Welcome to the Kipling Cluster EVER WONDER where you fit in society — exactly, that is? I wonder, and it’s ugly. There’s the eye color, a physical characteristic akin to skin pigment, one that can be used to discriminate by a brown-eyed majority. The blue-eyed in America stand at only 25 percent and dropping, a mere 8 percent globally. The green- and hazel-eyed hardly register. Now I learn that I have been identified by a Yale researcher…

No, Dr. Whitten, We’re Not Equal “We are not the party of identity politics, you utter idiots.” Ann Coulter critiquing the GOP response to the State of the Union. READING THE WORDING in the 74 bills that Gov. Holcomb signed into law this week, you were struck by the hypersensitivity to offending even slightly any segment of the population that might feel the tiniest bit unequal.  Peripherally, nothing in the bills or in the press announcements was…

by Mark Franke It is a matter of discipline with me to avoid listening to political speeches. They are hardly edifying and the current trend is a pronounced one toward less and less enlightenment each time a politician rises to his legs and starts talking. Last week’s State of the Union address by President Biden accelerated the velocity in that direction if the news reports, all with their own biased spins of course, are indicative.…

IU Tenure and the Heidt Memo WE APPLAUD the Indiana Legislature’s revolutionary attempts this session to reign in group-think and lockstep tenure in the university system. It’s about time. We call it “revolutionary” in the sense the Founder’s used the term and as it is explained in our newly published “Indiana Mandate: A Return to the Founding Principles.” It is not a rebelling against anything, it is a revolving back to where it should be. And…

Help Us Host a Signing Party The book is on sale! We have begun scheduling signing parties in advance of July 4th celebrations and the upcoming 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  Tell us who you want to invite and pick a time, date and place. We’ll do the rest, asking nationally syndicated cartoonist Gary Varvel or one of our other contributors to join you for a wide-ranging discussion of the Declaration and Indiana issues.  Call our office for help…

by Mark Franke It seems one can’t pick up a newspaper or journal without seeing a major piece on artificial intelligence. 9Until perhaps a year or so ago, I hadn’t even heard the term except in science fiction and now it gets more Google hits than Taylor Swift’s antics at a Kansas City Chiefs football game — the Taylor Swift phenomenon being something else I hadn’t heard of until recently. I don’t really live in…

An Eternal Education Conundrum I BELONG TO A STUDY GROUP that takes up a public policy issue each month. Over the months, one thing has become painfully clear: Viable and sometimes obvious solutions are more plentiful than the will to apply them. Indeed, in many cases it would be just a matter of noticing what’s going on. And if that sounds too pat, here is an example — school funding. Hundreds of legislators have gone through the…

Inside Journalism: What to Know IT WAS A COMMENDABLE practice in the Old Journalism that you did not write on the internal workings of the news room — no “inside baseball,” they said. Readers didn’t have time for it; all they wanted was reasonably accurate reports of the city’s goings-on, prescient whenever possible. That is all out the window. Gannett’s Indianapolis Star, for example, has taken to publishing baseball-card style bios of its reporters lauding their journalistic skills.…

Equity? Here’s a Position for You ALMOST 50 YEARS of an incoherent national dialogue on race has left me with some perverse views. If we are going to have separate black and and white national anthems, for instance, my position is that one of them ought to be Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 13. Recently, I have struggled with the prevailing logic that a founding document declaring all men (persons) equal is somehow…

by Jim O’Donnell Some of our Lord’s harshest statements were about wealth and the rich: Marx adapted that last one: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” With such strong statements by Jesus against wealth, it might seem like a contradiction that He could be a free-market capitalist. But capitalism is only a few hundred years old. Its major contribution to economics is the idea that markets should be allowed…