Budget, budget? Our state doesn't need no stinkin' budget

Lincolnland is a very poorly run state, and it has been for a long time. Presently there is no state budget, since last July, and not having a budget for the whole year is a real possibility.  Governor Rauner-round and the war lords of Madiganistan are at loggerheads. Rauner-round decided that he would hold the state budget hostage to force the war lords to pass anti-labor legislation that supposedly is pro-business, but they decided they could play chicken and have made no concessions, so the state is at an impasse. Both parties think the other party will get the blame, but there is plenty to pass around. Lots of organizations, lots of schools, lots of people are in dire straits, and it doesn't seem our politicians care, particularly the guy giving us the big Rauner-round. Turns out hostage taking is not a very good legislative strategy. This hasn't had a direct impact on yours truly, but you hate to see a poorly run state literally grind to a halt; at least the F1 was spared a layoff or cut in salary. Now add to this mixture, a lame-duck president, a native son, is visiting today to help matters out, not that he has done very well in terms of legislative action because of an inflexible majority in Congress. Perhaps the entire state should be put up for sale, scratched, dented, and bruised as it is, it still has good agricultural land. Can we let the free market forces decide?  Heck, everything else has been privatized, a solution to poor public management of everything from prisons to schools to traffic lights and other forms of gambling. So why not the state itself? Make an offer, please! Maybe you can figure out how to make things work. 

(T)Rump Roast - Recipe for disaster

So the Donald is running for POTUS. Imagine TPP's excitement. The Donald's message seems simple enough: I'm rich, I'm successful, so vote for me, and you'll have a rich, successful POTUS. So in what way is the Donald successful?  He's made a boat load of money, i.e., he's rich. OK, that was item one.  Got anything else? Any other qualities you think the POTUS should have? Or is it all just such simple ideas? For those of us with very different standards of success, the Donald seems pretty unqualified, but in comparison, candidates like Rick Sanctimonious, Mike Chucklebee, Randy Paul, and Rick "Oops" Parry begin to look better. Ted Cruise not so much. As a guide to understanding the Donald, please turn your attention of exhibit A.  Giving Lincolnland the Rauner-round is another rich, "successful" businessman, who presently thinks inundating citizens with ads blaming his inability to govern (dictate) on Dem guys. Hey, the campaign is over. You won. Now can you do anything constructive without resorting to failed GOP economic  and austerity policies as "solutions"? Can you actually govern? The answer seems obvious. And right now our rich, successful businessman has more political experience than the Donald. So much more fun awaits as states and our country continue to take on water while our successfuls drill holes to let the water out. TPP is so embarrassed that he won't be able to travel overseas anymore.    

Lincolnland needs a state vegetable? Well, don't nominate a fruit!

When it comes to crops here in Lincolnland, there are two, maize and soybeans. In terms of value nothing else comes close. Some 4th graders decided that the state needed an official vegetable, and one of our legislators with nothing else to do decided to help, so they are nominating sweet corn as the state vegetable. Except of course, it's technically a fruit, an immature caryopsis with sugary endosperm, i.e., a cereal grain. It's hard to know if Lincolnland has any vegetables of note; maybe asparagus. Now of course this is a repeat of the all too annoying problem of usage versus botany. Tomatoes and cucumbers are fruits. And so are cereal grains. Now apparently our citizens each eat on average something like 50 lbs of sweet corn, but is that the weight at harvest?  As you know, you buy sweet corn by the ear (infructescence) and the husks and cob are not eaten and discarded, and you hardly know where to put a high carb "vegetable" like this in the food pyramid. And of course when you got 4th graders doing the voting it skews things a bit toward the tastes of a younger cohort. According to their criteria the state "vegetable" should probably be squash, marketed as canned "pumpkin", for which the state is actually famous (pumpkin capital of the USA) but does that bounce it back into the fruit category where it actually belongs?  Who knows. Go for it kids.

Is it ethical for candidates to lie to the electorate? Is it ethical to lie to pollsters?

Hooweee!  Does TPP ever feel popular!  As the midterm elections approach and the campaign for governor of Lincolnland remains neck and neck, the telephone calls are unrelenting. You keep expecting one of them to say, "I'll go away if you just promise to vote for me."  And that's just the candidates, then there are the pollsters, those hired by the two parties, those hired by the different candidates, and those run by students who are learning about politics (3 just yesterday!). Caller: "We are conducting an independent poll.  Do you know who you are going to vote for?"  TPP: "Yes."  Caller: "Will you share with us your decision?"  TPP: "Yes, but understand that I may lie." Caller: "What?"  TPP: "My answer may or may not be truthful.  Do you want to proceed?"  Caller: "If you don't tell the truth then our poll won't be accurate."  TPP: "Yes, isn't that a shame? Please understand that I have no vested interest in the accuracy of your poll." Caller: "Why would you lie?"  TPP: "The candidates lie to us, so let's call it tit for tat."  Caller: "So you answer will be a lie?"  TPP: "It's not that easy, it only may be a lie."  Caller: "Good bye, sir." TPP: "Have a nice day."  Based on the response, it would appear that not many people tell pollsters that they may lie to them. It only seems fair based upon how many times the candidates have lied to us. To curtail the amount of dishonesty during election campaigning, perhaps this nation needs something like a PolitiFact people's court. To borrow from ice hockey, candidates and their campaigners have to spend time in the penalty box for lying about the other candidate, perhaps a number of days of complete silence. So you tell a half-truth or a misleading statement, maybe you get a 1 day timeout. Your statement is judged to be false, and you get a 3-day time out. And if you makeup a complete whopper, a real pants-on-fire falsehood, you get a week in the penalty box of silence. This gives the cleaner campaign a "power play".  Might that not raise the tone of political discourse?  Of course, having the candidates stand on a piece of paper would raise the political discourse significantly. So, please, no more calls from either of you. A vote will be cast, and maybe for one of you.

Election politics in Lincolnland

As the election season heats up here in Lincolnland, citizens are getting the old GnOPe Rauner-round, promises bereft of any plans or details, as if the how such things will be done were unimportant. Now where is it written that somebody who has made a lot of money in business (He’s rich. Get over it.)  knows anything at all about how to run a government?  These local Trumpettes (There is also Overwhite, the milk magnate.) do have better hair, but apparently no realization that a state government doesn’t work anything at all like their businesses, although the state government can and may go bankrupt, and that’s something they have probably experienced.  Please wait until TPP manages to extract his retirement funds from the state’s coffers before doing anything rash. (Yes, the fight with the retirement bureaucracy continues.)  One recent Rauner-round promise was to improve the administrative efficiency of state universities. Now this is something that TPP knows quite a bit about, and it’s a double whammy, a rich businessman who wants to be a politician who wants to tell educational professionals how to run a university.  Sure.  It’s bad enough when professional politicians try to run universities, let alone an amateur politician.  What happens when administration is made more efficient, i.e., smaller, is that the necessary functions performed by said administrators get pushed off onto faculty as if they had nothing else to do. Been there, done that. TPP has no love of university administrators, but he doesn’t want their job as part of his. Most of the Rauner-round is standard GnOPe sound bites, almost, but not quite as tired, but every bit as defunct as trickle-down economics. Voters let the GnOPe try all of this out in Kansas, their noble experiment, and the data is now in and everyone can see just how well it all worked. In case you didn’t know, it failed miserably.  (“Far from giving Kansas a bright new future, Brownback plunged it into chaos.”  Details at 11.) No question Lincolnland is a poorly run state, but at times you have to consider carefully the alternative, and with the realization that things actually can get worse, TPP will just have to hold his nose, and vote for the incumbent; if you don’t you just may get the change you asked for, just not the change you wanted.  Or you could move to Kansas and just try it out for awhile.

Monday, monday

Monday started early when a cat woke TPP to tell him that a thunderstorm was approaching, a fact he would find out himself in another 10 to 15 minutes. She's got good hearing and is a little afraid of thunder. The morning news confirmed that here in Lincolnland politics particularly the state's gerrymandered election districts were not going change because a political hired gun of a legal persuasion managed to convince a judge that the half a million signatures, more than twice the total needed, were invalid so the voter initiative would not be on the ballot. Democracy in action. Yeah, sure. BTW you only need 5000 signatures to become a candidate for governor. And then SCOTUS amazes us with the contorted legal logic they use to empower corporations at the expense of individuals. This after the most buffered branch of the government decides that women entering clinics don't need any spatial protection from the friendly counselors attempting to harass and intimidate them. SCOTUS needs a good dose of their own medicine.  Actually some of the justices just need to get out every year or so and see how people actually live and behave. On the good news front, more rain fell and Costa Rica won at the world cup. Ole mis amigos. Maybe the cat has the right idea; find a quiet place safe from thunder boomers and go back to sleep. 

Not feeling any safer here in Lincolnland

The fire-arms prohibited signs like this one were put on our academic building sometime during the past few days, but TPP is not feeling any safer.

Nonetheless, with quite a few restrictions, like no firearms at football tailgate parties (duh!), concealed firearms are now allowed on public university campuses because Lincolnland finally caved in to the SCOTUS rulings that certified citizens' right to bear arms without the necessity of well-regulated militias because apparently conservative judges cannot conjugate sentences.  Consider what typically occurs on campuses even before such signs became necessary.  First you take 20,000 to 40,000 eighteen to twenty-somethings and put them altogether with little or no adult supervision. OK that's actually all it takes. Most of them don't know how to drink alcohol in a mature manner even when they're old enough to be legal. Let's add up the other variables: a lot of raging hormones, some immaturity, peer pressure, various tribal affinities, and bad or impaired judgment.  During any particular period of say 2 days, stupid, crazy, regrettable stuff will happen just because, but mostly they live and maybe learn.  Now add concealed firearms to this equation and solve. What possibly could go wrong?  The campus environment doesn't need another variable that makes it so bloody easy for even a behavioral moron to kill someone, but they will. You can already hear the NRA chuckling over their antics. "Oh, those crazy college kids; always shooting each other." "Remember when we were in college and it was never anything worse than a fist-fight?" "Boy, do kids today have it easy."

Bishop to 21st century

Catholic Bishop Thomas Paparazzi is going to exorcize evil,or the devil, or demons, from Lincolnland this Wednesday at about the same time the Governor signs the gay-marriage bill into law.  Of course Bishop Paparazzi was bleating the usual silliness about the destruction of marriage, religious freedoms, and so on.  This event will demonstrate the power of prayer, a bishop’s prayer no less.  The bill will become a law and gay people will get married, and our dear bishop will have demonstrated the impotence of his prayers.  This assumes that the devil is real, and that demons are real, and that prayer is effective, and evil can be exorcized by certain ancient rights.  Of course, if the bishop really did manage to exorcize evil, how many pedophile priests would disappear from Lincolnland?  At the same time some diocese here abouts was in the news for getting some relic, some piece, a bit of something gross, of a former pope, and thereby worthy of veneration.  Zounds!  Would someone please tell the Catholics what century we’re in?

Blogging for bigotry by the Catholic Conference of Lincolnland

Robert Gilligan writes pretty plainly so you don't have to look very hard for the main message here.  Robert puts it right up front: religious liberty had ended in Lincolnland.  Here's a choice morsel.  "If a current church employee chooses to "marry" a same-sex partner, the legislation offers no specific protection regarding the church being forced to pay -- from funds collected every Sunday from faithful church-goers in the pews -- for benefits for the "spouse.""  So here's a church so tolerant that they actually have employed someone who was gay, although they probably carefully hid that fact to get the job.  So now their employee gets married to someone of the same sex and the faithful bigots in their pews have to pay for benefits for the "spouse".  Yeah, that's right.  First, paying somebody what they are due is just the right thing to do  because your church decided to enter into the employer-employee relationship.  Second, doing so is not an endorsement of their lifestyle, it's just legally required.  Thirdly, as Catholics you've been paying for pedophiles for years, and they are yours, all yours.  Here's Robert's closing message: "And hold on to the religious freedom that allows us to practice our faith beyond the four walls of a church."  Let's see when was the Equal Rights law passed around here?  How many decades ago?  That's right, this new law doesn't change the fact that you cannot discriminate in hiring no matter what you religious beliefs.  How long ago was it that Robert's church would have forbidden interracial marriages?  And they never liked the idea of someone of any other faith marrying a Catholic without all kinds of concessions.  Yeah, that's their idea of tolerance, concessions, where you basically acknowledge that there is one true religion and it's not yours.  Imagine the arrogance it takes to ask a non-Catholic to raise all your children to be Catholics.  To Robert religious liberty means just what you'd think, the right to be a bigot.  No question about it, Robert is a great spokesperson for the Catholic Church; it convinces TPP he was right about the decision to make no concessions all those many years ago to marry a nice Irish Catholic girl.  And what was his leverage?  The justice of the peace would be just fine.

Same sex marriage now legal in Lincolnland

Yes, much to TPP's amazement, the Lincolnland legislature rounded up enough votes, virtually all Democratic, to pass the law.  The opposition made the same weak arguments that have been making the rounds.  Our local representatives all voted against the measure, with Dan saying "This ignores 4,000 years of history."  Dan, the state, the country, and even your religion, haven't been around that long so WTF are you talkin' about?  This is the dumbest thing he's ever said, so he officially is being docked two votes in the next election.  And folks, he's the best the GnOPe has to offer in this state. Naturally the even dumber factions like the Lincolnland Family Council say the state just got in the fast lane to the Apocalypse and eternal ruination, all while proclaiming themselves not to be bigots. Sorry, people, religion doesn't give you a pass; it's just the reason you're a bigot.  Our church (Unitarian) will probably be fully booked next summer with people who have just been waiting for this, some of whom will be getting married after having been previously joined because now the commitment will be legal.  

Same sex marriage in Lincolnland

So far is has not been decided whether Lincolnland will allow same sex marriage or if our state will just stay unconstitutional.  Opponents still out number proponents in the state legislature, so the matter will probably not be brought to a vote anytime soon.  The opponents claim this will have a negative impact on religious liberties, but the only liberty that has the potential to be infringed upon is bigotry.  Even if the measure is passed, gay-bigot denominations would not have to marry any couples they object to, just as now, however, since TPP's church (Unitarian) would marry them, one might ask where is our religious liberty?  The problem here is that marriage exists as both civil and a religious institutions, and no issue shows more clearly why you don't want religion and government to become further entangled. Jocelyn Floyd, special counsel for the Thomas More Society for Religious Bigotry and Science Denialism doesn't seem to know any gay couples because she argues that the primary reason for marriage is too protect children and provide a "cultural environment where children [have] a mother and a father to each offer unique aspects in raising".  Every gay couple TPP knows, and he knows quite a few, provide exactly such cultural environment, and you need only interact with them a short time to figure it out.  At quite a young age our F1 completely understood that while her friend and playmate had two daddies, one of them was really the mommy.  Of course, extending Jocelyn's procreation and parenting reasoning, the marriages of senior citizens have no purpose.  Other zealots warn of the moral collapse of our society, and from what TPP can see their cure is worse than the disease.  One interesting twist here in Lincolnland is that in general black clergy oppose gay marriage showing that they learned very little during the civil rights struggles of my youth, back when interracial marriage was both socially, religiously, and legally outlawed. My students see no problem whatsoever, so our legislators had better wake up; these voters are paying attention.        

Warning: Liberal within!

The GnOPe of Lincolnland wants my vote; not for anyone in particular, not for any particular issue or agenda, just in general, more or less for everything.  In fact the missive sent to me only features one word in bold, red letters: LIBERAL.  Yes, vote against anything liberal; vote against the liberal agenda; vote against Washington liberals (if only we really had some!); meaning vote for the GnOPe.  Personally TPP is insulted.  The GnOPe seems to think that the word LIBERAL will affect me the way SQUIRREL affects dogs in the movie UP.  Well, TPP has stopped associating with the GnOPe since they became the party of stupid.  Since TPP is not alone, quite likely this message resonates quite well with their party's present main base, but liberal doesn't mean what they think it means.  TPP has long embraced a liberal philosophy of equality and justice supporting free and fair elections, freedom of speech, religion, and press, a right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. If the GnOPe is serious about opposing a liberal agenda, then they should be more specific about which of these rights and freedoms they wish to limit or take away.  Oh, yes, in a manner of speaking all of them, for one group or another.  The GnOPe doesn't want minorities or people who vote against the "conservative" agenda to vote.  The GnOPe doesn't want women to have any rights at all.  And freedom of religion is OK as long as it's the right one, and now even this is pretty confusing for the them trying to convince the religious right that Obama is the wrong kind of Christian while at the same time sort of side stepping the issue that Mittens isn't any kind of Christian at all by their own standards.  Ironic isn't it?  The original tea party was protesting the lack of representative government, and now the Tea Party embodies the biggest threat to our constitutional rights in the history of our republic.  Before receiving this missive, TPP was considering voting for at least one GnOPe candidate for state office, by all accounts a reasonable fellow, but how can he be reasonable and still be part of a stupid party?  Recalculating, recalculating.

Ethics training

Lincolnland requires all its employees to have annual ethics training.  Without question there are many ethical issues that confront university faculty; too bad the training has nothing to do with these situations.  You see the dummies that construct the training modules don't know anything about universities other than the business side of things, so the training modules ignore them with one single exception in this year's training, whether it is ethical to accept a gift from a student.  The majority of the training module concerned interactions with vendors.  Clearly important, but nearly irrelevant for faculty.  TPP also has one major concern and that is the state and its universities claim to have the right to prevent you from accepting any outside employment.  In other words, to work a second job, TPP needs to ask their permission.  This is pure bull.  As long as TPP functions such that he fulfills his contractual obligations to the university, they have no compelling reason for having such power.  Can TPP review this textbook?  Can TPP write a book?  Really?  When your regular job duties take way beyond the official 37.5 hour work week, the university has some nerve suggesting that they have the power to decide what else may or may not be done with your time.  If they can't control how many hours are spent volunteering or on a hobby, or reading or watching reality TV, then how can they restrict paid activities particularly before they ascertain whether they interfere with your university job?  So no, even though technically unethical, this faculty member will not be asking permission for paid outside gigs, if such gigs actually exist.  It's a matter of principle. That and thousands of hours of unpaid overtime.    

How to teach politics and government

Uh oh! Some of the fine citizens and the upstanding high school principal in Ronald Reagan’s college home town of Eureka have decided that the Daily Show’s coverage of politics is not appropriate material for a high school politics and government class, so after parent and student complaints, a 1st year teacher has been suspended, at least for now. For those of you who do not known Lincolnland, our state consists of one great big city, a handful of small cities, and a whole big bunch of small rural towns nestled in the maize and soybean agricultural desert. The Phactor can certainly sympathize with these people. You certainly don’t want your children to ever encounter any different opinions, any discomforting ideas, or any material that might make them uncomfortable. Proper schoolin’ should help them to remain smugly assured that their views, values, and ideas will never be subjected to any criticism particularly when that education is paid for by taxes. Any first year teacher of politics and government should know that the correct way to teach is to drone on about the 3 parts of government and how it was an OK idea until the presidency got too big for its britches especially when the office is not occupied by the party of choice in these parts like back in the good ol’ days of Reagan. Bringing in current events and popular culture to stir up interest is terrible teaching. No teacher should openly disparage political candidates. They should use clips and quotes from news sources, perhaps even the Daily Show, so that students can actually hear what the candidates actually say, you know, all those historical, geographical, political, and constitutional gaffs, which of course is exactly what the Daily Show does. What teaching moments they provide! No teacher disparagement required; just let students listen to and evaluate what politicians actually say. But rather than suggesting to their children that they figure out how to respond appropriately, how to defend their positions intellectually, how to make a case for their support of a political position, these parents whine to the principal who suspends the teacher. If people want to know why the educational system in this country is not what it used to be, parents and principals like these are the reason. They don’t want education; they want indoctrination, oh, and their children admitted to our state colleges and universities.

Friday Fabulous Flower - White Butterbur

The white butterbur (Petasites albus - Asteraceae) is a not a really spectacular wildflower, but it is an early spring flower often found blooming right at the edge of snow fields at over 1000 metres in altitude here in Linconland. The scenery is the view in the opposite direction from where this spring flower was photographed. Now that's spectacular! Who would have expected that? Oh, wait, that's actually Switzerland. Sorry, it's easy to get confused what with all the similar places around like Lake Zurich, Lake Geneva, the mountains, and all.

The Sound of Silence

Yes folks students in public schools in Lincolnland will now have to observe a "moment of silence" to start the day since a court has ruled that silence per se is not about religion especially if your religion says you are to make "joyful noise". Now if really taken seriously this would not be a bad thing because the Phactor has long benefited from the silent reflection upon ideas and research during his walk to work. But of course this isn't actually about serious thinking, this is a shallow victory for those who favor forcing everyone to acknowledge their religious superstitions. This is what legislators do in our state rather than try to solve difficult problems. At least one judge wasn't duped and called a spade a spade - a moment of silence is about prayer in school as if people of that religious bent could not always pray whenever they wanted, but it's just so much better when everyone else has to play, er, pray along. Now if they decide to extend this to universities, no question we'll comply. It's easy to get a moment of silence. Just ask who's done the assigned reading?

Lincolnland Tries to Teach Tropical Travelers a Lesson

A temperature of around -6 C and snow flurries is no way to greet tropical travelers who not only aren't used to it, they aren't dressed for it, and although their parents would be appalled at their lack of fore thought, even the Phactor felt sorry for students caught only in t-shirts. So the return from the tropics to the seasonal weather of Lincolnland was every bit as shocking as expected; it was as if our homeland were trying to teach us a lesson, but if it was, the lesson may have had the opposite effect. As observed by my sage senior colleague, "I don't have any damned classes to teach; why the hell didn't I stay in Costa Rica when I had the chance?" Good point that. And no question about it, if the state were not paying my salary, chances are the Phactor would be spending very little time there too. So let me close by assuring my employer and the citizens of Lincolnland that the Phactor returned with as many students as he took, and as a result a few of them may have some appreciation of the splendor of perfectly fried platanos and freshly picked ripe pineapple, the remarkable diversity of rain forests, the tenacity of ants, and the tropical life.

Mandatory Ethics Training

Yes, folks it's time once again, before the fall, for manditory ethics training if you are an employee of the state here in Lincolnland. Let's see what has been learned so far? Well, if you don't take long enough to read the grade 10 text before selecting the rediculously obvious answer you get accused of cheating even though you read with comprehension well above this level, and quickly, as part of your job. We've also learned that the people who get handsomely paid by our tax dollars to administer this training to university personnel don't have a clue what ethical challenges faculty face in our jobs. To date not one single item has any real bearing on what faculty do for their jobs, and an attempt to make the training relevant involved changing a few words so it sounded a bit like education, but do they think my "immediate supervisor" actually tells me what to do on a day to day basis? But no question about it, if there is ever time that a contract needs to be signed accepting Cubs tickets in return is not OK; now maybe Blackhawk tickets. The designers of this training could use a good ethics course wherein they learn about shades of gray rather than assume all situations are black and white. Making a personal call, say to remind my wife of an afterwork commitment, using my office phone is unethical, even though there is no real cost or waste, and many hours in compensatory time are worked, and no one is paying us overtime. And of course the only people employed by our great state that ever get called out on the carpet for major ethical infractions are our representatives who probably are not taking the ethical training they themselves mandated. Guess there aren't internet connections in prison.

Lincolnland 47th – one of least corrupt states!!!

How can our dear state of Lincolnland be one of the least corrupt states in the USA? What an outrage! Our state has more politicians in prison than any other state, well, except maybe New Jersey. And we rank only 18th in racketeering and extortion! This state elevated racketeering to an art form! Does the name Capone ring a bell? Let's face it, this ranking can’t be true, so how did anyone decide Lincolnland was 46th in the nation in fraud, 50th in the nation in forgery and counterfeiting, and 51st, dead last, in embezzlement? 51st! How can you be 51st out of 50? What we beat out DC? No way DC beats Chicago at anything (especially hockey!)!! Did the citizens of Linconland give back their pay because they took long coffee breaks rather than steal money from their employers? Well, we won’t stand for this! Who do they think they’re dealing with!
It helps you understand this travesty if you see what they are using for data. These rankings are based on the number of arrests for forgery, racketeering, fraud, and embezzlement. Duh! 46 states have arrested more people for all these crimes over the last 10 years or so and so theose states are more corrupt? You must be kidding! All those crooks are still running around free here in Lincolnland you morons! No one arrested them! Apparently our state doesn't arrest anyone for embezzlement. These other states are cleaning house; our crooks are still cleaning up. You idiots have got the rankings exactly backwards! And when you realize that, it puts Lincolnland in 3d place just about where it belongs! After all, New Jersey has to have something to brag about.

Ethical training in Lincolnland

Each year the state government of Lincolnland mandates ethics training for its employees. This is hard to argue with in a state with so many ethically challenged politicians, but it remains uncertain if they mandate such training for themselves or not. One way or another there seems little evidence of the training's effectiveness. Actually this training has little to do with real ethics and ethical dilemmas; it does learn you about state rules of how to conduct state business.
University employees get our own training, and you have no idea how helpful this is for faculty. Yes, should the Phactor ever have to deal with civil service time cards, work orders, job estimates, medical records, outside contractors, jobs in the private sector, vendors, the line will be toed. Other than learning that it's OK to accept a small present from the parents of a former student or an honorarium for speaking at another university, virtually nothing in this year's training had anything to do with the ethical situations encountered as faculty. Of course it was mildly amusing and quite ironic to have this year's ethics training endorsed by all of our university presidents, of which one had recently resigned for allowing political and financial clout to alter admissions decisions. Guess they missed that part of the training. Last year many faculty got dunned for taking the online training too fast, never mind it was written at no more than a grade 12 level and the choices were so obvious you could guess correctly most of the time. So the verdict from this quarter is that our tax dollars could be better used, you know, for things like bribing aldermen, deans, or constables.