Online Education Insanity

Wow - this is taking the "online education revolution" to it's logical and absurd conclusion:

Triumph Higher Education, which licenses the school’s name from the Escoffier Foundation, already has two brick-and-mortar professional cooking schools in Austin, Tex., and Boulder, Colo. It just launched its online curriculum, modeling it after the online degree programs such as those offered by the University of Phoenix. The course costs $5,000. While half its new enrollment comprises enthusiasts looking to learn the basics of cooking, the school’s core objective is to train the professional cooks that make up the rank and file of every restaurant kitchen.

At this point I should mention that I worked as a prep and line cook for several years in college. I had no formal training and I’m certainly no chef, but I make a decent vinaigrette, can debone a chicken, and have developed an unhealthy indifference toward open flame. I also carry the baggage accrued by anyone who has learned to cook in a restaurant.

Sure, your grandma can teach you to cook, but to learn how to cook professionally, there is no substitute for a hairy man in sweat-drenched chef whites bellowing in your ear, demanding to know how you could foul up a carrot brunoise.

I expressed my skepticism to Jeffrey Larson, Triumph’s director of admissions marketing, and Brian Sherrill, its vice president of technology, and they say they get that response a lot. Sherrill says cooking is such a hands-on profession that an entirely online curriculum seems counterintuitive.

Sherrill says no one is going to graduate from the school’s two-to-four-month program and open a restaurant. The idea is to teach the rudiments of cooking, along with a healthy dose of French culinary theory and kitchen science to students who want to embark on a restaurant career, he says.

Triumph expects its Escoffier graduates to develop the basic knowledge needed to land an entry-level position in a restaurant or caterer’s kitchen and go on to continue their education on the job.

“You’re not going to complete the class and become a sous-chef,” Sherrill says. “You’re going to learn knife skills, to learn your mother sauces, to learn the fundamentals.”

Okay, so graduating from this $5000 dollar program will teach you enough of the basics to get an entry level $7.50 an hour job at Applebee's.

And how will students be assessed and graded by the instructors so that Applebee's knows graduates from the Triumph Online Culinary School really know knife skills, how to make mother's sauces, etc.?

Why, by taking pictures and sending them in to the Triumph's teachers, of course!

The most obvious flaw in the school’s online system is that no instructor is eating the dishes these students create. No matter how good a meal looks, you’ve made an unacceptable dish if it tastes poorly. I share this criticism with Sherrill and Larson, expecting them to cringe in fear at my astute observations. I get the impression I’m not the first person to have raised this point.

You can divine a lot about how a dish will taste just by looking at it, Sherrill says. You can tell if a scallop has been seared properly by noting the level of caramelization on its exterior. You can see if a steak has been cooked properly by cutting it up and observing the redness of juices. You can tell if eggs have been scrambled properly by the size of their curds and the sheen of moisture on their surface.

This program so smacks of "How Do We Make Some More Money From An Online Component Because We Can't Raise Tuition At Our Brick And Mortar Schools Anymore."

I worked restaurants for a long, long time, albeit in the front of the house.

I am highly dubious that paying any culinary school $40,000 to get a degree that will eventually get you, at max, a $12 or $13 an hour job cooking in a restaurant makes any sense.

I am completely dubious that spending $5000 for an online culinary program makes any sense at all.

Unless you know, going in, that you're only doing it to learn the basics for yourself.

But if you think you're going to get a job out of this program, you should think again.

In my day, people started as dishwashers and moved onto the line where they learned the very same basics without paying any school $5000 for an online program.

I know times have changed and restaurants are looking more for trained chefs from programs rather than a newbie they're willing to train themselves.

But there are at least seven SUNY programs that you can attend to learn culinary skills that would serve you a lot better than this online program, and CUNY has at least two programs that will do the same.

Every school and every would-be edu entrepreneur thinks they can turn to the Internets and make a bundle with an online program.

I am skeptical of most of those, but I am really skeptical of this one.

Next week we'll take a look at the News Corporation''s online medical school program called "Operation!" and ask the question, "Would you go to a doctor trained online?"

Plunge Into The Data...Click Deeply

This is the advice we get from the geniuses at the NY Times today, as they have "updated" their data pages for each school in the system.

The article makes it sound as if the data is all trustworthy and if you just do your research, you will know which schools are "good" and which are "failing."

Because you see, nothing is more trustworthy than NYCDOE test scores and graduation rate data.

They're the LIBOR of the public school system - the core numbers and the solid foundation upon which everything else we know about schools, students, and teachers are based.

So plunge deeply into the data, people.

Wade in the truth that is ARIS.

Click deeply and feel the wisdom and power emanating from the numbers.

Just don't actually try to access the data itself.

You'll get a "server error" message.

And don't try to leave a comment on this NY Times schoolbook article.

You'll get a

403 Forbidden

notice.

But do plunge into the data, click deeply and know that in the data there is truth and in the cutting edge technology brought to us by the geniuses at the NY Times there is knowledge.

And when the server is back up, you will know the value of NYC schools and teachers.

You will bathe in the light of knowledge, wisdom and power.

Just like when you look up the LIBOR rates.

Wall Street Journal Opinion Writer Compares Schools To Supermarkets And Schoolchildren To Corn Flakes

All to sell the American public on free market schools! And evil, evil teachers unions!

Here is the piece in full, because it's behind a paywall:

If Supermarkets Were Like Public Schools
What if groceries were paid for by taxes, and you were assigned a store based on where you live?
By DONALD J. BOUDREAUX

Teachers unions and their political allies argue that market forces can't supply quality education. According to them, only our existing system—politicized and monopolistic—will do the trick. Yet Americans would find that approach ludicrous if applied to other vital goods or services.

Suppose that groceries were supplied in the same way as K-12 education. Residents of each county would pay taxes on their properties. Nearly half of those tax revenues would then be spent by government officials to build and operate supermarkets. Each family would be assigned to a particular supermarket according to its home address. And each family would get its weekly allotment of groceries—"for free"—from its neighborhood public supermarket.

No family would be permitted to get groceries from a public supermarket outside of its district. Fortunately, though, thanks to a Supreme Court decision, families would be free to shop at private supermarkets that charge directly for the groceries they offer. Private-supermarket families, however, would receive no reductions in their property taxes.

Of course, the quality of public supermarkets would play a major role in families' choices about where to live. Real-estate agents and chambers of commerce in prosperous neighborhoods would brag about the high quality of public supermarkets to which families in their cities and towns are assigned.

Being largely protected from consumer choice, almost all public supermarkets would be worse than private ones. In poor counties the quality of public supermarkets would be downright abysmal. Poor people—entitled in principle to excellent supermarkets—would in fact suffer unusually poor supermarket quality.

How could it be otherwise? Public supermarkets would have captive customers and revenues supplied not by customers but by the government. Of course they wouldn't organize themselves efficiently to meet customers' demands.

Responding to these failures, thoughtful souls would call for "supermarket choice" fueled by vouchers or tax credits. Those calls would be vigorously opposed by public-supermarket administrators and workers.

Opponents of supermarket choice would accuse its proponents of demonizing supermarket workers (who, after all, have no control over their customers' poor eating habits at home). Advocates of choice would also be accused of trying to deny ordinary families the food needed for survival. Such choice, it would be alleged, would drain precious resources from public supermarkets whose poor performance testifies to their overwhelming need for more public funds.

As for the handful of radicals who call for total separation of supermarket and state—well, they would be criticized by almost everyone as antisocial devils indifferent to the starvation that would haunt the land if the provision of groceries were governed exclusively by private market forces.

In the face of calls for supermarket choice, supermarket-workers unions would use their significant resources for lobbying—in favor of public-supermarkets' monopoly power and against any suggestion that market forces are appropriate for delivering something as essential as groceries. Some indignant public-supermarket defenders would even rail against the insensitivity of referring to grocery shoppers as "customers," on the grounds that the relationship between the public servants who supply life-giving groceries and the citizens who need those groceries is not so crass as to be discussed in terms of commerce.

Recognizing that the erosion of their monopoly would stop the gravy train that pays their members handsome salaries without requiring them to satisfy paying customers, unions would ensure that any grass-roots effort to introduce supermarket choice meets fierce political opposition.

In reality, of course, groceries and many other staples of daily life are distributed with extraordinary effectiveness by competitive markets responding to consumer choice. The same could be true of education—the unions' self-serving protestations notwithstanding.

Mr. Boudreaux is professor of economics at George Mason University and a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center.

Now here are some of the comments left by readers:

Can't imagine what you see as "missed." That this man teaches anywhere is the greatest indictment of education in America. Comparing education...or police forces, fire departments, or any other public service to free market industries is something that could only come from a Libertarian think tank...oh, wait, that is what he represents.

...

Seriously, this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

Next we'll read about competitive markets making your stroke care better.

...

Leave to the WSJ to publish tripe like this, accusing teachers of raking in huge salaries at the public's expense and comparing children to boxes of corn flakes and food commodities. Seriously. there is no shame at the WSJ.

...

This analogy is fundamentally flawed in that people are biologically programmed to feel hunger when they need food, but the desire to learn comes from internal and external motivation (being able to get a job and feed yourself comes to mind). How easy it is for a grocery stores to convince families to buy food! But imagine if parents never taught their children how to feel hunger. Imagine if buying food was never a priority in a child's home, so the child never understood that eating food leads to a healthy life. Imagine if the child was living in poverty and was never around food much, so the supermarket manager had to show them how to chew and how to swallow. Now imagine that the supermarket alone is held accountable for children's nourishment.

I am a public school teacher in a high poverty school. Every day I try to teach my students how to crave knowledge. Many of them do. They see that education is the means through which they will make a better life for themself. Others don't see it. They're just kids, after all. They haven't thought through the consequences of not graduating high school. They're also frustrated because, due to circumstances out of their control, they were given a late start. Maybe they moved around a lot, so they missed a lot of school; maybe English is their second language; maybe their parents never read with them when they were younger; maybe they're too busy being the parents to younger siblings that school becomes a second priority. Too many have never felt success before and so have given up on the idea that they ever will. I try to show them that this doesn't have to be true.

There's a reason why we don't hear about "all those failing public schools in wealthy neighborhoods." It's because education is a social and economic issue. I challenge critics of public schools to go visit some one day. Come see the difference we are making in the lives of kids. Come see the challenges we face every day and the challenges we overcome. Come see our kids learn.

The fetishization of free markets continues unabated.

If the writer of the article wants to see a monopoly at work, he ought to take a close look at how the Gates Foundation and Pearson Education are promoting a national curriculum with national testing.

Or how Comcast/NBC now provides 70% of the country with cable.

Or how Sony owns nearly every record company in the world.

Or how there will be just three cell phone companies in the US after AT&T complete their payoffs to the Obama administration and get their merger with T-Mobile.

Or how Monsanto owns the seed market (TM).

In NYC, Murdoch owns the Wall Street Journal, FOX 5, FOX News, FOX Business, the NY Post and Channel 9. Bloomberg owns Bloomberg News, Bloomberg TV, Bloomberg Radio, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Two oligarchs in one city own 10 different media outlets.

I know I'm missing a whole bunch of monopolies, but the point is this - the free market is NOT free or competitive. The big players either crush the little ones or buy them up, corner the market, pay off the gov't regulators and politicians, and rake in the bucks.

More and more consolidation, less and less choice.

That's what the "free" market is these days.

Joel Klein Crawls Out Of The News Corp. Sewer For An Interview

Yup - he's still an asshole.

That's the takeaway I get from the interview he gave to City Hall News.

On public education and controversy - he's for it.

On using data to drive instruction - not only is he for it, he plans to profit from it.

On why he likes data-driven instruction - he finds it "exhilarating" and teachers should too.

Did he make any mistakes as chancellor? Nope.

What should Walcott do as chancellor? Same as Klein did.

Are the test scores and grad rates inflated? Nope.

As always in the ed deform narrative, the reality is skewered so that the deformer is the hero, the deform policies are working and anybody who opposes either the deformers or the policies is for the status quo and against the kids.

Kristof And The "Great Teachers" Myth

Sometimes I look at the garbage Nicholas Kristof writes in the NY Times and think "Oh, my God, one of the DUMBEST people on the planet has a column on one of the most read pieces of op-ed real estate in the world!"

Today was one of those days.

It was education day at the Kristof corner - specifically a day to trot out the old Gates Foundation myths about "Great Teachers" and "Only The Teacher Matters."

Kristof, who somehow has won journalism awards for his work, essentially rewrites Gates Foundation p.r. releases and Bill Gates op-eds for this morning's column.

You see this often when the journalism "greats" like Kristof or Jonathan Alter or Tom Friedman turn their attentions to education issues.

The tip-off for these columns is the presence of the phrase "We know we works" or some variation thereof to talk about K-12 policy.

The other tip-off is that whatever the journalism "greats" like Kristof, Alter or Friedman write sounds like it came from a Gates Foundation press release.

Let's conduct a little experiment. I'm going to quote from both Gates and Kristof in the next couple of paragraphs and you tell me who wrote each of the pieces.

Here's the first:

One Los Angeles study found that having a teacher from the 25 percent most effective group of teachers for four years in a row would be enough to eliminate the black-white achievement gap.

Recent scholarship suggests that good teachers, even kindergarten teachers, increase their students’ earnings many years later. Eric A. Hanushek of Stanford University found that an excellent teacher (one a standard deviation better than average, or better than 84 percent of teachers) raises each student’s lifetime earnings by $20,000. If there are 20 students in the class, that is an extra $400,000 generated, compared with a teacher who is merely average.

A teacher better than 93 percent of other teachers would add $640,000 to lifetime pay of a class of 20, the study found.

Here's the second:

In K-12, we know more about what works.

We know that of all the variables under a school's control, the single most decisive factor in student achievement is excellent teaching. It is astonishing what great teachers can do for their students.

Yet compared with the countries that outperform us in education, we do very little to measure, develop and reward excellent teaching. We have been expecting teachers to be effective without giving them feedback and training.

To flip the curve, we have to identify great teachers, find out what makes them so effective and transfer those skills to others so more students can enjoy top teachers and high achievement.

The first piece of claptrap was "written" by Kristof and published in today's NY Times.

The second piece of claptrap is from a February 28, 2011 Bill Gates op-ed published in the Washington Post - a newspaper company that owns both a test prep company for K-12 standardized testing AND for-profit higher education schools (so they have a stake in promoting Gates' test heavy agenda AND his "Everybody Needs To Go To College!" agenda.)

They both promote the same jive-ass agenda - only the teacher matters, "great teachers" can perform miracles with the achievement gap and drop-out rates, if teachers would accept new, more rigorous methods of evaluation, they could be paid more (but only if they agree to take more children per class.)

But this agenda is misleading.

In the view of these men, there is no problem with the economic system that has seen an increase in poverty rates in children from 6%-22% over the last two decades, that has seen a continued erosion of middle and working class wages so that a middle class family MUST have at least two incomes in order to make ends meet, no serious consideration of the societal problems like long-term unemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, physical abuse, depression or despair that are so prevalent in impoverished areas of America.

Nope - none of this stuff matters because "Great Teachers," like Jesus in the Bible, can make all the stuff disappear AND raise test scores for children.

How do Gates and Kristof know this?

They claim "research" that supports the "Great Teacher" myth - for example, Kristof cites a Stanford study that says if a teacher who is better than 84% of other teachers is placed in a class of 20, those students will make $20,000 more during their lifetimes - adding $400,000 of "value" to the country.

Leaving aside that Kristof is either too stupid or too elitist to know that class sizes in public schools are NEVER 20 (try 24-34, Nick), leaving aside the validity of the stats and data Kristof is using (it comes from a Stanford researcher famous for saying that the bottom 10% of teachers need to be fired to improve public education) and leaving aside the impossibility of putting a teacher who is better than 84% of his/her fellow teachers in EVERY classroom, explain to me how adding $20,000 to each child over the course of a lifetime MEANS ANYTHING?

Serious, let's do some math.

$20,000 divided by the expected worklife span of children these days - 21-65 - comes to $454 dollars a year - or $37.83 extra a month.

Now I dunno about where you live, but here in NYC $454 additional dollars a year might buy you a couple of months worth of Starbucks lattes, but it certainly isn't going to decrease the wealth gap between the richest 400 people in the country, who own more than the bottom 150 million combined, nor significantly improve your own economic quality of life.

Hell, real estate in Manhattan has gone up 2 dollars per square foot over the past few months, meaning if you have a 225 square foot apartment in Manhattan, your $454 just got consumed on one month's rent.

And I dunno where you live, but here in NYC an extra $37.83 a month barely covers the increase in subway fares that seem to occur every year now.

$454 a year sure doesn't go far, does it?

You know, if Gates and Kristof and Alter and Friedman and the rest of the education deform jiveheads wanted to actually improve the economic lives of children in poverty, they would fight for an economic system that isn't constantly squeezing more and more work and productivity out of the working and middle classes while providing fewer benefits and lower wages.

They would find a way to spread the economic wealth around this country beyond the financial parasites on Wall Street who consume so much of it now (like this guy.)

They would fight for a liveable wage, benefits that would provide health care and pensions for all so that people could lead long, healthy lives and enjoy long, healthy retirements.

They would fight for economic justice in global trade so that people in China aren't working as wage slaves making Microsoft products for a couple of dollars a day while working 12-16 hour shifts.

But that's just it - Bill Gates is a hypocrite through and through with this stuff - exploiting millions of people on the one hand in the making of his Microsoft products while acting all philanthropist on the other hand.

The REAL problem is not education, as Professor Krugman, another inhabitant of the NY Times op-ed real estate corner, found the other day. The problem is economics:

Yes, we need to fix American education. In particular, the inequalities Americans face at the starting line — bright children from poor families are less likely to finish college than much less able children of the affluent — aren’t just an outrage; they represent a huge waste of the nation’s human potential.

But there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade.

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.

What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages.

I dunno if Kristof is simply stupid or just doing his part to promote the neo-liberal New Feudal Order for his corporate overlords, but the garbage he writes on education is truly odious. Sure, there are problems in public education, and sure there are problems in the American economic system, but it is rampantly dishonest to say that "bad" teachers are the reasons for them and firing those teachers and hiring "good" ones will fix the problems.

Further, it is complete idiocy to think that a teacher "better" than 84% of his/her fellow teachers can be put into EVERY classroom.

First, can you be sure the "objective measurements" you're using to assess that level of expertise are actually practical? This NY Times Michael Winerip article on value-added assessments suggests that is NOT possible right now with the mechanisms being used (though both Gates and Kristoff think it is.)

Next, if you're putting a teacher who is better than 84% of his/her fellow teachers in EVERY classroom, what happens to the other 84%? Do they get fired? Are they put on notice that if they don't get into the top 16% in a year or two, they will be fired? And if you do fire all those folks, can you be sure you're not firing lots of good teachers?

Finally, does anybody in their right mind think adding $20,000 to somebody's lifetime earning potential makes a significant improvement upon somebody's life?

Hell, Bill Gates makes $20,000 a minute off his Chinese wage slaves pumping out the Microsoft Xboxes that explode after they're on for a few hours.

This is ludicrous stuff from Nick Kristof, and given the level of jive I see in his education columns, it makes me thinks his other columns where he writes about non-education issues may be as loaded with jive as these.

Perhaps he can address the myth of the award-winning journalist in a future column?

UPDATE: Blue Texan at Firedoglake takes on Kristof too. He asks the question:
Why is Nicholas Kristof Bashing Teachers’ Unions?

To which a commenter replies:

You mean aside from the fact that he’s an idiot?

Yes, but he's an award-winning idiot!

Gotham Schools Censorship Hypocrisy

Gotham Schools continues to censor commentators that don't meet their corporate-friendly education deform standards for commentary.

The latest to be banned from commenting is Mustafa (you can see some of the fall-out from that in this thread here.)

Having had a few of my comments scrubbed in the past, I decided to largely refrain from commenting there.

I also decided to delink GS from my blog and to refrain from going to GS much.

It is of course their right to decide who can comment on their posts and what those commentators can say.

But they ought to leave the sanctimonious jive about only scrubbing personal attacks and bad language from their public explanation of why they are scrubbing commentators.

I have had comments scrubbed that were neither attacks on other persons nor contained bad language.

The corporate-friendly (and corporate-needy - DONATIONS PLEASE!!!!) Gotham Schools people just didn't like what I said.

That's fine and that's cool.

I don't much like how they frame issues - it's always through a Gates reform-friendly lens.

I know a lot of other working teachers and people on the education blogosphere who feel the same way about jive ass outfits like GS (and Ed Week for that matter.)

Listen, these people are ALWAYS looking for corporate grant hand-outs, so they HAVE to keep the dialogue corporate-friendly.

If it would upset Michael Bennet or New Visions or some other deform outlet, then GS doesn't want it on their site.

So the censorship goons at Gotham Schools have been busy with their Michelle Rhee brooms scrubbing anything that would make the ed deform folks sad or uncomfortable.

Again, that's their right.

But it is also our right to call them what they are - education deform hypocrites with a corporate-friendly agenda.

Bloomberg To City Workers: Screw You

No other way to read this story other than a) Bloomberg is an asshole and b) Bloomberg is a hypocrite.

See what you think:

During last week's snowstorm the Mayor closed all non-emergency government offices and announced that "New York City almost never takes a snow day, but today is one of those rare days." What he forgot to mention, apparently, was that if you didn't show up for work you would lose a day of leave. Sort of. If workers can provide a reason why they weren't at work, they won't be docked. Still, you can imagine how well this is going over.

And today Bloomberg managed to make it even worse by returning to his old prickly form when questioned about the flip-flop by the press.“I don’t know how you were brought up, I was always brought up that you had an obligation to work,” Hizzoner told one reporter before adding that “maybe it’s different in your world.”

Apparently workers should have recognized that once the weather started getting nicer on Thursday they should have dropped their sleds and come into work. Explained Bloomberg: “When you look out the window and it’s not as bad as you thought it was going to be, maybe a bell should go off and say, ‘Hey, maybe I can get to work today.’”

City workers are not warming to his logic though. One complained to the Post that "The mayor doesn’t get a do-over to say, ‘Well, the storm wasn’t as bad as we thought, so you could have come in,’ after he’s already told everyone not to come in. What was I supposed to have done? Not listen to the mayor and to have come in, even though I was expecting my office to be closed based upon what he was saying publicly?"

Meanwhile, the city is trying to shrug off the issue as no big deal. According to Bloomberg “all they’ve got to do is say they couldn’t get in. It’s not that hard.”

Here, let me handle this.

Here's a form letter everybody can send to Bloomberg:

Dear Moneybags:

YOU told them NOT to come in.

Then around 11 AM, YOU changed your mind and decided to dock them a day.

Which is just HYPOCRITICAL crap.

THEY shouldn't have to write anything.

YOU gave them the DAY OFF.

YOU should have to write why YOU are such an arrogant asshole.

Or copy on the blackboard one hundred times the following:

I WILL NOT BE AN ARROGANT ASSHOLE
I WILL NOT BE AN ARROGANT ASSHOLE
I WILL NOT BE AN ARROGANT ASSHOLE...

DOE Admits Cathie Black Misspoke

Is there any other kind of public comment issued by Cathie Black that isn't ignorant, naive, uninformed or a simple misspeaking of the truth?

Department of Education officials cleared up confusion today over whether new Chancellor Cathie Black has visited any of the city’s lowest-rated schools: she hasn’t. But she intends to, they said.

During her five-borough tour of some of the city’s successful schools yesterday, reporters asked Black to talk about her visits to any of the city’s D or F-rated schools, assuming she’d seen them. Black responded:

“I’ve been to every kind of school. I will continue that, I don’t have any desire to only visit one kind of school or another.”

As of today, it appears that Black misspoke. DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said that while Black has not visited any D or F schools, she has scheduled visits to them. Ravitz would not say which struggling schools Black will visit or when.

Remember that scene in the film Animal House where Dean Wormer is railroading the Delta fraternity and they all cough "Bullshit! Bullshit!" at something Wormer says?

That's what I'm doing after reading this article about Cathie Black's misspeaking.

Sociopath of The Year

TIME gave out its annual "Person of the Year" award - they gave this year's award to Facebook "founder" Mark Zuckerberg.

Their rationale:

"For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives," Facebook founder Mark Zukerberg is Time's 2010 "Person of the Year," the magazine just announced.

Meanwhile WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange - the man so dangerous to Western Civilization that he is being detained indefinitely on a "sex without use of condom" charge was only a runner-up.

More jive ass from the corporate media.

Assange has the powers that be very, very worried that the veil will be lifted off the banksters' world of operations.

He has already revealed the hypocrisy, hubris and idiocy that is American foreign policy, the American war strategy in Afghanistan, and the murderous consequences these policies have had for some innocent civilians.

Still, Zuckerberg gets the nod for Facebook.

What a joke.

I plan on being the last person on the face of the earth to NOT have a Facebook account.

I may even request that tidbit of info for my obit.

And anyway, hopefully by then some new technology will have come along created by some new sociopath that will put the old sociopath out of business.

POSTSCRIPT: May I remind everybody why I am calling Zuckerberg a "sociopath":

We've long discussed the fact that Facebook is a bit scary when it comes to privacy. This month saw renewed focus on Facebook's privacy problems following the launch of a new feature that lets Facebook share personal, identifiable information with selected partners. The feature, called "Instant Personalization," is enabled by default for all users and lets Facebook partners put your private Facebook information, including profile photos, up on their pages without user permission.

In the weeks following, some shocking revelations about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg have intensified privacy concerns about the social network, leading to a small exodus as users quit Facebook in droves.

So just in case you didn't already have them, here are three reasons why Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is a truly terrifying individual that you should be very, very afraid of:

1. Zuckerberg likes to play around with users' private data.

Remember when you signed up on Facebook and they swore that they would keep your private information secure? Apparently "secure" doesn't include preventing Facebook themselves from accessing your data. No matter how you configure your profile, Facebook still has access to everything you do on the site - they can read the text of your private messages, they can see whose profile you've been viewing - they can essentially see every single thing you do on the site. Not only can they do this, but according to David Kirkpatrick, author of the soon-to-be-released book "The Facebook Effect," Zuckerberg loves to play around with that stockpile of private data.

The book describes Zuckerberg as "amusing himself" by conducting experiments with users' private information. One particularly interesting example was that Zuckerberg, by analyzing users communication patterns and relationship graphs, could predict within 33% accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with after a week.

That's right - Zuckerberg is using Facebook to play around with your life.

2. Zuckerberg doesn't believe in privacy - at least, other people's privacy.

According to some under-the-table tweeting last month, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg "doesn't believe" in privacy - which is ironic, considering that he's fairly private about his own life. Apparently he doesn't believe in privacy for his users and the public at large, but doesn't include himself in that group. The social network's repeated incursions into their users' private information should be viewed in the context of that statement, keeping in mind that Facebook has been steadily chipping away at what little privacy remains for years and has no plans to stop that in the future.

3. Zuckerberg is a socially awkard, sex-crazed sociopath.

According to multiple insider accounts from friends of the Facebook founder, Zuckerberg is an "asberger's like" figure with difficulty engaging in normal social intercourse. According to the upcoming Facebook movie ("The Social Network"), Zuckerberg is a sex-obsessed sociopath whose original goal in starting the world's largest social network was to create a site where users could rate other Harvard students in a "hot or not" setup. We'll all know a lot more about these accusations in detail once "The Social Network" comes out, but if you must know now, you can read Ben Mezrich's "The Accidental Millionaires," the book on which the movie is based.

The latest privacy woes for Facebook - the revelation this week that they've violated their own privacy policies and shared personal, identifiable information with advertisers - more on that later. If you haven't yet checked out or list of Five Reasons it Might be Time to Kill Your Facebook, now might be a good time to do so.

This guy doesn't belong on the cover of TIME.

He belongs in jail.