Clayton's commentary on news and events of the day. Broadly speaking, I'm a conservative with libertarian sympathies (getting more conservative as my children get older).
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Saturday, February 06, 2010
Demon Sheep Ad
The comment over at YouTube: "Is this real?" captures it all. I don't have any strong opinion about Tom Campbell, having been away from the open ward that is California politics for too long. (Obviously, I hold Carly Fiorina in contempt, having worked at HP when the Empress was in charge.) But this demon sheep ad almost looks like a parody of the worst political attack ads! Especially the glowing eyes!
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.
Because the Department of Education could not produce all the students as witnesses, he was found guilty in only one case. A girl testified that Rosenfeld stopped at her locker, where she was standing with a friend, and "said I love him because I talk to him so much."
A DOE hearing officer gave him a slap on the wrist -- a week off without pay -- for "conduct unbecoming a teacher." He was cleared to return to teaching.
Instead, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has kept the scruffy 64-year-old in a Brooklyn rubber room, deeming him too dangerous to be near kids, officials said.
The DOE can't fire him.
"We have to abide by the union contract," spokeswoman Ann Forte said.
So Rosenfeld simply collects his $100,049 salary -- top scale for teachers -- plus full health benefits and the promise of a fat pension, about $82,000 a year if he were to retire today.
His pension will grow by $1,700 each year he remains. He could have retired at age 62, but he stays.
He has also accumulated about 435 unused sick days -- and will get paid for half of them when he retires.
With city teachers trying to negotiate a 4 percent pay hike, Rosenfeld stands to get the raise.
All this largesse comes as Mayor Bloomberg threatens to cut 2,500 teachers to help close a $4 billion budget gap.
Meanwhile, the multimillionaire Rosenfeld lords over the rubber room, where he is the oldest and most veteran of 100 teachers.
The same crowd that is full of defenses and excuses for why the First Amendment protects virtual child pornography, flag burning, live sex shows, is all upset that it also protects political speech! Wow! What a stretch! Who would have ever guessed that the Framers intended it to protect political speech!
1. Open a new file in your computer. 2. Name it 'Barack Obama'. 3. Send it to the Recycle Bin. 4. Empty the Recycle Bin. 5. Your PC will ask you: 'Do you really want to get rid of 'Barack Obama?' 6. Firmly Click 'Yes.'
Subtitled, "The Human Failings of Genius." This is a very different book. Nominally, it is about Einstein's many mistakes as a scientist. Okay, scientists are allowed to make mistakes--but Ohanian makes the point that some of Einstein's mistakes were because he was something of a mystic who started out with his destination firmly in mind--and then tried to make the physics and math fit his destination. Often as not, Einstein knew what the right answer was, and clumsily tried to fit the equations and the data to fit. When they didn't fit, he used a bigger hammer.
Ohanian also tells us a bit about Einstein's private life, some of which I knew (his frequent adultery) and much of which I did not. In a lot of ways, Einstein was the first rock star of scientists in terms of public attention and adulation--and it sounds like Einstein worked like a rock star when it came to women, too. There's a lot here that is surprisingly sleazy--like when he left his first wife for one of his cousins--and then, at the last moment, couldn't decide whether to marry this cousin he had been sleeping with--or her very pretty, very young daughter. (The daughter wasn't interested.)
There's a lot that is very disappointing, but perhaps unsurprising, all things considered. One of Einstein's sons, Hans Albert Einstein, became a prominent academic in his own right. Another had a schizophrenic breakdown while young, and spent the rest of his life in a Swiss mental hospital. Einstein apparently never visited or even wrote to his son for the last 25 years of Einstein's life.
The plus side of Ohanian's book is a very well done explanation of some of the big physics problems that lead to Einstein's work. I think this is the best explanation of the Michelson-Morley interferometer experiment that I think that I have read.
The down side is Ohanian's often quite distracting snarky remarks directed at evangelical Christians who, to hear Ohanian tell it, all think the Earth is 6000 years old. It is distracting, and likely to irritate a fair number of readers who might otherwise find the book a useful math-free introduction to Einstein's work. posted by Clayton at 10:48 PM permalink
Abstract: Cases on the right to arms in state constitutions can provide useful guidance for courts addressing Second Amendment issues. Although some people have claimed that state courts always use a highly deferential version of "reasonableness," this article shows that many courts have employed rigorous standards, including the tools of strict scrutiny, such as overbreadth, narrow tailoring, and less restrictive means. Courts have also used categoricalism (deciding whether something is inside or outside the right) and narrow construction (to prevent criminal laws from conflicting with the right to arms). Even when formally applying "reasonableness," many courts have used reasonableness as a serious, non-deferential standard of review. District of Columbia v. Heller teaches that supine standards of review, such as deferring to the mere invocation of "police power," are inappropriate in Second Amendment interpretation. This article surveys important state cases from the Early Republic to the present, and explains how they may be applied to the Second Amendment.
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.
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.
The SEC, according to an email sent by a New York Fed lawyer on January 13, 2009, agreed to limit the number of SEC employees who would review the document to just two and keep the document locked in a safe while the SEC considered AIG's confidentiality request.
The SEC had also agreed that if it determined the document should not be made public, it would be stored "in a special area where national security related files are kept," the lawyer wrote.
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.
Like almost everything that comes out of the environmental movement, they are a mixture of corrupt corporate dealings and fantasy.
I've previously mentioned the problems that I have had with CFLs in outdoor settings, where it is simply too cold for them to work reliably. But even the one area where I had some hope--that the purchase cost would be compensated for by their longer life as well as lower energy use--has turned out to be nonsense.
I bought a number of CFLs a few months after we moved into our current house in June of 2006. I bought some more in 2008. I have just replaced the fourth CFL--and in some cases, they are alongside the original incandescent bulbs that were installed in the house when it was built in late 2005.
I think I am going to buy a couple of the new LED light bulbs, and see if they last. I have some confidence. But the fact that environmentalists/corporate fatcats (pretty much the same thing) felt the need to pass a law to pretty much force us to stop buying incandescent bulbs shows how much hype is involved.
