Idle hands

Honesty in out-of-the-office announcements

I received this today:

[Charming Friend] is out of the office on annual leave from 11 July until 31 July using up a backlog of holiday. She will check emails every now and again for important project issues and because it is an addictive habit. So there will be some delay to any response.

You can't ever really stop checking email. At least I can't. That's why I don't have a phone that lets me do it when I am not near a computer. I don't want to be like those sad crackberry addicts who think no one sees them when they check emails under the table at meetings and conferences. Surely there is a government program for this?

Rocket Man goes to Alaska

Can you ever have too much William Shatner?

Hat tip: Kim Ross

Assorted links

1. When the Germans go native (American)

2. Weird Al on Weird MJ

3. Top 10 party schools for 2009

4. Wells Fargo sues Wells Fargo

5. What Richard Nixon would have said if the Apollo 11 astronauts got stuck on the moon.

Hat tips: Austin Kelly and the Good S**t blog

Ross School #5

The Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan is #5 in the latest Business Week ratings.

Congratulations!

Hat tip: Mario Macis

The meaning of the Gates arrest

Radley Balko has an excellent piece on the deeper meaning of this still somewhat confused affair. Key bit:

In the wake of both Gates and Obama escalating the arrest into a national debate about race, too many conservatives took the instinctively authoritarian tack represented here by Washington Post staff writer Neely Tucker:

One of the common-sense rules of life can be summed up this way: Don't Mess With Cops.

It doesn't matter if you are right, wrong, at home or on the street, or if you are white, black, Hispanic, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. When an armed law enforcement officer tells you to cease and desist, the wise person (a) ceases and (b) desists.

The End.

Perhaps on an individual level, this is sound advice. As a general rule, you ought not provoke someone carrying a gun, whether your criticism is justified or not. As a broader sentiment, however, it shows a dangerous level of deference to the government agents in whom we entrust a massive amount of power. And it comes awfully close to writing a blank check for police misconduct.

Speaking truth to power. Amen.

The Gates Affair

The battle continues for control of the narrative surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

A rightish commentator asks to see all the evidence. This seems reasonable enough to me.

A leftish commentator suggests that the real issue is more one of class than of race, though the interaction term is lurking around too.

Many police officers likely do not assign college professors the same exalted status that professors tend to assign themselves. This is presumably why a lot of universities run their own police departments, which can then be focused on the goals of the university and whose officers can be tutored in the academic hierarchy.

I recall when I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago that the undergraduates organized something called "Nancy Reagan Smoke Dope on Campus Day" on the central quadrangle. The university police duly surrounded the central quadrangle and did a fine job of ensuring that no one from "outside of the area" (as the U of C liked to say) wandered into the student protest, which was otherwise undisturbed by them. Class, indeed.