Our high school at work

The powers over there are preparing, it is said, to fire the most successful tennis coach they’ve ever had, Connie Jones. Her offense? Here’s what a reader says, which jibes with what I’ve learned:

Yes, this is the story. A bagel was tossed from the bus and a Greenwich coaching legend has to go before a closed board of the BOE tomorrow to learn her fate. And let it be known that no one at GHS or the BOE has shown any backbone in support of Connie Jones. The real story will eventually come out which exposes Gus Lindine for the corrupt individual he acutally is.
And for those who don’t know Gus Lindine — he is all that is wrong with GHS athletics.

The coach’s mistake, speaking as a lawyer, was to leave the bus and try to defend her kids against the cops. Never argue with these thugs – ever. They have complete control and many of them are only too happy to abuse it.

But why is she going to be fired today? Coach of the year in 2009 and now unfit to continue this year, right before final tournaments? There’s something rotten here, and it’s not Connie Jones.

Alright, so Texas needs work too

Drivin' that train, high on cocaine

From Overlawyered.com: 10-year-old given week’s detention for carrying a Jolly Rancher candy. Really – just like politicians, there’s no hope for school administrators. Fire them all, and start again.

New record (asking) price in Greenwich

Fudrucker sent me a new listing for 35 Winding Lane: $332,000,000 for 2 acres and a house. Somehow, I think the same guy who, it was claimed, typed in billions instead of millions on last week’s P&G trade, must have been fired and come to Greenwich to input new listing data for this broker.

Bummer though – when they correct it, David Ogilvy will lose his place as Realtor with the largest price reduction in Greenwich real estate history.

Assessment’s about $2.5, if you care.

Maybe there’s no such thing

NYT: Kagan nomination leaves Lefties bereft.

But much like every other Democratic nominee since the 1960s, [Kagan] does not fit the profile sought by the left, which hungers for a full-throated counterweight to the court’s conservative leader, Justice Antonin Scalia.

To be an intellectual counterweight, you need to have clear, logical arguments. The Left doesn’t have them. Emotion, yes; logic. no.

My late Uncle Gerry, a Freudian psychiatrist, would have loved this answer

[Questioned on Supreme Court nominee  Kagan’s lesbianism]

Asked why the White House pushed back so aggressively when CBS News published a piece on its website (CBS appears to have pulled the piece) that said Kagan, if confirmed, would be the country’s “first openly gay justice,” Gibbs said it was not an issue to the president.

“We are going to defend the nominee that the president has chosen,” Gibbs said when asked if he thinks the rumors will be brought up during the confirmation process.

When asked what the White House was defending Kagan from, Gibbs said: “That’s just a broad answer.”

What we don’t appreciate here in the east

Courtesy of InstaPundit is this story from Big Journalism:

Last month alone, just in one patrol region, we had sixty-four pursuits.  That means people who were driving a vehicle, failed to yield, took off like a bat out of hell, running red lights, creating traffic wrecks, numerous people were killed in these wrecks over the last several months, and who are these people?  Not one of them was a U.S. citizen.

There’s an insurrection occurring in our Southwest and since our federal government won’t admit or address it, the states are taking care of it themselves. That’s not racism; it’s self defense.

Michael Metter – an unappreciated genius of the pump and dump?

I was thinking tonight of the injustice inflicted on WGCH’s Michael Metter, who’s out on $2 million bail for his SpongeTech pump and dump scheme: he created 2.5 billion shares, sold them to a gullible public with a concerted, if fraudulent PR campaign touting non-existent sales and rosy prospects and, for his troubles, was hauled off in handcuffs by the FBI last week. Shouldn’t he be working for the EU, or Goldman Sachs?

Think of it: the EU “creates” a trillion dollars of imaginary money and promises that they will float a bunch of worthless bonds by its members. There’s no real money here – they’re printing it, just like our own government, and now Goldman and their type are busy selling those bonds, CDOs, and whatever else they can dream up to idiot traders and pension funds  while simultaneously,  I’m certain, dumping them themselves by selling them short.

And when it all comes crashing down and the European taxpayer is stuck with the bill, Goldman will allocate new billions in bonuses and the EU rulers will stay behind closed doors in Brussels, giggling madly.

I don’t know if Metter’s bail allows him to travel to Luxemburg but at the least, he should present himself at GS’s NYC headquarters, ready to report for work.

UPDATE: similar thoughts on Britain’s fraud here.

Mullah Omar captured?

This guy says he’s been in Pakistani custody since March but only now is our government being informed of that. We keep “killing” these bastards only to see them pop up again a few months later, so color me skeptical, but it would be nice if we have the head of the Taliban. The rest of the body can stay behind.

There might be hope for Walter Noel after all

Monica Noel, being coy

“Fake” Raphael turns out to be authentic, worth $30 million. So I’m thinking, maybe those Madoff investments ….

This should help

O’Bummer’s new Labor Board changes rules to make it easier to unionize Jet Blue and other low cost carriers. Just what we need: higher costs which will, under Obamanomics, lead to higher employment. You don’t understand that, go down to D.C. and ask them.

Sometimes a massage shoe is just a massage shoe

Pakistani arrested for boarding plane with shoes equipped with electrical circuits , batteries.

Hey – anything is possible these days, but if you check out a photo of the shoes, they sure look like exactly what he says they are: massage shoes. Never heard of such a thing, but these aren’t exactly trying to hide their wiring. They even come complete with on-off switches.

So who’s got two hours?

Walking five miles a day lowers your risk from all sorts of bad things. Great – sounds like worthless knowledge, for most of us.

No no no, ObamaCare is supposed to be free!

NYT: Allowing young people to stay on their parent’s policies will increase health care costs. Well Pelosi did say that we had to pass ObamaCare to find out what was in it.

Come on, isn’t this a little strange?

The second Supreme Court justice in a row who’s a lesbian and we can’t even mention it? Yeah yeah yeah, what difference does it make and all that, but if it makes no difference, why can’t we discuss it?

Will shale gas save us?

This WSJ writer thinks so but alas, I think she underestimates the Green’s agenda. Sure it’s cheap, abundant and could destroy or at least weaken OPEC, Chavez and Putin, but the Greens don’t want cheap energy and they certainly don’t want anything that would threaten Chavez’s hegemony. This stuff is going nowhere, I predict.

Europe is still toast

Folks aren’t impressed by even a trillion dollars. That’s sort of scary.

NYT:

But analysts pointed out that the package did nothing to reduce overall debt — it just spread it onto more shoulders.

There will also be a risk that, by in effect shielding Greece, Portugal, Spain and other over-indebted countries from the harsh verdict of the open market, the measures will make it harder for political leaders to overcome public resistance to the deep budget cuts needed to get spending and borrowing under control. Strikes in Greece led to a riot last week that left three people dead.

In what could be a sign of continued jitters, the euro gave up much of its early gains on Monday and interbank lending rates remained elevated. Moody’s Investors Service also announced that it might cut Greece’s credit rating to junk within the next month, citing the country’s “dismal” economic prospects.

“Lending more money to already over-borrowed governments does not solve their problems,” Carl Weinberg, chief economist of High Frequency Economics in Valhalla, New York, said in a research note. “Had we any Greek bonds in our portfolio, we would not feel rescued this morning.”

That’s what my father taught me

The market crashed last week because there were more sellers than buyers – in fact, for awhile there, there were no buyers. The market goes up? More buyers than sellers. Down? Quite the other way around. Don’t  need a Harvard MBA to figure that one out.

Oh, come on

The “No sex offenders in Greenwich” ordinance is coming back before the RTM. It’s a bit better than it was, but the RTM should consider what a broad net the sex offender registration act casts these days. Statutory rape? It’s in there, for the kid’s life, for having a consensual relationship with a girl slightly younger than he. Date rape? Got that too, even 20 years after the event.

Child molesters seem to be incorrigible and should probably be monitored every moment of the day, but for most of these poor people, I say we give them a break.

GHS tennis coach suspended

I received the following from a former GHS student concerning our school’s tennis coach, Connie Jones (Coach of the year in 2009). Unfortunately, the supporting material referred to was not included, so I have no idea exactly what’s up, but when a young person takes the time to write me in the (mistaken) belief that I have some influence, the least I can do is publish her letter:

Hi Chris,

I’m currently a student at [XXX] University but am originally from Greenwich.  I love your blog and read it everyday to keep up with what’s going on at home.

I wanted to bring your attention to something at Greenwich High School, as I think it relates to a lot of the stuff you write about.

It relates to Connie Jones, who is the GHS Boys Varsity Tennis coach.  As you can see below, she was suspended from coaching for essentially protecting her players, and is meeting with Dr. Chris Winters, the GHS headmaster tomorrow, for a hearing about whether or not she will be permanently terminated.

I was fortunate enough to have her as a coach my senior year (class of 07).  She coached us to state and FCIAC championships and is a really great person.  The school’s handling of the situation has been really horrible on its own, but when you compare it to how GHS Lacrosse Coach Burke was treated it really illustrates some of the bigger problems with the system.  Burke was finally removed from coaching and teaching this year when he went to prison for getting his 4th DUI.

I have a feeling Burke must have been in a teacher’s union because he was a history teacher as well as a coach.  Usually, I’d imagine, a coach would be fired after one or two DUI’s, as captains are suspended from teams for the same crime, but Burke was somehow protected and stayed at the school for a while. Connie Jones, however, is a full-time tennis coach, who doesn’t teach at the school, and would therefore not be in a union and not receive the same kind of special treatment.  How what she did could be worse than 1 or 2 or 3 DUI’s is beyond me, especially considering her outstanding record while the GHS tennis coach.

I hope you found that slightly interesting.  Thanks for all your writing.

When Nobel Prize winners lie

I try to keep an open mind and turn, from time to time, to former Enron advisor Paul Krugman to see what he might have to say on a current subject. Today it’s  oil wells, and I couldn’t get past the first few paragraphs.

Yet there is a common thread running through Katrina and the gulf spill — namely, the collapse in government competence and effectiveness that took place during the Bush years.

The full story of the Deepwater Horizon blowout is still emerging. But it’s already obvious both that BP failed to take adequate precautions, and that federal regulators made no effort to ensure that such precautions were taken.

For years, the Minerals Management Service, the arm of the Interior Department that oversees drilling in the gulf, minimized the environmental risks of drilling. It failed to require a backup shutdown system that is standard in much of the rest of the world, even though its own staff declared such a system necessary. It exempted many offshore drillers from the requirement that they file plans to deal with major oil spills. And it specifically allowed BP to drill Deepwater Horizon without a detailed environmental analysis.

The man is speaking of acoustic well blow out preventers. I know little about them, but from listening to NPR (!) and reading other sources, I know, as Krugman surely does, that they are not “standard in most of the rest of the world”.

In fact, just two countries: Brazil and Norway require them, and they are of completely unproven value.

I’m actually giving Krugman the benefit of the doubt here, and conceding that he actually has knowledge; information that he’s distorting because of his continuing Bush derangement syndrome. It’s also possible that he’s as stupid and ignorant as he appears but either way, I won’t waste my time reading him.