Month: March 2011

E.D. Kain defends making teachers hard to fire. He argues that if "you take away pensions, job security, tenure, the ability to unionize, and basically all the other perks of teaching, what you’re left with is a very difficult job with no job security, mediocre benefits, and relatively low pay":

Charts such as this one are misleading for a number of reasons.

First, this chart only applies to tenured teachers. Bad teachers can be weeded out much quicker before gaining tenure. School officials need to use this time window appropriately.

Second, the point of tenure is to protect teachers from arbitrarily being fired. Teachers need protection from over-zealous bosses and ideological politicians. This is the same thinking behind seniority rules, which protect more expensive teachers (i.e. veterans) from being laid off due to budget cuts. Teaching is not a high-paying job compared to jobs in the private sector, and one of the benefits is some job security. Occasionally this means bad teachers take longer to fire. 

A reader writes:

I see the same manic temperament with Charlie Sheen that I did with my brother – a now-deceased addict who suffered from bipolar disorder. I tried to go along and joke about Sheen's interviews and his pronouncements – he really is articulate – but I just can't. He's sick. He's an addict. He badly needs treatment, not amoral media outlets using him to fill airspace.

Another writes:

I am a long-time reader of your blog and enjoy your sharp and insightful commentary.  However, as a psychiatrist specializing in substance abuse for the last ten years, I have to call bullshit on your post about Charlie Sheen. 

You wrote:  "People do drugs for a reason. That reason is often intense pleasure to which they become addicted."  What you're missing here is the distinction between recreational use, drug abuse, and drug dependence.  The reason people do drugs changes depending on what their relationship to the drug is.  A recreational user is attracted to the pleasure that a particular molecule gives them.  A cocaine dependent person – undoubtedly Sheen meets the criteria – has become tolerant of most of the euphoric effects of cocaine.  Hence the suitcase full of cocaine Sheen was recently described ingesting, a superhuman dose that would kill a person who hasn't built up physiologic tolerance.  Typically, cocaine dependent people are motivated to continue using not for pleasure, but just to feel normal.  They become unable to cope with mounting emotional, professional, and financial consequences of their use, and this in turn becomes a motivation to use more drugs to make the problem go away in the short term. 

Cocaine is a particularly ruthless drug and the minority of users who find themselves dependent are in a truly horrific and treatment-resistant place.  Your links go further and virtually make Sheen into some kind of counterculture hero.  I think he's a hollowed-out shell who should be at the top of everyone's celebrity dead pool.

I think that exaggerates the point of my post. Sheen is not a hero in any respect. But he has been able to put the perspective of the addict into the public square in ways that few PSAs do.

Frum agrees with Bartlett:

With a new Republican majority in the House, you’d think this would be a moment to advance a positive Republican economic alternative. But no. Today’s GOP is a party with a budget policy, not an economic policy. As Bruce Bartlett notes, it is not even a well-considered budget policy.

A high-speed trip from Shinosaka to Tokyo, to the tune of VanShe's "So High":

Shinkansen ver.2 from daihei shibata on Vimeo.

David Remnick's must-read on Israel's leftist newspaper reveals, among many other things, the heavy cross that it bears:

[Columnist Gideon] Levy makes reporting trips to the West Bank every week. He thinks of himself as forcing Israeli society to see. “The dehumanization of the Palestinians in the Israeli media allows the public to feel fine about it all,” he told me one evening in the newsroom. “With the assistance of the Israeli media, we’ve built a world of our own, in which all criticism of the Israeli government is anti-Semitism, in which ‘they are all against us, anyway’—which is not true. We are more spoiled than any state in the world. …

Since the talks between Arafat and Barak collapsed, a decade ago, mainstream public opinion in Israel has become a paradox: majority support for the idea of a two-state solution, but a generalized distrust of Palestinian intentions. Middle Israel feels that it left Lebanon, in 2000, and got rockets from Hezbollah; left Gaza, in 2005, and got rockets from Hamas. The peace camp, despite occasional demonstrations and displays of vitality, is depleted. And so where Haaretz fits into the Israeli future is a serious question.

Kigali, Rwanda, 10.45 am

He firmly rules out any debt limit shenanigans and he pledges to tackle entitlements in a forthcoming budget plan – but without many details. I'm surprised by how much I have liked the man since he took over. Even better news:

Mr. Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said he told President Barack Obama that he would take the political plunge alongside him if the president announced his own willingness to tackle changes to those programs. "I offered to the president we could lock arms and walk out and begin the conversation about the size of the problem," Mr. Boehner said, adding that Mr. Obama responded "positively."

Know hope.

After reading reports about the US readying military options against Libya, Paul Miller tells Obama to chill:

The administration looks to me like it is being driven by the CNN effect. Libya is in the headlines, dramatic events are afoot, so the administration believes it must do something, it must act, probably to demonstrate resolve, or exercise leadership. It isn't leadership to let the media drive your foreign policy. If the exact same thing were happening right now in Equatorial Guinea, no one would care and we would not be contemplating a no-fly zone.

My immediate thought was not Equatorial Guinea but the Congo. But I'm with Bob Gates on this and so relieved he remains SecDef.

(Hat tip: Compass)

That, believe it or not, is now being taught in the US Air Force Anti-Terrorism Training Course. Above is a slide used in the course. Among other things this tax-payer funded course teaches:

And CAIR is obviously a "Muslim Extremist Platform", not a special interest lobby: