WP: “This month, though, some RushCard customers have not been able to access their money for nearly two weeks due to what appears to be a technical malfunction. Paychecks deposited directly onto the cards simply vanished. The economically vulnerable people Simmons had sought to help were suddenly left in a precarious spot.”
What a surprise.
Robert Weisberg writes: Now, compare what ordinary people can observe regarding global warming with the in-your-face facts regarding hard-wired genetically determined group differences. Even the most PC environment-is-everything egalitarian cannot avoid this reality. For example, outside of genetic predispositions how can one explain the readily visible evidence regarding the sizable and enduring differences in academic achievement between whites and blacks or between these two groups and Asians? And that nothing, even billion dollar panaceas have closed these gaps over a half century of trying? Similar enduring, well-known disparities exist in violent crime, welfare dependency, illegitimacy and poverty. Why are predominantly white cities such as San Francisco far more livable than black-dominated Detroit or East St. Louis? Can anything but innate differences in cognitive ability explain why sub-Sahara Africa remains forever economically under-developed despite hundreds of billions in foreign aid while Germany and Japan quickly returned to prosperity following WW II devastation?
These only begin the cataloguing of highly visible group-related differences suggesting a strong genetic element. Complicated contentious statistical models are unnecessary to show that schools populated by under-class African Americans are disasters compared to those with enrolling immigrant Chinese and Vietnamese and that these varied outcomes span generations. Any sports fan can see on TV that racial groups differ sharply in athletic performance.
As in the case of global warming, there are substantial financial benefits associated with upholding the environmental determinist orthodoxy. Why lavish billions on social engineering if group differences are largely intractable? The blank slate vision of human nature is a bonanza to all those who labor to close racial gaps in education, work on eliminating inner-city poverty and for those NGO’s trying to transform Rwanda into Switzerland.
The irony we have depicted bodes poorly for the future informed public discussion on these two issues. As the doomsday predicted by global warming believers fails to appear for all to see, its champions can only double down on suppressing disbelievers (it is hardly accidental that “global warming” has morphed into the scientifically nebulous “climate change”). Perhaps a parallel exists with the reaction of cultists who alleged that the end of the world was imminent and when that fateful day arrived and life continued, they became even more fervent in their obviously wrong beliefs. All those feeding at the climate catastrophe trough will not go without a fight, even if these means wasting billions, stalling economic growth and unemploying millions whose livelihood depends on fossil fuels.
A similar uptick in heresy prosecution will afflict those who argue that some group differences are sufficiently hard-wired that not even mighty Washington can force the incoming MIT freshman class resemble a cross-section of America. At best, a few heretics may gain their 15 minutes of notoriety but such voices are barely heard in public before being censored as “hate.” So, get ready for more inquisitions to stamp out “racism,” more mandatory sensitivity training, and more mainstream media dishonesty. Remember the travails of James Watson, the Nobel Prize winning co-discoverer of DNA, when he merely suggested that the lack of economic progress in Africa might be a result of low IQ’s though there is compelling evidence for his case. Alas, the repeated failures of social engineering projects will only further motivate lying and suppression.
We are not suggesting that modern science should rest exclusively on verification by personal experience. That would be a disaster–I for one have never observed an electron let alone an infinitesimally small vibrating string and I suspect that 99% of science is beyond what most people can readily grasp let alone observe. Rather, while we have come a long way from when scholars took pains to avoid offending the prevailing religious faith, we still have a way to go.
Abstract. This paper examines the controversy surrounding anthropologist Carleton S. Coon’s 1962 book, The Origin of Races. Coon maintained that the human sspecies was divided into five races before it had evolved into Homo sapiens and that the races evolved into sapiens at different times. Coon’s thesis was used by segregationists in the United States as proof that African Americans were “junior” to white Americans and hence unfit for full participation in American society. The paper examines the interactions among Coon, segregationist Carleton Putnam, geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and anthropologist Sherwood Washburn. The paper concludes that Coon actively aided the segregationist cause in violation of his own standards for scientific objectivity.
Earlier this week, Heather Mac Donald testified on criminal justice and the deincarceration movement before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Her opening statement follows.
Chairman Grassley, Ranking Member Leahy, and members of the Committee, my name is Heather Mac Donald. I am honored to address you today regarding the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2015. I am the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a public policy think tank in New York City. I have written extensively on law enforcement and criminal justice.
Today I want to examine the broader political context of the Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act. We are in the midst of a national movement for deincarceration and decriminalization. That movement rests on the following narrative: America’s criminal justice system, it is said, has become irrationally draconian, ushering in an era of so-called “mass incarceration.” The driving force behind “mass incarceration,” the story goes, is a misconceived war on drugs. As President Barack Obama said in July in Philadelphia: “The real reason our prison population is so high” is that we have “locked up more and more nonviolent drug offenders than ever before, for longer than ever before.” In popular understanding, prisons and jails are filled with harmless pot smokers.
The most poisonous claim in the dominant narrative is that our criminal justice system is a product and a source of racial inequity. The drug war in particular is said to be infected by racial bias. “Mass incarceration” is allegedly destroying black communities by taking fathers away from their families and imposing crippling criminal records on released convicts. Finally, prison is condemned as a huge waste of resources.
Nothing in this dominant narrative is true. Prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Drug enforcement is not the driving factor in the prison system, violent crime is. Even during the most rapid period of prison growth from 1980 to 1990, increased sentences for violent crime played a larger role than drug sentences in the incarceration build up. Since 1999, violent offenders have accounted for all of the increase in the national prison census.
Today, only 16 percent of state prisoners are serving time for drug offenses—nearly all of them for trafficking. Drug possession accounts for only 3.6 percent of state prisoners. Drug offenders make up a larger portion of the federal prison caseload—about 50 percent—but only 13 percent of the nation’s prisoners are under federal control. In 2014, less than 1 percent of sentenced drug offenders in federal court were convicted of simple drug possession; the rest were convicted of trafficking. The size of America’s prison population is a function of our violent crime rate. The U.S. homicide rate is seven times higher than the combined rate of 21 Western nations plus Japan, according to a 2011 study by researchers of the Harvard School of Public Health and UCLA School of Public Health.
The most dangerous misconception about our criminal justice system is that it is pervaded by racial bias. For decades, criminologists have tried to find evidence proving that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to systemic racial inequity. That effort has always come up short. In fact, racial differences in offending account for the disproportionate representation of blacks in prison. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas found that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites. Following conviction, blacks were more likely to be sentenced to prison, however, due to their more extensive criminal histories and the gravity of their current offense.
The drug war was not a war on blacks. It was the Congressional Black Caucus that demanded a federal response to the 1980s crack epidemic, including more severe penalties for crack trafficking. The Rockefeller drug laws in New York State were also an outgrowth of black political pressure to eradicate open-air drug markets. This local demand for suppression of the drug trade continues today. Go to any police-community meeting in Harlem, South-Central Los Angeles, or Anacostia in Washington, D.C., and you will hear some variant of the following plea: “We want the dealers off the streets, you arrest them and they are back the next day.” Such voices are rarely heard in the media.
Incarceration is not destroying the black family. Family breakdown is in fact the country’s most serious social problem, and it is most acute in black communities. But the black marriage rate was collapsing long before incarceration started rising at the end of the 1970s, as my colleague Kay Hymowitz has shown. Indeed, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued his prescient call for attention to black out-of-wedlock child-rearing in 1965, just as that era’s deincarceration and decriminalization movement was gaining speed.
It is crime, not incarceration, that squelches freedom and enterprise in urban areas. And there have been no more successful government programs for liberating inner-city residents from fear and disorder than proactive policing and the incapacitation of criminals.
Compared with the costs of crime, prison is a bargain. The federal system spends about $6 billion on incarceration; the state system spent $37 billion in 2010 on institutional corrections. The economic, social, and psychological costs of uncontrolled crime and drug trafficking dwarf such outlays. And prison spending is a minute fraction of the $1.3 trillion in taxpayer dollars devoted to means-tested federal welfare programs, as Senator Sessions has documented.
To be sure, the federal drug penalties are not sacrosanct. But though all sentencing schemes are ultimately arbitrary, our current penalty structure arguably has been arrived at empirically through trial and error. Sentences were increased incrementally in response to the rising crime rates of the 1960s and 1970s. Those rising crime rates were themselves the product of an earlier era of deincarceration and decriminalization. Sentences lengthened until they took a serious bite out of crime, in conjunction with the policing revolution of the 1990s.
Violent crime is currently shooting up again in cities across the country. Police officers are backing away from proactive enforcement in response to the yearlong campaign that holds that police are the greatest threat facing young black men today. Officers encounter increasing hostility and resistance when they make a lawful arrest. With pedestrian stops, criminal summons, and arrests falling precipitously in urban areas, criminals are becoming emboldened. While I do not think that the current crime increase is a result of previous changes in federal sentencing policy, it behooves the government to tread cautiously in making further changes. However, I unequivocally support the “productive activities” component of Section 202 of the Act, to the extent that it aims to engage all prisoners in work.
In closing, let me say that the committee would provide an enormous public service if it could rebut the myth that the criminal justice system is racist. Thank you for your attention.
From the Chateau: ♂SCIENCE♂ clearly confirms the field observation that women are instantly and romantically curious about a man who is in the company of other women, especially if those women aren’t fat bluehair feminists.
[Female preselection] solves a more important adaptive problem for females than for males—getting information about a potential partner. Because men are often initially concerned with the attractiveness of a partner, they can look at a female and instantly discern a fair bit of mate-relevant information. That’s often less the case for women. […]
Back in the 1970s, a pair of researchers conducted an experiment to examine the importance of having a physically attractive partner. Participants evaluated men who were either the boyfriend of, or unassociated with, a female; and the female was either attractive, or unattractive. Of the four conditions, the men with an attractive girlfriend were evaluated the most favorably. The men with the unattractive girlfriend were evaluated the least favorably. This was taken as evidence of how the company you keep seems to be important. […]
Because physical attractiveness is an important cue for female mate-value, the perceived quality of a man’s female partner can be determined to a large extent by how physically attractive she is. Due to positive assortative mating, this can have a bearing on a man’s own mate-value. Some studies have demonstrated that mate copying effects are stronger when the female partner of a man is physically attractive than if she is less attractive or perceived as unattractive. In some research I personally conducted, a man’s mate-value was elevated simply by having physically attractive female friends. […]
Based on the research presented above, a man looking to romantically attract women might do well to surround himself with beautiful women. And if one (or all) of them behaves favorably toward him, all the better.
CH has discussed this topic many times, because it is important. You can fast track your seduction successes by rigging the game with a powerful attraction-building shortcut: the presence of an (attractive) woman to cue other women that you are a HSMV man.
* It does seem to me that historically, Asians have faced far worse racism and government-sanctioned discrimination than Hispanics. So why is it that Hispanics get preferred AA and victimhood status relative to Asians? If they were smart, this is the argument Asians should use in those college admission lawsuits.
* This article’s existence says nothing more to me than the left is getting nervous about losing Asian-American votes to Trump in the short term. Hence why the New Yorker is seeding the ground to encourage Asians to think of themselves as “oppressed minorities” hated by evil whitey —all in order to drive them back to the leftist fold.
Why would lefties be threatened that Asian-Americans might be defecting to Trump?
Well, they’re already angry that their kids are getting the shaft at the Ivys big-time, and those slots given to to blacks and any Hispanic they can find. Tiger Moms don’t like pushing their kids to breaking points and then seeing some stupid welfare-roller take their kid’s slot.
But now immigration is hitting Asian-Americans where it really hurts–jobs. H1B1 visas kill Asian-American kids in Silicon Valley; the tech companies can get an FOB guy at 1/3 the price, work him double time, and then kick him out if he gets uppity. Why hire the local American kid, Asian or not, who can demand more?
And let’s not forget those Asian kids in California are feeling a lot of the brunt of illegal immigration first-hand.
If Trump starts successfully uniting white collar immigration concerns on H1B1 visas and the like (say it with me: “moratorium”) with the blue collar concerns on illegals and Americans of all levels fed up with illegal crime and parasitism—well, gee whiz, then Trump does look like an unstoppable juggernaut. Not only will it get him a ton more votes, but the Asian-American upper-middle class community might be inclined to open their pocketbooks for him–and similar immigration restrictionists. That might be a tipping point to finally counter other racial groups big-money donations that keep the borders unchecked.
* Because obviously immigrants ought to have instant income parity with Americans as soon as they arrive.
In short: Allow limitless number of poor and unskilled people to immigrate to the US. Then blame American racism and nefariousness when the immigrants aren’t at the same income levels as Americans. Advocate “social justice” programs to fix this problem.
* I don’t believe white guys get an inordinate amount of white fever Asian girls. It’s not so much that but rather than Asian men don’t get reciprocal attention from non-Asian women. Like black women, when the dating rules become deregulated due to race, Asian men lose out, as more opportunities leave than come their way. Asian girls might choose a white or an Asian dude, but non-Asian women aren’t choosing Asian men. They get increased competition for their resources but do not get to compete for the competition’s resources
When intra-ethnic and intra-racial dating prohibitions were in place, I’ll bet a lot more homely people of all races got laid, marriages, kids, etc. than today. Because of the smaller pool to choose from; it functioned as a de facto union for girls. As a girl, break the union rules and become a scab–i.e. date outside your race or ethnicity—and be shunned, lose your position, perhaps face violent reprisals. Stay with the union—i.e. only date your race/ethnicity—and you’d get a guy whose value might not be as high as the man in the other race/ethnicity you could get, but you’d keep social standing, have a pride of place, and see your kids look like you, and be guaranteed a pleasant homogeneous community.
BERLIN – Germany’s security and intelligence agencies expressed alarm over the influx of refugees and migrants who harbor radical Islamic views and hatred of Jews, according to a Sunday report in Welt am Sonntag.
According to a security document obtained by the paper and read by top-level agency personnel, “We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples as well as a different societal and legal understanding.”
The newspaper wrote that security sources warn that “the integration of hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants Germany is no longer possible in light of the number and already existing parallel societies.”
The term “parallel societies” in Germany is frequently defined as insulated Muslim communities that have little or no contact with mainstream society.
The document, called “the non-paper” because it was not signed, stated: “German security agencies…will not be in the position to solve these imported security problems and thereby the arising reactions from Germany’s population.”
A senior level security official told the paper that, “The high influx of people from all parts of the world will lead to instability in our land.” The official added, “We are producing extremists through immigration. Mainstream civil society is radicalizing because the majority don’t want migration and they are being forced by the political elite.”
He predicts that many Germans “will turn away from the constitutional state.” The paper’s exclusive information came from the four major security agencies in Germany – the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the Federal Intelligence Service, the Federal Police and Federal Criminal Police Office.
Steve writes: “Forty years sounds pretty harsh for somebody being an overly true believer in today’s conventional wisdom. There is a lot of talk about “over-incarceration,” much of it soft-headed. But this would seem like an example where the kind of Clockwork Orange-style technocratic interventions that the British have focused upon — restraining orders, GPS ankle-bracelet, mandatory psychiatric monitoring, blacklisting from her profession, etc. — ought to keep this lady from running too amok again without putting her in prison for a long time.
A lot of white-hating whites like this Anna Stubblefield aren’t quite right in the head. I mean, you know and I know and Daniel Engber knows that this lady was brought up and continued to live in a pretty mind-warping atmosphere of ethnic hatred, but how often do you think Professor Stubblefield was ever apprised of that fact? “Anti-gentilism” isn’t even a word …”
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* The people who rule over us, the political class, The Economist magazine, the WSJ etc are pretty much people who take their cue from people such as Anna Stubblefied. In an attenuated form, of course, but the Stubblefields of this world are the policy trail blazers.
* The good news is that there are lots of black prison guards who will gladly give this twisted women exactly what she craves.
* I assume movie rights have since been sold, the sentence immaterial to the strangeness of the story. But then, by one judgment, that would be half a movie we’ve already seen, I mean if the sentence made it stranger. This blunderbuss of an act of contrition aside, the thing with special snowflakes who are not right in the head is that we don’t let them be marginalized. There once were actual bohemians among us, yes there were, and they were forgiven many insanities for the sake of inspiration, and a great book is called Touched with Fire. Modern medz and especially the mainstreaming awareness of them has left Bohemia sundered. I actually think that’s about the most interesting social phenomenon in Western Civilization, because the phantom white menace really is a phantom but manic depression is, well, the true one percent. Strictly Bipolar is another book, very short, that explains big gifts.
* She’s a direct victim of feminist political correctness.
A man who has sex with a retarded woman under his care (1) likely has done so many times before he was caught and is otherwise a sexual predator (2) risks producing a very expensive state charge or requires the family to deal with getting an abortion for a retarded woman.
A woman who has sex with a retarded man does none of this harm, but feminism requires they two be sentenced equally for what is not even remotely the same crime.
At least 20 years in prison is just insane. If anything, she was performing an act of charity.
* Remade into a heart-warming movie after Anna is let out early (San Fran Federal court rules on appeal she is a political prisoner of ableist supremacy)- THE TIKKUN SESSIONS. Wayne Brady will play DJ in an Oscar-winning performance.
* Follow the money, this is ghetto lottery.
* I will say this for the New York Times. I wouldn’t have expected them to publish all the stuff about her and her background. They’re basically just giving the BadWhites ammo.
* Steve Sailer: The biopic The Diving Bell and the Butterfly about the editor of Vogue in Paris being completely paralyzed and dictating a book through pointing with his eyes was accused of being this kind of put up because the secretary who took the dictation for his book was also a professional writer. I did a little spreadsheet to test whether they could have actually gotten the book written the way they said they wrote it in the time they said it took. My finding was: barely, but it couldn’t be proved to have been hoax: there was just barely enough time to get it done.
From my review of Oscar-nominated “Diving Bell and the Butterfly” in AmCon:
“Blink” would have been a simpler, more evocative title because his speech therapist taught him to communicate using his eyelid. She would repeat the alphabet (re-sorted in order of frequency of use in French) until he blinked his one good eye to stop her at the right letter.
Director Julian Schnabel, the New York artist turned moviemaker, employs prodigious imagination to liven up the proceedings, filming much of it from Bauby’s perspective. Nevertheless, “The Diving Bell’s” pace is necessarily languid. With time on my hands, I wondered if Morse Code, which POW Jeremiah Denton used to blink “t-o-r-t-u-r-e” when displayed on North Vietnamese television, wouldn’t have been faster.
Bauby composed his text in his head each morning, memorized it, and then dictated it to a secretary for three hours per day for two months. His short book of about 25,000 words was published in 1997 to rapturous reviews two days before his death.
It’s a wonderful story, but is it true? Reporter Susannah Herbert has raised doubts in The Times of London, pointing out that Bauby’s “secretary,” the self-effacing Claude Mendibil, is a professional ghostwriter who refused to show her the original notebooks.
I calculate that to complete a first draft in two months, Bauby would have had to dictate 135 words per hour (or one letter every five or six seconds). That would be difficult, but not impossible, because Mendibil would often correctly guess many words’ endings. So, I won’t reject the movie’s authenticity, especially because I want to believe it’s true. (Certainly, though, Mendibil deserves the credit she’s never claimed for the sheen of the final draft.)
* For all her “Tikkun Olam”, this lady failed at preventing her mulatto daughter(!) from developing a form of white identity:
Stubblefield’s daughter, Zoe Stubblefield, told DailyMail.com today that the victim’s family, who are black, were targeting her mother because she was white and they were ‘money-hungry idiots’.
Speaking at her mother’s home in West Orange, New Jersey, Friday, the younger Ms Stubblefield told DailyMail.com that D.J.’s relatives were ‘huge a**holes’.
She said: ‘They have done this because my mom is white and we used to have a lot of money and they’re poor.’
* We bandy about words like moron, imbecile, and idiot when describing our political opponents, but these words are actually official psychological classifications:
Moron (IQ 50-69)
Imbecile (IQ 20-49)
and Idiot (below 20).
The black bell curve is shifted 15 points to the left relative to whites so we might give the nutty professor of “ethics” the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she mistook an idiot for an imbecile. Still, there must have been microcephaly or severe facial deformity (google images for imbecile), and if that didn’t tip her off, this man’s total lack of control over his bladder and bowels should have signaled to her that she is dealing with someone incapable of giving consent to anything except “baby want juice?”
This woman has more than just a fetish for social justice.
* I wish more Scot-Irish were raised to mind their own business. When they repair the world, it tends to lead to millions of people dying or millions of dollars disappearing. Russia has experienced both:
* Her ex-husband and father of her two children (Stubblefield- not Reuben, though) was black, but apparently disgustingly privileged with all his able-bodiedness.
* This is a product of extreme religious belief, if you ever needed proof that leftism is a religion.
Faced with a mentally retarded, crippled black male, the extreme leftist hamster spins a story about how he’s really an erudite genius trapped in his beautiful black body that is differently-abled (probably due to racism). She really did believe this nonsense because she is a true believer, darn it.
* Modern society pathologizes white identity politics or tendencies, it pathologizes “homophobia”, but this fetish-like attraction towards the “marginalized” goes undiagnosed, generally speaking. And it happens a lot.
I received a bad check from a black guy through my business many years ago. He was caught, charged and convicted (he’d written bad checks at other businesses as well), but rather than put him in jail, they told him to make restitution, which was fine with me. The problem was, he wouldn’t pay up. Whenever I told his white female probation officer that he wasn’t doing the restitution thing, she would always make excuses for him, saying, “he’ll be in next week.”
She did this for many months, so I mentioned it to a friend of mine who was a judge. He said out loud what I had suspected all along: She was probably having an affair with the guy.
I called her and told her that lover was going to jail if I didn’t see any money in 48 hours. He came in the next day and paid in full. I should’ve filed a complaint against her, but I wasn’t inclined to do things like that back then.
Very few people, if any, have a better reputation in Los Angeles Orthodox Judaism than Shlomo Rechnitz, but he’s getting hammered in the Sacramento Bee over the past few months.
It’s hard for me to read anything negative about Shlomo Rechnitz when I know of so many people he’s helped.
Sacramento Bee: California’s largest nursing home owner is facing a new round of government scrutiny as the FBI served search warrants last week at his Riverside facility, and two more of his former top administrators have been charged criminally by the state attorney general’s office.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller confirmed Saturday that FBI agents executed search warrants “seeking evidence in relation to alleged criminal activity” at a 99-bed facility in Riverside owned by nursing home magnate Shlomo Rechnitz.
Eimiller said she could not comment on the exact nature of the federal probe because the affidavit in support of the warrants is under seal. However, the FBI spokeswoman said it was her understanding that agents took documents, and that “patients were not removed or even disturbed” during Thursday’s raid at the Alta Vista Healthcare & Wellness Centre.
The latest investigations shine the spotlight again on Rechnitz, a 44-year-old Los Angeles entrepreneur whose facilities have been the focus of multiple local, state and federal probes, along with stepped-up scrutiny by health officials.
His stable of nursing homes in California has expanded rapidly in the last decade, giving him control of about 1 in every 14 skilled nursing beds in the state, according to a Bee investigation. With an estimated 80 homes under his control, Rechnitz has widespread influence on the quality of care being delivered in skilled nursing facilities, which serve some of the state’s most vulnerable residents.
The Bee found that homes he owned for all of last year were tagged with nearly triple as many serious deficiencies per 1,000 beds as the statewide average in 2014, according to the latest figures from the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Sallie Hofmeister, a spokeswoman for Rechnitz and his facilities, said Saturday in an email to The Bee: “We are not aware of any basis for the (FBI) investigation, but are cooperating fully with authorities. We cannot comment on the specifics of the discussions with the authorities, but at this time we have no reason to believe the investigation has anything to do with patient care. Alta Vista is proud of the care and treatment it provides to its patients.”
Besides last week’s FBI raid, several Rechnitz employees are facing their own legal challenges.
The former administrator and former top nurse at one of his Orange County nursing homes were charged criminally in August in connection with the alleged abuse last year of two residents – one of two criminal cases filed by the California attorney general in August against employees at facilities owned by Rechnitz.
Alameda Healthcare & Wellness Center
3 serious deficiencies
The facility got one of its serious deficiencies after a female resident lost more than 11 pounds in four months, or 13 percent of her body weight, and inspectors observed that she appeared “thin and frail.” The resident had told staff that the food was too dry and requested extra gravy because of her “swallowing disorder” that caused her to choke more easily. Inspectors found that the dietary aide failed to notify the cook, and the resident’s weight fell to 74.1 pounds.
Gridley Healthcare & Wellness Centre
6 serious deficiencies
Decertified effective Oct. 2 and set for closure. Surveyors identified immediate jeopardy to residents four times in five months. In the first survey, investigators said a patient suffered dehydration and died, while another resident with severe chest pain complained it took staff nine hours to get him an ambulance.
Oakhurst Healthcare & Wellness Centre
4 serious deficiencies
Inspectors issued multiple deficiencies after seven residents and one staff member fell ill from a contagious infection. Surveyors found poor hand-washing by staff, improper cleaning methods and unsanitary handling of linens. The director of staff development stated she had provided infection control training, but investigators found the documents had been taken from Wikipedia – “not recognized as a standard resource for professional infection control practice.”
Pacific Rehabilitation & Wellness Center, Eureka
1 serious deficiency
All 57 residents were found to be in immediate jeopardy when inspectors discovered the facility was using seven portable space heaters in resident care areas. The building’s heating system had been malfunctioning during a cold snap, and space heaters were set on high, posing a fire risk. Inspectors found one space heater in the front lobby beneath a table, near a lighted artificial Christmas tree. Another was inside the nurses’ station between two racks of clinical records.
Presidio Health Care Center, Spring Valley
2 serious deficiencies
The facility got two serious deficiencies because of low food supplies. Inspectors found inadequate food stock to meet daily nutritional needs, or for an emergency. Two refrigerators at the facility contained only a plastic bag with a “grey colored substance” (identified by staff as five pounds of hamburger) and five gallons of milk. The third refrigerator was empty.
Roseville Point Health & Wellness Center
1 serious deficiency
A resident with “moderate dementia” and a “history of self-mutilating behavior” was burned in September 2012 after she helped herself to four cups of coffee in the lobby and spilled them into her lap. The coffee, left out for anyone, was later found to be more than 170 degrees. Inspectors determined the facility failed to provide adequate supervision for the disabled resident to prevent the injuries.
South Pasadena Convalescent Hospital
(Renamed Mission Grove Healthcare & Wellness Centre)
2 serious deficiencies
Decertified effective Jan. 5. The facility got a serious deficiency after a 67-year-old female resident collapsed and died during an inspection. Investigators found that a licensed vocational nurse and certified nursing assistant did not know how to properly administer CPR, and 10 staff members did not respond correctly when asked later about CPR guidelines. The facility received a second serious deficiency after seven mentally ill patients were found to be coming and going without proper assessment. One committed suicide in a nearby neighborhood by lighting herself on fire.
Vernon Healthcare Center, Los Angeles
7 serious deficiencies
This facility had more serious violations in 2013 and 2014 than any other owned by Rechnitz. Key concerns were poor supervision, including one resident who used a motorized wheelchair twice found lying on the ground, injured, outside the facility. The administrator told inspectors that residents leave “all the time and just never return to the facility.” She said the nursing home does nothing to check on their welfare, assuming they “had just gone back to the streets.”
Wish-I-Ah Healthcare & Wellness Centre, Auberry
3 serious deficiencies
Decertified effective Nov. 7. Rechnitz permanently closed the facility late last year. Investigators visiting the home in October called immediate jeopardy in three instances and gave Wish-I-Ah its most severe deficiency for an infection that sickened residents and staff. Surveyors also issued a deficiency over the death of a 75-year-old resident from sepsis after improperly handling her wound dressing. They cited unsanitary conditions in the kitchen, bathrooms and ice machine, as well as improper disposal of raw sewage.
Today, 24 years after the devastating blaze, California’s attorney general is holding others criminally responsible for what ultimately happened to James Populus, who died last year at age 58 after allegedly receiving “grossly negligent” care at a controversial skilled nursing facility operated by the state’s largest nursing home owner: Shlomo Rechnitz of Los Angeles.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced last month that her office had filed involuntary manslaughter charges against Verdugo Valley Skilled Nursing & Wellness Centre LLC in suburban Los Angeles. Two registered nurses on staff also were charged with felony abuse.
The charges were in line with a 2012 pledge by Harris that she would aggressively step up criminal prosecutions of nursing home operators and staff, although her promise did not materialize for two more years.
Rechnitz has not been charged individually in the case. Public officials in neighboring South Pasadena continue to press Harris’ office for criminal charges against another nursing home owned until recently by Rechnitz – a facility the local police chief denounced as a “cesspool” and a “community menace” while under Rechnitz’s watch.
On Thursday, at a pivotal court hearing in Pasadena, the stakes of the Verdugo Valley case were evident as eight attorneys pressed into the fourth-floor courtroom wielding overstuffed roller-bags and document boxes stacked on hand carts. New legal issues delayed the preliminary hearing until December, but the case illustrates the complexity of elder-abuse prosecutions – and the ferocity with which the battles are waged.
Sallie Hofmeister, a Rechnitz spokeswoman, said an internal investigation found no basis for the allegations. Nevertheless, she said, the facility has increased training and oversight.
Earlier this month, Rechnitz gave up his ownership stake in a South Pasadena nursing home, where the police chief had complained for months about criminal activity in and around the facility. A new ownership group has stepped in, promising changes. The Montrose facility has had similar problems, according to elder-care advocates.
At the top of the chain: Shlomo Rechnitz, a 43-year-old Los Angeles entrepreneur and philanthropist.
Since 2006, Rechnitz and his primary company, Brius Healthcare Services, have acquired 81 nursing homes up and down the state, many of them through bankruptcy court. His chain has grown so quickly that he now controls about 1 in every 14 nursing home beds in California, giving him an outsized influence on quality of care in the state.
In the past year, multiple alarms have been raised about this relative newcomer to the industry and the care provided in some of his homes. His facilities have become the target of police scrutiny, lawsuits, stiff regulatory fines and state and federal investigations that have uncovered numerous alleged violations.
…Rechnitz’s troubles were compounded this spring, when the South Pasadena facility was hit with 24 state citations and $195,500 in fines from the Department of Public Health. Cargill’s suicide, for instance, resulted in a $20,000 fine and a Class A citation for the facility’s failure to supervise a patient with a history of schizophrenia, anxiety disorder and involuntary psychiatric holds.
Rechnitz agrees that his nursing home operation has been under siege, but he offers an alternative viewpoint. He says problems with regulators began after his management company became embroiled in a legal dispute with the state over delinquent paperwork, and the relationship soured.
“The things that happened are very shocking to me,” said Rechnitz, referring to his newly contentious relationship with regulators.
“All of a sudden, we show up to court one day and there is an emergency motion that refers to us as a quote-unquote serial violator of laws. It questions if we would pass the good character requirement … It basically makes us look like the Charles Manson of the nursing home business.”
The state denies it has singled Rechnitz out or has any ulterior motives.
