New York City restaurants are eliminating jobs, reducing employee hours and raising prices due to the higher costs of the $15/hour minimum wage.
A once-growing industry is contracting, according to an online survey conducted by the New York City Hospitality Alliance, an association representing restaurants in the city.
Last year, “full-service restaurants recorded a 1.6 percent job loss, which is the first recorded annual loss in two decades,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the trade group.
The survey also said about a third of respondents will eliminate jobs and most will raise prices this year because of the new $15-an-hour law backed by Gov. Cuomo and other state officials, which took effect on Dec. 31, 2018.
A total of 76.5 percent of full-service restaurant respondents reduced employee hours, and 36 percent eliminated jobs in 2018, the survey said.
The best way to automate lower-wage people out of a job is to make their labor too expensive.
"Intersectionalism" certainly creates some interesting problems. Lefties generally want to sexualize children, but not all lefties:
California’s new sex-ed framework, which tells very young children they’re not necessarily girls or boys, is getting pushback from parents.
Asian immigrant parents are leading the anti-sex ed charge in northern California, reports Joan Frawley Desmond in National Catholic Register...
“Asian people care about family values; we don’t appreciate kids being sexually active too early,” said “Sue,” a Chinese-American mother in Cupertino, told the Register. She was afraid to use her last name for fear of workplace retaliation.
Protests against “Teen Talk” spread to Palo Alto Unified, where parents also charged it was culturally inappropriate...
Latino parents were treated with disrespect by the school board in Santa Ana, a southern California district that’s primarily Latino, writes Kira Davis on TownHall. “It is probably no coincidence that the vast majority of immigrant based/related communities in this state are whole-heartedly opposed to LGBT-based sex-ed curriculum in their public schools,” she charges.
Informed Parents of California staged a protest yesterday at the State Capitol asking the state board of education to reject the new sex-education framework at its May meeting.
The ingrates. After all the left has done for them....
I understand that people in the media can make mistakes (after all, your best and brightest don't pursue journalism as a calling). But when those mistakes always go in the same direction, when they always play to the left and damage the right, a person who understands probability might, just might, ask if perhaps bias is at play:
So since nobody else has compiled an updated, extensive list of this kind, here are:
78 Notable Mistakes and Missteps in Major Media Reporting on Donald Trump
I suppose the indigenous people of Mexico-500-years-ago never made war on each other:
Spain's government has refused a demand from Mexico's new president that it apologise for conquering the country five hundred years ago.
Firing the first shots in what threatens to become a diplomatic row, the Left-wing Mexican leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced on Monday that he had sent letters to Spain’s King Felipe VI and Pope Francis urging them to apologize for crimes committed against the indigenous peoples of what is today Mexico.
“There were massacres and oppression. The so-called conquest was waged with the sword and the cross. They built their churches on top of the temples,” Mr López Obrador said in a video message. link
I'm not quite sure from whom I should seek reparations. If I'm descended from the pre-Roman Britons, and I no doubt am, then I can whine to Italy (the Romans), Germany (the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), Denmark (those darned Vikings took over a healthy percentage of that island with the Danelaw), and France (William the Conqueror, who was Norman/French). Those governments should have deep enough pockets to satisfy my need and desire for historical recompense.
Does it make sense today to ask any government or organization to apologize for what others did 500 years ago?
Republicans evidently hoped to use the legislation, which contains a variety of far-fetched and fiscally unrealistic propositions, either to show Americans how radical Democrats — including 2020 presidential candidates — are becoming, or to split the left on the measure by enticing some moderate senators to vote against it.
Perhaps sensing a trap, most Democratic senators decided not to vote on the bill at all, instead voting “present.” The final vote was 0-57. All 53 Republican senators voted “no” on the measure, and they were joined by three Democrats: Doug Jones (Ala.), Joe Manchin (W.Va.), and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), along with Independent senator Angus King (Maine), who caucuses with the Democrats.
According to reporting from the Washington Post, Democrats called McConnell’s decision to bring the bill to the floor a “sham,” but the majority leader had little sympathy for this claim: “Do you believe it’s a prescription for America?” McConnell said. “Then why would you not want to vote for it? A vote for ‘present’ is a vote for it.”
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), meanwhile, said that “[McConnell’s] stunt is backfiring” and claimed “the Republican party is way behind the times on clean energy.” At a press conference for the Green New Deal earlier today, the Senate bill’s chief sponsor Ed Markey (D., Mass.) claimed he stood behind the proposal. “It is the national-security, economic, health-care, and moral issue of our time,” he said. But Markey, along with 52 of his fellow Democrats, still refused to vote in favor of the legislation.
Meanwhile, everyDemocraticsenatorrunningfor president has publicly stated his or her support for the Green New Deal, and, in fact, all of them have even signed on to Markey’s legislation as a cosponsor. Yet not one of them voted in favor of the measure this afternoon.
So do they support it, or not? And what does "supporting" it mean if they don't vote for it? And if it's the moral imperative of our time, why won't the Democratic leadership of the House even bring it up for a vote?
If you expect morality or leadership from liberals, you'll always be disappointed.
Today has been the best day to be a conservative since the night of the 2016 election. It was almost as much fun this past weekend, watching all the lib reporters and anchors who have breathlessly reported every made-up rumor as a bombshell! eat crow and have to admit that every conspiracy they peddled has been shown to be empty, as it was to watch those same anchors and talking heads in November 2016 as state after state fell to President Trump. Schadenfreudelicious!
The fun continued today with charges filed against leftie sweethearts Michael Avenatti and Mark Garegos (he of Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, Colin Kaepernick, and Jussie Smollett fame--picks some winners, doesn't he?), who are already talking about their expectations of due process.
The American left, along with their willing accomplices in the media, tried to overturn the results of a legitimate American election--and fortunately they failed. Now they seem disappointed, if not despondent, that the president didn't break the law and collude with an adversarial government.
As Rand Paul tweeted, perhaps now it's time to investigate the Obama administration officials (Lynch, Clapper, Brennan, Comey) who "concocted and spread the Russian conspiracy hoax". And perhaps the Instapundit was more than prescient with this March 2017 post: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”
Senator Lindsay Graham lays out the case for going after the liars:
You want collusion with Putin? I got'cher collusion with Putin right here:
Will there be any introspection on the part of the left? If the 2016 election is any indication, they'll pretend to reflect for 10 or 15 seconds and then the fourth estate will go right back to being a 5th column.
Yes, I know we on the right aren't perfect. But we're on a roll right now, and I hope the movers and shakers know how to take advantage of it. To be sure, we need to keep hammering home these points:
Hands up, don't shoot. Trump's a Russian spy. Kavanaugh ran a secret gang rape cartel. Covington kids assaulted a vet. Never forget that these lies--and yes, they were outright lies--were deliberately peddled by all the same people for all the same reasons.
Keep hammering. Don't even let them come up for air.
The House of Representatives failed to garner enough votes to override President Donald Trump's veto of the resolution crafted to terminate his national emergency declaration to divert military funds and build a wall along the United States border with Mexico.
The vote finished 248-181, far short of the required two-thirds majority required to overturn a presidential veto.
A federal judge tossed out one of the remaining challenges to President Trump’s
travel ban policy on Wednesday, ruling that the government had the
power to refuse visas for people under the affected countries.
Judge Brian M. Cogan also ruled that while there is
such a thing as a right to “familial association,” it only applies to
people already legally in the U.S., and cannot be used to demand the
country let in relatives who aren’t in the country.
Did you see the movie 300? It's a stylized telling of the Spartan warriors who stood against the Persian army in northeast Greece 2500 years ago. Xerxes' ambassador demanded of Spartan King Leonidas that he lay down his weapons and submit, and history tells us that Leonidas' reply was Molon Labe--"come and take them".
These days, it serves a similar function, though. It’s a more polite way to tell someone to “bring it on.”
You see, if someone like me says those two little words, we’re conveying a whole lot in a short period of time.
For one thing, we’re saying that we oppose any kind of gun control, that we won’t lay down our arms as a tyrant demanded of free people at Thermopylae. We’re saying that we’re committed to our cause, that we’re willing to die to protect our rights and the rights of our brothers and sisters.
More than that, though, it’s a warning.
When we say that, we’re warning lawmakers that if they push too far on gun control, they’re going to get a fight. It’s not a declaration of war, but it’s a warning that one will be coming if legislators decide they can take away our guns and ignore the Second Amendment. More than that, though, it’s a warning that the Second Amendment won’t go away quietly.
The truth of the matter is that gun owners tend to recognize that no people become enslaved unless they’re disarmed. No genocide happens unless people are disarmed. Atrocities which shock the world only happen to disarmed societies.
We Americans have decided that won’t be us.
I neither confirm nor deny possession of any firearms. And that's as it should be.
The president of the University of California system, a Clinton cabinet member who now runs an organization well-known for using its institutional heft against conservative students and thinkers, doesn't think too highly of President Trump's executive order requiring a little free speech on campuses:
The president of the University of California system lashed out
against President Donald J. Trump, who Thursday signed an executive
order to protect free speech on campus.
Unprompted, Janet Napolitano issued the following statement...
Don't let facts get in the way of your beliefs, Janet.
In related news, the University of California claims that calling the United States "the land of opportunity" is a "microaggression" of some sort, despite the average income of different ethnic groups in the country. Again, don't let facts get in the way of your beliefs, Janet.
Remember when the Mueller investigation was going to end the Trump presidency? Remember when, if it didn't find evidence he colluded with Russians to win the presidency--as if Vladimir Putin has the keys to the White House--his financial misdealings, including money laundering, was going to end his presidency? Remember when, if it didn't find evidence of financial misdealings, his children and son-in-law were going to be caught for crimes?
Mueller's report was dropped on a Friday evening during March Madness--and that's not done when there's big news to be had.
In other words, it was a big nothingburger. And mark my words, we're now going to be told how it was never a big deal anyway, how Trump is still somehow a criminal, blah blah blah. The entire report must be released to the public, no redactions at all, or else it's not legitimate. Lefties truly are sore losers--which is why they made this whole thing up in the first place, because their candidate, the Dowager Duchess of Chappaqua, lost the election.
Relatively unreported, except by moderately conservative outlets fairly recently, has been the extent to which bad players in the FBI and DOJ conspired to remove a lawfully-elected president whose only crime is that he beat Hillary Clinton fair and square in an election. Yes, most of the press were complicit in this, but their involvement, while reprehensible, doesn't rise to the level of criminality. Those so-called Deep State players within our own government, though--those involved in the Steele Dossier, those involved in using fake evidence to get FISA warrants for wiretaps--they need to go to jail.
With only a few exceptions — Fox News, the editorial pages (not the front pages) of the Wall Street Journal, and a handful of websites — the better part of the American media has spent the last two years fulminating about Trump-Russia collusion we now know never existed.
Actually, we always knew that, but finally, it's official. It was always a bunch of — excuse the expression — trumped up baloney that made no sense except to those who wished so deeply to believe it was true.
Which makes the people who were doing that fulminating — media, politicians and (usually retired) intelligence figures, who were, as is becoming increasingly clear, betraying the American Constitutional system with impunity — sick and evil.
The Special Counsel's investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated wityh it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the report states: "[T]he investigation did not establish that mebers of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"...But as noted above, the Special Counsel did not find that the Trump campaign, or anyone associated with it, conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in these efforts, despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump Campaign.
And then, on the topic of presidential misconduct regarding obstruction of justice:
After making a "thorough factual investigation" into these matters, the Special Counsel considered whether to evaluate the conduct under Department standards governing prosecution and declination decisions but ultimately determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment...After reviewing the Special Counsel's final report on these issues; consulting with Department officials, including the Office of Legal Counsel; and applying the principles of federal prosecution that guide our charging decisions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and I have concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense. Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.
In making this determination, we noted that the Special Counsel recognized that "the evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference," and that, while not determinative, the absence of such evidence bears upon the President's intent with respect to obstruction.
The Attorney General then addressed legal requirements about making the report public:
Separately, I also must identify any information that could impact other ongoing matters, including those that the Special Counsel has referred to other offices. As soon as that process is complete, I will be in a position to move forward expeditiously in determining what can be released in light of applicable law, regulations, and Departmental policies.
The president was unjustly accused by rogue elements of the FBI and DOJ, in concert with a willing press as well as Hillary Clinton's losing campaign, and appointed a special counsel to investigate himself and his campaign. The special counsel filled his team with Democrats--and still they came up with nothing.
Hands up, don't shoot. Trump's a Russian spy. Kavanaugh ran a secret gang rape cartel. Covington kids assaulted a vet. Never forget that these lies--and yes, they were outright lies--were deliberately peddled by all the same people for all the same reasons.
Honestly, I haven't had anything to write about! A short break from blogging hasn't seemed to hurt me much, but I definitely need to get back into the game!
Critics have attacked Big Pharma for widespread biases in studies of new and potentially profitable drugs. Now, scholars are detecting the same type of biases in the education product industry — even in a federally curated collection of research that’s supposed to be of the highest quality. And that may be leaving teachers and school administrators in the dark about the full story of classroom programs and interventions they are considering buying.
An analysis of 30 years of educational research by scholars at Johns Hopkins University found that when a maker of an educational intervention conducted its own research or paid someone to do the research, the results commonly showed greater benefits for students than when the research was independent. On average, the developer research showed benefits — usually improvements in test scores — that were 70 percent greater than what independent studies found.
“I think there are some cases of fraud, but I wouldn’t say it’s fraud across the board,” said Rebecca Wolf, an assistant professor in the Center for Research and Reform in Education at Johns Hopkins University and lead author of the draft study. “Developers are proud of their products. They believe in them. They’ve worked hard in developing these products. They want a study that puts the best face forward.”
Biased research matters because current federal law encourages schools to buy products that are backed by science.
There’s little reporting of “the scandal that afflicts the vast majority of young Americans,” he writes. “Namely that our K–12 schools only prepare about one-third of our students to succeed in postsecondary education, even as they encourage two-thirds of eighteen-year-olds to give college a try.”
It's not that we're preparing too few, it's that we're pushing too many.
Recycling, for decades an almost reflexive effort by American households and businesses to reduce waste and help the environment, is collapsing in many parts of the country.
Philadelphia is now burning about half of its 1.5 million residents’ recycling material in an incinerator that converts waste to energy. In Memphis, the international airport still has recycling bins around the terminals, but every collected can, bottle and newspaper is sent to a landfill. And last month, officials in the central Florida city of Deltona faced the reality that, despite their best efforts to recycle, their curbside program was not working and suspended it.
Those are just three of the hundreds of towns and cities across the country that have canceled recycling programs, limited the types of material they accepted or agreed to huge price increases.
“We are in a crisis moment in the recycling movement right now,” said Fiona Ma, the treasurer of California, where recycling costs have increased in some cities.
Prompting this nationwide reckoning is China, which until January 2018 had been a big buyer of recyclable material collected in the United States. That stopped when Chinese officials determined that too much trash was mixed in with recyclable materials like cardboard and certain plastics. After that, Thailand and India started to accept more imported scrap, but even they are imposing new restrictions.
What I get from this is that recycling only works if we have a 3rd world to dump our trash in.
With fewer buyers, recycling companies are recouping their lost profits by charging cities more, in some cases four times what they charged last year.
Amid the soaring costs, cities and towns are making hard choices about whether to raise taxes, cut other municipal services or abandon an effort that took hold during the environmental movement of the 1970s.
Is this a genius move, a catastrophic disaster, or one that at best will lead to a Pyrrhic victory?
The Sacramento City Teachers Association spent three weeks collecting votes, and said turnout was 70 percent. According to the union, 92 percent of its 2,500 members voted to approve the strike.
They're going to strike when the there's a threat of a state takeover, which could throw their contract out the window--and perhaps, some of their security along with it? Maybe I'm missing something, but that doesn't sound very wise to me.
This former "gotta power everything with wind and solar" believer changed his mind once he understood the practicalities. Like Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, he now supports nuclear energy:
Environmentalists have long promoted renewable energy sources like solar panels and wind farms to save the climate. But what about when those technologies destroy the environment? In this provocative talk, Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment” and energy expert, Michael Shellenberger explains why solar and wind farms require so much land for mining and energy production, and an alternative path to saving both the climate and the natural environment. Michael Shellenberger is a Time Magazine Hero of the Environment and President of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization. A lifelong environmentalist, Michael changed his mind about nuclear energy and has helped save enough nuclear reactors to prevent an increase in carbon emissions equivalent to adding more than 10 million cars to the road. He lives in Berkeley, California. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. link
We celebrated Pi Day at school in a few different ways, including pi-digits-recitation and pie-eating contests at lunch. What I didn't know is the lore claiming that Pi Day comes from Northern California:
It takes a visionary to see the possibilities of an ancient ratio, a date in March and all forms of pie (dessert, pizza and otherwise), but Bay Area local Larry Shaw saw the potential in pi.
Shaw, the technical curator at the Exploratorium for 33 years, is known as the first to come up with the connection between the number pi (3.14...) and March 14, now known as Pi Day. As Exploratorium lore would recount, it was at a staff retreat back in 1988 when Shaw first came up with the idea to take the endless 3.14 figure, eventually turning into an internationally celebrated, math- and pie-centric holiday.
"With teaching," Shaw said, "you're looking for any kind of hook you can get — especially with kids."
It also didn't hurt that March 14 is Albert Einstein's birthday, to give the holiday some extra oomph...
The day has since evolved from its humble, locally-held roots at the Exploration. March 14 became recognized by Congress as National Pi Day as of 2009, and has continued to become more of a cultural phenomenon as the years pass. Pies are known to sell out on March 14, while pizza shops have also gotten in on the act, with many offering discounted slices (generally themed around the 3.14 figure).
I was an agency fee payer for many years before the Janus decision, and my local union as an entity never gave me any problems. After the Janus decision, my local union as an entity did not give me any problems. Not every teacher can say that, though, as some local unions use shady justifications to blatantly ignore the Supreme Court's ruling:
Special-needs instructor Bethany Mendez has been fighting for months to escape the teachers union in Fremont, California, but the school district continues to funnel a portion of her paycheck directly to the labor bank account.
She joined four other public school educators in filing a federal class-action lawsuit Monday against the California Teachers Association to stop the forced collection of union dues, armed with last year’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME.
“This is a financial issue for many people as well as a personal choice,” Ms. Mendez said at a press conference in San Francisco. “It is unfathomable to me that after even receiving a revocation of consent, and the passing of Janus, that the local and state unions would continue to assert this mandatory deduction from our paychecks.”
As far as I'm concerned, the suit should be against the school district. After all, it's the district that's taking her money and giving it to the union.
In an Oct. 12 letter, she notified the union she had resigned and revoked any dues-collecting authorization, but the CTA told her in a Feb. 8 response that she could quit only during a 30-day window described as “not less than thirty (30) days and not more than sixty (60) days before the annual anniversary date” of her recommitment.
Unions have always acted shady. They've always used strong-arm tactics. It's the entire history of the union movement.
So many times before, I've identified all the catastrophes--and just the ones in my lifetime--that were supposed to spell doom for the human race, yet here we sit with a higher percentage of humans on the planet not living in poverty than at any known time in human history. The left has unjustly cried "wolf" so many times that I wonder if there will ever even be a wolf attack.
The author of this post identified some of the most egregious (and grossly incorrect) environmental claims of the past few decades and justified skepticism of today's Chicken Littleism this way:
“Perhaps children and young Americans are more likely to buy into the extreme environmentalist doomsaying due to the fact that they weren’t around for the laughably wrong predictions of the past that never came true,” he said.
Stepman went on to say that nearly every big prediction made by the environmentalists ends up being proven wrong. Remember in the 60s and 70s when enviros were all worried about overpopulation…
Stepman concludes saying, “If there’s a lesson to be learned from all of these predictions, it’s not that scientists are always wrong or that we shouldn’t be good stewards of the environment. Instead, we should treat extreme predictions with skepticism, especially if they mean upending our way of life.”
There's a (very cynical) reason the left always tries to scare the children.
Update, 3/16/18: Let's not forget the rabid panics of this past, including this one from 1989:
A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday...
The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.
If Patrick Moore believes in carbon dioxide as a benefit to the climate, how could he have helped found Greenpeace? He argued that it was the organization that changed from its original mission, not him.
"I was one of the Founders doing a Ph.D. in the late 60s, early 70s in ecology. I was radicalized by the Cold War and the threat of all-out nuclear war and the emerging consciousness of the environment and we did a lot of good things," he recalled. "We stopped nuclear testing in Alaska. We have stopped it in the south pacific. We saved the whales. And we stopped a lot of toxic waste being put into the ocean. And the air."
"But, by the mid 80s we had gained a lot of notoriety and we were bringing in a lot of money and we were hijacked by the extreme Left who basically took green peace from a science-based organization to an organization based on sensationalism, misinformation, and fear," Moore insisted.
So what is he saying about climate change?
On Tuesday morning, Patrick Moore, a founding member of the environmentalist organization Greenpeace, slammed climate alarmists for promoting a fake emergency. President Donald Trump tweeted his remarks shortly after he made them.
"In fact, the whole climate crisis as they call it is not only fake news, it’s fake science. There is no climate crisis," Moore, author of the book Confessions of a Greenpeace Drop-Out: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist, told "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning...
The Greenpeace founding member did not deny that climate change is real, but he insisted that it is not a crisis.
"Yes, of course, climate change is real. It’s been happening since the beginning of time. But it’s not dangerous and it’s not made by people," Moore insisted.
What is climate change, if it's not a man-made imminent crisis? "Climate change is a perfectly natural phenomenon and this modern warm period actually began about 300 years ago when Little Ice Age began to come to an end," he explained. "There is nothing to be afraid of."
As for the alarmists, "that’s all they are doing is instilling fear. Most of the scientists who are saying it’s a crisis are on perpetual government grants."
Clearly I agree with him, as I've been saying the same thing for years.
Instapundit has gone all in for requiring colleges to have some "skin in the game" regarding student loans. He links to a Wall Street Journal story about President Trump and his desire to "require schools to take financial stake when students don't repay."
I disagree with this. Why should universities be on the hook for the bad decisions of their (adult) students? Target isn’t on the hook when people overspend there (barring bankruptcy, which is its own issue). Why should a university care if someone wants to major in Medieval Uzbeki Film Studies? The school is there to provide the education, not to determine people's ability to pay over the long term.
If schools themselves were lending students money, perhaps they'd be more careful about whom they lend to and would consider the ability to pay the loan back--especially if student loans were dischargeable via bankruptcy, which they're currently not. But if (since) schools are not lending the money, why is it their responsibility when students don't pay back debt owed to a bank (or most likely, the federal government)? Universities exist to provide an education, to expand minds--not just to provide checked boxes for future employment. Lenders charge the interest and take the financial risks.
I arrived at work at my usual time this morning, but the parking lot was relatively empty. Why might this be the case? My guess is the time change that occurred in most US states this weekend.
I can't stand changing the time. I don't care what time zone we choose--for all I care, use Central European Time or Uzbeki Standard Time or whatever. Just pick a time zone and stick with it. Study after study shows no noticeable energy savings despite having an extra hour of daylight in the evenings, and what about the lost productivity?
I'm tired of changing the darn clocks. There's no natural political constituency for changing the clocks, and surveys show that staying on one time zone has bipartisan support across the country. We could all come together!
It's not that I'm "against" the concept of diversity, but I certainly don't always view it as a strength. You don't build a good team by focusing on what divides us, you build it on commonality. Much like anything else, diversity is good only insofar as it doesn't do damage--and the way it's talked about, emphasized, and implemented by the American left, it does plenty of damage.
This post gives an excellent primer on "toxic diversity" as opposed to genuine diversity. Here's an example:
Toxic "diversity" scolds; genuine diversity invites. Toxic
"diversity" is Brie Larson contemptuously dismissing the opinions of
"40-year-old white dudes" because a certain movie supposedly "wasn't
made for them." Genuine diversity says, "We wanted to try something a
little different, but we hope everyone will like it."
Toxic "diversity" rejects evidence; genuine diversity is evidence-based. Toxic
"diversity" asserts that all disparities are the result of "the
cis-hetero patriarchy" or "white supremacy." Genuine diversity
understands that the causes of such disparities are most likely
multivariate; further, it acknowledges indisputable progress. It is a
documented fact, for example, that while women are the minority in
certain hard STEM fields, they now dominate higher education at both the
undergraduate and graduate level pretty much everywhere else. It is
also a fact that while significant wealth gaps remain, most African
Americans do not live in poverty. Genuine diversity doesn't deny that
racism and sexism exist - or that certain policies need to be tweaked to
allow for greater equality of opportunity - but its approach to
apparent injustice is fundamentally grounded in reality.
There's doubling down on stupid, and then there's this:
Did you hear the latest about the travel ban? No… not the President’s
temporary ban on immigration from a number of majority-Muslim nations.
I’m talking about New York’s ban on official travel to North Carolina.
Governor Cuomo put the ban in place in 2016 in response to the Tar Heel
State’s efforts to stop men from using the women’s bathrooms, locker
rooms and showers and it’s not yet been repealed. It was initially
described as a ban on “official travel” for state employees, but the
rule affected more people than state government workers.
The ban also applied to travel by anyone using state funds. This
included students at State University of New York (SUNY) campuses.
That’s now become a serious issue because a number of members of the
swimming and diving teams at SUNY Geneseo qualified for the national
championships this year. The problem is that they’re being held in
Greensboro, North Carolina. Cuomo initially said that they couldn’t go
at all, but recent developments have made the question more complicated. (Democrat and Chronicle)...
These students bust their butts training all year long and competing
for a chance like this. Cuomo’s initial instinct was to forbid them from
attending entirely. After the inevitable pushback, his “compromise”
isn’t all that much better. The teams raised their own money for the
travel expenses, but now the Governor is saying that they can only go
and spend that money if they stay at a hotel in Virginia, meaning there’s an extra hour of commuting time every day, to and from the event.
Yes, that’s right. Virginia is the state where the top three elected
officials are all under fire for either racism (blackface photos) or
alleged sexual assault.
This story sounds so over-the-top that I want to believe it's made up:
Sonia Mongol says her son was not allowed to go to the restroom at his South Los Angeles school and instead had to wear two plastic garbage bags and sit in his urine-soaked clothing, according to CNN affiliate KCAL.
Mongol talked about the alleged incident in November during a news conference at Manhattan Place Elementary School Thursday. She said her 8-year-old son was not allowed to use the restroom during class. Mongol called on school officials to clarify what happened...
Mongol said after her son asked to go to the bathroom, the teacher told him that he could instead urinate in a trash can at the front of the classroom, "exposing himself in front of all the other students."
He got urine on himself and was given trash bags to cover his wet clothes, Mongol said. She also claims she was not told that he would have to spend the rest of the day wearing them.
Retired teacher Latricia Mitchell joined Mongol at the news conference and she told reporters that teachers can refuse to let students leave to go to the restroom under certain circumstances. But there is common sense and good judgment.
"After they ask you twice, you should realize something is going on," Mitchell said.
Mongol said teachers have denied her son permission to use the restroom since the incident, KCAL reported, and that since the principal did not adequately respond to the claims, she will be taking the issue to the school board.
If this happened as described, and if the teacher in question is a union member, I wonder how vigorously that union will respond, protect the teacher, and justify the teacher's actions.
Nevada proposed a similar plan before the economic downturn of 2008-09:
North Carolina lawmakers are once again pushing to arm teachers with guns, and they're trying to make it worth teachers' while.
Filed on Wednesday, the School Security Act of 2019 would give a 5% salary boost to teachers who undergo basic police training.
These "teacher resource officers" could carry guns in an open or concealed manner, and they would have the same arrest powers as police officers, the bill says.
Nevada's plan was to make these trained teachers "reserve sheriff officers", with no law enforcement powers until they were brought onto active duty during an incident. They would be deputies on the scene until full-time law enforcement showed up.
They can't anymore, not with all the students being harassed and kicked out of class for wearing MAGA shirts or hats:
Fifty years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision on student speech that was emblematic of its era, but has also reverberated and remained relevant for generations of public school students—and administrators—that followed.
In Tinker v. Des Moines Community Independent School District, the court ruled 7-2 to uphold the right of several students in Des Moines, Iowa, to wear black armbands in school to protest and draw attention to the Vietnam War. The court said the armbands were symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment as long as school was not substantially disrupted...
Writing for a 7-2 majority in the Tinker decision, Justice Abe Fortas said, “In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students.”
And in the opinion’s most often quoted line, Fortas wrote, “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
Note: on November 4, 1980, I wore a black armband to school to protest the taking of the American embassy hostages in Tehran a year before. No one gave me any hassle about it.
I don't know when adults began to fear holding children to even minimal standards of decorum--maybe it was when other adults screamed discrimination and filed lawsuits instead of expecting their own children to act like decent humans.
In my school, law and order have gone the way of the slide rule.
I am a math teacher at a middle school in Flushing, Queens, and two months ago, I was helping one of my students work out an arithmetic problem when he called me a “f–kin’ asshole.” When I asked for an apology, he shoved a chair at me and stormed out.
Five minutes later, an administrator brought the student back to class. She informed me that she had called his parents and that he could return.
And what did I do? I went on teaching.
In my 20 years working for the Board of Ed, I’ve never seen such a disregard for the rules — and human decency — as I’m seeing now.
Smoke weed on campus? Grab your fellow student’s breast? Tell your teacher to f–k off? You just earned yourself an in-house suspension — also known as a hang-out-with-your-phone-in-an-empty-classroom day.
Now refresh your memory about this post from just a few days ago.
Williamson County officials had the ultimate power to approve an
In-service “white privilege” training curriculum for their teachers last
month, said a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Education
Wednesday.
But that’s inconsistent with the TDOE’s standards and practices on In-service teacher training, as specified on that department’s website...
According to the TDOE’s website, “In-service education shall be
consistent with the Professional Development Policy for Tennessee
Schools.”
“In-Service education is defined as a program of planned
activities designed to increase the competencies needed by all licensed
personnel in the performance of their professional responsibilities,”
according to the TDOE’s website.
“In this context, ‘competencies’
are defined as the knowledge, skills, and attitudes which enable
personnel to carry out their tasks with maximum effectiveness.”
Approvable
activities for In-service training include, among other things, helping
probationary teachers develop their skills, workshops based on the
assessed needs of a school system, and studying teaching methods and
strategies, TDOE’s website said.
As reported,
county school system officials recently made teachers watch a video
that tried to indoctrinate teachers on how to teach students about
“white privilege.”
The 26-minute In-service training video, the
third in a series about cultural competency, profiled several people
whom the video described as “Williamson County Voices.”
How much Microsoft money does it take before these so-called geniuses quit thinking they can "fix" this?
Don't look now, but another tech billionaire is using his vast fortune to make a mark on K-12 education.
The Ballmer Group,
created by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and his wife Connie, has
quietly committed more than a quarter-billion dollars to K-12-related
organizations and projects over the last two years, according to an Education Week analysis.
The flow of money includes more than $100 million granted to
organizations working to improve opportunities for children and families
in poverty, as well as a $59 million investment in a for-profit
software company seeking to ease the flow of student data between K-12
school districts and nonprofits.
"These grants place the Ballmer Group among the larger funders in
K-12 education," said Sarah Reckhow, an assistant professor of political
science at Michigan State University who tracks philanthropic giving in
education.
They also reflect an approach to K-12 education that diverges in
significant ways from those of other high-profile education funders from
the technology sector, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Yes, the Ballmers have given more than $10 million to Teach For
America, plus millions more to a handful of charter school networks.
They are also big believers in the power of data and technology. And like Zuckerberg,
the couple has structured their philanthropic organization as a limited
liability corporation, rather than a traditional foundation. That means
they can use the Ballmer Group to pursue a mix of charitable donations,
for-profit investments, and political activity, all with minimal
transparency requirements.
But to date, at least, the couple has not sought to fundamentally
disrupt public education. They haven't thrown their considerable fortune
behind efforts to spread the adoption of personalized learning in K-12.
And they haven't focused on issues like academic standards and
curricula.
Instead, the Ballmer Group's known activity to date primarily
reflects a "wraparound approach" to education, said Reckhow. It
emphasizes the community context in which children grow up, and it
relies heavily on people with extensive experience in the
social-services field and deep roots in the communities where grants are
being awarded.
Sounds good. Talk to me when there's objective, replicable data showing statistically significant improvement.
Five Parsippany High School seniors could have slept in on a snowy March
morning, instead they were up and shoveling at 4 a.m. so a neighbor
could get to her dialysis treatment...
On Sunday night Patrick Lanigan realized the forecast 6 to 8 inches of
snow expected overnight may prevent his neighbor from getting to her 6
a.m. dialysis treatment. He called friends and told them to be ready to
shovel bright and early...
The high school seniors and Peter Lanigan arrived at the home of the
elderly neighbor and 30 minutes later had the driveway ready to receive
the transporting ambulance.
Claims that the mainstream media are biased in favor of the Democratic
Party are commonplace. However, empirical research has yielded mixed
results and neglected potential bias in the dynamics of media behavior.
This article contributes to this literature by using time series
analyses of the dynamics in media tone based on more than 400,000
stories on inflation and unemployment from top-circulating American
print media and the Associated Press newswire. The results
suggest there is bias in favor of Democratic presidents. Media tone in
unemployment and inflation coverage is more favorable during Democratic
presidencies after controlling for economic performance. Tone is also
generally more responsive to negative, short-term changes in economic
conditions during Republican presidencies. In other words, bias is
stronger with worsening economic conditions.
The California Supreme Court made it clear Monday that state and local governments may reduce pension costs by repealing certain benefits without running afoul of constitutional protections for public pensions.
In a unanimous decision written by Chief Justice Tani-Cantil Sakauye, the court upheld California’s 2012 repeal of an “air time” benefit that allowed state workers to buy credits toward retirement service.
The decision was the court’s first in a series of pending pension disputes it has agreed to review.
Some legal analysts said the ruling suggested the court would strive to rule narrowly in future pension cases. Others contended the justices eventually would have to address how far state and local governments may go in reducing pension liabilities.
Public employers want the court to make it easier to cut pensions for current employees to tackle hundreds of billions of dollars in pension shortfalls.
Labor unions are fighting cutbacks, pointing to decades of court precedent that says California’s public pensions are contracts protected by the state Constitution...
For more than 60 years, California has adhered to a legal rule that guarantees workers the pensions that were in place the day they were hired.
Known as the “California Rule,” the protective legal doctrine has stymied state and local lawmakers wrestling with hundreds of billions of dollars in pension shortfalls.
The court declined to address the controversy over the rule, saying it was unnecessary to resolve the dispute...
Under current law, pensions are treated as contracts protected by the California Constitution. Monday’s decision did not alter that, but made it clear that a benefit that simply affects a pension may not be untouchable.
As the Instapundit often says: something that can't go on forever, won't.
Anyone with at least half a brain could figure out that if you relax disciplinary standards in schools, students will behave worse. Why wouldn't they? If you knew you weren't going to get speeding tickets anymore, would you watch your speed at all?
On March 8, 2010, one year into the Obama Administration, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a passionate speech in which he asserted (correctly) that African-American students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than white students. Although he did not mention it, it is also true that white students are the subjects of school discipline at higher rates than Asian American students and that male students are disciplined at higher rates than female students.
In response to the racial disparity he identified, Duncan promised that the Department of Education would be stepping up its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the years that followed, the Department of Education made good on that promise by opening numerous investigations based on statistical disparities. On January 18, 2014, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice jointly issued a “Dear Colleague Letter” on school discipline in which they asserted that the law prohibits not only actual discrimination in discipline on the basis of race, but also what they called “unjustified” disparate impact.
In Part I of this article, we point out that there are two sides to the “disparate impact” coin. The Department of Education has focused only upon the fact that, as a group, African-American students are suspended and expelled more often than other students. By failing to consider the other side of the coin — that African-American students may be disproportionately victimized by disorderly classrooms — its policy threatens to do more harm than good even for the group Secretary Duncan was trying to help. In Part II, we discuss the Department of Education’s enforcement policy toward school discipline in greater detail, its over-reliance on racial disparate impact, and how that over-reliance pushes some schools to violate Title VI’s ban on race discrimination rather than honor it. In Part III, we elaborate on why school discipline is important and present evidence that the Department of Education’s policy has contributed to the problem of disorderly classrooms, especially in schools with high minority student enrollment. In Part IV, we discuss how aggregate racial disparities in discipline do not in themselves show the discrimination against African Americans, Hispanics, and American Indians that some proponents of the Department of Education’s policy claim. Rather, the evidence shows that they are the result of differences in behavior. In Part V, we explain why the Department of Education’s disparate impact policy is not just wrong-headed, but also unauthorized by law.
A wise man once said that the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. Obama, Holder, and Duncan really screwed things up by trying to "fix" a problem that they had misinterpreted.
Taps vigils, which we held whenever a cadet died, were always emotional experiences. I assume cadets still hold them, and there has recently been another one:
A “heartbroken” U.S. Military Academy at West Point has announced the death of a top senior cadet who suffered fatal injuries in a skiing accident.
Class of 2019 cadet Peter Zhu, 21, was involved in a bad accident while skiing Feb. 23 at the West Point ski slope. West Point officials said he died Thursday...
Zhu, of Concord, Calif., was president of the Cadet Medical Society. He was planning to attend medical school at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences.
I've long been a fan of Patrick Moore, the co-founder of Greenpeace; in fact, I have posts mentioning him in February 2005, and I started this blog in late January 2005. Well, Patrick's stock goes up again after attacking Bolshevik Barbie and her so-called Green New Deal:
Pompous little twit. You don’t have a plan to grow food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels, or get the food into the cities. Horses? If fossil fuels were banned every tree in the world would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating. You would bring about mass death.
How much of this problem might be related to lack of discipline and safety in schools, as opposed to just pay?
There is a crisis in Oakland Unified School District — educators are leaving our classrooms at an alarming rate. Each year, we lose more than 300 teachers from Oakland schools. At the start of the school year, we had 570 teacher vacancies, mostly in our flatland schools with high concentrations of low-income black and brown families. As a result, every year, we see our schools scramble to get adults in classrooms, while students don’t have the supports needed to succeed.
As students and parents, we know these adults are not leaving because they no longer love us. It’s because they’re not being paid a living wage to work and live in Oakland. The reality is OUSD is facing a funding crisis and won’t be able to keep teachers here — and they’re not alone...
For us, the teacher strike is more than just about wages. It’s about
fighting to keep our role models, extended family members, and essential
support systems. It’s also a warning sign of how much is at stake for
our communities if we continue to underfund schools.
If an "only men must register for the draft" law is unconstitutional, how can a school program only for girls not also be unconstitutional? It's either legal to discriminate on the basis of race, or it's not:
A University of Michigan economics professor recently filed a complaint against Wayne State University over a summer educational program.
According to The South End, a Wayne State student newspaper, the university held a “Black Girls Code” event designed for young women in the summer of 2018. The program “introduces computer coding lessons to young girls from underrepresented communities (and is) devoted to showing the world that black girls can code and do so much more.”
The event was hosted by Wayne State from July 30, 2018-August 10,2018.
The professor, Mark Perry, alleges the event only allows girls from 13-17 which violates the Title IX policy. He told The South End, “that educational program (Black Girls Code) clearly discriminates against young men from ages 13 to 17, who because of their gender, are illegally excluded from participation in that annual program hosted by WSU.
Furthermore, he stated, “it’s a prohibited form of gender discrimination that violates Title IX, WSU’s commitment to follow Title IX and the Michigan Constitution.”
A 19-year-old man has been charged with assault after he allegedly attacked an 81-year-old man who was wearing a "Make America Great Again Hat" at a grocery store in Somerset, New Jersey, authorities announced Thursday.
Franklin Township police were called out to the grocery store after receiving reports of a fight on Monday. When they arrived, they found an 81-year-old man who had several minor injuries. The elderly man told police he was on his way out the store after finishing his shopping, when a young man, later identified as Ryan Salvagno, began confronting him over the "Make America Great Again" hat he was wearing.
Picking on an 81-yr-old obviously makes you a man.
A suspect was identified and arrested Friday in connection with the assault of a conservative activist on the campus of the University of California-Berkeley, according to Berkeley News.
Zachary Greenberg was arrested by the University of California Police Department on Friday afternoon as the Alameda County District Attorney's Office considers whether or not to file criminal charges against him.
The assault was committed against Turning Point USA activist Hayden Williams, who says he was training other members of the organization when he was confronted and assaulted.
The incident, which took place on Feb. 19, garnered widespread attention due to video showing Williams being pushed, cursed at, and eventually punched in the face by a man in a black t-shirt.
While they consider whether or not to file criminal charges? Sheesh.
A man who attacked a Texas teenager over his "Make America Great
Again" hat at a Whataburger fast food restaurant has been indicted by a
grand jury, and faces a steep punishment for his crime.
30-year-old Kino Jimenez was made famous by the viral video showing him stealing a MAGA hat from 16-year-old Hunter Richard and cursing at him as he walked away.
He likely regrets the attention after he was apprehended by police for the assault.
Jimenez was indicted by a grand jury Friday on state felony charges of theft of person, and faces two years in jail if found guilty.
Lefties should do a better job of "live and let live" and controlling their anger. Maybe lefties should all be required to report to anger management training.
On Monday, an 18-year-old Oklahoma high school student who
encountered another student wearing a MAGA hat and a Trump 2020 flag
like a cape, blocked the other student from passing him, and snapped,
“Take it off or I’ll rip it off… do you want me to rip it off?” and “You
going to rip it off or am I going to burn it?” before knocking off the
hat and ripping the flag away so he could throw it on the ground.
Now the student might face a criminal charge, as a school resource
officer issued an assault and battery summons by a school resource
officer.
Interesting that I don't remember hearing such stories about people wearing Saint Obama apparel. And if someone finds a story about the one time that happened somewhere, I'm going to ask--do you support such political attacks? Were there anywhere near as many anti-Obama attacks? Are you really going to try to claim there's some sort of parity, are you really going to claim this is just tit-for-tat? Go sing your "mmm mmm mmm, Barack Hussein Obama" song in your comfy padded room.
Lakeland Regional High School administrators
sent a letter to parents this week stating that prom attendees must
take school-provided and chaperoned coach buses to and from the venue in
June.
Schools Superintendent Hugh
Beattie says it's a matter of safety and equity for all students. He
says it will cost $15 to ride the buses.
Combine this with my previous post, about local schools doing away with class rankings, and you see where this so-called equity takes us--it lifts no one, it just drags everyone down to the ground.
The three high schools in Folsom Cordova Unified School District have chosen to do away with student rankings because they felt brilliant students were getting left out.
We'd never do this in athletics--because athletics is important.
