To the Editors of the Bloomington, Indiana Herald-Times (a Schurz Communications Product), I think we must conclude that the HT is not a newspaper dedicated to anything like journalism. Perhaps it is at best a community gossip sheet. Please supply your own comparisons. It has been conveyed to me on more than one occasion that [...]
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Because We Said So
I felt the below was worth passing on. We have no “establishment” journalism any longer; from the NYT to the Washington Post to Your Local Paper (if you still have one), these vestiges of another era serve only to promote the reigning ideology of business. And how can we blame me them, we opine, they [...]
The Factory Store
or Telling Lies to Children, or Education in America. So, do you remember when you were a child and someone asked you, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I don’t either, but let me ask differently, have you asked any child this? This magical, mystical, and ultimately mystifying question was answered [...]
Indiana Rape Statistics
Yesterday our local paper printed a piece on the fact that the CDC discovered that nearly 1 in 5 high school females in Indiana have been raped. “I was shocked at the 9-through-12 rate,” Heiman said. “And this is an area where the data are really clear. The (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have [...]
Educating Unethical America: The Lie of Impartiality
Or, immorality in amorality Or, the Ownership View Or, the View from the Top I. I got canned in January 2010. We had had several shake-ups in middle to upper management and had a new “brash” VP that, upon reflection, seemed to have been given the “clean house” directive. I’m sure there were myriad other [...]
State of the School Corporation: Roll Over and Play Dead
In Bloomington recently the new (7 months on the job) Superintendent offered a kind of State of the School Corporation address and our local paper chose to offer mostly pictures of the event rather than any analysis. Here is a link (pay-wall) to the “news” of the event, “MCCSC superintendent DeMuth outlines school progress in [...]
The Loss of Soul: Corrupting Language and Stealing Common Understanding
Today our newspaper editorialized that the “fight’ over “right-to-work” legislation “should just go away” (seriously, that’s the headline). Here’s their primary argument: The so-called “right-to-work” issue has already disrupted the Indiana General Assembly. The Republicans’ insistence on making it their top legislative priority has been met by Democrats failing to show up for work again [...]
“Can ponwyi”–The Grace of Gods by Force
In Acholi, a language of the Acholi people of Northern Uganda, “can ponwyi” literally translates as “disaster and poverty teach you.” (Allen, “Postscript: a kind of peace and an exported war,” 283)* This might put one in mind, in the Western tradition of literature, of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon: Zeus sets men on the path of wisdom, [...]
Antipodal Responses to Authority
Recall this from Kropotkin: throughout the history of our civilization, two traditions, two opposing tendencies have confronted each other: the Roman and the Popular; the imperial and the federalist; the authoritarian and the libertarian. Now, regarding a local protest of a recruiting visit at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business by a representative of J.P. [...]
The Lords and Owners of Their Faces
Today I read another “Privatization is good” piece in our local paper. It is claimed there that selling our public roads is a brilliant maneuver in managing budget shortfalls. As this isn’t argued, detailed or proven in any way by appeal to facts or outcomes, it is clearly only rhetoric. The rhetoric is only intended [...]
