-Berkeley protests saw their supporters dwindle after each successive meeting

- Activists interrupted a regent’s board meeting, were removed by the police, and nothing changed as a result of this action

These three actions failed to net any positive change, and are identified as failures in the manifesto.  This self criticism and analysis is a bit of a departure from the original manifesto which was essentially a rehashing of old communist pamphlets.  The part I was most impressed with was the following:

“No decision making body has the power to give us what we want…The deans and chancellors making the cuts are subordinate to the UC president.  The UC president is subordinate to the Board of Regents.  The Board of Regents gets its funding from the legislature.  And the hands of the legislature are tied by the California constitution, which require a two-thirds majority to raise taxes.”

This is the ugly truth of the situation.  Of course they left out the fact that everyone in the chain from the Regents down is an appointee, with the governor appointing the Regents to 12 year terms (that’s some serious job security).  The people in decision making positions are so removed from any sort of oversight or democratic process that it is far more common for those in charge of the UC to make self enriching decisions instead of decisions that are in the best interest of the UC.  This naturally breeds a lack of confidence in the leadership of the UC system.

So considering that I have been disappointed with the previous manifesto for its vague nature and a thinly veiled attempt to spur some sort of communist revolution, this well thought out argument and description of the problems facing the UC took me by surprise.  Of course it didn’t take very long for the manifesto to loose my support.

Since the manifesto begins with a rejection of other forms of protest due to their inability to net any sort of positive result, I assumed that the manifesto would lay out some sort of plan with which an occupation, unlike other strategies, would net a positive result.  Unfortunately there is no plan.  In the manifesto the author writes “It is simply because we are at the University, we have occupied a building and we begin with what we know.”  After this quote is a list of successful occupations in Mexico, Latin America, France, Chicago, and South Korea.  How an occupation will overcome the difficulty in obtaining a positive outcome, as described in the beginning of the manifesto, is not addressed.  If a rally or a negotiator will not accomplish anything, how will an occupation be any different?  This is the unanswered question that lies at the heart of the problem the UC system faces.  The line from an occupation to a reversal of fee increases is actually made less clear after reading the manifesto since the beginning lays out problems that the middle fails to address.  The end of the manifesto talks about how to block doors and doesn’t touch on the philosophical underpinnings of the occupation.

The current occupation at UCSC is at the Kresge town hall.  I think the Kresge town hall is sort of a community room for kresge college, which is stereotypically the hippie college.  Essentially the occupation is a gathering of like minded people in a supportive college in a  room that doesn’t hold classes.  The occupiers could possibly have even filled out some forms to use the room through the college, but then it would be a University event instead of an occupation.  Basically this is one of the least confrontational rooms to occupy since it is not an administration building or a building used by graduate students.  My expectation is that the University will ignore this new occupation in a manner similar to the treesit.  The Kresge town hall is tucked off into the corner of the University (the campus map describes its location as “The Kresge Town Hall is located in the northwest corner of the campus“).  A person would have a hard time finding the occupation if they didn’t already know the general location of it.  My guess is that eventually the number of students at the occupation will thin out and then, during an academic break, the University will clear out the occupation.

Essentially the occupation is at the raising awareness stage.  We’ll see if it gets past it.