I was looking at the HT database of salaries for Indiana University employees and discovered something interesting: a lot of people at IU make a lot of money. Nearly 1,000 employees make over $100,000.00 per year. This is in no way thorough but I simply went in and choose 2011 as a parameter and then starting putting in minimum salary numbers. The results are as…
A Big Secret: Democracy Doesn’t Exist
Listen, come closer…closer…that’s it. I have a secret. Democracy does not exist. Why not? So many reasons! But let’s focus on Democracy first by defining it and then use a recent national example of something extremely undemocratic to illustrate how the USA is not one, cannot be one, if this is exemplary of our government. From Wikipedia, but this is a generally agreed upon definition:…
Unrepresentative–HT Sides with GOP While Our Community Suffers
Opening the Herald Times this morning brought frustrating political and fiscal news as well as a deeply wrong-headed editorial. Where to begin? Local Income Tax Revenue to drop in ’12: well, there’s a shocker though the City Council expressed surprise with Council member Geoff McKim saying (in what I imagine is a kind of Gomer Pyle voice), “All along, everybody thought that as the economy…
Radical Reading–Against Preemptive Killing
HT headline today: Prosecutor’s office rules police shooting justified. Article details of note: Though the prosecutor’s office has ruled, the police are investigating themselves. Lt. William Parker is charged with this. The man, Richard North, was previously a police stooge who “relayed” a confession offered by a cellmate and was rewarded by release and dropped charges. The wheels of justice? This is a Law &…
Alone in America
Yesterday a Bloomington man with a long criminal history took his wife hostage by holding a gun to her head and walking with her down Rogers Street. He was apparently agitated enough, shaking his gun at police, his wife, and even himself, that a member of the Critical Incidence Response team shot and killed him. It must have seemed like a scene from a television…
Voter Registration as Segregation
I offered the following as a Letter to the Editor in response to a Guest column in this morning’s HT, and also posted a portion as commentary online (scoring a minus 2 so far). The Guest Column by James Allison (“Fear of voter fraud worse than fraud” ) while highlighting an important topic and a well-received book on the subject, seems to want to offer…
I Pledge Allegiance to the Gun, And to the Republic for which It Stands…
A friend of the Errant, Steve Hinnefeld at School Matters (a great local school politics blog), posted a link to an opinion piece by Matthew Tully at the Indianapolis Star calling for a rational talk about guns. No such luck. Well, at least as far as rational commentary goes. Right out of the gate, the first comment to his post: “Momma Cass Elliot choked to…
Gold Crush: Cowboys, Aliens and Filthy Lucre
While Cowboys & Aliens has its issues, it doesn’t pit good humans against bad humans (except as a local particularity). It doesn’t glorify war, and perhaps tries to do the opposite; it presents weapons as commonplace but dramatizes the need to respect the mighty power of such; it doesn’t glorify technology the way recent “superhero” movies do; it actually prizes loyalty to kin, blood and…
(Lack of) Sustainability Articles in HT
Today’s HT has much to recommend it, particularly as it offers many articles that focus on the issue of sustainability, notably the entire “Down to Earth” section. The Errant applauds this and wants to highlight bits and pieces of each in an attempt to stretch and perhaps even challenge the notion presented to us as sustainability. Let’s start with the basics: what exactly is meant…
The Game of Life: IU’s Newest HR Consultant
This morning, as I was reading the front page of the HT I overheard my kids and a friend playing “Life.” Someone landed on “you learn CPR,” and I grumbled to myself about just going through CPR training as a requirement to be certified by the state to teach in secondary schools. Where was my token to receive a raise at my next mandated stopping point?…