Category Archives: culture

The VA Still Fails

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The Veterans Administration is still creating waitlists and secret waitlists, even after all this time of reporting on and calling the VA out for its dishonesty and its disservice to our veterans.  Now a Colorado VA facility is—still—doing secret waitlists.

Investigators with the VA Office of Inspector General confirmed whistleblower and former VA employee Brian Smother’s claim that staff kept unauthorized lists instead of using the department’s official wait list system.

That made it impossible to know if veterans who needed referrals for group therapy and other mental health care were getting timely assistance, according to the report. The internal investigation also criticized record-keeping in PTSD cases at the VA’s facility in Colorado Springs.

Senator Cory Gardener (R, CO):

It [the secret waitlists] highlights even more VA mismanagement and lack of accountability in Colorado. This cannot happen again, and it’s time for the VA to finally wake up and ensure our men and women are getting the best care possible.

No.  The VA is not going to clean itself up.  Outside agencies cannot clean this sewage pit.  The VA must be disbanded and its budget and nominal future budgets passed to our veterans as vouchers so they can get the medical help they deserve—and in too many cases, desperately need—from the doctors of their choice and the medical facilities of their choice.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.

Fake Apologies

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Senator Al Franken (D, MN) has been accused Thursday of sexually harassing a woman while the two were on a USO tour in Afghanistan 11 years ago.  He’s apologized for it.

He was also quoted in a 1995 New York Magazine article about his generating a “joke” for Saturday Night Live, where he worked at the time, that centered on drugging and raping then-journalist Leslie Stahl.  He apologized for that, too.

Then he said about that apology during his 2008 campaign for Senate that he

didn’t think he should have to apologize for the cracks, which his opponents were taking out of context. “To say I was sorry for writing a joke was to sell out my career, to sell out who I’d been my entire life,” he writes [in his book]. “And I wasn’t sorry that I had written Porn-o-Rama or pitched that stupid Lesley Stahl joke at 2 in the morning. I was just doing my job.”

But…”I learned that campaigns have their own rules, their own laws of physics, and that if I wasn’t willing to accept that, I would never get to be a senator.” And so Franken took a deep breath and told a little white lie: “I’m sorry.”

Little white lie.  Franken still wants to be a Senator.  With his clearly stated position that apologies are just lies to be mouthed in order to get what he wants, how is it possible for anyone—let alone the woman who accused him last Thursday—to believe his apology for that Afghanistan harassment?  Or any other apology he might pretend to offer for any other transgression?  Or anything at all he might say on any matter?

And lest there be any question about that USO incident, understand clearly: the existence of Franken’s pseudo-apology stands as his blithe confession that he did the thing of which he’s accused.

And he’s still a Senator.

Sexual Harassment

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The stampede to call out sexual harassment is growing, and actionable complaints are being made.  These need to be carefully investigated, and the hides of those convicted nailed to the outhouse wall.

However, there also is a growing number of accusations made against unnamed harassers—just claims of workplace harassment devoid of useful specifics.  The latest round (eliding Al Franken, who’s the subject of a nearby post) is claims of harassment in Congress.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier (D, CA) said she knows of two current members of Congress who “have engaged in sexual harassment,” while another congresswoman, Congresswoman Barbara Comstock (R, VA) recounted a member who exposed himself to a female staffer.

The members were not named.

And

Senator Claire McCaskill (D, MO) told reporters that she had been harassed when she interned on Capitol Hill, but she did not report it.

And

[Former Congressional Black Caucus Fellow] M Reese Everson said that a member of Congress asked if he could flirt with her “in order [for her] to excel in [her] career.”

The problem with this sort of accusation is that there’s no reason to believe them, certainly there’s no way to check them out, and most importantly, there’s no way to go after the harassers if they do exist—they get off scott free.

That’s unacceptable in both ways.  Name names.

Cornell Professors

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…apparently support racism and racist stereotyping.

Recall that George Ciccariello-Maher, Associate Professor of Politics and Global Studies at Drexel University, routinely says it’s whiteness, white victimization, all things white that are at fault for mass shootings and violence generally. For instance, this in an interview with Democracy Now!

Whiteness is never seen as a cause, in and of itself, of these kinds of massacres despite the fact that whiteness is a structure of privilege and it’s a structure of power, and a structure that, when it feels threatened, you know, lashes out.

What makes white men so prone to this kind of behavior?

And his tweet a year ago, All I want for Christmas is white genocide.

Cornell University’s professoriate demurred from Drexel’s decision to discipline Ciccariello-Maher ever so lightly (he’s on paid vacation leave) for his inflammatory and racist remarks (over Twitter proximately), wherein he blamed white victimization (and, of course, “Trumpism”) for the Las Vegas mass murder.

Seventy professors signed a letter on Wednesday protesting the university’s decision to take disciplinary action against George Ciccariello-Maher, saying it infringes upon academic freedoms, reported The Cornell Daily Sun.

Of course they do.  It’s entirely appropriate for college professors to “stereotype” groups of Americans of whom they disapprove.

Never minding that their favored groups of Americans became favored through precisely that “stereotyping.”

And Cornell, the school, is silent about it.

Hmm….

Frightening the Snowflakes

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It seems a Cambridge University professor had the effrontery to warn new students of a class of his—Physical Sciences—that life is hard and that it’s harder when you’re stupid.  For instance, this in an email that he sent to his incoming students:

Remember that you are NOT at any other uni, where students do drink a lot and do have what they regard as a ‘good time’—and you are NOT on a course, as some Cambridge courses sadly are, where such a behaviour pattern is possible or acceptable.

Oh, the wailing and bodice rending that resulted.

Student Minds Cambridge, a “mental health” activist group:

We are very concerned that this could be extremely damaging to the mental well-being of the students concerned, and potentially others as well.

And a Vice-Chancellor of nearby Buckingham University, Anthony Seldon (late of Cambridge):

Frightening impressionable undergraduates into believing that work alone is all-important is irresponsible, unkind and wrong-headed[.]

Wow.

On the contrary, what’s damaging to incoming university students, what stunts their mental development, what’s frightening regarding “impressionable undergraduates” is coddling them, rewarding them for their precious snowflake-ness, and thereby trapping them in a sense of victimhood, instead of confronting them with the difficulties of serious learning, the sterner difficulties of life in the real world, and teaching them how to cope—and especially that they can actually cope.