Flotsam & Jetsam
Jerry E. Smith’s decision on Sanches v. Carrollton–Farmers Branch Independent School District:
Reduced to its essentials, this is nothing more than a dispute, fueled by a disgruntled cheerleader mom, over whether her daughter should have made the squad. It is a petty squabble, masquerading as a civil rights matter, that has no place in federal court or any other court.
Also, in a footnote commenting on the grammar of the plaintiff’s opening brief:
And finally, the sentence containing the word “incompetence” makes no sense as a matter of standard English prose, so it is not reasonably possible to understand the thought, if any, that is being conveyed. It is ironic that the term “incompetence” is used here, because the only thing that is incompetent is the passage itself. [Emphasis added]
(Via Deadspin)
Deadspin just published audited financial statements from NFL Ventures. The upshot: the profits of NFL Ventures, which is the NFL’s promotion, licensing, production, and international entity, were up 29 percent in 2010, to almost $1.3 billion.
Tommy Craggs’ take:
Last week, we posted audited financials for the NFL league office, which administers the G-3 stadium fund, offering low-interest loans to teams that are building stadiums. The money ran dry in 2007 after a decade-long stadium-building boom, and the case could be made that the real dispute at the heart of the lockout lay between the owners who’d exploited the G-3 program to build bright new revenue-generating stadiums and those who hadn’t and now couldn’t because their peers had burned through the fund. In this light, the lockout looks like something else entirely — less a battle between management and labor and more a proxy war in which the owners, unwilling to fight each other for money, decided to extract it from the players instead.
More additions to my collection of Italy photos, this time from the touristy parts of Pisa. If you just want to see the new stuff, start with this Leaning Tower photo and keep clicking “Next”.
Also! I made three additions to the Florence photos (here, here, and here), and one substitution in the earlier Pisa photos.
William Deresiewicz:
Tenured professors enjoy the strongest speech protections in society. It’s time they started using them.
Brian Moritz:
[C]onceptually, I don’t see the difference between me getting paid to get my doctorate and a college athlete getting paid to play his or her sport.
(via Deadspin)
More Italy photos, this time from a day trip to Florence. Start here and keep hitting “Next” if you just want to see the new stuff.
The above is the church of San Lorenzo approximately 5 minutes after the most startling thunder I’ve ever heard and 10 minutes before it started pouring rain.
Last week I was at a workshop on Entanglement & Linking at the Centro di Ricerca Matematica in Pisa, Italy. I’m currently processing the hundreds of photos I took. I just added a few taken in the (relatively) non-touristy parts of Pisa to this set on Flickr. I’ll be adding more stereotypically touristy stuff in the next few days.
Above is the Chiesa di Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri, which is across the square from the CRM (where I stayed).
Malcolm Harris on the impending student-loan bubble:
The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting. […] The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it.
