You Are Free To Be A Bad Person

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Alexander Technique teacher Jennifer Roig-Francoli writes: When you really grasp the full significance of this, you will come to realize that you are just as free to go in the “wrong” direction (a direction that is unhelpful and causes suffering) as you are to aim in the “right” direction (a direction that is helpful and relieves suffering).

This is the reality: you are free to choose to think thoughts that hurt you, and you’re free to do the wrong thing. You’re free to stiffen and tighten your neck. You’re free to collapse and pull down, and you’re free to compress yourself so much that you can’t breathe or play the flute.

You’re free to make your life more difficult, and you’re free to make yourself progressively less happy. You’re even free to do that to other people.

At first glance, this may seem obvious to you. And most of us want to be and feel “good”, and to do the “right” thing. We want to be helpful and healthy and establish good habits that bring happiness to ourselves and others….

Can you grant yourself the freedom to be bad, go wrong, and mess up? Or do you stop halfway and only give yourself partial freedom, because it’s terrifying to imagine what might happen if you recognized the staggeringly immense freedom that you already have?

Posted in Alexander Technique | Comments Off on You Are Free To Be A Bad Person

Brussels: Just A Stop On The Jihadist Journey To America

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Mike McDaniel writes:

“Belgium, like the United States, suffers because it misunderstands multiculturalism. Multiculturalism doesn’t mean we’re all equal or that we must embrace cultural or moral equivalence. Rather, we should insist—Australia style—that everyone who comes subscribes to certain common values, even as they celebrate any cultural heritage that doesn’t contradict the values of society. Basically, to come to Belgium or America should mean subordinating oneself to a core set of values.

At the moment, neither the Democrats nor Republicans are willing to do this. Democrats are hopelessly in thrall to multiculturalism, and congressional Republicans lack the strength of character and will to oppose them. It is by no means certain that a Trump or even a Cruz presidency would be able to convince congressional Republicans to significantly control immigration, and the idea of requiring fealty to a common moral, cultural code is out of the question. If Americans can’t so much as agree that American citizenship has any value, real assimilation is likely impossible.

Obviously, simply requiring absolute fidelity to the Constitution would be the basis of such assimilation. Isn’t the Constitution the basis for all our liberties and civic obligations? However, the Democrats have so degraded even American’s understanding and appreciation of the Constitution that it may be impossible to walk it back. They see the Constitution as an impediment to their social justice desires, to their utopia. Surely, Democrats absolutely would oppose any requirement that immigrants honor the Constitution, and Barack Obama has set such destructive anti-constitutional precedents, it may be entirely too late to even try.

With any Democrat presidency, there would be absolutely no hope. Even if a Democrat president tried to use the Constitution as the basis for a common cultural heritage, the Supreme Court justices they would surely seat would never allow it when other Democrats inevitably sued their way to that court.

We’re in a slow motion, pre-9/11 train wreck. We all see the problem developing and getting closer to the United States but the government just delays taking action and so we will be hit and hit hard. One problem remains visa waivers. It’s all well and good to take assurances that France, Belgium, and other European states share passenger manifests in advance, but they have very clearly failed to develop the necessary surveillance and intelligence capabilities…

Even the Obama Administration has admitted–grudgingly indeed–that we cannot vet Syrian immigrants, and the truth is, we can’t do it for virtually anyone else either. We will indeed be hit hard, often and endlessly. Unless we drastically change course and very, very soon, Americans will learn to expect to be murdered in the streets and public places by Muslim terrorists, just as Europeans have.

I used to wonder what it would take for the American people to demand military action and retribution: another 9-11? The nuclear destruction of a city? Multiple cities? One death is a tragedy; millions are just a statistic. Under Barack Obama, Americans have become so inured to lawlessness, scandal and outrage, I fear there is nothing that would rouse most Americans to awaken as we did in WWII and utterly destroy those that, as I write these words, are plotting to destroy us.

Posted in Islam | Comments Off on Brussels: Just A Stop On The Jihadist Journey To America

Working The System

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

REPORT: A common program to compensate public safety workers for job-related disabilities is to grant them a tax exemption, whereby 50% of their retirement pension is exempt from state and federal taxes. While it is virtually impossible to collect data from pension fund administrators on exactly how many retired public safety workers have retired with this benefit, a 2004 investigative report by the Sacramento Bee found that among retired members of the California Highway Patrol, 66% of the rank and file officers, and 82% of the chiefs retired with service disabilities. Similarly, a 2006 investigative report by the San Jose Mercury found that two-thirds of San Jose Firefighters retired with service disabilities. Neither of these reports remain available online, although a Google search on the term “Chief’s Disease” (a term coined by the Sacramento Bee) will find dozens of secondary references to these studies.

REPORT: September 11, 2004

SACRAMENTO – Fifty-five of the 65 high-ranking officers who retired from the California Highway Patrol since 2000 filed workers’ compensation claims within two years, entitling them to lucrative disability settlements and medical pensions with tax-free income.

The practice is so widespread among the roughly 150 CHP chiefs and captains that rank-and-file officers have dubbed it “chief’s disease,” boosting costs in a department that pays the highest rate in state government for injuries and medical pensions.

The payments are in addition to routine pension benefits that let CHP officers retire at age 50 with up to 90 percent of their pay.

Nearly 70 percent of CHP officers retire on disability, and the department pays among the highest percentage of workplace injury claims, The Sacramento Bee found. The combination cost taxpayers $75 million two years ago.

“It turns out we need to be policing the police,” said state Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Daly City, chairwoman of the Select Committee on Government Oversight.

CHP Commissioner D.O. Helmick, who is being nudged into retirement next week by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, has asked the Public Employees’ Retirement System to determine if he, too, should be granted a disability pension because of injuries from vehicle accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, said spokesman Tom Marshall.

“Some of these people have pushed the envelope on this and it’s just grown and grown and grown,” Helmick told the Bee. “The system is so lucrative, I’m afraid people are going to take advantage even if they’re 100 percent ethical.”

It’s not unexpected for CHP officers to suffer injuries over the years while patrolling highways and pursuing criminals. And experts say it’s difficult to prove fraud because an officer unable to continue at the CHP may be qualified to work another job.

But then they’re no longer disabled, said Speier.

“If someone has a miraculous recovery, then they’re not eligible for a lifetime tax break. It’s an insult to the taxpayers of the state that they continue to draw a disability pension if they’re not disabled,” she said.

More than 80 percent of the chiefs who retired in the last four years claimed a debilitating injury as they prepared to retire, the Bee found, although many of the alleged medical problems had been building for years and were common for those in any field who are nearing retirement.

In one case, a deputy chief who suffered episodes of racing heart was described by a doctor as a danger to the public. In another, one chief’s skin cancer was attributed to years of patrolling the highways, although he found a new career as a scuba instructor in sun-soaked Hawaii.

One captain was found to be 61 percent disabled from knee injuries, ulcers, high blood pressure and hearing loss and took a medical pension from the CHP, then became assistant sheriff of Yolo County.

“What the Legislature and the courts have said is that the aging process is compensable,” said Frank Floyd of the State Compensation Insurance Fund.

Posted in California | Comments Off on Working The System

Has Neil DeGrasse Tyson Done Any Real Science?

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

“Has Tyson done any real science? He seems to be a media celebrity, but when I look in the Smithsonian/NASA ADS, I can find no record of scholarly work in science, except for popular books and social commentary. Is he in fact a practicing astrophysicist?”

Response: “Not since graduate school (he did not successfully progress towards a degree at UT/Austin, and convinced Columbia to give him a second try). Aside from the obligatory papers describing his dissertation, he’s got a paper on how to take dome flats, a bizarre paper speculating about an asteroid hitting Uranus, and courtesy mentions *very* late in the author lists of a few big projects in which it is unclear what, if anything, of substance he contributed. No first author papers of any real significance whatsoever. Nor is there any evidence that he has been awarded any telescope time on significant instruments as PI since grad school, despite the incredibly inflated claims in his published CVs. He cozied up to Bush and pushed Bush’s version of man to the Moon, Mars, and Beyond, and now gets appointed to just about every high level political advisory board. To an actual astronomer, this is almost beyond inconceivable. It’s just bizarre. To answer Delong’s question, no: he is not a practicing astrophysicist.” – Don Barry, Ph.D. Dept. of Astronomy, Cornell University

Comment: Remember that Tyson miraculously got into Harvard’s Ph.D. after flunking out of UT-Austin (but still getting a master’s). The Princeton post-doc followed, then the headship of the Hayden.

His daughter got into Harvard because his father was Cyril de Grasse Tyson, a big man in NYC civil rights in the early years (HARYOU, later 100 Black Men). Anybody else who had a son who flunked out of astrophysics at UT would have had to go drive a cab or something.

Posted in Science | Comments Off on Has Neil DeGrasse Tyson Done Any Real Science?

Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower

Posted on March 24, 2016 by Luke Ford

Jason Riley writes for the WSJ: When a plane starts its final descent, are the passengers more concerned about the competence or about the skin color of the air-traffic controllers on the ground who will help the pilot land safely? The answer may be obvious to readers, if not to the Obama administration.

A recently completed six-month investigation by Fox Business Network found that the Federal Aviation Administration has quietly moved away from merit-based hiring criteria in order to increase the number of women and minorities who staff airport control towers. The changes come despite the fact that the FAA’s own internal reports describe the evidence for changing the hiring process as “weak.”

Until 2013, the FAA gave hiring preference to controller applicants who earned a degree from one of its Collegiate Training Initiative schools and scored high enough on an eight-hour screening test called the Air Traffic Selection and Training exam, or AT-SAT, which measures cognitive skills. The Obama administration, however, determined that the process excluded too many from minority groups. In May 2013, the FAA’s civil rights administrator issued “barrier analyses” of the agency’s employment procedures, which recommended “revising how the AT-SAT is used in establishing best-qualified lists.”

By the start of last year, the FAA was using a biographical questionnaire (BQ) to initially vet potential hires. The questions—“How many sports did you play in high school?”, “What has been the major cause of your failures?”—seem designed to elicit stories of personal disadvantage or family hardship rather than determine success on the job.

“The FAA says it created the BQ to promote diversity among its workforce,” reported Adam Shapiro of Fox Business. “All air traffic control applicants are required to take it. Those who pass are deemed eligible and those who fail are ruled ineligible.”

The FAA would not tell Fox Business what the biographical test is trying to measure and did not return my phone calls. But an FAA report released in October, “Using Biodata to Select Air Traffic Controllers,” concluded that the AT-SAT exam, not the biographical questionnaire, is a much better predictor of performance. “The biodata items assessed did little to improve our ability to select applicants most likely” to complete training successfully, said the study. “If biodata are to be used to select controllers, additional research is required to identify those biodata items that will add to the prediction of controller training performance over and above the effect of AT-SAT score.”

Given that training an air-traffic controller can cost more than $400,000 on average, selecting candidates based on who is likely to complete the process makes economic sense. Hans Bader, a legal scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that the FAA’s focus on diversity is not only inefficient but may be a violation of the Civil Rights Act. “The FAA’s jettisoning of merit-based hiring criteria violated the Supreme Court’s Ricci decision, [Ricci v. DeStefano, 2009] which limits agencies’ ability to discard hiring criteria in order to increase minority representation, especially when there is no strong evidence that the criteria are not job-related,” said Mr. Bader.

After the FAA changed its screening process in 2014, thousands of applicants who were already in the pipeline—people who had obtained an FAA-accredited degree, taken the AT-SAT exam and had been designated “well-qualified” to become air-traffic controllers—were told by the government that they would have to start the process again. “But this time, when they applied for a job, their college degrees and previous military experience would mean nothing,” reported Fox Business. “They would now compete with thousands of people the agency calls ‘off the street hires’; anyone who wants to, can walk in off the street without any previous training and apply for an air traffic control job.”

Posted in Affirmative Action | Comments Off on Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower