Though there was uncertainty for some time, Dean Kagan has just announced the current 1Ls will receive Low Pass/Pass/High Pass grades instead of the traditional +/- A/B/C system. Part of her email:

Dear HLS students:
 
In the last couple of weeks, I have received thoughtful input from many of you about the Law School’s transition to a new grading system.  I am very grateful for your views and suggestions. I am writing to let you know how the School will resolve these questions.
 
Current first-year students will receive our new grades (Honors-Pass-Low Pass-Fail) in all of their courses this year, including spring semester electives.  The faculty has agreed that this new grading system will have significant educational benefits.  It makes sense for first-year students, who have not received any grades under our old system, to share fully in these benefits.  Input I have received in the last couple of weeks indicates that an overwhelming majority of the first-year class agrees.

Just an update–turns out the whole thing was a hoax. Excerpts:

PITTSBURGH (AP) - A McCain campaign volunteer made up a story of being robbed, pinned to the ground and having the letter “B” scratched on her face in a politically inspired attack, police said Friday….

She now can’t explain why she invented the story, Bryant said. Todd also told police she believes she cut the backward “B” onto her own cheek, but did not provide an explanation of how or why, Bryant said. 

Full story 

Why the “McCain Victim” is probably lying:

I’m not in the business of second-guessing assault victims, generally. But Drudge has a story out tonight about Ashley Todd, a 20 year-old McCain volunteer who was supposedly mugged for money and, near the end of the mugging, mutilated and had a “B” carved into her face because of her McCain bumper sticker. Ok. Sounds scary. Until you see the picture:

Is anyone else concerned that this “B” is backward and looks strangely similar to a “B” one might self-inflict using a mirror, thinking you were doing an awesome job until you realized letters are backward when reflected? Or the part where the “black eyes” look a whole lot like make-up? And then the part where she refused to go to a hospital until the next day? Just saying…

Just annouced by Dean Kagan:

To all students:

I am writing to let you know that the faculty decided yesterday to move to a grading system with fewer classifications than we have now.  The new classifications, much as at Yale and Stanford, will be Honors-Pass-Low Pass-Fail.  The faculty believes that this decision will promote pedagogical excellence and innovation and further strengthen the intellectual community in which we all live.  The new system will apply to students entering HLS in fall 2009; yet to be determined is whether it also will apply to some or all classes of current students. 

The faculty began consideration of this issue last year, and has consulted with groups of students, alumni, and other employers in the course of our discussions.  Before making a decision on whether to implement the system now, for all or some of our current students, I want to make sure that any interested student has a chance to express his or her views.  To provide this opportunity, I will hold a “town hall” meeting on Thursday, October 2 from 2:30 to 3:30 in Austin North.  I look forward to seeing you some of you there.

Best,
Elena Kagan

Interesting article in the WSJ a couple days ago. Incidentally, Mollie Ziegler Hemingway was my editor during the Koch program in the summer of 2007, so it was neat to stumble upon one of her articles. The underlying idea here is similar to one expressed by Delsol in Icarus Fallen. The rejection of religion and Judeo-Christian morality does not, in practice, result in amorality, no matter how hard you try. Rather, morality and some form of religious belief are inescapable, and what Delsol terms a “black market morality” emerges. This probably is a poor restatement of the idea but I read the book about 3 years ago and Civil Procedure is about to start. In any event, the article:

“You can’t be a rational person six days of the week and put on a suit and make rational decisions and go to work and, on one day of the week, go to a building and think you’re drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space god,” comedian and atheist Bill Maher said earlier this year on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”

On the “Saturday Night Live” season debut last week, homeschooling families were portrayed as fundamentalists with bad haircuts who fear biology. Actor Matt Damon recently disparaged Sarah Palin by referring to a transparently fake email that claimed she believed that dinosaurs were Satan’s lizards. And according to prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins, traditional religious belief is “dangerously irrational.” From Hollywood to the academy, nonbelievers are convinced that a decline in traditional religious belief would lead to a smarter, more scientifically literate and even more civilized populace.

Continue Reading…

Thankfully I don’t have to get up before 10.

SECTION 3

“Obama simply asks that big oil companies contribute a reasonable share of the windfall profits they receive from high oil prices over the next five years to pay for emergency assistance for families right now,” the campaign says.

Straight out of Atlas Shrugged.

I recently finished designing a revised Students for Liberty website, as the organization has moved from an annual conference to a full-fledged organization run by Alexander McCobin, a fellow Koch alum currently at the Cato Institute. The new site is arguably uglier and more cumbersome/confusing than my first design (legacy site here), however it has the benefit(/limitation) of being built on top of WordPress, which allows easy content management by many untrained but generally competent users.

WordPress isn’t really the right tool for what the Students for Liberty site is, but I went ahead and used it anyway. WordPress is generally a useful tool for blogs, while Students for Liberty is a page-based (as opposed to a post-based) site with relatively constant content.

I don’t really know php but I can read it well enough to try to modify existing themes built on top of WordPress. For the first site I was able to basically build something in Photoshop, cut it up, and paste it together with html; but for the new site I had to spend way too much time trying to manipulate CSS only to have the site still look significantly different depending on what browser you use.

In any event, the new site will allow the organization to maintain content without my assistance while I focus on law school.

Last week I cancelled my subscription to TIME magazine. After four and a half years of (more-or-less) loyal readership, I finally called it quits… threw in the towel… signed onto their online customer service center and clicked the “Cancel My Subscription” button.

The truth is I stopped reading TIME a long time ago. In trying to stay “relevant” over the past four years, with blogs gaining in popularity and more and more people turning to the Internet for news, I watched TIME shift from a mediocre source of reporting on only-sometimes manufactured issues, to a magazine filled with nothing but uninteresting spin thinly guised as commentary. I’m not the first to note the recent rise of the commentariat, but TIME managed (much like MSNBC over the same period of time) to truly devalue what was a once valuable product to the point where it’s too costly (and painful) for me to even take the time out of my day to read (or watch) it.

I’ve always been a fan of commentary—but real commentary. What TIME publishes (what MSNBC airs) is commentary sans serious, honest analysis. It’s not smart; it’s increasingly pedestrian and uninspired. Hollow argument. No one honestly believes it, but it’s not important whether or not it’s a legitimate view of the world. Perhaps it’s naive, but what if all I want is real reporting of national and world events?

This election season, I think, is what really put me over the edge. There’s nothing more aggravating to me than reading an editor’s poor attempt at trying to mask and temper the fact that Joe Klein (here, but particularly here and here) feels like he’s part of some elite inner circle of the Democratic Party—a true insider, a force. He’s not. Similarly, I’ve never been a fan of TIME’s Managing Editor Richard Stengel posturing in his editorials as if he and I are best friends, insisting on signing them simply as “Rick.”

More substantively, I had to watch TIME slowly fall in love with, then shill for, Barack Obama. There are plenty of articles out there about the Obama Media Orgy and Obamania. For me, the fact that Obama has already appeared on the cover of TIME eight times—before even winning the Democratic primary—says a lot about the media and more about the magazine. Eight times. The man isn’t even President. Clinton, in contrast, appeared on the cover four times this election season. Similarly, by this time eight years ago Bush had only made the cover four times. McCain has appeared on the cover exactly one time since the election season began.

If that wasn’t enough, the stories have been similarly tiring. “How Much Does Experience Matter?” the headline of one cover asks. “Why science says it may be overrated” an article title answers. Though I had long suspected it, I was still unsure, until reading TIME, that there was a solid scientific basis for supporting Obama over Clinton. Vindicated. Next week’s issue featured Clinton on the cover as “The Fighter: How she came back—and why it could be too late.” Careful not to give Clinton an apparent edge of even truly being a fighter, however, an article title counters “Why Obama is tougher than he looks.”

There’s been plenty of speculation over the last couple years that the medium of the magazine is inherently doomed. That may be true. Pages are costly where pixels are cheap. Still, what TIME puts on those pages is only accelerating that decline.

I think I found something I wasn’t supposed to find.

Many of you have probably read about Dr. James Dobson’s criticism of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. Late tonight I was reading an AP story titled “Obama dismisses Dobson criticism about Bible.”

In the article AP reports: “The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell… said Tuesday he belongs to a group of religious leaders who, working independently of Obama’s campaign, launched a Web site to counter Dobson at http://www.jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com. The site highlights statements from Obama and Dobson and asks visitors to compare them.”

The key clause here is “working independently of Obama’s campaign.”

Really?

Less than 24 hours seemed, to me, like a remarkable turn-around time to get a site registered, operative, and in the press. So I did a little research. Everybody that registers a domain name, according to law, must include with that registration their name, address, contact info, etc. This information can easily be accessed through a whois search (go ahead, try it–plug in your favorite domain name).

So I did a whois search of www.jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com. Turns out the site is registered not to Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, but to one:

Alyssa Martin 
alyssa.p.martin@gmail.com
3424 Old Dominion Road
Lincoln, Nebraska 68516
United States
(402) 304-1489

Fine.

But a quick Google search reveals Alyssa Martin actually works for the Obama campaign as an intern in the Religious Affairs department. In fact, she just started five days ago. So it appears, counter to the AP report that a pastor “working independently of Obama’s campaign, launched a Web site to counter Dobson,” that the Obama campaign is, in fact, directly linked to the creation of this site.

It gets better, of course, because later on during the evening of the 24th, after I had sent some emails out to AP reporters/Drudge, the whois changed. Now the registrant is:

Kirbyjon Caldwell
400 Milam Suite 200
Houston, Texas 77006
United States

Kirbyjon Caldwell, you’ll recall, is the unaffiliated reverend. Why this sudden change? It makes me feel like something is fishy. Luckily, I thought the Obama campaign would catch on to this eventually so I made .pdf copies of the whois search before they updated the information. Observe:

Original whois early evening June 24th

Revised whois late evening June 24th

Why would you change your whois registration unless you were trying to hide something? Does this seems at all strange to anyone else or am I just blowing this out of proportion? Comments welcome.