There are signs that need correction!

A timely illustration, only 104 years old.

Case in point: this political cartoon.

Am I supposed to laugh at it? Find it appalling? I don’t know. It looks like a pretty sweet deal, this socialist state.

I took a look at some of his other cartoons. Mainly what I see is a bozo flying into fits of apoplexy at the idea of “free stuff”, where the underprivileged get anything that might make their lives better. He’s really committed to making sure everyone stays “in their place”.

But come on! A high-speed rail to Alaska and Hawai’i? Who could complain about that?

It’s because when he goes to an event with a more representative sample of the population, he discovers that there are people who despise him. Case in point: Trump was booed at a baseball game. He better get used to it, because he’s going to be seeing open expressions of contempt from the public for the rest of his life.

I guess I’ve been failing to keep up with the educational literature, because I haven’t seen any articles that recommend screaming at your students until they break down and obey your will. I think I might be reading the wrong journals — is there a “Journal of Pedagogical Bullying” that I’ve missed?

Somebody’s been reading it, anyway. Like a certain engineering professor at UW-Madison.

Graduate students described the work environment under engineering professor Akbar Sayeed as “toxic” and “abusive.” The professor called students “monkeys” and “chimpanzees.” One said he compared them to “slaves” who must learn to endure pain because it would last only four or five years.

Turnover seemed constant. Some students joined his lab only to leave within a few months, even though it meant losing their financial stipend.

The churn put more pressure on Brady, who came to UW-Madison in 2010 to pursue a doctorate in electrical engineering and worked as a research assistant in Sayeed’s lab. Despite Brady and others’ attempts to address how Sayeed’s behavior drove students away, the tirades continued and Brady’s responsibilities mounted. He trained new student workers on top of his own research, pushing his degree further into the future.

“Exploitation may not be too strong a word to describe how (Sayeed’s) behavior impacted (Brady) in his position as grad coordinator,” a report on Sayeed’s conduct would later say.

How can such a situation arise? How can it persist? If I heard that kind of story from a student or witnessed a colleague doing such things, I’d be be bringing it up to the chair, or to an HR committee, or straight up to the chancellor. If this behavior were brought up in a tenure review meeting, Sayeed ought to have been out on his ass. But UW-Madison let this untenable situation fester for years, until something happened that required the university to sit up and pay attention.

In 2016, Brady’s seventh year on campus in a program that typically lasts five or six, he started secretly recording Sayeed screaming at students in the lab. He hammered out his thoughts in a Microsoft Word document, describing a siege mentality among students in the lab. He arranged a meeting with a trusted faculty member that fall, one he had turned to the year before with concerns about Sayeed.

Brady never made the meeting. In October 2016, at age 28, he killed himself.

Jesus. You’ve got a professor who is driving students to suicide. What do you do?

If you’re the University of Wisconsin, you put him on a two year leave, during which time he is snapped up by NSF to work there. They also declared that this death was an “extreme and isolated” case. It doesn’t sound isolated at all to me — this is a systemic problem where an abusive, bullying professor could function without oversight or correction for years and years, until he pushed it just a little too far. It shouldn’t take a student suicide to set off alarm bells.

Sayeed is returning in January, which I find unbelievable. This is the kind of outrageous failure and persistent ethical lapse that ought to end his career. He’s even confessed and admitted to serious anger management problems!

In response to the university’s investigation, Sayeed admitted and apologized for his unprofessional conduct but denied abusing his authority as professor, making threats or intentionally delaying Brady’s degree. He said that if the department had taken action in response to students’ complaints, it may have “altered some of the outcomes.”

If only the administration had prevented me from bullying, this wouldn’t have happened, says the bully, placing the blame elsewhere.

If you’re wondering how he had a job in the first place, all is explained.

Since he started working for UW-Madison in 1997, Sayeed said, he has done everything he can to advance his students’ careers and secured millions in research money.

I hope, since the university won’t take appropriate action, that the whisper network among students at UW-Madison guarantees that he never gets another graduate student, and that this disgraceful behavior means NSF never trusts him with another penny.

She might be facing a few challenges of her own, though.

Republican Danielle Stella’s campaign to take down Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar has hit a bit of a snag. There is currently a warrant out for her arrest after she failed to appear for a court hearing on Tuesday morning.

She is accused of shoplifting a few thousand dollars worth of stuff from a Target in Edina, which is quite possibly the most Republican White Woman from Minnesota crime ever.

I wonder if being in jail would affect her electability in her district? Not with the Republicans, probably, they’re all thick as thieves, you know. The Muslim inhabitants might have higher standards.

She was never a serious challenger, she’s got a bizarre homophobic/racist background, she only seems to be supported by right-wingers, and yes, recently she had a freaky meltdown about being indirectly accused of being a Russian agent. Don’t care. She’s done. She was never going to get the Democratic nomination. All the attention being paid to this irrelevant distraction is meaningless, except as a tool to get you to ignore the slimeball-in-chief.

In every election, there is always an assortment of fringe kooks who make noise for a while, get the backing of some other fringies with money, and then melt away as the campaigning gets serious. She’s one of them. Move on.

I swear, media coverage of the Democrats is like watching a dog with the zoomies spotting a squirrel.