* The Painful Awkwardness of Teenage Years

Pennsylvania teen, Alex Hribel,
accused of stabbing classmates.

 



Connecticut teen,
Christopher Plaskon,  
accused of stabbing
a classmate to death.

* Words my Aunt Bertha never heard

James Walter Logan 1878-1966

 



Bertha Nugent Logan 1888-1965
 

Internet
iPad
iPod
Skype
Laptop
PC
Google
Facebook
cell phone
touch screen
android
iPhone
Hyundai
Acura
Kia
Lipitor
Viagra
Kent State killings
President Mandela
Dominique Strauss-Kahn
James Earl Ray
We All Live  in a Yellow Submarine
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
David Letterman
Beyoncé
oral contraception
Roe v. Wade
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
"One small step for man ,one giant step for mankind.
Boston Marathon
Boston Marathon bombings
Dodi  Fayed
Twitter (she probably heard this as a verb)
Phablet
erectile dysfunction
blog
blogger
blogspot
artificial intelligence
clone
genetic code
.com
.net
.edu
World-Wide Web
www.
http://
Lang Lang
The Moral Majority
The Common Core
McChicken
Barak Obama
Obamacare
Oprah
Netflix
Three Mile Island
Chernobyl
Fukushima
Janet Reno
Hillary Rodham Clinton
no-fault divorce
rehab
bulimia
anorexia
Gay Liberation
same-sex marriage
safe sex
HIV
palm pilot
mouseclick
cable TV

(to be continued)


PK Lookalikes (16)

WOMEN IN BLACK

Sister Wendy Beckett, art critic

Georgia O'Keefe, artist

Marianne Moore, poet

* Let the new world begin !

Letter to the Editor
The Valley News

Editor:

It’s time for folks like me who’ve lived seven decades  to get out of the way and let the new world begin:  Out with Town Meeting and in with Australian ballot; out with local school governance and in with regional school boards; out with the dignity of manual labor and craftsmanship and in with college and career readiness for all. Out with high school grades and in with standardized national testing.

 

There’s nothing worse than us old folks who stand in the way of Progress with our old fashioned values. Oh  abolishing guilt and sin and hell has worked wonders for society:

 

• Look how we have mass shootings on a regular basis and nobody raises an eyebrow-------at least not for more than a week.

 

• Look how putting a casino and a peep show in the pocket of every citizen who can scroll a touch screen regardless of age has liberated our children from the Puritan morality which drove us old folks to the psychiatrist’s couch.

 

• Look how cracking down on that doorway-drug marijuana has built hundreds of new prisons, filled them with inmates, and made thousands of jobs available for security guards.

 

• Look how no-fault divorce has ennobled the institution of marriage and made our children optimistic about building lasting families of their own after a trial-run with an apprenticeship first marriage.

 

• Look how the consolidation of banks into mega-bank-merger-of-the-week-clubs has enabled home buyers to enter the housing market with faulty mortgage loans and  made “foreclosure” a household word.

 

• Look how a college education guarantees huge debt and no job upon graduation.

 

• Look how Big-Pharma not only fills our medicine cabinets with pills whose side effects (suicidal thoughts, bleeding; death) are worse than the illness they purport to treat, but  with pills which also turn our children into addicts and sometimes overdose victims.

 

• Look how governments have reneged on pension promises and left workers high and dry after thirty years of service.

 

Yes sir.   Let the new world begin.  Who needs old fashioned ideas like keeping your word, anyway?

Paul D. Keane

* The Emperor's New Screens

 

* Pushing University Presidents who hold Yale Ph.D's



Yale Ph.D in Philosophy
and
President of Kent State University,
Glenn A. Olds



Yale Ph. D in Literature
 and
 President of Yale University,
A. Bartlett Giamatti

Yale Drama School graduate,
 Miss Isabel Wilder,
 with her brother,
author,
Thornton Wilder



LINK to Yale Daily News article on Yale President, Peter Salovey, in which the following post appears.

theantiyale • 2 minutes ago

 

"Moral leadership".

I worked with two university presidents as a student activist, both Yale Ph.D's.

They both exerted "moral leadership" but only after they were pushed.

Glenn A.Olds ( Ph.D, Philosophy) , was successor to the President of Kent State University who had been just sitting down to a martini lunch at the local Brown Derby May 4, 1970 when four of his students were murdered by guns wielded by Ohio National Guardsmen who had taken over the campus after two days of demonstrations by students, May 2nd.

A full year and three months later Nixon's Attorney General announced there was "insufficient evidence" to convene a federal grand jury investigation of the murders.

Along with the President of the Kent State Republican Club I mounted a petition to Nixon to reverse Mitchell, and asked Kent President Olds to sign it. (Fat chance---he had been a Nixon appointee to the U.N.)

He never signed it but unwittingly he did us one better.

 He said he would personally take the petition and us to the White House to present it, BUT ONLY if we got a majority of the students at the University to sign it. I'm sure he doubted this would be achieved, but it made him look like a flexible university president in the press.)

In less than ten days, we got 10,380 signatures of the 19,000 student body, thousands of whom were commuters.

Olds took us to the White House in the University piper-cub (thank God he had a pilot).

Of course, there was a snow-ball's chance in hell that Nixon would over-rule his Attorney General, and after dragging his feet for a year, Nixon said "no." ironically, after two more Attorney's General had come and gone due to Watergate, the Acting Attorney General--- for a grand total of three whole days (Robert Bork, of all people) allowed a Federal Grand Jury investigation of the Kent State murders to be convened.

 

A. Bartlett Giamatti (Ph.D, Literature) was president of Yale in the early 1980's before AIDS had a known cause (HIV hadn't been discovered).

When I confronted him with evidence that a prostitute whose infant had been born with AIDS and was so ill he had never left the ICU at Yale-New Haven, and that the prostitute was still turning tricks on Howe Street and booting up heroin with friends using dirty needles,
he refused to meet with me to discuss the situation

http://aidsatyale.blogspot.com

 

After I announced that "60 Minutes" would be in town to do a piece on this---the first known American example of heterosexual transmission of what had been erroneously though to be a "gay disease" --- Giamatti could have continued to ignore me, and the situation.
Instead he provided me access to University legal counsel (later a federal judge) Jose Cabranes, who advised me through the "60 Minutes" piece on how not to fall into legal booby-traps when interviewed by "60 Minutes."

President Giamatti later agreed to over-rule his own Health Service whose director had refused my plea that they distribute the blunt-language pamphlet "Sex and AIDS" created by myself and a Yale Biology professor, and paid for by Miss Isabel Wilder, the octogenarian sister of the late author Thornton Wilder and herself a graduate of Yale Drama School.


The pamphlet was distributed to every Yale student but at our expense (Moral leadership, yes---but not a penny more!)

Hence, my lesson learned: university presidents with Yale Ph.D's exert moral leadership in moments of crisis only when cornered publicly or pushed.

Paul D. Keane

M. Div. '80
M.A., M.Ed.

 

* Standing up for The Late Bloomers

CLICK and Press CTRL +  to enlarge

 

* Dave Clark's Eyebrows


 Time Waits for No One

Left: Dave Clark at 71;
Right: Dave Clark in the heyday of
The Dave Clark Five,
 circa 1966+



* Harkness Tower: Yale's New Haven Harbor Light House

LINK to Yale Daily News article:

Yale's Fossil Fuel Mistake

 http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2014/04/04/barlowe-fossil-free-yales-mistake/

* Nine Jars at Yale's Peabody Museum,circa 1952

 

 


(L-R) Geronimo; Prescott Bush,
 the Yale thief who stole Geronimo's skull as a prank,
later U. S. Senator from Connecticut
and sire of George H.W.,
grandsire of W.

 

LINK to original Yale Daily News article: Through the Lens: Peabody

________________________________
Science Student  • 3 days ago  

 

Vertebrate Zoology has some incredible collections -- as do most divisions of the Peabody. A special favorite of mine are the fossils of O. C. Marsh, one of the most important paleontologists of all time. His life was controversial, and for good reason -- but Marsh discovered Triceratops, Stegosaurus, Torosaurus, Apatosaurus, Allosaurus and more. We've got all the type specimens right here at Yale!

theantiyale  • 5 days ago  

As a school aged child I was brought to the Peabody and saw with my own eyes nine formaldehyde-filled jars each containing a developing human fetus. I'll bet this display has disappeared and will never be admitted to having existed at all. I was born in 1944 so you can approximate the dates of the exhibit from that year onward through school-age.

 

Science Student to theantiyale  • 3 days ago  

Dear Mr. Keane,

I work at the Peabody as a student assistant, and thought I'd try to address your comment. I work in Vertebrate Paleontology, so human fetuses are quite literally "not my department" -- but I did some searching to see what I could find.

 The Peabody keeps a database of all the specimens it contains, and it does list a number of human remains. All of these, however, are osteological -- which makes sense, in light of the Peabody's collection structure. We tend to preserve mammals as skins or skeletons -- not in jars of formaldehyde. Our liquid-preserved specimens tend to be fish or amphibians.

 Preserved fetuses don't sound like the Peabody's usual fare, and there are certainly none in our collections database. Perhaps the ones you saw were a temporary exhibit from another institution? Or perhaps they were from the medical school, which I know has some human specimens? Maybe you'd be interested in this article: http://news.yale.edu/2010/09/1...

 Whether or not there were fetuses on display, your post raises valid questions about museum ethics. Like any powerful institutions, museums DO sometimes behave in highly-questionable ways. The Peabody itself has a fairly checkered history, largely due to its founder O. C. Marsh.

 Marsh was one of the greatest paleontologists of all time, and the discoverer of hundreds of fossil species. But he was also a combative, difficult man whose rivalry with E. D. Cope led him into an academic feud. In the course of their battles, Cope and Marsh slandered each other in the press, destroyed and stole fossils, etc.

 Furthermore, Marsh was a grave-robber. During his fossil hunts out west (in the 1870s-1880s) he disinterred the remains of a number of Native Americans, bringing back their bones for the Peabody's collections. Even at the time, this spurred outrage -- as contemporary newspaper articles prove.

 Ethical issues aren't unique to the Peabody, either. Plenty of museums contain (or once contained) stolen artifacts, unearthed bones, and human specimens of questionable provenance. This is a particular issue for older museums, as scientific ethics have changed greatly over the years.

 I feel, though, that the past actions of museums matter far less than their current behavior. Museums offer incredible resources to their patrons, volunteers, employees and visiting researchers. These days, most of them (including the Peabody) operate on strict ethical principles, and would be horrified at the deeds of O. C. Marsh. Some museums have even reburied specimens in atonement for their past actions.

 The modern Peabody is not Marsh's museum -- or even the museum of sixty years ago. It's a source of incredible scientific research, and a depository for some truly incredible collections. I grew to love the place as a student even before I started working there -- and it's a job I'm proud to have. I hope that you -- and other readers -- aren't put off by what the Peabody once was. Many institutions have a checkered past, but this one is working toward a bright future!

 Please let me know if you have other questions, and thanks for reading!

 

theantiyale to Science Student  • a day ago  

How fascinating. Perhaps it was the med school. At the time I was 8 or 9 and my mother was showing my horrified little eyes (I was fascinated AND horrified) what was in the bottles. I didn't quite know what the facts of life were ( remember this was 1952 when I was 8).

 I DID know that my mother had had two miscarriages before I was born. And now, that I am an old man, I wonder if any of those fetuses were my siblings (odd thought, but you know doctors didn't tell their patients what happened to the miscarriages in those days. No documents or authorizations were signed).

 It is ironic that two blocks from the Peabody at that time, Roman Catholics were conducting all-night vigils saying the Rosary in front of Planned Parenthood on Orange Street as Griswold v State of Connecticut was about to emerge and make its way through the courts,

 I made these remarks in a post on YDN and a letter to the head of the Peabody a few years ago (I'm sure he brushed it off as many at Yale brush off the feelings of town folk) and never had the courtesy of a reply, so your long courteous and fascinating history here is welcome for more than one reason.

 It sounds as if O.C. Marsh and Prescott Bush (a Skull and Bonser , later Connecticut's U.S. Senator and father of Geo H.W. and grandfather of W) were both busy stealing bodies while at Yale: (Prescott stole Geronimo's skull for his secret society), Dubious desecration.

 I only today--after years of posting --- learned that there is a way to access on the YDN posting board those who reply to my posts.

 Many thanks for your serious reply.

PK

 

Science Student to theantiyale  • 16 hours ago  

 

Hi, Mr. Keane, and thanks for your reply!

 Just wanted to comment on your attempted communication with Dr. Briggs. I'm sorry he never replied (I know he's very busy with renovations) -- but I'm not sure if he'd be able to answer your questions. In 1952, the Peabody's director was Carl Owen Dunbar -- who passed away several decades ago. The public portions of the museum's archives (in which I've worked) don't contain much information on past exhibits; it's unlikely a current employee would know about 1952 displays.

 If you're interested, you might try contacting the Museum's archives. If there's information on old displays anywhere, it ought to be there -- plus the archivists are more used do dealing with this kind of inquiry. The med school might also have information for you. If the Peabody ever displayed fetuses, they'd have to come from somewhere -- and the medical school would have better access.

 As to the origins of the fetuses you remember... I hesitate to speculate. If they were preserved in jars, they could have been around for years -- so there's no way to know when they were collected. If such an exhibit existed, I'm not surprised it was long ago -- medical ethics have changed much in the past decades.

 It was in the early fifties, if I remember correctly, that the cancerous cells of Henrietta Lacks were cultured without consent. Her "HeLa" cell line contributed greatly to medical research, and without a doubt saved many lives . But still, Mrs. Lacks' case shows much about the treatment of patients at the time. Not all doctors (or scientists) felt the need to obtain samples by request.

 Of course, this has changed much over the years, and informed consent is a critical part of modern medical ethics. These days, displayed fetuses are generally donated after stillbirth -- but as you said, that wasn't always the case. Given the timeframe of this story, what you suggest is certainly possible -- though I don't think that the modern Peabody (or medical school) would do such a thing.

 

Thanks for reading, and let me know if you have other questions! I'd be happy to find you some contact information if you're interested in talking to someone about this.