For over 25 years I was on the Stanford campus nearly every week for music rehearsals until the week before my county lockdowns started because Stanford began locking down a week early. I watched the faculty, staff and students go evermore wacko-wokie over those years. How and why did all those ticket-puncher fools flock to apply to Stanford making it as "desirable" as Harvard?
I also have visited and worked at the Stanford hospital for nearly 60 years. Worked for 2 years as a high school volunteer in the emergency room and on the wards. I saw the underbelly of that institution and its medical school under the same roof and did not like what I saw. A creeping callousness and disregard for patient safety by 99.99% of the doctor staff who looked on patients as scary inconveniences most of the time. Worsening "us v them" dynamic over the years as California became so litigious on medical malpractice. "I got hurt so SOMEONE must pay!" Medicine is not an imperfect "art" anymore but a black & white simple recipe where all results must be perfect for everyone all the time! So what if my daily habits or diet is a cause of my illness! If I stick my hand in a farm machine and my arm is ripped off (while doing a stupid human trick) someone has to pay me!! The State finally limited malpractice awards to a pittance of under $200k for even gross negligence and then it was off to the races for malpractice with impunity.
I saw Stanford's nurses ever more overworked and underpaid. Lip service at best for the hippocratic oath. Nurses and doctors spending more time typing on computers for insurance reports than observing or talking to patents. Gross negligence constantly covered up. Death certificates issued fraudulently to cover up disasters easy to in the computer records of pill and potion dosages administered. I learned a few years ago from doctor-friends at the hospital never to go to the ER after 5 pm on weekdays or on any weekends or holidays since that is when as they said, "the maintenance crew" of low level residents were on duty. Go at those times to a nearby non-teaching hospital 15 minutes away even if in full cardiac arrest.
I once did legal work in front of the Stanford Medical School's human subject research oversight board and let's just say they all looked at human test subjects as idiots to be abused and underpaid in their own publish-or-perish and get-patent-royalties races but for one board member who was a non-doctor pastor required by federal law to be the token non-medical doctor on the panel. A binary "us v. them" in the extreme. Petty authoritarian dictators, ticket-puncher go-alongs, and resume builders from birth allowed - no, encouraged and enabled! - to run amok.
As the software tech boom started in the 1970's and the words "Silicon Valley" hit the mainstream press by the early 1980's, I saw ever more Gold Rush get-rich-quick students and faculty arrive as the Leland Stanford Junior Memorial University board of trustees got evermore pasty-faced software "bros" tech titan-tyrant-geeks who had usually no skills in math or biology whatsoever. Poor people skills having grown up glued to computer screens. Now many of them seriously think A.I. can replace all doctors and artists, too. Add in equally dumb trustee fools from the venture capital, real estate redevelopers, lawyers, investors, and banking sectors and here we are. The bankruptcy this year of Silicon Valley Bank and the Sam Bankman-Fried scandals - the latter is still under house arrest at his parents' Stanford Faculty Ivory Tower Happy Ghetto house one block away from the Stanford president's house built by former Stanford trustees' chair US President Herbert Hoover and his wife - are the tip of the iceberg on that board of rot which gleefully rubber stamped all that online bat flu censoring and has invested way too much of the university's endowment in risky securities.
Current trustee chair is Jerry Yang, a former Stanford student computer geek who founded Yahoo!, and sold it shortly after the People's Republic of China tried to impose tough censorship on it. He now does venture capital. Married to a Stanford MBA student he met while starting his company. She has served a long time on the San Francisco Ballet's board and they are big supporters of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. No kids. He has served multiple terms as Stanford's board chair. Current term expires July 1, 2023. https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/board-members/
Glad I am old enough to have been assigned to read in high school Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, and Huxley's Brave New World books along with extracts from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, with lots of US history, too, studying many primary documents from George Washington's and Ike's farewell speeches to the US Constitution. Plus I took a lot of biology, math, physical science and history courses in college. Trained to drill down to primary sources, do math without calculator, and writing without a computer.
What I saw in 2021 from a 2020 Massachusetts candidate for US Senate who was deplatformed from Twitter right before balloting by a fascist gov/corp scheme which he uncovered with FOIA demands and lawsuits detailing Stanford's involvement in gov/corp online censoring means I will not participate in any Stanford activities until they clean house. But, I suspect they have to hit the rock bottom of bankruptcy for that to happen. Thanks to old Railroad and Junk Bond Dealer Leland “Robber Baron” Stanford, a former California governor and US senator, the university he built on his old trotting horse farm sits on a massive ever expanding real estate tax-free portfolio held in a special trust Old Leland pushed like a royal emperor through the state capitol before he died.
History teaches empires always rise and fall. Power always corrupts giving rise to reformers who become corrupt themselves. Some empires and their enablers fall faster than others.
Re: The Good and the Ungood
For over 25 years I was on the Stanford campus nearly every week for music rehearsals until the week before my county lockdowns started because Stanford began locking down a week early. I watched the faculty, staff and students go evermore wacko-wokie over those years. How and why did all those ticket-puncher fools flock to apply to Stanford making it as "desirable" as Harvard?
I also have visited and worked at the Stanford hospital for nearly 60 years. Worked for 2 years as a high school volunteer in the emergency room and on the wards. I saw the underbelly of that institution and its medical school under the same roof and did not like what I saw. A creeping callousness and disregard for patient safety by 99.99% of the doctor staff who looked on patients as scary inconveniences most of the time. Worsening "us v them" dynamic over the years as California became so litigious on medical malpractice. "I got hurt so SOMEONE must pay!" Medicine is not an imperfect "art" anymore but a black & white simple recipe where all results must be perfect for everyone all the time! So what if my daily habits or diet is a cause of my illness! If I stick my hand in a farm machine and my arm is ripped off (while doing a stupid human trick) someone has to pay me!! The State finally limited malpractice awards to a pittance of under $200k for even gross negligence and then it was off to the races for malpractice with impunity.
I saw Stanford's nurses ever more overworked and underpaid. Lip service at best for the hippocratic oath. Nurses and doctors spending more time typing on computers for insurance reports than observing or talking to patents. Gross negligence constantly covered up. Death certificates issued fraudulently to cover up disasters easy to in the computer records of pill and potion dosages administered. I learned a few years ago from doctor-friends at the hospital never to go to the ER after 5 pm on weekdays or on any weekends or holidays since that is when as they said, "the maintenance crew" of low level residents were on duty. Go at those times to a nearby non-teaching hospital 15 minutes away even if in full cardiac arrest.
I once did legal work in front of the Stanford Medical School's human subject research oversight board and let's just say they all looked at human test subjects as idiots to be abused and underpaid in their own publish-or-perish and get-patent-royalties races but for one board member who was a non-doctor pastor required by federal law to be the token non-medical doctor on the panel. A binary "us v. them" in the extreme. Petty authoritarian dictators, ticket-puncher go-alongs, and resume builders from birth allowed - no, encouraged and enabled! - to run amok.
As the software tech boom started in the 1970's and the words "Silicon Valley" hit the mainstream press by the early 1980's, I saw ever more Gold Rush get-rich-quick students and faculty arrive as the Leland Stanford Junior Memorial University board of trustees got evermore pasty-faced software "bros" tech titan-tyrant-geeks who had usually no skills in math or biology whatsoever. Poor people skills having grown up glued to computer screens. Now many of them seriously think A.I. can replace all doctors and artists, too. Add in equally dumb trustee fools from the venture capital, real estate redevelopers, lawyers, investors, and banking sectors and here we are. The bankruptcy this year of Silicon Valley Bank and the Sam Bankman-Fried scandals - the latter is still under house arrest at his parents' Stanford Faculty Ivory Tower Happy Ghetto house one block away from the Stanford president's house built by former Stanford trustees' chair US President Herbert Hoover and his wife - are the tip of the iceberg on that board of rot which gleefully rubber stamped all that online bat flu censoring and has invested way too much of the university's endowment in risky securities.
Current trustee chair is Jerry Yang, a former Stanford student computer geek who founded Yahoo!, and sold it shortly after the People's Republic of China tried to impose tough censorship on it. He now does venture capital. Married to a Stanford MBA student he met while starting his company. She has served a long time on the San Francisco Ballet's board and they are big supporters of the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. No kids. He has served multiple terms as Stanford's board chair. Current term expires July 1, 2023.
https://boardoftrustees.stanford.edu/board-members/
Glad I am old enough to have been assigned to read in high school Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, and Huxley's Brave New World books along with extracts from Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, with lots of US history, too, studying many primary documents from George Washington's and Ike's farewell speeches to the US Constitution. Plus I took a lot of biology, math, physical science and history courses in college. Trained to drill down to primary sources, do math without calculator, and writing without a computer.
What I saw in 2021 from a 2020 Massachusetts candidate for US Senate who was deplatformed from Twitter right before balloting by a fascist gov/corp scheme which he uncovered with FOIA demands and lawsuits detailing Stanford's involvement in gov/corp online censoring means I will not participate in any Stanford activities until they clean house. But, I suspect they have to hit the rock bottom of bankruptcy for that to happen. Thanks to old Railroad and Junk Bond Dealer Leland “Robber Baron” Stanford, a former California governor and US senator, the university he built on his old trotting horse farm sits on a massive ever expanding real estate tax-free portfolio held in a special trust Old Leland pushed like a royal emperor through the state capitol before he died.
History teaches empires always rise and fall. Power always corrupts giving rise to reformers who become corrupt themselves. Some empires and their enablers fall faster than others.
W.R.