Federal Agents Raid Office of Special Counsel


Essentially, the news item is a dismayingly familiar tale of (alleged) malfeasance of office and abuse of power. The part that grabbed my attention, in a pointing-and-laughing sort of way, is:


I have a mental image of a petty crook confident that he can't possibly be caught because he saw some clever trick on TeeVee.

Swiss experts say plants have rights too

A report by the government-appointed Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) described interfering with plants without a valid reason as "morally inadmissible".

The committee looked at ethical views held on plants and issues of how their use could be justified.

t said that from a wider perspective, "all action involving plants for the preservation of the human race was morally justified"....

Well, that last part is certainly reassuring.


 

Marc Fisher's column in today's Washington Post begins with the question:

What would drive one of the nation's most successful and respected school systems to report which racial and ethnic groups demonstrate the soundest moral character and ethical judgment?

The answer, it appears, is a classic case of bureaucratic "thought" run amok:

But in Fairfax, and in schools across the land, the instinct -- no, the compulsion -- is to amass data points and "disaggregate," ed-lingo for looking at children not as individuals but as members of a group. The move to quantify grows from a religious devotion to test scores, a faith that the shaping of a mind can be mapped like a cancer cell and expressed as a number. And the resort to race stems from the balkanization of society, the self-destructive notion that we are a collection of groups rather than a nation of individuals who believe what it says on the coins in your pocket: e pluribus unum -- out of many, one.

"The superintendent told me that the reason they broke it down by race was that two years ago, the board decided to report all data by race," Hone says. "That was part of the No Child Left Behind frenzy. This is a classic case of a pendulum overswing."

From George Will's column:

First, measuring sectarian violence is problematic: The Post reports that a body with a bullet hole in the front of the skull is considered a victim of criminality; a hole in the back of the skull is evidence of sectarian violence.

I'm not sure this is a useful distinction. It is computed that eleven thousand Sectarians have, at several Times, suffered to be called common Criminals, rather than submit to shoot their Foes in the back of their Skulls.