It was carnage at MidWeek yesterday as 23 people were laid off without advance notice. The manner in which these layoffs were carried out seems unusually cold, even in an industry where cuts have become part of the natural order.

Unlike the S-B’s earlier cuts of 17 employees, this round of layoffs created just a small ripple of news. The S-B’s own web site didn’t mention them.

Peter Boylan had a good follow-up story in yesterday’s Honolulu Advertiser on a series of FBI raids on Maui apparently related to a mortgage fraud scheme with a sovereignty theme.

Officials said the homeowners, many of whom are Native Hawaiian, were charged between $2,500 and $10,000 to attend seminars or counseling sessions on avoiding foreclosure, and were told they would receive bonds worth $1 million that could be used to pay off the outstanding balance of their mortgage.

Officials said the bonds were bogus and that no mortgages were paid off.

The schemes also promise to block property taxes and override credit card debt.

The bogus bonds are not sold through an investment firm or brokerage house, as legitimate bonds are. They also purport to represent ownership in a fictitious Hawaiian nation named Ko Hawaii Pae Aina, sponsored by the Hawaiiloa Foundation.

The plan to hold a coffee hour at the UH Manoa campus to introduce eight new administrative appointments ended with a bang, then a whimper. The coffee hour invite was issued last week by the chancellor’s office.

Then, on Tuesday, an email circulated on the campus inviting graduate students to use the occasion to protest what they see as poor conditions. Bang!

The university administration is hosting a meet & greet coffee on Wednesday from 10—11 am in Hawai’i Hall 309 to welcome 8 new administrative people on the staff. I have no particular complaints (or knowledge!) about any of these people or about the need for high-level staff. However, in the face of the draconian budget cuts we are facing and the increasingly dismal/desperate state of funding for individual graduate students and for our programs, including cuts in already-promised lecture-ships, it seems unconscionable to be hiring people who no doubt are quite generously recompensed for their labors…

So, some of us are thinking it would be good to get as many people out as possible to attend this coffee and make a statement on behalf of the horrendous conditions of graduate student life at this University at present. We aren’t thinking of some hugely disruptive presence, but just a strong statement of concern and protest at the way these cuts
are being made. Of course I recognize that it is very, very tough everywhere and we know that the University is in many ways between a legislative-rock and a hard place, but it still behooves them to think about what the priorities should be. Uhhhh…higher learning, anyone?

Finally came the whimper, a brief email from the chancellor’s office canceling (or, technically, “postponing”) the event.

Due to Chancellor Hinshaw’s schedule, we will have to postpone tomorrow’s planned coffee hour until a later date. We will keep you posted and we apologize for the late notice.

Please advise your staff of the change.

I missed this NY Times story earlier in the year concerning computerized snooping by American Express. We have an American Express card from Costco because of the discount it provides, so the description of the company’s rather aggressive risk screening should have caught my attention earlier.

And in anticipation of tomorrow’s Feline Friday, a reader sent along this item about cat-cam installed on a cat door that automatically uploads pictures of the cats’ coming and goings to a Twitter account.