Ward on Words

Seventy years ago, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, igniting a force that changed history. Though it's a movie about the European theater of World War II, I think of that lovely quote near the end of Saving Private Ryan, when the mortally wounded Captain Miller leans in to Private Ryan as he whispers his last words... "Earn this." Those are words that should inspire all of us.

In 1998, a boy came home from school one day with wet hair. His sharp-eyed mother noticed. A conversation was had. And Jerry Sansdusky first fell into the sightlines of the law. You can find this described in the state of Pennsylvania's grand jury presentment about the Sandusky criminal investigation. This is the story of Victim 6. In 1998, Sandusky was still coaching for the Penn State Nittany Lions. In 1998, Sandusky was a highly respected, very successful man who devoted a great deal of free time to The Second Mile, a charity he founded to help "at-risk" youth.  In the case of Victim 6, there was a lengthy investigation by University Police. But the case was closed "after then-Centre County District Attorney Ray Gricar [who vanished without a trace in 2005] decided there would be no criminal charges." However, the mother of Victim 6 decided to have a couple of conversations with Sandusky, conversations that local detectives had eavesdropped on. Ac...

When he was 28 years old, Mike McQueary walked into the Penn State locker room one evening and saw a man raping a ten year old boy. It wasn't just any man. It was McQueary's former coach, Jerry Sandusky. And it wasn't just any victim; it was a naked, young boy. Now McQueary is a big man. A former Penn State quarterback. A man who had played at Penn State during Sandusky's tenure as a Penn State football coach. So on this night, McQueary sees his old coach ( who had "retired" three years earlier, a year after a janitor reported seeing Sandusky performing oral sex on a child ) naked in the showers raping a child. Here's what the grand jury report says about this incident:

Niall Ferguson has a post in the Daily Beast in which he lambasts the Occupy Wall Streeters for blaming "big business" for our ills, rather than the real culprits, which (in his mind) are the Baby Boomers. For Ferguson, a Harvard professor, it's easier to point a finger at a generation, rather than at the highly compensated Ivy League grads on Wall Street, whose fiscally unsound business practices dragged our economy into a sewer. Here's Ferguson, on the protestors: "Yet if I were a young American today, occupying Wall St. would not be my objective. Just reflect for a minute on the unbridled economic mayhem that would ensue if the protesters actually succeeded. The headline “Goldman Sachs Under Control of Hip Teenage Revolutionaries” would be the last straw for an already fragile economic recovery." Ferguson feels the protesters need to shift attention away from Wall Street and focus on Boomers - the source of our ills today is the Boomers' pr...

An impossibility becomes possible; it has been a decade since 9/11/01, the day that shook our world. Ten years have passed since the planes pierced the Twin Towers in Manhattan. Ten years since the Pentagon was hit. Ten years since ordinary people wrestled with mad men flying a plane over a field in Pennsylvania. No one who was alive that day will forget it. I will never forget it. On that September day, ten years ago, the sky over Chicago was as bright a blue as the sky seen in New York. Bright, cloudless, breathtakingly blue. A sky and a day full of the beauty of autumn. But halfway across the continent, planes like bombs flew into the towers. Red and black flames licked the white buildings. The towers collapsed and the dust swirled like thick, black smoke, choking life out of the glorious day. And the dark cloud blotted out the bright sky. The beautiful day darkened into early night. Hatred begat a violence that was beyond the imagination of all of us. A hatred s...

Just what students of public policy need... lessons from Henry Paulson. He's  apparently joining  the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies for a five-year stint as a senior distinguished fellow. Curious as to the lessons he'll pass on to his students - the need for extreme leverage ratios (as he preached when CEO of GS) or the urgent need to bailout those institutions whose leverage ratios gutted their businesses (as he preached when US Treasury Secretary).

David Leonhardt has a post on the NY  Times Economix blog , talking about the "huge" returns that come from earning a college degree. (You can link to his longer piece in the Sunday Review  here .) My children are small - we're focused on the elementary school education right now. But my beloved niece is in high school - she's just turned onto that road that will determine her future. And college most definitely is in that future of hers. But what kind of college? Her parents (my sister and brother-in-law) just attended a presentation by Northwestern University, and learned that starting next fall, a year's worth of education at NU will set you back $60,000 a year. 60,000 bucks per annum. Sixty thousand dollars a year. Forgive the repetition, but that figure astonishes me. Multiply that times four and you discover that you'll be paying out nearly a quarter of a million dollars for the highly desired NU education. (I have twins and shudder to think of...

In an article called Too Big to Fail or Too Big to Change , Harvard Law School starts with a bang... "Two and half years removed from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the investing public has grown increasingly frustrated with the lack of criminal prosecutions of, and absence of truly significant fines levied against, the senior executives and companies responsible for igniting the subprime meltdown." Good point! Jail the crooks who dragged the economy off the cliff. But that would require a system backed  by ethics and law, not greed and corruption. And that would require BIG CHANGES in America....

An opportunity knocked. We're moving cross country to pursue it. Which means we need to sell a house. The first time we sold a house, many, many years ago, we sold without a broker to friends of friends. That house never went on the MLS at all. And both parties walked away very happy. Last time we sold a house, seven years ago, we sold it by owner for close to the asking price in less than three days. That was then.  This is now. And what we've discovered - the market for homes has vanished completely. There are no buyers at all. We are motivated sellers. We've priced our home competitively. Yet let me repeat: there are no buyers. And if you look at market metrics, for several years now, the supply of homes for sale far exceeds the number of buyers. Within any given month, there are several hundred homes for sale, and just a handful of sales. That's grim news if you've signed the contracts and are moving cross-country in a couple of months. The one bit of gre...

Apparently Newt Gingrich's top campaign team members resigned en masse , frustrated to work with a man who'd rather vacation with his wife than hit the campaign trail. He's alienated the House Republicans by trashing Paul Ryan's "Prosperity" plan. He's alienated those who believe the marriage contract is binding, and not something to be tossed aside (especially when the wife is in the hospital being treated for cancer.) He's alienated working class Republicans with his half million dollar loan from Tiffany's. And now he's alienated the top tier of his campaign staff. I myself will never understand the enormity of the Newtonian ego, nor what props it up, seeing as a reality-check would pop it faster than a pin. But what passes for reality on Main Street seems but a strange dream to those in DC. Thus Newt remains a candidate in name only, a man with no hope of winning at all.