Have Waller herself be the antagonist, getting frustrated trying to get it through his head that he’s upholding a system totally opposed to his overly idealistic vision, but Clark just can’t grasp it.
Even better, have 90% of clark’s shit get assuaged by “oh actually it’s OK because it’s legal”.
Clark catches an off duty cop shooting a black 17 year old for stealing apples and running away (Clark uses xray vision to tell the kid has a recipt on him)
Clark’s article focuses on how the kid didn’t steal the apples and the cop should have made sure.
Lois: Uhhh shouldn’t you mention that cops shouldn’t be summarily executing children for being black under the pretense of stealing? Maybe that the justice system shouldn’t create situations where kids need to run from cops?
Clark: Whoa whoa whoa the internal investigation determined that the cop was not racist and had to defend himself incase the kid had a gun. The kid should have worked with the system, not against it. Both people are wrong here.
Back in the early 70s, NASA engineer tests on a part indicated that a joint with 2 O-rings was too wide and could expose the o-ring. Northrop Grumman and NASA’s project manager said it was fine, 2 o-rings meant one was redundent right? and the design made it into the solid rocket booster.
Then in 1977, a different test indicated 1 oring was letting gas during certain levels of mechanical stress. The engineers proposed a solution, which was ignored.
Then in 1980, they asked to test what would happen if 1 oring weren’t there and what would happen if the oring was cold. This was denied.
Then in 1981, a return booster was inspected and they found soot between the orings and one eroded, and the problem was added to the critical issues list. And ignored.
This happened again in 1984.
In 1985, they realized when the oring was cold at launch, the problem got way worse. Northrop Grumman finally changed the design to fix it.
But they had a bunch of the old, unsafe part laying around, and NASA didn’t want to miss deadlines, so in January of 1986, they launched a shuttle with the part that they knew was unsafe in cold conditions, coldest morning they’d ever launched and a middle-school class watched a live stream of their teacher exploding 10 miles in the air.