So the question is asked, where is the fuckin' money goin' to? if San Diego State is charging hand over fist for every little thing. Well, the dirty truth is that the California State University system has become a wealth-hording mechanism for this tiny clique of college presidents, all of whom now make anywhere from over $300,000/year to just over $500,000/year. SDSU Persident Adela de la Torre makes $533,148 every year now.
Above: A 2022 chart of all the CSU schools, their presidents, how much their salaries have gone up, and if free housing is provided. The red line points out SDSU. Chart released by the California Faculty Association and used in the Peter Herman op-ed linked to above, "Hefty Raises Show CSU Values Administrators Over Faculty and Students", Times of San Diego, 08-18-2022.
Besides the CSU presidents, all the administrators got seven percent raises, while the professorate negotiated for a four percent raise and only got a three percent raise because one hundred million dollars was taken out of the CSU budget by the state government. Herman claims that even the four percent raise was behind the rate of inflation. And then there's the housing issue....
We last wrote about San Diego State University in 2018, mocking their then-newish Engineering building and all the damn ofo rental bikes dumped on the campus. Things have gone downhill since then. According to Peter Herman*, professor of English and Shakespeare scholar, the main library (Love Library, opened in 1971 and named after ex-SDSU President Malcolm Love) is crumbling to pieces; they could not take a massive collection of Jazz/Blues/Gospel/Funk records all recorded by Black artists from an emeritus UCSD English professor (Bram Dijkstra) and his wife Sandra because the library cannot control humidity to a level where LP records and their sleeves aren't slowly being damaged, because it would require a new HVAC system for the space where all the records would be kept (plus the listening space where people would actually listen to the music, probably on headphones) was "too much of an expense." They literally have small dehumidifiers in the stacks to suck out the moisture, and the garbage cans the water is pumped into have to be drained multiple times a day. Also the exterior of the building is losing small chunks of concrete; "A colleague tells me he has seen 1,000-year-old cathedrals in better shape."
It's not just Love Library - the Life Sciences complex either reeks of saltwater in the Oceanographic section or like a greenhouse in the Botany section. The place is split between "north" and "south" sections; the former is where the greenhouse is and dates back to 1962, the latter is connected to the long patio (collonade? loggia?) that connects Hepner Hall to Hardy Tower. The school wants to demolish Life Science North and replace it with a slightly larger building, but the funding has not been scrabbled together.
The final cut to all of this is the probable 2027-2028 enrollment cliff Dahn Shaulis has written about a lot; the students that weren't born during the Great Recession's worst period are going to start making their absence felt in a few years, so it might get very easy to get into SDSU because they will be desperate to find any students at all. Will the education be worth anything? Only time will tell.
Above: The better days of 2011, when Elliot Hirschman ("President Slick") was in charge.
Below: The "Living Horror of COVID" message from President Slick's successor.
Is this paid editing, or just some very strange fanboy? Back in 2008, Henry T. Nicholas, III was in a lot of hot water for securities fraud and also building an underground sex-and-drugs space beneath his Laguna Hills mansion, a mansion patrolled by three guards who were a mix of ex-military and ex-police officers, while Nicholas' wife and three children went about their lives. The organization Nicholas was lying to shareholders for was Broadcom, a microchip manufacturer he had co-founded. There was a tizzy of coverage, mostly over the "orgy cave" and the fantastic amounts of drugs Nicholas was ordering/doing. In the end, everybody else seemed to take the fall, and Nicholas emerged a divorced dad with time at the Betty Ford clinic but still in charge at Broadcom somehow. None of this is is the story we are interested with today (you could tell because I didn't even mention that the "orgy cave" plan was abandoned and HTN III converted a warehouse to the same purpose), we are interested in how certain Single Purpose Accounts tweaked Nicholas' BLP ("biography of a living person") so that the events of 2008-2011 are totally buried.
Once all of this dance was completed, then other SPAs moved in to smooth the article down, make it duller. They were Beahero, Worrytrap, Silvergoldsilver, plus Dstringer71, who liked to edit the article on Marsy's Law, a victims' rights law passed in 2008. Who was "Marsy"? Marsilee Nicholas, sister of Henry Nicholas, who was killed by an ex-boyfriend in 1983; HTN III was one of the promoters. Now the reader can see why we are asking if this is paid editing or fanboyism.
It add to this, in June 2010 noted dimwit administrator Ohnoitsjamie tried to demolish the article, then SPA Phoneyplayer showed up to defend it:
(cur | prev) 18:54, 26 June 2010 Ohnoitsjamie (talk | contribs) . . (16,397 bytes) (+16,369) . . (oops) (undo) (cur | prev) 18:54, 26 June 2010 Ohnoitsjamie (talk | contribs) . . (28 bytes) (-16,369) . . (yes it does; we only need one article, the one at Henry Nicholas) (undo) (cur | prev) 18:50, 26 June 2010 Phoneyplayer (talk | contribs) . . (16,397 bytes) (+16,369) . . (Undid revision 370285439 by Ohnoitsjamie (talk) redirect didn't go anywhere?) (undo) (cur | prev) 18:35, 26 June 2010 Ohnoitsjamie (talk | contribs) . . (28 bytes) (-16,369) . . (redirect (we don't need three pages on the same subject)) (undo)
What I find interesting about the name Phoneyplayer is that the "phoney" is spelled the same way as IAmAPhoney, the "Paul [McCartney] is dead/Faul" editor/musician who may or may not be part of a 2010s viral marketing campaign to promote the Beatles. Anyway, the Henry Nicholas BLP is now being watched over by Patapsco913, who Barbour alleges is a paid editor. Finally, archive.org has a couple early copies of the article saved from 2009 and 2010. Both of them have section headings mentioning the sex cave. With Wikipedia, you always have to check your sources.
Above: the weirdest photo of Henry Nicholas I could find. He always looks haggard.
About eleven months ago we did a post on the Russian-Ukrainian war, pointing out the amounts of outright censorship and throttling of outlets online. Things have gotten a lot more bizarre since then.
NAFO
Part of the absolute reduction of Twitter from "that site the journos and comedians hang out at" to "Elon's Rightwing Funhouse" has been the rise of the North Atlantic Fellas Organization, this bizarro quasi-parody of NATO, operator culture, and Internet memes. All of the members get little Shiba Inu person avatars (a reference to Dogecoin), and they have made "saints" out of anti-tank/short-range anti-aircraft missiles, such as "Saint Javelin", a name they reused for their sticker and merchandise store.
Above: a pretty conservative-looking "Shibe" avatar; many are depicted carrying weapons in full combat gear. Most of them have the same stance, a feature probably taken from the computer-generated style of NFT "art" collections.
The criticism of NAFO has been there early on, because anybody can join (ex-Congressman Adam Kinzinger is a "fella") and this has not just meant the normal Twitter horde but a bunch of government figures, mercenaries, political operators, and hangers-on as Moss Robeson and The Greyzone point out. Paul Massaro ("senior policy advisor to the U.S. Helsinki Commission" - Robeson), his online girlfriend Alona Shevchenko (involved in cryptocurrency and now Ukrainian nationalism), Matthew VanDyke (founder of the Sons of Liberty International mercenary group, and a former fighter in the Syrian civil war), Benjamin Wittes (Brookings Institute, married to an ex-State Department official), the Kyiv Post newspaper (very pro-Azov Battalion, paper mostly staffed by imported rightwingers after most of the Ukrainians were fired), John Sipher (ex-CIA media commentator), and many others are joining/backing NAFO. . . . .which means their money is going to back the Georgian Legion of Mamuka Mamulashvili (founded 2014), which seems to be what Kamil Dyszewski and Matt Moores (the mostly-unspoken founders of NAFO) were aiming to do, and everything else is a bonus. No word if Saint Javelin creator Christian Borys (Canadian freelance journalist) is unhappy with that choice. The Georgian Legion (now full of non-Georgian foreign volunteers) has gotten in hot water in the past for killing disarmed Russian soldiers on camera, no less. Mamulashvili has said his group does not tolerate neo-Nazis and ethnic nationalists, and yet men like Ethan Tiling (Australian, now claims to being an ex-neo-Nazi), Norweigan Joachim Furholm (another neo-Nazi), and Craig Lang (ex-US Army, did time with Right Sektor and the Georgian Legion, on the run for two murders in the US) were involved, mostly in the run-up to the Russian invasion when the Georgian Legion was fighting in the Donbass and Luhansk.
It should be said that much of the above were taken from news reports written within the last five years, but NAFOkeeps on giving to this day, such as when "fella" Pekka Kallionniemi, a research fellow at Tampere University in Finland started ripping Kim Dotcom in a Twitter thread. Dotcom responded and one of his rebuttals involved Seth Rich, that he was unwilling to handle the information (the Hillary Clinton emails and DNC leak material) Rich had, so Dotcom put him in contact with Wikileaks and things moved from there. In one swoop a NAFOite was able to sink the "Russian hackers" story, all by accident, if you believe Kim Dotcom's claims.
. . . . .Ukraine’s new authorities actually made every concession to neo-Nazi militants because they themselves feared the monster they had armed to keep them in power. However, nationalist and neo-Nazi groups were systematically made mainstream by all Ukrainian governments after the collapse of the Soviet Union; they were needed to reverse the mass nostalgia for the late-Soviet welfare state with free healthcare, education, free apartments for workers, free trips to resorts and vacation homes with very low prices for food, gas, electricity and public transport.
Now people get prison sentences for even wearing a Soviet badge, listening to Communist songs, or wearing a T-shirt with a hammer and sickle. Most of the communists left for the rebellious republics of Donbass (where their own communist party operates), some went to Russia, and some stayed to work underground in Ukraine.
Even recently, in March 2023, the Ukrainian security services reported the detention in western Ukraine, in the city of Lviv, of a cell of the illegal Communist Party of the Soviet Union, numbering 45 people. Judging by their description, they were mostly elderly people. . . . .
....Even before 2022, Ukraine went through a stage of deindustrialization, when most of the country’s enterprises were shut down. This was one of the consequences of the trade association with the European Union, which caused the Euromaidan in 2014. Millions of Ukrainians were already working on construction sites in Russia or in the fields in Poland, as nurses in Italy, or in shopping malls in Turkey. By that time, a whole class of people had formed in Ukraine, living on their relatives’ salaries, which they transferred to them from abroad.
As a consequence, Ukraine is experiencing a shortage of workers, even to maintain infrastructure. A Ukrainian worker receives an average of $200-250 per month, but this is usually enough for a couple of weeks. The fact is that in 2014 Ukraine began to take mass loans from the IMF, the World Bank and Western countries. The condition for the loans was a sharp increase in tariffs for gas, light, and gasoline, so that the debtor could pay back later. Since 2014, the prices of heating, water, transport, and electricity in Ukraine have increased five to six times, while in Donbass they remained almost at the same level. For this reason, Ukrainian workers prefer to work abroad and spend their earnings at home.....
The Russo-Ukrainian Dilemma
Not enough has been written about the probable collapse of the Russo-Ukrainian identity, which was fragile at the best of times. Unfortunately at the time of this edit of this post (11-09-23) the string of online articles we were hoping to unearth on that subject did not materialize. We will do more work, and will come back to this subject in the near future.
The "side of Russian things"......
Above: One of the 2020 social media ads made by a news website (not the infamous "troll factory") in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) with ties to the now-deceased Yevgeny Prigozhin (he was on their board of trustees) that pushed for a Russian federal amendment to the Russian constitution making it mandatory that households who adopt children be cisgender, i.e. a man and woman in a family unit. The ad itself is set in 2035, features a gay couple adopting a Russian orphan boy, with all the nasty undertones of pederasty implied in this sort of "think of the children" propaganda. This video is from The Moscow Times, but my link to it is The Russian Reader blog.
Russian Dissent Substack: The Revolution That Wasn't (June 28, 2023) A piece on the Wagner Group revolt before Prigozhin's demise.
Below: Video from Vestnik Buri on the history of Yevgeny Prigozhin up to roughly January of this year. A very critical view of the man. Remember to turn on the subtitles in the settings.
Below: The film that embodies what has been going on in Russia since the war started, a return to the military-criminal mess of the 1990s, Brat (Brother) from 1997, made right after the First Chechen War ended in 1996. This version has hard-coded subtitles (laserdisc dub?), and is broken into eight pieces. They have the film in HD, but subtitle-less and I presume my audience does not speak the language. Here is part one:
I will probably take all of these IRC and make a book out of them with a running commentary.
Session Start: Tue Feb 16 17:41:16 2010
Session Ident: #wikimedia-ops
[17:41] * Now talking in #wikimedia-ops
[17:41] * Topic is 'Wikimedia IRC operators | Ops in Wikimedia channels are voiced | eir: http://freenode.net/eir.shtml | ASM: [[m:IRC/Bots/AntiSpamMeta]] | [[m:IRC Group Contacts]] | If you have a private message for ops, please /join #wikimedia-ops-internal | No public logging | See http://is.gd/4KaNT to request a cloak | IRC community meeting: http://is.gd/7zSYm'
[17:41] * Set by Rjd0060!~Rjd0060@wikimedia/Rjd0060 on Tue Feb 02 17:31:52
[17:41] -ChanServ- [#wikimedia-ops] Welcome to the home of the Wikimedia chanops. Questions, requests and the like can be filed here and we'll try to help. To find an operator for a particular channel, type "/quote chanserv access #channel list".
[17:41] -ChanServ- [#wikimedia-qc] Bienvenue sur le canal de l'�ventuel chapitre qu�b�cois de Wikim�dia! N'h�sitez pas � vous tirer une b�che et � jaser avec vos � chums �.
[18:06] -eir:#wikimedia-ops- (9REM) ban[17193] *!*@gateway/web/freenode/x-klvyxrmzpoeeoaew was set on #wikimedia-ops by killiondude!~Killiondu@wikimedia/Killiondude on 2010-02-15 19:51:16 with reason "Pickleboy" and had an expiry date of 2010-02-15 22:51:16. It was removed by killiondude!~Killer@wikimedia/Killiondude on Tue Feb 16 23:06:10 2010
[21:47] <The_Thing> omg... I feel bad for bringing /b/'s wrath into -en... they think were monitoring them in there
[21:48] <Betacommand> The_Thing feel free to add their trollings to -alerts
Session Close: Tue Feb 16 21:54:32 2010
Above: This is from "Three Valentines" a season-six episode of Frasier. With this one bit of silent comedy David Hyde Pierce won the show an Emmy that year (1999).
This one came from the back room about one of Wikipedia's back rooms, which en.Wikipediaburied before I could write about it. It looks like this today:
But you can see what it looked like via the Wayback Machine here.
Buried near the bottom was this:
You saw that right, Grawp's real name was dropped by Tim Starling and David Gerard in 2005, and they were too cack-handed to hide it behind asterisks. Pure idiocy.
Essjay disrobed February 27, 2007 (Blog by Nicholas Carr, now deleted*)
Post
Last July, the New Yorker ran a long article on Wikipedia. At one point, the author, Stacy Schiff, told
the story of a particularly dedicated and well-qualified contributor to the popular online encyclopedia:
One regular on the site is a user known as Essjay, who holds a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon
law and has written or contributed to sixteen thousand entries. A tenured professor of religion at a
private university, Essjay made his first edit in February, 2005. Initially, he contributed to articles in his
field - on the penitential rite, transubstantiation, the papal tiara. Soon he was spending fourteen hours a
day on the site, though he was careful to keep his online life a secret from his colleagues and friends ...
Essjay is serving a second term as chair of [Wikipedia's] mediation committee. He is also an admin, a
bureaucrat, and a checkuser, which means that he is one of fourteen Wikipedians authorized to trace
I.P. addresses in cases of suspected abuse. He often takes his laptop to class, so that he can be available
to Wikipedians while giving a quiz, and he keeps an eye on twenty I.R.C. chat channels, where users
often trade gossip about abuses they have witnessed.
Essjay is also, it now appears, a particularly accomplished liar. In an editor's note in this week's edition,
the New Yorker reports:
Essjay was recommended to Ms. Schiff as a source by a member of Wikipedia's management team
because of his respected position within the Wikipedia community. He was willing to describe his
work as a Wikipedia administrator but would not identify himself other than by confirming the
biographical details that appeared on his user page ...
Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan
Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught. He was
recently hired by Wikia - a for-profit company affiliated with Wikipedia - as a "community manager";
he continues to hold his Wikipedia positions. He did not answer a message we sent to him; Jimmy
Wales, the co-founder of Wikia and of Wikipedia, said of Essjay's invented persona, "I regard it as a
pseudonym and I don't really have a problem with it."
If credentials don't matter, why bother faking them? Ah, well, Schiff put it best in the final line of her
article: "Your truth or mine?"
Posted by nick at February 27, 2007 01:57 PM |
Comments
[Comments by not included].
Credentials probably helped add credibility to his earlier work on the site, but over time, his cred was
likely attached more to his work than his faked credentials. Sounds a lot like the real world to me.
Posted by: Ed Kohler at February 27, 2007 03:33 PM
"other than by confirming the biographical details that appeared on his user page" It was in Wikipedia!
That makes it truthy ...
Posted by: Seth Finkelstein at February 27, 2007 04:12 PM
Aw, come on now..don't you think it's getting a bit old, bashing Wikipedia? Let's bash Second Life
instead, this magnificent bonfire of vanities deserves it so much more
Posted by: darkobserver at
February 28, 2007 05:39 AM
A liar is a liar is a liar. No excuse for it.
Posted by: Windwing at February 28, 2007 10:40 AM
FYI:
What The New Yorker Article Fraud Tells Us About Wikipedia
"Executive summary: This is the delusion Wikipedia fosters - it's what it is, how it runs."
Posted by:
Seth Finkelstein at March 1, 2007 08:18 AM
I am one of the people who Essjay lied to on a regular basis. I found him to be, in general, insightful.
However, I cannot forgive that he lied to me, or his lies to the Wikipedia community and the public. It
is a disgrace that Jimbo's response to being informed of Essjay's lies was to promote him, and his
choice to do so sends a clear message about Wikipedia.
Wikipedia's credibility as an information source is bad enough without having to deal with having
documented fraudsters as leading contributors.
Posted by: Kelly Martin at March 1, 2007 01:40 PM
For Jimmy not to "have a problem with" Essjay’s identity fraud is essentially for him to declare: you
can falsely claim all sorts of credentials you like on Wikipedia, and not have them. Truth-telling about
yourself really doesn't matter on Wikipedia, and credentials (of course) don’t matter either. Perhaps we
already knew this. But nothing has ever more eloquently illustrated it.
Posted by: Larry Sanger at March 1, 2007 08:27 PM
I just thought for other people reading this blog they should know who Larry Sanger and Kelly Martin
are. Larry was one of the cofounders of Wikipedia, essentially the COO to Wales' as CEO. Many of the
early policies are Sanger's. Kelly Martin is a long time contributor whose held an 2 dozens offices on
wikipedia and has founded many of the committees and structures that exist today. While both of them
are in some sense "exiles" these a people who really understand wikipedia.
Posted by: JeffB at March 2, 2007 03:16 PM
To be frank, I'm a little ashamed of the New Yorkers initial reporting on this. The journalist couldn't
have taken the simple step of finding out where Essjay apparently got his degrees from or where he
taught? A phone call would have disproved the sentences concerning Essjay.
Essjay is honestly the embodiment of Wikipedia -- anyone can write over someone else's history,
including their own. He just happened to invent his up completely.
Posted by: PBH at March 6, 2007 10:54 AM
Wikipedia IS fraud. The whole idea of free editing means nobody takes responsibility for the content.
So propagandists and all sorts of jokers, along with racists, religious bigots and the like are able to
plant their lies at leisure. Wikipedia provides them with a platform and a training ground.
Essjay was not a sophisticated liar, there are many much better than him doing nicely from academic
and journalistic fraud. Indeed, we should be grateful to Essjay for exposing the true nature of
Wikipedia.
Please see my comments on the article about Roger Casement in the discussion page of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is a disgrace to those involved in it. It should go offline until it sorts out the quality problem.
The editors of articles should have the guts to put their names to what they write. kevin.mannerings@vr-web.de Posted by: lugboy at March 12, 2007 05:14 PM
