As the blog is wont to do whenever I change anything, all the posts (temporarily) disappeared, and we had to run the site in the WordPress “Classic” theme.

I was updating to the latest version of WordPress to address a security flaw. An article I read pointed out that spammers had been hacking WordPress blogs and using them for nefarious spamming activities.

Ha, I thought. Well, I don’t think that’s happening, but I should upgrade anyway.

When I opened up my header.php file, I found hundreds of lines of text full of links to discounted pain, sleep, and erection medicine. They didn’t display, but they were in there.

Why? I didn’t know. It could be as simple as boosting their Google ranking by creating a large number of links to their sites. I went ahead and stocked up, then deleted the links.

Whatever the reason, 12apostrophes had been exploited by hackers, just like a blog ten times as well-known or frequently updated! I feel all warm and fuzzy. We’ve really made it.

[dork gibberish warning: just in case the following bit of insider baseball could help anyone out there like me, who uses a modified Kubrick theme and tried to upgrade their WordPress, and had the oh-my-God-all-the-posts-are-GONE problem, listen up: you didn't update the wp-content folder, right? Because you didn't want to overwrite your modified theme? Go ahead and update wp-content/themes/default/functions.php. It's OK. In fact, it will make all your posts magically reappear. The problem does not lie with a conflict in your loop(s), no matter how many hours you spend squinting at them. Ha ha.]

According to The Book of Revelations:

The Anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will
deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a MASSIVE
Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him
and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.

My first thought was, dude, if Obama is the Anti-Christ, we got bigger things to worry about than the election. Because according to that movie “The Omen”, things are figgin’ to get bad – REAL bad. When the Anti-Christ shows up on earth, whoa, look out. There’ll be fire raining down, everyone will have 666 tattooed on their forehead, and “American Idol” will be cancelled – forever!

And what are we going to do with “Obama the Anti-Christ” after the election? Even if he isn’t elected president, he’s still a Senator. Then we’ll be stuck with the Anti-Christ sitting in the U.S. Senate – on the Foreign Relations Committee, no less! Wait a minute, I thought the Anti-Christ was already on the Foreign Relations Committee? Oh, I guess that’s just Dick Lugar. My bad.

Luckily, one of the e-mail recipients replied with a powerful bit of information – that the Book of Revelation (that’s one Revelation, not “Revelation-S”) was written 400 years before Islam was a religion. And that there is not one single reference to the Anti-Christ in it, nor does it contain any description of the Anti-Christ.

The author then continued:

And now:
For the award winning Act of Stupidity Of all times the People of
America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the
Planet — The Presidency of the United states of America … A Male of
Muslim descent who is the most extremely liberal Senator in Congress
(in other words an extremist) and in his 40’s. (emphasis mine)

Hmmm, so being “extremely liberal” makes you an “extremist”? Then what does being “extremely conservative” make you? Well…an “extremist”, right? It goes both ways, doesn’t it?

The author closed with this:

Have the American People completely lost their Minds, or just their
Power of Reason ???

Peace in Christ,
Mary Alice Cantrell

Well, Mary Alice, I have to say, that last question is definitely a valid one. In fact, as I was reading your e-mail, I was asking myself the very same thing. And let me tell you, it’s a tough call. But I have to believe, “Peace-in-Christ” Mary, that you are not representative of the majority of Americans. The majority of Americans have lost neither their minds nor their power to reason, and can see straight through this ridiculous tripe.

Still, after watching his interview with Katie Couric right after the debate, I do wonder who found him and how.

Joe sounds like he works for McCain, saying things like “We’ve seen who McCain is — we don’t know who Obama is” [in other words, "he ain't from around here"].

Joe also calls Obama “well-spoken, better spoken than I am.”  ["How dare he be better spoken than I am?  He's black!"]

He makes fun of Obama, portraying him as a performer who just fed him a memorized response [For a memorized response he should review McCain's response to a question about Russia's invading Georgia.  For his "answer," McCain simply recites a list of all the countries in the area].

Finally, Joe gets really ugly.  He says “he’s almost better than Sammy Davis, Jr.”

Now that’s just insulting. Who trained Joe?  Apparently he took a logic course in plumber’s school; note his appropriate use of the concept of slippery slope in the transcript below of his October 16 interview with Diane Sawyer: “I mean, $250,000 now. What if he decides, well you know $150,000, you’re pretty rich too. Let’s go ahead and lower it again. You know it’s a slippery slope. When’s it going to stop?”

Check out the original interview here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFC9jv9jfoA&eurl=http://www.google.com/reader/view/

I like the way Obama talks to the guy, admits that his tax rate may possibly increase, and gets specific about exactly where it could go up.  He also points out that if his proposed tax breaks for actual working class people had been in effect, Joe might have been benefited – and been in a postiion to buy the business before now, instead of working 10- to 12-hour days all these years for somebody else.

This morning I found this story that said Joe had now decided to vote Republican: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/10/15/joe_the_plumber_the_video.html?hpid=topnews

And I thought, well, of course, I could see why he might vote Republican: Joe is rich.  He makes more than twice what my husband and I earn combined. We are way older than Joe, but we put off entering the work force while we were earning Ph.D’s, and we don’t work in nearly as lucrative fields as plumbing.  I’m an English professor.  [P. S.: Good for Joe! I work hard, but I bet I don't work nearly as hard as he does].

Of course, Joe is rich, but he still might be afraid to vote Republican because, unless he has no 401K invested in anything based in stocks or credit,  but keeps his retirement money in gold bullion under his bed, he might be afraid to keep the financial deregulation that just caused a stock market crash, banking panic, and incipient recession.  But I digress.

This morning, I decided to check Joe’s math.  First of all, he’d have to NET MORE THAN $250K to pay higher taxes on any of it, and as Obama clearly explained last night, his tax raise would entail a rate shift from 36% to 39% — ONLY for what Joe netted OVER $250K!

So say Joe improved his profit margin and went from netting $250K to $275K.  That’s ten percent, a big jump for one year.  Under the current 36% rate, he’d be paying $9K tax on that $25K.  Under Obama’s plan, Joe would pay $9750 on that top $25K.

So, because he’s going to pay an extra $750 on twenty-five thousand dollars extra profit, Joe is not going to buy the business? Is Joe claiming that the extra $750 tax bill is going to prevent him from getting credit?

Has Joe been working so constantly that he has somehow not heard that the stock market has crashed, banks are terrified to lend money even to each other, and so credit is already much, much harder to get and will be for who knows how long?

I’m skeptical, because I can’t see a puny $750 tax increase on income over $250K dissuading me.  Credit is going to be harder to get anyway.

Somebody please explain this to me.

I’m going with D.  When John McCain asked her to be Vice President, she boasts, “I didn’t blink.”

Watching Palin in the VP debate with Joe Biden, I had a strong gut reaction I couldn’t explain: sheer terror at what might happen if this person were President — if McCain (AKA “Other foot on a banana peel”) were elected and anything happened to him.  Today, however, I understand why I was and am so frightened.

I would expect a person who understood the seriousness of the job to “blink” indeed — to pause to think about it, and to ask herself, “Could I be ready in Jan 2009 to potentially serve as the leader of the free world?”  Palin seems proud of the fact that she did not pause to think, even for a moment, and to wonder if she were indeed up to the enormous responsibility being VP would entail.  Her naive pride makes me quake in my shoes.

Here’s why I’m so scared.  In 1999, researchers at Cornell experimentally confirmed what I had long suspected — that the worse people perform at a task, the more likely they are to overestimate their competence.  It gets worse: not only do incompetent people overestimate their level of skills, but also the worse someone is at a skill, the more grossly she overestimates her own ability at it.

The New York Times reported the on this experiment shortly after it was published [link below].  It used two complex tasks: a test of recognizing grammatically correct standard English, and a test of recognizing what was funny, for which subjects rated the humorousness of thirty jokes on a scale of one to eleven.  (The jokes had been rated by a panel of comedians which included Al Franken).

Then subjects estimated by percentile how competent they thought they were at each skill.

The researchers found that people whose competence was below the 60th percentile would overestimate their performance  — and the further their scores below the 60th percentile, the more grossly they would overestimate their skills, to the point where “bottom-quartile participants were nearly 4 times more miscalibrated than their top-quartile counterparts” (page 1131).

Why?  Because, unsurprisingly, the skills necessary for competence are also necessary to recognize and rate competence.  (The researchers also list many previous studies that also suggest this conclusion).
People whose performance rated at above  the 70th percentile, however, would err in the opposite direction: they would tend to underestimate their own performance, and the higher they ranked, the more severely they would underestimate it.

Both these findings matched what I have observed in my years of teaching writing: While strong performers are uniformly  modest in their self-assessments — I can’t count the number of really talented writers I’ve met who have told me, “I know I need to work on my writing” — the ones with the lowest scores are the ones most willing to tramp into my office demanding to know why their essays were awarded a D [a question whose only truly honest answer would be, "Because I was feeling generous that day."]

So no wonder the fact that Palin would so blithely offer that she “didn’t blink,” as if that somehow qualified her for the leadership of the free world, scares me to death.  Her apparently baseless confidence signals to me that she doesn’t understand what a huge task being Vice President would be — and is clueless that intellectually she simply may not be up to it.

The NYTimes covered this experiment.

Original article: Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning.  “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own
Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999), Vol. 77, No. 6. pages 1121-1134.  <http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf>

The warehouse was cozier than a warehouse has any right to be—excepting the warehouse ceiling and cement construction, the room was closed in by a half-wall painted burnt orange, had tall mirrors on the walls, and was lit by tucked-away lamps and candles on the tables, scattered chairs, and stools.

The friend who had brought us—let’s call him “P”—plied us with Trader Joe’s three-buck chuck in Cabernet, Merlot, and Shiraz flavors. He had cases of the stuff in the back of the room. This was a rehearsal space for him and his band. He had actually got his three-buck chuck for a $1.50 a bottle, somehow, maybe by the same new math that gets you a free flamenco show on a Wednesday night.

At the height of the flamenco, there were five guitarists, two good dancers, one extraordinary singer, and a smattering of box-drummers and hand-clappers. In between, there was a bit of a flamenco class, that some of us were invited to join (not me—the flamenco people glanced at me and knew, accurately, that I had the rhythm of a woodpecker with a head cold).

P said: “This is better than a bar, don’t you think? Live music, laid back, none of the bar-hassles.”
I said: “Like paying for my drinks. I agree!”

Later, P said: “What are other people doing right now? In Minneapolis? Snoozing. Watching a little TV. They may see live music once a year, and hope none of the members of their band die.”

I agreed whole-heartedly. Then went home to snooze, but I kept the TV off.

It’s called Americans Are Not Stupid, with Subtitles. It’s a few minutes long.

This reminds me of a funny story. Or a depressing story. Definitely a related story. Yesterday a member of my family sent a petition to other members of my family (not me). The petition was one of those bogus right-wing scare tactic petitions talking about how the bad “illegals” are trying to steal good, patriotic Americans’ jobs and social security and so on. The petition also claimed Congress recently passed a bill allowing “illegals” to have social security benefits. A false rumor that’s well-worn. The e-mail’s even in Snopes.

Anyway, the petition demands that only U.S. CITIZENS be allowed social security benefits, or any social services. My relative who sent it was born in the United States. Her husband (my brother) and parents-in-law (my parents) were not. They’re all legal residents (who’ve long paid social security taxes), but not citizens. So my relative SIGNED MY BROTHER’S NAME to a petition that demands he lose his social security benefits. Brilliant. Then she forwarded it to his non-citizen parents, suggesting they sign it too. Double brilliant.

I asked her about this later and she told me she forgot that we (including her husband) are all “aliens.” She then pointed out that either way, the petition is how a lot of people feel. Then she said not to worry because no one is referring to us. Apparently, she doesn’t understand what the word “citizen” means.

The upside to this…. Well, ok, there isn’t an upside to this. But in my fantasy resolution, my relative is disqualified from voting. That’s because to become a citizen and voter, you have to take a basic citizenship test and have half a brain. And I figure if you’re an English speaker with half a brain, you know what the word “citizen” means. That’s what you’re taking a test for! So in my fantasy, she fails the test, I make an uncitizen’s arrest, and the feds consider Guantanamo.

Ok, silly fantasy and bad to make jokes about Guantanamo, one of the more depraved entities in modern U.S. history. And of course, if I believe in equal rights for all, I have to allow room for dumb people. This does, however, bring me back to the above video. My relative belongs in it.

Do some of you have relatives who belong in it?

I came across this machine when I was at a Mall in Roseville, Minnesota. In case you can’t tell, those are iPods and iPod accessories in the vending machine for when you have that hankering that a diet coke just won’t quench…

I am very obstinate. And I don’t always like to change my opinion…

As opposed to the more common breed of obstinacy that is dying to change.

The color in this ad is very vibrant and alive. It makes the reader feel calm and serene.

The only explanation I have is that the colors at first energize you so much that you feel alive, but the effort that goes into being alive exhausts you and eventually calms you down.

We cannot censor speech until we censor the words that come out of our mouths.

Infallible logic.

I hate writing. I would much rather use words.

It’s true! Writing without words has always been puzzlingly difficult for me as well.

Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart to show Africa had a rational past. African was not a wild ferret.

I have to say, I was stumped by this one. Africa, latest studies have shown, is in fact NOT a wild ferret, and might never have been.

Verbal responses can be equally funny—sometimes more so since students process their thoughts even less. For instance, once this student raised her hand after I’d given about a 15 minute lecture on history and relevance of the Berlin Wall. Her question was, “So is the Berlin Wall the same thing as the Great Wall of China?”

Days like that, I’m proud to be a teacher.