You’ve probably seen these images of UC Davis protestors getting doused in pepper spray during an Occupy protest at the campus. I can’t come down in support of either side, all I can do is ask questions. Here’s why:

I’ve yet to find a vetted timeline detailing the events that led to the spraying. It’s hard to gather the entire story from a video that starts as the spraying commences. As far as I can tell, based on the limited stories I’ve read and the description posted on the video itself, that this particular group  of students sitting on the sidewalk did so in protest of police disrupting the original protest, tearing down tents and making arrests. The human chain these protestors formed was designed, based on this eyewitness account, to [peacefully] demand the release of the students and to block any path the police may have used to make these arrests.

The woman, in her eyewitness account, says:

“We were never warned that we were going to be pepper-sprayed.

Lt. Pike walked up to my friend, and I am told that he said, “Move or we’re going to shoot you.”

Then he went back and talked to a few of his police officer friends. A couple of other officers started to remove people who were sitting there, blocking exit. Pike could have easily removed us, just picked us up and removed us. We were just sitting there, nonviolent civil disobedience.

But Pike turned around and I am told that he said to the other officers, “Don’t worry about it, I’m going to spray these kids down.”

He lifts the can, spins it around in a circle to show it off to everybody.

Then he sprays us three times.”

Were the arrests, prior to the pepper spraying, lawful? That’s not for me to decide, and it’s certainly not up to the students to decide. Before we get wrapped up in the dramatic images of the incident, we should ask ourselves:

1. why were these protestors pepper sprayed?

From the accounts I’ve read, it appears as though they were pepper sprayed for impeding police officers making arrests.

1. is it lawful in California to impede an officer in the act of making an arrest?
2. if it is not, is it lawful for police to use approved methods  (such as pepper spray) to disperse a crowd acting in a way — peaceful or not — that impedes their ability to make an arrest?

If yes, then:

1. are the police required to warn protestors prior to utilizing pepper spray?

If yes, then:

1. were the protestors warned?

It’s hard to tell from the video, and the eyewitness account says they were not warned. However, based on a different angle from another video, students have their heads tucked down, hoods covering their heads, and one student is wearing a bandana to cover his face. Is this the norm at Occupy protests, or were the protestors warned that they would be pepper sprayed? Further, given all the media accounts of pepper spray being utilized at Occupy protests around the country, should students have reasonably expected to be pepper sprayed during their act of civil disobedience?

A high school student body in California elected its first same-sex homecoming court this weekend, naming Rebeca Arellano the school’s first female homecoming king. Arellano’s girlfriend, Haileigh Adams, was named homecoming queen. Such an event is encouraging in light of the anti-homosexual bullying dominating news tickers over the last year. But I take issue with it, and here’s why:

First, Arellano’s Facebook post directed at all those who oppose her being named homecoming king, particularly those who oppose it in the name of tradition. She says:

“For all the girls who think tradition should be continued, go back to the kitchen, stop having sex before you’re married, get out of school and job system, don’t have an opinion, don’t own any property, give up the right to marry who you love, don’t vote, and allow your husband to do whatever he pleases to you. Think about the meaning of tradition when you use it in your argument against us.”

Arellano, before she even graduates high school, is prepared to take into the  world the idea that “tradition” is a bad thing. Tradition is neither good or bad, its value is based on whatever we ascribe to it. On Christmas, tradition tells us to give gifts to those we love. Flying a patriotic flag on the Fourth of July is tradition. Saying a blessing before a meal is tradition. Hell, crowning those chosen to the court is itself tradition. Is arguing for a traditional male and female homecoming court wrong? No, it is not. Unless we’ve determined that a male and female homecoming court is itself wrong. Also, I presume Arellano is telling women to consider those things for which they have no choice, that they would otherwise be forced into for the sake of tradition. I know plenty of women who freely and willingly desire to cook in the kitchen (in my current heterosexual relationship, I do as much if not more of the cooking), who desire to wait for sex until marriage (Tim Tebow?), get out of school and the job system (my uncle is a stay at home dad, and my sister couldn’t dream of a greater calling for her own life than to stay at home with her four children — two on the way).

Second, selecting a female as homecoming king deprives a male the opportunity of filling the court, which is by all means unfair. But that’s not the thrust of my point, it’s consequential (although, I’ve noticed Progressives are uncharacteristically quiet concerning this blatant disregard for fairness).

Third, as I said, the second point concerning fairness is entirely consequential. The only way selecting a woman as a homecoming king deprives a man of the opportunity is if that’s the point of the homecoming court: to elect one man and one woman who represent the values of the student body. If the point of the court is to elect a homecoming couple, then by all means, elect whatever kind of couple decides to enter (good luck to you when those in a polyamorous relationship decide to enter). And what of those who want to run as a homecoming king or queen, but are not in a relationship? Do they not hold as much value as their peers who are in relationships? If they are, that’s not the message we are sending. And what of two same-sex best friends — not in a relationship — who decide that, rather than run against one another, they will both occupy the court as king and queen? Is a woman not permitted to run as king because she isn’t in a homosexual relationship?

The best answer to these questions is to amend the homecoming court and turn it into, quite literally, a popularity contest (because isn’t that what homecoming court amounts to, anyway?). Simply elect the most popular person to represent the student body at homecoming. It’s not romantic, nor nostalgic — but it’s fair. And how did we get to this point in the first place? Because two women decided it was unfair for them not to occupy the court …

still waiting for the argument that lays out exactly how or why that’s unfair.

Before you lament the fact that I’m going to draw comparisons between a dramatized version of the accounts surrounding the Oakland Athletics’ 2002 season (see: Moneyball) and the state of today’s print news industry, I should remind you that some of life’s greatest lessons were learned from parables — storytelling meant to entertain and inform. My highschool class Valedictorian chose to address our class with some life realizations learned from the then-popular movie The Matrix, and encouraged us to choose either the red or blue pill upon our entering the “real world.” I’ve never forgotten that speech, in large part because he actually distributed pills and coerced us into choosing one. He was incredibly persuasive.

When I entered journalism in college, from Reporting 101 up until my very last class nearing graduation, I was led to believe the problem in print journalism finding a sustainable home online lied with the content. If only we had more video, photos and reporters who could produce that content …

I didn’t understand the problem at all.

Not until I took an online newsroom course in 2010 with Dr. Camille Broadway (she found the book “Digitizing the News” which served as my reading, and she built the curriculum around case studies and interviews with newsroom managers already “doing” online) did I learn that the problem in creating a successful online news entity lied in the business model, not in its content. In Digitizing the News, I learned that innovative content strategies were executed just about as early as the Internet itself — but the platform and infrastructure didn’t exist to take make it sustainable (we have been doing for years what Netflix learned recently — or has known — that you can’t give something away that costs money to produce).

Had I known this from the beginning, I would have tailored my education more around business management and less around writing — or some sort of combination of the two.

Enter Moneyball, wherein Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane must field a competitive baseball team on a tight budget. He does so by thumbing his nose at traditional baseball scouting and relying on calculated analysis of ball player stats.

In one of the movie’s early sequences, Beane meets with his scouts to find suitable replacements for three, recently departed players (lost to free agency, not death). He chastises the scouts for their inability to grasp the problem: the problem isn’t that they merely need to fill three empty slots by acquiring good players; the problem is that the team needs to buy wins. How do you buy wins? By buying runs (and you earn runs by getting on base). Beane challenges his team to think differently, telling them that it’s necessary to “adapt or die.”

I hope newspapers are beyond the point of realizing that we need to “adapt or die.” In large part, due to the likes of Jeff Jarvis, Steve Buttry and Mike Orren (among many others) leaving their mark on new media. Now we’re finally at a place where we can begin implementing some kooky ideas for making money online.

I’ve often admired the heart behind Liberal’s well-intentioned positions on certain public policies and legislation, but I haven’t been able to reconcile it with what I view as realities in the world. On the surface, many progressives spout liberty as their core objective, but much of what stems from that rhetoric is, what I would consider, an antithesis to freedom. A recently published map outlining the most free states in the U.S. affirmed my gut “feelings” on this. The map lists New York, arguably the most liberal state in the country, as the least free. And Texas, arguably one of the most conservative, as one of the most free.

I’ve been reading “A Theory of Everything” by Ken Wilber after my brother recommended it to me. In the first three chapters, Wilber outlines why progressives appear to bowl over reality in the name of fairness and equality. I’ve included the texts wherein Wilber discusses these inconsistencies, which he calls “boomeritis” and blames on narcissism:

“Pluralism becomes an unwitting home for the Culture of Narcissism, and narcissism is the great destroyer of any integral culture in general and a [Theory of Everything] in particular (because narcissism refuses to step outside of its own subjective orbit and hence cannot allow truths other than its own) … and this is where Boomeritis enters the picture.

The boomers, critics agree, have been a notoriously rebellious generation. Some of that rebellion, no doubt, has come from postconventional individuals sincerely interested in reforming those aspects of society that are unfair, unjust, or immoral. But just as surely—and we have much empirical evidence for this—an alarmingly large chunk of that rebellious attitude has come from preconventional impulses that are having a great deal of difficulty making it up to conventional realities. The standard shouts of the sixties—from “Fight the system!” to “Question all authority!”—can come from preconventional just as easily as from postconventional; and evidence suggests that it was the former more often than the latter.

The classic case study is the Berkeley student protests of the late sixties (protesting especially the Vietnam war). The students claimed, in one voice, that the were acting from a position of higher morals. But when given actual tests of moral development, the vast majority scored at preconventional, not postconventional, levels. (There were few conventional/conformist types, because, by definition, they are not very rebellious.)

The most fascinating item about such empirical studies is something that is often seen with “pre” and “post” situations—namely, both pre-X and post-X are non-X (for example, both preconventional and postconventional are nonconventional, or outside the conventional norms and rules), and thus they are often confused. In such situations, “pre” and “post” will often use the same rhetoric and the same ideology, but in fact they are actually separated by an enormous gulf of growth and development. In the Berkeley protests, virtually all of the students claimed they were acting from universal moral principles (e.g., “The war in Vietname violates universal human rights, and therefore, as a moral being, I refused to right in that war”). But tests showed unequivocally that only a minority were acting from preconventional moral principles; the majorty were acting from egocentric drives: “Nobody tells me what to do! So take your war and shove it.”
It appears that in this case very high-minded moral ideals were used to support what were in fact much lower-minded impulses.

… Boomeritis is that strange mixture of very high cognitive capacity (the green meme and noble pluralism) infected with rather low emotional narcissism—exactly the mixture that has been noted by so many social critics. In other words, the very high developmental meme of pluralism becomes a shelter and a haven for a reactivation of some of the lower and intensely egocentric memes. In [the pluralist's] noble attempt to move beyond beyond conformist rules (many of which are indeed unfair and marginalizing), and in its genuine desire to deconstruct a rigid rationality (much of which can be repressive and stultifying)—in short, in [the pluralist's] admirable attempt to go postconventional—it has often inadvertently embraced anything nonconventional, and this includes much that is frankly preconventional, regressive, and narcissistic.

This strange mixture of very high postconventional memes with preconventional narcissistic memes is boomeritis. A typical result is that the sensitive self, honestly trying to help, excitedly exaggerates its own significance. It will possess the new paradigm, which heralds the greatest transformation in the history of the world; it will completely revolutionize society as we know it; it will revision everything that came before it; it will save the planet and save Gaia and save the Goddess; it will be the most extraordinary …
Well, and off we go on some of the negative aspects of the last three decades of boomer cultural studies.

… boomeritis has significantly tilted and prejudiced academic studies; it is behind much of the culture wars; it haunts almost every corner of the New Age; it drives many of the games of deconstruction and identity politics; it authors new paradigms daily. Virtually no topic, no matter how innocent, has escaped a reworking at its hands …”

Dale Hansen, sports reporter for WFAA in Dallas, says the decision to air the story about a drunken Jerry Jones in a bar was the wrong decision. Good job standing up for capital “J” Journalism.