That’s sort of my point — 23 lockers, no drugs found. There are many possibilities here: The dog(s) just screwed up; some kid came to school that morning, put drugs in his locker, got them out for lunch and the dog alerted on it that afternoon; or, just maybe, there were drugs in at least some of the 23 lockers, the dogs alerted on them and, at the end of the search, “no drugs were found.” I have seen this. This happens.
As far as the dogs simply wearing out — yes. Some people get upset that a trained dog starts at about $10,000 and then retires in five years, but the point is, they wear out. New, young dogs are brought in.
You mention radar, etc., but I was talking about dogs. A well-trained drug dog is pretty good at finding drugs. Has anybody verified that? Yes. Some handlers, on the other hand, probably do try too hard to find drugs, or an excuse to find drugs, and the dogs mysteriously alert when there are no drugs. That’s not the dog’s fault.
And I have noticed there has been, pretty much, a dead silence to my question about school board meetings. That’s because nobody (I know, that’s a little bit of a stretch, but, realistically, nobody) goes to school board meetings.

The Agitator is safe from their eyes.

That’s a good point. But let’s keep that on the down low, because there are plenty of drug warriors cynical enough to implement that policy. Shhhh.

Definitely not just unions. Corporate America has gotten way more in from taxpayer bailouts than unions could ever hope to.

As a matter of politics, the more groups which receive asset forfeiture money, the longer the practice of asset forfeiture will continue.

Let that cash start going to children’s hospitals or widows of combat veterans, and the drug war will never end.

Of course, asset forfeiture is precisely the police-state’s solution for when the community insufficiently funds them through taxes.

Seriously, the UAW isn’t being given just enough so it’s members are going to avoid poverty in their old age. They negotiated enormous payouts that weren’t sustainable at all. If this was really about just taking care of people when they retire, they wouldn’t have played their part in bankrupting General Motors.

So you’re saying that any time any company goes under, or goes bankrupt, taxpayers should step in to fund the employees’ pensions and promised health care benefits?

Come to think of it, I had some promised 401(k) contributions and student loan help that vanished when the dot-com I was working for in the late 90s went under. Why shouldn’t taxpayers step up and give me what I was promised?

Should taxpayers also fund the gold-plated retirement packages promised to the executives after they drive a company into the ground?

Or is it only unions that get the privilege of taxpayer-guaranteed benefits?

“…A private organization (GM) enters into a contract with another private organization (UAW)…”

I of course agree with the main thrust of your comment, but we should never pretend that GM and UAW are private organizations in any meaningful sense. One is a rent-seeking monster kept alive by bailouts, entry barriers, regulatory capture, and various levels of trade protectionism. The other is an extortionist political machine whose only aim is to constantly improve its margin of plunder from the revenues of the first.

Together they share total ownership of two United States Senators, along with a number of Congressmen.

There is nothing “private” about either organization.

So, let me get this straight. A private organization (GM) enters into a contract with another private organization (UAW). GM makes promises that it can’t keep to the UAW. Your solution to this is to get a third party to rob individuals unrelated to this of their hard-earned money to fulfill GM’s diamond-encrusted promises to the UAW. And you consider NOT robbing these people (who had nothing to do with the private agreement) to be “playing hardball” and that we should expect retaliation from the parasites that want to rob people via a third party to fatten their own wallets?

Am I misrepresenting your position here?

Maybe you need to go back and read the rest of the post I left where I discuss that. History is a convenient tool to understand what large groups of people do when they feel they have been deprived of a lot of compensation. When it comes to labor movements who are already organized and embittered…it may not be pretty.

You want to play hardball with them, they play hardball back.

Even if nothing really destructive happens, you still have significant social costs and tax payer costs that YOU CANNOT GET OUT OF PAYING!

Sorry, but there it is. You defend the pensions, then you pay to put the geezer and his wife in a public funded retirement home with social security. Mutilply that by thousands, and then add in the food stamp and other issues.

You still pay.

*shrug*

If you don’t want to be in a society with a social safety net and where the public comes to your rescue when bad things happen, you can always find another place with different social rules. Beats me. I’m all for going after abusive cops, power drunk judges and wasteful spending. I don’t consider this wasteful in the same way that I don’t think it is wasteful that bank accounts are guarenteed by the government up t a certain amount.

Here in NC, I believe Durham, they took drug dogs through a high school. Pulled the kids out of class forced them to sit in the hall while they made a big show of searching the lockers.

The dogs “signaled” on 23 lockers. Not one of them had drugs in it. Now did the dogs actually signal or did the cops just get a list of lockers from the admins and made sure the “right students” got searched? I don’t know, neither do you, nor does anyone else.

The point is that assuming that the dogs are good at their job, outside of the context of their job, is dangerous business. You state that the dogs can successful find drugs without their handler, but in the real world are they never without their handler. Furthermore has this infallibility on the part of the dogs ever been demonstrated? How often are they tested in a double blind environment? Do their skills deteriorate after 1 year in the field? What about 3, 5, and 7 years?

This is a problem endemic to police work. How often are radar guns and breathalyzers tested and re-calibrated? In many places, never. All of these things provide police with an air of certainty, we are supposed to rely on the impartiality of the dogs or technology. But the practical result is one of handing the police a dowsing rod and simply allowing them to search, detain, or arrest anyone they point it at.

No kids for me. I’m afraid having some might turn me into one of those former libertarians who seeks to socialize the burdens of parenting by supporting laws he once evaded and despised.

“The unions made a deal. With management.”

You might have half a case if this had been first auto industry bailout. But long before 2009, both management and labor in Detroit knew they were playing a game of too-big-to-fail with taxpayers as the only and inevitable source of rescue.

I’d love to try an experiment. I don’t know how many people who read this site regularly have (or had) school-age kids. I’d like to ask anyone who does (or did) if they ever attended a school board meeting. If so, why? How many other (non-school) people were there?

Where is Mike Bloomberg when you need him?

The unions made a deal. With management. If you want to worry about this, perhaps sparing a thought to management might be worth one. I, for one, would be in favor of a “most favored nation” clause, wherein any deal agreed to mirrored (in structure, if not amount) management’s compensation. Note that I’m not talking about investors.

If you want to talk about pitchforks, history isn’t fair, but it is instructive. Humans don’t seem to mind oligarchy until it gets out of whack.