Oh McCain, you old partisan war-monger, you…

Class–ic!!

CEOs make may too F’ing money for the sorry-ass job they do… nothing new here.

This isn’t an eye opener, it’s been everywhere in the news for the past few years.  But it’s a nice graph.

Something seems to have shifted in the early 80’s… 

Police Department too stupid to hire smart officers… and Judge says it’s okayYesterday

I spotted a story on Digg yesterday about a judge ruling that an applicant to the New London police force who had argued he was rejected because he scored to HIGH on an abridged IQ-test was not being discriminated against - because all applicants were subjected to the same standards.

“Judge Peter C. Dorsey of the United States District Court in New Haven agreed that the plaintiff, Robert Jordan, was denied an opportunity to interview for a police job because of his high test scores. But he said that that did not mean Mr. Jordan was a victim of discrimination” the paper reported.  

Following, “Judge Dorsey ruled that Mr. Jordan was not denied equal protection because the city of New London applied the same standard to everyone: anyone who scored too high was rejected.” 

Mr. Jordan apparently told the paper, ”I was eliminated on the basis of my intellectual makeup,” he said. ”It’s the same as discrimination on the basis of gender or religion or race.”

I remembered hearing about this case a few years ago and went back to find some of the original stories only to find this case appears to have been in the courts for a decade, with original reports of the case’s filing from 1997.  My favorite of what I found from that time was a reprinted AP story on the Car Talk site.

From that report, “Jordan says Assistant City Manager Keith Harrigan, who oversees hiring for the city, told him: “We don’t like to hire people that have too high an IQ to be cops in this city.”

…and followed, “Monaco and the city’s deputy police chief, William C. Gavitt, have said in the past that candidates who score too high could tire of police work and leave not long after undergoing costly academy training. The city spends an estimated $25,000 to train a police officer.”

Apparently Jordan scored a 33 on the IQ-test-lite, which is estimated to be equivalent to a 125 on a full test.  The department’s policy is to interview (and therefore only hire) applicants with scores ranging from 20-27.  The original AP story also reports:

“The average score nationally for police officers, as well as general office workers, bank tellers and salespeople, is 21 to 22.”

which is pretty sad if the range is only from 20-27!!!

On the surface, I find this completely outrageous, especially as society needs for more and more critical judgement from its police officers.

However, as far as the case goes, I think this Jordan fellow could have used a few extra IQ points.  His argument that discriminating on the basis of his higher IQ is akin to discriminating on the basis of race and gender is a bit faulty on logic tip, as there are no standards whatsoever for racial makeup or gender identity.  

The problem with his argument is that there is a lower bound (20 in the 20-27 range) that’s applied and which we’d probably all have a problem removing.  So to say that they shouldn’t discriminate on the basis of IQ is saying IQ is not a legitimate factor for consideration.  A more accurate comparison may have been age, where it’s obvious that there should be a lower bound that excludes minors while an upper bound that arbitrarily restricts age is capricious.  If you’re 60 but can still blaze through academy training then more power to you.  Another comparison might be physical fitness.  Obviously unfit individuals are a burden on other offices and may jeopardize the lives of their partners, therefore legitimizing physical fitness as a criteria for consideration.  But what would the opposite bound be… if you’re too fit, so fit in fact that you refuse to scarf donuts and greasy meals with your fellow officers, they might feel uncomfortable and put-off by your stand, which could lead to a hostile work environment, therefore, you can’t be too fit.

I think those comparisons move the department’s procedures more clearly into the ludicrous category.

The city’s apparent claim that hiring officers with high IQs would lead to increased attrition and therefore loss of money spent on training is a valid concern.  But it’s shortsighted to jump from there to the policy they’ve enacted.  Their reasoning goes something like this: High IQ ==> bored ==> quit = department loses money.  But are they saying that only officers with higher IQs get bored or is it just that they have more employment potential, so they have the option to quit more often.  If this is true, then maybe all officers are just as likely to get bored (based on IQ score) and it’s just about what other options they have that determine their attrition rate.  Okay, let’s assume that’s the case for a moment, then all these cops are bored.  What do the officers in the 21-22 IQ-score range do when they get bored? Hmm or this more applicable story

An bored officer without alternative employment as lucrative or stable as the police force is likely inclined to just stick it out, but that doesn’t mean there are no other repercussions.  They may end up being more likely to engage in inappropriate behavior simply as an alternative to boredom, even if it diminishes citizens of their rights.

I would have liked to have seen this guy’s lawsuit lead to an addressing of the underlined complaint here, that officers get bored, rather than the focusing solely on the the potential loss of money through attrition.

 

Let’s see what youtube finds for us… this list

Why WordPress SUCKS!!!

I really hate the usability of WordPress!  It’s like a corvette, it’s got a pretty face, all the right curves and stats and all but as soon as you drive it off the lot and spend some real time in it, you realize just how flawed a piece of shit it really is.  

So I just posted a few minutes ago, and I had two embedded links in the post.  I like to have them open in separate windows but the link pop-up was coming up blank, so I just switched to HTML mode and added the links manually.  But I forgot to add the  target=”_blank” commands and only realized after I posted.  Of course, as soon as I try to go back to edit, the HTML is stripped out and my links are gone.  So I get a choice, live with what I did, or go back and manually enter each link all over again.  It’s not too much to burdensome when there are only two links but I have some posts that have some serious HTML in them and it’s such a basic function of the service that is completely deficient… maybe I should just turn this into an anti-WordPress WordPress blog.

Our Racist Nation…

I was just reading this msnbc story about Obama camp volunteers and staffers meeting racist sentiment on the campaign trail.  It’s pretty depressing.  The only really redeeming thing is the reminder that through it all, the polls don’t lie (in this case) and there are plenty of people out there willing and eager to vote for him. The piece notes that…

“Obama has won five of 12 primaries in which black voters made up less than 10 percent of the electorate, and caucuses in states such as Idaho and Wyoming that are overwhelmingly white. But exit polls show he has struggled to attract white voters who didn’t attend college and earn less than $50,000 a year.”

Tonight he got trounced in West Virginia and I can’t help that it was more racially determined than any other measurement of difference between Obama and Clinton. Of course McCain only got 1% of the vote in the state back in February so maybe they’ve gotten so used to being inconsequential they just choked.

I return to that Obama statistic “…exit polls show he has struggled to attract white voters who didn’t attend college and earn less than $50,000 a year” though; It has me sitting here now thinking to myself… how about a little ‘viral’ campaign ad for Obama.

It might go something like this…
The Polling statistics say Obama has a hard time winning the votes of white voters who haven’t attended college and earn less than $50,000 a year. We all know politicians will do anything for votes. Think about this for a moment and you might realize that should he win this year he has a big incentive to get people into college and jobs that pay more than $50,000 to insure himself reelection. And the people who appeal to these voters over Obama… well they have incentive to keep people poor and away from opportunities to further their education.

Ahh, logic - what a flexible thing.

WTF!?!

I got a kick out of this - it’s been hanging out in my browser history for a while, waiting for me to post it.  I have a saved one of my own that’s less crude - but I’ll have to look for it.

It’s been a while I know…

Some recent stories recorded here for posterity…

• McCain Criticized for Slur: He says he’ll keep using term for ex-captors in Vietnam
• Intel chair to Bush on FISA: I will not back down to you
• Countdown Special Comment on FISA: President Bush Is A Liar And A Fascist 
• “Homegrown Terrorism” Bill ~ News and Opinion Round-Up
• Clinton Remained Silent As Wal-Mart Fought Unions
• After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton
• Halliburton/KBR, sexual assault is just part of the workplace experience for women
• Scalia: Enhanced interrogation is constitutional 
• House finds Bolten, White men hold superdelegate power balance 
• Democrats defy Bush on spy program and immunity 
• Superdelegates get campaign cash
• Net Neutrality’s not anti-property, it’s about our property
• BitTorrent Developers Introduce Comcast Busting Encryption 
• Domestic Spying Program Could Aid Terrorists, Experts Say
• Is the party over in China? Massive unemployment looms
• Great Firewall of China Faces Online Rebels

I HATE this fucking wordpress  bullshit… I’ve just spent 20 minutes trying to format simple spaces between between my links… and it scraps my formatting every damn time!  I HATE you, wordpress… I’m going to go try blogger!

The Celebrity Society and Obama…

upfront: This has nothing to with Obama’s credibility as a candidate or anything about him specifically really. It’s all about us.
Well, it’s slick… a little too slick. I couldn’t put my finger on it for about half of the video. The track was clever and appealing, and the pictures… the pictures, well they were of celebrities. Why am I supposed to respond to celebrity? Oh, yeah… I’m not. It’s the marketer’s device - taking advantage of weakness of our psyche. And then I realized why it rubbed me the wrong way, why it wasn’t as affective a device as it could have easily been. The track doesn’t match the images. Change is a great message but celebrity faces does nothing for me, and if it does something for you, then what do you want with the ideas behind the words? It should have been pictures of the change and the hope, of the past and the future, the old and the new, where we are headed and where we wish we were headed. Really… October Road guy?

The Clinton Machine… Paving over history on the road to victory!

After the New Hampshire primaries I related hearing on the radio a story from Bob Scheer about a person from Clinton’s campaign team saying that Hilary is a better candidate because Obama has relatively little political experience and using Bill Clinton’s first term as an example of what could happen if we elected a relative political novice.

Perfect timing…

nice,huh? and classy!

Browser Wars: Flock fires back… Strikes a blow at FireFox’s dominance

Honestly, Flock is really an impressive browser, aside from occasionally having a cpu process freak-out or hogging memory. I’m not the biggest fan of the theme colors either, but the feature ideas are solid, and the Mozilla base allows for the Firefox extensions I crave.

Sadly, I’m writing this review using Flock 0.9.0.2 since the 1.0.3 build crippled my cpu with a solid 100% load. That’s a problem. I assume it’ll be fixed since actually working is kind of the number one criteria for adoption.

Flock is aimed at the web 2.0 crowd, the folks with a blog or three, a web photo album and friends with photo albums, the RSS feed watching types - basically those with a web presence. In fact, not only am I using Flock while typing this blog, but I’m using their built in blog publishing tool. I didn’t have to open up WordPress or a text editor to blog away. I just clicked the little quill-pen shaped button to ‘create a blog post’ and a little window popped up. I had entered my WordPress account info already and so it’s simply a matter of getting it straight and then clicking publish (of course that doesn’t mean wordpress won’t totally ruin the formatting, requiring me to go in and fix it - but that’s not really Flock’s issue). It’s basically a built-in version of what was first the performancing (now ScribeFire) extension for Firefox. When I say it’s like performancing, I mean that ScribeFire is an imporvment over performancing but Flock hasn’t incorporated those improvements. For one, there are fewer editing buttons, such as ‘insert image’ and a host of other secondary features technorati tags.

MoveOn.org’s members - graph of support

Those bleeding heart progressives are all over the place!

Volatility

 

At predicting electoral politics…

I’m about as good as I am at predicting March Madness game outcomes.  And it takes about as much skill - in other words none.

As David Brooks put it - all the pundits were wrong!

  

The only thing I’m sure of is Mitt Romney’s Medal handouts after each primary are going to get old fast… Next up, “well, we didn’t get the gold, or the silver, or the bronze… I’m going home.” ha

  

Campaign politics: The media’s real life Stratego - Republican Party’s edition.rtfd

Last Thursday was Iowa’s caucus night. It was a media bonanza. On the Democratic side Barack Obama took 38%, Edwards 30%, and Clinton 29%, while for the Republicans Huckabee ran away with 34% over Romney’s 25%. Thompson and McCain each took 13%, Ron Paul 10%, and Giuliani at 4%.

Apparently 60% of republican caucus-goers identified themselves as evangelical. They overwhelmingly went for Huckabee, and all Romney’s cash could only muster 25%. It got Huckabee a solid upset victory and perhaps more importantly, Romney a significant defeat.

Romney picked up a preposterous chunk of Wyoming but hey, it’s probably the only state where Cheney could be on the ticket and probably win! Now how preposterous is that?

The Republican contest is as, if not more, interesting because rather than having too many favorites, there just aren’t any.

Campaign Politics: The Media’s real-life game of Stratego - Demoratic Party’s eddition

Last Thursday was Iowa’s caucus night. It was a media bonanza. On the Democratic side Barack Obama took 38%, Edwards 30%, and Clinton 29% with Bill Richardson in a 4th at something around 4%.

On the Radio yesterday, Bob Scheer mentioned two things about the results that all Americans can be happy with: That a black guy can win a caucus for president in an almost all white state and that money can’t always buy a wining result. He also related a story about hearing from a person from Clinton’s campaign team that Hilary is a better candidate because Obama has relatively little political experience and using Bill Clinton’s first term as an example of what could happen if we elected a relative political novice. Of that exchange, Bob said it’s moments like this that keep him coming back. If this comparison made the main-stream news, I wonder how long it would take for that guy to get canned. Right, they’re campaigning subliminally on the public’s fondness of Bill and the ‘relative’ tranquility and prosperity of his time in office and selling the notion that we can expect a repeat (because they know what they’re doing). So the guy turns around and says Obama is like the Clinton you elected as president 16 years ago. Smooth!

The least talked about but probably most significant statistic to take away from the Iowa Caucuses were the turnout numbers.  About 120,000 voters showed up to vote Republican while around 230,000 poured in to vote Democratic.  That’s a huge difference.  It’s hard to imagine a neck and neck national race on election day next fall.

FireFox 3 and the Mozilla Webdom!

I caught this article a few days ago on ‘5 things you’ll love about Firefox 3’ right after reading a few others about new stuff being built on the Mozilla platform Instantbird, Spicebird and the ‘elder’ of the group, Songbird.

So okay, first impression, what’s up with the bird names?