Extolling danger in Orange County

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MY LIFE is way busy these days. But Sunny the cat is at the vet, and I’ve got to wait around for a phone call. Time to read the news.

EXTOLLING DANGER

This morning, the clever scribblers at the OC Register report on a program at Los Alamitos High School that warns students about the dangers of drunk driving.

The name of the article?

"High school program extols dangers of drunk driving"

—Extols? That can’t be right. I checked my dictionary. It means to “praise enthusiastically.”

Thought so.

POP TO IT

According to the LA Times, Garden Grove (which has neither) is contemplating partnering with an Indian tribe and opening a casino. Turns out GG is in the habit of contemplating goofy revenue-enhancing schemes:

[T]he city…has pursued ambitious plans before, only be to disappointed. One developer proposed a replica of the London Bridge across a man-made river...and another suggested a cultural center dedicated to the late King Hussein of Jordan.

I know. Why don’t they build a garden? Or a grove?

I guess I’m no libertarian, ‘cause I can’t help but view casinos as addiction generators/enablers. I mean, except for décor, what’s the real difference between a casino and an opium den?

The casino plan concerns the Gabrielino “Indian” tribe. But there’ s a problem:

There are an estimated 2,000 Gabrielinos in Southern California, but the splintered tribe is mired in a leadership battle and has yet to achieve federal recognition, which could complicate or even sink its efforts to build a casino.

Sounds dicey.

But GG wants its magic revenue source, and they’re determined to find it, even if they have to open an opium den.

"We're never going to see a significant boost in revenues unless we get something with a lot of pop to it," said the City Manager.

EVEN BANDITS ARE GETTING GREEN

Evidently, according to the Times, Orange County banks are being menaced these days by the “Landscape Bandit”, who is described as “heavyset, favoring sun hats and glasses and smelling of dirt….”

SORT OF

The OC Register reports that, a week before his big retirement party, popular and inspirational Tustin High teacher, John Sorenson, died unexpectedly.

Said one former student, “"He was sort of like a mentor….”

EXCELLENT

Meanwhile, Pioneer Middle School, in Tustin, was evacuated, owing to a bomb threat.

How did the evacuation go?

"I would consider it an excellent evacuation," said Tustin police Sgt. Pat Welch.

DEAD POSSUM MAYOR

On Wednesday, we learned that the Mayor of Newport Beach owns a house in the city that’s pissing off the neighbors:

The yard is overrun with weeds, and the lanterns on the front porch are caked in rust. The paint is peeling, the plaster is exposed, and a dead opossum reportedly lingered for several weeks.

One neighbor calls the Mayor’s place "the little junk house."

HONORED AND MOTIVATED

A new president has been named for Cypress College:

Michael Kasler, the campus's executive vice president, was named Cypress's 10th president Tuesday night by the North Orange County Community College District board of trustees.

Kasler issued a statement:

"I feel both honored and motivated…,” he stated.

CHIQUITA?

The Reg offers a story about a property rights battle over a big plot of open space called Chiquita Ridge. Lots of slippage up there, evidently.

The devil causes Inside Higher Ed to publish false reports

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ONE THING about right-wing critics of academia: the facts just don’t matter to them.

According to this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, a new study has compared young people who do and young people who do not attend college with regard to loss of faith.

Here are the facts (evidently): decline in faith among young people is more common among those who don’t attend college than among those who do.

Jeez, what’s it all mean?

…The more you pursue a higher education, the more likely you are to abandon your faith — at least that’s what conventional wisdom holds.

“Actually we’ve just been wrong about this for quite a while,” said Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of a new study that suggests students who attend and graduate from college are more likely than others to hold on to their faith.

It’s not that colleges necessarily encourage faith, he said, but for all the talk about how intellectuals are out to destroy students’ relationships to their religions and God, the main obstacles to such relationships have to do with maturing and how young people spend their time. “Some kids were bound to lose [their faith] anyway and they do,” Regnerus said. But the evidence suggests that college isn’t responsible.

…The data were mined for trends on three factors of religious activity: attendance at religious services, relative importance of religion, and disaffiliation from religion. A substantial majority of young adults report a decline in attendance at religious services, while a minority report that religion has become less important and that they have completely dropped their religion. But the greatest drops come from those who are not in college. [My emphasis.]

So with all the talk about supposedly liberal, anti-religious professors, why do the young adults who don’t go to college suffer more of a religious loss?

Regnerus said that what the study suggests — and his personal experience confirms — is that while there are plenty of non-religious professors around, they aren’t trying to discourage any students from practicing their faith. “Of course there are some who are hostile to religion. But they don’t teach that. They teach their discipline,” Regnerus said. The attitude, he added, is: “Whatever I think about evangelicals, when I go to teach quantum physics, I teach quantum physics.”

…Behavioral factors, he said, are a better way than college status to predict whether young adults will become less religious. Those who don’t have sex before marriage are also those who don’t experience as much of a drop in religious connection. Those who have smoked pot experience more of a drop. Those who increase alcohol consumption during their young adulthood experience more of a drop in religious connection.

Those who blame college for declining religious activity by students don’t understand that it is these factors, among others, that are the influence, Regnerus said. “This is about this period of the life course where freedom and choice become paramount,” he said. “What diminishes religiosity is freedom and choice, not intellectual engagement.”

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs

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THE OTHER DAY Mona Lisa Quesadilla was struck by a sign she saw as she made her way through the world. There, in the fair city of Orange (some say the fairest city of all in the O.C.), the venerable Chapman Avenue meets a not-so-venerable street named: Trails End.

That's right, no apostrophe.

Trails End.

She believes that the lack of an apostrophe renders the sign a declaration rather than the typical locale observation often found in other signs, say, for example, Hill Top Drive or Santiago Canyon Road.

So, it is not Trail's End as in the end of the trail or even Trails' End as in the end of trails.

It is Trails End as in, the trails, all of them, are over, kaput, finis.

It's an announcement.

Mona Lisa finds herself agreeing with the sign, even as she shakes her head.

What can she say? Mona Lisa loves the O.C., the sense of doom she finds in even an innocent street sign, unsure of whether it marks the end of nature, the end of punctuation, the dearth of thoughtful, detail-oriented urban planners, or all of the above. Who's in charge of street names anyway? Where does she sign up for that job?

To close, a poem by Billy Collins who once remarked that the massive signs announcing new housing developments seemed to him to serve as epitaphs for the creatures and fauna who previously resided there.

The Golden Years

All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasant to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.

I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would just remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I'll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

The KKK took my judgment away

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FALSE ACCUSATIONS BY TRUSTEE:

The SOCCCD is the kind of place in which trustees go on TV to assert, falsely, that faculty work 36-hour weeks and that they each make $100K. It’s the kind of place in which a college president can falsely accuse faculty of “hate crimes.” (Trustees responded to that one by providing the fellow, now Chancellor, with a “security” stipend!)

Well, as this morning's Inside Higher Ed reports, things are getting similarly wacky at MiraCosta College, just down the road:

The president of the board of MiraCosta College, in California, has apologized for accusing faculty and staff leaders of vandalizing his home, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported. In an apology sent to all employees, Charles Adams, the board chair, said he didn’t believe that recent vandalism was really committed by faculty or staff leaders and said that “I sincerely regret” having made the accusation. The board and employees have been involved in a series of disputes and Adams went on to say that “I do believe that the climate created by the Academic Senate leadership has contributed to and cultivated a campus climate that nurtures malicious gossip and unfounded allegations and attacks.”

PALM TREES, SLUSH FUNDS

According to the Union-Tribune,

MiraCosta College board President Charles Adams has apologized to faculty and staff leaders for accusing them of vandalizing his home a week ago…Adams' wife, Lillian, found the letters “KKK” scrawled on an exterior wall at their Oceanside home June 1…During Tuesday's board meeting, Adams left the dais, stood behind the public lectern and pointed his finger at the presidents of both the Academic and Classified senates, saying they were responsible.

…The North County college has experienced continuous turmoil since the announcement a year ago that it was investigating illegal sales of palm trees for private profit, leading to the unwilling departures of three administrators.

In November, the full-time faculty voted no confidence in [College President Victoria Muñoz] Richart…In May, one of those administrators, Alleen Texeira, former head of the horticulture department, pleaded guilty to one count of grand theft involving a $306 overpayment to her then-fiance for the sale of campus palms.

The other two dismissed administrators, Eileen Kraskouskas and Julie Hatoff, have sued the college.

Richart received a death threat in April, and then came the vandalism to Adams' home.

Neither Tom Fuentes (the TV trustee) nor Chancellor Raghu P. Mathur ever apologized for their outrageous accusations. Trustee Adams, however, seems to have offered an equivocal apology:

“I am writing you to ask you for your forgiveness and to let you know that I sincerely regret what happened at yesterday's board meeting,” Adams said in his message to MiraCosta employees Wednesday.

“I sincerely apologize to Abdy Afzali and to Jonathan Cole (Academic Senate president) for making those accusations,” Adams wrote. “I do not believe that they are responsible for what happened to my family and me.”

But, he said, “I do believe that the climate created by the Academic Senate leadership has contributed to and cultivated a campus climate that nurtures malicious gossip and unfounded allegations and attacks.”

This sort of finger-pointing can get mighty rich. These days, Mathur is in the habit of accusing faculty (again wrongly) of circumventing process and going directly to trustees with their troubles. As a chemistry instructor at IVC, Mathur continually did exactly that (one such episode led to his formal censure by Irvine Valley College’s Instructional Council).

Mathur, too, has claimed to have received “hate mail”—numerous times, in fact. When, several years ago, during deposition, he was asked for copies of any of the alleged “hate” communications, he said that he could produce none of them.

PHILOSOPHER RICHARD RORTY DIES:

Inside Higher Ed reports that Richard Rorty has died:

Richard Rorty, one of the leading philosophers in the United States, best known for his studies of pragmatism, died Friday. A detailed biography of Rorty appears online in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a bibliography is on Rorty’s home page at Stanford University, where he was an emeritus professor….

If contemporary right-wing critics of academia were more honest, they’d attempt to understand Rorty’s kind of “relativism” instead of the usual straw man variety.

ILLINOIS FOLLOWS CALIFORNIA’S LEAD re STUDENT JOURNALISM:

Inside Higher Ed reports that

The Illinois House and Senate have passed legislation, now under review by the governor, to protect student journalists at public colleges from administrative censorship, the Chicago Tribune reported. The legislation — similar to a measure enacted in California — is designed to reverse the impact of a 2005 federal appeals court ruling involving the paper at Governors State University, in Illinois.

We reported on the California measure back in August (The good news...).

Some "fake" student journalism from years past:

Trust us

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ONE GREAT THING about Saddleback College is its proximity to the beach. ⎯To surf. Sand. Squawkin' birds.

And to a nuclear power plant.

Yes, there's San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station (SONG) just down the road. Inquiring minds wanna know: is the plant safe? Well, Saddlebackians, you'll want to check out this morning’s OC Register: Nuclear incidents 'more than minor':

On Dec. 11, operators in the control room of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station were bringing Reactor 3 up to full power after a months-long refueling outage…The goal: raising power to 18 percent by adding water to the nuclear core.

But rather than doing the precise calculations necessary to determine how much water to add, operators consulted a book, did some rudimentary math and added 500 gallons – twice what was necessary…When power jumped to 19 percent from 15 percent, operators alerted supervisors. Boric acid injected into the reactor halted the increase at about 20.3 percent of full power, according to Nuclear Regulatory Commission reports.

…This incident was among more than a dozen at San Onofre last year considered "more than minor" because it could have led to a significant event, challenged safety systems or affected workers' health. In the end, the incidents had very low safety significance, and no harm was done, the commission said.

Overall, San Onofre gets good grades from the commission. Seven years elapsed between its last two major enforcement actions. But some neighbors don't trust the commission. Last year, radiation 16 times higher than that allowed in drinking water was found beneath the decommissioned reactor known as Unit 1. The commission called it "troubling" but said it was within radiation protection limits.

…Southern California Edison, which runs San Onofre, declined to discuss the Dec. 11 incident in detail. In a statement, spokesman Ray Golden said: "We concur with the NRC that these issues were of very low safety significance, and never presented a risk to the community or to the operation of the facility. It should be understood that we review and monitor every step of our operation to ensure that we work error-free. This is an ongoing and never-ending process."

The safety debate about nuclear power is intensifying as a push to build nuclear power plants surfaces in the U.S….Most of the new plants will be in the South. Nothing is planned for California, because state law forbids nuclear development until a federal waste repository comes online.

…How safe is nuclear power? There have been no major accidents in the United States since a reactor at Three Mile Island had a partial core meltdown in 1979. Radioactive gases were released, but no deaths or injuries were reported….

How safe is San Onofre?…While violations serious enough to garner official dings are fewer and farther between than they were a decade ago, there are still many minor incidents – some reported by San Onofre itself. An Orange County Register review of commission reports shows San Onofre workers:

•Improperly labeled a container of radioactive material, which wound up in a chemistry-lab trash can.
•Allowed debris to collect in water-storage tank enclosures, which could block flow in an emergency.
•Failed to promptly identify trapped air in safety-injection suction lines, which could damage emergency core cooling-system pumps.

Dave Lochbaum, director of the Nuclear Safety Project for the Union of Concerned Scientists, has criticized the commission, testifying before Congress that it has let plants cut back on safety checks and operate with dangerously worn equipment….Lochbaum's group isn't anti-nuclear, but argues for stricter regulation. At the Register's request, Lochbaum reviewed San Onofre's recent safety records.

…Lochbaum is impressed by how hard San Onofre officials are trying…"About a year ago, I attended a public meeting between San Onofre and NRC," he wrote. "San Onofre had requested the meeting. They presented the results from a recent survey of the workforce on safety culture issues. … The survey results for San Onofre were really good – numbers that most sites would love to have. But San Onofre's presentation to the NRC was as if they got a failing grade. I sent them (a) letter commending them on having such high standards. It's not the first commendation letter we've sent, but it's in a very small group."

That's not much comfort to Lyn Harris Hicks of San Clemente, who has lived beside the reactors for about 30 years…She is deeply troubled that radioactive tritium was found last year in groundwater beneath a defunct San Onofre reactor more than a decade after it ceased operations. Public health was not in danger, the commission and Edison said...Harris Hicks is skeptical. "Tritium into the beach is the most important issue to us," she said. "This indicates it may have been seeping into the ground there all those years. We have our young surfers down there all the time. … That's the problem of nuclear radiation, of course. It permeates."

…Harris Hicks and the Coalition for Responsible and Ethical Environmental Decisions aren't convinced [that residents she be reassured by existing oversight]. She particularly objects to the secrecy surrounding physical security in the wake of 9/11.

On March 15, the commission released a letter saying San Onofre has two low-level security violations, but did not say what they are….[End]

Just for laughs, check out:

● National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says San Onofre "tsunami ready"

Officials from NOAA's National Weather Service have recognized California’s San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station as the nation’s first nuclear power plant to establish a tsunami and severe weather safety plan as part of the federal weather agency’s nationwide program of preparedness....

● Southern Cal Edison's advice to residents

Should any emergency occur at SONGS, San Onofre officials would immediately contact local, state and federal authorities. Those groups then make the decision to alert the public, if necessary. The public would then be notified through the siren system and by government agencies on the Emergency Alert System (EAS) via television and radio announcements. Upon hearing the sirens, residents should turn on a radio or television and wait for instructions. The EAS message might advise you to stay inside your home with doors and windows closed. Or, it might recommend that you evacuate, depending on the nature of the emergency....

● The state: What to do in the Event of a Radiological Emergency

THINGS GETTING WACKIER AT UCI:

Also from today's Reg: UCI deals with claims of anti-Semitism:

A young man in a turban, his face covered, marches around UC Irvine with signs saying "Death to Infidels. Death to Israel" during a week of campus demonstrations by Muslim students…Here's the catch: He's not Muslim. In fact, he's not even a student at UCI….Instead, he's one of many outsiders who have become embroiled in a campus war of words between a small number of Jewish and Muslim students….

See: UCI: a history

Fabulous cash prizes

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From this morning’s New York Times: A Plan to Pay for Top Scores on Some Tests Gains Ground:

Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard economist known for his study of racial inequality in schools, is back in New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests and their performance might improve. And he has captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Across the country, educators have been experimenting with cash incentives. A program in Chelsea, Mass., gave children $25 for perfect attendance. Some Dallas schools pay children $2 for each book they read.

…Until now, Professor Fryer’s idea of cash for performance has had no serious takers. Three years ago, he tried to implement a pilot program in New York City charter schools that would have given students cash in exchange for good test scores.

“They kicked us out,” Professor Fryer said of the schools that first considered the program. And some Department of Education officials were not enthusiastic, either, he said. “They laughed in my face.”

But Mr. Bloomberg has recently shown interest in using payments, raised from the private sector, as a way to change behavior and reduce poverty.

In September, he proposed giving cash to poor adults to encourage them to do everything from keeping their children in school to seeking preventive medical care. And so, he said yesterday at a news conference, he was receptive to Professor Fryer’s idea. “If we aren’t looking at everything,” he said, “shame on us.”

…Professor Fryer said that under his program, fourth graders and seventh graders who take the new round of mandatory standardized tests that the city is introducing in the fall would be rewarded with at least $5. They would get more money for high scores, with a cap of $25 for fourth graders and $50 for seventh graders. In addition, each participating school would receive $5,000.

…Professor Fryer and other educational scholars have argued that some children, especially those from impoverished backgrounds, lack the foresight and role models to be self-motivated.

“The fundamental problem with education and motivating kids to learn what they need to learn is that the payoffs are so distant,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization. “So it’s very hard to motivate students to do well. Good students get that motivation from somewhere — from peers, their parents, how they’re raised — but the kids who are unmotivated have a very hard time understanding that what they do today pays off decades from now.”….

The new homeopathic "study" aid

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Evidently, it's all the rage. Students say it works!
For when you really need to "get a A."

See Wiki

P.S.: I'm told that there's a parallel universe in which advertising is a tad more honest. There, the ad campaign goes like this: