I Wish I Had A Union This Good

I Wish I Had A Union This Good

From the February 1, 2010 New York Post:

A Queens teacher who collects a $100,000 salary for doing nothing spends time in a Department of Education "rubber room" working on his law practice and managing 12 real-estate properties worth an estimated $7.8 million, The Post found.

Alan Rosenfeld hasn't set foot in a classroom for nearly a decade since he was accused in 2001 of making lewd comments to junior-high girls and "staring at their butts," yet the department still pays him handsomely for sitting on his own butt seven hours a day.

In 2001, six eighth-graders at IS 347 in Queens accused Rosenfeld, a typing teacher who filled in for an absent dean, of making comments like "You have a sexy body," asking one whether she had a boyfriend and making others feel uncomfortable with creepy leers.

Rosenfeld can't be fired, because the union contract does not allow it.  He collects a salary of $100,049 per year, plus full health benefits, and a pension that would be $82,000 per year if he retired now.  That pension will grow $1700 per year for every year he stays in the rubber room.  Rosenfeld is the oldest and most senior of more than 100 teachers in the "rubber room."


Gee, I wonder why they have a budget shortfall?

AIG's Corruption

AIG's Corruption

From January 25, 2010 Reuters:

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators originally treated the New York Federal Reserve's bid to keep secret many of the details of the American International Group bailout like a request to protect matters of national security, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

Crisis in Credit

The request to keep the details secret were made by the New York Federal Reserve -- a regulator that helped orchestrate the bailout -- and by the giant insurer itself, according to the emails.

The emails from early last year reveal that officials at the New York Fed were only comfortable with AIG submitting a critical bailout-related document to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after getting assurances from the regulatory agency that "special security procedures" would be used to handle the document.

If there is anything that the Bush and Obama Administrations could agree upon it was this: that incompetent Wall Street firms needed government protection. And that alone should have been enough argument for letting them go under. Painful? Yes. But I wonder how much of the continuing crisis more than a year later is because of the unwillingness to allow the market to liquidate and rationalize the bad consequences of the 1999 decision to encourage bad loans.

Taser As Proctological Tool

Taser As Proctological Tool

A Taser isn't supposed to be used in this way--and Boise City is settling out of court, reputedly in six figures, for police officers using a Taser where the sun doesn't shine--and worse:

The City of Boise wants to make it clear that they are not admitting guilt in the case of a man sodomized by Boise police with a Taser gun.

But they are also dishing out an estimated $150,000 to Gerald Amidon to prevent this matter from going to court.

This was so disturbing I went looking for more discussion of what actually happened, and it confirms what this audio recording of the incident shows. The July 29, 2009 Idaho Statesman coverage is pretty shocking:

Upon arrival, the officers heard the sounds of a struggle and voices coming from inside. The officers yelled for someone to open the door, and were greeted with a profane comment by a man in the residence. The officers had to kick and push the door open; the man inside was pushing against the door for more than 80 seconds. Once they gained entry, the officers said the suspect did not comply with their demands to get on the ground and stop resisting.

The suspect said that he was hit three times with a Taser after he was already handcuffed and face-down on the floor. Murphy's investigation found evidence that the suspect was hit twice with the Taser — once in the back before he was handcuffed and once in the buttocks after he was cuffed.

Murphy said the officer who used the Taser -— described as Officer #3 in the report — also coarsely threatened to use the Taser in the man's anus and genitals. Murphy's report says that use of Taser on a man's buttock's does not violate policy in and of itself; the question is whether it was "reasonable and necessary."

... 

The exchange between Officer #3 and the suspect during the incident was captured on a police officer's recorder. Murphy transcribed some of it in his report:
Officer #3: Do you feel this?
Complainant: Yes, sir.
Officer #3: Do you feel that? That’s my -
Complainant: Okay
Officer #3: -Taser up your ass.
Complainant: Okay
Officer #3: So don’t move.
Complainant: I’m trying not to. I can’t breathe.
"This exchange, especially the complainant’s response, strongly suggests that, at that moment anyway, the Taser was pressed between the Complainant’s buttocks and near his anal area," Murphy wrote in his report on the incident.
Two circular burn marks 1 to 2 centimeters in size were found on the suspect's buttocks, Murphy said.
Officer #3 also threatened to use the Taser on the suspect's genitalia.

The officers involved are apparently being disciplined. Not fired? Not prosecuted? Look, if someone is resisting arrest, use of a Taser makes sense. But someone who is handcuffed and face-down on the floor?

UPDATE: Yes, the claim of "sodomized" isn't correct. Still not at all an appropriate behavior by the police officer, and it puts a bunch of money into the hands of someone who is probably nothing wonderful, either.

George Soros At It Again

George Soros At It Again

From the February 27, 2010 Daily Mail:

A secretive group of Wall Street hedge fund bosses are said to be behind a plot to cash in on the decline of the euro.

Representatives of George Soros's investment business were among an all-star line up of Wall Street investors at an 'ideas dinner' at a private townhouse in Manhattan, according to reports.
A spokesman for Soros Fund Management said the legendary investor did not attend the dinner on February 8, but did not deny that his firm was represented.

At the dinner, the speculators are said to have argued that the euro is likely to plunge in value to parity with the dollar.

How typical: progressive Democrats--the crowd that put Obama in office--figuring out ways to get rich while destroying a national economy.

Decline and Fall of American Civilization

Decline and Fall of American Civilization

When I was young, there were radicals who argued that women should be regarded as the intellectual equals of men--that regarding women as sexual objects was degrading and wrong. Maybe I grew up in a "weird" home, but this didn't seem terribly radical to me. I had always understood that women were different, but different didn't mean inferior--just different. Part of this liberating radicalism was the idea that strip clubs, pornography, and the like, by objectifying women, were reducing women to an inferior status.

You could argue that the traditional approach of American society, which put women on a pedestal, claiming that they were too pure to be part of a man's world, was an excuse for keeping women in a lower station, not a higher one. But at least on the pedestal, they weren't being degraded.

You doubtless know what pole dancing is--an "art form" that you will see in strip clubs and such. I was utterly startled when my wife told me that she had heard advertising for a fitness club that teaches pole dancing--in Boise. And sure enough, it's true. From the December 18, 2008 Boise Weekly (one of the alternative weeklies):

For thousands of years, Chinese acrobats have awed and amazed as they perform spins, lifts, holds and inversions on vertical poles, showing off their strength, flexibility and concentration. But when a Western woman performs some of the same moves, the connotation suddenly becomes one of sex, conjuring images of clubs with low lighting.
But women­ are taking control and taking pole dancing out of the clubs thanks to pole dance fitness classes where strength, grace and flexibility are stressed, rather than the inherent sensuality.
"Some people see it as demeaning or degrading," said Allison Holley, a Boise-based pole dance instructor. "But I see the opposite in class. It's empowering."
Holley is one of a handful of instructors in the Treasure Valley to bring what has quickly become a national trend to the Gem State. Holley began teaching classes early last summer, and since then, her classes and workshops have quickly filled with the eager and the curious.
"If you even whisper 'pole dancing,' they will come," Holley said of the response to the classes.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure that it really does strengthen all sorts of muscles. But pretending that something that is so intimately tied with sexual exploitation of women is "empowering" is rather like reading feminists defending Islamic clothing rules as liberating women from being ogled by men.

Not A Very Large Sample

Not A Very Large Sample

But it still doesn't say much for the situation, especially when you look at the average age they started. From the December 2, 2009 Telegraph:

Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.
But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn't find any.”
Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examined the habits of those young men who used pornography – which would appear to be all of them.
Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old.

This really is Generation Porn.

Senator Boxer Must Have Failed Analogies

Senator Boxer Must Have Failed Analogies

From the December 8, 2009 San Jose Mercury-News:

WASHINGTON — As abortion took center stage in the Senate's historic debate over health care reform, Sen. Barbara Boxer was right in the middle of the fight, comparing an effort to limit women's access to abortion to restricting men's access to Viagra.

Her combative stance on the issue was a familiar one for the third-term Democrat, whose support of abortion rights has been central to her political career.
"Why are women being singled out here? It's so unfair," Boxer said on the Senate floor Tuesday. "We don't tell men that if they want to ... buy insurance coverage through their pharmaceutical plan for Viagra that they can't do it."

If the government decided that Viagra wasn't necessary (which strictly speaking, it isn't), and decided that it shouldn't be covered, you would not get any argument from me. But the bigger issue here is Boxer's misunderstanding of how analogies work. Boxer clearly doesn't understand that the moral discomfort that most Americans have with abortion isn't about sex; it's about killing what is going to be, in a very short time, a human being. And this is analogous to Viagra in what way?

Viagra helps men (and presumably their wives) achieve sexual satisfaction. This is not truly necessary from a health standpoint, but has no other morally worrisome aspects to it. Is Boxer arguing that abortion is some sort of sexual satisfaction procedure?