Fly the Flag, Print the Correction

Below is a lightly edited version of a letter that was emailed on June 19, 2026, to newspaper publisher George Hearst III and Dr. Havidan Rodríguez, president of the State University of New York at Albany. The letter is the most recent in a series that was kicked off by an attempt to get a correction printed of a straightforward and consequential mathematical error printed in the Albany, New York, USA, Times Union, a Hearst newspaper. The claim was made that the proposed 2026 New York State budget was 26% larger than the budget had been five years earlier, but this figure did not take inflation into account. The comparison was much like calling 2.5 centimeters 150% larger than 1 inch. Measured in constant dollars in accordance with the Consumer Price Index, the two budgets were roughly equal, and according to New York State's own inflation correction, the difference was 7%. Exaggerating the increase in state spending would tend to discourage calls to tax large fortunes, including the baronial wealth of the Hearst family, the 14th-richest family in the United States (Hearst family). Therefore, I claim that the refusal to print a correction constitutes a serious ethical violation on the part of publisher George Hearst III. Furthermore, failure to account for inflation in reporting monetary amounts distorts our economy in many ways, including by forcing workers to demand cost-of-living adjustments to their salaries, changes that get portrayed as raises, endangering the compensation of meek folk, who tend to be reluctant to ask for things for their own benefit. The messages in this series will be posted in reverse chronological order.

Above: A picture taken at Collins Circle, at the State University of New York at Albany, on June 17, 2026, in the middle of Pride Month, shows the United States flag flying from one pole and the New York State flag, with the SUNY Albany flag beneath it, flying from another pole. No pride flag is to be seen. Photo credit: James Lyons Walsh 

Dear Pres. Rodríguez and Mr. Hearst,

Happy Juneteenth! Happy Pride Month! I hope this finds you both well. I have time-sensitive advice for you both. I’d like to share a story first, to frame the issues.

Here is a very disturbing video of a marginalized man named Steven McCluskey, who fell at the base of an escalator in a transit station, whose clothes got caught in the mechanism, and who died of strangulation, his clothes having been drawn tight around him and the skin of his back having been pulled into the machinery. What would you do if you saw a man trapped by a moving escalator? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WPj1OJg0Go)

McCluskey was a carpenter, as Jesus is reputed to have been, who became an addict. I think the crises of mental health and substance abuse are a natural consequence of the anomie that allows the United States to continue accelerating its destruction of the habitability of Earth, which kills poor people worldwide first; conducting assassinations from the sky of the innocent and guilty alike, which was going on in the Obama administration, too; arming Israel, which is again making war in Lebanon and never stopped killing in Gaza or the West Bank, consistent with an outmoded, minority variant of Judaism that worships the Old Testament genocidal deity Whom most of humanity with any interest in the matter has aligned to a greater extent with what is good and decent; failing even to discuss the starvation that is apt to ensue later this year from disruption in the Iran War of fertilizer shipments during the Northern Hemisphere planting season; and blaming many people for their miserable lot in the glorious meritocracy that deliberately consigns one-third of its members to degrading existences.

My interest in the video, however, focuses on the several passersby who stopped to help McCluskey and on the many others who didn’t: Nobody pressed the emergency stop button on the escalator! (https://youtu.be/1WPj1OJg0Go?t=129)

Let’s think about what you see from around 2:30 to 3:00 in the video. Was no one aware of the emergency stop button? Were people hesitant to interfere in the functioning of machinery they didn’t own? What did you think in response to my question about what you would do if you saw someone trapped by a moving escalator? I thought of the emergency stop button immediately, before I saw the situation.

The United States has an emergency stop button, which has been pressed in an attempt to stop our callous abuse of so many vulnerable folk, like Steven McCluskey, worldwide. Look at how our power is being destroyed. Look at how thieves, and not the good Jesus- or Robin Hood-type robbers, but patrimonialist gangsters, have been permitted to take over our institutions. Our nation’s eyes are being plucked out by carrion birds, and the otherwise decent folk, the good Germans, so to speak, who spent their lives going along to get along while the United States victimized billions, are being funneled into trajectories that end in destruction.

Do something, won’t you? Here’s what I require of the two of you today.

Pres. Rodríguez, what follows is a post I made yesterday on LinkedIn. I’d share it with you on LinkedIn, but I was banned years ago from your LinkedIn page, where I posted considerable feedback in the comments when the page was visible to me while logged in. Now I can see it only when logged out. Leadership becomes very difficult when leaders ignore the voices of those who disagree with them. Timidity in the form of selective deafness is the eventual downfall of authoritarianism. In any case, here’s an urgent communication you may not have seen:

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Happy Pride Month! The city of Albany, New York, USA, flies the progress flag, a version of the pride flag that honors LGBTQ+ people and people of color, at multiple, prominent locations in honor of Pride Month. So does New York State. Why doesn't UAlbany, the State University of New York at Albany, fly any pride flag at Collins Circle, its main entrance, or anywhere else that this alumnus passed by on a long walk across the main campus yesterday?

In a series of brief videos, totaling four minutes among the first three, I document this jarring contrast and the analogous difference in groundskeeping choices between UAlbany's Collins Circle and the city of Albany's Washington Park. The former is dominated by a vast monoculture lawn, where, at great expense, every species but one is destroyed to produce uniformity. Washington Park, which can be understood to honor every decent person of great accomplishment who bore the name Washington, offers gorgeous polyculture lawn. Everywhere you see the standard grass, there's also clover, and in many places you'll find great variety in the plants that combine naturally, and hence harmoniously, to provide ground cover.

Frankly, as an alumnus of UAlbany (PhD, 2020), who was matriculated from 2012 to 2020, I saw the encroachment of neoliberalism as paid marketers gained power, students who came from money increasingly flaunted their wealth, food courts stopped providing free water, the University at Albany School of Business became the showpiece of the university, and everything that might bring bad publicity got swept under the rug, regardless of danger to students who lacked privilege.

In my opinion, UAlbany, like so many other colleges and universities, has evolved toward fascism, drawn along by the MAGA movement, yes, but pushed by the kind of people who, in their hearts, think of MAGA folk as deplorable and love, love, love money for all the good they think it can do. I'd like to remind these people that too much of a good thing, including money, is bad and tell them that we got saddled with MAGA in part as a reaction to their elitism and willingness to discard folk who didn't go to college.

We need, at the very least, to see the progress flag flying over the University at Albany. Its absence speaks volumes. As an alumnus, I insist that it be raised this year and suggest psychotherapy to damp down the herbicidal mania that keeps UAlbany lawns monoculture.

Pride Month at UAlbany: No Pride Flag and Precious Few Wildflowers #pridemonth #ualbany - YouTube

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Here’s link to a copy of the above post that I inserted at the Collins Circle Meadow Project: Mom's Hair - Pride Month 2026 at Collins Circle

Mr. Hearst, I would love to move on at this point from criticizing the Hearst organization, but my attention has become riveted by the filthy influence network that Rosebud, who famously used yellow journalism, warmongering, and, according to Wikipedia, both a progressive campaign for public office and, years later, support for the Nazi Party—a pattern that reveals his nature as an amoral, opportunistic, patrimonialist sack of Trump—to parlay mining wealth into real power, has bequeathed the United States as part of the disease, crying out to be cured, that is baronial wealth. I need to see a lot more movement in the right direction than the mere elevation to deputy managing editor for news of a distinguished journalist formally trained in the field, a step forward that the Times Union has made, to be sure, but not enough. I need that correction to run of what is now a baldfaced lie about how much the New York State budget increased over five years. I hear that Bengay is good for stiff necks, Mr. Hearst.

I was unable to locate information on your training, Mr. Hearst, but I found that early in your career, you were an assistant director of advertising (George R. Hearst III, Publisher and CEO - Times Union). Frank Bennack, the former longtime Hearst CEO, whose memoir is entitled LEAVE SOMETHING ON THE TABLE and Other Surprising Lessons for SUCCESS in BUSINESS and in LIFE, a title that communicates what is presumably a central lesson of the book even to people who never open it, which makes me feel vindicated for how I chose to entitle my own memoir, started in classified ad sales, according to you (Legacy media: A talk with George Hearst III | America's Newspapers). Advertising and sales are important ways of spreading information through the system, but maybe there are too many salespeople, business-degree holders, lawyers, and rich folk in charge.

By the way, I just watched a 5- or 10-second video of the exterior of the Times Union headquarters, which was teased among the many advertisements I see when I read your paper online. I wanted to see whether you had modified the groundskeeping techniques there, but I had to sit through considerable portions of two ads to watch the clip, which ended with the start of a third ad.

Slathering ads over a website is famously a way to eliminate traffic to that website. Many people subscribe to the Times Union to answer Rachel Maddow’s call to support local print journalism, but even do-gooders have limits to the abuse we’ll take. Are you trying to destroy the Times Union for some nefarious purpose, or are you just another of the many geniacs and brainiuses, like Pres. Trump, that baronial wealth has foisted upon us in leadership roles throughout society? Is there another possibility? The consistency in foolish business practices across higher education, among other large sectors of our society, suggests the hand of a puppeteer up society’s ass. Is that hand yours in the Capital District, Mr. Hearst?

By the way, does the Hearst family seriously think that baronial wealth will survive to midcentury, given the current threats to the system as a whole and the threat of backlash against MAGA, whether or not a period of fascism proper occurs? Do something different now.

In your interview with Mr. Seiler (Legacy media: A talk with George Hearst III | America's Newspapers), you speak approvingly of growth and of the power afforded by great wealth to resist legal attacks from shady operators. Vines are very difficult to overcome, too, Mr. Hearst, but that doesn’t make them good as part of a garden. Diversity requires a system that limits the growth of the strongest competitors. Survival requires limiting the growth of cancer. At this point, is the Times Union more like a strong competitor or cancer? Either way, the Times Union should be reluctant to grow.

In contrast to your competitive efforts in Schenectady, where a viable local paper exists, perhaps the expansion of the Times Union in the Hudson Valley is into areas that you consider underserved by print media, following the forest fire that internet advertising has constituted with respect to even fairly sturdy trees among local newspapers. However, by exercising self-restraint, by not expanding into every print media desert, you will give seedlings the opportunity to grow, perhaps into novel shapes that Rosebud would never have imagined and of which the world is being deprived by the invasive tendrils of the Times Union. If you scoff that saplings will fall to slapp suits, put your money and that of your friends behind reform of libel laws.

Incidentally, Rosebud expanded his business into a growing market. Times Union expansion, like that of colleges and universities, is happening in a shrinking market, analogous to a weakening swimmer who keeps their head and shoulders dry by pushing others down, too callous to care about the victims they drown and too foolish to realize that the advantage they gain is temporary, a distraction from dealing with the flood, which demands cooperation or, at least, détente. In fact, the business strategies of the Times Union, UAlbany, and Siena University remind me of Donald Trump riding Pete Hegseth across a map of the world, attacking everyone they mistake for being weak enough to topple easily.

Furthermore, when you tout Rosebud’s attacks on Tammany Hall, as you did to Mr. Seiler (Legacy media: A talk with George Hearst III | America's Newspapers), recall that Al Smith, the happy warrior, darling of Roman Catholic high society in New York State after growing up a child laborer, was a creature of Tammany Hall, which may be underappreciated in history that was written by the victors. Baronial wealth won that war, which is why we must now cut baronial wealth back, before, vinelike, it throttles everything else that’s trying to grow in poor Chauncey’s garden (Being There clip 1 - YouTube). I suggest that you help with the pruning, before others take hold of the shears.

Most importantly, Mr. Hearst, you speak in your interview with Mr. Seiler (Legacy media: A talk with George Hearst III | America's Newspapers) of curating high-quality information, but in recent months, when I have more vigorously lent my expertise to the cause of rectifying low-quality information on science and math that made its way into print at your paper, you and those you employ have ignored me or offered rationalization, rather than run corrections. I’m afraid that endangering your new revenue stream, derived from information curation for OpenAI, or whatever other entity currently helps to fund that curation, is an act I would not expect of a highly competent scion of baronial wealth. I suggest you stop putting yourself in a bad light.

In short, then, Pres. Rodríguez, Mr. Hearst, you give the impression of being high on your own supply of smugness. To restore appearances, at the very least, hoist the flag, print the correction. After that, please consider changing strategies in response to changed circumstance, perhaps, among other things, leaving something on the table, as advised by the title of the Bennack memoir that's been issued to Times Union employees in the past, so that everyone can eat, a lesson Pres. Seifert might consider as well, over at Siena University, where, incidentally, I still see the erroneous $124,000 figure I mentioned in an earlier letter. That false statement of median earnings of Siena alums ten years after graduation was published in the Times Union in an essay that’s still posted on the Siena website, making the claim false advertising to prospective students and subjecting Siena to legal liability (Siena University Is Financially Strong and Building for the Future | Siena University).

While we wait for these simple, but very important, corrections, I'll ask Vasily to give me a ping. ("One Ping Only")

Best wishes,
James, a Kibitzing Physicist

Next: 5.3 Cooperatives, Therapy for Leaders, and Contextuality