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Archives for July 2016

Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 6

July 16, 2016 By Mark 107 Comments

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

08/28/16 — The Inevitable Damage to Come From J. Bruce Harreld’s Ranking Obsession.

08/26/16 — J. Bruce Harreld in Three Days: Confused, Compliant and Caustic.

08/23/16 — On Bruce Rastetter, Oversight, Politics, Business and Biofuels.

08/21/16 — The Moment When J. Bruce Harreld Sold Women Out and Went All-In on Gary Barta.

08/18/16 — Regents Appoint Abuser of UI Students, Faculty and Staff as Co-Chair of UNI Search.

08/15/16 — The Iowa Board of Regents Sics the Iowa AG on a Teacher the Board Abused.

08/14/16 — Iowa Regent Larry McKibben Tells a Lie Within a Lie Within a Lie.

08/12/16 — On Presidential Searches, Funding Splits and Regental Incoherence.

08/10/16 — Governor Terry Branstad Corrupted the Iowa Board of Regents.

08/08/16 — A Brief Administrative History of Bob Donley and Mark Braun. Updated.

08/06/16 — What You Don’t Know About 2016 UNI Presidential Search Firm AGB.

08/03/16 — Comparing the 2015 UI Presidential Search to the 2016 UNI Search (So Far). Updated.

07/31/16 — Bruce Rastetter and the Common Application Portal Scam.

07/26/16 — On the Iowa Board of Regents, Fairness and the UNI Search.

07/23/16 — J. Bruce Harreld and Big Data. Part 1. Part 2. Updated.

07/21/16 — The Iowa Board of Regents and the UNI Search Firm Search.

07/19/16 — The Iowa Board of Regents as Crony Political Machine.

07/17/16 — Ten Months of J. Bruce Harreld’s Mendacity in One UI Press Release.

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: Harreld

Two Headlines 33 Minutes Apart

July 8, 2016 By Mark 2 Comments

The media race is once again on to distill mass murder into a motive that can then be analyzed, debated and profited from long past the burials to come. This is America in 2016, where a bloodbath in the streets is simply more riveting fodder for cable news.

Then again, take any country in which a third of the population would welcome a culture war, stock that country with an endless supply of firearms including military-grade weapons, add in toxic political voices at the highest levels of political discourse, and this is the inevitable result. What is happening all around us is not happening to America, it is America.

Two headlines from Google News, 33 minutes apart:

Official: 5 Soldiers Killed in Shooting in S Sudan Capital
New York Times – 10 minutes ago

Two Snipers Kill Five Officers, Wound Several Others At Dallas Protest
NPR – ‎43 minutes ago‎

America is at war. Many of the battles are individual skirmishes, many of the victims have been innocents. Yesterday, however, saw a tactical assault on law enforcement in a major city in the United States. Read those two headlines again.

For more context, read this. If you want a deeper understanding of why we are where we are, follow the link in that post and keep reading.

If you just want to keep yourself alive, recognize that for the time being every peace office in the United States is going to be on the edge of hysteria. That does not exonerate crimes committed by the police, but it does give bad cops even more of an excuse to kill, and good cops every incentive to shoot first if there’s any doubt.

Move slowly. Do what’s asked of you. Keep your hands in plain view.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Non Sequiturs Tagged With: violence