Israeli legalized organized crime strikes again:

 General strike set to cripple Israel on Wednesday

Histadrut chairman Ofer Eini called for social justice for the subcontracted workers at a conference on Monday of some 200 trade union members from across the country.

Eini demanded that some of the 350,000 to 400,000 subcontracted workers in various sectors no longer be outsourced. Eini is demanding that they be employed directly by their place of work.

So he’s threatening to basically shut down the economy in an attempt to intervene in private contracting—on behalf of people who are probably not even union members.

And yet, Haaretz:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been kept updated on negotiations and is reportedly considering intervening to end the crisis.

The crisis, however, is not what Netanyahu thinks it is.  The crisis is not the looming strike, it is the criminal organization that has a chokehold on the rest of Israel.

Disdain for Orthodox Judaism is a rather common attitude among people who have left the fold.  One thing that makes this attitude rather unpleasant is that is often accompanied by the delusion of expertise.  Leon Wiesletier, for example, frequently espouses his brand of orthodoxy as he criticizes what he thinks Orthodox Judaism is, and since he grew up in that world, clearly he must be an expert.

Setting aside the faux-scandal of gender segregation in Israel for another time, I’ll just quote Wieseltier from his rambling diatribe on the topic:  “[T]he Ministry of the Interior fell into the hands of the Muslim Brotherhood—excuse me, I mean Shas.”  Someone who feels the need to compare Shas to the Muslim Brotherhood clearly still has some unresolved issues.

Class action lawsuits have been filed against fourteen law schools so far, charging the schools with the use of deceptive employment figures.  More specifically, the claim is that schools fraudulently lured students to attend, with the prospect of high-paying jobs that were, in fact, never reasonably attainable by graduates of those schools.

Each lawsuit has been filed by multiple graduates as representative plaintiffs. The lawsuits allege that many schools falsely inflated graduate employment rates by, among other artifices, employing their own graduates in temporary jobs and counting graduates working in non-legal-related jobs and part-time and temporary jobs as “employed” even though such jobs either do not require a law degree or do not pay enough to service the massive debt taken on to finance the degree. The representative plaintiffs further allege that many schools reported “average” salaries based on a small sample of high earning graduates. As a result, the representative plaintiffs enrolled and remained enrolled at the school only to find themselves burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.

Law schools have routinely claim that entire graduating classes have median starting salaries of $145-160,000 within nine months of graduation.  But ever since the 2008 crash and the massive layoffs during the first months of 2009, BigLaw jobs have become less easily obtainable, to say the least.  NALP, for example, provides this useful chart, for the class of 2010:

So when hundreds of people pay exorbitantly high tuition with the expectation of landing six-figure jobs, only to learn they were deceived, the ensuing lawsuits are no surprise.  What is somewhat surprising is the targets of these suits.  Although nearly all U.S. law schools participated—and continue to participate—in this massive fraud, the organizers of this legal battle have chosen to focus on schools such as Hofstra, California Western, and Florida Coastal.  Setting aside any fraud on the part of the schools, these are not schools that anyone with half a brain would attend with any reasonable expectation of landing a BigLaw job.  On the other end of the spectrum, schools like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia probably are reporting accurate—and high—figures.

It is the schools closer to the middle, places like University of Illinois, Emory, and UCLA, that I would expect to be sued.  These are schools that report that their recent graduating classes have median salaries of $160,000, which is simply not true.  Yet these are also schools for which it is not absolutely ridiculous to believe those numbers. Instead, people are now claiming—with straight faces—that they attended TTTs with an expectation of making boat-loads of money upon graduation.

There are several possible explanations, but none of them are particularly interesting.  For now, at least the entertainment factor is rather high.

When it refers to this report, ranking Israel as the second-most educated country in the world.

Two comments.  First, Israel is ranked second on this list, which examined OECD members, but a closer look reveals that educated may not really mean educated.  Its GDP is nowhere near number two in the OECD, and the percentage of the population with postsecondary education is inconsistent at best, when looking at the past five years.  That figure stands at 45% today, it was 44% in 2007,but  it was actually higher in 2006—46% of the population.

Second, with respect to the study itself, note that it names the “most educated countries,” not the “most highly educated countries.”  In other words, the report measures the quantity of education (or educated people) in the countries studied—not the quality of education that so many Israelis receive.

Perhaps that also explains the apparent inconsistency between GDP and percentage of educated people in Israel.  Much of Israeli higher education is high-quality, but that is not true for the education of all “educated Israelis.”  If so many “educated” people are still unable to become productive members of society (for example, this person), maybe the education so many receive effects a drain on GDP, instead of the other way around.

When it’s actually “genocide.” Bernard Lewis:

I had an argument about this today with one of my sisters online after I caught her praising France for the new law that makes it a criminal offense to deny that what the Turks did to the Armenians was “genocide.”

She argued that the United Nations has defined genocide. It has, but their definition sucks:

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

So, “causing serious … mental harm to members” of a group, with intent to “destroy” that group “in part” is genocide? Really? Maybe it’s nasty behavior, maybe it’s some really unpleasant form of discrimination, but genocide? Seriously?

I proposed this clarification on how genocide can be determined: the party committing the act must (a) put together a serious plan to exterminate an entire people physically and (b) attempt to carry out that plan.

I further said that what happened to the Armenians was, in the modern terminology, ethnic cleansing.

More correctly, in the pre-modern terminology, what happened to them was jihad: as a dhimmi population they were afforded every indignity but allowed to keep their lives; when they became aware in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they didn’t have to accept this, they began rejecting it; the Turkish and Kurdish Muslims among them, who knew from birth that Christians must always be, and would always be, subjugated, could not tolerate this; hence, conflict and massacre.

Business Insider:

A young New Yorker we’ll call Minerva McGonagall* was tired of dipping into her savings to keep up with her Manhattan lifestyle.
…
Then she discovered Match.com– the perfect site for a broke 23-year-old.
…
McGonagall started eating out five nights a week using a rotation of different guys she met through the dating site. McGonagall kept things simple—no more than five dates with the same guy.

If you use dating sites to meet girls, you should assume that every girl you meet is currently sleeping with four other guys.

One of them called for making spreadsheets about each guy who took them out for their drinks and/or meals. It included names, photos and details from their Match.com accounts.

If you think anything you tell a girl online, or the way you present yourself to a girl online (pictures, name, anything else about your identity) is private or secret, then think again.

Disclaimer: I use online dating to meet girls. I’m pretty open about my identity online, too. They can see my facebook, chat about me with their friends and compare notes (sometimes this works against me, I assume, but I know for a fact that it sometimes works in my favor). But here are three things I will never do with a girl I met online:

1. Buy her alcohol before she’s slept with me.
2. Buy her a meal before she’s slept with me (except fast food).
3. Buy her anything expensive before she’s slept with me.

First date is always coffee (I don’t mind paying). Second date is always something as cheap as coffee, or even cheaper. If we haven’t had sex by the end of the third date, it’s not going to happen.

By the way, I have a friend in New York who does the same thing as the girl in the article above. She’s cute and in her mid-20s. She refers to her behavior as “going on the Jdate diet.” The principle of that diet is that she never buys her own food, and only eats what is bought for her by guys she meets on Jdate.

SFGate:

“My body had become a bumper sticker,” Tidwell said. “It bothered me that people could take one look at me and think they knew what I liked or didn’t like.”

Not really. Before, people could take one look at him and realize that he was a complete moron. Now it will take multiple looks.

Haaretz:

Noam Shalit, father of the ex-Israel Defense Forces soldier who spent five years in Hamas captivity in Gaza, announced on Monday that he intends to run for a place on the Israel Labor Party list for the next Knesset.

“Following years of a public struggle, during which I got to know Israeli society thoroughly – both its beautiful and ethical sides – I have decided to join public life,” he told reporters.

“This is out of a desire to serve the public, and to be in a place from which it is possible to influence the character of Israeli society…”

So Noam Shalit is a scumbag after all. Who would have guessed?

Yachimovich congratulated Shalit, saying, “The battle of Noam Shalit and his family to free Gilad started as a private battle, but turned into a battle that contains within it all the base values of Israeli society: Solidarity, Mutual support and Zionism.”

The struggle to barter for Gilad Shalit’s freedom reflected everything negative about Israeli society: the complete refusal to identify a problem correctly and treat it what it is; the total failure of the military, both in terms of intelligence and also operationally; the indulgence of weeping mommies and daddies and petulant unshaven 23-year-olds; the promotion of one individual’s safety and security at the expense of an entire nation’s safety and security; the commitment to a belief that anything can be negotiated, with any enemy, at any time.

Noam Shalit will make a great member of Knesset.

Haaretz:

Veteran Israeli journalist Yair Lapid announced Sunday he was leaving his longtime news anchor position at Channel 2 in order to compete in the next Israeli elections.
…
Polls show that a Lapid-led independent party would garner 15-20 Knesset seats, and could potentially form a coalition that would rival Netanyahu’s Likud.

Here’s what’s going to happen:

1. Lapid’s new party will present itself as “centrist,” but in actual fact its platform will resemble Meretz’s.
2. It will surge in the polls.
3. It will formulate its identity and personnel by recruiting high-profile members, including generals retiring from the military.
4. Support for it will plummet.
5. It will join Kadima, Labor or Likud with guaranteed positions for the core leadership.

Anybody want to bet that the above five things don’t happen in the order that I’ve stated?

When a police officer hides his name tag in Oakland (SFGate):

An Oakland police lieutenant has been demoted and an officer is facing a one-month suspension because the officer was videotaped at a recent Occupy Oakland protest with the name on his uniform covered by black tape, sources said Wednesday.

When a police officer hides his name tag in Israel (Arutz 7):

Ayalon was caught on film ordering the officers under his command to violate the law by removing their name tags prior to the forced evacuation of the Chavat Gilad (Gilad Farm) hilltop community in October of 2002. The footage also documents him telling them not to worry about charges being filed against them, as he would “dissolve the files.”
…
[Public Security Minister Avi] Dichter announced his intention to appoint Ayalon as deputy to Maj.-Gen. Dudi Cohen, his latest proposed replacement for outgoing police chief Moshe Karadi.

The Right complained. Nobody noticed. Haaretz:

The search committee for the next Fire Service commissioner has recommended that Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch appoint a former candidate for police commissioner, Major General Shahar Ayalon, who is soon to complete his term as commander of the Tel Aviv district police.