Stuyvesant and The Limits of Affirmative Action

I support public and private sector workplace affirmative action programs. Due to this country's history many people have a strong preference for their own and a disdain for black intelligence and competence. We live in a very segregated society. 

People who live separate residential and personal lives are as a group often unable or unwilling to judge co-workers, business partners, or new hires solely by potential and results. Humans usually don't work that way. 

Whether it is law firm partners who find more errors in associates' work if they think the associate is Black, hiring agents who sight unseen reject candidates with "Black" names, people that just tell someone straight out that they don't hire their kind, immigrants who won't hire Black people, managers more willing to hire white felons than Blacks without criminal records, workplace bigotry and stereotyping remains a huge problem. It's partly why the black unemployment rate has stubbornly remained twice that of whites for about as long as the metric has been recorded. If you're Black and haven't experienced any workplace funny business, congratulations but I think your number just hasn't come up yet.  It will soon. 

We do need standards. Properly done, affirmative action's should make people define and enforce objective standards. If a company hires an incompetent Black person, I won't cry when that person is fired, demoted or transferred. But evaluating job performance can be opaque and biased. A person who excels in one role or with one set of people can fail in a different role or with different co-workers. Measuring educational performance is different. This brings us to Stuyvesant High School. 

Drug Tests, Welfare and Joni Ernst

I have no use for junkies. They are wasting their human potential. Perhaps if my reality were woefully lacking I would better understand their cravings. However, though I haven't gotten everything I wanted out of life I really like myself. I don't want to become like a now deceased grade school classmate who fell into a drug habit for which he paid by walking the streets. Drug dependency is foul. Nevertheless some drug usage is not that different from legal substances such as tobacco or alcohol. I also eschew those items but that is just me. People near and dear to me as well as (obviously) strangers make different decisions and that is fine. If you smoke God bless you, just don't do it around me or there will be some problems. If you drink, knock yourself out, just don't drink and drive or operate other dangerous machinery or vehicles while your judgment, perception and motor skills are somewhat impaired. So with some exceptions I'm pretty much a live and let live fellow. We're all going to end up six feet under so if your idea of personal fun is different than mine I won't have a temper tantrum about it, provided it doesn't interfere with my life or hurt other people. Unfortunately a swath of the Republican Party doesn't see things that way. The conservative brain trust's latest idea is that the impoverished people on government assistance should be tested for drug use, before and during the times that they are accepting assistance. This idea was tried and rejected in Florida but Michigan recently implemented a pilot program to do much the same thing. Keep in mind that Michigan already has a 48 month lifetime limit on welfare.

Although supporters claim that the state has an interest in ensuring that anyone who is accepting government funds is not a drug abuser I don't think that's the real concern. Most information that we have shows that poor and black people (and make no mistake there's a racial element whenever we talk about "welfare") use illegal drugs at similar or lower rates than rich or white people. It's expensive to be a junkie. The welfare rolls are not overrun with junkies. They are filled with people who can't find a good paying job. The biggest reasons that they can't find a job are not because they are substance abusers or lazy coconuts but because in a time of globalization, outsourcing, de-unionization and de-industrialization, increasing automation, dodgy child care, segregated job markets and housing tracts, racist hiring practices, bad schools and employers who can afford to be picky with a large labor reserve, living wage jobs are not easily found. There are so many myths about poor people. 
Many people who support testing welfare recipients anyway ignore those points and counter with "Well, if they don't want to prove that they're drug free, they must not need the help that badly." This is a moral statement that shows the true issue behind the urge to drug test welfare recipients. It's all about power and humiliation. It's an S&M power play posing as purposeful public policy. It's just to humiliate and shame people for the crime of being on welfare. 

Yes, there are some welfare recipients who are scamming the system, who do have drug or alcohol issues or who just need a swift kick in the butt. But in this case the state will likely waste more money determining who is "deserving" of assistance than it will save by identifying those welfare baseheads. And if people taking government assistance should be tested for illicit drugs why aren't we applying that standard to everyone across the board?

If you own a home, or to be more precise, are paying interest on a loan you took out to purchase a primary residence, you may deduct the interest paid on that loan against your federal tax liability. Effectively the government is subsidizing your purchase. You're getting government help. If you own a business you can depreciate machinery, business property and other items to once again reduce your federal tax liability. If you are building or already own a sports stadium or multi-use property it's quite likely that the local and/or state government gave you sweetheart deals on the land, agreed to not collect taxes or only do so at a extremely low rate, provided you loans at very favorable terms, used public money to build your stadium or even used eminent domain to move other private businesses, individuals or even competitors out of your way. If you're a farmer, you can mumble a few platitudes about "the heartland", "American values", "pickup trucks", and maybe chew on a corncob pipe while you rush yourself down to the nearest Department of Agriculture office to pick up your subsidy check. You can then kick back and sneer at all those lazy welfare city slackers who aren't real Americans like you. These examples are just a very small portion of middle-class or upper-class goodies available from the government. This doesn't include the salaries and perks of upper level government employees like Senators, Representatives and Judges.

In most political circles the above people are not regularly and constantly derided as lazy spongers, useless eaters, parasites or the like. Few of them are ever told "Well if you want this money from the government, go fill this cup so we can ensure you're not a crackhead". Why? Statistically we KNOW some of them are snorting, smoking, injecting or injesting something the law forbids. It's because conservatives in particular and Americans in general believe that if you're poor you're a loser who should be shamed, mocked and generally pushed around. If welfare drug testing was really about the principle that government aid should come with strings attached then we would see people calling for testing individuals in the classes listed above. But we usually don't. One irony is that conservatives have generally been skeptical or hostile to the idea that government involvement or assistance in a private business or marketplace, direct or diffused, can or should be the leverage used to compel a private behavior change. The other irony is that your stereotypical welfare queen with a substance abuse problem doesn't greatly impact my life. But a Senator or Representative who's on the pipe? A real estate mogul who has both a heroin addiction and friends with eminent domain power? A judge with an oxycontin dependency who is hearing a case with a Big Pharma defendant? Those people can affect my life more than a poor family trying to survive on food stamps and hundred dollars and change each week.

The public spotlight might not prove to be Ernst's best friend. The District Sentinel, a Washington, D.C., news co-op, reports that despite her campaign pitch that her parents "taught us to live within our means," her family members collected $463,000 in federal farm subsidies from 1995 through 2009.

The figures come from the Environmental Working Group's authoritative database of farm supports. Most of the money, more than $367,000 in mostly corn subsidies, went to Ernst's uncle, Dallas Culver, and his farm in her home town of Red Oak, Iowa. An additional $38,665 went to her father, Richard Culver, and $57,479 went to her grandfather, Harold Culver, who died in 2003.

We called Ernst's Senate office to ask how this record comports with her ostensible distaste for individual reliance on the federal government, but there was no answer and the line wasn't taking messages.

If "welfare" means taking government handouts then the families of people like Joni Ernst or Mike Illitch are bigger welfare queens than anyone in any inner city tough town, USA. But somehow all the various corporate welfare transfers don't excite the same level of contempt and slavering rage that a poor person does when he or she needs help. To repeat, there are indeed lazy greedy people who are always looking for a way to get over on everyone. But let's not pretend that they are all at the lowest end of the income/wealth spectrum. So all of you form a line to the left, drop trou and fill that cup!!!

Thoughts?

Hot for Teacher-Adult Actress Teacher Stacie Halas Fired

I've got it bad
I've got it bad
I've got it bad
I'm hot for teacher
Hot For Teacher-Van Halen

It's been a minute since I was in grade/middle school. I don't remember having crushes on any of the women teachers there. I knew virtually nothing about their personal life and wasn't that interested. It was big news when occasionally their boyfriend or husband would pick them up from or drop them off at school. I mean who knew that Miss or Mrs. so-n-so actually had a life outside of the classroom? Of course I was a bit of a solipsistic young lad and the times were more conservative so it wasn't surprising that I didn't know anything about a teacher's extra curricular life or her activities and lifestyle before she became my teacher. Of course, as the Stacie Halas story shows us, maybe it's a good thing that I didn't know anything about my teachers' lives prior to them becoming an educator.

32 year old Stacie Halas was a California middle school teacher who was recently fired from her job. She lost her appeal of that firing as well. Why was she axed? Well she was terminated from her position because she was, prior to working as a teacher in her current school, but perhaps not other schools, an adult film actress. Evidently some other teachers and/or students recognized Halas' .... (ahem)... face and did some quick research to make sure. Once this information became public, Halas was let go. People found interviews in her movies in which she talked about being a teacher and hoped her other job choices would not be discovered. I wonder who got the job of downloading and reviewing those movies, purely for research purposes of course.

Her lawyer, Richard Schwab, said Halas had tried to be honest but was embarrassed by her previous experience in the adult industry."Miss Halas is more than just an individual fighting for her job as a teacher," he said Tuesday. "I think she's representative of a lot of people who may have a past that may not involve anything illegal or anything that hurts anybody."

Halas has been on administrative leave since the video surfaced in March. Teachers then showed administrators downloads of Halas' sex videos from their smartphones. 

In hearings, former assistant principal Wayne Saddler testified that, at the start of a sex video, Halas talked about being a teacher, and he felt her effectiveness in the classroom had been compromised.

In October, Oxnard Unified School District spokesman Thomas DeLapp told CBS Los Angeles that once students were able to find the videos of Halas on the Internet, they made it difficult for her to be an effective teacher."We even had kids who were referring to her by her stage name in class, from catcalls in the back," DeLapp said.

LINK

Of course there are other jokes I could make about this but right now I don't have any more*. When I first heard about this I was somewhat opposed to the school board's action because people can and do change. Do we want to put a scarlet letter on someone for the rest of their life for a bad, but legal choice they once made?  Halas' time as "Tiffany Sixx" appears to be in the past. It's not as if she were arriving directly from the studio sets to teach impressionable young teens/pre-teens and/or tell them all about her deeds. At least, that doesn't appear to have been the case. But thinking more about this teachers are indeed supposed to maintain a good moral example for the children they instruct. Performing circus sexual acts on film for money with men and other women is usually not considered to be setting a proper moral example. I used to be a 12 yr old boy. I can definitely say that Halas' effectiveness as a teacher would be near zero if she was teaching boys of that age. So for that alone, even if I don't care about her previous career, she'd probably have to find a different job.  

And while the sordid details of her paid interactions with men or women may have been outre, the fact is that virtually every teacher, heck almost every human being has had sex or will have sex at some point in their life. There's just a record of some of her activities.  If she had announced she was gay, should/could she have been fired for that? That is still considered deviant in some circles and to be setting a bad influence. But working essentially as a prostitute is, unlike gayness, something that still unites many on the feminist left and on the traditionalist right in disgust. So maybe it's not as cut and dry as people might think.

And let's be honest, it's not just about the children. That's something of a cop-out. I do not think that in the average corporate workplace, were it discovered that the budget analyst in general ledger was or had been an adult actress, that she would be able to keep her job, or at least keep her job with the same level of respect and productivity that she had had prior to that information becoming public. Is that fair? Probably not. People should be judged on what they do at work, not on what they've done in their private lives. But that's idealistic. The reality is that often you sell not only your on the job skills to your employer, but also the implied or actual promise that you won't embarrass your employer or bring undue complications to your job. If, for example, a man who was an actuary, supply chain mgr or officer for a Fortune 500 Company decided to supplement his salary by investing in perfectly legal strip clubs or lingerie football leagues, chances are good that his company might bid him adieu. That's just how it goes.

So what do you think?

Was the school district within its rights to terminate Halas?

Was it the right thing to do?

Would you be concerned if Halas were teaching your children?

If you were a male student in her class would you ask her for extra "homework" or some one-on-one tutoring? (*Ok, just one joke)

Don't Mess With Texas: Prisons and Air Conditioning

If through an unfortunate series of events, I was unlucky enough to be convicted of a crime and sent to prison, I would have many concerns that I would want to address. Things like avoiding becoming someone's sexual surrogate, learning all the correct rituals around which tables to sit at, exactly when you should curse out the guards just to make people know you're not soft, how to make dangerous weaponry from plastic utensils, when it is permissible to talk to or befriend a prisoner of a different race, which territory belongs to which prison gang, staying alive, and above all getting OUT as soon as possible would be foremost on my mind.


Something that probably wouldn't be on the immediate concern list would be air conditioning. Of course I am not in prison and (knock on wood) not in a Texas prison so the issue lacks a little, shall we say, urgency for me.

But there are some people for whom this is not just an academic exercise. In fact they claim it is a matter of life and death. They are quite serious about this. It's not a joke to them. Not at all.

Inmates and their families have complained for years about the heat and lack of air-conditioning in the summertime, but the issue has taken on a new urgency. An appeal is pending in a lawsuit initially filed in 2008 by a former inmate claiming that 54 prisoners were exposed to Death Valley-like conditions at a South Texas prison where the heat index exceeded 126 degrees for 10 days indoors. And several inmates at other prisons died of heat-related causes last summer; a lawsuit was filed Tuesday in one of those deaths.A Texas law requires county jails to maintain temperature levels between 65 and 85 degrees, but the law does not apply to state prisons. The American Correctional Association recommends that temperature and humidity be mechanically raised or lowered to acceptable levels.

“The Constitution doesn’t require a comfortable prison, but it requires a safe and humane prison,” said Scott Medlock, director of the prisoners’ rights program at the Texas Civil Rights Project, which is representing the former South Texas inmate who sued prison officials. “Housing prisoners in these temperatures is brutal.”A prison agency spokesman, Jason Clark, said that many prison units were built before air-conditioning was commonly installed, and that many others built later in the 1980s and 1990s did not include air-conditioning because of the additional construction, maintenance and utility costs. Retrofitting prisons with air-conditioning would be extremely expensive, he said.

State Senator John Whitmire, a Democrat from Houston and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, said he was concerned about the inmate deaths but wanted to examine the circumstances of each. He said he was not sympathetic to complaints about a lack of air-conditioning, partly out of concern about the costs, but also out of principle.“Texans are not motivated to air-condition inmates,” he said. “These people are sex offenders, rapists, murderers. And we’re going to pay for their air-conditioning when I can’t go down the street and provide air-conditioning to hard-working, taxpaying citizens?”

LINK

Basically Whitmire hits upon something that I initially agreed with upon reading this story. If you're convicted of a felony and if you're in prison then you must have been, your comfort is not really going to be high on the state's priority list. There are special circumstances with aged or invalid prisoners where I think the state does have a special duty to ensure some level of cooling but that aside it's called prison for a reason. It's not supposed to be a comfortable pleasant environment!!! If you murdered or raped someone then really you should be thankful that you're still alive and being fed by the state instead of having a quicker and permanent solution imposed. But on the other hand the state does have a duty to ensure to the best of its ability that while you're under its control you don't do anything so final as die from heatstroke. And if you make conditions too unpleasant there's always the possibility of prison riots. And those cost money. So there's that. I would want to know more about the death stats in Texas prisons before air conditioning became widely available. Certainly in the 1920s-1940s no prisoner would have thought to sue over lack of air conditioning, would they? There are plenty of people today who lack air conditioning in their home. I don't think that someone in prison should have more comfort than someone out of prison. That messes up incentives fairly dramatically.

What's your take on this? 
Should air conditioning be made widely available in prison? 
Is it cruel and unusual punishment to live without air conditioning?