Tag Archives: responsibilities

My Personal Experience Says Otherwise

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Matthew Hennesey, writing in the WSJ‘s Free Expression columns, was concerned about the heavy exposure to the unbridled freedom of everything being abundant and—from the student’s perspective—free and how this gives those still impressionable minds a false sense of the effectiveness of socialism to the point that it seems like to each according to his wants and from each according to what he feels like giving. And then the child faces the world as it is after “graduation” [my euphemism quotes].

College is where young people get a first taste of living on their own. But it’s a false freedom. The cost of things most adults must budget and pay for—food, transportation, housing, entertainment, even laundry—is bundled on campus. There are no price signals. Everything comes out of the big payment made before the semester starts. And who picks that up? Mom, Dad, and maybe Sallie Mae.
…As a result, “they experience consumption without consequence or even comparison.” Everything feels free. When, after graduation, these kids hit the real world, the shock is too much to bear. They have no sense of opportunity costs and trade-offs. They revert to a defense of the all-inclusive economic program they know and love.

The ill discipline, though, is a mark of the degradation of parenting as well as of the schools themselves. My first two years in college, I lived within the allowance my parents gave me. That upfront cost? One semester of each of those two years came from the fruits of my summer jobs. My second two years, I had no parental allowance, I had USAF Sgt’s pay courtesy of an ROTC scholarship. The upfront cost, though, was entirely picked up by the USAF, via my ROTC scholarship.

Nothing in the book store, from books to froo-froo to junk food was free the entire time. Nothing in the student union was free, also. The school’s cafeteria only served lunch and supper, no snacks or anything of the like. Nothing between meals. Snacks could be purchased in the student union or in the book store. The cafeteria might have served breakfast, too, but I wasn’t eating breakfast so I never noticed.

Now helicopter parents or lazily uninvolved parents—no middle ground constituting a measure of parental responsibility—ruin their kids before they get to college, and colleges now coddle those children while burying all of the costs in those upfront payments that the students never experience and indoctrinating them rather than teaching them.

Why Weren’t Reporters Told?

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It seems that President Donald Trump (R), on the way back from a NATO meeting in Ankara, boarded a “legacy Air Force One,” moved to a catering truck’s container that was ostensibly transferring provisions to the aircraft, via that catering container transferred to a different aircraft, and flew that one to the UK. On arrival there, he transferred to the legacy Air Force One, which had arrived at the same time, and deplaned in view of the press and onlookers, with none of them the wiser.

The press corps and a number of government officials who had accompanied Trump to the meeting had remained on that Air Force One, uninformed about the President’s having shifted to a different aircraft.

The whole business was a Secret Service response to a threat that Iranians would attempt to shoot down the Air Force One aircraft on its takeoff from Ankara, murdering the President.

The Press Precious Ones have their collective panties in hard wedgies over not having been informed of the switch and having seemingly been used as decoys, as CNN‘s Jake Tapper bleated.

An angry press is demanding answers on why reporters weren’t told of Trump’s plane transfer or whether their presence aboard the supposed Air Force One—alongside senior officials Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—put them at serious risk.

There’s this, too:

The White House didn’t plan to disclose the feint, officials said, until the Washington Post revealed it….

And this from John Kirby, who spent his Navy career in the Navy’s press-facing career track and was ex-Presidents Barack Obama’s (D) and Joe Biden’s (D) Pentagon and White House Press Secretary, had this:

They also deserved—as did the unwitting staffers on the plane—the opportunity to make alternative travel plans….

Sure. Because the sudden mass transfer of passengers from Air Force One to alternate aircraft, coming as close as it necessarily would have to the Air Force One’s scheduled departure given the timing of the decision to set up the President’s transfer, would not have exposed the Secret Service’s and the US and of Israeli intelligence communities’ knowledge of the threat. Right.

WaPo‘s exposure and Kirby’s studied disingenuousness are why the press wasn’t told of the transfer. The press cannot be trusted with information like that. Even revealing the transfer after the fact is dangerous, revealing capabilities and potentially sources as it does.

Pressmen are well aware, as much smarter and so much better informed than us average Americans as they hold themselves out to be, of that danger.

Decoys? That’s the highest value of today’s news writers.

More Ivory Tower Foolishness

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It seems too many academicians (are they any such anymore, or are there only folks who’ve gotten credentialed and now sit in those chairs?) have no contact with the empiricism of the real world outside their ivied and cloistered halls.

The University of Michigan provides the example.

The University of Michigan will drop grades for first-semester freshmen next year in an effort to “curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-aged individuals,” according to the school.
Instead of a letter grade, first-semester transcripts will show “pass or no credit.” The program is designed to help students “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys,” the school said.

These Know Betters even shy away from the “fail” that is only alternative to “pass;” preferring to cower behind the euphemism of “no credit.” With their timidity, these august personages do even more harm to their charges.

This rationalization seems instructive:

The shift at Michigan, among the nation’s largest and best-known public universities, comes as schools wrestle with grade inflation and the need for remedial instruction for freshmen ill-prepared for college-level classes.

A coverup of Michigan’s reluctance to put an end to its own grade inflating practices? Maybe, maybe not. In either event, though, if the little dears are not expected to meet standards, they’ll never learn to meet standards. If they’re not required to acclimate, they’ll never acclimate. Silliness like this at Michigan only delays the inevitable, and that delay only makes the pupil’s coming crisis all the harsher when it does arrive.

Another step, done before the hold them to standards part, would further mitigate the “mental health crisis” the school’s enrollees are claimed to experience. This one is to do away with the remediation bit. If the enrollees are that ill-prepared for college-level classes, disenroll them and send them home to get themselves ready. It harms those students who are ready when resources that should be going toward their instruction are withheld from them in favor of those who can’t cut it.

In the meantime, regarding those other newly enrolled, let the student wannabes struggle. Be firm on grading, setting maximum percentages per class of As, of Bs, and of Cs. Most of the students will work through their struggles and be the stronger, emotionally and academically, for it. Those few who truly cannot make the adjustment, having had that first semester to try, would be better off sent home to try again the next year.

US Election Security

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And less-than-dedicated State election officials. An example of that lack of dedication is provided by Nevada’s Progressive-Democratic Secretary of State, Francisco Aguilar:

I feel like I’m in a UFC chokehold. Everything we do has to be perfect.

Well, yeah—with our elections at risk of tampering by foreign entities, of contamination by folks not eligible to vote voting anyway, by sloppy and repeated vote counts, and on and on, perfection in the process and the counting after the process is a requirement.

It’s true that perfection isn’t achievable, but working—hard—toward it certainly is, and that effort leads to constant improvement in election security. If Progressive-Democrats worked as hard toward that level of performance as they do against moves to improve our election security, we’d have far fewer illegal voter registrants and far less illegal voting and far lower “ordinary” error rates to the point that even the illegal vote conspiracists would have no beef, and the only conspiracists remaining would be the Left’s and Party’s with their voter suppression conspiracies.

Accesses to Classified

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SecDef Pete Hegseth has revoked the security clearance of Frank Kendall, ex-President Joe Biden’s (D) Secretary of the Air Force. Kendall had been quoted in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal as saying that the Air Force One jet gifted to President Trump by the Qatari government lacks the defensive capabilities of the traditional jets that fly the president.

Kendall is all wide-eyed innocence.

“I’m mystified,” Kendall said in a text message when asked for comment. “I’ve been extremely careful to not say anything that could be classified, and as far as I know I have not said anything classified.” He added, “So far no one has told me what I’m supposed to have revealed.”

Revealing the defensive capabilities of the aircraft flying as Air Force One is perfectly jake?

This is Kendall pretending to not understand the requirements of OPSEC. Or he’s cynically standing on the legalist distinction between classified material vs OPSEC material. That’s assuming, generously, that he didn’t reveal actual classified information—and I would be amazed if information regarding the military capabilities of our President’s transport aircraft were unclassified.

It’s good that Kendall has lost his accesses. More retired or resigned officials should lose their accesses.

The problem could be mitigated greatly if all employees, government or private, automatically lost their clearances as well as any other accesses when they leave the job in which they had those credentials. This needn’t be stigmatic; it should be routine: those people no longer have any need for a security clearance, and so it’s automatically revoked.