We're all just waiting for orders: A kind word for the Uvalde Police

 Years ago, I was a practicing attorney in Alaska. Most of my clients were rural school districts that operated village schools in what Alaskans call the Bush: that vast region of Alaska that is off the road system. Most of these schools could only be reached by air.

One day I received a call from the principal of one of the village schools. "One of our students has a rifle," the principal informed me, "and he's holed up in the gymnasium and shooting into the village."

I asked the obvious question: "Have you called the troopers?"

Yes, the principal told me, the troopers had been alerted and were in the air.  They would arrive in the village in about an hour.

Then I asked a second obvious question: "Why are you calling me?" After all, I was a civil attorney, and a shooting incident is a criminal matter.

The principal's reply astonished me. "Because the shooter is Special Ed."

Under federal law, all kids designated as Special Ed are entitled to an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), which cannot be changed without a due process hearing.

Apparently, the principal was concerned that arresting this kid or shooting him without giving him a hearing would violate his IEP.

I thought about this incident recently when I read about the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where a young man killed 19 children and two teachers in an elementary-school classroom.  

Several armed Uvalde police officers were in the school while the shooter was killing children, but they waited about an hour before storming the classroom and killing the shooter. Some wounded children bled out during the standoff--children who would have lived had they received prompt medical care.

Why did the police wait so long before confronting the shooter? Experts have opined on this question. Commentators have suggested that a communication breakdown explains the police officers' conduct or perhaps confusion about who was in charge.  Some critics have charged the Uvalde police with cowardice.

I do not believe the officers hesitated out of fear. Texas lawmen are known for being physically courageous.  The Uvalde officers probably knew the families of the kids being slaughtered.  In fact, one Uvalde officer in the school during the shooting lost his child, and another officer's wife bled to death in her classroom. These officers weren't cowards. 

I think there is another explanation for their inaction.

Americans now live in a society dominated by 24-hour news. News commentators and "talking head" experts seize on every catastrophe and breathlessly report as each tragedy unfolds. Almost instantly, the experts appear on our television screens to tell the world what the authorities did wrong and what they should have done.

Moreover, many shooting tragedies like the one in Uvalde wind up in protracted litigation,  with lawyers grilling the people in charge and pointing out all the things that the people on the scene should have done.

All of us in this juiced-up world of hypermedia are getting a subliminal message that it is better to wait for instructions than react spontaneously to a tragedy like the one in Uvalde.  We want a higher authority to tell us what to do. Then--if we get sued--we can say we were just following orders.

Finally, I wonder if police departments have become less effective by turning themselves into paramilitary forces.  The little town of Uvalde had its own SWAT team, and many small police departments now have armored vehicles.

I think the Uvalde police may have dawdled while children were being killed because they were waiting for technical equipment and more highly trained rapid-response units.

In retrospect, I think everyone agrees that it would have been better for the Uvalde police to have immediately stormed that elementary-school classroom with pistols--even if one of the officers got killed in the assault.

Nevertheless, I have great sympathy for the Uvalde police officers who were waiting in a school hallway while children were dying--made impotent perhaps by a culture that trains all of us that it is better to wait for orders when faced with a crisis than to follow our natural instinct to act.

 

Federal Reserve Bank of Philly: Student-Loan Payment Pause Just Postpones The Day of Reckoning

 In March 2020, the Department of Education suspended required payments on federal student loans due to the COVID crisis. The feds extended the pause six times, meaning that most borrowers have not made student-loan payments for more than two years. 

Nearly four out of five borrowers benefited from the pause on their student-loan obligations during the pandemic. The question now is whether student debtors can resume making payments when the loan-payment moratorium expires next month.

No one can answer that question definitively, but a recent survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia suggests that many college-loan borrowers will have trouble getting back on track with their student-loan payments when the payment pause comes to an end.

According to the Fed report, borrowers' "chronic repayment struggles are not primarily the result of pandemic-related transitory financial shocks but are more systematic in nature." For most student borrowers, the Fed concluded, "[the payment pause] is simply postponing the day of reckoning with loan payments that [survey respondents] consider unaffordable."

About half the respondents to the Fed's survey whose loans were in abeyance said they could resume making loan payments when the moratorium expires. The other half said they could only make partial or no payments on their student loans.

Moreover, the Fed report pointed out, "A common narrative during the pandemic was that the forbearance period enabled many education loan borrowers to save or deleverage [pay down other debts]." The Fed found, however, that among student borrowers who didn't expect to be able to resume making loan payments, very few were using the moratorium to save or pay down other debts.

Like many reports written by government agencies and policy wonks, the Fed's announcement on expected student-loan repayment contains turgid language and an excessive number of bar charts.

Nevertheless, the Philly Fed said plainly that the long pause on making student-loan payments only postponed the day of reckoning for most distressed student-loan debtors.

Meanwhile, American colleges continue to raise their tuition prices, which means that millions of overburdened college borrowers will see their debt burden become even more onerous than it is now.

Robert Crimo III Killed Six People and Escaped in a 2010 Honda Fit: Are We Teaching Our Children Well?

 We all know the drill. An alienated young white guy commits mass murder with a semiautomatic rifle. Almost instantly, the shooter is captured or gunned down or commits suicide.

Political leaders, flanked by their lackeys, hold a press conference where they heap lavish praise on the police even if the police did a lousy job (like at Columbine and Uvalde). The liberal media cries out for gun control. Pundits describe the shooter as a cowardly scumbag.

Our political, media and cultural elites never blame themselves for these mass shootings. No one blames the public schools, where all these young shooters spent their childhood and youth. No one laments our waning religious beliefs or the disintegration of our nation's civic life.

No one ponders why so many of these shooters were addicted to video games. No one asks why these shooters express their anguish in graphic detail on social media--anguish that is wholly ignored.

Crimo shot up a Fourth of July parade and escaped in a 2010 Honda Fit. Perhaps he knew that this pathetic little car symbolized his pathetic little life.

Crimo probably sensed that taking out student loans for college would not help him build a decent future for himself. He probably didn't have a girlfriend or any vocational goals. He was perhaps searching for meaning without having been issued a moral compass.

Whose fault is that?

James Howard Kunstler recently observed that "[t]he chief duty of men and women in [the] future will be doing everything possible to ensure that their children do not become hot messes." 

Who disagrees? 

But Americans are not striving to prevent their children from becoming hot messes. They're not doing everything they can to nurture and encourage young people to become functioning, self-reliant, and moral adults. 

Instead, our government shovels money into our corrupt universities to pay professorial nihilists to teach that America's heritage is nothing more than the story of white oppression. 

Our mainstream media has nothing good to say about patriotism or traditional civic values. Instead, op-ed writers label religious, patriotic Americans as "Christian nationalists," which is a racist code phrase.

No wonder guys like Robert Crimo III are becoming increasingly common. Indeed, the United States can hardly go a week without a mass shooting.

Ironically, the elites trying to destroy American civilization are never the victims of these young men's rage. They live in gated communities or highrise condos, surrounded by bodyguards and safely protected behind bullet-proof glass.

No, the people killed or maimed by the Robert Crimos of the world are school children, mall shoppers, and folks who only want to enjoy a Fourth of July parade.

Making his getaway in a 2010 Honda Fit

Dana Milbank, progressive WaPo journalist, slams Texas (and Oklahoma)

 Dana Milbank published an article in the Washington Post titled "Texas Republicans want to secede? Good riddance." His essay drips with regional bigotry, and his description of Texas is so inaccurate and prejudiced that I feel obligated to respond.

Milbank's essay is a sarcastic response to a call from the Texas Republican Party to allow Texans to vote on the question of Texas independence. He would like to see Texas go. "Better yet," Milbank smirked, "let's offer Texas a severance package that includes Oklahoma to sweeten secession."

Why would any sensible person want to kick Texas out of the United States? Texas exports more goods and services than any other state,  and its homeownership rate is higher than New York or California--those hotbeds of progressivism. The Lone Star State is experiencing robust population growth while the population of many liberal-leaning states--California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York--is stagnant or declining. That's why Texas is gaining seats in the U.S. House of Representatives while supposedly more enlightened states are losing them.

Milbank's essay shows a shocking ignorance of Texas culture and Texas politics. He predicts that the U.S. would have to airlift "sustainable produce" and contraceptives if Texas were to form its own country.

But there is no evidence of any hostility to birth control among Texas political leaders or prejudice against healthy food. Milbank is merely displaying a provincial and ignorant worldview--a malady caused by watching too much CNN on television.

Milbank suggests that urban centers and South Texas would not leave the union if rural Texas were to secede, assuming urban Texas and Hispanic South Texas think like he does. It is true that Texas cities reliably vote for the Democrats, as do the voters along the Rio Grande River.

Nevertheless, the Texas Nationalist Movement, the prime advocate for Texas independence, is strong all over the state. As for South Texas, the Tejanos are appalled by President Biden's open-border policy and are leaning more and more toward the Republicans. 

Progressive and left-leaning pundits may sneer and ridicule Texas all they want and even encourage the state to form its own nation. But they should remember that Texas has the largest natural gas reserves in the U.S.

Self-righteous prigs like Milbank despise flyover country, but they rely on the heartland for the food they eat and the energy they need to heat their homes and power their cars. Milbank thinks the rest of the United States would be better off without Texas and should encourage the state to secede. 

He should be careful what he wishes for.

Dana Milbank: four-time winner of annual Paul Giamatti Look-Alike contest

Doxing Frederick Law Omsted, Designer of Central Park. Should We Pull Omsted's Statue Down?

Dox:  to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) is famous for designing Central Park in New York City and is justly renowned as the founder of American landscape architecture. A National Park Service memorial site is maintained in his honor in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Many of his admirers, however, are unaware of Olmsted's published works on the antebellum South. In particular, Olmstead wrote A Journey Through Texas about his horseback tour through the Lone Star State in 1853 and 1854. Many scholars consider it the most definitive contemporary account of life in Texas before the Civil War.

Contemporary readers of Journey Through Texas might be offended by Olmsted's racial prejudices, which are expressed repeatedly throughout the book. Although he became a vocal opponent of slavery, the n-word appears repeatedly in his volume on Texas, and he was mighty hard on Native Americans and Mexicans.

This passage from his Texas travelogue summarizes Olmsted's feelings about indigenous people: "If my wife were in a frontier settlement," Olmsted confessed,  "I can conceive how I should hunt an Indian and shoot him down with all the eagerness and ten times the malice with which I should follow the panther." 

Olmsted had a few brief encounters with the Lipan Apache while he was in Texas and formed the view that Native Americans are"chaotic, malicious idiots and lunatics." 

Olmsted visited some Mexican border communities during his horseback ride through Texas, and his impressions of Mexican culture (and Mexican Catholicism) were no less unkind.

The impression had been of a fixed stagnancy, amounting to a slow national decay; the cause, a religious enslavement of the mind, preventing education, communication, and growth, giving rise to bigotry, hypocrisy, political and social tyranny, bad faith, priestly spoliation, and, worst of all, utter degradation of labor.

 Olmsted's modern-day admirers may find Olmstead's racial prejudices shocking. Should his statues be torn down? Should the National Park Service's national historic site be closed? Should his books be burned, Central Park bulldozed? In short, should Olmsted be doxed?

I don't think so, and I doubt anyone else does either. For some strange reason, American progressives are highly selective in doxing historical figures, focusing on Southern white men and leaving northern bigots alone.

Christopher Columbus Langdell, Dean of Harvard Law School in the late nineteenth century, refused to admit any student to the law school who graduated from a Catholic college (as documented in On the Battlefield of Merit, a history of Harvard Law School).  Yet Harvard has not taken Langdell's name off the law library.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of the birth control movement in the United States, was a eugenicist and a racist, but she is remembered only as a champion of women's rights.

Frederick Law Olmsted's statues are safe. He was a racist and a bigot, but contemporary progressives will never scrub his name from the history books.

I'm okay with that. I only wish our public intellectuals would apply this balanced understanding of selected historical figures to everyone who muddled along in benighted bigotry in the nineteenth century.

Should Olmsted's statues be torn down?

Biden cancels $6 billion in loans owed by student borrowers who attended more than 100 for-profit colleges

This week, the Biden administration agreed to cancel about $6 billion in student debt, granting relief to 200,000 college borrowers. 

The Department of Education reached a settlement agreement in a class-action lawsuit brought by student borrowers. A federal judge must approve the deal before it goes into effect.

DOE had already determined that more than one hundred for-profit schools had committed fraud or material misrepresentations to some of their students. Students who attended those schools and filed loan forgiveness applications will see their student loans wiped off the books. 

The proposed settlement agreement is especially significant because it involves so many for-profit schools. The rogue's list of defrauders includes the usual suspects: beauty schools, culinary schools, and art institutions.

But DOE's list also includes some prominent for-profit universities. The University of Phoenix, DeVry University, Capella University, and Grand Canyon University made the list.

In addition, DOE concluded that four for-profit law schools made misrepresentations to their students: Arizona Summit Law School, Charlotte School of Law, Florida Coastal Law School, and Western State University College of Law. And at least one medical school, Ross University School of Medicine, got tagged.

Added to the $25 billion student debt forgiven in earlier actions, President Biden's Department of Education has forgiven a total of $29 billion in college loans.

This latest development is just cause for celebration. More than one million students have now gotten some debt relief, which they richly deserve.

Nevertheless, when I look at the list of for-profit schools accused of making fraudulent misrepresentations, I can't help but wonder why the U.S. Department of Education keeps shoveling billions of dollars a year into dodgy for-profit colleges.

Round up the usual suspects.

Student Debtors Say Affordable College is More Important than Debt Forgiveness

 National Public Radio (NPR) recently ran a poll to determine what Americans think about student-loan forgiveness. More than half the respondents favor President Biden's plan to forgive $10,000 in student debt per borrower.  

Among people with outstanding student loans, 84 percent support Biden's debt relief plan, and 68 percent want Biden to forgive all student debt (as reported in Inside Higher Ed.)

That's not surprising. If the President offered to pay off my Visa card, I would certainly say yes. 

And here's the NPR poll's most interesting finding: Among college-loan debtors, 82 percent believe making college more affordable should be the feds' priority. 

The NPR poll results show that most Americans understand why the federal student-loan program is out of control. A college education costs too much. 

Giving student debtors $10,000 in student-loan relief will do nothing to solve the student-debt crisis, which worsens with each passing month. While politicians and pundits debate whether President Biden should forgive some of this massive debt, the colleges keep raising their tuition. 

The United States has too many colleges and too many frivolous degree programs. Too many universities offer over-priced, mediocre graduate degrees that don't lead to good jobs.  

Most universities are bloated with platoons of highly paid administrators who draw higher salaries than the professors. Several for-profit schools have been found guilty of fraud; almost all charge too much for degree programs that don't pay off financially.

It's easy to shower college-loan borrowers with helicopter money-- a one-time gift of $10,000 in loan forgiveness to every student debtor. Kinda like giving a couple of bucks to a panhandler--how hard is that?

It is much harder to grapple with the underlying reasons for the student loan crisis: corruption, mismanagement, and price-gouging at American universities.