A year and a half ago or so, this WordPress-based website was hosted by a rapidly disintegrating shared-hosting platform that was the networking equivalent of a wide-open frontier town which had been hit by a virulent pathogen. The original site host I had signed with was almost immediately bought out by an internet slumlord, and in only a matter of weeks the promised protections, service and support went from adequate to abysmal. As such I had to become much more knowledgeable about protecting my site from everything from outages to intrusions, including automated attempts to break into the back-end/control panel. [ Read more ]
Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 9
A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
03/29/17 — The End of the End for ISU President Steven Leath.
03/19/17 — J. Bruce Harreld Sheds His Skin. Part 1. Part 2.
03/09/17 — Iowa State President Steven Leath and the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. Part 1. Part 2.
02/27/17 — Waste and Delay at the Stead Family Children’s Hospital of Iowa.
2/18/17 — Unraveling the Mysteries of the ISU Flight Services Supplemental Cirrus Log.
02/12/17 — In Demonstrating His Superior Judgment J. Bruce Harreld Proves He Is a Fraud. Part 1. Part 2. Updated 02/14/17.
02/10/17 — Regents President Bruce Rastetter will not seek a second-six year term on the board. His current term ends April 30th. Initial reports here, here and here.
02/02/17 — Steven Leath’s Rochester Trip That Violated ISU Travel Policy and State Law. Part 1. Part 2.
01/23/17 — Catching Up on the Last Six Weeks of J. Bruce Harreld’s Lies, With Bonus Steven Leath. Part 1. Part 2.
01/15/17 — Steven and Janet Leath’s $6,800 King Air 350 Round Trip to N.C. on 07/03/14.
01/10/17 — An Apples-to-Apples Comparison of Student Interviews With Sally Mason and Steven Leath. Part 1. Part 2.
12/31/16 — Why the Iowa Board of Regents Cannot Fire ISU President Steven Leath. Part 1. Part 2.
12/24/16 — Why Did Both of Iowa State’s Airplanes Fly to Northeast Illinois on the Same March Dates?
12/22/16 — The Problem with Using ISU Pilot Joe Crandall to Justify the Cirrus Round Trip on 03/12/16.
12/20/16 — ISU Flight Services Billed $3K in Per-Mile Charges for Leath and Wife on Empty Plane.
12/17/16 — The Regents Audit Did Not Exonerate ISU President Steven Leath of Criminal Acts. Updated 12/17/16. Updated 12/18/16 [1]. Updated 12/18/16 [2].
12/15/16 — Bleeding Heartland posted a tour de force on the failings of the regents audit, and why law enforcement must investigate Steven Leath.
12/10/16 — Say It Ain’t So, Joe: The 2016 UNI Presidential Search in Context.
12/01/16 — Engines of Anxiety and J. Bruce Harreld: A Book Review in Context.
11/20/16 — The Missing Piece of Iowa’s Tuition and Student Debt Conversation.
11/13/16 — There is No Iowa Board of Regents.
Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 8
A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
11/10/16 — Iowa State President Steven Leath: Feudal Lord of Story County.
11/06/16 — ISU President Steven Leath: “I am open, honest and forthcoming.” (With bonus Harreld and UNI.)
11/01/16 — ISU President Steven Leath Is More Than a “Minor User” of the King Air 350.
10/30/16 — On Iowa State President Stephen Leath Having it Both Ways.
10/27/16 — Krapf vs. Iowa Board of Regents: Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss is DENIED.
10/25/16 — Steven Leath’s Use of the ISU King Air 350, Either Alone or With His Wife.
10/22/16 — An Unofficial Audit of the Iowa State Cirrus SR22 Flight Logs. Updated 10/23/16. Updated 10/24/16.
10/18/16 — Bruce Rastetter’s Serial Betrayals of the Iowa Board of Regents.
10/16/16 — Iowa State President Steven Leath: Honest Abe or Tricky Dick?
10/13/16 — The Middle of the End for ISU President Steven Leath — Part 2.
10/10/16 — The Middle of the End for ISU President Steven Leath — Part 1.
Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 7
A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
10/06/16 — The Real Legacy of University of Iowa Traitor Jean Robillard.
10/01/16 — Wrong Way Leath and the Microburst Lie. Updated.
09/27/16 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI ‘Speak Out Iowa’ Campus Climate Survey.
09/23/16 — J. Bruce Harreld Injects His Poison into the UI Faculty Ranks.
09/20/16 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Office of the Ombudsperson.
09/17/16 — On 03/22/16 Regents President Bruce Rastetter Lied to the Des Moines Register.
09/14/16 — J. Bruce Harreld’s 20-Year-Old Failed and Fake Ranking Plan From Kentucky.
09/11/16 — J. Bruce Harreld Officially Welcomes His Excellency J. Bruce Harreld. Part 1. Part 2. Updated.
09/08/16 — It’s not just me. Bleeding Heartland chronicles a year of posts about the Harreld hire.
09/06/16 — On the Origins of J. Bruce Harreld’s U.S. News Ranking Obsession. Part 1. Part 2.
09/03/16 — Bruce Rastetter, Joe Murphy, and the Iowa Board of Regents’ Revolving Door.
08/30/16 — Your Most Important Right as a University of Northern Iowa Presidential Candidate.
Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 6
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.
Two Headlines 33 Minutes Apart
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 agoTwo 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
On Gun Violence in America
In August of 2014 I began writing what eventually turned into a series of posts about entertainment and violence. At the time I was interested in understanding the dynamics behind oft-repeated claims that violence in entertainment begets violence in the real word, along with parallel assertions — oft-repeated in the press — that the motive for acts of violence, and in particular acts of mass violence, can be reduced to a certainty. While I had long been interested in the subject matter as a storyteller, particularly having worked in the interactive entertainment industry for many years, the catalyst for digging into the issue was the massacre of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. That tragedy also marked the moment when I checked out on the calcified gun violence debate, because any country that responds to an atrocity like that with a collective shrug is on its way to cultural collapse.
The problem, of course — beyond the violence itself — is that I did not and still do not feel fatalistic about America. I feel fatalistic about a debate which is so entrenched that it cannot be dislodged by any act of barbarity, including the recent mass killings in Orlando. What is now being described as the single deadliest mass shooting in American history could be surpassed tomorrow, and quite easily. There are no protections, there are no steps being taken to prevent the next atrocity, and the horrifying idea that such violence may become the new normal in American culture is already a historical footnote.
If you want to read the posts in order, you can start here. Toward the end of the seventh of eight total posts, however, which were written over a six-month period, I wrote this, in a post about Real-World Violence and Means:
Whether an act of violence is caused by terrorists or a berserk mass murderer, the civilian authorities charged with responding to such emergencies need to have the means of doing so. Because any American citizen has the legal right to own as many weapons as they want, and there is often no way to determine who owns what when police arrive on scene, let alone whether today is the day when a formerly law-abiding citizens is going to go berserk, the police rightly feel they should have military-grade weapons with them at all times because it’s impossible to predict in advance when such weapons may be needed. The militarization of America’s police, then, is simply following in lockstep with the militarization of America, which in turn encourages those who have an axe to grind or who hope to terrorize the populace or destabilize the government to also procure even more destructive weapons. Sprinkle all those firearms and tensions with time, economic pressure, martial discord, substance use, long-simmering hatreds and even mental illness, and not only is it likely that mass murders will increase, it’s likely that the police will eventually become stressed and begin overreacting to any threats they do perceive.
It’s a maddening and vicious cycle, but just when you are convinced that the problem can never be solved, you realize that it will necessarily resolve itself. Yes, a lot of people will die in the interim, but at some point, after enough attacks take place on American soil using ever-more-lethal and legally purchased firearms freely available in the marketplace, either at the hands of foreign terrorists, domestic terrorists, or both, targeting shopping malls, schools, hospitals or even police stations, the sheer amount of blood running in the streets will convince a majority of citizens, and in particular a majority of government officials who themselves may have been targeted, that the 2nd Amendment must be repealed. There will be a lot of wailing along the way, of course, to say nothing of fatalities, but precisely because the 2nd Amendment cannot be infringed it will at some point have to be retired so firearms can be regulated in the interest of public safety.
In the aftermath of the shootings in Orlando you will read a lot of well-intentioned think pieces like this, which will ultimately do nothing to prevent the next Orlando or Sandy Hook from happening. In America, what stands in the way of common-sense gun restrictions that other civilized countries have adopted over the past two hundred years is not a lack of insight into possible solutions, but the industrial franchise granted by the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution.
As noted in the quote above, the 2nd Amendment will inevitably fall of its own weight, but it’s equally true that there is nothing anyone can do in the short term to hasten its demise. What you can do as a citizen, however, is simply flip that switch in your own head, leaping past all of the pros and cons to a simple determination that the 2nd Amendment has outlived its usefulness. If there are negotiations to be had about who can own a gun in America, and what types of guns they are allowed to have, we can have those debates after the 2nd Amendment is gone.
So have that conversation with yourself and your friends. Because that’s the same conversation people had long ago about slavery and women’s suffrage, and more recently about gay marriage, and other cultural changes that have come to pass. It may take a long time for change to come, but it won’t come at all if people aren’t willing to accept it. For me, if it keeps anyone from being shot to death by a berserk American with enough firepower to wage war, I’m willing to accept that change.
— Mark Barrett
Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 5
A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.
07/14/16 — The Rastetter-Leath Land Deal and Iowa’s Gift Law. Updated.
07/12/16 — Following Up on the Rastetter-Leath Crony Land Deal. Updated.
07/12/16 — More on the Rastetter-Leath land deal from AP’s Ryan Foley here. Key confirmation that the Leaths directed the purchase through Rastetter’s company, rather than simply buying the land themselves, thus saving themselves 50% of all associated costs.
07/11/16 — DesMoinesDem at Bleeding Heartland had a post up yesterday about the Rastetter-Leath land deal, and assorted crony activities at ISU. The potential savings to Leath and his wife looks to be considerably more than that reported by the Des Moines Register. (See also the update in the post below.)
07/10/16 — The Beginning of the End for ISU President Steven Leath. Updated.
07/07/16 — J. Bruce Harreld, Tuition Hikes and Mental Health.
07/03/16 — J. Bruce Harreld is Right Behind You.
06/30/16 — The Daily Iowan’s coverage of the Iowa Board of Regents continues to impress. Brad Pector on the regents’ lack of transparency. Addison Martin on the proposed decrease in meetings.
06/28/16 — UI Faculty Senate Ex-President Christina Bohannan Tells a Lie.
06/26/16 — Bruce Rastetter’s Long Game at the Iowa Board of Regents. Part I. Part II.
06/24/16 — J. Bruce Harreld and World Class Incoherence.
06/22/16 — J. Bruce Harreld and the UI Faculty Senate.
06/19/16 — The AAUP Sanctions the University of Iowa. Updated.
06/10/16 — Branstad, Rastetter and Harreld, and the $20M Tuition Hike Caper. Updated.
06/07/16 — Branstad, Rastetter and Harreld, and the $1.7M Regents Shortfall. Updated.
06/05/16 — J. Bruce Harreld, Gary Barta, and Bromance. Updated.
06/02/16 — On the Lawsuit Challenging Rastetter’s Secret Regent Meetings.
Rape, Responsibility and Point of View
Toward the end of last August Chrissie Hynde launched a memoir called Reckless: My Life as a Pretender. In the book and in interviews about the book Hynde placed blame for being raped at the age of 21 squarely on herself:
“This was all my doing and I take full responsibility,” she said. “You can’t paint yourself into a corner and then say whose brush is this? You have to take responsibility. I mean, I was naïve.”
Hynde then added comments which generalized about personal conduct and rape:
“If I’m walking around in my underwear and I’m drunk … Who else’s fault can it be? You know, if you don’t want to entice a rapist, don’t wear high heels so you can’t run from him.
“If I’m walking around and I’m very modestly dressed and I’m keeping to myself and someone attacks me, then I’d say that’s his fault. But if I’m being very (flashy) and putting it about and being provocative, then you are enticing someone who’s already unhinged … that’s just common sense.”
Predictably, social networks exploded in response to Hynde’s comments, mostly because that’s what social networks do, but also because of legitimate concern that Hynde was engaging in victim-blaming, which has a very long and ugly history in the U.S. and around the world. In writing this post I hope to reconcile those valid concerns with Hynde’s comments, because I think rape needs to be understood not only in the context of justice, but in terms of real-world implications which are often difficult to discuss when sloganeering or political correctness rule the rhetorical day. And because I can already see you bristling at the very notion that the question of rape and responsibility is anything but black and white, we will address the black-and-white part first. [ Read more ]
Capitalism vs. Democracy
In looking into the administrative mechanics by which the Iowa Board of Regents fraudulently appointed J. Bruce Harreld as president of the University of Iowa, I have been repeatedly surprised by the level of corruption in state government. While purportedly committed to public service, by odd coincidence Governor Terry Branstad, Regents President Bruce Rastetter and various other government administrators are all using the state’s institutions of higher learning for everything from greasing political connections to profiting on investments to finding cushy state-funded jobs and projects for political cronies. As last week’s lightning-fast recess appointment of yet another political crony to the board attests — coming on the heels, as it does, of another crony’s abrupt resignation, just ahead of news that she was on the payroll of a company that landed a massive no-bid contract with University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, of which the Board of Regents are trustees — there remains no inkling that anyone at the state or federal level will ever investigate the corruption which led to J. Bruce Harreld’s hire. [ Read more ]