Editor’s Note: The Indianapolis Star yesterday launched a series of articles beginning with “God and Politics: A once-fringe Christian movement gains influence in Indiana government.” It attempts, incredulously, to marginalize Christian teaching, the basis of both western civilization and the American experiment, as only a recent political tactic of extremists. Along the way, it butchers the concept of separation of church and state. We asked Micah Clark, a veteran of such battles, to share his initial views.…

AS A NEWSMAN I don’t have high expectations for modern journalism but we are at a new low.  The media’s coverage of the congressional decision to shut down government demonstrates how close we are to tyranny.  The press focused on the narrow issue of SNAP benefits rather than on the broader and more intractable issue of the congressional dysfunction leading up the shutdown. Why? Easier. It allowed a single person, the president, to be painted as the villain. If…

by Mark Franke Every year the Gallup organization conducts an opinion poll to determine the level of confidence Americans have for major institutions. It should come as no surprise that news organizations rank at the bottom with Congress and educational institutions also scoring high negatives.  The confidence level in the Supreme Court of the U.S. is much more nuanced and not easy to decipher. Ever since the contentious Robert Bork nomination, names advanced by the…

The NIMBY of Data Centers AS USUAL, the emotional argument is winning the day, this time against data centers. If you mingled with the crowd of anti-Google activists at a recent library town hall in Fort Wayne you would have met precious few engineers and zero economists. Rather, the one hundred or so in attendance can be characterized as informationally deprived NIMBY crackpots determined to “stick it to the man,” as we used to say.  Our NAACP leadership…

The Mamdani Effect “It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong.” — Thomas Sowell HAVING WORKED with words all my career, I have admired the economists’ turn of phrase. Shakespearean almost, they pack a lot into a few syllables. My favorite is “rational ignorance,” the realization that certain things are so confused that learning…

by Richard McGowan, Ph.D. This year’s world series and all the attention paid to Shohei Ohtani reminded me of the way students used to get by when writing papers. They used CliffsNotes instead of doing research. Can AI be far behind? I had a bright student who wrote a paper on Plato’s “Crito” as explained by every student’s former cheat sheet, i.e., CliffsNotes. Conner discovered that CliffsNotes was woefully deficient. In its analysis of that Platonic dialogue, it never addressed history’s…

Grades: All Rhinestones Now “Personally, I liked working for the university. They gave us money and facilities. We didn’t have to produce anything. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there. I’ve worked in the private sector — they expect results.” — Dr. Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) in the 1984 movie “Ghostbusters.” A UNIVERSITY, as any institution, is justified by its product and function, that is, the service it provides society. You might…

by Mark Franke One hears the word democracy so often these days — and in so many contexts  — that it has lost its meaning. There is the tiresome charge that anything Donald Trump does is a threat to democracy on one hand and on the other hand a rather pedantic academic argument that we are not and never were a democracy, being a republic instead. One is tempted to just tune it all out if…

by Nathanael Snow, Ph.D. People respond to incentives. Governor Mike Braun has called a special session of Indiana’s legislature for the purpose of redrawing Congressional District lines. Indiana voters ask Braun why he cares so much. What’s in it for him? And then let the legislators ask the same question. A legislature is supposed to be the arena of political compromise. A state representative from the Indianapolis region may desire to see an increase in infrastructure…

The Municipally Privileged “All government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt HAS YOUR CITY worked out its new budget with the cuts and adjustments made necessary by property-tax reform? Mine has done so, and in a long, torturous process inscrutable to the common man. But we do know one thing for certain: No city employee was inconvenienced. We know that…