In a possible world, more hellish than our own

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A question re the Chief of Police search

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● We at DISSENT the BLOG get all sorts of information, some of it offered anonymously. Most of the anonymous stuff we simply ignore, since, often, we are in no position to verify it.

And some of it is not anonymous. We ignore lots of that, too.

Someone recently visited me and told me something disturbing that I cannot easily verify, but the person has been reliable in the past, and their claim, if correct, is important. So let me just report it to you as such. They are making a claim. Is it true? Dunno.

This person, person X, asserted that the search committee for the new IVC Chief of Police is packed with cronies of the old Chief of Police, Owen Kreza, who left us not long ago amid an investigation and a cloud of controversy. There had long been stories and charges circulating regarding Kreza’s alleged unprofessionalism, cronyism, and abuse of power. Most of us at IVC were happy to see Kreza go.

The worry here is that, if the hiring process yields a Kreza crony, at least some of the same old problems with our security/police department will persist.

Now, again, I have no reason to believe that X’s charge is accurate, other than the fact that X makes it. So those of you who have something relevant to offer, please weigh in on this. Is the committee overly friendly to Kreza? Is it liable to focus on a pool of candidates that will give us more of the same?

UPDATE: a member of the committee told an associate, who told me this afternoon, that the search committee is strictly on the up and up. In fact, said the member, the committee is proud to have among its members Irvine Police Chief David L. Maggard, Jr., a respected law enforcement figure. I do believe that the idea here is this: Maggard represents a high standard of police professionalism, no funny business.

FLY CATCHER? OK, I admit it, this isn't really fair. In truth, there have been one or two good administrative hires in the district in recent memory. But I found these old fly catchers in a drawer—my dad handed 'em to me a few years ago as though they were the greatest thing since sliced bread—and I couldn't resist whipping something up. Let's hope the big new searches/hires—the IVC VPI, comes to mind—will yield some good & competent people.

● Lots of people on campus (here at IVC) seem very happy about Wayne Ward's exit—that'll happen next week Friday. I'm surprised they haven't broken out the blue and white balloons.

● An article in this morning’s OC Register (Irvine expects growth spurt) discusses the debate concerning managing the growth of the city of Irvine:

The county's fourth-largest city will add at least 70,000 people by 2025, according to the latest city population estimates.

The city's growth is spurred by 6,781 acres that have yet to be developed into villages such as Portola Springs, Orchard Hills and Stonegate. Additionally, the city has two redevelopment areas–the old El Toro base and the industrial area near John Wayne Airport–where thousands of residences are being built.

And the population estimate–made by city planners using birth, death, development and other figures–could rise….

…The city's last and largest development decisions are now being made by the City Council. And council members have two different visions for Irvine in the year 2025.

Councilman Larry Agran once was touted as a "slow-growth" advocate–or as he now says, a promoter of "controlled or carefully managed growth." … Today Agran sees the city's future differently. He said two things have changed his vision: more market demand for housing and the closure of El Toro and defeat of efforts to build an airport there.

…The city can manage to add at least 70,000 people – in part by focusing on mass transit, he said. Creating a system of pedestrian and bicycle trails, bus routes, light rail and heavy rail, Agran said, will help residents depend less on vehicles.

Councilwoman Christina Shea disagrees. Shea supports mass transit, but said it should add to, not substitute for, regular traffic planning. The city is adding too many residences without properly planning for quality of life areas such as traffic and city services, she said. "I believe our development is leading the city on a downhill spiral," she said….

Waning Waynitude

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CAMPUS WAS ABUZZ this afternoon with the news that Wayne Ward, Irvine Valley College's unpopular Director of Facilities and Maintenance, has announced his departure later this month from the college. He did so earlier today at a staff meeting.

Evidently, Wayne has secured a new and similar position at UC Irvine. He begins there next month.

People seemed generally pleased about this development, though they also expressed amazement that UCI would choose to hire the fellow. Said one colleague, "I hate to say it, but the bigger the institution—"

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to. Everyone nodded.

There's talk of a Wayne Ward "Hit the Road Jack" party. It will feature a water-filled condom "toss off," a series of faux public humiliations, and a brief seminar on "free gasoline."


Many speculate that Wayne's exit is related to the controversies that marked his tenure as Director. Several grievances have been filed against him, and many who serve under him tell tales of persistent & defiant Wayne Wardian unprofessionalism & high-handedness, as when he refused to fix equipment that posed a hazard to employees or apparently retaliated against grieving employees. Further, students and employees have long complained about the very poor condition of restrooms and other facilities over which Wayne is responsible, and the pattern of repeated SNAFUs, as when the CEC temporaries were not ready for use at the start of Fall Semester, leaving many classes without rooms.


(We'd love to give credit where credit is due. We'll try to find out just why this has occurred.)

Let us know what you think about Wayne's exit and what will or should come next.

I, for one, will miss seeing Wayne's Camaro parked—well, wherever the hell Wayne wants to park it.

I should mention that, according to reliable sources, recently, the CSEA (classified union) dropped a grievance against Wayne. No word yet on whether that decision was related in any way to Wayne's decision to leave.

See also:

● Abject finger pointage

● Tales of SNAFUery

● ”It’s a condom,” he said

● Wayne’s retaliation?

● The “flesh-eating cart from hell,” and other tales

New CECs: not ready for prime time

Sunny horns in on production of Dissent, Tuesday morning.

“They should work like a Kalashnikov”

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I FOUND THIS ARTICLE (below) about a Russian gas-powered boot in this morning’s New York Times.

My guess: it's an April Fool's joke that's arrived two weeks early.

Some excerpts (see These Boots Were Made for 22 M.P.H.):

…Mr. [Viktor K.] Gordeyev invented a gasoline-powered boot that looks like pogo sticks that strap to your shins….[His] boots — which use tiny pistons — became classified as a Russian military secret until 1994.

…[T]he boots became a military secret, as generals envisioned soldiers running swiftly and effortlessly alongside armored vehicles.

The boots were declassified in 1994, and Mr. Gordeyev and his partners imagined growing rich by selling their invention to a lazy public. Instead, the company went out of business in 2006.

[Demo: emitting small puffs and eliciting big stares]

... Instead of fastening a seat belt, the … runner … strapped on shin belts…. Then he flicked an ignition switch.

Before running down a university corridor, he jumped in place a few times to warm up the engine. [The runner] then ran laps for about 10 minutes, going about 12 miles per hour, with the two-stroke boots emitting small puffs of exhaust.

…The tanks in the shoes hold a third of a cup of gasoline each and will take the runner three miles; that means the boots get about 70 miles per gallon.

[Pesky hazards, comrade:]

…“The worst situation is when the spark fires as the runner just lands, and the force of the blast is absorbed by his body,” [the runner] explains flatly.

The two powerful engines tend to throw a wearer off balance or cause knees to buckle.

Mr. Gordeyev … disagrees that the boots are dangerous and still has visions of their mass adoption. “We’ve been running in them for years and we haven’t had one trauma,” he said….

[A little history, a little fear, a little Smirnoff in your ear:]

First, [Gordeyev’s] institute tried to interest the Soviet Army.

“We ran in the corridor of the general staff building, in front of the generals” and the minister of defense, [one of the designers] said. “They liked it, and were even a little frightened.”

An order came down for the paratroop command to test the boots, and the design became classified. This gave the [Ufa State Aviation Technical] university access to [the Russian] space agency.

One result … was a calculation that the energy in calories used to move the two-pound boot at a run would exceed the energy input from the gasoline engine. That meant, it was more tiring to run with the motorized footwear than without it….


Only if the weight could be reduced to below 2 pounds per boot would the wearer have a net energy gain. So far they have failed at this.

After the shoes were declassified in 1994, when capitalism was beginning to sweep across Russia, the inventors decided to market the boot.

[Not yet safe, like AK-47, comrade:]

A former student, Anfis G. Saibakov, formed a company called Ekomotor to design a user-friendly version. He imagined people might want to commute in the boots, as they do on bicycles or rollerblades. None of this happened.

When Mr. Saibakov demonstrated the boots at Disney World in Florida in 1998, safety came up as a concern, he said, and the company lacked money to fine-tune the product.

“They don’t have characteristics that would allow an ordinary person to use them,” Mr. Saibakov said glumly, admitting that running in the shoes would always mean “taking certain risks.”

“They should work like a Kalashnikov,” he said….

Sunny Girl, on so fine a day, abjures all politics

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The Sunny Girl at about 1:00 p.m., Trabuco Canyon, CA.

No clouds, no monsters.

Just grass.

A mess is a mess, oh yes, oh yes

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1. OCC gone wild

Dang! All you ever hear about is that damned Orange Coast College. Among local colleges, it’s the admired/despised “popular kid” in the classroom. Students flock to that place as though it were a beach party held by that “Girls Gone Wild” jackass. (The above is actually a GGW poster.)


And no wonder! They’ve got yachts and private Canadian islands and wacky, beret-wearing student radicals! What have WE got here at sober old Irvine Valley College? The students are all Republicans. We used to have a laser beam & a clock tower. Plus orange groves. All of that got yanked out.

Naturally, I don't advocate turning IVC into another party school. There's one too many of those already. But I do think that IVC could do a better job marketing itself. But how do you compete with a party? One with its own yachts and islands and gifts from Dr. Laura?

Back to the party school. OCC really does have an island. Some guy who previously gave the college a yacht (yup, another yacht) turned around and gave the college an island to boot, worth a cool million.

Well, it’s seriously uncool to accept a gift like that and then to sell it for cash, but it looks like reality is forcing that option upon the OCC bacchanalians. According to this morning’s LA Times (O.C. college to sell its Canadian island), OCC

has decided to sell its craggy British Columbia island over the protests of students and faculty…. The Orange Coast College Foundation Board of Directors voted 15-1 … on Thursday to proceed with the sale of Rabbit Island, a 36-acre swath in the Gulf Islands, which dot the Strait of Georgia off of Vancouver. [See graphic.]

…The decision comes after a lengthy campus debate in which some faculty members argued that Rabbit Island affords the college a unique research opportunity. Students circulated petitions that said selling the island "for a quick cash boon would be a hasty and unwise use of a generous gift."

…The college, which has an enrollment of about 24,000, held classes on the island each summer for about 25 students, who combed it for plant samples and snapped photos of spectacular tides. They stayed in four cabins equipped with twin beds, sinks and mirrors; the island also has a solar generator, a windmill, several bathrooms and an outhouse carved with the requisite crescent moon.

…Recently hired consultants concluded that the island was too far away and its maintenance too expensive to make a research station feasible….

When I was a little kid, I lived in Vancouver, but all I remember is fog and cold (and fish & chips). I bet those OCC kids tried to party on Rabbit Isle but they found out fast about the weather. I can hear them now: "Who’d o’ thunk that there’d be islands that don’t offer Coronas, sunshine, and wild island babes? "Road trip!"


2. Stupider-than-usual Idiot spotted at South Coast Plaza

OK, I can’t resist this one. Wednesday night, some guy tried to rob a clerk at Macy’s (in South Coast Plaza)—sans weapon. Evidently, the would-be robber demanded money “several times.”

Well, “the clerk refused…”

The robber “ran away.”

(See Unarmed idiot tries to rob Macy's.)

3. Lunging


Apropos of nothing, I direct you to a recent humpback whale sighting off Dana Point. According to the Reg (Rare humpback whale seen off Dana Point),

A humpback whale, one of the most majestic creatures in nature, was sighted four miles off Dana Point Harbor last Saturday by nature lovers.... Melissa Panfili, an instructor on the cruise, estimated the whale at 50 feet in length. [The Ocean] institute says the whale was "engaging in 'lunge feeding,' a process by which the whale circles around a school of fish, blowing bubbles to round them up into a group. The whale then lunges into the school, gulping down hundreds of the small fish at a time."

Lunge feeding? I thought only my little brother did that.

4. A mess is a mess, oh yes, oh yes

Well, the 2nd part of that super-duper Stanford U study on California public education hit the fan yesterday. It focuses on money:

California needs to boost education spending at least 40 percent, or about $25 billion a year, to dramatically raise student achievement levels, according to the second part of an education research project released Thursday…. (See Study calls for more school money without performance guarantee.)

Dan Walters weighs in on the study’s release in this morning’s Sacramento Bee (It's official: Education is a mess):

The studies, about 1,700 pages of often-opaque academic prose, were publicly unveiled this week…. And they fundamentally confirm what those who watch the system already knew: It's a disaster and needs a top-to-bottom overhaul.

The schools spend more than $60 billion a year to educate about 6 million K-12 students of immensely diverse backgrounds, but may be underfinanced. However, the researchers concluded, merely spending more will not significantly improve outcomes, especially for children living in poverty, unless what project Director Susanna Loeb called "systemic and fundamental reform" is also adopted.

What reforms? The researchers focus on what's wrong with the system—such as the convoluted structure of "categorical aids" that distort financing and too much micromanagement from Sacramento—but are vague on what specifically should be done to make the system more responsive and effective.

…Will the research … really change the state's long-standing gridlock on education policy? The papers, as noted earlier, largely confirm what informed observers already knew—that the Capitol has habitually disregarded reality and logic on substantive issues. When it comes to schools, the competing political positions are well-entrenched, as the dynamics of the unveiling underscored.

Schwarzenegger reflected a common Republican position, stressing reform over new financing…. But Democratic legislative leaders and state schools Superintendent Jack O'Connell, echoing the education community's long-held position, insisted that more money must accompany structural change. "Both reform and resources are essential," said Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, who nonetheless refused to talk about raising taxes.

So now we have a trove of data and critical analysis about our school conundrum that could be a basis for serious policymaking. But overcoming ossified political positions would be immensely difficult, perhaps impossible, mirroring the even larger question of whether this very complex state is governable at all.

See also School study calls for cash, local control

Failure, fraud—plus somebody got a prize

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1. Public Ed in California fundamentally broken.

Today’s big education story is the release of a super-study (a collection of 22 studies) commissioned by the Governor and a bipartisan group of legislators a year ago. Turning to Stanford researchers, they asked:

Um, what’s wrong with the public school system?

Apparently, the answer is: lots. The system is fundamentally broken, evidently. See

● The San Francisco Chronicle: Deep flaws found in school system
● The LA Times: No quick, cheap fix for state's schools
● The Sacramento Bee: State education report gets rapid assessment

The study’s findings will be exploited by both parties. Republicans will now say “we told you so.” But meaningful reform that is guided by this study will cost huge money. Democrats will therefore claim that the study refutes the Republican slogan that “more money” won’t solve the problem. Well, as far as this study is concerned, fixing our public ed system will require INCREDIBLE SHITLOADS of money.

One alleged solution, of course, is the elimination of the public education bureaucracy altogether.

2. Compton Community College audit


☞You’ll recall that, owing to various egregious misdeeds by officials, Compton Community College lost its accreditation a few years ago. That forced the State Chancellor’s Office to swoop in and do whatever those people do, which ain’t much most of the time, I’ll tell you for sure.

Well, on the 10th, State Chancellor Mark Drummond issued a press release:

“Since the first day of the takeover of the Compton Community College District by the Office of the State Chancellor in 2004 a state intervention team has worked to fiscally stabilize the college and focused on keeping the doors open for students; while cleaning up the past practices of mismanagement, fraud and corruption. This audit report details just how bad things were, and what the team from the State Chancellor’s Office has faced in the past 2 1⁄2 years.

“The ‘clean-up’ process is nearing completion … While there are a few in the community that still insist that ‘nothing was wrong’ and the state takeover was misguided, this comprehensive independent audit by FCMAT should put most of those sentiments and suspicions to rest.

“The vast majority of faculty at Compton Community College was never the source of the problem, and they have worked very diligently with the recovery team to make a future for the college and the students it serves….

“This entire experience is a lesson about what happens when locally elected officials violate the public trust. The Office of the Chancellor has greatly improved monitoring capability to prevent things like this from occurring in the future, but there is no sure cure for corrupt public officials except for transparency and voter scrutiny.”

—OK, but just what happened?

Well, three days later (on the 10th), the Times reported:

In a scathing audit of Compton Community College released Monday, state investigators said they found numerous instances of potential financial fraud, phony student enrollments, missing computer equipment and even the campus auto shop being used for private gain.

The "extraordinary audit" ordered by the state Legislature backs up and expands previous probes that led to the college being taken over by the state in May 2004 and to the school's loss of academic accreditation last year. The campus became a satellite of El Camino College in Torrance last fall.

State auditors and the investigative firm Kessler International recommended that legal authorities consider possible prosecutions for irregularities found during the 2003-05 period examined in the study. The FBI and Los Angeles County district attorney's office are looking at the report, several officials said.

A former college trustee, Ignacio Pena, pleaded guilty in 2005 to siphoning more than $1 million in public funds via a dummy organization that enrolled people in sham college courses.

…[I]n the face of so much uncertainty and scandal over the last several years, the student body has declined by about half to an enrollment of about 3,000, officials said. …

Among its findings:

• Administrators and teachers enrolled nonexistent students or lied about enrollments to hike funds from the state. In some cases, multiple identification numbers were assigned to the same students and some students were listed as taking the same courses several times. Instructors were scheduled on paper to teach two or more classes slated for the same time periods, the audit found.

• Hundreds of thousands of dollars in classroom rent for nonexistent rooms was paid to off-campus firms, and additional money went to an instructor and his companies to help produce a campus newspaper that was not published, several sources told investigators.

• Large sums were paid without proper documentation to consultants and independent contractors. Among those, programs supposedly geared to recruit students and get them ready for college billed the school for trips to amusement parks and restaurants and bought clothes and shoes.

• "Extremely disorganized" payroll policies allowed one maintenance employee to miss three consecutive months of work and still get paid, and another worker to award herself a 25% raise without approval from bosses. Moonlighting was winked at, such as a campus security officer who appeared to work simultaneously as a police officer in another city.

• More than $571,000 worth of computers, iPods, televisions, cameras and video games were purchased but never showed up in inventories later.

• A collection of African art that was donated to the school wound up stored in potentially poor conditions off-campus and a few pieces were taken to an employee's house…. (See State audit details mismanagement at Compton Community College)

3. OCC Art History instructor receives Hayward Award

An instructor at Orange Coast College recently received the Hayward Award for Excellence in Education from the State Chancellor’s Office. An SCO press release informs us that

Art History Professor Irini Vallera-Rickerson has received numerous local and national awards for teaching excellence...Her local service includes advising for such student organizations as the Muslim Club and Amnesty International. Consistent with her workshops, lectures and presentations that enhance the educational, cultural and social experience of students, Professor Vallera-Rickerson created a successful campus-wide fund raising effort for victims of Hurricane Katrina. For the past sixteen years, she has worked with students and colleagues to raise tens of thousands of dollars, annually, to provide Christmas gifts for rehabilitation shelters. At the center of her professional life is the belief that “Everything is interrelated,” and her incessant effort to prepare students for active, constructive participation in a democratic society is reflective of that belief….

4. “On the air” is at the college

While we’re on the subject of OCC, did you know that Dr. Laura Schlessinger donated a $2.3 million yacht—named “On the Air”—to OCC’s School of Sailing and Seamanship? Happened a couple of weeks ago. See their press release.