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Bypassing Adulthood in San Diego
RE #10: I am most proud of the professionals in this town who I tutored through City/Mesa College, SDSU, USD and beyond. For any male thinking about college, my best advice: Know how to tutor the lowest level math course on the schedule. It's where all the intense party girls are, and they need major help to avoid failing. It's downright fun to be a hero to an entire cheering section of grateful coeds... Tutoring will make sure you learned it yourself in the first place as a matter of intellectual academic honesty. Any comments I make on student loan debt will only incriminate me. As for arrested development in San Diego and lowered IQs, I can't think of a single major city anywhere that has a higher concentration of in-house Nobel laureates than San Diego with UCSD as our flagship public university. We can solve all problems once we start thinking on the same wavelength. We are getting there, but some of us are still not in tune yet... I guess that's why I'm damn glad you're still blogging.— June 7, 2010 3:13 p.m.
Fat Cats Still Pouring Money into Proposition D
RE #9: I've been predicting the eventual sale of Balboa Park for years. Developers are salivating at the idea, all managed through a brand spanking new redevelopment agency, no doubt...— June 7, 2010 2:50 p.m.
Cities, States, Individuals; we all need Money
Greed has eventual implications for how many of us are fighting overseas. Things still need research and revealing, but a great deal of anti-American anger is better directed at artificial persons in the form of American corporations, the same corporations inserting themselves into overseas economies that most often gag on the massive infusion of American competition into those markets. Does anybody remember Halliburton of Iraq fame? Will anyone in the future remember Halliburton + Transocean + BP? I seem to have misplaced my confidential copy of THE PELICAN BRIEF...— June 7, 2010 2:47 p.m.
Fat Cats Still Pouring Money into Proposition D
I may only vote on Props. D, 16 and 17 on Tuesday. As for individual candidates, I'll probably do the Robert's Rules of Order cop-out by abstaining in favor of the majority will. That way, I have "plausible deny-ability" when the primary results for candy-coated candidates are announced later. I still can't find the Jerry Sanders-as-Hulk "Strong Mayor Smash" cartoon online...— June 7, 2010 10:50 a.m.
Bypassing Adulthood in San Diego
RE #2: I am thankful there are no debtors' prisons in America. I owe everything to all of the teachers, mentors, deans and professors I was taught by, public and private, secular and religious, family and institutional. God is great. I'll never be rich tutoring college students, but my satisfaction comes from watching the light go on in others, especially in returning ones who left high school years or even decades ago. I learned speed reading as a junior high student; this means I can tutor college-level courses I never actually took as long as I can grab the text and "absorb" a semester's worth of reading in a weekend or so. I am also grateful to my JROTC instructors who made me earn my instructor badge by the time I made master sergeant, after taking Military Teaching Methods in my third cadet year. I have an intense interest in systems analysis and design from the AS in data processing degree and then being the lead Quality Assurance Program tutor at City College. All of my internships were just short-term engagements in real-world problem solving that added to my total educational experience. This explains the following: Being a professional student means getting into student representation involving small but significant student stipends. After re-writing the student government constitution at City College as a personal systems design exercise, I served as student government president and was later consistently involved in shared college governance for years. Dean of Students Larry Brown and City College President Jean Atherton would never keep me waiting more than a few minutes whenever I walked in unannounced to see either of them; if I showed up, it was because something important was happening, I had an angle to make both students and City College look good for getting something done about it, and students would be on top of things under their supervision. Theirs and the SDCCD chancellor's recommendations were the reason I was the only community college student in the country chosen as a Minority Leaders Fellow in 1990 out of nearly 60 Fellows selected that year, but my thing was always finding issues and solutions to unite the student body, not to divide us by race or sexual orientation. I actually hate the concept of hyphenated Americanisms when it tends to lead towards ideological self-segregation. It was around that time that I first met Fred Williams as a student leader. America needs more leaders of the kind that we can't seem to find currently at Sempra Energy, PG&E, BP, among nearly all real estate developers, and at Wall Street generally. Our educational institutions need to be incubators of that future ethical American leadership, or they are not worth the tax money we spend on them. Period.— June 7, 2010 10:30 a.m.
Bypassing Adulthood in San Diego
As a professional student without losing my amateur standing since the 1970s, I can attest to the "arrested adolescence" part: JROTC lieutenant colonel and USAIC/Ft. Benning, 1976 Ft. Knox NCO Academy/Drill Sergeant School, 1978 or so Coleman College certificate of computer science, 1983 San Diego City College AS in data processing with honors, 1987 ARCO Foundation Minority Leaders Fellow/RTC HQ internship, 1990 City College AA in mathematics with honors, 1991 USD non-graduate in computer science with math/beer appreciation minors (and GPA nowhere near academic honors), 1995 or so City College paralegal program/Ch. 13 bankruptcy trustee internship, 1998 or so blah, blah, blah... My IQ has never dropped while living here but is currently in extended suspended animation. Brain cells not killed off by alcohol in the Army or at USD were only made stronger. ;-)— June 5, 2010 1:12 p.m.
Paean to Jerry Dominelli
I won't argue that intelligence and ethics are mutually exclusive; instead, I'd say highly intelligent people who receive no formal or informal continuing training in reaching ethical decisions seem to account for most if not all of the current troubles we have seen in the markets lately, especially the derivatives disaster. RE #33: "I don't think that having a high IQ means you are qualified for anything based on that sole criteria." Amazingly enough, my 99.99 percentile ranking on the California Test of Mental Maturity was the only thing that got me admitted into the Annapolis local group of Mensa, decades before I unofficially minored in Beer Appreciation at USD while Jennifer was still re-writing drafts of her admissions application. http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/edu/45/8/499/ A shout-out to my girlfriend, USD Hahn School of Nursing class of 2002 or so...— June 5, 2010 12:44 p.m.
A Torchlight Tattoo Memory for Memorial Day
... and on myspace when I re-posted this, I put a picture subtitled "The Real Thing... Not Elmo"— June 4, 2010 10:33 p.m.
Surprise! A Present from Sempra
Still counting all of the faulty SDG&E smart meters that were installed and had to be replaced...— June 4, 2010 7:50 p.m.
Employment Report Suggests Economy Weakening Alarmingly
RE #1: "We are in uncharted waters." Right now, the only economic models that seem to make sense are sociological. There have been a lot of changes in the nature of the players at the top of the markets, and some of those players no longer exist as independent entities after the Crash of 2008. It appears that a move to new regulations regarding exotic financial products could make for even more changes in what players will be left in the markets, and we still don't know what the result of investigations into Goldman Sachs (and others in the wake of those investigations) will be. Bad publicity could be key. Not "will be", just "could be". There was a lot of noise today that BP has obligations to pay out dividends as it has the resources to do it, and its stockholders need to be taken care of in the face of a 30% loss in equity value. At the same time, the losses suffered by residents around the Gulf who happen not to be BP stockholders don't really amount to much for BP's Tony Hayward until he gets his life back; that's par for the course for the breed apart that are corporate executives at the highest level. Corporations matter because we allow them to matter. When we are visibly and undeniably fed up with them, then they just might react to us in a way that preserves that all-important quarterly income to their stockholders, before we boycott them out of existence. Until then, all we can do is skim the goo off the Gulf of Mexico, and hopefully, Pres. Obama will hand them another invoice. Until then, I expect BP to do what Sempra Energy did after the 2007 Wildfires caused in part by SDG&E overhead power lines and "unavoidable" utility employee negligence: raise its dividend, like bad publicity matters to them yet...— June 4, 2010 7:28 p.m.