Global Warming and The Left

What to do when Mother Nature doesn't comport with your ideology?

You gotta hate interrupting a comic like Jon Stewart in a state of high dudgeon by peeing in the left’s punchbowl. But his entire rant blasting Fox News for the presumably fallacious premise that subzero temperatures defy the enviroleft’s global warming dogma is misleading.

Weather is just the ironic premise for discussing the subject. What Stewart’s entertaining stemwinder is missing one thing: evidence. Weather has nothing to do with the right’s objections to global warming dogma.

Not just one, but FIVE major datasets used in climate science research show that global temperatures are flat for the last 17 years, despite the rise of Carbon Dioxide levels to 400 parts per million in earth’s atmosphere...

Stewart’s rant shows the power of satire and ridicule, which the left uses in lieu of an actual argument nowadays. The Comedy Central host can cherry-pick the bragadocious Donald Trump as an exemplar of the other side’s argument, and then “freeze, personalize and polarize” him so that other people ‘don’t want to be like Donald Trump.’

I heard on the radio today that it's colder in some parts of the US right now that it is on much of Mars.  That's an interesting comparison, given that the Left's ideology is "out there".

Walmart's Health Insurance Benefits

New Obamacare health insurance enrollees may feel a pang of envy when they eye the coverage plans offered by Walmart to its employees.

For many years, the giant discount retailer has been the target of unions and liberal activists who have harshly criticized the company's health care plans, calling them “notorious for failing to provide health benefits” and "substandard.”

But a Washington Examiner comparison of the two health insurance programs found that Walmart's plan is more affordable and provides significantly better access to high-quality medical care than Obamacare.

What will be the Left's next bugaboo?

1968 West Point Video

A Foreigner's View

The symmetry of life. In 1985 I saw Foreigner perform in Nuernberg, Germany, and now I have a foreigner from Nuernberg as an exchange student in class.

He dropped by after school today to show me the math book he'd be using if he were back home--it's about 1/4" thick! We chatted for a bit as well.

I asked him what his biggest surprise was, what has he encountered that he never expected. Without hesitation he said, "Customer service. We have no such thing in Germany. Nobody cares about the customer there."

I thought that a most interesting observation for a teenager.

Parents, How Can You Let Such Kids Go Off To College?

The question preceding that one would be, how could you possibly raise your kids this way?

Let's back up. Today a former student came in to visit (we had a teacher work day today, students return tomorrow). He's now an RA in college and he shared with me some of the questions he's been asked. Parents, I marvel at the idea of
a) sheltering your child so much that they have to ask such questions, and
b) letting such a sheltered child out of your house to go away to college.

Here are just three of the questions he's been asked.
1) How do you do laundry?
2) (asked just a couple hours before the final move-out time) Do you have a suitcase I can borrow?
3) (when told there were no extra suitcases lying around) Can I take a garbage bag on the plane?

These students attend a $60,000/year private school.

If you had to guess, would you think these questioners are majoring in engineering or related fields? :-)

Just A Reminder

America, you made a mistake in November 2012.

When Left Becomes (What They Think Is The) Right

An apt analogy:

It is no accident that American progressives put so many of us in mind of our Puritan ancestors: not for their virtues, such as they are, but for their sanctimoniousness, their humorlessness, their grim little mouths set permanently in rictuses....

The article is about the left's favorite boogeyman, racism:

Touré’s concept of “niggerization” is very subtle, so subtle, in fact, that only the most discerning of sensibilities — presumably Touré’s — can detect it, like one of those world-class master sommeliers uncovering notes of burnt pencil shavings in an ’82 Bordeaux. The less subtle forms of that phenomenon — for example, using the famous racial epithet on national television — have been in the 21st century restricted to members of the political party that Touré supports, for reasons that are no doubt subtle beyond the brute understanding of the uninitiated. And that is the state of play today: When Robert Byrd, a Democratic senator and Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan, helpfully elucidates the concept of “white niggers” on the evening news, that’s an unfortunate episode that demands sympathy for the wretched old coot. But when the Associated Press accurately transcribes the current president’s faux-folksy “g”-dropping — “Stop complainin’,” etc. — the verdict from MSNBC is not just “racist” but “inherently racist.”

Except he really does talk that way. Sometimes. And if you’ve ever noticed that Barack Obama’s propensity for slipping into ersatz southern cornpone preacher-speak correlates with the complexion of the audience being addressed, you might wonder who, exactly, is behaving in a way that is “inherently racist.” But such thoughts are unthinkable.

I like this observation as well:

The Left needs racism, because unlike their good, old-fashioned Marxist forebears, the postmodern Left’s politics is not rooted in economics or history but in narrative — the most adolescent narrative: Good Guys and Bad Guys. (You could call it Cowboys and Indians, but that would be . . . ) If the other side is Hitler, then almost anything is acceptable, because Hitler can’t win. But, unfortunately for the inventors of national crusades, you don’t get a lot of Hitlers. So Hitlers must be invented. This is one of the reasons every social issue adopted by the Left (and a few adopted by the Right) becomes the “moral equivalent of war” — War on Poverty, War on Drugs, etc. Hitler was many things: nationalist, socialist, central planner, advocate of substantial “investments” in national infrastructure projects, in favor of generous spending on the arts. And, of course, a racist. The GOP checks off none of those boxes, the Democrats check off a few, but Republicans are Hitler because somebody on Fox News said Santa is white. It makes sense, if your worldview depends on its making sense.

At this point in history, the Left needs a spectral standard of evidence when convicting its opponents of racism because there is so little actual evidence to be found. Right = Racist is an article of faith on the left, facts be damned.

Time Flies

I was watching some music videos last night and sent one to an old friend who's now pretty much just a "Christmas card friend"--saying to him, guess which song I just heard?  His reply this morning was the he can't believe it's been almost 20 years since we went to "that" concert at Shoreline.

UPS, Fedex, Christmas, and High Expectations

I was tempted to jump on the "quit'cher whining, ye-who-wait-till-the-last-minute buyers" in reference to the delays experienced over Christmas in overnight package delivery.  Part of me thinks that anyone who waits that long to be "thoughtful" deserves to have their hopes dashed.

But that part of me is towered over by the part of me that loathes the idea that governmental action is required to fix the problem or guarantee that it never happens again; I'm sure that UPS, Fedex, and especially Amazon will work on their own to repair the damage done to their reputations.  As for people being upset that their packages were late, this post made eminent sense to me:

Counting your blessings is always a good idea, but calling the Christmas delivery breakdown a “first world problem” points to what’s wrong with that criticism. We want first world reliability, and if the public just shrugged when things went wrong we wouldn’t get it...

Online shopping and overnight shipping have become like Google or IMDB. They constitute what what my strategy-professor husband Steven Postrel calls “new-wave utilities,” a category that also includes ubiquitous retailers such as 7-Eleven and Starbucks. These businesses have taught us to count on them -- and take them for granted -- the way we assume the tap water will be clean and the lights will turn on. Unless something goes wrong, we don’t think about how amazing they are or how we got them in the first place.

It took years of sustained efforts by online retailers and delivery services to make overnight orders realistic. It also took dissatisfaction: insanely demanding companies working to please insanely demanding customers -- or, in some cases, to offer customers services they hadn’t even thought to ask for -- as each improvement revealed new sources of discontent...

Rising expectations aren’t a sign of immature “entitlement.” They’re a sign of progress -- and the wellspring of future advances. The same ridiculous discontent that says Starbucks ought to offer vegan pumpkin lattes created Starbucks in the first place. Two centuries of refusing to be satisfied produced the long series of innovations that turned hunger from a near-universal human condition into a “third world problem.”

Complaining about small annoyances can be demoralizing and obnoxious, but demanding complacency is worse. The trick is to simultaneously remember how much life has improved while acknowledging how it could be better. In the new year, then, may all your worries be first world problems.

I don't even have a label with which to adequately categorize this post.  First world problem.

The Irony Burns Like Candle Wax

I've avoided talking about the group of Global Warmers who, in the Antarctic summer, had to be rescued because their ship got stuck in pack ice.  I don't know why I avoided it, but I did.  Now, however, how can I avoid the story?  According to the BBC:

The Chinese ice-breaker that helped rescue passengers stranded on the Akademik Shokalskiy vessel in Antarctica may now itself be stuck.

The link above, and the commentary below, come from here:

Strangely enough, the BBC devotes almost 1,000 words to this story, but not once is it mentioned what these passengers were doing there. Just seeing the sights? Trying to prove that global warming climate change threatens to melt the polar ice caps and flood Al Gore’s basement?

Who knows? Who cares? Shut up, you climate denier. Now, be a dear and turn up the thermostat, won’t you? It’s positively beastly in here!

Awesome :-

Bill Gates Wanted His Money And He Said No

Bill probably isn't used to being told no:

Bill Gates is the richest person in the world — but one retired New York hedge-fund mogul thought the software pioneer’s Giving Pledge was “practically worthless"....

Wilson found especially problematic the pledge’s loophole that allowed signers to gift their wealth to a family-controlled foundation.

“And these foundations become, more often than not, bureaucracy-ridden sluggards,” Wilson wrote to Gates in a June 2010 e-mail, a copy of which was obtained by the website BuzzFeed.

“I’m going to stay far away from your effort,” Wilson told Gates in the same e-mail...

 Wilson, by signing the pledge, could inspire younger people to increase their giving, Gates wrote.

Wilson, in a second e-mail to Gates, was a bit more testy.

“You, being a liberal, think you can change people more than I think,” he wrote.

Wilson had his own views on how and when to engage in philanthropy.  Read more here.

When The Best And Brightest Have No Freakin' Idea What They're Doing

How is the education establishment going to react to this?  Charter schools, which they hate, run by state universities, which they love, being recommended to be shut down, which they love, by an organization, which they hate, that supports charter schools, which they hate:

The California Charter Schools Association called Thursday for the closure of a West Sacramento charter school that is run by UC Davis, Sacramento City College and the Washington Unified School District.

West Sacramento Early College Prep, which served 119 students last school year, is among the worst-performing campuses in the state based on standardized tests.

While the statewide organization is a champion of charter schools, it believes that calling for the closure of struggling programs demonstrates that charter schools are willing to be held accountable, said CCSA President Jed Wallace...

The West Sacramento school is one of six charters that CCSA has identified; the others are in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Rosa, Antioch and Delano.

Ever hear of anyone in the education establishment making calls to shut down low-performing public schools?  Me, either.

The funny thing is, one could argue that perhaps this school is doing fine given its population, that its "value-added" is significant.  To argue that, and to counter that argument, would require the usual sides to reverse their usual positions!

No matter how you look at it, though, the performance of the students at this school is among the worst in the state.  It ranks in the bottom 15 schools in a 4-county region.  They may be doing wonderful things at that school, but there's no empirical evidence for such a belief.  And the excuse they gave was a classic:

Levine says students at the school don’t fare well on the state’s standardized tests, known as STAR tests, because they aren’t aligned to “the way we want them to think.” He said the school adopted project-based learning in 2008 that is more closely aligned with the new Common Core State Standards curriculum that California students will begin to be tested for in 2014.

The dean noted that California students are no longer taking STAR tests. He questioned why the charter association is using an “outmoded” measure to decide if a school is performing well academically.

Isn't that beautiful?  I'm told that Common Core will boost students' academic thinking beyond mere regurgitation of facts, that they'll understand the material on a deeper level.   If this school is teaching its students to operate that way, wouldn't those students perform even better on the STAR tests, which supposedly ask for only a cursory, fill-in-the-blank-style understanding?

I'm no fan of the Common Core standards or of the effort to use them to impose so-called discovery learning or any other educational fad on us, but even CC supporters must concede that using CC standards to excuse and explain low performance is a harsh indictment indeed.

But here's the fun part:  this school is run with input from the University of California, Davis.  A UC campus.   If this school is the best those eggheads can come up with, how much confidence should we taxpayers have in that university's school of education?  Why should prospective teachers pay to attend a UC program with such results?

Will the California Charter Schools Association's proposal lead to any introspection on the part of the movers and shakers at Davis?  Sadly, I wouldn't bet on it.  They're ideologues, evidence means nothing to them.

Why The Rest Of The Country Thinks We're Nuts Here In California

Anyone who thinks this is the best way to handle the problems posed by the smallest fraction of a percent of students--well, they're why the rest of the country just shakes their heads at us:

With a law that spells out the rights of transgender students in grades K-12 set to take effect in California, school districts are reviewing locker room layouts, scheduling sensitivity training for coaches, assessing who will sleep where during overnight field trips and reconsidering senior portrait dress codes.

But administrators, counselors, teachers and school board members also are watching and waiting. The law, the nation's first requiring public schools to let children use sex-segregated facilities and participate in the gender-specific activities of their choice, could end up suspended within days of its Jan. 1 launch if a referendum to repeal it qualifies for the November ballot.

Are we going to require students to have signed affidavits attesting to their sexual identity?   Is sexual identity "fluid"--a boy could use the girls' restroom and play on the boys' basketball team, or vice versa? 

I'm not arguing against the rights of the transgendered, or being insensitive to what they see as their plight.  I'm arguing that what we've done in California is among the worst ways of addressing it.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/12/26/6028303/calif-schools-prepare-for-transgender.html#storylink=cpy

CTA Steps Into A Lawsuit

Larry Sand, president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network, writes in his usual style:

If successful, this lawsuit will remove the tenure, seniority and arcane dismissal statutes from the California education code and render them unconstitutional, thus making it easier to get rid of incompetent and criminal teachers while outlawing seniority as a method of teacher-retention. (It’s worth noting that the Students Matter lawsuit doesn’t ask the court to devise specific policy solutions, leaving those decisions to local districts as they are in 33 other states.) While this litigation will help all students in the state, inner-city kids would benefit the most...

Though not named in the lawsuit, the teachers unions – refusing to sit by and accept a change in rules that would benefit students at their expense – intervened as defendants. In the recent edition of California Educator, the California Teachers Association’s bimonthly magazine for teachers, the union tries to explain to its members that the lawsuit is the work of the devil; in doing so, it manages to haul out every platitude it could muster from its amply furnished cliché closet, attempting to convince all concerned that they are a beleaguered but scrappy David fighting against a corporate Goliath.

Yes, people with money are behind the suit. Lawyers don’t work for free and the poor children who have been victimized by the current system don’t have deep pockets. And what corporate agenda is he talking about? Usually this scare statement refers to the allegation that corporations want to take over and privatize education. This lawsuit is attempting to do no such thing; it is simply trying to make public education better. And his last point is a real howler. CTA does not, I repeat, does not fight to have qualified teachers in every classroom. They fight to keep every teacher – qualified or not – on the job to ensure their bottom line is not affected. Unfortunately this means that in addition to good and great teachers, the union also fights to keep stinkers and pedophiles alone with your children seven hours a day, five days a week.

You might want to read the whole thin--especially the end, where Larry describes what it takes, and how much it costs, to fire a bad teacher.

The Laziest Day Ever

I went to an early New Year's party last night but still had to get up early to go to breakfast with a former student.  Not long after that I picked up my son and we met my mother and her guy at the theater to see Grudge Match.  (I didn't hate it, but can't recommend it.)

I've spent most of the rest of the day on top of my bed, finishing up the 30-hour audiobook John Adams by David McCullough.  A slight headache has bothered me for hours.  I may go to bed now.

I'll probably put away the Christmas decorations tomorrow.

How Does This Make Sense?

I understand that the author is using the English language, but I don't understand the meaning as he's strung them together and drawn a conclusion:

On average, cities and counties in California pay about 35% of every police and fire salary dollar as the employer contribution to CalPERS. Employees themselves contribute an additional 8% to 12%. This is why California's pension system is not in a crisis, despite what the anti-union critics say. Our local governments and their employees are making contributions totaling 40% to 50% of salary to keep the state's pension system solvent.

What percentage of salary are such employees retiring with?  I'll bet it's over 40-50%.  How is the shortfall being dealt with?  Answer:  it's not.  That's why it's a shortfall.

Sympathy

It wouldn't be hard, as some of have done, to suggest that this guy check his class privilege at the door.  It's Christmastime, though, and I can afford to be a little more sympathetic:

The blog's anonymous author graduated from a law school that was in the top 50 ranked by U.S. News and World Report. He was on law review and even got a summer position at a firm after his second year. He didn't get a job offer though.

This grad still hasn't found legal work and took a job selling cologne just before the holidays to make ends meet. Now he says he's "liveblogging the loss of my last shred of dignity."

I've never liked it when people talk down about being a janitor.  Our soon-to-be-ex-superintendent threatened a district administrator by saying he'd demote her to janitor.  I get that it's not a glamorous job, and certainly not one I'd enjoy, but I think that implicit in such talk is that being a janitor is beneath your dignity, that some are too good to be a janitor and some are not.  I'm very uncomfortable with that kind of elitism.  Honest work shouldn't be beneath anyone's dignity, no matter what the job.

So the blog writer mentioned above could be mocked, or chastised, because he talks of losing his dignity.  No one takes that from you, you give it away.  People have faced a lot worse than a retail job and managed to retain their dignity.

But we all understand his point.  He wanted "more" than a retail job.  He worked for more.  And he currently doesn't have it.  Whether it be prestige or pay or whatever else, he wanted more, and he can rightly feel disappointed for not yet having achieved it.  I can sympathize with that.  And I respect his decision to take the (honest) job he took in order to support himself.  That's admirable.

On the other hand, his current situation is temporary; I can't imagine that he'll still be selling cologne in a few years.  Instead of whining about his dignity, he should continue working towards the profession for which he's trained.  Instead of talking down about customers or the people he works with, he should take some pride that his fellow employees come to him expecting him to know the answers to their questions; perhaps he can gain some empathy by working amongst the people he seems to look down upon.  He doesn't look down on them as people--he feels a kinship for working the same "dehumanizing" and "soul-crushing" job with them--but since he doesn't think anyone should have to work retail, and some of the people he writes about do have to work retail, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that he does think he's better than they are, at least in the abstract.

He's looking at his current condition as a glass-half-empty.  He could choose to look at it in a different way.

Does The Left Hand Know What The Right Hand Is Doing?

Long-time readers of this blog know that, in general, I'm a fan of Michelle Rhee, and have been since she addressed us at the CEAFU conference a few years ago.  I don't understand the purpose of this proposed law, however:

A ballot measure submitted by a political consultant for education advocate Michelle Rhee seeks to remove seniority as a factor when California school districts lay off teachers, requiring instead that decisions be based on performance and student test scores.

That approach has been at the core of Rhee’s advocacy efforts as head of StudentsFirst, a national group headquartered in Sacramento. Rhee, who is married to Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, has said she established the group to try to counter the influence that teachers unions have in decisions about public education. Unions generally reject the idea that teachers should be rated based on their students’ test scores, and prefer contracts that call for the most recently hired teachers to be the first let go during layoffs.

It's not that I'm against the idea, I just don't see how it will work.  Under the new testing regime with the Common Core standards, I understand that students will only be tested a few times throughout their K-12 experience.  In high school they'll be tested in the 11th grade.  Given that, how do you determine who the lousy teacher(s) is (are) and ditch them if there are to be layoffs?

I don't like ideological solutions to problems, I like practical ones.  Yes, it turns out that I often see practicality in solutions that conform to my ideology, but definitely not in this case.  I'd want to see how this would work in practice before I'd support it.

It's About Darned Time

I have no idea if Mr. Yu is, in general, a sinner or a saint, but I absolutely believe the foundation of his lawsuit:

Yu, a U.S.-educated Chinese citizen, is now going after the Poughkeepsie, New York, school in federal court, claiming not only wrongful expulsion and irreparable personal damage but sex discrimination. His complaint argues that he was the victim of a campus judicial system that in practice presumes males accused of sexual misconduct are guilty. His is one of three such lawsuits filed last summer. St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia is being sued by an expelled student, New York state resident Brian Harris, who likewise claims he was railroaded by a gender-biased campus kangaroo court. And in August college basketball player Dez Wells sued Ohio's Xavier University for expelling him in the summer of 2012 based on a rape charge that the county prosecutor publicly denounced as false.

How I Spent Christmas

After my son and I did Christmas morning together, we both took off--he to his mother's house, I to San Francisco.

It's hard to believe, but I have a friend who had never before been to San Francisco.  He couldn't get anyone to take his shift at work today, so he flew in Christmas afternoon and flew out of Sacramento early this morning.  This gave us somewhat over 24 hours in The City.

December in San Francisco is Northern California's best-kept secret, and I can say that knowing that no one will remember or believe me anyway.  In fact, the weather there the last couple days was better than what they usually get in June--clear skies and 60's, no wind, no fog.

You want proof:

click to see complete picture

Only in SF would you need a 20 minute time limit and the first "rule" at a public toilet!

View from Telegraph Hill

Who doesn't love Ghirardelli chocolate?!

I could tour this submarine over and over again--and in fact have done so!

Fort Point, a Fort Sumter-like garrison at the entrance to the Golden Gate.  That's the Golden Gate Bridge towering over it.

Alcatraz, with the cell block on top