“Ideas cannot be owned. They belong to whomever understands them.”–Sol LeWitt

The Courant reports:

Sol LeWitt, a Hartford-born artist known as one of America’s most significant visual artists of the past four decades, died this morning in New York City at the age of 78.
…
LeWitt’s death, after a long battle with cancer, brings an end to one of the most legendary artistic careers of our time. To all who knew him, he was an extraordinary and principled man, an artistic maverick, a native son who never forgot his local connections, a genius whose talent and drive were equaled only by his enormous generosity, and a husband and father whose love of his wife and their two daughters, Sofia and Eva, was a literal wellspring of color in his life and work.

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The trend is clear from the many comments here and from the deluge of emails I’ve been getting. There’s some serious problems with the way our school system is run, and no one wants to be the one to step forward and tackle it. Part of that is the fear and intimidation tactics used by the proponents of the BOE budget. Part of it is political. Part of it is the caliber of the people involved.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” — Albert Einstein

The Problems

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Today we throw a little spotlight on current BOE member Bruce Kimmel. Kimmel garnered a reputation as a strong advocate of curbing the reckless spending of the BOE. But the words use to describe his performance on the BOE by his former colleagues range from dissapointing to toothless. SO why is Kimmel changing his spots? Well, it turns out that Kimmel prefers to pick positions on his vested interests. The rumor circulating around town is that he wants a full time job with the BOE after he retires from the NYC school system. Could his aspirations be so crass? Who, but Kimmel knows?
Should we be surprised by this political chameleon? Well, I suppose not if we take a look in the wayback machine for another position that Kimmel took and how he handled it. . The beauty of the web is that is that there exists a kind of permanent record of who says what and when. And you just don’t know where you’ll find things.
Bruce’s famous personality is caught here, on a blog post, about one of those meaningless Democratic town committee resolutions about US foreign policy. There’s a part of the Democratic party that is strongly anti-war, and the resolution in question was about the Iraq war. From Neurotwitch:(emphasis mine)

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