CALIFORNIA UNION TO PARENTS: STOP VOLUNTEERING!

In Culver City, Calif., a local union wants to force unionization of — get this — parent volunteers at the local public schools. At several schools in the city, parents have banded together to form non-profit booster clubs to fundraise for and hire part-time teacher’s helpers, who also mostly come from the ranks of the parents themselves.

The local union — the Culver City Association of Classified Employees — is not OK with that kind of initiative. The union wants the parents to continue to fundraise, but to send the funds directly to the school district so the district can then hire union employees to fill the part-time positions. As the union’s scheme makes clear, the school district presently doesn’t have the money to hire anyone to fill the roles parents have voluntarily filled. The parent volunteers aren’t stealing existing jobs from union employees. . . .

If the union has its way, parents will have to raise even more funds to cover the additional costs of union dues, administrative overhead and higher union wages — but they’ll have no say over hiring, control, supervision or decision-making. What’s to incentivize the fundraising in that scenario? As likely as not, parents will just stop putting forth the effort to raise funds in the first place — and students will lose the benefit of the added help in the classroom.

Take your kids out of public school. Or better yet, leave California for some place without overweening public employee unions. Meanwhile, California should fire ’em all and privatize. But it won’t. Until it hits bottom, anyway. “It’s compassion and concern for all taxpayers that motivates efforts to limit the power of public employee unions.”

As Poul Anderson once wrote, “compassionate government” is a code-phrase meaning that there will be absolutely no compassion toward the taxpayer.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

My two kids go to Culver City schools. My daughter’s is a well-regarded language-immersion school where the teachers’ aides come in handy for teaching Spanish (and Japanese). It’s funny to watch tragically liberal Westside parents suddenly outraged by a public union’s actions.

By the way, Culver City schools are much better than L.A. Unified – but that’s like saying it’s “the garden spot of Ceti Alpha 6”.

Heh.

MORE: Another reader writes:

In the last two days you’ve had at least two posts in which you have suggested mass firings of public school teachers. I’m a public school teacher in Oregon, so your frustration with the public schools saddens me, but only because, alas, it is justified. To pick one example from many candidates, watching the buffoonery in Wisconsin for this past year has made me cringe, since I can appreciate the impact such behavior has on public opinion in general.

I am not a “member” of the NEA, which means my paycheck is pilfered to the tune of $70 or so a month for union dues (I live in a right to work state) but I have none of the benefits of membership, which would require a PAC contribution.
As much as I wince whenever I hear or read attacks on teachers, we bring it on ourselves. So, carry on. Some day the whole stinking structure will collapse and we can rebuild it better.

Public employee unions ruin everything they touch. FDR was right about them.

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TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT, a reader emails:

I’ve been kicking around an idea for the past couple years that fits in with your discussion about lifestyle conservatives and their appeal (or complete lack thereof) with voters.

Here’s the thesis. Everything comes down to the movie ‘Footloose’. For a large majority of people, ‘the’ political question is, “How would the sanctimonious preacher from the movie Footloose feel about this subject?” They answer the question, and then take the opposite position.

This mindset is absolutely ingrained in a lot of people my age (a couple years younger than gen-x). For every preachy moral conservative I’ve met in real life, I’ve seen twenty on TV. For each Baptist I know in real life, I’ve seen ten in movies. To me, they are all the preacher from Footloose.

Jeff Wimble

PS Please run for the Senate.

Not gonna happen, then or now. I think he was right, but the Senate thing was a non-starter.

And on the “Footloose” angle, my brother was telling me about how Tanzania tried to ban soul music and miniskirts back in the late ’60s. Didn’t work out. And here’s a bonus link to the Zambian “Zam-rock” band WITCH, which was influenced by James Brown. More here.

UPDATE: Reader Cindy McNew writes:

Let’s not forget, though, that the Footloose preacher wanted to ban stuff that he and his fellow travelers saw as being bad for the individual (dancing, specifically drunk dancing and then drunk driving, got his son killed). The new Footloose Preachers, the Greens, want to ban stuff that they see as bad for, at best, everybody, and at worst, the nonhuman omnipresent Environment god, and most of them will not even modify their own behavior in example if it involves reducing their comforts.

Consistency is for the little people. Ask Bob Zubrin.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Jacoline Loewen writes:

Your post on Witch, the Zambian band, was terrific. I was born in Zambia and grew up there until 18 and then moved to the border of Alaska. Mining was the industry I knew well.

James Brown performed in Zambia and appeared on Zambian TV and I remember him well. As a young girl, the way he threw around his microphone stand captured my inner rebel and I loved his music. James Brown and Bruce Lee were the two iconic heroes of pop culture for Zambians back then.

Creedence Clearwater was the big band too.

Malawi also banned minis and bell bottoms and females had to wear skirts to the knee or were jailed. It created a culture of fear and control. I was also in Zimbabwe where the Chinese taught Mugabe the art of fear and using it to control the people. It was quite extraordinary moving from that to a place where people did not know fear. I heard a podcast where a guest da driven along a road of bones and the hosts were joking that they wanted a road of bones in their town. No idea of the reality of that name.

I am fascinated with politics and the Conservatives in the US could take note of Stephen Harper and the Canadian Conservatives and how they took power in what is a socialist country. They stayed away from the social issues. Gay marriage was put into law and abortion is a sad reality. Harper made his entire team of right wing politicians shut up and not discuss those two topics. They took on environmentalists, the UN and immigration and made those their social issues. They are now a majority and Harper is the longest serving PM in history.

I agree with the comment on social issues and how Santorum seems a lovely family guy but is trying to make everyone the same as him. Sanctimonious is how he seems, just like those movie preachers.

At least we’re spared Kenny Loggins.

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INSTAVISION: I talk with Robert Zubrin about his new book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism. Bob’s written a number of influential books, but I think this one is really going to make a splash. I like the way he calls out the greens on their “eliminationist rhetoric.”

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FOREIGN POLICY: CHINESE COUP WATCHING.

Interesting note: Last night I was talking to a friend who was recently in China, who said that while Beijing looks fancy, the countryside is looking increasingly run-down. In particular, he noted villages where every available space was planted with corn. As he said, when you’re cramming three cornstalks in next to a telephone pole, that doesn’t suggest prosperity. The folks in the villages also looked kind of “hard-bit,” he said. When China turns over, it usually comes from the peasants. Not sure what that has to do with trouble at the top, except that if those folks get busy infighting it could either encourage the peasants to rise, or lead to one faction or another stirring them up for its own purposes. If that happens, it could get ugly.

HOW WILL PRESIDENT OBAMA EXPLAIN THIS TO SASHA AND MALIA? Biden Makes Dirty Lubrication Joke At White House.

UPDATE: Reader Corey Hall writes: “I read it as a drunk Irish joke, not a dirty joke. Maybe I’m missing something.” Nah, that’s probably it. And I suppose that’s how President Obama will explain it to Sasha and Malia.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: What it looks like when you “win” a war on the young. “The stakes in Italy are higher than many Italians seem to grasp. This isn’t just about Italy’s prosperity or its ability to stay in the euro. It is about survival. Italy’s birthrate is far below the natural rate of replacement; that is not unrelated to an economic system that makes it impossible for large numbers of young people to start households of their own. Unless Italy becomes a country where twenty somethings can routinely leave home and build promising careers so that they have both the economic means to marry and the security to embrace the responsibilities of parenthood, Italians will become a demographic curiosity in their own country — and sooner rather than later.”

LAWS ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: “The LA Times’ Subscriber Services breaks California laws on recording people without their consent by calling me — at my home! — and announcing that they’re recording me.”

UPDATE: Actual California lawyer Eugene Volokh emails:

Glenn: I think Amy’s analysis might well be mistaken, and the L.A. Times might well not be breaking California law. Two-party consent is required only for confidential communications, defined as “any communication carried on in circumstances as may reasonably indicate that any party to the communication desires it to be confined to the parties thereto, but excludes a communication made in a public gathering or in any legislative, judicial, executive or administrative proceeding open to the public, or in any other circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be overheard or recorded.”

The announcement of the recording suggests that this is indeed a “circumstance in which the parties to the communication may reasonably expect that the communication may be … recorded,” since the caller said it was being recorded. See also Flanagan v. Flanagan, 41 P.3d 575 (Cal. 2002) (endorsing the view that “a conversation is confidential if a party to that conversation has an objectively reasonable expectation that the conversation is not being overheard or recorded”). Perhaps I’m mistaken, but that’s what seems to me to be the rule.

I realize that you were just quoting Alkon’s statement, and not expressly endorsing it; but since she’s accusing the L.A. Times of violating the law, and the accusation appears to likely be incorrect, I thought it might be noting that the Times’ behavior might well be quite legal.

That makes sense, though I wonder if they’re already recording even before the announcement has played. And even if legal, it seems a bit heavyhanded and intrusive. Then again, I hate pretty much all robocalls so I may be prejudiced. I just got one tonight — I think, but am not sure, that it was about the Insta-daughter’s emergency room visit for which we’ve never gotten a bill — where it rattled off a lengthy toll-free number, an even lengthier reference number that I was to use, and then hung up without repeating before I could even find a pen.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “Just to let you know, I work for a major cell company and we have to occasionally make outbound calls (for technical reasons here but some departments to sales) and record calls. Largely, to insure that reps aren’t calling customers and either berating/harassing them or making offers that cannot possibly be honored by anybody, which does happen. The caller can refuse recording at which point we will disconnect. Its done, frequently, to insure that the service is satisfactory, not to annoy customers.”

A BOOM TIME for education startups.

SCIENCE: Should Science Pull the Trigger on Antiviral Drugs—That Can Blast the Common Cold? It’s not as open-and-shut as you might think.

Our bodies are rife not just with bacteria but with viruses too. Even when we’re perfectly healthy, we have trillions of viruses inside of us. Scientists are only beginning to survey this viral ecology, but some suspect that it may actually be essential to our health. Many animals depend on viruses. Aphids, for example, need a virus that makes a toxin that prevents wasps from laying eggs inside their bodies. Scientists have found that infecting mice with lymphotrophic viruses protects them from developing diabetes. Other viruses attack cancer cells.

We may have such beneficial viruses inside our own bodies as well, waiting to be discovered. These viruses may not even infect our own cells but could instead be inside the bacteria that colonize us. Some species might keep the populations of their microbial hosts in check, like predators thinning a herd. Some viruses merge with bacteria rather than killing them, providing their hosts with useful genes for feeding or fighting off competitors. All of these microbe-infecting viruses may ultimately help us stay healthy.

It’s conceivable that a broad-spectrum antiviral could devastate this complex, poorly understood biological jungle. As beneficial viruses disappeared, we might pay the price, developing diseases that the viruses used to keep at bay. Even Lingappa concedes that virus-killing could potentially go too far. “I don’t think we want to kill all viruses,” he says. “You only know about a virus when it does something bad. We’ve evolved with them. There’s probably some virus out there doing something good.”

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