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Odin and the Valkyries
Widespread technological ignorance, inherent in some academic departments, allows systems administrators to gain control of educational technology applications, computers, media equipment, and libraries. Apparently, they think that technology must rule preeminently and that applications represent a secondary concern. They sanctify and enforce their own ideas of political correctness and expediency. They make frivolous claims of user infraction of regulations, then curb freedom of expression. Fortunately, these despots can neither gain absolute control of the Internet nor empower themselves as absolute censors. Ethan M. Katsh wrote a decade ago: [01]
As the newer technologies appear on the scene, publicized attempts to control information will probably increase, just as censorship laws proliferated in the sixteenth and seventeenth century . . . The inevitable end of the process, however, will be a realization that total control of public information is an anachronism.
However, faculty members still do not use their academic freedom to prevent technocratic demagogues usurping their communication rights. They submit to technocratic Valkyries without complaint. They relinquish their academic freedom through fear, apathy, ignorance, or lethargy. Subsequently, they find themselves censored when they have a need to publish controversial material themselves.
Through fear they fall victim to the totalitarianism that usually accompanies censorship. By constant carping about the "appropriateness" of Internet messages, they give systems operators the means to disenfranchise them and their colleagues. By their apathy they give these latter day Big Brothers and Sisters the excuse, and inordinate power, to censor them. By their lethargy they do to themselves what they have done to others through their irresponsible behavior. Consequently, freedom of expression ceases to exist and assistant technocrats and lawyers frequently control both the media and the messages. These entrenched hetaerae follow the absolute dictates of their despotic gods.
Smith Hempstone, former US ambassador to Kenya and a journalist, compared contemporary female technocrats and specialists [lawyers] with Renaissance women. He described them as having incisive minds and an ability to write without cant. He wrote that they have a matching generosity of spirit and grace in their writing style.
Indeed, Renaissance women had broad intellectual interests and accomplishments in both the arts and the sciences. Moreover, they contrast the hetaerae of their time and modern technologists and university lawyers. Meritless members of this group have consistently feathered their nests through misusing affirmative action programs for more than three decades. One must assume that Hempstone deliberately waxed satirical while writing his essay or had spent too much time in the African sun sipping gin and tonic.
Instead of women with intellectual accomplishments matched with charm and grace, the academe has become an aerie for Valkyries. These wild, warrior maidens from Valhalla fly on winged steeds through the academic halls owing allegiance only to their personal gods who resemble Odin. They pander to the totalitarian ideologies of these gods without thought because they have lost the ability to think critically. They flash their weapons in the gleam of halogen lights and their weird laughter mingles with the sound of computers. They hold politically correct trysts upon the Valkyrie rock, a haven for female followers of Odin's ideologies. [02] After deciding who will die, they organize war among the male professorate to emasculate them. Then they carry the souls of their slain intellectuals to Valhalla, where, the supreme deities and creators of the cosmos, the gods of computer science and administration, receive them.
Despite First Amendment protection and Federal law, Ronald A. Johnson, Vice President, Computing and Communications, University of Washington (UW), supported by his hetaera, Sandra S. Moy, Director, University Computing Services, practices arbitrary expressive assassination by removing computer access. Moy's previously consistent record of freedom of speech advocacy suggests that Johnson probably fosters her actions. His previous irrational behavior supports this contention.
For example, Johnson received an electronic invitation to attend a public meeting. He then, without notice or due process, ordered the removal of the sender's computer access and destruction of databases. The email message resembled many other messages sent by both faculty members and students. It announced that Satish Kumar, an international speaker from Schumacher College in England, would speak in Seattle. University Unitarian Church (UUC) sponsored the event and provided the accommodation. Kumar lectured on deep ecology and the environment. Paradoxically, the university bookstore has since sponsored him for a second lecture series that it held in Kane Hall on the UW campus. When Johnson received the invitation to attend the first lecture, he responded by threatening the UUC public relations officer with legal action for sending it to him, thus:
Any further mailings to me constitute harrasment [sic]. I intend to apprize the Attorney Generals [sic] Office of the State of Washington.
Then Moy arbitrarily removed the sender's computer access and has for five years either denied access to his academic and journalistic databases or destroyed them, surely, irrational behavior from the twilight zone and not the responsible actions of public officials.
Richard L. McCormick, President, University of Washington, has increased the salary of the semi-literate Johnson (who has evidently never made full professor) from $125,004.00/1994 to $231,000.00/1999 (84.79%). He now receives the second highest salary at UW, including the medical school, and only $16,176.00/yr less than McCormick's base salary. Apparently confidence tricksters employ like people with similar talents to cover up their unlawful activity.
Johnson and Moy, as systems administrators, earn taxpayer-funded salaries at more than three and two times, respectively, the rate received by a full professor with tenure. Despite these taxpayer-funded rewards, they choose to neglect their ethical responsibility to protect freedom of expression. Instead, they work toward consolidating their own power through absolute control of the media. Then they use the services of the state attorney general and campus lawyers Niccolls and Olswang to cover up for them.
Early in the 1990s, Moy exhibited some integrity. She resisted the technocratic megalomania rampant on the campus and showed a reasonable level of ethical behavior. Interviews with her staff revealed her as a fair employer with a pleasant, ecological disposition. Considering her qualifications and experience, she earned a very generous salary of $103,044.00/1994. Moy now receives $154,200.00/1999, a 49.64% increase in the four years since McCormick took office. In contrast, a full professor with tenure received an average $60,156.00/1994 and an increase to $74,187.00/1999 (23.32%) during the same period.
However, Moy obviously had a hidden agenda with a commensurate price. She grasped the opportunities offered by the reorganization of the corrupt Gerberding regime (McCormick's regime follows suit). The regents renamed the UW Valhalla "Gerberding Hall" and appointed Richard L. McCormick as president and his wife as his consort. A thorough investigation shows that this pair of New Jersey confidence tricksters has previously left a trail of unlawful activities at several institutions. The regents did not bother to check their credentials before they hired them. Incidently, their cohorts at two universities continue to try to deny lawful access to public records to cover up the trail of fraud and deceit left by McCormick and Lebsock.
Moy chose to match the gutter ethics and politics of Johnson, and other minor gods in various university departments. She supports the insidious censorship that Johnson has imposed upon the electronic media and the university libraries. Perhaps more serious, she has committed misprision of a felony. Misprision means concealing a felony committed by another. [03] For example, if a principal commits a felony and an assistant has full knowledge of it she must notify the authorities. If she conceals the crime then she has committed misprision. [04] Moy has committed misprision often by not reporting the computer fraud committed by Johnson and others to federal authorities. [05]
Likewise, Carol S. Niccolls, then an assistant attorney general, but apparently having none of Moy's redeeming qualities, saw her opportunity to make a killing. She moved from a position of dubious advocacy to obviously unlawful activity. She has frequently framed evidence then obstructed justice by denying due process of law. These violations rank particularly seriously when made by a public official. However, they rank doubly so when committed by a lawyer because they violate Washington State Bar Association rules.
Obstruction of justice means impeding or obstructing people who seek justice in a court: the act by which one person attempts to prevent the rightful due process of another person. It particularly applies to conduct intended to play on a person's disadvantage through knowingly false assertions. [06] It also applies to withholding evidence and public records in attempts to suppress or destroy evidence knowing that an investigating officer will need it. [07] Furthermore, computer fraud ranks as a federal offense with punishments ranging from five to ten years imprisonment. [08] Niccolls has spent more than five years denying due process and falsifying evidence. She has destroyed and concealed public records to cover up her felonies and conspired with others to commit computer fraud.
Not surprisingly, Niccolls participated in the appointment of McCormick, then became his executive assistant: a flagrant conflict of interest because she participated in McCormick's appointment. As an assistant attorney general she received a salary of $43,200.00/1994. She now receives $120,000.00/1999, a 177.78% increase, probably for keeping the skeletons in the closet. Evidently, McCormick pays his hetaerae handsomely to keep their mouths closed and to violate law for him.
Technocrats have already made considerable inroads into the academic process by controlling communications tools. Prior restraint has reemerged with a new generation of technocratic censors, probably more dangerous than those encountered in the past. Dangerous because they silence dissent by hacking into Internet communications networks and deface web pages to suppress information that they find unpalatable. A UW communications official has even published instructions on how to deface web pages. He has provided on the Internet the strings of code so that any recalcitrant student can deface them. This encourages more electronic graffiti.
Moy and Johnson use unsubstantiated accusations claiming infraction of systems rules to deny access and then refuse due process of law. The lawyer Niccolls manufactures evidence to support prosecution then prosecutes the case herself. This resembles the firefighter who sets a fire so that she can become a hero putting it out. Their joint actions resemble those of the French court described in Turgot's Ancien Regime. Conal Thomas' questions again become relevant: not, "Does censorship exist?" rather, "Under what kind of technological censorship does one now live?"
The inexhaustible capacity of technocrats to find ways to practice prior restraint and to censor information becomes an ironic contrast to the idea of global communication. Through censorship they curtail information transfer to suppress the truth. Consequently, they prevent the development of universal intellectual freedom. This results in a pernicious technocratic totalitarianism (or technological cultism).
Moy and Niccolls persist in proving the anachronism that total control of public information will succeed although any rational person can see that it will eventually fail. Apparently, they have a subconscious professional death wish that they must assuage or think that, as Valkyries, their gods will protect them. Johnson and McCormick prove that democracy becomes a sham when controlled by any form of technocratic elite, especially when that elite works for a state bureaucracy. They remind one of the way that an elite force acted in the name of the proletariat in the former Soviet Union: absolute control without accountability.
Meanwhile in the State of Washington, Governor Gary Locke, the state's supreme Odin, looks on, supported by his chief Valkyrie, Christine O. Gregoire, Attorney General. Together they continue their laissez fair policies with full knowledge of rampant computer fraud at the University of Washington. By their willful blindness and inaction they condone it.
The mythical Odin and the Valkyries never learned that one can only sacrifice others when one becomes ready to sacrifice oneself. They now exist only as a figment of the imagination in a Wagnerian opera. However, they still serve as a powerful metaphor for oppression. The players in the Washingtonian tragicomedy will probably end a similar way because they have yet to learn that when one tolerates others one begins to tolerate oneself. Toleration protects freedom of expression by denying technocratic intervention and insuring due process of law.
Nmesis.
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