We have seen a loss of integrity in educational leadership. Leaders and administrators appear to lack energy, vision, commitment, or even the moral wherewithal to stop the bad things we have seen happen on college campuses. A sort of sickness in college culture has taken hold.
For someone who grew up in North Dakota and Iowa before the Des Moines kidnappings, current laws and practices are nuts. I don’t see how children can grow up, never out of site of a grown-up.
Let everyone in the stands show kneeling players a sign of support during the national anthem. Salute them. It takes courage. You won’t be a son of a bitch.
The Kennedy School knew its decision to recognize Chelsea Manning as a visiting fellow would be controversial. When objections came, straight from the CIA no less, the Kennedy School embarrassingly chose to align itself with the agency that mistreated prisoners as a matter of policy.
It was all bullshit. They knew it, too, or should have. The reason Jonathan Gruber said we were all too stupid to understand ACA is that no one can understand bullshit, not even MIT professors.
Equifax suffers a hit to its reputation, and must endure a few news cycles where people write articles like this one. Come Christmas, they’ll be back to business as usual, except they will try to have more safeguards in place. They will hope the next group of criminals is not so clever. Believe me, the hope is vain.
Police have a lot of ways to kill you, a lot of excuses for doing it. Michael Bennett was correct to wonder if he would see his family again. How did Bennett disguise himself as a criminal? We can only guess. You will never hear an apology, or an explanation from the officers who mistreated him.
If we want to counter this unhappy impulse to know everything about everyone, we ought to mock authorities’ incompetence, ridicule their foolishness, and make fun of their badly conceived deceits before they feel assertive enough to end free-spirited criticism.
When we have magistrates who lock people up, and then force them into choices the judge has no business with, we all lose.
Google has been a symbol of sorts for the American way. We can still innovate. We can still make a profit and call it good. A couple of bright guys can work hard and build a successful company.
That adrenaline isn’t the result of dry, routine training in procedures. It results from a culture of fear and threat perception turned to aggressiveness, and use of firearms as a form of aggressive self-protection. It requires a lot of firm, even obstinate leadership in the other direction to change this culture, to turn police officers into public servants again.
We realize now how completely our relationship with police has flipped. Police used to put themselves in danger to protect us. Now they put us in danger to protect themselves.
