“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 inIslam|Comments Off on Brussels: Just A Stop On The Jihadist Journey To America
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.
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 inCalifornia|Comments Off on Working The System
“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 inScience|Comments Off on Has Neil DeGrasse Tyson Done Any Real Science?
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 inAffirmative Action|Comments Off on Affirmative Action Lands in the Air Traffic Control Tower
Steve Sailer writes: Back in 2007, the Bush Administration rewarded the firemen of New York City, 343 of whom died on 9/11, by suing them for disparate impact discrimination in hiring. In 2009 a Democratic judge ruled the test devised by the city of New York was racially/ethnically biased because it presented readings on fire safety and then asked hard questions, such as: what kind of chainsaw should you use to cut through a steel door? You could pass the test either by having strong reading comprehension skills or by studying firefighting intensively.
FDNY candidates will take an entry exam that quizzes them on topics like African killer bees and on math questions such as comparing veggie chips to pretzels, but little on firefighting.
With the city planning to give the first FDNY entry exam in five years in 2017, critics say the test has been dumbed down since a judge ruled a former exam discriminated against minorities.
A recently posted preparation manual asks aspiring Bravest to practice by watching videos produced by Lowe’s hardware store on how to install a toilet, replace a sink, and lay a tile floor.
“It’s great to prepare firemen for their second jobs as plumbers,” an insider quipped. “The FDNY might as well call this the ‘Side Job Preparation Guide.’ ”
To test reading comprehension, the tutorial asks applicants to read a 1998 Tampa Tribune article, “Natural Born Killers,” on African bees migrating to the United States.
On math, it first gives tips on solving word problems, then a sample exercise showing the nutritional labels for vegetable chips, rice cakes, trail mix and pretzel twists.
The first of 10 multiple-choice questions says: “Firefighter Harris ate one cup of Fruit & Nut Trail Mix. What percentage of Saturated Fat did she have (% Daily Value)?” Other questions ask test-takers to compare the snacks for fat, carbohydrates and protein.
In another exercise, applicants read labels on bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen, then answer questions such as: “Which medicine relieves pain from toothaches?”
… The test is apparently meant to level the playing field so those more familiar with firefighting don’t have an advantage.
… In January 2010, Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Giraufis ruled the FDNY exams first given in 1999 and 2002 discriminated against black applicants and halted their use. The city later agreed to pay $98 million in back pay to those minorities passed over, and give some a second chance to join the department.
The city and the Vulcan Society, a fraternal group of black firefighters, devised a new exam that Garaufis approved in 2012. Of 9,400 who scored high enough to be hired, 42.3 percent were minorities — more than ever.
Now, the FDNY has finally learned the lesson that La Griffe du Lion pointed out years ago: If you want to please the feds, you can minimize disparate impact (percentage point differential) of the hiring test by making it extremely easy, then hiring randomly.
The 2012 test approved by Judge Garufis was passed by 97% of test-takers.
COMMENTS:
* Any test that requires study is, ipso facto, racist.
* LA County Sheriff Dept. had a test of basic English. To pass you needed to score over 50%, if you got 51% that was just as good as if you scored 100% in the hiring process.
* I suspect elite judges think a fireman’s job involves no knowledge or smartness. That its just a matter of running into a building with a hose.
In NYC you you have 150 year old rotten wood death traps standing side by side with new sprinklered buildings that compartmentalize to prevent the spread of fire. And all the buildings that come in between with varying degrees of safety. Firefighters need to know all types of building and their particular weaknesses and strengths.
You don’t need to be a genius to figure this stuff out but you need to have a certain level of intelligence and diligence.
* That’s what Emily Bazelon of the Yale Law School asked in 2009 in Slate. I asked in response whether she had any career advantages in law in being the granddaughter of David Bazelon, chief judge of the first district court of appeal and Supreme Court justice William Brennan’s best friend.
* Do you ever experience the sensation of overwhelming despair washing over you after you read news like this? Sometimes it helps to pretend that I’m Alice and have gone through the Looking Glass, but I can only pretend that I’m in a make-believe world for a second or two before reality intrudes.
* I’ve taken firefighting exams before (not FDNY though). From my experience, the tests tend to have these type of sections:
1. Basic math
2. Memorizing tools/knots and their functions
3. Memorizing the layout of a room
4. Memorizing the details of a fire scene
5. Reading a fire-related passage and then later recalling details
You need to have good memorization skills to do well. Especially the ability to recall images.
* If you do well enough on the test, then they’ll call you in for an oral interview. Typically they’ll ask questions about your work experience, teamwork&leadership skills, views on ethnic diversity, etc.
The oral interviewers are under heavy pressure to give generous grades to certain underrepresented minority groups and also women. If you’re black or a woman, expect to be graded very easily at the oral interviews. That’s mostly because of all the law suits involving blacks complaining about racism and women complaining about sexual harassment. FF depts are eager to hire lots of blacks and women to avoid more law suits.
If you do well at the oral interview, usually you proceed to a second round of orals. If you do well there, you are given a background check. If you pass, you get the job. Of course, even after getting the job, you have to pass through basic training.
It helps to be a military veteran too, as veterans are given a large number of preference points. In one fire department I applied to, I was told that 30% of the FFs were veterans.
* Being a large-city firefighter is a good deal.
1. Typically the base salary for large-city staff FFers (attained after a few years) is in the 90-100K range. Very good benefits, strong union, and lots of vacation too.
2. They work a one-day on, two-day off schedule. Some work two-days on, four-days off schedule. So lots of time for hobbies, relaxing, partying, starting your own band, getting a side job, etc. Even when they’re on the job, there’s a lot of downtime and fairly low stress.
3. Very generous pension (50% of peak salary after 20 years on the force). Lots of fire fighters even “double dip” by getting a 50K/yr pension and working a second job.
4. Very strong job security. Rare for there to be layoffs.
5. If you test well, you can test up into senior level positions. Some of the higher-ups in the organizations actually have considerable prestige in their local city govts.
6. For a kid who can’t enter an elite career track (finance, law, medicine, consulting) and doesn’t want to go the entrepreneurship route, climbing the ranks of a FF department can be a good option to attain prestige and power. The competition is less fierce too.
I’d strongly advise any young man to consider a career in firefighting.
* FDNY is under more pressure to hire minorities than other departments. Not only do you see lots of black and Hispanic hires these days, but even Asians and (even more implausibly) Indians/Pakistanis. They want the dept to reflect the city’s diversity. NYPD is even worse.
For a very long time though, the FDNY just hired lots of ethnic Italian/Irish guys. They were able to get away with it too. Much better than the NYPD.
* You need to add a seventh bullet point: You’ll score a hot wife.
There are a number of firefighters in my Orange County neighborhood and all of them have very nice looking (my husband says hot) stay at home wives who have large rocks on their fingers and live in pricier homes than mine.
* My relative has tried out several times for the fire department. He graduated from a ten month long course on firefighting that cost him about 16K. One thing that he told me really struck me. The male testers have to drag a dummy 100 yards weighing 180 pounds. But the female testers only have to drag a dummy weighing 120 pounds. When I asked one of his instructors what would happen in real life if a female firefighter had to drag a 180 pound person out, I was just met with embarrassing silence.
* All standards are racist. Live with it.
* I have read that firemen have far fewer fires to deal with than in times past. Smoke alarms, automatic sprinklers, OSHA regulations, etc, have made fires less common and less destructive. When it’s time to run into the burning building and pull the children out, they have to earn their keep, but you can be a dummy or a weakling and get by for a longer time than was possible decades ago.
* Whether blue collar or white collar, intelligence and work ethic make a huge difference in quality and productivity. When it comes to fighting fires that difference is measured in the number of lives saved.
* About 80% of firefighting calls are EMT-related. Only 20% involve fighting actual fires.
EMT calls still require a high degree of competence. However, firefighting departments get huge numbers of applications and hire the top 1-2%. So even if they hire minorities/women due to AA, they can get fairly competent people. Just not quite as competent as they would if there was no AA.
Firefighting is still 95% white as a profession. As it changes and becomes more diverse due to AA, perhaps competency will fall.
* I’m familiar with a few firefighters that hold two “full-time” firefighter positions in two different cities. They’re able to schedule their 24 hours on/48 hours off to allow them to do this. The earn about $70K at each job, and earn two pensions!
The firefighters have strong unions and media and over the years have been able to bamboozle the public as to how “dangerous” and busy their jobs are. The local city officials are scared of the fire unions and roll over every three years at contract negotiation time. Remember, every firefighter wage and benefit was negotiated by city management and approved by city council.
* I’m a 45-year old NYFD firewhiner with 25 years of “service.” For my dedicated “service” to the good citizens of NYC, I deserve to get paid! I’ve got bills! Alimony & child support to three ex-wives, payments on my Escalade, Harley, and speed boat. I’m juggling three girlfriends, and have some serious gambling debts. I now make close to $200K per year but deserve more! Not too bad for a high school grad who was washing cars before I got on with the NYFD. I did, however, earn my A.S. degree in “Fire Science” on the City’s dime. You wouldn’t believe how easy that was. The “instructors” were my NYFD buddies, so I passed w/ all As w/o opening a book! And that silly degree got me promoted three times to Sr. Deputy Assistant Deputy Big-Cheese Battalion Chief Indian Chief. And I still have lots of free time to work out while on the job. I’m trying to get on next year’s “Hottest Firewhiners of NYFD” calendar.
Last year I “worked” tons of OT to spike my pension and will soon start accumulating my $100K/yr pension, and I’m only 45 years old! In 20 years, I’ll be 65 (the retirement age for most of you stiffs), the 3% COLA will have doubled my pension to $200K per year! My life expectancy is 88 years, so my pension will double again to $400K per year by the time I die. It gets better; my lovely 20-year old mail-order bride will collect my pension long after I die. Her life expectancy is 90 years. She’ll collect my growing pension for another 25 years after my death! The New York City has been very, very good to me. And I know you don’t feel appreciated, but a big thank you to the NYC taxpayers. Now get back to work and pay those taxes! Oh, by the way, F.U. Pay Me!
* I also think the presence of lots of Italians and Irish makes a difference. They tend to be much “meaner” than whites in other parts of the country. They’re not much into the idea of white guilt. They fought neighborhood integration and busing much harder than whites in other parts of the country. As recently as the 80s, the east coast had overwhelmingly white housing projects.
Of course, these days, their ethnic solidarity and clout isn’t quite what it used to be.
* LSAT entrance exam for law schools and the bar exam to practice law also have disparate impact on black and latinos but no judge is striking down those practices.
Presumably because they feel it is justifiable to select for intelligence in practice of law, not justifiable to do so for firefighting.
* That was the way it was originally in the Canadian banking system as well–the late Peter Jennings of ABC News used to tell of how, since he came from a respectable Toronto family but was not himself really college material (in fact he dropped out of the 10th grade), he was encouraged to take an entry-level job with the Royal Bank of Canada, with every expectation that he had an eventual shot at upper management despite his lack of education. Finance, in the Commonwealth countries, historically simply was not seen as an “academic” field.
Oh, and that “dumb” Canadian banking culture, as David Frum would be happy to tell you, was ruthlessly realistic in its mortgage lending standards into this century. As Orwell said, some things are so stupid only an intellectual can believe in them.
* In other countries, you have to take rigorous college entrance exams in order to pass into college in the first place, and also into the major of your choice. Many countries even place students on specific study tracks years before the end of highschool, and not all students qualify to even take the entrance exams for studying law.
We can debate the pros and cons of such a system versus the American one, but I think it goes against the American ethos to tell a student that they can’t choose what they want to study. I wonder if all the Bernie Sanders supporters quite understand the major restrictions that come along with free higher education, as it’s such a different system from the American one. Or do they believe that they can do away with these restrictions and keep the system as it is now, only free?
* I remember the television show Rescue Me. It was mostly Irish and Italian firefighters, with 1 token Puerto Rican and 1 token African American.
Posted inIQ, Race|Comments Off on NYP: FDNY’s new entry exam asks about everything but firefighting
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
