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. 

Black Hawk Speaks

 Here, for the first time I touched the goose quill to the treaty---not knowing, however, that, by that act, I consented to give away my village. Had that been explained to me, I should have opposed it, and never would have signed their treaty, as my recent conduct will clearly prove.

What do we know of the manner of the laws and customs of the white people? They might buy our bodies for dissection, and we would touch the goose quill to confirm it, without knowing what we are doing. This was the case with myself and people touching the goose quill the first time.

We can only judge of what is proper and right by our standard of right and wrong, which differs widely from the whites, if I have been correctly informed. The whites may do bad all their lives, and then, if they are sorry for it when about to die, all is well! But with us it is different: we must continue throughout our lives to do what we conceive to be good. If we have corn and meat, and know of a family that have none, we divide with them.If we have more blankets than sufficient, and others have not enough, we must give to them that want. 

Life of Black Hawk or Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, Dictated By Himself, Penguin Books, New York, 2008, Pgs. 44-45.

Dog Food

This article describes what can happen if your dietary ideas differ from that of elements of your community.

 The action took place in South Korea, perhaps the most Americanized locale anywhere in Asia, so it isn't unusual for US ideas to have found a home there. 

Americans, who ridicule the veneration for cows of the Hindus of India, hold a perhaps greater esteem for canines. After all, dogs are actually considered to be the legal equivalent of some humans, namely policemen. Hindu cows don't become agents of law enforcement.

At any rate, what does this mean, if anything? Should a culture be able to employ the legal system to determine the dietary habits of its members? If Sharia law becomes the norm somewhere in the West will pork in the form of bacon, ham, chops and sausage be forbidden? In the US the consumption of horse meat is already prohibited, perhaps because bygone military leaders of the northern-most section of the country are frequently portrayed in paintings and sculpture mounted on horses. Not long ago horse meat was routinely eaten, by the Harvard faculty as one example, and still is in many other parts of the world. 

One question might be, "Why should anyone care what others eat?" Do-gooders, always worried about the health of others and the economic externalities of crappy diets, can't be too worried about horse meat or even dog meat, neither of which have the long-term fatal effects found in ice cream and cotton candy. So it must be some ethical or even religious thing. It's just wrong to kill and eat an animal that can be trained to fetch sticks.

What about other animals? Lambs are cute and cuddly but don't seem to have an effective lobbying organization. Both domestic and wild ducks and geese aren't idolized, maybe because they poop on golf courses and occasionally hold up traffic.

This is not to say that an individual can't try to discourage others from engaging in eating habits he deplores. He's probably within his rights to forbid his children from eating live frogs or other amphibians. But is it right for him to use the governmental power to enforce his own food ideas?

This is actually the crux of the matter. If a kind of behavior is "good" or "better" or whatever, its proponents should be able to convince others of that fact and their behavior would change to voluntary acceptance. That's not how it works when government is involved. "You can't do it because we said so." 

How Language Works

Language carries many messages beyond the simple definitions of the words we use. Words have denotations and connotations. The denotation of a word is it's basic dictionary definition. The connotation of a word might include attitudes that give that word positive or negative qualities in the mind of the listener. For instance freedom fighter has a positive connotation but war lord has a negative one, even though both terms could often be used to describe the same individual.

There's daily evidence in the world of advertising of this kind of thing. General Motors calls one of their auto models the Impala, an athletic, graceful antelope native to Africa that's never tipped over an American garbage can or pooped in the yard. The response to the name is generally a positive. On the other hand, no cars are named Skunk or Raccoon, animals that regarded as varmints and pests by suburban homeowners. These animals are simply animals. They aren't inherently good or evil.

This newspaper item regarding a recent incident demonstrates how denotation and connotation work: 

The hateful messages received last week by Black students at White Bear Lake Area High School were a “hoax,” sent by a female student who was trying to raise awareness of problems at the school, according to school and city officials.

The FBI helped identify the student who created the anonymous Instagram account, and she took responsibility Monday afternoon, Superintendent Wayne Kazmierczak wrote Tuesday in a letter to families.

 

There's a lot of interesting verbiage in these two paragraphs but the most interesting is the phrase took responsibility. The writer of this article, Josh Verges of the Twin City Pioneer Press, had some options available in composing this sentence. If the actions of the individual involved some kind of criminal or even anti-social behavior, and the individual involved acknowledged that action, it would ordinarily be described as an admission. The person admitted guilt. Admission in this case has a distinctly negative connotation. It's a close cousin to confession, which would also have negative connotations in this context.

Instead, Verges called the individual's response to the discovery of something so heinous that the FBI was called in to assist the local gendarmie in an investigation as took responsibility. In ordinary circumstances taking responsibility is regarded as an act of virtue. It has  very positive connotations. The  flip side of taking responsibility, being irresponsible, has hugely negative connotations.

Perhaps one could make the case that the incident was, in itself, a case of irresponsibility. Or criminal mischief. Or, since the messages were purported to be from another, identity theft or maybe digital fraud. It's possible that the rapid development of electronic communication has left behind some legal consequences for digital wrong-doing.

However, that's not the issue. The real issue here is in what light a media figure cares to present the actions of a certain individual. If there had been no hoax, or it had not been discovered, the person deemed responsible for it would likely have been expelled from school and tarred  forever with the disgrace of racist behavior. The actions of the anonymous Instagram commenter are magnitudes worse. If taking responsibility, also anonymously, is the sum of her punishment, it's another example of true cultural corruption and, in terms of this article at least, the continuing debasement of the English language in North America. It's more "mostly peaceful demonstrations" and "no widespread voter fraud".