Tag Archives: responsibilities

Exposing Truth in Belgian Universities is a Punishable Offense

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Nathan Cofnas, a post-doc at Ghent University in Ghent Belgium, has been suspended by the school’s Rector, Petra De Sutter. Cofnas expects to be fired, and he may well be by the time you read this. He was, you may recall, the man who exposed (former, now deceased) Cambridge Professor Jason Arday’s fraudulent activities, activities that were primarily broad based plagiarism.

Calling out an academician’s dishonesty, though, is strickly verboten in Belgium.

University Rector Petra De Sutter:

[T]he University takes the recent public statements made by a postdoctoral researcher [Cofnas] at Ghent University regarding this matter very seriously. Ghent University has decided to take appropriate action within its powers and the applicable framework.

Never call out an academic. That’s the Ghent message to academia.

Responsibility

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A letter writer to The Moneyist wrote that

…political issues came up, and our daughter-in-law wanted to discuss and debate them with me. I calmly reminded them of our previous agreement [that there would be no political discussions among them].
Since January, our son and his wife have stopped communicating with my wife and me. They have refused to return our phone calls or respond to our texts. We have been told that our daughter-in-law does not wish to have contact with our family.

The letter writer added that we have also tried to respect the boundaries they have established.

First, it’s not just the daughter-in-law who has broken off contact. So has the son, who plainly has gone along with his wife, perhaps actively sides with her for the same reasons she has for refusing contact. It’s not inappropriate for a husband to support his wife over his parents, so there’s nothing to be read into that aspect. Both son and daughter-in-law are affirmatively not wanting further contact with the parent; that’s the boundary they’ve set.

Against that, the letter writer wonders if he and his wife should cut the two out of their will(s). A potential complication is that the letter writer has another son, only mentioned for his existence, so I assume (yes, yes) that this son is on good terms with the letter writer.

My position is this, because I tend to be a bit black and white on such things. The son and daughter-in-law have taken themselves out of the letter writer’s family. The only tie, such as it is, remaining is the accident of birth involving the son. Their removal of themselves—as the letter writer notes, they were not driven out—also took them out of any familial-related connections and obligations.

The parents would be well-served to acknowledge their son’s decision, not impose themselves on him—honor the boundaries they have established—and rewrite their wills (each parent should have his/her own will), and allocate their estate elsewhere. That’ll be hard to do, emotionally, but it’s necessary according to the son’s and his wife’s boundaries. That reallocation might also lead to friction between the son and daughter-in-law and the other son, but that’s among those three; it’s irrelevant to the fact of the two having decided to leave the family altogether.

Overly Optimistic

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Meghan Cox Gordon likes the idea of typos in finished products.

If there’s a goof, you know the author is human. Writers who compose using their own eyes and brains (and fingers) are going to err. Machines that collate and disgorge synthetic blocks of text, or that comb through human-generated text for usage mistakes, are not.

Not so. AI will learn to introduce typos and mistaken phrases entirely separately from its “ordinary” hallucinations. Dishonest writers and plagiarists will inject typos and mistaken phrases in attempts to disguise their own dishonesty.

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.