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Severe Outflow by R. Edwards

Utopian Liberalism vs. Real World: A Prime Example

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Far too many coffee-shop liberals who never have been directly and chronically involved in the welfare system (unlike yours truly), who never have sniffed American “poverty” (unlike yours truly), and who therefore don’t understand jack-sqaut about the “other” side of it (unlike yours truly), haven’t got the slightest clue about the rampancy of abuse out there in the real world. I promise you, it’s nothing new, and nothing small. This story points out but one relatively tiny example in one locality with one program, among countless possibilities nationwide.

“Despite Reforms, Federal Cell Phone Program Still Plagued By Fraud” [Link may be perishable…if it fails, use Google.]

That is but a tiny, flyspeck-small glimpse of the real world of welfare, folks…the real world–not some ivory-tower, academic version thereof where everybody is honest and pure in intentions, government aid runs with fine-tuned efficiency, and distant suits and ties in DC or insular professors at Harvard with zero street cred actually know what’s best for the poor. And don’t you know it, there are unicorns crapping Skittles.

Lying, cheating, scams, theft, hustles…they’re everywhere. I mean all over–rampant, dripping from every pore of the obese bag of bloat that is the welfare system. News flash: human beings are not fundamentally good. [If we were, we wouldn’t kill each other by the hundreds of millions over the course of the last 500 years, sin in even the most minor of ways on the individual level, or ransack the planet.] No, it is basic human nature to take fullest advantage of every possible out, to take shortcuts, to cheat, to game the system in any way possible–especially the more seemingly dire the circumstances. Greed is a vice common to rich and poor alike. I saw it first-hand in the inner city 30 years ago, and you’re dreaming Utopian delusions if you think it’s any better now, in a worse economy, with higher unemployment and public-aid rates.

As with massive infestations of cockroaches in decrepit rental homes (something else with which I have first-hand experience), this problem with the welfare phones is simply one little roach running along a baseboard in the labyrinthine haunted house of governmental welfare. For every one you see, countless bazillions more are crawling behind the walls.

The intentions, as with all such programs, were good: get low-cost phones into the hands of the poor so they could communicate for the sake of emergency security and jobs. It helps hugely to have a phone number to put on a job application if one’s priority is to get a job (that priority a dubious assumption in many but not all cases). Yet it’s laughably easy to procure numerous phones and fence them on the black market for drugs cigarettes stolen goods booze sex basic living expenses. Those who, through no fault of their own, truly are in dire need should be the most up in arms about all this, as it is they (and once was “we”) who lose out thanks to to the undeserving, in more ways than one.

In the case of the phones, and similar heavily subsidized, top-down programs, it’s not the heartfelt idea with which I have a problem–but the real-world execution. The waste and abuse isn’t just the end level, but all the way up the chain to the top. For example, one facet of the current version of the phone program involves a government contract for smartphones (Welfare smartphones??? Why not just basic talk phones?) awarded to one of Barack Obama’s campaign-money suppliers. Oh, now I see…

I don’t believe in complaints without solutions, and I have offered some to the welfare and poverty problem. Solutions at the governmental level are not helped by political payback, cronyism, and administrative overhead and inefficiency. How can any thinking person trust this or other welfare programs, administered by distant and unfamiliar bureaucrats, contracted with Chicago-style cronyism at the top, rife with layered overhead throughout, and riddled with rampant abuse on the field side? I guess if you’re a latte-sipping Utopian dreamer, you’ve never seen or even imagined the toxins of the system from well within. Being so ignorant of what’s happening on the streets, enough cognitive dissonance sets in so that the real world is but an inconvenient truth. You think throwing money at the problem solves it. [Of course, that usually and selfishly means someone else’s money too.] As if…

Wake up. As I’ve said before:

    Government hasn’t solved American “poverty” in twenty decades of trying. What makes higher-tax advocates think that will change? It won’t, no matter how much money we feed to the red-tape-covered entitlement monster and mass-promoter of public-dependency addiction that is big government. We cannot tax our way out of “poverty”.

Therefore, I have a modest proposal:

Before mindlessly across-the-board cutting of essential programs for safety (such as national defense, border security, meat inspections, air traffic control, storm forecasting, etc.)., and before raising taxes in any way, for anyone, there must come this firm and non-negotiable precondition: Eliminate every last dollar of waste, fraud and abuse everywhere in government, period. I mean every single dollar of waste–not half, or 75% or 99.9%–all of it–before a penny of tax or fee increases can occur! Now there’s a goal worth striving for.

Example of A Common Copyright Violation in Storm Photography

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Back in the early 1990s, Fred K. Smith of Okeechobee, FL, took one of the most dramatic weather shots ever known–a tornado over Lake Okeechobee, adjacent to a bright, forked lightning strike. [The lake was behind some trees.] The WeatherMatrix BLOG, among other sources, legitimately reports on and properly credits the image. However, they have the date wrong–it actually was 15 June 1991 (not 1993). I actually was out the same night, attempting with much less success to shoot lightning with different storms, about 100 miles south of Fred’s position.

I have a signed print of the photo sent by Mr. Smith himself, a souvenir of a photographic exchange that Fred and I had in ’93, shortly after I moved to Kansas City from South Florida. All the evenings I spent photographing storms in the heat, humidity and mosquito clouds of the Everglades never yielded anything like that! The image ended up in National Geographic and several other legitimate publications, surely earning Fred some well-deserved shekels for his retirement.

Unfortunately, illegal scans of Fred’s iconic photo have been circulated around the Internet in countless forms over the years, including e-mail relays with an oil rig faked into the photo and passed off as being in Texas. About.com has an urban legends page devoted to that incident. All manner of bogus “facts” have been assigned to the image.

It just keeps happening. I’ve blotted out names and avatars of all but the person who is propagating Fred’s image without his consent.

No. No! No!!! NO!!!!!

This is NOT yesterday night’s North Platte tornado. Whomever first claimed it as such is a bald-faced liar. And everyone underneath the photo, in the comments section, has been jobbed too, by being misled into wrongful attribution of the image.

Let’s not rush to conclusions and blame either Jim Logsdon or his son yet. Both of them could have been played like a fiddle by somebody else passing off this Florida tornado as being from North Platte. Still, nobody should pass along photo claims without verifying their authenticity; and that’s where Mr. Logsdon definitely erred (along with six of his Facebook followers). Let me be clear: Ignorance is no excuse.

This photo, at some point, was stolen from its owner and propagated without his permission. Credit needs to go where credit is due, and that is to Fred Smith. As a fellow storm photographer, I feel a rightful duty to call out this kind of untruthful garbage. Far more of this happens than I notice; but when it does, I won’t hesitate to bring attention to it.

I also will alert photographers I know to unauthorized uses of their imagery, online or in print. I am grateful or other storm enthusiasts who have afforded me the same favor. I have given, and will continue to offer, monetary reward from the copyright-violation settlement to anyone who finds a photo of mine that turns out to be used without permission.

Academic Freedom: Where’s the Line?

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What are the limits of academic freedom?

Thirty-six year veteran epidemiology professor James Enstrom at UCLA is finding out, after publishing studies that went against conventional thinking regarding tobacco smoke an diesel soot.

Of course, one legitimately could ask the same question about Ward Churchill at Colorado, who was pushed out for academic-misconduct reasons after referring to the occupants of the WTC who died in 9/11 as “Little Eichmanns”, among other things (including apparently false statements about his own tribal heritage).

And how can we forget another recent case (of effective demotion instead of dismissal) closer to home — specifically involving David Deming at OU?

Each of these cases raises big questions about precisely where the threshold lies for universities to get rid of or demote faculty, under what guises, and how equitably that threshold is applied. In all cases, the threshold seemed to be vague, unknown to the professor until it was applied, and wasn’t specified to the media (i.e., the public) afterward. Whether true or not, each case (at first) smacks of arbitrary and capricious action, with legitimate constitutional issues revolving mainly around freedom of speech.

I say the threshold resides in making patently false, fraudulent and/or factually incorrect claims to get hired or promoted, being convicted of a felony, or engaging in certifiable and provable scientific or academic misconduct (as opposed to mere allegations). Based on that, Ward Churchill doesn’t pass the test, given on his false statements about his heritage, not on his lunatic but freely expressed opinions. The Deming case was so muddy, it’s hard to evaluate independently without a lot of inside knowledge that’s being kept under wraps (under wraps…wait a minute, OU is a public university, right?). But given what is known, it sure seems like a case of institutional vindictiveness and retaliation to me. It’s too early to say about Enstrom; UCLA needs to prove he has done something wrong.

As UCLA, CU and OU are PUBLIC universities, funded by PUBLIC tax dollars, freedom of speech and “innocent until proven guilty” apply. Public universities should make the lines for dismissal or demotion crystal-clear, sharply defined, unambiguous, universally and equally applicable, and readily available to those who provide their tax dollars.

Private schools, of course, are a different matter. Faculty at those should be smart enough to know what they’re getting into before they sign on, that there is a risk of their academic freedom being restricted, and not to join to begin with if they don’t agree. As such, some private schools can become safe havens from intellectual challenge for the like-minded, or for quiet and compliant types who are content never to make waves or question authority.