Measuring Bad Behavior

 In July 2020, Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend, was arrested on sex trafficking charges. Prosecutors allege that she participated in Epstein’s sex crimes by recruiting girls for Epstein to assault. She is also charged with sexually abusing at least one underage victim.

She is being held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. Her trial is set for November.

 

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 A driver with a revoked license who ran a red light that resulted in two pedestrians being thrown through a plate-glass window last week, killing one of them, has a history of convictions but has faced few consequences.

 

Neologism Needed

The fabulously inventive American culture that has come up with new words like crowdsourcing, metrosexual and chilax, has yet to devise a word to describe a fairly modern problem.

 What does this sign mean? Does it state that it's illegal for someone to pretend that they are a dog trained to assist a human in some way? Probably not. What is meant is that it's illegal to walk around in a business pretending that the dog on the leash is needed to assist the bearer in some way.

There doesn't seem to be a word that can clearly convey this idea so "impersonate" is used. Of course service animals, be they dogs or hamsters, aren't persons so they can't be impersonated. Would "inanimalate" do? Not for me.

For the immediate future let's go with "K-fake". The sign could read "K-faking is illegal". That makes more sense than using the term "impersonate" in this context.

 

The World's Second Most Hyped Event And It's Demise

The historically scandal-plagued jingoistic non-event that is the Olympic Games has moved from ridiculous to insane, as this article describing the preliminaries used for team selection points out. 

Perhaps there's a kind of warped normality that drives athletes to devote a major portion of their lives to the pursuit of global success in some little known or contested "sport" like sailing, sport climbing and trampoline. Go ahead, without touching the mouse or key board tell me who was the last trampoline gold medalist. Nevertheless, these are Olympic events and people diligently train for them. Having a medal awarded by the IOC hanging in the cubical or den certainly beats a picture of the dog or cat.

In this particular Olympic Games, to be held in Japan, the festival encounters three different forms of weirdness, the Olympic committee itself, a kind of internationally endorsed criminal enterprise, the official government responses to the pandemic and the unique culture that is Japan.

These three factors have made this edition of the games so warped that any athlete willing to accept the conditions for competition must be regarded as mentally ill. As for the international horde of television spectators, pull the plug and engage in some athletics personally.

 

The Student Loan Debacle

Or is it, in typical political terms, a "crisis"? In any case, the Wall Street Journal examines the situation and provides some enlightening information on how these kinds of disasters occur. 

From the Friday, April 30, 2021 edition:

"One instance of how accounting drove policy came in 2005 with Grad Plus, which removed limits on how much graduate students could borrow. It was part of a law designed to reduce the federal budget deficit. A key motive was to use projected profits to reduce federal deficits, said two congressional aides who helped draft the bill.

Each change was publicly justified as a way to help families pay for college or to save the taxpayer money, said Robert Shireman, who helped draft some of the laws as an aide to Sen. Paul Simon (D., Ill.) and later was deputy under secretary of education the Obama administration."

It turns out that elected officials either don't have the knowledge and expertise to draft legislation or that they're time is being monopolized by the electioneering efforts needed to retain their seats, most of which is either media grandstanding or private conclaves with donors and election advisors. So unelected and generally unknown staffers like Mr. Shireman are the ones who attempt to legislatively keep the promises made by their bosses. Simply having a tenure in such a position is a gateway to bureaucratic advancement, even if their work ultimately results in failure.

The failure in this case is that federal student loan programs could cost taxpayers as much as half a billion dollars as borrowers continue to default, according to the WSJ article, which also states that this fiasco could exceed the dimensions of the S&L melt down of thirty years ago.

There is an even deeper dimension to this problem. Where does the money being borrowed in these programs go? Of course, it goes to the educational institutions themselves, organizations top-heavy with expensive administration that have become gate-keepers to the social/economic futures of modern Americans. Students at exclusive schools like Amherst and Bentley are being subsidized by janitors and truck drivers.

While private universities are at liberty to charge whatever the market will bear, tax-payer subsidized public schools are even more profligate in being homes for over-paid, tenured professors that don't teach many classes because they're devoted to research and writing papers that few ever read.

There's a strong possibility that the Covid-19 pandemic, or actually the government response to it, will provide an impetus for change in an academic environment that has been substantially the same as it was in 18th century Germany, where it was born. We can only hope that this will be the case.