News and Views

On April 22 new regulations for housing contractors go into effect, and they're going to put a lot of small contractors out of business without netting any significant gains in safety.  Nasty stuff. Formerly there was an opt out option for homeowners who didn't have anybody in the home who was at risk- that's being removed because it's 'ripe for abuse,' meaning you just can't trust those home-owners.  But the probability is those untrustworthy homeowners will just opt to do any work themselves or hire black market contractors. 

This is interesting advice, but I disagree:

Sandy, Jim and Karen work at a downtown community centre where they help low-income residents apply for rental housing. Sandy has a bad feeling about Jim: She notices that when black clients come in, he tends to drift to the back of the office. Sandy suspects racism (she and Jim are both white). On the other hand, she also notices that Jim seems to get along well with Karen, who is black. As the weeks go by, Sandy becomes more uncomfortable with the situation. But she feels uncertain about how to handle it. Test question: What should Sandy do?
If you answered that Sandy's first move should be to talk to Karen, and ask how Jim's behaviour made her feel, you are apparently a better anti-racist than me.
That, for what it's worth, was the preferred solution offered by my instructor at "Thinking About Whiteness and Doing Anti-Racism," a four-part evening workshop for community activists, presented earlier this year at the Toronto Women's Bookstore.  

The Headmaster calls this approach "gossip," and he will write up employees for it, and eventually it becomes a firing offense.  He expects employees to do the right thing and first go to the person about whom they have a concern, and then if their concerns are not alleviated they can come to him.
Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2758198#ixzz0kzG23ZEM

Diane Ravitch is no longer a fan of school choice or our so-called educational standards-

  She argues that the accountability and testing provisions in legislation like No Child Left Behind and similar reforms have actually corrupted the testing process, taken time away from subjects other than math and reading, and failed even to boost success in math and reading.

Last night we had friends over, one of whom is, I think, even more opposed to the Health Care Bill than I am, and I told him there was a newly discovered unintended consequence of the Health Care Bill would make him  laugh-

Turns out that fantastically long, mind-bogglingly complex bills which no one has actually read may create unintended consequences. Remember how they forgot to require insurers to cover kids with preexisting conditions? Oh, and they forgot initially to let young adults be covered by their parents’ insurance until Reid fixed it in reconciliation. Now this. Who knew that when Pelosi said they’d have to pass the bill so that people could find out what’s in it, “people” meant Congress?

I’d call it comedy gold if not for the obvious point raised by the Times: “If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans?”

He said that he really didn't think I was going to be able to make him laugh, but that was pretty funny.  Of course, he pointed out, this will be 'fixed' within hours- probably by the time you're reading this.  Tom Maguire has more.  Yeah, I'm not laughing anymore.  Still kind of smirking, though, because, you know, that's some serious snark worthy funny.

Then there's this one unintended consequence which I knew about, but apparently some didn't:

thanks to page 1239 of the health care bill that President Obama recently signed into law. It requires employers to provide "a place, other than a bathroom, that is shielded from view and free from intrusion from co-workers and the public, which may be used by an employee to express breast milk." Only companies with less than 50 employees can claim it's an undue hardship.

And here lies the difference between principled conservativism and nanny government advocates.  I LIKE breastfeeding.  I am a huge breastfeeding proponent.  I nursed all my babies, my last one until he was two years old.  I nursed in public.  I comfort nursed.  I prefer demand feeding over scheduling.
I enjoy comfortable nursing spaces.  I like it when a business offers them to customers or employees.  But this should be voluntary, not coerced by law.  This is none of Congress' business.
And one wonders, what if a business has 55 people and none of them are nursing mothers?  What if all the women who work there are menopausal and childless?  Do they still have to supply a safe breastfeeding space?



Hypocrisy watch:

Despite Hersh's unreliability, his suggestion Cheney was assassinating people at will was dutifully parroted by the activist Left and receptive members of the media.
This week President Obama publicly ordered the assassination of a U.S. citizen, Muslim Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Unlike Hersh's scurrilous charge, this presidential directive is a matter of record -- not a wild rumor.
Make no mistake: al-Awlaki is a bad guy. He's been definitively linked to the 9/11 hijackers, and more recently the recent Fort Hood massacre, not to mention the failed underwear bombing plot this past Christmas.
But he's also a U.S. citizen, and thus entitled to basic constitutional protections. So where are the denunciations of Obama's extraordinary decision from those who spent eight years decrying Bush and Cheney's wartime expansion of executive power?

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/The-assassination-double-standard-90571969.html#ixzz0kzJ1FoiR

The recent brouhaha over the Quatar diplomat who spent a lot of time in the bathroom on an airplane, and when asked what he was doing callously joked about being a shoe-bomber (not very diplomatic, is he?) reminded Dymphna and the Baron of when Annie Jacobsen thought she was seeing a dry run for a terrorist attack in planning, and was scoffed at:

Snopes still insists on calling the Jacobsen charges false despite the fact that Homeland Security did indeed think it was a probe. However, as with any bureaucracy facing bad news, they claimed it was merely her hysteria before they admitted her intuition had some foundation. We saw the same “no-it-wasn’t-terror-related-yes-it-was” from Ms. Napolitano during the furor following the aborted underwear bomber attack

In 2007, three years after the fact, the suits at the Department of Homeland Security finally got around to acknowledging Jacobsen’s reality.

over Christmas last year. In other words, the bureaucrats change chairs, but they're all blowing the same smoke and castigating the public for their refusal to believe the fairy stories.

Their conclusion on the Quatar diplomat- should have been taken more seriously at the time, but does appear he was just an arrogant so and so who thought he should be able to make jokes about blowing up a plane and get away with it.

Governor Christie of New Jersey: "We have the worst unemployment in the region and the highest taxes in America, and that is no coincidence."  Yowza.  I like this guy.

Obama's recent nuclear summit didn't impress NeoNeo-con or reporter Dana Milbank- at least, not in a good way.  Milbank says that basically, the President gave foreign reporters a clinic in how to circumvent a free press.


There's a new biography out about the President, apparently quite favorable- and yet, even a friendly author couldn't find any evidence that Obama ever was known for being a good student or a good writer- until Dreams of My Father (which has a very interesting pre-publication history):

In his 600-plus pages of surprisingly lifeless prose -- Ayers is the better writer -- Remnick does, at least, find his way into certain corners of Obama's life that the media had not previously penetrated. Among these are the New York years, about which Obama had declined even the New York Times' "repeated requests" for information. Post-election, Remnick makes a little more headway.

At Columbia, Remnick tells us, Obama was an "unspectacular" student. Northwestern University communications professor John McKnight reinforces the point, telling Remnick, "I don't think [Obama] did too well in college."

McKnight, a Chicago friend, wrote a letter of reference for Obama to attend Harvard Law School. Remnick assures us that Obama was a "serious" student at Columbia, just not a particularly good one.[...]

Obama certainly did not write well when he was at Columbia. Remnick charitably describes the one article Obama wrote for Columbia's weekly news magazine, Sundial, as "muddled," and he is referring only to the content. The grammar is worse. As I have previously noted, in his 1800-word article Obama manages an appalling five noun-verb mismatches, and the punctuation is equally capricious.

He received over six figures in an advance to write a book. Over a year later, he still hadn't written it, and the drafts he turned in were so bloated and uninspired that the publishing company finally canceled his contract- and then he said he couldn't pay back the advance because of his overly burdensome student loans. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a reporter out there somewhere interested in finding out why nobody can produce an article, a school paper, a report card, SAT scores or sort of record of what the President was writing and thinking about during those years?????

Ah, the cult of the expert is no place for somebody trying to make decisions about the future:
U.C. Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock. Tetlock questioned 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends," asking them to make predictions about future events. Over the course of the study, Tetlock collected quantitative data on over 82,000 predictions, as well as information from follow-up interviews with the subjects about the thought processes they'd used to come to those predictions. 

His findings were surprising. Most of Tetlock's questions about the future events were put in the form of specific, multiple choice questions, with three possible answers. But for all their expertise, the pundits' predictions turned out to be correct less than 33% of the time. Which meant, as Lehrer puts it, that a "dart-throwing chimp" would have had a higher rate of success. Tetlock also found that the least accurate predictions were made by the most famous experts in the group.

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