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Harvard U is fake, no longer “Harvard”

The plagiarism scandal around Harvard University’s low quality, diversity-hire president Claudine Gay has now destroyed not just Gay’s personal and academic reputation, but Harvard’s as well. Harvard is no longer an academic institution based on rigorous intellectual debate and merit, it is a nakedly and proudly political activism site motivated by far left wing ideas and values.

In her PhD dissertation (the subject is useless nonsense and subjective fluff), Claudine Gay plagiarized material from a number of authors and academics, not the least of which was her own PhD dissertation advisor at Harvard. Her plagiarization has led to a lot of discussion across the Harvard University campus, some academic advisory boards, the Harvard University board of trustees, academics, racially-based groups, and American society. Understandably so, because Harvard University has been the flagship educational institution in America since its founding nearly four centuries ago.

Harvard’s reputation has always rested upon two simple things: 1) The highest intellectual rigor for its students and its educators, 2) the most exclusive and competitive screening of its students and its educators. For hundreds of years, to either teach or be taught at Harvard has been the gold standard for academic achievement in America and worldwide. The cold and uncaring application of logic, reason, proofs, and meritorious capability have winnowed the desirous from the truly stellar there for centuries. Well, no longer and not any more, as Inspector Clouseau said as he smashed the priceless Steinway piano into splinters.

The debate about whether or not Claudine Gay has the academic merit and the necessary high character to remain as the university’s president has torpedoed Harvard’s reputation. Simply because the widespread formal response by Harvard University to Gay’s failures of judgment and moral character, and to her academic cheating, has been to not only allow her to stay on as now a really, really blatantly incompetent diversity hire (no white man or white woman in that position would have ever made it beyond the first few minutes of this multifaceted crisis), but to also literally allow Gay to cheat even more, only this time in public.

Claudine Gay is now being allowed to retroactively amend her PhD dissertation with the necessary citations and quotation marks that were missing when her doctoral thesis was approved. This is like the judge allowing the robber to go back to the bank and put the money back in the vault, in order to avoid being charged and held accountable for the original crime of robbing the bank, now that the robber has been caught.

Gay is being allowed to do this re-crime so that her detractors are no longer empowered with the truth, so that they can no longer accurately accuse her of academic cheating. And for those who don’t know it, academic cheating is an automatic FAIL on every real academic report card, and it is usually the means for ejection from whatever school the cheater is enrolled at.

Harvard University’s board of trustees and the academics behind this brazen sleight of hand have basically told everyone in academia, in research and development, in the business of important ideas, and in the competitive world of merit that some animals are more equal than other animals, and that there are harsh rules for everyone, except for those few special people who some remote, self-anointed elite group has artificially determined should not be judged by the same standards as everyone else.

No society can sustain itself with this kind of fake justice system, or this kind of fake educational system. With this decision to both allow Claudine Gay to retroactively amend her already finalized dissertation, and to retain her as president, every single internal brake and decision-making system designed to ensure that all of Harvard University’s outputs are the best possible on Planet Earth have failed.

It has been determined by the powers that be at Harvard that the institution is now a (leftist) political activism center with no intellectual rudder, no universal standards for behavior or achievement, no universal code of conduct. Only subjective political decisions will be used henceforth to run the school, and we now see that certain skin colors and certain Marxist outlooks will be the preferred choices.

There are a lot of things I did not expect to see in my lifetime. I did not expect to see a presidential election fraught with so many wild irregularities across so many states and jurisdictions. I did not expect to see the entire media establishment and the entire political establishment not only fail to address those electoral irregularities, but to jointly sweep everything under the rug, declare a winner who had not even campaigned in public, and to accuse those who questioned the election results as “election deniers.” I did not expect to see the force of law be used against the “election deniers” for questioning the outcome and legitimacy of the questionable election, and who have since become persecuted political dissidents and outright political prisoners in their own “democratic” country. I did not expect to see the rule of law fail as widely and as quickly as it has, and I did not expect to see the rise of a totalitarian federal bureaucracy as fast as it has happened.

I also did not expect to see America’s flagship academic institution (the school now formerly known as Harvard University) gleefully burn down its own reputation in a public bonfire of vanities.

With all of these spectacular and unbelievable failures, Harvard’s just being the latest, we are seeing the severe cultural rot America has been experiencing since the 1960s finally come to fruition. All of the cultural safeguards, institutions, and legal infrastructure designed to keep America functioning as a constitutional republic are failing and being failed on purpose and in front of our faces. We are told by the agents of these failures that we must accept these outcomes not as failures, but as inevitable changes necessary to re-make America into the socialist utopia it was always meant to be.

It now seems possible not just that the Hamas loving racist academic fraudster Claudine Gay will be retained by Harvard as its president, but that she could be forcefully installed by the federal bureaucracy and its media wing (not elected by the people) as the next president of the United States “for our own good.”

Symbols have now officially become more important than facts in America. We all see that Harvard is fake, and we are told that it is still Harvard.

 

About James O’Keefe’s apparent ouster at Project Veritas

Because I have both served on numerous boards of directors and also worked for and with non-profit organizations that are subject to oversight by a board of directors, for many years, a kind of “sense of things about boards of directors” has developed in my mind.

My take on the apparent ouster of James O’Keefe at Project Veritas, the organization he founded and ran superbly for twenty five years, is that political moles were planted on his board in order to take down the organization.

Yes, James O’Keefe is probably a tough boss to work for. Given his incredible track record of real investigative journalism, he would have to be a tough boss. When I watch his videos and his reports and his hands-on real reporting from the street, I have no doubt that he drives his employees to work almost as hard as he works. And apparently in February 2023, having a tough boss who demands that employees strive for excellence and who holds employees accountable for failing, is now grounds for terminating the boss.

At least this is the standard for board members who want the tough boss gone so the organization can be greatly weakened.

And isn’t it simply amazing that the two board members who want James O’Keefe removed from his own Project Veritas are the two newest board members? One has to wonder just how much money is being secretly paid to board members by the targets of PV’s investigations, to incentivize them to take such a drastic step, especially as such new members. New board members are usually “back bench” and “learning the ropes” of the organization’s board they just joined. When someone new joins a board and immediately begins to significantly, even catastrophically dismantle the organization, then it is a clear sign that the person joined not to help but to hurt the group.

I once worked for an organization where a newly appointed and very married executive seemed to be having an open affair with a subordinate. Employees who obviously knew about the relationship were either summarily or eventually fired by the executive after he took power, and as a result the board became heavily fractured. Big time infighting on the board resulted, and about a year later the executive was allowed back into board meetings, held onto his job, cemented his power over the board and the organization, and survived.

When I see the apparent blitzkrieg coup d’etat against James O’Keefe at Project Veritas, I absolutely know that something is really deeply awry on the board. And the only explanation I can logically arrive at is that huge sums of money were paid by the enemies of PV to people on the board to act as moles and work directly against the interest of the organization.

For the record, I have donated to Project Veritas about a dozen times over the years. It is one of the very few investigative news outlets left on Planet Earth, and PV repeatedly showed a huge glaring spotlight on a lot of really bad, illegal, and immoral behavior by people in positions of public trust and power. As we all know, democracy dies in darkness, and the enemies of democracy and the advocates of darkness are now trying to turn off the lights at Project Veritas.

Wherever James O’Keefe goes, so goes my support.

UPDATE: James O’Keefe’s resignation discussion.

Keith Oellig, another American keeping America moving forward

Every day of his life, Keith Oellig was one of the few Americans who, rain or shine, kept America moving forward. He grew the crops and raised the beef that Americans across America take for granted every day that they simply buy and eat these products.

Raised on a central Pennsylvania farm with chores and work, work, work before play, Keith’s friendship was as strong as his nonstop work ethic. He was a dear and devoted friend to many fortunate people, including me, and he died unexpectedly last week from a life-long heart condition he managed as best he could until it caught him by surprise one last time. He was just 56 years old.

This essay is my way of memorializing this amazing human being, and saying goodbye.

Keith was a representation of everything the farming life is supposed to be – down to earth, honest, truthful, hard working, generous, natural, patriotic, devoted to community and fellow man. He served on many boards, including the Dauphin County Farm Bureau, the Central Dauphin East School Board, the Dauphin County Planning Commission, and others I can’t recall off the top of my head.

His heart was golden, always ready to do a kindness for someone, and the more distant the stranger the better. Almost every year he grew great patches of sweet corn and donated much of it to his church food pantry, and to any others in need. But they would have to pick it themselves. Straight out of the Bible, which is what inspired him, drove him, filled him.  (Those friends who merely enjoyed sweet corn got the phone call that it was ripe about three days after everyone else in true need had had a shot at it)

Keith was politically active, but he had mixed feelings and thoughts about politics, because so much of it is divorced from the sacred walk of life whose values he cherished.

Every election he and I would run around his farms putting up signs, especially really big ones along the road frontages and both sides of I-81 by Penn National Race Track/ Hollywood [!?] Casino.  And as hard as he worked putting them in, Keith would also grouse about career politicians, even about the person whose sign he was putting in. He even did it to me when I ran for state senate. Like out of a comedy movie: “Sure, I’ll help ya, and I’ll bet you’re going to be just as corrupt as everyone else. Now hurry up because we have a lot more signs to put in the ground.”

Here he is with one of two big banners we put up last October at his main farm, one on either side of I-81.  Every.Single.Vehicle.Driving on I-81 honked at us. We used a loader with bale spikes and twine, and it was hard but fun work. 
This is how many of us will remember Keith, with his innocent, gentle smile and loving eyes.

Keith and I worked as a team to fell dozens of dead and dying ash trees, and some oaks and poplars (see background), in an area where he wanted to expand the cattle pasture. I ran the chainsaw while he pushed with the front end loader. It was dicey and scary work, as his smashed windshield shows. A week later, a huge limb carved a gigantic V in that cab, but Keith just kept on, peering around either side of the destroyed metal and glass to see where he was going.

I am sure going to miss you, buddy

“Black Shoes. Basic Blues. No Names. All Game”…. gets me back in the game

Congratulations to the Penn State football team on its defeat of Wisconsin for the Big Ten conference title last night.

How strange that Ohio State is in the running for the national title, when they neither beat Penn State in the regular season (OSU lost to PSU), nor did they win their conference (PSU won it last night).

We are back in the familiar conundrum of old, where PSU got and still gets no respect. How many decades did PSU go winning, winning, and winning, but frequently blocked  from playing for the national title?

It is time to stop this unfairness and give to PSU what is their due: A shot at the national title. This requires making the OSU guys feel bad, which is nearly always what happened to PSU in the past. Sorry OSU, enjoy a shot of your own medicine.

After coach Joe Paterno was railroaded and publicly humiliated at PSU by a weak board and a weaker CYA-run administration that made former assistant coach Mike McQueery a wealthy man, my interest in PSU everything pretty much dropped to zero. I stopped watching the games, stopped caring, stopped donating to the university, and basically dropped PSU from my life. The cataclysmic Paterno auto de fe signaled a break from the core values and principles I had grown up with and identified with. I was no longer Penn State Proud.

That said a lot, because I grew up in the State College area, graduated from PSU, my mother has her PhD from PSU, and I attended PSU home games from the time I was seven until I left for Vanderbilt to pursue my career as an academic.  Plenty of our family have graduated from PSU, and watching Penn State football together during the holidays was a family tradition. I went to school with two of the Paterno kids and still maintain contact with one of them, the one I was closest to and spent the most time with. Time spent in the Paterno home listening to Coach Paterno recruit players shaped my own life. He was all about clean living.

Last night’s win over Wisconsin was meaningful to me not because PSU is back in the winning game, but because the fans, the alumni, the board (more on that pathetic, worthless PSU board of trust-less-ees in a moment) and the administration have given Coach Franklin the breathing room to resurrect the destroyed team from the ashes of annihilation at the hands of State Senator Jake Corman, disgraced pedophile Jerry Sandusky, the NCAA, former FBI head Louis Freeh (a great fiction writer), PSU administrators, and the worthless PSU board.

Coach Franklin needed the space and time to breathe new life into a program that always was and always should be top ten quality. He needed the kind of space and patience Paterno had received. Getting the damned names off the jerseys, and getting back to the no-frills basics of Black Shoes, Basic Blues, No Names, All Game. Getting this space marks somewhat of a return to normalcy, where professionals are allowed to be professionals. Professionalism was one of the former hallmarks of PSU football. Staid dedication and loyalty were once a hallmark of PSU administrative culture. The former players’ conservative, humble, and respectful approach to playing football always contrasted with the weak hotdogging that plagues the NFL and most college teams.

Shades of Coach Joe Paterno here. Might we be touching greatness again? I am looking.

So I am now finding myself maybe interested once again in PSU football. But not all football, because I am still boycotting the NFL – not one NFL game watched this season – due to the league’s support of anti-America player Colin Kaepernick. Thank you, PSU folks. This could be rewarding to me, as leaving PSU football was a sad time in my life.

Now, about the PSU Board of Trustees, that worthless aggregation of empty names that supposedly runs Penn State University.

Last week, Harrisburg businessman Alex Hartzler was appointed to the PSU board by Governor Wolf. Alex and I attended PSU together, and we were both active in politics there. We have stayed in touch for the past fifteen years. Alex’s entrance into the snake den is a bright spot, because simply put, Alex don’t give a sh*t about whatever crybaby weak stuff the other members are bringing in as fodder for their continued presence there.

Alex and I differ on almost every policy subject. He is one of the few Democrats I know to ever emerge from Lancaster County, and a farm boy at that. I am a Constitutional conservative who thinks the Republican Party is worthless, and also from Pennsylvania farm country. While Alex has maintained his partisan loyalty to one party, even as it was going over the cliff, he has always displayed a sharp and incisive intellect and tough attitude that brooks no bullcrap. I think Alex Hartzler is exactly the kind of person to help PSU get its act together. Yes, he will want policies on climate change junk science, same-sex bathrooms, and a bunch of other PC issues that I believe are unworthy of consideration let alone debate, but at the end of the day, I expect to see lightning bolts from the moribund board. Thank you, Alex.

Let’s get the PSU show back on the road.

PA Office of Open Records – the battle for control

Erik Arneson is never going to win awards for public relations savvy, but he does deserve to hold on to the job of director of the Office of Open Records he was appointed to by outgoing governor Tom Corbett back in December, 2014.

Incoming governor Tom Wolf immediately “fired” Arneson and sought to put someone else in his role.

Arneson and the PA senate Republicans sued Wolf, claiming that the job holds a six-year term and that’s it.  It is not a political appointment to serve at the whim of whichever governor is in office at the time.  To do so would place the office squarely in the middle of politics it is supposed to be above.

Showing up to his January lawsuit press event in a Green Bay Packers-marked ski cap and satin jacket, Arneson alienated every Steelers and Eagles fan around, not to mention us PSU Nittany Lions fanatics.  Plus, he did not look real professional, either, dressed up like he was going to a November football game, and not into a high stakes legal battle.

Maybe his rumpled look and out-of-synch team clothing choice represent a kind of idiot-savant mentality, which I would find refreshing.  You know, a guy who is so focused on doing his job so utterly professionally that he walks around with his zipper open, his hair touseled, his head involved in important things, not mundanities.

More likely is that Arneson has spent so long in the ultra-insulated world of the professional party functionary system (Republicans and Democrats alike have this alternate dimension), that he is unaware that his appearance in public matters to the public.   He may not even care.  Accountability in that party functionary world is non-existent, and professionalism is not always what taxpayers would or should expect from the people they pay.

But the fact is that Arneson was duly appointed to a six-year term, which itself strongly indicates an independent position above the whims of politics, such as incoming new governors wishing to make government in their image.

Nearly all of Pennsylvania’s commissions and boards involve six or even eight year terms; some are four years, but they tend to be the ones where the governor alone makes the selection.  At least that is my sense of things, having been involved in the selection process for the PA Game Commission and the PA Fish & Boat Commission.  Both of those commissions had eight-year terms until last year, when they were changed to six years, which is still sufficient time for a board member to ride out political changes that might corrupt their otherwise professional and detached judgment.

For those people complaining about Arneson’s politically partisan credentials, ahem, we did not hear your voice when the first occupant of the office was selected, Terri Mutchler.

Terri Mutchler is a very nice person whom I knew a bit when we were students at Penn State, way back in the 1980s.  She was professional and diligent, way back then, and again during her tenure as the first director of the Office of Open Records.  And in that new role she feuded just enough with then-Governor Rendell to lend credibility to her claim of being above partisanship.

But recently Mutchler has come forward and admitted that she was a tool, literally, for partisan politics in past jobs, even in one of her most sensitive jobs as a senior reporter and news editor.  [those of us already long ago jaded by the mainstream media are unsurprised by her admission; we just wish current political activists posing as news reporters at NBC CBS ABC NPR NYT etc. would be as honest]

In other words, Mutchler was a nakedly partisan Democrat, perhaps like Arneson would be a partisan Republican.

But if you don’t like Arneson for this reason now, where were you for the same reason back then, when Mutchler was appointed?  Critics of Arneson cannot have it both ways – happy to have Mutchler’s partisan role back then, but opposed to Arneson’s presumed partisan role now.  That is inconsistent, and therefore undeserving of respect.

Inconsistency is the hobgoblin of good government,and if there are two words that define what Americans expect from their government, it is good government: Professional, a-political, non-partisan.

So, Arneson must stay on, despite his frumpy appearance, his poor taste in football teams, his deafness to Lion Country’s football preferences, and despite the nakedly partisan calls for him to step aside for a Wolf Administration selection.

But I will say this: His beard, that damned scraggly beard, it looks incredibly unprofessional and unkempt; if he keeps that for one more day, then he does deserve to be fired immediately.  And tie your shoes, Erik, dammit.

409+

Last week, under pressure to perform at an adult, professional level, the senior staff at the NCAA folded right before appearing in court.

The discovery phase of a lawsuit brought against the NCAA for its disproportionate over-correction of Penn State University was about to begin, and with a handful of damning NCAA emails already in hand, the meaty part of discovery would have exposed the heavy handed NCAA overlords for what they are: Incompetent, vacuous bullies.

The fictional Louis Freeh “report” aka Hit Piece and Flaming Bomb Meant to Humble Penn State has gradually yielded to the collective bits of disbelief and basic deductive logic surrounding the Joe Paterno Assassination aka The Oxbow Incident.

Knowing now what we already knew two years ago, the NCAA storm trooper and tactical nuke assault on one of the very few pristine colleges in the nation has blown up in the NCAA’s own face.

Yes, we got our 409 wins back, but we deserve so much more.

And to have undergone so much knee-jerk reaction injustice…..Penn State deserves compensation, to be made whole, to get back what we lost, if it’s remotely possible.

I want blood.

I want guts.

I want a shred of public justice for Joe Paterno and Penn State, and for the student athletes immorally saddled with faux guilt from the sick, distant actions of a man they’d never met, let alone heard of (Jerry Sandusky).

To begin with, the Joe Paterno statue immediately goes back to its original prominent place on campus.

Then, every member of the PSU board involved in the debacle issues a personal, hand written apology. And then each resigns. I’ve got a few names to go with that demand.

Then each NCAA staff member associated with the debacle issues a hand written apology, and then resigns.

That’s what real leaders do when they fail badly.

And for those folks who really want to demonstrate their earnest attitude, I’ve got some old Japanese swords you can fall on. I’m tempted to serve as your second….to ensure a clean ending, of course.

A clean ending to a tragedy, a failure to protect little boys, a failure to act like grown men and women and apply justice carefully, a failure to protect the grown boys on the team and the many professional educators and students unfairly tarnished by the NCAA’s hasty, shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude.

And then there’s the scholarships, the bowl money PSU lost. The opportunities unfairly crushed. How do we get all that back?

And Mr Louis Freeh, you may be ex-FBI, but I’m ex-Penn State Nittany Lion. Don’t meet me in a dark alley.

Bruce Warshawsky for Susquehanna Twp school board

Bruce Warshawsky is a local attorney of note, having run for office and participated in many campaigns.

Bruce is a taxpayer, father of three children, married to Terri, and a long-time Susquehanna Township resident. He is a good guy and a hard worker.

Susquehanna Township is going through some oddball politics right now, with strong racial tones that I personally find frightening and sad. America is better than what we are seeing there at this time.

Bruce has always been above race issues, advocating for an inclusive set of principles instead, the most important of which is Academic Excellence above all else.

Academic excellence should be the goal of all parents and all taxpayers who foot the bill for government schools.

The best way to reach Bruce is 717 547-4089, or btwarshawsky@comcast.net. Recall that even small donations of ten or fifteen bucks go a long way. Bruce also needs volunteers to help distribute campaign literature to voters.

Think Voter Fraud Happened in Philly? Listen to This!

In the city where Romney received zero votes in 59 precincts…