This should at least help delay our country’s decline

Why does a hears horse snicker hauling a lawyer away?

Applications down, law schools cut size of incoming classes.

Law-school class sizes fluctuate from year to year and, in isolated cases, schools have reduced enrollment in the past to lower their student-to-teacher ratio or to reflect the jobs picture in their region.

But experts say that the planned reductions by at least 10 of the roughly 200 laws schools accredited in the U.S., suggest a new reality is sinking in: The legal profession may never return to its prerecession prosperity.

“This looks like it’s a big structural shift,” says William Henderson, an Indiana University law professor who studies the market for law jobs. “Law schools don’t think this is going to bounce back.”

In previous economic downturns, the number of law-school applicants increased, as students who would otherwise have looked for jobs found temporary refuge studying for an advanced degree. But the number of law-school applicants this year is 65,119, down 14% from a year earlier, according to the Law School Admission Council Inc., a nonprofit corporation that administers the Law School Admission Test.

Maybe the wait is over

But will I still be able to link to the Greenwich MLS?

Apple’s introducing a slew of new products tomorrow, including new improved Mac Air Books. I’ve been waiting to upgrade the EBT Command Center system shown here, but I’ve been waiting for this – the arrival, or even the promise of a new Air Book should drive the price of the current model down and for this techno-illiterate, an older model at a better price should work just fine.

Walt sends his best from Frisco, where he participated in Nude Bicycle Ride Day

At least I assume he’s the one who sent me this picture.

Roman Holiday

 

 

Our money’s over there, I think!

Breaking news from 1933: Italian bank declares ‘holiday” Some might find this alarming, but hey – la dolce vita, baby; have an espresso, light up a Nazionali, and wait for the Germans. Done that before, right?

 

Wake up and smell the coffee

Jewish support for Obama plummets. But 64% still support him, according to the latest Gallup poll. I must hang out with the wrong crowd because of all my Jewish friends I’d guess 95% voted for Obummer and say that they intend to again. Yet most of them also say they believe in Israel’s right to exist, a belief not shared by the current Commander in Chief. Cognitive dissonance or just the left tilt of our tri-state area? I dunno.

But it leads to some interesting discussions on my fishing trips and poker games.

From Montana to Coney Island, NEA spreads its poison, Vol. II

God DAMN America1

Coney Island principal Greta Hawkins forbids singing of “God Bless the USA” at kindergarten graduation ceremony because “we don’t want to offend other cultures”.  It wasn’t that long ago that we all participated in one culture, called “American”, but that was before teachers rejected the melting pot story, introduced hyphenated concepts of racial and national identity, preached moral relativism and inculcated their students with the deep hatred of America they had absorbed in their own training.

Obama says we need to hire more teachers.

Georgia’s loss will be Vermont’s gain

Welcome to  the south, boy;  hope  y’all brought your guns!

Want to save the planet, you zero-carbon-footprint tree hugger you? Move south!

…in the past 20 years, more and more Americans are moving away from the chilly Northeast and to the Sunbelt in the West and Southeast. And, judging from this graph, made by Stuart Staniford using EIA data, that can have a huge impact on energy use. Houses in those booming Sunbelt regions use less energy.

It shows that air conditioning in warm regions uses far less energy than heating in cold regions.

So if you want to help save the planet, move out of Vermont and get yourself to Alabama where people know how to live in harmony with Mother Gaia. Moving out of New England could be the purest form of environmental activism; your selfish, earth destroying choice of living in Massachusetts in killing us all. And as for Canada, Gaia’s message is clear: shut it down, now. The Germans for their part could help the planet by moving to Spain and Greece; this might also help with Europe’s financial woes.

The fix is in?

Land use specialist Mike Finkbeiner (the guy to call for all your questions regarding waterfront or dry land building) has a question for our town leaders concerning their double – secret – probation plan for soil remediation at the high school:

Surveyor’s only question was “where’s the plan?”  Will we need to go
to Hartford to learn there is /was no “phased remediation plan? “

If that’s the case, and AECOM never said there was such a plan in the
first place, didn’t the RTM have the right to know that before they
voted the funding in May?

Just asking.

Finkbeiner is complaining that the town is claiming that there is a “staged remediation plan” that’s in place for cleaning up the contaminated soil under the proposed Music Palace, but they won’t release it, and apparently Hartford doesn’t know anything about it. Why?

I can think of two possible reasons:

1. There is no such plan and our leaders therefore have no idea how much remediation will cost, notwithstanding their promise to the contrary made to the RTM; or

2. There is a plan, the town knows what the clean-up will cost and fears that if that cost is disclosed it will be the final stake through the heart of the Palace.

Neither one is a good way to run a railroad.

(But a third explanation might be: chief complainant in this matter is the perennial High School gadfly Bill Efros, who sues the town over everything and anything concerning the school, from stadium lighting to the color of graduation gowns. Efros lives way up on Old Church Road, 200′ higher than the school property and thus unlikely to be harmed by water (which runs down, not uphill).  That doesn’t mean the town shouldn’t respond to his questions or the questions of the consultant he’s hired, but it’s understandable.)

Publication: Greenwich Time; Date: Jun 10, 2012; Section: News; Page: A1
ONLY IN PRINT
Questions remain on high school auditorium project, surveyor says
By Lisa Chamoff
[snip]
Finkbeiner, who runs Land Water Solutions, a Greenwich firm that resolves land use issues, recently put in a Freedom of Information Act request to AECOM, the environmental consultant the town hired after contaminated soil
was discovered at the school last summer. At issue is how the building committee for the project, which is known as MISA and is expected to cost at least $37 million, is aiming to proceed with construction before polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, are removed from the rest of the property.

In order to prevent contaminated groundwater from infiltrating the MISA site during construction of the orchestra pit, which will be built 12 feet below the water table, the committee has proposed installing a cofferdam, a watertight
structure to enclose the area that sits under water.

Finkbeiner said the high school property sits on an old peat bog, and he doesn’t believe it would be possible to
install a watertight structure. “If you’re driving it into a peat bog, where do you get the seal?” Finkbeiner said during a recent interview.

In his FOI request, Finkbeiner asked why the site plan filed with the federal Environmental Protection Agency,which will decide whether the MISA project can be “bifurcated,” or proceed before toxins are removed from the rest ofthe high school property, doesn’t include the cofferdam. He also requested a site plan that demonstrates the feasibility of constructing MISA prior to remediation.
[snip]
Finkbeiner said he filed a complaint with the state Freedom of Information Commission after the town didn’t respond to his request.