I have
written many times about Priscilla Slade's ethical problems, but
this tops any revelation so far:
"Ousted TSU President Priscilla Slade racked up a $100,000 bar tab at Scott Gertner's Sky Bar during her tenure and stuck Texas Southern University with the bill, prosecutors said Wednesday. TSU routinely paid for $100 bottles of wine for Slade and drinks for her friends and staff, despite a prohibition at that time on state monies being spent on alcohol, Assistant District Attorney Donna Goode said."
Say good bye Priscilla.
Side note: The story confuses me when quoting two different dollar amounts Slade is accused of misspending:
"Slade is on trial on charges of misapplication of fiduciary property of more than $200,000, accused of spending school money on personal expenses.
...................
Slade is accused of spending more than $500,000 of the school's money on personal expenses, like home renovations, drapes and bedding."
Which is it, $200,000 or $500,000?
So another woman
kills her husband.:
"A man who authorities said was stabbed to death by his wife early Friday morning has been identified by the University of Houston as a UH physics professor."
I sat don't worry about it. Just claim abuse and unnatural sex requests and you too can get
sixty seven days in jail.
She can sit next to me anytime:
"A 23-year-old woman who boarded a Southwest Airlines plane in a short skirt for a flight to Arizona says she was led off the plane for wearing an outfit that was considered too skimpy."
Why are we so prudish?
I never heard of
her before the nude photos began circulating on the Internet:
"Brainy Gabriella of 'High School Musical' would no doubt blush at the idea that nude pictures of young actress Vanessa Hudgens were circulating on the Internet. The problem for the Walt Disney Co. is that Hudgens plays Gabriella. The 18-year-old star of Disney Channel's wildly successful 'High School Musical' franchise apologized on Friday. The photos show a coquettishly smiling Hudgens posing naked in a bedroom with a red curtain behind her."
You know what?
Who cares? She is an attractive young lady who let her boyfriend take a nude photo of her. She did not rob a convenience store or get caught driving under the influence. I cannot understand why our society is so afraid of sex and sexuality. We cannot show the human body in its natural form on TV, but can certainly show it being killed and mutilated by unnatural human evil. To me, that is ass backwards. We should be celebrating love and sex while demonizing violence. Instead, we celebrate violence as the natural state of humanity while denigrating sex and sexuality. So the message to the Disney Channel children is our bodies are something to be feared, that is unless being blown open by a bullet or sitting on a stainless steel autopsy slab. Then, it is OK.
Stupidity. Plain and simple.
According to
this standard,
she'll get released on time already served:
"A West Palm Beach woman was in jail on Friday on charges of dousing her boyfriend with boiling water as he slept. Police did not know the motive but said Billie Reynolds admitted pouring the scalding water on Gregory Laughlin earlier this week. Laughlin suffered second-degree burns on over 20 percent of his body and remained hospitalized on Friday. "
Gee, I wonder why the
bank rate in Venezuela ballooned?:
"Venezuela's interbank overnight rate soared to as high as 120 percent after the central bank said it would halt some of its lending operations to financial institutions. The rate closed at 30 percent, up from an average daily rate of 8.7 percent since Aug. 1, traders said. Banco Central de Venezuela suspended its repurchase agreements Wednesday, three days after President Hugo Chavez prodded policymakers to stop acting as an 'oxygen tank' for banks that needed cash."
Can you say "economic collapse"?
U.S. consumers go on buying binge:
"'When you look at August, there was a lot of doom and gloom,'said Chris Donnelly, partner in the retail practice at the consulting firm Accenture, referring to news headlines chronicling growing numbers of mortgage defaults and financial market turmoil. 'But consumers were out there spending. ... Back-to-school sales were good.'
Yes, gloom and doom in the media, just not reality. And keeping with the media narrative, roll out the "Yeah but":
Still, Donnelly warns, shoppers could pull back in the year's final months."
H/T
Instapundit:
For the first time in
10,000 years, farming is not the dominating industry:
"And thus passes a tremendous milestone in the history of our species. Farming, invented around 8000 BC, quickly dominated human activity and has so continued to for the following 10,000 years (give or take a few). And we even find that the tradition agriculture->industry->services transition doesn’t hold up globally. The industry segment simply isn’t big enough, so many workers skip to services. "
Now THAT is news.
Americans Are World's Most Productive Workers:
"They also get more done per hour than everyone but the Norwegians, according to a U.N. report released Monday, which said the United States "leads the world in labor productivity." The average U.S. worker produces $63,885 of wealth per year, more than their counterparts in all other countries, the International Labor Organization said in its report. Ireland comes in second at $55,986, followed by Luxembourg at $55,641, Belgium at $55,235 and France at $54,609.
The productivity figure is found by dividing the country's gross domestic product by the number of people employed. The U.N. report is based on 2006 figures for many countries, or the most recent available.
Only part of the U.S. productivity growth, which has outpaced that of many other developed economies, can be explained by the longer hours Americans are putting in, the ILO said.
The U.S., according to the report, also beats all 27 nations in the European Union, Japan and Switzerland in the amount of wealth created per hour of work — a second key measure of productivity.
Norway, which is not an EU member, generates the most output per working hour, $37.99, a figure inflated by the country's billions of dollars in oil exports and high prices for goods at home. The U.S. is second at $35.63, about a half dollar ahead of third-place France.
Seven years ago, French workers produced over a dollar more on average than their American counterparts. The country led the U.S. in hourly productivity from 1994 to 2003.
The U.S. employee put in an average 1,804 hours of work in 2006, the report said. That compared with 1,407.1 hours for the Norwegian worker and 1,564.4 for the French."
I guess I better watch out for
this.:
"Rose told police that she had placed the coffee on her desk and walked out of her office. When she returned after forgetting something, she saw Chiu holding a baster-like object over her coffee mug. The baster was believed to contain xylene, a substance found in paint thinner and airplane fuel."
I have a hard time thinking she would die from this. She would have likely smelled it and would have definitely tasted it. The LD50 (lethal dose for 50% of the test subjects) is 4300 mg / kg. So, for a 50 kg lady, it would take 215 kg ingested to kill her. That is a lot. Even if she chugged a coffee cup full, the likely effect would be her throwing up.
Regardless, the idiot tried so he will go to jail.
Allen R. Sanderson: Library of Economics and Liberty:
"The rich may have five or ten times the income I do, but if I can keep them from driving expensive gas-guzzling sports cars, taking long (and hot) showers, and vacationing on the French Riviera, all in the name of reducing one's carbon footprint... then our relative standards of living are distributed ex post much more equally than our market incomes."
Read it all for it is good.
Give Up Your SUV:
"It's a wonder we Americans haven't choked to death on all the hypocrisy we've been force-fed of late.
It's much more of an "us versus them" confrontation, "us" being any rich politico looking to protect his or her unfettered access to privilege and luxury, "them" being the suckers (you and me) being asked to sacrifice for the good of our noble caretakers
Aviation experts say that just one cross-country round trip on a GIV churns out between 83,000 to 90,000 pounds of carbon dioxide...the average earth-raping American, on a per-capita basis, produces just 50,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from all activities (including driving those shameful SUVs) in an entire year. "
As Glenn Reynolds
says: "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis."
We always hear about "miracles", but rarely
tragedies:
"A plane carrying five Jehovah's Witness ministers crashed in a remote area of eastern Tennessee, killing all aboard, officials said. The crash, which happened around 10:30 a.m. Saturday, wasn't discovered until more than eight hours later, when another pilot spotted the wreckage."
File
this under non-sustainable:
"The [Japanese] pension mess, fully disclosed in May, has landed on one of the world's fastest-aging societies: 21 percent of its 127 million inhabitants are 65 or older and some 25 million retirees are collecting pensions, rising to 35 million by 2040."
When we get nationalized health care, we will see more of
this:
"Patients enjoy same-day scheduling, routinely empty waiting rooms, appointments that linger as long as it takes to unhurriedly answer questions and access to doctors via phone and e-mail during non-office hours."
But of course, the socialists can't have that:
"The movement is nothing if not controversial. Advocates say it is a patient's right to purchase better health care and argue that the model represents a return to the way medicine was supposed to be practiced. Critics raise questions about a physician's ethical obligation to treat patients regardless of ability to pay and the further stratification of the American health-care system.
"Concierge care is like a country club for the rich," U.S. Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., said at a 2004 congressional hearing into the practice. "The danger is that if a large number of doctors choose to open up these types of practices, the health-care system will become even more inequitable than it is today."
From physicians organizations to health-policy researchers to liberal activists, they accuse concierge medicine of everything from elitism to patient coercion to an abandonment of physician obligations. The patients most hurt by the concierge-care model, they say, are those who could never afford it."
This will be interesting to watch.
Quality is the
:
"Toyota plans to sell 10.4 million vehicles globally in 2009, well above the auto industry's current 30-year-old record and another sign of the Japanese automaker's momentum toward displacing industry kingpin General Motors. ADVERTISEMENT But even as he outlined the ambitious plan, Toyota Motor Corp. President Katsuaki Watanabe said the company was going after quality -- not quantity. 'As we continue to elevate quality in our products, then I think quantity will follow as a result,' he told reporters at a Tokyo hotel."
Make a quality product people want at a competitive price, and they will come.
