Twin Peaks

I'm watching Twin Peaks for the fourth or fifth time.  I put the following review up on Netflix. Some of the commenters claim that Netflix is thinking of doing a sequel or remake. In January 2008 I suggested that HBO do one, but Netflix would be even better.

This is one of my favorite TV programs.  It combines imagination with satire, comedy with spirituality, sci fi and horror with social commentary.  The eerie music is  a metaphor for the unconscious: Maddy Ferguson's murder occurs in a  gap in Julee Cruise's song, for it is through art that inner forces, including terrible ones, are revealed. The program is about immanence, the truth within, and transcendence, the greater truth. False immanence, Killer Bob, takes possession of souls, and true immanence, both the  corruption beneath the town's surface and the good in the Bookhouse Boys, Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), and James Hurley (James Marshall) intersect.  Agent Cooper's (Kyle Maclachlan's) struggle, like that of any seeker, is to reveal immanence and seek transcendence.  Good as well as evil are satirized; as in some of WH Auden's poems ("As I Walked Out One Evening"), cliches expressed as satire transcend themselves as art.  Through art we achieve understanding. Lynch's cast, a hodgepodge of talented actors and amateurs, comprise a bohemian  Diane Arbus-like ensemble. (Is it a coincidence that Cooper continually records messages to "Diane"?) The cast is an expression of Lynch and Frost's artistry. It is tragic that ABC allowed the show to run for only 35 episodes, but yes, we are fortunate that ABC allowed it to run at all.  

Defund the IRS

Steve Forbes hits a home run in the current issue of Forbes: Because of the IRS targeting-of-conservatives scandal, which is reminiscent of the fascistic Europe that Obama and his morally diseased supporters idealize and hope to emulate, the IRS should be defunded until the scandals are resolved.

Forbes notes that the current Obama administration is wracked with scandal more significant than the Teapot Dome in the 1920s, which preceded Warren G. Harding's death, and Watergate.  For some reason the totalitarians in the Democratic Party claim that their Fuehrer did not know, a claim that they would have ridiculed in 1974 when Nixon was president.

Forbes does not go far enough, of course.  The IRS is a criminal organization that should be permanently closed, not just until the Obama scandal is investigated.  With a crooked, fascistic president in Washington, the claim that the federal government is a force for good is nonsense.

Professional Staff Congress: a Left-wing Tax Scam

She thinks she's Che Guevara

In Harris v. Quinn, decided last week, the Supreme Court suggested that coercing public sector employees who prefer not to join a union into paying an agency fee may violate the First Amendment.  Agency fees are charged to those who prefer not to join a union, and they usually equal the dues less the amount the union spends on unrelated political activity.  Other forms of union security arrangements are the open shop, the union shop, and the closed shop. The open shop gives employees the freedom to neither join nor pay dues. The union shop coerces employees into joining after they are hired. The closed shop coerces employees into joining before they are hired, and it coerces employers into hiring union members.

The rationale for the agency fee is that nonmember employees benefit from the union's collective bargaining, and were they not to pay an amount equal to the dues, they would be free riders.  In the 1977 case that has governed agency fee arrangements, Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, the Supreme Court held that agency fees are legal, but the union must be willing to refund the proportion of dues spent on political lobbying unrelated to bargaining activities.  The reason is that violently coercing nonmembers to support lobbying with which they don't agree violates their freedom of speech. 

But what if a union spends little time on collective bargaining and other workplace-related activities so that all dues either are for unrelated lobbying or are otherwise unrelated to improving working conditions?  That has to be the case with the CUNY faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC),  because it contributes nothing to my wages.  I earn less than I would in a nonunion environment.  Hence, the Abood claim that I would be a free rider were I to not join my union is nonsensical. 

In the recent Harris v. Quinn case, the court has raised the question as to whether agency fees can ever not involve violations of agency fee payers' First Amendment free speech rights.  The reasons are manifold:  It is difficult to extricate political from other activities; unions lie about how much they spend on politics; ultimately, all public sector union activity may be political.

In the case of Seidemann v. Bowen  (also here) decided in 2009, Brooklyn College geology professor David Seidemann sued to determine the actual amount of  dues that the PSC spends on political activity.  The union repeatedly lied about the amount; initially, they claimed less than one percent, yet the case was settled at a point at which Seidemann and his pro bono Jones Day attorney had determined that they spend 14%.  Seidemann believes that the true amount is closer to 20%, but the cost of further pursuing the case has been prohibitive. Part of the settlement was that the union paid $250,000 in legal fees to Jones Day. Few foundations can afford that kind of money for a venture with an ambiguous outcome.

As left-wing extremists led by President Barbara Bowen, an authoritarian, left-wing kook who thinks she's Che Guevara, the union leadership thinks little about using government-enforced violence to coerce dues money from faculty who do not agree with them.  They have repeatedly refused to represent faculty with whom they disagree, and they chiefly support the left-wing Working Families Party, a simple-minded band of economic illiterates who favor failed, reactionary, big-government solutions.  In choosing to openly affiliate itself with and pay the lion's share of campaign contributions to a third party, the PSC has ensured that conservative Democrats and Republicans will have little interest in supporting its cause.

The union serves as a conduit of tax-favored money from the taxpayers to the fringe left.  Public money is budgeted to CUNY and used for faculty salaries; as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization CUNY pays no taxes; faculty dues are collected on a tax-deductible basis; the union does not pay taxes, and as a 501(c)(5) tax-exempt organization, it donates the dues tax free to the Working Families Party, likely claiming that all of the issues it lobbies about are related to its purpose, which is what 501(c)(5) requires. That, of course, is nonsense.   

The June 19, 2014 minutes of the Delegates Assembly of the Professional Staff Congress states that the assembly resolved that the ROTC should not be institutionalized at CUNY. It spent much of its time discussing how situations in which it, and the American Federation of Teachers, to whom it contributes, should coordinate situations in which the two organizations make donations to different candidates.  It also passed a resolution favoring restitution of pensions to Detroit municipal employees.  It also developed a foreign policy.  Its resolution says this:

Resolved, the AFT concur with the AFL-CIO National Executive Committee, which declared in August 2011: 'The miliatarization of our foreign policy has proven to be a costly mistake. It is time to invest at home,' and that the AFT call for funds freed by reductions in military and national security spending to be reallocated to many urgent human needs; and

Resolved, that the AFT call for US foreign policy regarding international conflicts to be guided by strategies that prioritize the needs of working people everywhere and the use of negotiation and diplomatic means over military deployment, whether in Syria, Ukraine, Iran, Pakistan, or other 'hot-spots' as they may emerge...

In addition, it passed resolutions concerning the legacy of slavery, the Mayday$5K national movement for slavery, and Coca Cola's abuse of children and violation of human rights. Coca Cola's exploits overseas are indubitably within the purpose of a New York faculty union. Obama says so, for why should the PSC pay taxes if Tony Rezko and Timothy Geithner didn't?

In addition, about 5% of the minutes describe a collective bargaining update in which Bowen describes two contract settlements at the UFT and TWU.  The minutes do not explain why CUNY has not drawn up a contract with its faculty since 2007, nor do I sense from the minutes that they  care.

The question the Supreme Court should have raised and didn't is whether public sector unions serve as scams to avoid income taxes on contributions to left-wing Democrats, the Working Families Party, and other left-wing causes.  

Is Climate Science Data Falsified Junk?

A July 5 article in the UK Daily Mail (h/t Mike Dovich) says that UN climate data and climate predictions are falsified junk. The article starts by noting that there is more polar ice in the southern hemisphere than there was 35 years ago. The article also says that 40% of temperature gauging stations are down and that  "authorities" have been imputing temperatures using neighboring stations without revealing the gaps in their data. That may or may not be a serious problem depending on the representativeness of the working stations.  Ethical scientists would discuss the data gaps and the limitations, if any, on their estimation procedures. The article seems to imply that the gaps have not been openly discussed, although that is not clear. If they haven't been, then the scientists are not doing a good job. 

A bigger problem to which the article alludes is this:

It has also been discovered that the  US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is using estimates even when perfectly good raw data is available to it – and that it has adjusted historical records.

Why should it do this? Many have noted that the effect of all these changes is to produce a warmer present and a colder past, with the net result being  the impression of much faster warming.

 
 If the article is right, i.e., if climatologists are revising data in a biased way and replacing real data with estimates that flatter their hypothesis,then, well, I could just scream. In that case universities are even worse than I thought, and that's pretty bad.  I'm not surprised when the dummies at the United Nations make up whoppers about things like climate change, but if scientists are yanking our chain, just what purpose do universities serve?