Opinion
Neutering Congress before the upcoming debt ceiling dispute by asking the U.S. Department of the Treasury to mint a platinum coin worth $1 trillion was an idea that emerged from somewhere in the blogosphere in 2010. A couple years ago, Congressional gridlock over whether one of the wealthiest nations in the world would pay its bills wasted time that should have been spent on anything else and, despite the nick-of-time agreement not to default, degraded the nation’s credit rating anyway.
Just when you think technology can’t get more convenient, it completely revitalizes and changes traditions ingrained in our society. For decades, adoption was a lengthy process in which years and years might go by before “waiting” parents could actually adopt a baby.
Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring the world of massively open online courses (aka MOOCs), comparing the offerings on Coursera.org, among others, to those I’ve taken at Portland State. The experience has been revelatory.
Like a Magic 8 Ball with a single shred of advice floating around its inky interior, the National Rifle Association—one week after a gunman took the lives of 26 people in an elementary school in Connecticut—insisted that firearms are still the best medicine against gun violence.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’…I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
In the face of its departure, many political pundits have already declared the 112th Congress the worst in U.S. history. While I could debate the merits of that claim for a while, it’s a fact that while attempting and failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act a total of 33 times, a lot of other important work was never quite accomplished in 2012.
Texas radio host Alex Jones began a White House petition in late December to have CNN’s Piers Morgan sent back to England for threatening your Constitutionally protected right to bear arms. Last year’s string of mass shootings led Morgan, a limey, to promote a federally mandated ban on “military-style semiautomatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
“Build a better mousetrap,” Emerson is supposed to have said, “and the world will beat a path to your door.” Why build that mousetrap in the first place? Why do we innovate? The question has been the focus of decades of research, but it’s not merely academic. Portland State’s administrative leadership thinks it knows the answer, and it’s betting—with student money—on “green.”
Whether we like it or not, Portland State is the college we chose for the time being. Every school has its advantages and disadvantages and the same goes for PSU, which has its own set of achievements and disappointments.
The job of a journalist becomes increasingly difficult as news articles are more regularly posted on Facebook and retweeted on Twitter because of eye-catching titles rather than content.
It’s nice to think that we’ve come pretty far as a country in the last 200-ish years. And we have, but not all at the same time. From observations on both the academic and Internet fronts, there’s a large number of people who would have us believe that America is “post-racial.”