Sen.Blutarsky

Don't hire this guy, photo attached, as your commune director ...

Good job! Nowadays it's custom to publish your source code for noncommercial applications, otherwise people who don't know you personally may properly question the safety of your compiled code. So I ask you to please post your source. As a courtesy, I'm attaching a draft header that contains legal notices for protecting you and your rights, also it bears the usual statuory exculpations. Thanks for sharing

My office advises that it depends on which of two tracks a student is on. Philosopher kings receive a tuition discount whereas philosopher messiahs must pay full freight. Neither classification receives a complete tuition abatement, while each of them needs to cover room, board, cocktails and other necessities. BLUTARSKY 2008!

So why are you settling for less? The superior Chicago weather? BLUTARSKY 2008!

A similar logic was applied to the information technology industry I seem to recall ... BLUTARSKY 2008!

A constitutent has asked my office to post the following article. Grad-student walkout: first step to getting a union? By Eliza Strickland | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor NEW YORK - When David Wolach arrived at Columbia University in 1999 to pursue a PhD in philosophy, he didn't anticipate any conflict other than a few departmental squabbles. "I entered Columbia with the expectation that I would bury my head in my studies," says Mr. Wolach. "I did not expect to be involved in anything political." But he quickly became dismayed by the conditions of graduate student living. In addition to studying, Wolach worked as a teaching assistant for 20 to 25 hours a week, grading papers and holding office hours. For one semester's efforts, he earned $990. "I felt that [graduate students] were undervalued and significantly underpaid," he says. Today, Wolach is an organizer for Graduate Student Employees United, the fledgling union at Columbia now pressing the administration for official recognition. To force the administration's hand, the students are considering a strike in coming weeks. "We want to be able to negotiate with the university over our working conditions in a meaningful way," says Wolach, "and be guaranteed a living wage." Union drives have recently become a fact of life at colleges across the country. In public university systems, many have succeeded, aided by sympathetic state legislators and regional labor boards. At private universities, however, administrations have balked at the idea and fought the trend in courts and on campuses. Currently, New York University is the only private university that has recognized a graduate student union. The debate hinges on whether the teaching graduate students perform qualifies them as university employees, who have a right to organization and collective bargaining. "It is Columbia's view that graduate teaching fellows and research assistants are students, not employees," says Alissa Kaplan Michaels, a senior public affairs officer at Columbia. "Teaching responsibilities are part of their academic training," she says, which prepare them to become professors. Columbia and other universities that have taken a stand against unionization - most notably Yale, University of Pennsylvania, Brown, and Tufts - base their stance on a July 2004 decision by the National Labor Relations Board. That ruling, which declared unequivocally that graduate students are not employees, overturned a 2000 decision that unequivocally stated the opposite. The sharp contrast between the two rulings is attributed to the new board members appointed by President Bush after his election in 2000, say scholars of labor law. The three Bush-appointed Republicans on the labor board formed the majority in the 2004 decision that ruled against graduate students, while the two Democrats dissented. The decision means that the graduate students can no longer appeal to the labor board to mediate, but they still have the right to directly petition university administrations to recognize their unions. The debate over unionization at Columbia has swirled around campus over the winter. On a recent snowy evening, about 100 graduate students crowded into a meeting room to discuss how to make the administration take their demands seriously. "We're not going to get a union without a fight," said Adina Popescu, a fifth-year graduate student in the history department and also a teaching assistant. The students' demands include the official recognition of their union by the administration and an agreement to negotiate a contract, which they hope would include salary guarantees, better health benefits, child care, and increased teacher training. Union organizers acknowledge that the situation has improved in recent years, with the average graduate student now receiving about $18,000 per year, up from $12,000 in 2000. But organizers see that pay increase as the first victory of their campaign, rather than a sign of largess on the part of the university. "There were many, many years of polite conversation that got us nowhere," said Ms. Popescu. Columbia organizers plan to take action in the coming weeks to further ratchet up the pressure, and say a strike is possible. Last year, the graduate students went on strike for four weeks at the end of spring semester, causing classes to be cancelled and disrupting final exams. With union groups at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania also considering protest actions in coming months, the Ivy League may have a tumultuous spring. Still, Columbia University seems likely to face the first wave of organized dissent. "The membership will decide our next move," says Wolach. "One way or another, we'll compel the university to sit down at the bargaining table." Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0329/p14s01-legn.html Blutarsky 2008!

And the answer is: Tony The Tiger, a TV personality and company representative whose claim to Grrrrrrrrrrrrrreat ness has never been seriously challenged (the fruity rabbit, flakey Irishman and quispy Martian were mere pretenders, not legitimate contenders). At the very least Tony was the "greatest" when considered along with a bowl of milk, I bet most of the others mentioned didn't even smell very good, let alone taste Grrrrrrrrreat.

Rest assured our government continues to work with your educational service provider to address this dire problem ... the approach taken by my office is reknown on the issue, seven years of college down the drain simply is too much time to spend on a single "skill." Until we are successful, endeavor to persevere. (

Uh, the pilot survived the incident so he didn't "go in." A "forced landing" is how I believe he would describe it - he's still around so ya's can ask him - no need to be alarmist.

This is my weapon, and this is my gun This one's for avalanche control, and this one's for fun ... Sounds like the DOT guys were so overly occupied with one tool they neglected to give proper attention to the other one. "Son, drop that magazine and get familar with your magazines."

And the answer was: What is Ice-Nine? Doorprize goes to Mr. Kilgore Trout.

A constituent wishes to know whether the above Vonnegutian definitions have any bearing on skydiving. Thoughts?

Tonight's another Big Lebowski night at the Blutarsky household. Naturally we'll be serving up lots of Russians, and since the local bartender persuaded us to buy Tito's Handmade, a batch distilled vodka from Texas, for the first time I'm wondering whether our guests will enjoy their drinks, an important component of many things Lebowski. Comments on your Tito's vodka experience will be appreciated so we can prepare to explain-away or boast, as may be appropriate. -Senator & Mrs. (Mandy Pepperidge) John Blutarsky

Rule #9: No matter what happens never give up. I've Rule #9'd throughout my life kid, and now I'm rich and relatively happy in comparison with my peerage. Hang in there, the cloud cover will lift and you'll experience a lifetime of great jumps!

That's what they _want_ you to think, fartbrain. Good luck and take care.

If it helps you keep perspective while you're submerged, try and recall that the air you breathe on your submarine can be a whole lot fresher than the crud we typically snarf in the otters when we're nearing altitude.

I personally doubt serving in Iraq would prepare you to FUBAR Iran, which is a completely different set of facts and has not been attrited for more than a decade prior to being FUBARd, as Iraq was. I do wish and the others good luck, though.

Choose one poster to dz.com who is currently serving on active duty and pick another poster who is presently serving in the reserves. Let these fellow skydivers be killed visiting FUBAR upon Iran. Now, please share with us what it is that their deaths have achieved? Do you intend for us to occupy Iran? If so, we may need to perform some multiplication on the above numbers. At this stage this would be for the explicit objective of ... (help me out please)

Lefkow killer doesn't fit our need for symbols John Kass March 11, 2005 You probably don't like to jump to conclusions in homicide cases, either. But I bet nobody figured that the killer in the Lefkow slayings would turn out to be some crazed Polish electrician with mouth cancer and a grudge. Instead, many of us thought of the obvious, of young white men, skinny and hateful and poor, with a thing for leather, scrawling swastikas on their shoulders with markers, stacks of magazines under their beds, porn and Soldier of Fortune, speaking with a twang. "No one would have figured it," a Chicago police detective told me. "[Investigators] had nothing. If he didn't kill himself, if he didn't draw attention to himself with the notes, he'd probably still be out there." The electrician seems so ludicrous after so many white supremacist theories that it was unsettling. Not as unsettling as the slayings themselves, but almost. Because the killer of the husband and mother of U.S. District Court Judge Joan Lefkow was supposed to be a white supremacist. Isn't that so? That's what was expected. But it didn't happen. It must have been jarring for many, the news that the killer is not some creepy ideologue, but a lonely, angry man raging against Judge Lefkow because she tossed out his medical malpractice suit. Bart Ross, who lived on the North Side with his dog and cat, claimed responsibility for the Feb. 28 slayings of Michael Lefkow and Donna Humphrey. He wrote at least two notes of confession and described how he killed them. He sent one note to the NBC news station in Chicago. He had another with him in his car when he drove to Milwaukee. A local cop stopped him for a minor traffic violation, and Ross decided to put a bullet into his own brain. The news was disappointing. Most folks weren't ready for something this random. They weren't properly prepared. No one was. How could we have been? The drumbeat was all about the supremacists. The politics lined up neatly, along with all the theories. And there was this key fact: The deadly white supremacist Matthew Hale was already awaiting sentencing on charges that he conspired to have Lefkow killed. So it was Matthew Hale this and Matthew Hale that, and white supremacists this and white supremacists that. That was a natural connection to make, and it had to be investigated. But those outside the investigation, those speculating, had proper political cover. It also fit our need to make the killings of the family of a federal judge something worthy of the deed. It had to be linked to someone like Hale; someone tied to a bitter ideological vine, because by then the victims themselves had also been transformed. They'd become symbols for what is decent. And it wouldn't do if some babbling maniac wiped out decency. That would leave too much to chance and not enough to reason. Most of us are reasonable people. So it had to be a supremacist. Then reality showed up and ruined the movie. It also eclipsed the Big Speech. The Big Speech is what I call that monologue that concludes a TV crime drama. The Big Speech is given by actors who play a detective or prosecuting attorney or judge, and they speak in a weary voice as prescribed by the cliche. I suppose we should throw in real news people, since we often make the Big Speech, too, although we play ourselves. The Big Speech in the Lefkow case was so tempting; a few couldn't help but make it before anyone was charged with the crimes. Those who came later would have struck the same tone. We would have all denounced the racism of the haters and stood confidently on the side of angels. We would have each felt very good about ourselves, wagging our fingers at Hale, comfortable with the moral of the story. There has to be a moral, at least in bad fiction written by people who probably should know better. It is the lesson, the why. That's the Big Speech. "That's why I never watch detective shows," the detective told me Thursday, as we talked about the Lefkow case, as we had been doing for several days. "You know those shows," he said. "First the victim is killed, then there's a commercial, you get a sandwich and at the end, you get a guilty verdict and the boss says something snappy and then another commercial. You don't watch reporter shows, do you?" Of course not. "OK. A homicide is either simple, cut-and-dried gang stuff, or domestic stuff, and you figure you know who did it, or it takes some weird twists and you have to backtrack it for a long time," he said. "But in those weird ones, you never focus in on one theory. Otherwise, you get tunnel vision." And you can't make the Big Speech, I said. "Whatever," he said. ---------- jskass@tribune.com Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune May God grant the Lefkows peace.

Prediction: Great news for the American waistline, terrible news for McDonald's shareholders. Blutarsky 2008

In Oil Request, U.S. Says Rock On By John J. Fialka Uintah County, Utah Rising oil prices have sparked new government and corporate interest in developing oil shale, a tantalizingly plentiful but difficult-to-access resource largely abandoned after oil prices crashed in the early 1980s. The Pentagon is working on plans to direct, within four years, a portion of its $5.5 billion fuel-purchasing budget for high-quality oil, extracted from sedimentary-rock formations called shale, here and in the surrounding region. The move is designed to “catalyze” a new industry that can supply the military with oil from untapped domestic sources, according to a Defense Department official. The Interior Department, meanwhile, soon will lease tracts of land in the West for research and development of oil shale – something it hasn’t done since the 1970s. Officials have received positive comments from independent producers and two big oil companies, Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Exxon Mobil Corp. Shell has informed the Interior Department it has spent “many tens of millions of dollars” on field research for a new development process and plans to start a U.S. research projects by year end. Shell said in a filing with the Interior Department that the U.S. should designate oil from shale as a “strategically important domestic fuel that should be developed on an accelerated basis.” The company isn’t seeking government assistance but would like the government to elevate oil shale on its energy-priority list. Shell also announced in January that it was working with China’s Jilin province to develop oil-shale deposits there. With an estimated two trillion barrels of shale oil under American soil – roughly 60% of the world’s known deposits – successful development would, at least on paper, begin to change the international oil business. The U.S. would become the world’s single biggest oil source, far surpassing Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves of 261 million barrels. … Source: The Wall Street Journal (March 10, 2005)

I do like it, since perpetuating the threat-counterthreat cycle is the only thing that keeps my defense stock shares appreciating in value. Plowshares aren't lucrative. God, I almost sound like a Texan.

... T-minus 8 and counting before Nazis and lockdown. T-minus 7 and counting before Nazis and lockdown. T-minus ...

Happy Bo-day mon.

A constituent has asked my office to forward her response to John's post, as follows: Funny, I hold a similar position on academy members who bilk the business class for what amount to political pursuits and then demonize said producing class, biting the very hand/economic system that feeds both them and their RA's/slaves (NB, RA's are scholars who not infrequently are compensated at less than minimum wage levels by their masters and cannot unionize as a practical matter). Why should I pay someone to indoctrinate my children and grandchildren in self-loathing when cars, homes and boats can contribute real human value I actually experience with my family and loved ones, these assets lay within my means of control, and inanimate objects don't routinely attack me for providing the very means that make their existence possible?