"A French prisoner accused of killing and devouring part of his cellmate's lung ripped out the organ and started his grisly snack while the victim was still alive."

It's Nicholas Cocaign, the world's worst cellmate.

After the argument [over the toilet] escalated to blows, the real-life Hannibal Lecter allegedly butchered his cellmate, carved out his victim's lung - mistaking it for the heart - and fried up part of the organ with onions on a makeshift grill before eating it....

The case has drawn scrutiny to the entire French penal system. It comes on the heels of last week's ruling by a tribunal in favor of 38 inmates and former inmates who sued over inhumane conditions at the same Rouen jail where Baudry was killed. The court ordered the French government to pay $430 to $21,500 dollars to each plaintiff, Agence France-Presse reported.

Cocaign himself testified Monday that the murder was a cry for help - and not just from the victim.

Cocaign said he warned prison officials that he was capable of violence, begging to be transferred for psychiatric treatment as he served time for several rapes, among other crimes.

"No one was listening to me," Cocaign told the court, according to the AFP. "I made several appeals for help, saying I was a man capable of being dangerous. I took action, and then they took me seriously."

The French government actually is responsible for the murder because...
	A loud argument was not stopped before it escalated to violence.
	A man who needed psychiatric treatment was instead housed with other prisoners.
	They allowed cooking equipment and ingredients in the cell.
	"Butchered"? "Carved"? They let him have a weapon!
	France doesn't have the death penalty.
pollcode.com free polls

A few more details here. The weapon allowed in the cell was a pair of scissors. Cocaign was not in prison for murdering anyone. He was only facing a charge of armed robbery charges. There were onions, olive oil, salt and pepper on a portable camping stove in the cell. Cocaign "initially claimed that he was fascinated by the 'inner workings of Baudry's personality' and 'wanted to take his soul', he later admitted that he was 'curious to see what he tastes like.'"

"Other cable news channels force-feed viewers one narrow, predictable point of view; in contrast, CNN will be offering a lively roundup of all the best ideas..."

Assuming you're eating points of view, are you hungry for more variety in your diet? Great! CNN is serving up a yummy plate of Spitzer.

Sarah Palin is 9-3 in this primary season.

Have you noticed? Impressive? Romney is 13-1

"If the president fires McChrystal, we need a new ambassador and we need an entire new team over there."

"But most importantly, we need the president to say what Secretary Clinton and Secretary Gates have both said but what the president refuses to say: Our withdrawal in the middle of 2011 will be conditions based. It's got to be conditions based and he's got to say it.... He won't say this because he's captive of his far-left base."

McCain.

Meanwhile: "Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal left the White House after meeting with President Obama for about 20 minutes, apparently departing before another meeting on the Afghanistan war scheduled for later Wednesday morning, but there was no immediate word on whether he would keep his job as the top American commander in Afghanistan."

AND: "[W]hy were the general and his team so candid?... They were in Paris...."

AND: In the Wall Street Journal, there's "Why McChrystal Has to Go" by Eliot A. Cohen. But the editors say:

Above all, the President should think beyond short-term political appearances to the difficult hand his own policy restraints have presented to General McChrystal....

This is no justification for military disrespect, but it ought to make Mr. Obama think twice about advice that he sack General McChrystal merely so he doesn't look weak as Commander in Chief. He'll look a lot weaker in a year if his Afghan policy looks like a failure. With a war in the balance, Mr. Obama should not dismiss his most talented commander without knowing who, and what, comes next.

"I used to think diversity was my best friend marrying a black guy."

"But the guy graduated from rich-kid private schools and has tenure at UCLA and, at this point, I think diversity is not skin color but rather social upbringing."

Writes Penelope Trunk, the Brazen Careerist blogger, who married a farmer. The link post is actually about remodeling the farmhouse, or that's the factual context anyway. It's titled "How to cope with diversity." There's a list of 7 tips for coping with diversity, all explained in remodeling-the-farmhouse stories.

***

Here's a spoken-word performance that I love on the subject of home-remodeling: "Terrors of Pleasure," by Spalding Gray. God, I miss Spalding Gray.

And we missed Penelope Trunk, when she went almost a month without blogging after writing that post.

At the Purple Rock Café...

... we felt the cold breath of the devil, but we got away!

New Orleans federal judge rules against Obama on the deepwater drilling moratorium.

Details:

... Hornbeck Offshore Services of Covington, La., claims the government arbitrarily imposed the moratorium without any proof that the operations posed a threat. Hornbeck says the moratorium could cost Louisiana thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in lost wages.

During Monday's hearing, [Judge] Feldman asked a government lawyer why the Interior Department decided to suspend deepwater drilling after the rig explosion when it didn't bar oil tankers from Alaskan waters after the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 or take similar actions in the wake of other industrial accidents....

ADDED: Here's the opinion in PDF. Conclusion:

This Court is persuaded that the public interest weighs in favor of granting a preliminary injunction. While a suspension of activities directed after a rational interpretation of the evidence could outweigh the impact on the plaintiffs and the public, here, the Court has found the plaintiffs would likely succeed in showing that the agency’s decision was arbitrary and capricious. An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.

You think the new issue of Rolling Stone is tough on General McChrystal, but how do you think Lady Gaga feels?

She posed for the cover in a big machine-gun bra and a nearly naked ass and purports to "tell all," yet everyone's talking about McChrystal, whose name isn't even on the cover! Life is so unfair to Lady Gaga!

ADDED: That gun bra made me think of this crotch-gun in "From Dusk 'Til Dawn":

"Maybe Michelangelo was hiding secret drawings of brains inside the Sistine Chapel's ceiling frescoes."

"Makes total sense, right? Because... well, wait, it doesn't make any sense at all."

"It's been an unforgiving couple of decades for 21-year-old meth addict Jayden, but he's still got that smile."

Fun with that website that purports to show you what you'll look like in 20 years.

Feel free to "toggle whether you're a drug addict or not."

And here's some clever sleuthing:

And then I tried throwing a cartoon face at it, and got a glimpse of what’s actually going on: it looks like in20years is just blending one of a handful of pre-rendered facial templates onto the submitted face. I got curious about what all those templates look like, and so I found a very simple line-drawing face via google image search... 

Ha.

Why are people acting surprised by this NYT article about law schools adjusting student grade point averages upward?

Here's the Times article. Memeorandum collects the reactions.

I saw the NYT article yesterday and decided it wasn't worth blogging, but I'm blogging it now because it's getting blogged and only to say that I consider this news a huge bore in light of the fact that law students' grades are always adjusted on a curve.

It's not as if the students previously got the grades they deserved and now the grades are phony. When  lawprofs grade law school exams, we may start with raw scores that represent what we really think of them, but the final grades are determined by the school's predetermined goals for averages and percentages at the various grade levels. If the school thinks those averages and percentages are set in the wrong place and it can reset them.

It never had to do with the actual performance of the students. It was always about where the school, as a matter of policy, decided the grades ought to be. It was always about communicating with law firms and other employers in the hope of advantaging our graduates in comparison to other law schools' graduates. We're all lawyers here. This is all advocacy. Are you actually surprised?

General McChrystal and his advisers spoke to Rolling Stone — "derisively ... often in sharply flippant and dismissive terms" — and now... what?

WaPo reports:

Preparing for a speech he is about to give at a French military academy, McChrystal "wonders aloud" whether he will questioned about the well-publicized differences in opinion between himself and Biden.
"Are you asking me about Vice President Biden? Who's that?" McChrystal says with a laugh, trying out the line as a hypothetical response to the anticipated query.

"Biden?" chimes in an aide who is seated nearby, and who is not named in the article. "Did you say Bite me?"

More quotes from the Rolling Stone article here:

"Who's he going to dinner with?" I ask one of his aides. "Some French minister," the aide tells me. "It's fucking gay."...

According to sources familiar with the meeting, McChrystal thought Obama looked "uncomfortable and intimidated" by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn't go much better. "It was a 10-minute photo op," says an adviser to McChrystal. "Obama clearly didn't know anything about him, who he was. Here's the guy who's going to run his fucking war, but he didn't seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed."...

The Times Square bomber, Faisal Shazad, pleads guilty...

... and is questioned by the federal judge, Miriam Cedarbaum:

"I'm going to plead guilty a hundred times over because until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes ... we will be attacking the U.S.," he said. "And I plead guilty to that."...

"Did you look around to see who they were?" Cedarbaum asked him of his potential victims.

"Well, the people select the government," Shahzad said. "We consider them all the same. ..."

"Including the children?" the judge demanded.

"Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don't see children, they don't see anybody," Shahzad fired back.

"They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims."

"One has to understand where I'm coming from," Shahzad told the judge. "I consider myself ... a Muslim soldier."

"And it's a war to kill people..."

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says:

" 'And it's a war to kill people...' "

The bomber broadcasts a reality that many Americans refuse to acknowledge.

At the Summer Sky Hotel...

... have a beautiful night.

"[S]tudent evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance."

Stanley Fish writes:

[T]hey measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades. 

That's not just an old professor complaining that the students don't like his style. Fish is critiquing a proposal — from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, "a conservative think tank dedicated to private property rights and limited government" —  that would give cash bonuses to teachers (at the college and university level) based on so-called "customer satisfaction":

If there ever was a recipe for non-risk-taking, entirely formulaic, dumbed-down teaching, this is it....

ADDED: Normblog thinks Fish exaggerates:

[T]here are some things that even a student can tell. She may not yet know enough to understand all the subtleties of a challenging teaching method, but she does know something, and she knows more as she goes along. She can tell the difference between clarity and obscurity, between a love of the subject from her teachers and a dullness about it, between an enthusiasm for learning and an indifference towards the process and the students themselves, between a conscientious teacher and a lead-swinger, between an inspiring lecturer and a useless one.

Bork Kagan...

... says Bork.