Fornits

Fornits Home for Wayward Web Fora
An open discussion about the troubled parent industry

Figure it out....do you have something to say to me or not?  Why bother writing it up if you're gonna delete it before I read it?

Well look who has been mysterious, what TC/program were you with or where is your experience coming from. Time to pony up my boy, name, rank and serial #.

You too, BOY.....what about the girl and the van?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37218735/ns ... ss-careers

Parents go overboard to help college kid get job
Some apply for positions for adult child, stick nose in salary negotiations

By Eve Tahmincioglu
msnbc.com contributor
updated 9:40 a.m. ET, Mon., May 24, 2010

Last summer, Joe Glenn, who works for DuPont, helped his son Joe Jr. land an internship with the chemical company.

“It’s becoming a necessity to utilize parents to make contacts for kids, but the student has to close the deal,” Glenn said about his decision to help his son, now a junior at the University of Delaware.

“It’s a difficult employment situation right now,” he added, referring to the dim job prospects for college students and recent graduates. “I’m getting calls from people who have children in college or about to graduate asking the same thing of me: ‘Do you have an internship? Are there positions available?’ I try to match them up.”

With job prospects for new college graduates at historic lows, some parents are using their contacts, connections and job-hunting savvy to help their children get hired. But sometimes in their desire to help, parents can go too far.

It’s no surprise that parents want their children to land well after college. The average student loan debt for graduating college seniors in 2008 was $23,186, according to the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study.

And the national unemployment rate is still hovering near 10 percent. Among 18- to 24-year-olds, the rate is even higher — 14.6 percent for those ages 20 to 24 and 21.7 percent for 18- and 19-year-olds, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Employers said they were planning on hiring 5.3 percent more college graduates this spring than they did in 2009, but that’s less than half the projections hiring companies made just five years ago, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Parents can talk to their kids about career goals and also use their networks to assist when the job or internship search begins, said Leslie Stevenson, director of the University of Richmond’s Career Development Center.

Just don’t become your kids’ headhunter.

When parents go overboard
When parents go too far in helping their kids, Stevenson said, it doesn’t build confidence in the child or employers looking to hire them.

“It is not productive for parents to project their personal career goals on their children or tell them which fields they should pursue,” she said. “Additionally, employers frown upon parents taking the initiative to check on the status of job applications.”

Indeed, some parents are going overboard, said Steven Rothberg, president and founder of CollegeRecruiter.com.

“I recently received a call from the mother of a Ph.D. student who was applying to jobs on behalf of the daughter and thought there was nothing wrong with it,” he said. “The mother asked for suggestions for what jobs she should apply to on behalf of the daughter and I told her none.”

Rothberg said the mother was surprised at his reaction. “It had never occurred to her that her daughter should be in charge of her own career, especially as she was in her late 20s and looking for a professional position,” he added.

Parents are also popping up at job fairs with their children.

Tom Dezell, career adviser for the Maryland Professional Outplacement Assistance Center, a federally funded organization, often mans resume booths in the Baltimore area during job fairs and has seen parents bringing their grads up and speaking for them. “I say, ‘Are you going to be next to them when they face the employer?’ ”

Salary negotiation with candidate’s mom
Some parents also are sticking their noses into the salary negotiation process.

Late last year, Lisa Fedrizzi-Hutchins, a hiring manager for an environmental company in New York, made a job offer to an entry-level candidate and asked her to review it and call if she had any questions.

“The following day, I received a phone call from her mother because she felt her negotiation skills were far better than her daughter,” Fedrizzi-Hutchins recalled. “She had explained to me that the salary was far too low for her daughter to live comfortable in New York City and wanted to know what we needed to do to bring her salary up.”

The mom also asked for four weeks of vacation, above the standard two weeks' vacation for employees starting out.

Suddenly Fedrizzi-Hutchins found herself doing salary negotiations with the job candidate’s mother.

“The mother was not very happy with how our conversation ended, and sadly, her daughter did not accept the position with our company,” she said.

There’s nothing like the protective instincts of a parent. We want to make sure our kids get off to a good start and have all the opportunities for success that are available to them.

But parents need to learn to take a step back, said Susan Smith Kuczmarski, author of “The Sacred Flight of the Teenager: A Parent’s Guide to Stepping Back and Letting Go.”

“It’s important for the teen or young adult to find her own job,” she said. “If a parent stays out of it, kids learn the difficulty of finding a job, an important discovery.”

“Recent college grads, especially, may be less likely to heed their parents’ advice since they are adults and, at least on paper, are ready for the real world,” said Kristen Fischer, author of “Ramen Noodles, Rent and Resumes: An After-College Guide to Life.”

Another problem, she added, is that your help may be outdated.

“Resumes are written differently,” Fischer said. “Finding a job doesn't mean flipping open the newspaper or clicking on Monster.com anymore. Now, social media is involved, and there are rules for using that, too.”

And meddling too much in your kid’s job search may end up hurting your reputation — or even your own career.

If you start handing out your business contacts to your children, you want to make sure your offspring won’t embarrass you and that you’re matching them up with the appropriate people. It’s the same rule you probably already follow when giving your networking sources to your friends and colleagues.

Don’t let the love of your children cloud your judgment, said CollegeRecruiter.com’s Rothberg. “Make sure your kids have the skills or will be a good fit,” he said. “Then step out of it.”

That’s pretty much the approach of Brooke Allen, a manager for the trading desk at Maple Securities in Jersey City, N.J., and founder of the site NoShortageOfWork.com. He has been using his social networking contacts to help his son, who’s a senior at McGill University, land gigs and internships while he studies abroad.

“I am good at finding opportunities, but many younger people are not — yet,” Allen said.

At one point, Allen connected his son with a host of individuals, but his son didn’t follow up on any of the offers that resulted.

Allen wasn’t upset though. “I think it’s a kid thing,” he said. “I wasn’t good at that age either. He’s getting better at it.”

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/05/13 ... eet-goals/

AP IMPACT: After 40 years, $1 trillion, US War on Drugs has failed to meet any of its goals

Associated Press

MEXICO CITY



MEXICO CITY (AP) — After 40 years, the United States' war on drugs has cost $1 trillion and hundreds of thousands of lives, and for what? Drug use is rampant and violence even more brutal and widespread.

Even U.S. drug czar Gil Kerlikowske concedes the strategy hasn't worked.

"In the grand scheme, it has not been successful," Kerlikowske told The Associated Press. "Forty years later, the concern about drugs and drug problems is, if anything, magnified, intensified."

This week President Obama promised to "reduce drug use and the great damage it causes" with a new national policy that he said treats drug use more as a public health issue and focuses on prevention and treatment.

Nevertheless, his administration has increased spending on interdiction and law enforcement to record levels both in dollars and in percentage terms; this year, they account for $10 billion of his $15.5 billion drug-control budget.

Kerlikowske, who coordinates all federal anti-drug policies, says it will take time for the spending to match the rhetoric.

"Nothing happens overnight," he said. "We've never worked the drug problem holistically. We'll arrest the drug dealer, but we leave the addiction."

His predecessor, John P. Walters, takes issue with that.

Walters insists society would be far worse today if there had been no War on Drugs. Drug abuse peaked nationally in 1979 and, despite fluctuations, remains below those levels, he says. Judging the drug war is complicated: Records indicate marijuana and prescription drug abuse are climbing, while cocaine use is way down. Seizures are up, but so is availability.

"To say that all the things that have been done in the war on drugs haven't made any difference is ridiculous," Walters said. "It destroys everything we've done. It's saying all the people involved in law enforcment, treatment and prevention have been wasting their time. It's saying all these people's work is misguided."  (ummmmm, yeah!!)

___

In 1970, hippies were smoking pot and dropping acid. Soldiers were coming home from Vietnam hooked on heroin. Embattled President Richard M. Nixon seized on a new war he thought he could win.

"This nation faces a major crisis in terms of the increasing use of drugs, particularly among our young people," Nixon said as he signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act. The following year, he said: "Public enemy No. 1 in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive."

His first drug-fighting budget was $100 million. Now it's $15.1 billion, 31 times Nixon's amount even when adjusted for inflation.

Using Freedom of Information Act requests, archival records, federal budgets and dozens of interviews with leaders and analysts, the AP tracked where that money went, and found that the United States repeatedly increased budgets for programs that did little to stop the flow of drugs. In 40 years, taxpayers spent more than:

— $20 billion to fight the drug gangs in their home countries. In Colombia, for example, the United States spent more than $6 billion, while coca cultivation increased and trafficking moved to Mexico — and the violence along with it.

— $33 billion in marketing "Just Say No"-style messages to America's youth and other prevention programs. High school students report the same rates of illegal drug use as they did in 1970, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drug overdoses have "risen steadily" since the early 1970s to more than 20,000 last year.

— $49 billion for law enforcement along America's borders to cut off the flow of illegal drugs. This year, 25 million Americans will snort, swallow, inject and smoke illicit drugs, about 10 million more than in 1970, with the bulk of those drugs imported from Mexico.

— $121 billion to arrest more than 37 million nonviolent drug offenders, about 10 million of them for possession of marijuana. Studies show that jail time tends to increase drug abuse.

— $450 billion to lock those people up in federal prisons alone. Last year, half of all federal prisoners in the U.S. were serving sentences for drug offenses.

At the same time, drug abuse is costing the nation in other ways. The Justice Department estimates the consequences of drug abuse — "an overburdened justice system, a strained health care system, lost productivity, and environmental destruction" — cost the United States $215 billion a year.

Harvard University economist Jeffrey Miron says the only sure thing taxpayers get for more spending on police and soldiers is more homicides.

"Current policy is not having an effect of reducing drug use," Miron said, "but it's costing the public a fortune."

___

From the beginning, lawmakers debated fiercely whether law enforcement — no matter how well funded and well trained — could ever defeat the drug problem.

Then-Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel, who had his doubts, has since watched his worst fears come to pass.

"Look what happened. It's an ongoing tragedy that has cost us a trillion dollars. It has loaded our jails and it has destabilized countries like Mexico and Colombia," he said.

In 1970, proponents said beefed-up law enforcement could effectively seal the southern U.S. border and stop drugs from coming in. Since then, the U.S. used patrols, checkpoints, sniffer dogs, cameras, motion detectors, heat sensors, drone aircraft — and even put up more than 1,000 miles of steel beam, concrete walls and heavy mesh stretching from California to Texas.

None of that has stopped the drugs. The Office of National Drug Control Policy says about 330 tons of cocaine, 20 tons of heroin and 110 tons of methamphetamine are sold in the United States every year — almost all of it brought in across the borders. Even more marijuana is sold, but it's hard to know how much of that is grown domestically, including vast fields run by Mexican drug cartels in U.S. national parks.

The dealers who are caught have overwhelmed justice systems in the United States and elsewhere. U.S. prosecutors declined to file charges in 7,482 drug cases last year, most because they simply didn't have the time. That's about one out of every four drug cases.

The United States has in recent years rounded up thousands of suspected associates of Mexican drug gangs, then turned some of the cases over to local prosecutors who can't make the charges stick for lack of evidence. The suspects are then sometimes released, deported or acquitted. The U.S. Justice Department doesn't even keep track of what happens to all of them.

In Mexico, traffickers exploit a broken justice system. Investigators often fail to collect convincing evidence — and are sometimes assassinated when they do. Confessions are beaten out of suspects by frustrated, underpaid police. Judges who no longer turn a blind eye to such abuse release the suspects in exasperation.

In prison, in the U.S. or Mexico, traffickers continue to operate, ordering assassinations and arranging distribution of their product even from solitary confinement in Texas and California. In Mexico, prisoners can sometimes even buy their way out.

The violence spans Mexico. In Ciudad Juarez, the epicenter of drug violence in Mexico, 2,600 people were killed last year in cartel-related violence, making the city of 1 million across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, one of the world's deadliest. Not a single person was prosecuted for homicide related to organized crime.

And then there's the money.

The $320 billion annual global drug industry now accounts for 1 percent of all commerce on the planet.

A full 10 percent of Mexico's economy is built on drug proceeds — $25 billion smuggled in from the United States every year, of which 25 cents of each $100 smuggled is seized at the border. Thus there's no incentive for the kind of financial reform that could tame the cartels.

"For every drug dealer you put in jail or kill, there's a line up to replace him because the money is just so good," says Walter McCay, who heads the nonprofit Center for Professional Police Certification in Mexico City.

McCay is one of the 13,000 members of Medford, Mass.-based Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group of cops, judges, prosecutors, prison wardens and others who want to legalize and regulate all drugs.

A decade ago, no politician who wanted to keep his job would breathe a word about legalization, but a consensus is growing across the country that at least marijuana will someday be regulated and sold like tobacco and alcohol.

California voters decide in November whether to legalize marijuana, and South Dakota will vote this fall on whether to allow medical uses of marijuana, already permitted in California and 13 other states. The Obama administration says it won't target marijuana dispensaries if they comply with state laws.

___

Mexican President Felipe Calderon says if America wants to fix the drug problem, it needs to do something about Americans' unquenching thirst for illegal drugs.

Kerlikowske agrees, and Obama has committed to doing just that.

And yet both countries continue to spend the bulk of their drug budgets on law enforcement rather than treatment and prevention.

"President Obama's newly released drug war budget is essentially the same as Bush's, with roughly twice as much money going to the criminal justice system as to treatment and prevention," said Bill Piper, director of national affairs for the nonprofit Drug Policy Alliance. "This despite Obama's statements on the campaign trail that drug use should be treated as a health issue, not a criminal justice issue."

Obama is requesting a record $15.5 billion for the drug war for 2011, about two thirds of it for law enforcement at the front lines of the battle: police, military and border patrol agents struggling to seize drugs and arrest traffickers and users.

About $5.6 billion would be spent on prevention and treatment.

"For the first time ever, the nation has before it an administration that views the drug issue first and foremost through the lens of the public health mandate," said economist and drug policy expert John Carnevale, who served three administrations and four drug czars. "Yet ... it appears that this historic policy stride has some problems with its supporting budget."

Carnevale said the administration continues to substantially over-allocate funds to areas that research shows are least effective — interdiction and source-country programs — while under-allocating funds for treatment and prevention.

Kerlikowske, who wishes people would stop calling it a "war" on drugs, frequently talks about one of the most valuable tools they've found, in which doctors screen for drug abuse during routine medical examinations. That program would get a mere $7.2 million under Obama's budget.

"People will say that's not enough. They'll say the drug budget hasn't shifted as much as it should have, and granted I don't disagree with that," Kerlikowske said. "We would like to do more in that direction."

Fifteen years ago, when the government began telling doctors to ask their patients about their drug use during routine medical exams, it described the program as one of the most proven ways to intervene early with would-be addicts.

"Nothing happens overnight," Kerlikowske said.

___

Until 100 years ago, drugs were simply a commodity. Then Western cultural shifts made them immoral and deviant, according to London School of Economics professor Fernanda Mena.

Religious movements led the crusades against drugs: In 1904, an Episcopal bishop returning from a mission in the Far East argued for banning opium after observing "the natives' moral degeneration." In 1914, The New York Times reported that cocaine caused blacks to commit "violent crimes," and that it made them resistant to police bullets. In the decades that followed, Mena said, drugs became synonymous with evil.

Nixon drew on those emotions when he pressed for his War on Drugs.

"Narcotics addiction is a problem which afflicts both the body and the soul of America," he said in a special 1971 message to Congress. "It comes quietly into homes and destroys children, it moves into neighborhoods and breaks the fiber of community which makes neighbors. We must try to better understand the confusion and disillusion and despair that bring people, particularly young people, to the use of narcotics and dangerous drugs."

Just a few years later, a young Barack Obama was one of those young users, a teenager smoking pot and trying "a little blow when you could afford it," as he wrote in "Dreams From My Father." When asked during his campaign if he had inhaled the pot, he replied: "That was the point."

So why persist with costly programs that don't work? Because it makes them feel like they're doing something useful and it's good PR for their careers.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, sitting down with the AP at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, paused for a moment at the question.

"Look," she says, starting slowly. "This is something that is worth fighting for because drug addiction is about fighting for somebody's life, a young child's life, a teenager's life, their ability to be a successful and productive adult.

"If you think about it in those terms, that they are fighting for lives — and in Mexico they are literally fighting for lives as well from the violence standpoint — you realize the stakes are too high to let go."  It's not working!!  So, all you're doing is justifying your goddamned budget and making your base feel all warm and fuzzy, even though it's proven to be totally unsuccessful.

Poor little guy.  


http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local-beat ... 71929.html

 Suspicious Package: TSA Worker Jailed After Junk Joke
MIA worker assaults colleague who made crack at genitalia after walk through machine
By WILLARD SHEPARD and BRIAN HAMACHER

Perhaps the new airport body scanners are a bit too revealing.

A TSA worker in Miami was arrested for aggravated battery after police say he attacked a colleague who'd made fun of his small genitalia after he walked through one of the new high-tech security scanners during a recent training session.

Rolando Negrin, 44, was busted for assault after things got ugly at Miami International Airport between Negrin and some of his fellow Transportation Security Administration workers on Tuesday.

Sources say Negrin stepped into the machine during the training session and became embarrassed and angry when a supervisor started cracking jokes about his manhood, made visible by the new machine.

According to the police report, Negron confronted one of his co-workers in an employee parking lot, where he hit him with a police baton on the arm and back.

"[Negron] then told victim to kneel down and say 'your sorry,'" the report reads. "Victim stated he was in fear and complied with [Negron]."

Negron was arrested the next day when he arrived for work. He told police he had been made fun of by coworkers on a daily basis.

"[Negron] stated he could not take the jokes anymore and lost his mind," the report reads.

Negrin was arrested and booked into Miami-Dade County Jail. His arrest photo (above) shows him wearing his blue TSA shirt at the time of the arrest.

The attack may be the first piece of proof that the new scanners may be leaving too little to the imagination.

The $170,000 machines, which were introduced last year, took some heat from fliers who weren't quite ready to show their bod to government employees.

But if this latest incident is any indication, the scanners sound like good news for anti-terrorism and bad news for less-than-average men.

From one of the guestbook entries, it looks like suicide.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sptime ... =141866598


Michael Mannira

MANNIRA, Michael (Toth) Sept. 12, 1964-April 5, 2010 Survived by mother, Sandra Mannira; sister, Sara Mannira; brothers, Todd (Eileen), (twin) Andrew (Missy), Sam (Dawn) Mannira; 8 nieces and nephews; wife, Julia Paulos. Preceded in death by his father, Anthony Mannira. Graveside service at Curlew Pioneer Cemetery at 11 am on April 24, 2010 with celebration gathering at Anderson Park, shelter number 5 immedietly following. Moss Feaster Dunedin 562-2040 http://www.mossfeasterdunedin.com

Pa. district took 56,000 images on student laptops


http://www.dailyfinance.com/article/pa- ... nt/912040/

By MARYCLAIRE DALEAP posted:  8:33 AM 04/20/10

PHILADELPHIA -A suburban school district secretly captured at least 56,000 webcam photographs and screen shots from laptops issued to high school students, its lawyer acknowledged Monday.

"It's clear there were students who were likely captured in their homes," said lawyer Henry Hockeimer, who represents the Lower Merion School District.

None of the images, captured by a tracking program to find missing computers, appeared to be salacious or inappropriate, he said. The district said it remotely activated the tracking software to find 80 missing laptops in the past two years.

The Philadelphia Inquirer first reported Monday on the large number of images recovered from school servers by forensic computer experts, who were hired after student Blake Robbins filed suit over the tracking practice.

Robbins still doesn't know why the district deployed the software tracking program on his computer, as he had not reported it lost or stolen, his lawyer said.

The FBI has opened a criminal investigation into possible wiretap violations by the district, and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, of Pennsylvania, has introduced a bill to include webcam surveillance under the federal wiretap statute.

The district photographed Robbins 400 times during a 15-day period last fall, sometimes as he slept in bed or was half-dressed, according to his lawyer, Mark Haltzman. Other times, the district captured screen shots of instant messages or video chats the Harriton High School sophomore had with friends, he said.

"Not only was Blake Robbins being spied upon, but every one of the people he was IM chatting with were spied upon," said Haltzman, whose lawsuit alleges wiretap and privacy violations. "They captured pictures of people that have nothing to do with Harriton. It could be his cousin from Connecticut."

About 38,000 of the images were taken over several months from six computers the school said were stolen from a locker room.

The tracking program took images every 15 minutes, usually capturing the webcam photo of the user and a screen shot at the same time. The program was sometimes turned on for weeks or months at a time, Hockeimer said.

"There were no written policies or procedures governing the circumstances surrounding activating the program and the circumstances regarding turning off the activations," Hockeimer said.

Robbins was one of about 20 students who had not paid the $55 insurance fee required to take the laptops home but was the only one tracked, Haltzman said.

The depositions taken to date have provided contradictory testimony about the reasons for tracking Robbins' laptop. One of the two people authorized to activate the program, technology coordinator Carol Cafiero, invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions at the deposition, Haltzman said.

About 10 school officials had the right to request an activation, Hockeimer disclosed Monday.

The tracking program helped police identify a suspect not affiliated with the school in the locker room theft, Hockeimer said. The affluent Montgomery County district distributes the Macintosh notebook computers to all 2,300 students at its two high schools, Hockeimer said.

As part of the lawsuit, a federal judge this week is set to begin a confidential process of showing parents the images that were captured of their children.

The school district expects to release a written report on an internal investigation in the next few weeks, Hockeimer said. School board President David Ebby has pledged the report will contain "all the facts — good and bad."

Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
2010-04-20 08:33:14

http://www.caica.org/NEWS%20Deaths%20Li ... mitted.htm


It's way too big to post here with my limited skills. You have to go to the link.  Can a screenshot be posted in a thread?