Obama's Education Secretary Openly Lies About The Effects of the Sequester, Washington Post Calls Him On It

Why anyone would believe a single word coming from any mouthpiece of the current Administration is far beyond me.  Just this week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has lied through his teeth three times regarding the apocalyptic effects of sequestration; his claims were bad enough that the Washington Post, hardly a right-leaning paper, gave his claims 4 Pinocchios, their worst rating:

Duncan’s claim, on one of the Sunday morning shows, that teachers were already getting pink slips because of the looming sequester was actually the second time he had made this assertion.

“I was on a call yesterday, people are starting to give RIF [reduction in force] notes,” Duncan said in a meeting with reporters Feb. 21, three days before his appearance on CBS. “Schools are already starting to give teachers notices.”

Oddly, however, the Education Department for days was unable to cough up the name of a single school district where these notices had been delivered. Then, on Wednesday, Duncan appeared before the White House press corps and produced a name — Kanawha County in West Virginia — with a major league caveat. “Whether it’s all sequester-related, I don’t know,” he said...

In fact, no one in the county seemed to know what Duncan was talking about, including the education reporters who cover the school district for the Charleston, W.V., newspapers. “There’s very little sequestration-related panic, at least on the education side of things,” one reporter said...

The administration has been on thin ice with some of its claims about the impact of the sequestration cuts. Duncan’s assertion that “as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs” also appears to be hyperbole...

There is little debate that across-the-board spending cuts in education funding will cause pain for some schools and states. But there is no reason to hype the statistics — or to make scary pronouncements on pink slips being issued based on misinformation.

Indeed, Duncan’s lack of seriousness about being scrupulously factual undercuts the administration’s claim that the cuts are a serious problem.

Duncan made this claim not once, not twice, but three times. Let this be a teachable moment for him: Next time, before going on television, check your facts.

That's about as close as the Post is going to get to saying "liar, liar, pants on fire", so I just said it for them.

Only In America Could Something This Stupid Happen

In no other country on the planet would this even be contemplated:

A Texas high school student has filed a federal lawsuit against her school and her teachers after she was punished for refusing to salute and recite the Mexican pledge of allegiance.

The Thomas More Law Center filed the suit on behalf of Brenda Brinsdon alleging the McAllen Independent School District violated the 15-year-old girl’s constitutional rights when she was forced to recite the Mexican pledge and sing the Mexican national anthem.

Brinsdon, who is the daughter of a Mexican immigrant and an American father, refused. She believed it was un-American to pledge a loyalty oath to another country.

Ironically, the school district has a policy that prohibits a school from compelling students to recite the American Pledge of Allegiance.

Well, duh.  That was decided by a 1943 US Supreme Court decision, but let's continue:

The recitation of the Mexican pledge and the singing of the Mexican national anthem was part of a 2011 Spanish class assignment at Achieve Early College High School.  The teacher, Reyna Santos, required all her students to participate in the lesson.

When Brinsdon refused to back down – she was punished, the lawsuit alleges. She was given an alternative assignment on the Independence of Mexico. The teacher gave her a failing grade – and then required the student to sit in class over a period of several days to listen to other students recite the Mexican flag.

The lawsuit states Brinsdon offered to recite the American pledge in Spanish but the teacher refused her request.

“It’s astonishing that this Texas school would deny Brenda her right of conscience and free speech not to pledge allegiance to a foreign country,” said Thompson...

And while she is fluent in Spanish and English and is proud of her Mexican heritage, Brinsdon is a “true-blooded American,” Mersino added.

Who will defend this teacher's actions?  Anyone?

Bad Teacher Doing A Bad Thing

Doesn't this just make your heart sink?

A California high school student was shocked at what she found when she decided to play detective and stop a string of thefts from backpacks during gym class.

Justine Betti said she decided to hide in a locker to see if she could catch the thief in action. She didn’t expect the alleged culprit to be her gym teacher.

After all of the students left the locker room, the teacher stayed behind, rummaged through backpacks and took money, Betti said.

“Something needed to be done. That’s not okay,” she told ABC News’ Sacramento affiliate KXTV.  Betti is a sophomore at Linden High School in Linden, Calif., about 60 miles southeast of Sacramento.

Betti decided to hide in the locker again — this time, with a cellphone camera to record what she saw. She set up a second camera in another locker to get two angles.

I'm curious if this teacher's union is gearing up a defense.

Classy

If you're one of the 7 people in the country who hasn't seen this video yet, I'm privileged to be the one to provide it for you:

Both those teams are full of winners.

Update, 2/28/13:  Clearly CBS isn't full of winners, as they're removed the video due to copyright considerations.

Why We Can't Build Any More Hoover Dams

I periodically hear people, often liberals, claim that America isn't great anymore, and as evidence say that we don't build things like the Hoover Dam anymore.  Even President Obama said so last fall:

The dam is frequently cited by Obama as an example of American ingenuity and the value of government-funded investment in public infrastructure.

There are plenty of reasons why we can't or don't, and many of those reasons are liberals. Here's a modern example:

The application for approval (for the Keystone XL pipeline) has been under review by the U.S. government for more than four years, far longer than any other cross-border pipeline project and more than twice as long as it would take to build the pipeline.

I Don't Quite See How The Common Core Standards Address These Issues (Especially The California Version of Those Standards)

But who doesn't like a funny Xtranormal video?

Strippers For Teens

I'm not convinced this is really genuinely truly endangering the welfare of a child, but it's certainly base:
World’s Best/Worst Mom Hired Strippers For Her Son’s 16th Birthday Party

I'm sure you don't want to miss the picture of the stripper upside down on the boy's lap with her crotch in his face.

And People Still Talk About This Guy For The Supreme Court

The correct way to amend the Constitution is via Article V.  That's why the Founders put Article V in the Constitution.

"But Darren," some claim, "the Article V hurdle is too high!  Things have changed, times have changed, and we need an easier way to make things right!"  My answer to that is to change the Constitution to make it easier to change the Constitution, not just ignore Article V because it's (intentionally) difficult.

Of course, if you're an ideologue California Supreme Court justice in arm's reach of the US Supreme Court, that pesky Constitution isn't something you have to worry about for long:

Asked about the doctrine of enumerated powers and whether it was possible to reconcile the limited view of federal power articulated in The Federalist with modern Supreme Court doctrines, Liu demurred. “If I had an answer to that I’d have written a book,” he quipped, observing the question of federal power is an enduring constitutional and political debate. Despite the language of enumeration, he noted, “there are certain economic realities that have shifted our understanding of these words over time,” such as the increasingly integrated economy. Nonetheless he noted that it is a hotly debated proposition whether courts should rely more on founding era understandings or contemporary realities.

That's fancy talk for "I'll do what I think is right, the Constitution be damned."

You want a poster child for liberals?  There you have one.

Amazon Student

I probably spend $39/year in shipping costs on Amazon anyway, so now that I'm a student again I'm taking advantage of this offer.  If you're a student, too, check it out!

Most Miserable Cities In The US

The list created by Forbes involves the scrutiny of the country’s largest urban areas which are then ranked via factors such as the city’s crime rates, foreclosures, taxes, home prices, commute times, weather, and decreasing populations.


Go take a look at the list, and note the following:  of the 20 most miserable cities, how many are west of the Mississippi?  And of those, how many are in California?


Socialism doesn't work because, as Margaret Thatcher said, eventually you run out of other people's money.

University Students and Their Expectations

A couple days ago I posted on the pleasant experience I had in Reno, meeting up with two former students.  I wrote about how pleased I was that they'd figured out that personal responsibility is one of the important life lessons to be learned at college.

Clearly not everyone has figured that out:

Such accusations reveal little about the professor in question; no one ever satisfactorily distinguishes a boring professor from a boredom-inclined student — which is not to suggest that boring professors do not exist, simply that Rate My Professors cannot recognize them. What the comments reveal are students’ assumptions about what they are owed by their teachers and what constitutes a good classroom experience. Most pointedly, they show the extent to which higher education in North America has become a consumer product like any other, catering to client satisfaction and majority appeal. Reading through the comments, one is disheartened not only because so many are crude and illiterate but also because they indicate how deeply most students have imbibed the canard that university is about being entertained and helped to feel good about oneself.

The following observation, though, doesn't apply only to college:

Statistical researcher Valen Johnson has demonstrated in Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education (2003) that student responses to their university experience have been corrupted by an entitlement mentality about grades. Because students tend to excuse poor performance by pointing to external factors, they often blame their teachers when marks are lower than expected — when, as one student wrote on the site, they are “completely blindsided by a bad grade.”

Accuracy vs. Political Correctness

Rasmussen reports:

Voters continue to believe that political correctness trumps accuracy in most school textbooks. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 16% of Likely U.S. Voters think most school textbooks are more concerned about accurately providing information. That's down from 27% in March 2010. Fifty-nine percent (59%) think most textbooks are chiefly concerned with presenting information in a politically correct manner, consistent with attitudes for the past three years. Twenty-five percent (25%) are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Considering the requirements of California textbooks, this result should be higher in California. I wonder if it is.

Skiing Yesterday and Today

It snowed a little on Tuesday, so skiing yesterday was beautiful.  My knee, though, hurt like heck--I don't think I can do this anymore.  Here are two phone-cam videos from the top:

They're mp4 files, and I don't know if Blogger will recognize them as videos or pictures....

Update, 2/23/13:  Try this Vimeo link.

Teachers Unions As Bullies

The author of this piece is the president of the California Teachers Empowerment Network (CTEN), of which I am a board member.

Here's the setup:

The Michigan Education Association had its apple cart turned upside down when the Wolverine State went "right-to-work" in December. This means that, unlike California and 25 other states, a worker doesn't have to pay union dues as a condition of employment.

My introduction to union coercion came in 2005, when, as a middle school teacher in Los Angeles, I joined the Prop. 75 campaign. That initiative would have prohibited public employee labor organizations from collecting the part of union dues which goes for politics without prior consent of the employee. Sensing a disruption in their forced dues gravy train, the California Teachers Association went into overdrive. It raised union dues on its members for a three-year period and mortgaged their offices in Sacramento, then used the millions they accumulated to scare teachers and the public – ominously warning them of imaginary horrors that would be visited on them if the proposition passed.

Here's the part the unions and their u-bot zombie supporters just cannot argue:

Teachers unions are forever telling its members how much the union does for them in the way of wages, job benefits, etc. You would think that an organization that does so much for its members wouldn't have to resort to bullying to keep them in the fold.

The rest of the piece is just as strong, go take a read--especially the part about the unions' specious "free rider" complaint.

College Life

Yesterday I drove up to Reno, skiing a little bit on the way up.  I'd arranged to meet a couple of former students (now UNR students) for dinner at Circus Circus, and I hope they enjoyed themselves as much as I did.

They've already figured college out.  They both said how college is "on you"--no one cares if you go to class or not, if you do your work or not, if you do well in the classes or not.  Personal time management (e.g., not procrastinating) and personal responsibility have been the most important things they've learned.

One made a very specific point.  He said that there's plenty of time to party, you don't need to go to college to party.  Those that do, those that can't stand their classes and are only there for the social aspect of it, aren't learning anything.   His point was that you should study what you like so that you look forward to going to class; that will help build the sense of responsibility to actually go.

We agreed that partying is fun now, but when it's over you have nothing more than a nice memory that will no doubt fade with time.  You could have the same experience partying after working as a shopping cart gatherer at your local grocery store, you don't need to pay the high cost of tuition to experience that.  Getting an education, though, lasts forever--and you can still party on weekends.

I'd say they're coming along just fine for freshmen.

Chase

My grandfather died 16 years ago.  Several years after that, when we moved my grandmother into an assisted living facility, I bought nana and grandpa's house.  I've lived here for 7 1/2 years and very infrequently I get mail addressed to one or the other of them--often solicitations for money.

Today I received mail from Chase addressed to my grandfather.  It felt like a credit card so I opened it--and sure enough, there was not one but two credit cards in grandpa's name.  Remember, he died 16 years ago.  You'd think a bank as big as Chase wouldn't  have to use such old lists.

Pardon Me, Would You Have Any Grey Poupon?

Who didn't like those commercials?  No one?  I thought not, so it's good they're coming back:

After a 16-year hiatus, the mustard that mocked its own stuffy image in one of TV's most famous commercials will once again take to the airwaves during the Academy Awards show on Feb. 24. 

And now the bad news:

The spot comes as Kraft Foods looks to boost sagging sales of the Dijon mustard, which is facing competition from a growing variety of high-end condiments on supermarket shelves.

I Can See Clearly Now, The Rain Is Gone

Yesterday's rain here in the Valley meant snow up in the Sierra, enough that checking the CalTrans web site showed that chains were required over Donner Summit.  As I look out the window this morning, though, I see nothing but the clearest of blue skies--not a cloud--and I-80 is clear.

Guess I'll make use of this:

I have another post scheduled to appear later today, enjoy!

Spam

The less I blog (and I know I haven't been blogging much lately), the more spam I get.

How does that work?

Give Her The Axe

This is remarkable on a couple different levels:

A tenured professor who forced her students to sign pledges that they would vote for President Barack Obama last November should be fired, the college’s president recommended.

Sharon Sweet, an associate professor of mathematics at Brevard Community College in Florida, is guilty of electioneering, harassment, and incompetence, according to a three-month investigation into her classroom behavior leading up to the November election.

The Board of Trustees will hold a hearing on the matter, and then vote on whether to adopt President James Richey’s recommendation that Sweet be fired.

It's All About The Money. In Fact, That's All It's Ever Been About.

If you have to compel someone to buy your service, your service obviously sucks.  Just sayin:

Less than six weeks before Michigan's controversial right-to-work law takes effect, teachers unions across the state are clamoring to get new contracts approved, in what some observers say is an effort to get around the measure and keep dues flowing into union coffers.

Union leaders representing teachers in Utica, Plymouth-Canton, Dearborn and Detroit Public Schools are all working toward new collective bargaining agreements ahead of the new law, which takes effect March 27.

The law includes a clause that says all contracts in place before that date are immune from the new rules, which means members would be tied into paying dues until the new contract expires. The measure bans requiring financial support of a union as a condition of employment for private-sector and most public-sector workers.

If I were a representative of those school districts, I wouldn't negotiate at all.

How did California become more union-crazy than Michigan, home of the UAW, and Wisconsin, home of the so-called progressive movement? Can we ever fix this?

How Many Homosexuals

I once read that reasonable estimates put the percentage at 1.5-6%, nowhere near Kinsey's long-discredited 10%.  Gallup further informs:

The percentage of U.S. adults who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) ranges from 1.7% in North Dakota to 5.1% in Hawaii and 10% in the District of Columbia, according to Gallup surveys conducted from June-December 2012. Residents in the District of Columbia were most likely to identify as LGBT (10%). Among states, the highest percentage was in Hawaii (5.1%) and the lowest in North Dakota (1.7%), but all states are within two percentage points of the nationwide average of 3.5%.

Why There Was No Blogging Yesterday

Gave my son some freeway driving experience yesterday, but the veteran driver took over before we got to the Bay Bridge.

If you've never driven in San Francisco, count yourself lucky. Being a nice dad, I spared my son and took the headache upon myself. Once we were back in the East Bay I let him take the conn to get us home.

I Need A Break!

Next week is Ski Week--or officially, Presidents' Week.  Yes, I get a week off school.

I'm exhausted.  Am I exhausted because it was a rough week, or am I exhausted because I knew there was a break coming and waiting for it to get here took all I had, or is there something else at work?

Whatever it is, it's taken me 3 nights to get through one of my video course 50-minute classes, and tonight I was still struggling. 

I'm glad to get a week off!

Because Obviously, Hispanics Aren't Americans

Some people.  Sheesh.

Four California high-school students were reportedly suspended for chanting “U.S.A! U.S.A!” and wearing American flag bandanas during a basketball game. While their punishment has since been rescinded, school administrators said “the incident is far from over.”

Oxnard Union School District superintendent Gabe Soumakian told Fox News Radio that “we need to pursue this further” and “work with teachers and students and the community about the concept of cultural proficiency.” Soumakian and Camarillo High School principal Glenn Lipman felt that the students’ actions might have had racist undertones since the schools have large Hispanic student populations.

“We wanted to make sure [their actions weren't] racially motivated, and I told the kids I just want to be sensitive to the feelings of everybody,” Lipman said. “If we’re doing it for patriotism, that’s fine. But if we’re doing it for something else that’s racially motivated, I’m not going to allow that.”

I'm curious--are Americans a race? What racial overtones do you get from USA! USA! ?

You Can't Win For Losing

We're always told to try to "make learning real", to "engage" the students, to get away from lecturing and "show" them something.  This teacher did, the student was barely inconvenienced, and now the teacher is considered the king of bad judgement:

What started off as a history lesson at Schrade Middle School in Rowlett ended up with a 7th grader having rope marks around his neck.

A history teacher was trying to teach lasso techniques used during cattle drives. He asked for student volunteers, and had them run... then tried to rope them.

"[The teacher] was visiting with the students, telling the students about how Cowboys would corral maverick steers back into the herd," explained Garland Independent School District spokesman Chris Moore.

The 13-year-old volunteer ended up with bruises.

Bruises? They look like scratches to me.

When I was in 11th grade US History class our teacher brought in a pillory.  I volunteered to be locked in it.  The pillory was bolted to plywood, and I stood on the plywood--what if I'd fallen over and cracked my skull?  Would the teacher have been showing bad judgement by putting me in the pillory, or would it merely have been a bad accident?

This kind of behavior on the part of the parents, and the response from the school system, should be enough to dispirit any teacher.  You know what?  Just sit down, shut up, and take notes.  No one gets hurt doing that.

Should Universities Really Have Anything To Do With This?

My answer is "no":

Over the last decade, as activists started pushing colleges to accommodate transgender students, they first raised only basic issues, like recognizing a name change or deciding who could use which bathrooms.

But the front lines have shifted fast, particularly at the nation's elite colleges, and a growing number are offering students health insurance plans with coverage for gender reassignment surgery.

No college or university offered such treatment just six years ago, but when Brown University said last week that its student health plan would be extended to cover sex-change surgery beginning in August, advocates for transgender students said Brown would become the 36th college to do so.

If private schools want their plans to offer this, that's their business. But the University of California system, which I subsidize with my tax dollars? Are you kidding me?

Technology For Its Own Sake

I'm not the only one who wasn't smitten with Cupid's technology arrow:

Professors at top research universities are highly skeptical of the value of the instructional technologies being injected into their classrooms, which many see as making their job harder and doing little to improve teaching and learning.

That's the conclusion of "Technological Change and Professional Control in the Professoriate," published in the January edition of Science, Technology & Human Values. Based on interviews with 42 faculty members at three research-intensive universities, the study was funded under a grant from the National Science Foundation and particularly focuses on professors in the sciences, including chemistry and biology, with anthropology thrown in as a point of comparison.

Consider the opinions of two different chemists. "I went to [a course management software workshop] and came away with the idea that the greatest thing you could do with that is put your syllabus on the Web and that's an awful lot of technology to hand the students a piece of paper at the start of the semester and say keep track of it," said one. "What are the gains for students by bringing IT into the class? There isn't any. You could teach all of chemistry with a whiteboard. I really don't think you need IT or anything beyond a pencil and a paper," said another.

Some of the professors make a point that I've made for years--that technology is good for administrative tasks but its usefulness in teaching is somewhat more limited.

Rose-Colored Glasses

You know what the problem with columns like this is?  It's the fantasy that the pre-NCLB days were filled with wine and roses, and that's just ridiculous.  The reason NCLB was instituted in the first place was because there was (and still is) wide consensus that our high school graduates weren't up to snuff.  That may or may not have changed, but blaming NCLB is blaming the symptom, not the disease.

Getting Out of a Rut

It was just over 25 years ago that I got my first apartment, a 2BR/1BA in a nice complex just outside of Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, CO.  My mother and grandmothers got together and helped outfit me--I had plenty of bath towels and dishes and even furniture.  My mother had also bought me some nice framed posters of places I'd been--Florence, Paris, and New York.  To that mix I bought and framed a picture of Schloss Neuschwanstein.

Every place I've lived for the next 25 years, those posters lived, too.  In my current house, in which I've lived for 7 1/2 years, Florence held a place of honor over my fireplace while Neuschwanstein held guard in my bedroom.

This weekend I was out doing some shopping at my favorite art store (OK, it was Ross, but whatever) and I saw a beautiful picture of the Grand Canal in Venice.  It looks like a photograph that had been transferred to canvas, and the price was right.  It now hangs over my fireplace; Florence is (temporarily?) in a closet.

On my cruise last summer I won a lithograph of an oil painting of the Casino building in Avalon, Catalina Island, and being tired of tripping over the shipping tube, I decided to go out and get a frame for it.  The custom matting (the picture is an odd size) will be here this week, and Avalon will replace Neuschwanstein in my bedroom.

After 25 years, I'm starting to change the decorations in my abode :-)

Update, 2/13/13:  Here are the new pictures:

The Science Is Settled (Until It Isn't)

From the February 2013 issue of Smithsonian:

The idea that the Clovis people, as they came to be known, were the first Americans quickly won over the research community. “The evidence was unequivocal,” said Ted Goebel, a colleague of Waters at the Center for the Study of the First Americans. Clovis sites, it turned out, were spread all over the continent, and “there was a clear association of the fauna with hundreds, if not thousands, of artifacts,” Goebel said. “Again and again it was the full picture"...

The Clovis theory, over time, acquired the force of dogma. “We all learned it as undergraduates,” Waters recalled. Any artifacts that scholars said came before Clovis, or competing theories that cast doubt on the Clovis-first idea, were ridiculed by the archaeological establishment, discredited as bad science or ignored.

Take South America. In the late 1970s, the U.S. archaeologist Tom D. Dillehay and his Chilean colleagues began excavating what appeared to be an ancient settlement on a creek bank at Monte Verde, in southern Chile. Radiocarbon readings on organic material collected from the ruins of a large tent-like structure showed that the site was 14,800 years old, predating Clovis finds by more than 1,000 years. The 50-foot-long main structure, made of wood with a hide roof, was divided into what appeared to be individual spaces, each with a separate hearth. Outside was a second, wishbone-shaped structure that apparently contained medicinal plants. Mastodons were butchered nearby. The excavators found cordage, stone choppers and augers and wooden planks preserved in the bog, along with plant remains, edible seeds and traces of wild potatoes. Significantly, though, the researchers found no Clovis points. That posed a challenge: either Clovis hunters went to South America without their trademark weapons (highly unlikely) or people settled in South America even before the Clovis people arrived.

There must have been “people somewhere in the Americas 15,000 or 16,000 years ago, or perhaps as long as 18,000 years ago,” said Dillehay, now at Vanderbilt University.

Of the researchers working sites that seemed to precede Clovis people, Dillehay was singled out for special criticism. He was all but ostracized by Clovis advocates for years. When he was invited to meetings, speakers stood up to denounce Monte Verde. “It’s not fun when people write to your dean and try to get you fired,” he recalled. “And then your grad students try to get jobs and they can’t get jobs.”

The applicability of this cautionary tale to the Church of Global Warming is self-apparent.

Asteroids--Caused By Global Warming

The CNN anchor said it, not me.

“Talk about something else that’s falling from the sky and that is an asteroid. What’s coming our way? Is this an effect of, perhaps, of global warming or is this just some meteoric occasion?”

Watch video at the link, decide for yourself.

Results Are In

I scored 46/50 on yesterday's test.  The test was open book/notes, but on the bad news is that there are no bonus or extra credit points on it to make up for the goofy errors I made.  I'm still satisfied with the results.

Grades in that course come 90% from tests and 10% from a project.  My instructor approved my project yesterday:  I'm going to try multiple regression to determine if I can predict an NFL team's score in a game if I'm given only total yards, total number of offensive plays, and number of turnovers.  If my model works, I can try it out next season as a predictor for which teams should win--and see if I get over 50/50.  If nothing else, it's fun :)

Taking The Night Off

I took the 2nd of 6 tests today for my class this semester, Statistical Analysis.  I'm done with math for tonight!

Does Education Drive Economic Growth?

Jonah Goldberg says "no":

Higher education in particular is almost universally championed as the key to "winning the future"

— a buzz phrase the president borrowed from Newt Gingrich awhile back. New York Times economics columnist David Leonhardt calls education the "lifeblood of economic growth."

Often channeling such writers as Thomas Friedman, whose fondness for the Chinese economic model borders on the perverse, Obama routinely elevates education to a national security issue. "There's an educational arms race taking place around the world right now — from China to Germany, to India to South Korea," Obama said in 2010. "Cutting back on education would amount to unilateral disarmament. We can't afford to do that."

Now, obviously, education is important and necessary for a host of reasons (and nobody is calling for "disarmament," whatever that means). But there's little evidence it drives growth.

I have long asked to see some evidence that all our spending on higher education in this state is of value to the taxpayer and not just to the student who gets heavily subsidized college.  It's not that I'm against higher education or believe that California's 50-year-old master plan for higher education is a bad idea, but when faced with its cost, I wonder if we can afford it anymore.  Merely asking the question brings a barrage of commentary about the public benefit of our "investment" in higher education, but I've never seen evidence.

Goldberg suggests I shouldn't hold my breath anticipating such evidence.  Go read the whole thing.

It's Not That I Disagree With The Thesis...

This would be getting a lot more attention if the president had an (R) after his name instead of that (D), which must be the chemical formula for teflon since it allows anything bad to be deflected by its wearer:

The Department of Justice has developed a white paper outlining the specific circumstances under which the United States can conduct a lethal drone strike against an American citizen, a copy of which was obtained Monday by NBC News.

The paper provides the first detailed look at the criteria the Obama administration uses to judge if it can legally kill American citizens traveling abroad without the benefit of due process. The release of the administration's legal rationale comes days before CIA nominee John Brennan is scheduled to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Panel members, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), have been pressing the administration on the issue for more than a year.

I don't fault the president for this, although it is hard to jibe with his pre-election stances. But I do call out the so-called anti-war left who, if the president had an (R) after his name, would be out protesting in the streets by the tens of thousands.  I'd seriously have more respect for them if they were honest about their intentions.

Update, 2/6/13:  Instapundit encapsulates:

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Drone Strikes, Waterboarding, and Moral Preening. “So what do you think Senator Barack Obama would have said if President George W. Bush had pursued these policies? And how do you think the press and the political class would have reacted?”

Update #2, 2/11/13:  Here's a longer list:

Obama's national security policy has continued some of the most controversial moves of the Bush administration. Silence from much of the left.

Yup.

Update #3, 2/12/13: Even the Brits notice:

The same month, former Bush DOJ official Jack Goldsmith - who provided the legal authorization for the illegal Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program - went to the New Republic to celebrate that Obama was not only continuing the core Bush/Cheney approach to terrorism, but even better (from his perspective), was strengthening those policies far beyond what Bush could achieve by transforming Democrats from opponents of those policies into supporters.

And exactly as Goldsmith happily predicted, polls now show that Democrats and even self-identified progressives support policies that they once pretended to loathe now that it is Obama rather than Bush embracing them.

School District Theft

How could any right-thinking person think this is a good idea?

A proposal by the Prince George’s County Board of Education to copyright work created by staff and students for school could mean that a picture drawn by a first-grader, a lesson plan developed by a teacher or an app created by a teen would belong to the school system, not the individual...

The proposal is part of a broader policy the board is reviewing that would provide guidelines for the “use and creation” of materials developed by employees and students. The boards’s staff recommended the policy largely to address the increased use of technology in the classroom.

I would be against this even if it applied only to teachers, who are at least paid, but students? The idea is that we compel them to be there, then take ownership of what they create?

I'm entirely baffled.  I honestly don't see how this could be legal, much less moral.

Taking ownership of teacher material is more of a gray area for me.  It all comes down to what they pay me to do; if I do something on my own time, I own it.  Even if I used it in my classes, I still created it on my own time for my own satisfaction and the school district has no claim to it.

It’s not unusual for a company to hold the rights to an employee’s work, copyright policy experts said. But the Prince George’s policy goes a step further by saying that work created for the school by employees during their own time and using their own materials is the school system’s property.

The old adage of "follow the money" certainly comes into play:

Kevin Welner, a professor and director of the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder, said the proposal appears to be revenue-driven. There is a growing secondary online market for teacher lesson plans, he said.

“I think it’s just the district saying, ‘If there is some brilliant idea that one of our teachers comes up with, we want be in on that. Not only be in on that, but to have it all,’ ” he said.

This guy gets it right:

Peter Jaszi, a law professor with the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic at American University, called the proposal in Prince George’s “sufficiently extreme.”

Jaszi said the policy sends the wrong message to students about respecting copyright. He also questioned whether the policy, as it applies to students, would be legal.

He said there would have to be an agreement between the student and the board to allow the copyright of his or her work. A company or organization cannot impose copyright on “someone by saying it is so,” Jaszi said. “That seems to be the fundamental difficulty with this.”

Cahn said he understands the board’s move regarding an employee’s work, but he called the policy affecting the students “immoral.”

“It’s like they are exploiting the kids,” he said.

It's that very reason why I think it's wrong for teachers to use TurnItIn.com--that company makes money off of student work without compensating the students. In short, it's theft.

Hat tip to reader MikeAT for the link.

The Real "Gun Nuts" Are Those Who Go Nuts at the Thought of a Firearm

Is there anyone with a sound mind who will try to defend this?

This time, Daniel McClaine, Jr., a freshman at Poston Butte High School in Tan Valley, Arizona, made the mistake of setting a picture of a gun as the desktop background on his school-issued computer.

The picture shows an AK-47 lying on a flag, reports KNXV-TV. The gun isn’t his, McClaine assured the ABC affiliate in Phoenix. He found it on the Internet and liked it, partly because he is interested in serving in the military after graduation...

This incident is the latest in a growing line of extraordinarily strong reactions by school officials to things students have brought to school — or talked about bringing to school — that are not anything like real guns.
At D. Newlin Fell School in Philadelphia, school officials reportedly yelled at a student and then searched her in front of her class after she was found with a paper gun her grandfather had made for her. (RELATED: Paper gun causes panic)

In rural Pennsylvania, a kindergarten girl was suspended for making a “terroristic threat” after she told another girl that she planned to shoot her with a pink Hello Kitty toy gun that bombards targets with soapy bubbles.

At Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Maryland, a six-year-old boy was suspended for making the universal kid sign for a gun, pointing at another student and saying “pow.” That boy’s suspension was later lifted and his name cleared. (RELATED: Pow! You’re suspended, kid)

In Sumter, South Carolina, a six-year-old girl was expelled for bringing a clear plastic Airsoft gun that shoots plastic pellet to class for show-and-tell. The expulsion was later revoked.

As the Instapundit alluded to, why aren't the adults practicing the "critical thinking" skills that they like to think they're teaching the children?

Is It Too Early, Or Too Late, To Say "I Told You So"?

The IPCC gets around to agreeing with me:

The Earth has been getting warmer -- but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural causes?

A leaked report by a United Nations’ group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun may play a larger role than previously thought.

“[Results] do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate,” reads a draft copy of a major, upcoming report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...

“Climate science has the problem of trying to explain why we are now in our 17th year without a significant warming trend. As a result, you are seeing many forecasts of warming for this century being ratcheted down,” he said.

All this has happened before, and it will happen again. Earth's climate is cyclical, with or without SUV's.

Why, then, do the True Believers cling to their global warming with religious fervor?  I point out the reasons in this post, among others.

It's All About The Money. That's All It's Ever Been About.

Some teachers hang onto the fiction that their local/state/national teachers unions exist to make their lives better, or perhaps to make the world a better (read: liberal) place.  They can choose to hang onto that belief with religious fervor, pretending that it's so, but we all know it's crap:

The president of Michigan’s largest union is instructing officials to prepare to sue its own members, according to a leaked memo issued after the state adopted right-to-work laws in December.

Steven Cook, president of the Michigan Education Association, circulated an email to local unions officials and staff instructing them to monitor revenue streams in light of the right-to-work laws, which are set to go into effect on March 27, 2013. The law allows workers to opt out of union membership unless they have an existing contract with their employer.

“We will use any legal means at our disposal to collect the dues owed under signed membership forms from any members who withhold dues prior to terminating their membership in August,” Cook wrote.
The tone of the message shocked labor reform activists.

“The level to which the MEA appears to be willing to go after its own members—the same ones whose interest they claim to represent—is amazing,” said Mike Van Beek, director of education policy at the Mackinac Center. “When it comes to their revenue, we know where their priorities stand.”

When you have to compel someone to give you money, there's a good chance your reasons for doing so are illegitimate.

Expelled For Cheating

When I attended West Point there was a single sanction for violating the Honor Code: dismissal. That's been relaxed in recent years, and it came to mind as I read this article about an Ivy League school:

Harvard has forced dozens of students to leave in its largest cheating scandal in memory, the university made clear in summing up the affair on Friday, but it would not address assertions that the blame rested partly with a professor and his teaching assistants.

Harvard would not say how many students had been disciplined for cheating on a take-home final exam given last May in a government class, but the university’s statements indicated that the number forced out was around 70. The class had 279 students, and Harvard administrators said last summer that “nearly half” were suspected of cheating and would have their cases reviewed by the Administrative Board. On Friday, a Harvard dean, Michael D. Smith, wrote in a letter to faculty members and students that, of those cases, “somewhat more than half” had resulted in a student’s being required to withdraw...

The Administrative Board’s Web site says that forced withdrawals usually last two to four semesters, after which a student may return...

While Harvard has not identified the course or the professor involved, they were quickly identified by the implicated students as Introduction to Congress and Matthew B. Platt, an assistant professor of government. Dr. Platt did not respond to messages seeking comment Friday.

In previous years, students called it an easy class with optional attendance and frequent collaboration. But students who took it last spring said that it had suddenly become quite difficult, with tests that were hard to comprehend, so they sought help from the graduate students who ran the class discussion groups and graded assignments. Those teaching fellows, they said, readily advised them on interpreting exam questions.

Administrators said that on final-exam questions, some students supplied identical answers, down to, in some cases, typographical errors, indicating that they had written them together or plagiarized them. But some students claimed that the similarities in their answers were due to sharing notes or sitting in on sessions with the same teaching fellows. The instructions on the take-home exam explicitly prohibited collaboration, but many students said they did not think that included talking with teaching fellows.

This is what I don't understand. If you're smart enough to get into Harvard (assuming you got in on your brains), why would you need to cheat in a class?  Or is Harvard not an "academic" school anymore, but rather merely a marker of wealth or diversity?

Abuse of Power Should Cost

Usually it doesn't, as transgressors get off the hook with "qualified immunity"--it's their official position, not they themselves, that took the illegal steps.  That argument didn't work this time:

There is great news for students from a Georgia jury today, as former Valdosta State University President Ronald Zaccari has been found liable for $50,000 in damages for unjustly kicking one of his students, Hayden Barnes, out of school for a collage he posted on Facebook...

Rooting For The Underdog

I know nothing about this topic except what I've read in this article, but it sounds believable enough that I'm compelled to root for the underdog.  Go Antigua!

For the rare cases where a member doesn't comply with a ruling, the WTO allows the victorious country to put domestic pressure on a non-compliant member by allowing the prevailing member to penalise an entirely "innocent" sector of the other member's economy.

In this instance the United States has never complied with the judgement in our favour. Further, years of patient negotiating has resulted in nothing but frustration. American officials have stepped up efforts to enforce the very laws ruled invalid by the WTO. The industry that once employed some 4,000 Antiguan people now employs just a couple of hundred...

Just as in the United States, in Antigua the government owes a duty to its citizens to protect and enforce their rights. We have reluctantly decided to suspend intellectual property rights protections for American firms and products. Hopefully, the remedy will work as designed, and American business interests can convince the Obama administration to follow international law.

For why should, for example, the U.S.motion picture industry suffer just so the federal government can continue to protect the monopolies of the big American gambling interests?

A School With A Vocational Focus?

Where do such wacky ideas come from?  I mean, really, the thought of preparing students for actual jobs instead of pretending they're all going to college is just, well, uh...

The energy capital of the world soon might have a high school befitting its title.

Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier on Friday announced preliminary plans to develop a magnet high school for energy, petroleum and technology careers. Much like DeBakey High School for Health Professions, the small campus would help educate and train students for jobs in one of Houston’s most important industries.

Ah, now I know the correct tack to take:

They're preparing kids to make global warming worse! Dirty oil, why can't they make a school advocating solar and wind power?  I'll bet George Bush is involved....

OK, I'm done pretending to be a liberal for the day.  Thanks to reader MikeAT for the link.

Women Marching In The Streets About Senator's Abuse Of Women (or girls)

What?  They're not?  Why not?

SO HOW COME WE’RE NOT HEARING FROM ALL THE LIBERAL WOMEN on the Bob Menendez prostitution scandal? Oh, right, because he’s a Dem. Of course, the real scandal is that he stiffed them on the tab.

Update, 2/2/13: As Instapundit says today:

JIM TREACHER ON FACEBOOK: “The same people who claimed Mitt Romney was waging a ‘War on Women’ are doing everything they can to avoid talking about Bob Menendez.”

You might almost think they're not serious, just partisan or something.

The Newest Civil Right--The Right To Attend A Bad School

You can't make stuff like this up:

Closing or reorganizing low-performing urban schools discriminates against black and Hispanic students whose schools are most likely to be targeted, charge community activists in the Journey for Justice Movement.

Closing neighborhood schools is “a violation of our human rights,” said Jitu Brown, an organizer from the South Side of Chicago, in a meeting with Education Secretary Arne Duncan yesterday.

As I said in my comment at the end of that post:

Maybe they’re tacitly admitting that the *school* isn’t the root cause of the poor performance.

It's the culture.

OJ

When I moved into this house almost 8 years ago, I planted an orange tree in the front yard.  A year later I planted one in the back yard.  I don't like oranges much, but I love orange juice, and the idea of having some shade, as well as having some fresh-squeezed orange juice, sealed the deal for me.

The tree in front has long been shaded by some of my neighbor's trees, so this year was the first year I got oranges off the front tree.  Last year I got oranges off the back tree but the juice was very bitter.  Anyway, a couple days ago I harvested my first crop from the front, about a dozen oranges, and this afternoon I juiced them.

Heaven :-)

UC Students and Health Insurance

The headline is Obamacare Loophole Threatens UC Students--but does it really?  That fact that it doesn't give them new, free (ie, paid for by someone else) healthcare, does that mean it really threatens them?  Talk about some biased reporting!

Life was great for Kenya Wheeler in the spring of 2011. He'd just enrolled in a UC Berkeley master's program in city planning and had won a research position that would pay his fees. Healthy as a horse, he biked to campus every day.

A year later, a cancer diagnosis had changed everything. Wheeler, 38, had so many medical bills that he reached the $400,000 limit allowed by his UC student health plan. He scheduled a hasty wedding with his girlfriend in March so he could continue receiving life-saving chemotherapy through her insurance.

"I didn't know when I was diagnosed that I would be in for a battle to fight my cancer - and for my medical care," Wheeler told the UC regents at this month's meeting in San Francisco.

Health care limits like the one imposed by UC are already illegal under the sweeping federal health-care law - dubbed Obamacare - that takes full effect next Jan. 1. But the health care act does not apply to "self-funded" college plans like UC's, in which the university takes on the financial risk of medical claims.

Now, thousands of UC students are demanding through a petition drive that the university voluntarily lift its insurance caps.

It amazes me when our privileged UC students want even more--and they want me to pay for it!  This state is going to continue reaping a bad harvest if this is what we're sowing amongst our putative best and brightest.  Don't they know this state is already broke?  How do they expect the state to pay for this?  My guess is they don't care as long as they don't have to pay for it.  They don't understand that most basic of natural laws, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

Performance Excellence/Setting The Example

A captain--not a cadet, but a captain--sets a new record on West Point's Indoor Obstacle Course Test.

Gawd, I remember that test.  The only part I feared was "walking across the bars", shown at :25.  When running:  1st lap is with a medicine ball, 2nd with a baton, last lap and a half carrying nothing.

We had a term for someone like this back in my day:  stud.

No, I don't remember at all what my best time was.  Honestly.

It Pains Me, How True This Is

California is in a death spiral:

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: California’s Twilight. “The result of 30 years of illegal immigration, the reigning culture of the coastal childless households, the exodus of the overtaxed, and the rule of public employees is not just Democratic, but hyper-liberal supermajorities in the legislature. In the most naturally wealthy state in the union with a rich endowment from prior generations, California is serially broke — the master now of its own fate. It has the highest menu of income, sales, and gas taxes in the nation, and about the worst infrastructure, business climate, and public education. Is the latter fact despite or because of the former?”

Licence Plates

Here in Sacramento we don't see too many non-native license plates.  We're a couple hours' drive from Nevada, and several hours from either Oregon or Arizona.

On the way to work this morning, though, I saw two interesting plates.  The first was from Distrito Federal--Mexico City!--and the second was a consular plate (country unkown). 

Interesting.

Where Are The Protests?

Obama fails yet again:

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Obama administration closing Gitmo-closing office. “Four years ago, Barack Obama’s first act as President was an executive order to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The White House created a position at State of ‘special envoy’ to Guantanamo, whose duties included reviewing the pending cases with Attorney General Eric Holder, and diplomacy with allies to place the current detainees in order to close the facility. Four years later, the only thing being closed is Special Envoy Daniel Freed’s office.”

I guess he can't do everything by fiat.

Where else has he failed?  Can't lead from behind in Libya, can't require the Egyptians to be democratic, can't get Republicans to agree to anything, can't compromise, can't lead at all.  I can't wait to hear the howls from the liberals when the next Republican president tries to behave the same dictatorial way.

Oh, and where are the leftie peacenik protestors on this one?  One could be excused for believing that their beliefs are not sincere, that they only care about such things when the president has an "R" after his name.

And one would be correct.

15 Lies of Liberalism

It's hard to argue with this article:

Liberalism offers up a utopian vision of the world and then invites its practitioners to feel good about themselves for embracing it. Not only does this beautiful fantasy world never come to pass, liberalism fails to address the root causes of the problems it sets out to solve while creating whole new disasters in the process. In other words, it's a never ending circle. There's a problem, liberalism is offered up as the solution, it doesn't work and creates more problems, for which liberalism is offered up as the solution, etc., etc., etc. until you're starving, bankrupt, or your society is tearing itself apart at the seams.
Liberalism says that....

Yeah, go read the whole thing.

Apollo 1, et. al.

Today is the 46th anniversary of the fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee in the Apollo 1 capsule.  Tomorrow is the 27th anniversary of the destruction of Challenger and her crew: Dick Scobee, Mike Smith, Ron McNair, El Onizuka, Judy Resnick, Christa McAuliffe, and Greg Jarvis.

There's always a price.

Climate Change and Nuclear Energy

Bjorn Lomborg, the skeptical environmentalist on whom I've written several posts, has another great opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.  While I don't agree with everything he says, I do celebrate his pragmatism:

In his second inaugural address on Monday, President Obama laudably promised to "respond to the threat of climate change." Unfortunately, when the president described the urgent nature of the threat—the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"—the scary examples suggested that he is contemplating poor policies that don't point to any real, let alone smart, solutions. Global warming is a problem that needs fixing, but exaggeration doesn't help, and it often distracts us from simple, cheaper and smarter solutions.

For starters, let's address the three horsemen of the climate apocalypse that Mr. Obama mentioned.

Historical analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%...

Claiming that droughts are a consequence of global warming is also wrong. The world has not seen a general increase in drought...

As for one of the favorites of alarmism, hurricanes in recent years don't indicate that storms are getting worse...

This does not mean that climate change isn't an issue. It means that exaggerating the threat concentrates resources in the wrong areas.

The left's solutions are always the same--more government control, more showy proposals that endanger prosperity, more punishing of success and affluence.  Lomborg, rightly, sees better alternatives.

One of my litmus tests to determine if someone truly believes or is just an ideologue is their stance on clean, safe, relatively inexpensive nuclear energy.  If they support use of that clean, mature technology, then we have some common ground on which to stand.  If not, they're just a leftie spouting off their talking points, and I have no use for that.  There's even a documentary at Sundance:

Meanwhile, sit down for this: at the current Sundance Film Festival–Robert Redford’s baby–there is debuting a new documentary about environmentalists who have changed their mind and are now pro-nuclear power.  Does Redford, who signs direct-mail letters for the anti-nuke NRDC, know about this?  The film is called Pandora’s Promise, and here’s what one early critic at Sundance has to say about it:

When was the last time you saw a documentary that fundamentally changed the way you think? It’s no secret that just about every political and socially-minded documentary shown at Sundance is preaching to the liberal-left choir. The issue may be dairy farming, human rights abuses in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the marketing of AIDS drugs, or Occupy Wall Street (to list the topics of four festival docs this year), but the point of view is almost always conventionally “progressive” and orthodox. So when Robert Stone, who may be the most under-celebrated great documentary filmmaker in America (watch Oswald’s Ghost if you want to touch the elusive truth of the JFK assassination), arrived at Sundance this year with Pandora’s Promise, a look at the myths and realities of nuclear power, he was walking into the lion’s den. For this isn’t a movie that preaches to the choir. It’s a movie that says: “Stop thinking what you’ve been thinking, because if you don’t, you’re going to collude in wrecking the world.” Pandora’s Promise is built around what should be the real liberal agenda: looking at an issue not with orthodoxy, but with open eyes.

When liberals use reason, I can understand them. When they just emote and cry and beat their drums, I can't. The lefties I've quoted above, I could sit down over a burger and have a nice discussion with them.

Head Start

I've written about the failure of the Head Start program before, but here's more information.

Given that it doesn't show any lasting effects--and what's the point, if it doesn't have any effect--why does that program still exist, $180 billion dollars later?  Because it's a liberal government program that has a constituency that votes Democratic.  And it makes libs feel like they're doing something to help poor kids.

Reality-based community?  This program doesn't even meet its own goals!  Why do you continue to support it?  Yes, I know the answer, I just want you to admit it.

I'm Not Going To Make Too Many Friends With This One

Is there anyone who, deep down in their heart of hearts, is genuinely surprised by this?

Academic profiles continue to be markedly different for secondary school subject matter teachers in contrast with elementary, special education, and physical education teachers. Those with secondary licenses have much stronger academic histories.

When I hear the old factoid that teachers generally come from the bottom of their college classes, I've always doubted it--at least for people who graduate with degrees other than general liberal arts or education.  There is, however, some good news on the teacher quality front:

Praxis passing rates have decreased substantially. This decrease is likely attributable to the
increasingly demanding testing requirements put in place during the (previous) eight years.

The academic profile of the entire candidate pool has improved. Candidates who graduate from teacher education programs are stronger than in years past. Those who report not having gone through a teacher education program are similarly strong.

The academic profile of those meeting state Praxis requirements has improved.

These improvements are consistent for both males and females, across racial/ethnic groups, and across licensure areas.

This report came out in 2007. I wonder what it similar statements could be made today.

Proud

Today I saw on Facebook that one of my former students (who graduated 6 years ago) has now been granted his California Teaching Credential in math.  He once told me (and another teacher, so I have proof!) that he chose being a math teacher because of me. 

Yeah, I'm a little proud.

How Could Anyone Possibly Have Thought This Was Reasonable In The First Place?

California gets something right--but it's something that should be so obvious that a law shouldn't even have been necessary in the first place:

Starting Jan. 1, 2013, California will be the first state to enact comprehensive social media privacy legislation, officials say.

As he passed the act known as the Social Media Privacy Act on Sept. 27, California Gov. Jerry Brown posted on his Google+ page: ”Today I am signing Assembly Bill 1844 and Senate Bill 1349, which prohibit universities and employers from demanding your email and social media passwords. California pioneered the social media revolution. These laws protect Californians from unwarranted invasions of their social media accounts"...

“The practice of employers or colleges demanding social media passwords is entirely unnecessary and completely unrelated to someone’s performance or abilities,” said (State Senator) Yee in a news release issued by his office. “Today, California has declared that this is an unacceptable invasion of personal privacy.”

Is This Legal?

No.  Next question.

It's 2013, do we really need a women-only lounge on a public university campus?

Blogiversary

8 years ago I wrote my first blog post. 

Wow, maybe I need a new hobby!

Cruci-fiction

This past 3-day weekend was somewhat active for me; I went skiing on Saturday, did a 90-minute hot yoga class on Sunday, and also attended a 75-minute hot yoga class on Monday.  Before Monday's class I asked the instructor to assist me in getting into some of the postures, as even with the heat I'm still not very "bendy".  She knows what to do--push, pull, twist, whatever is necessary.  My body will take it.

One of the postures (#22 here) requires a fairly significant back bend, which I was close to achieving.  Just before reaching my ankles with my hands, though, my instructor grabbed my hands, spread my arms behind me, and I think put her foot in my back, arching me into an exaggerated "I'm the king of the world!" pose.

Let's take a break at this juncture of our story and talk about an ancient Roman method of execution, crucifixion.  What's, uh, interesting about crucifixion is the way you actually die.  The whole point of crucifixion was the painful torture of it, but people could survive that as well as the blood loss.  No, the way you died, generally, was the day wore on and you couldn't be left up there at night, so they took the Roman equivalent of a 2x4 and broke your legs.  This caused you to arch forward because you couldn't stand up straight, and in that position you suffocated.  That's how you died in crucifixion, you suffocated.  One of the many novel things about Jesus' crucifixion was that the guards did not have to break his legs, he was dead already.  Now back to my yoga class.

With my arms spread back, and my weight pushed forward, I couldn't breath!  I could barely squeeze out "that's enough", so she didn't push any more, but I still couldn't get air.  I didn't panic, though, knowing that the posture would last only a few more seconds, so I stuck it out, but it was a remarkable experience.

I remember when I first learned about the suffocation aspect of crucifixion, I didn't believe it.  Put your arms behind you and try it, you can't replicate it.  So while intellectually I knew what was supposed to happen, my experience told me that it just wasn't so.

I'm a believer now.

Dr. King Holiday

How appropriate that I saw the following on Facebook today, when we honor the memory of Dr. King:

Why do you "need" an AR-15?

Why did Rosa Parks "need" to sit in front of the bus?

In a free country, there is no requirement to show a "need" to exercise a right.

Success

Today I got back in the saddle.

Almost two years ago, on Saturday, April 23, 2011, I got spectacularly hurt in a rather mundane skiing accident.  Just a couple weeks before, Boreal had offered a special: buy a season pass, and it would be good for the remainder of the 2010-11 ski season and all of the 11-12 season.  I bought one, and was using it for only the 4th time when I had my accident.  I was unable to use it the rest of that season (which ran until the 4th of July!) and was out the 11-12 season as well.

Working with the general manager at Boreal, I was able to get the pass reissued for this season--and today I went up there, skiing for the first time in almost 2 years.

I admit to being somewhat nervous, in part because I didn't know what I'd be capable of and also because I now know the consequences of screwing up.  My first run was on a green (easiest) trail, and it was immediately clear that my injured leg is not "up to snuff", not anywhere near its pre-injury capabilities.  I was constantly aware of it--somewhat weak, and feeling "questionable".  I made a few green runs, but that was getting boring, so I tried some others--the terrain park and a couple of intermediate slopes.  I didn't do any of the terrain "features"--never could--I just wanted to ski over the mounds and through the narrow slides.  It was beyond my current capabilities and was probably dangerous so I only did it once.  I had enough confidence to make a few intermediate runs, just gliding back and forth across the trail so that I could stay in control and not risk any shenanigans from the knee.

I only skied for 3 hours, deciding that that was enough for a first time.  To be honest I thought I'd be able to do more than I did, but at least I got back up on the mountain.  I've got the rest of the season to improve.

Here's to no more injuries!

Update:  On the way home I stopped at my aunt and uncle's place in Auburn to visit with them and grandpa, who will be 101 in a few weeks!

Achieving Diversity At Universities

The ways they'll twist and contort to avoid what is so plainly obvious to us mere mortals:

After a morning here in which admissions leaders and legal experts discussed strategies for colleges to look beyond the grades and test scores of applicants, Art Coleman said that it was time to acknowledge the "proverbial elephant in the room." That's the issue of merit.

Coleman is a lawyer who has worked with numerous colleges and higher education groups to craft admissions policies that promote diversity and can also survive legal challenges. And he is sympathetic to the strategies discussed here, and to the idea that diversity is important to higher education, and that colleges have good reason to look beyond a formula of test scores and grades. But he said that if colleges fail to talk about merit and what it means, they are likely to lose the battle (in courts and public opinion) for the way they seek to diversify their classes.

My favorite line in the article:

"There is a fundamental disconnect between the ivory tower and Main Street on these issues," he said.

Well, duh.

It's A Start

While I still think the entire TSA, and perhaps the Department of Homeland Security, should be scrapped, this is a tiny positive move:

The agency is ending a contract with Rapiscan Systems, which manufactures the scanners which produce a naked image of travelers who pass through them. Privacy rights activists have complained that the scanners, first rolled out in 2007, constitute a virtual strip search. The TSA plans to continue using a scanner that is considered less invasive, and which makes a generic image that has been likened to a cartoon, or stick figure, yet highlights potential foreign objects on the traveler's body.

Federal Court Upholds The Wisconsin Law That Caused So Many To Get Their Panties In A Bunch

A federal court of appeals has upheld the law in its entirety:

A federal court of appeals on Friday upheld Wisconsin's law repealing most collective bargaining for most public employees, handing a victory to Gov. Scott Walker and his fellow Republicans who put the law in place amid tumult two years ago.

Parts of the collective bargaining law, known as Act 10, remain on hold because of a state judge's ruling in a separate case, but Friday's decision was a setback for public employees and their unions...

The lawsuit was brought by the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the Wisconsin State Employees Union and other unions. WEAC President Mary Bell expressed disappointment with the decision...

Among the provisions was a ban on allowing the state or local governments from deducting union dues from employees' paychecks. Another element of the bill required unions to hold annual recertification votes to remain intact, and to succeed they had to get the approval of 51% of all eligible employees, not just a majority of those voting...

The unions now have to decide whether to ask the full Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to review the panel's decision. The unions have the option of skipping that step and appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, which takes only a small number of cases.

Good for Wisconsin. I can fantasize about the day that Californians come to their senses.

Insubordinate. And Churlish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw
Do not mess with this guy.  I think he'll go beyond the beatings that I suggest on a daily basis.

Statistical Analysis

I passed Linear Algebra last semester with over 99% in the class, a high bar indeed to set for myself as I start my second of ten master's courses, Statistical Analysis.  Honestly, I think I have a few "gaps" in what they consider should be prerequisite stats knowledge, despite the fact that I teach introductory stats in high school.

The instructor is quite good about answering my questions via email, though, and I feel like I'm catching up to where I should be.  This is good, because I'll probably take the first test (out of 6) next week!

Escaping the Past

Education of students is the purpose of our schools, and anything that interferes with that purpose must be looked at with a critical eye.

I understand that it would be highly disruptive to the educational environment for students to have access to, be interested in, and talk about a teacher's sex life.  It is unfortunate, though, that a woman's past--doing something that's entirely legal, don't forget--prevents her from being a teacher:

A middle-school science teacher fired after students learned she had appeared in pornographic movies had hoped not just to get her job back, but to set a precedent for people looking to escape an embarrassing personal history.

A three-judge commission put a decisive stop to both, saying firmly and unanimously that Stacie Halas should not be in the classroom.

"We were hoping we could show you could overcome your past," Halas lawyer Richard Schwab said Tuesday. "I think she's representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."

Judge Julie Cabos-Owen said such a past matters in an age when technology makes porn easy to access and hard to bury.

"Although her pornography career has concluded, the ongoing availability of her pornographic materials on the Internet will continue to impede her from being an effective teacher and respected colleague," Cabos-Owen said in the 46-page decision issued Friday by the Commission on Professional Competence.

I completely understand this ruling and its logic, but I still don't like it.  I admit, though, that I cannot think of how they could have ruled reasonably in a manner that I would find more appealing.

Boys Will Be Boys

This kind of stupidity has to end:

Two more Maryland school kids got into trouble for pointing their fingers playing cops and robbers at school.

Actually, in the Eastern Shore schoolyard during recess in this latest case.

What kind of person can honestly punish children for this type of behavior and expect to be taken seriously ever again?

Why Gun Control

Question:  Why is the so-called reality-based community so wedded to gun control in the face of facts?

Once you strip away the raw emotionalism of the carnage at Sandy Hook, or the Aurora theater, or Columbine, or Luby's, or whatever, you're left with a series of inconvenient truths for gun-control advocates: Over the past 20 years or so, more guns are in circulation and violent crime is down. So is violent crime that uses guns. Murders are down, too, even as video games and movies and music and everything else are filled with more fantasy violence than ever. For god's sake, even mass shootings are not becoming more common. If ever there was a case to stand pat in terms of public policy, the state of gun control provides it (and that's without even delving into the fact that Supreme Court has recently validated a personal right to own guns in two landmark cases). It's probably always been the case but certainly since the start of 21st century, it seems like we legislate only by crisis-mongering and the results have not been good: The PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, TARP, fiscal cliff deals, you name it. Would that cooler heads prevailed then and now.

Answer: because facts don't form the basis of their belief structure.

Whores

I wouldn't really have a problem with legalized prostitution--I used to know someone who made the reasonable argument that it shouldn't be illegal to do for money what it's perfectly legal to do for free.  If it were legal, would the stigma currently attached to being a whore remain?

I ask because--well let's be honest here, these women are whores.  We can dance around the word, and we can pretend they're just "escorts" or "arm candy", but a reasonable person could make the assumption I'm making:

A new study out Monday by dating website Seeking Arrangements reports that UC Davis ranks 43rd in the nation for female students looking to “sugar daddies” to pay for college...

The average monthly payment to the girls is around $3,000. UC Davis students aren’t shocked by girls turning wealthy men for money.

Be honest.

According to further research, Cal-Berkeley tops California schools at #18.  The top school is NYU.

If I'm Ever In Eastern Utah....

I like smoothies.

Lions and Lambs, Lying Down Together

This I like:

Yes, that’s right.  You’re not misreading the headline.  This weekend I had a chance to go to Berkeley, California and hang out at the home of my friend Joan Blades, one of the co-founders of MoveOn.org.  “What???  How is that possible,” you ask?  It’s possible because there is more common ground between left and right in this country than you might think.  And Joan and I (and many others) intend to do our best to explore that ground, and force intransigent incumbent politicians to take action on the issues where we agree…

There are many things that divide us politically, and when the time comes, we’ll all still have our very partisan fights about those.  But we can’t continue to buy into the overall politics of hate, perpetrated upon us by politicians and others in the ruling elite who find it quite profitable to keep us apart in order to maintain the status quo.

A Genius Plan!

You're a teacher and don't want to teach, or don't want to be reassigned?  Try what this teacher is doing:

A 61-year-old high school teacher has filed a disability discrimination lawsuit against a suburban Cincinnati school district. Her disability? She has a phobia of young children, The Cincinnati Enquirer reports.

Maria C. Waltherr-Willard, a French and Spanish teacher who was employed by the Mariemont school district for 35 years, alleges that the discrimination occurred primarily in 2010, when the district reassigned her from high school to junior high. The suit also claims the district wanted her to resign because of her age.

Brilliant!

Feds "Going Nuclear" on California Pot Provider

The New York Times gave a sympathetic hearing to Mr. Nagourney, but Ann Althouse is having none of it:

Yes, and it is mind-boggling that those who argue for the broad interpretation of federal power and who scoff at the idea of the 10th Amendment and reserving powers to the state somehow can't grasp the meaning of their general propositions when they encounter an issue where they prefer the state policy to the federal policy. The NYT and other drivers of elite opinion ought to have to face up to the reality of what their legal propositions entail.

And quite aside from the problem of the allocation of power at the federal and the state levels, how about some consistency about equal justice under the law? Let the law — as written — apply the same way to everyone, whether they have a round face and 2 young daughters or not, whether they've gone to grad school or not, whether they have big visions of massive profits or they are living hand to mouth. If the law is wrong, change the law — for everybody. Don't cry over the people you think are nice — like David Gregory and Aaron Swartz. Nonphotogenic and low-class people deserve equal treatment, and cutting breaks for the ones who pull your heart strings is not justice.

Yet another data point in my conservative belief that we should not invest so much power in the federal government. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and all that.