Monthly Archives: April 2020

Teachers Unions and Online Education

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Oregon’s public schools are closed down due to the Wuhan Virus situation, as are most of our nation’s school systems.  As a result of that, parents started flocking their children to online charter schools so as to continue their education.  The Oregon Education Association, among others, object to that, though. They’d rather the kids sit around at home (because Oregon, like many States, has instituted a stay-home policy for all the State’s citizens and others living there) twiddling their thumbs, making pests of themselves, and otherwise being bored out of their minds rather than continue their schooling. So:

Under pressure from the unions, the Oregon Department of Education stopped allowing transfers on March 27. At Oregon Connections Academy, this means some 1,600 students who had sought to transfer won’t be able to….

Whatever happened to “It’s for the children?”

Oh, wait–these are teachers unions.

Where Were the FISA Court Judges?

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DoJ’s Inspector General is finding yet more, yet more rampant, miscreancies in and done by what used to be our nation’s—the world’s, even—premier law enforcement agency.

DOJ’s new assessment indicated that FISA problems were systemic at the bureau and extended beyond the Page probe. In four of the 29 cases the DOJ inspector general reviewed, the FBI did not have any so-called “Woods files” at all, referring to documentation demonstrating that it had independently corroborated key facts in its surveillance warrant applications. In three of those applications, the FBI couldn’t confirm that Woods documentation ever existed.
The other 25 applications contained an average of 20 assertions not properly supported with Woods materials; one application contained 65 unsupported claims. The review encompassed the work of eight field offices over the past five years in several cases.

The IG went on.

“As a result of our audit work to date and as described below, we do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods procedures in compliance with FBI policy,” the DOJ IG wrote in a memo today [31 Mar] to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

That’s damning enough, but the problem is much wider than just a failed FBI.  The judges sitting on this Star Chamber FISA court knew those materials needed to be present, yet they approved the warrants in all of those flawed, to the point of dishonesty, warrant applications. Every single one of them.

This is another demonstration that this secret court cannot be fixed; it must be eliminated.

Full stop.

Government Aid and Government Stakes

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The current version of the Federal assistance to American airlines contemplates the government taking stakes—in the form of warrants convertible to (voting) common stock—in return for sending money to the airlines to help tide them over the disruptions resulting from the current Wuhan Virus situation. There are a number of objections to such a condition, most of them valid. Flight attendant unions have their own objection. They’ve

urged federal officials not to make grants to airlines contingent on government stakes, saying they believe executives would refuse—costing jobs in an industry hard hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

I have a couple of thoughts on the flight attendants’ objection; I’ve already expressed my objections to the government taking stakes in private business.

One thought is that the jobs supposedly to be lost would be, primarily, union jobs, and that can only be good for the airlines’ bottom lines as labor costs come down, especially if replacement hires on the turn-around are not from unions, and that would be terrific for the traveling public.

The other thought is that it’s not a foregone conclusion that the airlines, or very many of them, actually need government assistance, for all that airline management would like to have such bailouts.  Recall the Panic of 2008, wherein three auto companies of the American auto industry, supposedly needed government bailouts. GM and Chrysler jumped on those bailouts with both feet. Ford, though, despite pressure to take the bailout, refused to take the money; it said it would stand on its own feet (it did take a credit line against a potential need, but it never did tap even that).  Ford is thriving today, even playing a leading role in producing badly needed medical equipment.

So it will be for competently managed airlines centered in the US.

What Are They Going to Do?

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Cut us off?

The chairman of Huawei Technologies Co warned the US to expect countermeasures from the Chinese government if it further restricts the technology giant’s access to suppliers….
Eric Xu, Huawei’s chairman, said he believes Beijing would respond with restrictions of its own on American companies operating in China if the US.

In addition to the draconian restrictions already inflicted on American companies—and other nations’ companies—operating in the People’s Republic of China. These restrictions include demands for government-controlled backdoors into companies’ operating software and transfer of companies’ technologies to domestic partner companies—which are required for most foreign companies in order to operate in the PRC.

With the PRC’s threat to cut us off from needed medicines, intermediate medical chemicals, and medical equipment, and the PRC’s recent attempt to restrict access to rare earth elements, it’s become clear that our manufacturers—and Europe’s, come to that—need to revamp their supply chains to vastly reduce their dependence on PRC intermediaries and suppliers, if not eliminate that dependency altogether.

Xu’s threat only emphasizes that need.

Death Panels or Triage?

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A New York City hospital has explicitly instructed its ER doctors to “withhold futile intubations” and that they have the sole discretion for that decision and the decision to use a ventilator on any particular patient.

What draws my attention to this order is that ER doctors have always had triage authority in their decisions regarding use of limited resources when potentially lethally injured or sick patients arrive in numbers that could overwhelm those resources.  New York State’s triage guidelines, in particular, were established in 2015.

What are this hospital’s administrators hinting at?