Bush administration: still hypocritical

California and 16 other states don't get to have their own air quality standards, because the Bush administration thinks we should have a single national standard. Where were they on Medicare, where their private insurance/drug coverage plans have created a dramatically confusing system? How about when they gave states 'superwaivers' from all the miscellaneous welfare regulations and also from independent evaluation processes?

You know, I have some respect for people like Mike Huckabee and John McCain, even though I think they'd be terrible presidents, because they mostly seem to have some kind of political philosophy that informs their votes and policies. With the Bush administration, it's just about greed. Up until I started reading about No Child Left Behind, I imagined that it had just been a triumph of misguided educational philosophy; actually, it's a give-away to test publishers, private tutoring companies, and corporate curricular design. I have never, ever heard of a Bush initiative that was not a corporate give-away of some kind if you paid attention.

Having a single national emissions policy would be good. But the one we have? It sucks. California's independent emissions laws - 50+ waivers already granted - have driven much of the new automotive technology, including hybrids, ultra-low emissions vehicles, zero-emissions vehicles, and electric cars. The rest of us are better off because of those laws. As the US refuses to use regulatory structures to promote public health (see also Europe's new toxicity standards for artificial materials) we get further behind other industrialized countries, and end up being a dumping ground for crappy, high-emissions vehicles and left-over stocks of cheap, unsafe plastics. California and state standards are our hope of fixing that, since right now the federal government is too greedstruck and deadlocked to do much.

Meanwhile, doesn't it strike anyone else as funny that 17 states, with a good portion of the US population, want better air standards, and yet we can't get them through Congress?

Stay tuned for further discussion of counter-productive public policies that conflict with what we actually know about the world. I'll be at it all decade.

crazy shit

I haven't written anything for, what, a month? And I never did write the post about the Outward Bound trip and how amazing it was and how ridiculously cute all those kids are, but if you email me I'll send you the link to their photos.

And I have a whole month's worth of crazy shit at school to write about (getting asked about by a senior, apparently seriously; the boys who just got arrested; two murders of students in two weeks; class average on a quiz being 81%, meaning they learned their times tables [!!!!]; the boy who told me, 'this is the best math'; long conversations with a student about friendship, values, strip clubs, and Aristotle; explaining why I don't have a TV; Vietnamese food with kids) but there will always be crazy shit at school.

What there might not always be, though, is ice in the Arctic. Which, that is crazy. The Northwest Passage? It's going to exist. The North Pole? Not frozen. As of 2013, says the new prediction, and that doesn't even consider the historic lows in ice coverage from 2005 and 2007. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is talking about catastrophe: catastrophic extinctions (40-70% of species on earth!), catastrophic drought (Tucson, I'm looking at you), continued and catastrophic rises in sea level (wiping my current and possible future homes off the map).

Where's my post-apocalyptic survival group when I need it?

schoolyard politics

Bush gets played
Musharraf makes Bush look like a fool. Frank Rich tells all.

Democrats develop a spine
Publicizing a more accurate figure for the cost of the war is great and all, but where were they when the budget got written?

check it

Ok, so on Wednesday I got called in for a meeting on Friday, during which we would discuss my 'excessive use of force' with a student. Wha? There were 5 kids at the door, 3 of them had a pass but wouldn't give it to me, one girl ducks under my arm, I grab her shirt and then let go, and this is excessive use of force?

So I'm meeting with the assistant principal and my union rep, and the union rep had counseled conciliation and apology, so I was trying so hard to do it. And the AP is all, this is regrettable, you should never touch a child, blah blah blah, we'll see if the parent is ok with what you said, you should talk to your students the way you would like your own child talked to. You're the model, and you need to set a good example even when things are frustrating. Oh, and we hear you're not doing Drop Everything and Read the last 15 minutes of the day like you're supposed to! Every day! In math class! With no books!

In the Political Schmientist's words, "She called you in for one bullshit thing and then started giving you shit about another bullshit thing?" Yes. Indeed, that is what happened.

During the meeting, she gets a call. Another teacher was covering my class (the class in which the alleged incident had happened), and there had been so much noise in the room that the discipline head for the ESOL department - a woman who has been teaching in the school for 32 years - came down the hall thinking there was a fight. No fight, just chaos. They call one school police officer: no effect. Two school police officers: not much. The discipline head for the students in the class: nope. There are now five adults in the classroom, and it's still kind of a mess. So the assistant principal comes down, and I come down, and she screams at them about how the joke's going to be on them in life and threatens to suspend all of them unless they spend the last 20 minutes of the day (including the reading time) doing the worksheet they were supposed to do.

1. It took 7 people to cover my class for 54 minutes, and I'm the person getting in trouble for discipline issues.

2. Guess who prevented the students from dropping everything and reading for the last 15 minutes of Friday's class? Not me. The person who scolded me about how I wasn't doing it.

3. Every student turned in a paper with a name at the top. Maybe 8 or 10 of those didn't have any real work on them. Only one person got suspended. News flash: when you don't follow through on your threats, you make them meaningless! So now the assistant principal will have no clout with my students, which is bad for me and, ultimately, bad for them.

the scientific method v. cultural myths

The CDC just reported that being overweight makes you less likely to die, over-all. When you consider all sources of mortality, people who are 'overweight' are much less likely to die from a number of diseases, which cancels out a higher death rate from a few well-known ones. They also found that being underweight is associated with higher mortality, and I think it's worth pointing out that the article didn't mention any possible alternative explanations for obesity being associated with higher mortality, but listed several possible alternatives to the heresy that being skinny is itself unhealthy (e.g. people get thin because they're sick or smoke).

Like many other ideas about body size, the idea that being over a particular size will kill you was one with scant or no evidence; now we have actual evidence against it.

In response, a preventive medicine specialist told the New York Times that "excess weight makes it more difficult to move and impairs the quality of life." Let's stipulate that there are people for whom this is true. But there is no evidence that people can lose weight and keep it off except becoming obsessive about it in the way that anorexics are obsessive about it; and I would bet money I don't have that for most people, "excess weight" mostly "impairs the quality of life" because people are assholes about it, because there's practically no positive media about anyone over a size 4, and because of the constant pressure to get thin. Those issues, incidentally, affect almost all women of all sizes, and use up a good chunk of the brain power of a couple generations. Have I mentioned that fat is a feminist issue?

One of the researchers very sensibly said, "If we use the criteria of mortality, then the term 'overweight' is a misnomer."

Another, after stressing that it was his personal opinion, said, "If you are in the pink and feeling well and getting a good amount of exercise and if your doctor is very happy with your lab values and other test results, then I am not sure there is any urgency to change your weight."

Which is such sensible advice, and so well supported by his research. And yet fat is such a crazy issue in American medicine that he had to qualify the hell out of it. Being sensible is a dangerous position in the diet wars.

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1. Quotation marks because saying people for whom arbitrary combination of their height and weight is over 25 weigh 'too much' is ridiculous, as the article linked to points out. 'Too much' for whom? For what reason? Over what weight?

red meat

OK, there've been two meat recalls this week, one for tainted beef (over a million pounds from Cargill) and one for frozen pizzas with pepperoni. The pizzas have caused illness so far, the beef not. This is a ridiculous problem, because it's totally avoidable and absurdly common.

E. coli contamination: totally avoidable. No reason it should ever happen. All the types of E. coli that cause illness not only live in cowshit, but also only live in the feces of cows who eat corn, not cows who eat grass. A corn diet turns a cow's rumen acidic - it's supposed to be about neutral - and makes the digestive system a hospitable place for illness-causing E. coli. The strains of E. coli that make you sick literally can't survive in a cow that's eating grass, which is what cows' digestive systems are adapted to.

So of course almost all beef is raised on corn.

Beyond that, notice that the Cargill plant that produced the tainted beef produces 200 million pounds of ground beef a year. That's a huge amount. The recall applies to 1 million pounds, also a huge amount. Notice also that Cargill is "working closely with the USDA" - that's because even though every meat plant has to be USDA inspected, the USDA has no authority to issue a recall, no authority to order product destroyed. Instead, their authority is only to close a plant, which they are under enormous pressure not to do. Because plants are so enormous, a shutdown becomes a huge loss to a company; also because plants are so enormous, a single piece of contaminated meat immediately gets ground up with all the other meat, contaminating the rest of it. But any USDA inspected plant has to have facilities (including a private office and separate bathroom) for an inspector - a legitimate need, considering the threats USDA inspectors have gotten, but one that weighs heaviest on small plants; the USDA has even told a few small slaughterhouses that they were too small for the USDA to bother inspecting, effectively shutting them down. It's a major barrier to small, local, quality meat, which you can read a lot more about in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma or this New York Times article about the Farmers Diner.

The way the USDA treats meat and contamination is also pretty interesting. I've been told by sources I can't cite that plants often understate the fecal contamination of their products by as much as 90%. My parents run a small business making prosciutto in a traditional Italian style: when my father went to Italy to learn about it, he learned that in Italy the slaughterhouse is responsible for delivering clean meat to the prosciutto maker; here, the prosciutto maker is required to treat the meat as completely contaminated and guarantee that the curing process kills any pathogens. I don't know which of those is a better system from a public health standpoint, but they say something about what the slaughterhouses in the two countries are probably like, and about the availability of alternatives.

And yet we keep treating food poisoning and contaminated meat on a grand scale as inevitable.

their world

From the professor in my math methods class, in response to a question about how to teach kids something particular on a graphing calculator: "I would just let them explore. They absolutely know more than we do about technology. It is their world. When we look at the calculator, we have so much more trouble understanding it."

This to a group of people who had spent the previous half hour playing Block Dude on the calculator and reminscing about how Drug War was the best TI-89 game.

and then...

I got to school at 7:41, but I hadn't made my copies so I had to run down the hall, make the copies, run back to the office and sign in, run back to class, get things started.

And then the whole soccer team and all the kids who know someone on the soccer team were yelling at each other, about what I eventually figured out was their loss last night in the semifinals, possibly due to racism by the referee, and the ensuing fight/riot.

And then in second period we were observed by four people: the new assistant principal who's been giving out 'unsatisfactory' ratings, the head of the English department, the school growth teacher, and the principal.

And then kids complained about having a discussion and dragged ass moving their seats, which is what was happening when the assistant principal left.

And then we had a discussion which started out practically dead and ended up with kids jumping out of their seats to talk about Beowulf, Jay-Z, 50 Cent, boasting, and the definition of a hero.

And then the principal said, during morning announcements to the whole school, that our class was what American education should look like, and gave one of our kids $20.

And then I met the parent of my most trouble-making ESOL kid, and the girl who was there while I was talking to him said that what I told the dad would get the son beaten.

And then Joey rolled up his black pants to right below the knee so you could see his black socks pulled all the way up and it looked like he was wearing pantaloons, put on his girlfriend's jean jacket, and started dancing.

And then I gave him and these two other kids a problem they got wrong, which was awesome because those three are way underchallenged in my class.

And then it was lunch, and the copier was busy, and I was almost late to class.

And then this girl - a senior now, someone I know from last year - came huffing along down the hallway to say, "You are one hard person to find. Here's a letter." Which also contained a check for five hundred dollars. FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS. For my class!

And then this kid showed up 10 minutes late to class, complaining about it, and his cousin who got suspended yesterday for saying obscene things to me ("She's like a mosquito, she can't stop sucking" + noises, gestures, etc) was there too, and the cousin wouldn't leave.

And then this girl showed up halfway through class who's NOT IN MY CLASS and inexplicably wants to be in it and she wouldn't leave either.

And then school security had to be called.

And then some girl broke a glass pane out of my door.

And then I couldn't help this girl do math because I had to write pink slips instead, so I told her that this was why I didn't like it when people misbehaved, and she was all, yeah, that's true, that's a problem.

And then I was all teary and pissed off in the women's bathroom during lunch, and this other 2nd-year teacher was nice to me, and before we talked she checked under the stalls to see if anyone was there, which was great.

And then it was the last period of the day and my 5th period kids were back and almost as bad as before.

And then this girl started picking up broken glass and wouldn't put it down and I was worried that she was going to hurt herself.

And then at the end of the period the girl I talked to about how people misbehaving screws up her education asked if I was ok and I said no and she asked if it was the class (yes) and her personally (no) and then she started cleaning up the classroom, and it was the best thing ever.

And then I gave the kids who did their work candy.

And then it was Outward Bound club meeting, and that was really fun.

And then this kid from Sierra Leone talked in Krio and Liberian English and Nigerian English for a while, and can I get him a stand-up comedy gig? He really is that funny.

And then they all wrote paragraphs about why they want to go on another Outward Bound trip.

And then they talked about getting t-shirts made with pictures from the Outward Bound trip and having the principal have an Outward Bound day so they could wear them to school.

And then I ran around getting suspension slips delivered.

And then I missed my workout.

And then I came home and put on my coziest clothes and wrote this.

And then I was completely exhausted.

moral hazard

There's this idea, beloved of conservatives, called moral hazard. It's the idea that if you don't bear the full pain of a problem, you're more likely to take risks with it: not locking your car if you're insured against theft, not worrying about getting pregnant if someone else is going to pay to raise the child (or for an abortion). The concept crops up in many, many conservative social policies. One of the most notable is the opposition to birth control, abortion, and sex ed - there's a strain in the anti arguments that people (specifically women) need to experience the immediate negative consequences of sex so they won't have it.

Moral hazard is also the key to understanding most conservative health care schemes. Paul O'Neill, former secretary of the treasury, wrote an op-ed arguing for a health care system that insured everyone against catastrophic health expenses, but required people to pay out of pocket or for private insurance until then. In his words: "since most Americans would have a significant personal cost until the catastrophic coverage took over, they would, at least in theory, shop for the best product." Otherwise, he argues, we lack incentive to care for our health or choose a good insurance plan, which drives up over-all health care costs.

Problem is, moral hazard isn't an especially useful theory for either of these situations. People have sex regardless of the consequences, because the incentives to have sex are so powerful: making people bear the most negative consequences just results in more people in bad situations. Health care is even worse from a moral hazard perspective. People mostly don't avoid seeking care for emergencies because of the cost - as Bush so insightfully pointed out, you can just go to the emergency room if it's bad enough. Instead, our health care system already accounts moral hazard, and it's a disaster: preventive care is expensive, so people avoid it or treat it as optional, so their conditions get worse, so their care becomes more expensive. O'Neill has it absolutely and totally backwards. Making basic care expensive and insuring against catastrophe just leads to people skimping on basic care, and getting to catastrophe: it's more of what we have now, which has given the US the world's most expensive health care mess. Instead, we need universal access to preventive and maintenance care - the kind of thing that prevents kids from dying of their dental problems, because they won't have dental problems.

I think I find this interesting mostly because it's such a great example of a flawed theory of human nature leading to flawed policy ideas. O'Neill has this idea about how people act (so do the abstinence-only sex ed people), but it's not accurate - and not only that, he's not willing to modify his theory based on the evidence (and neither are the abstinence-only people). Instead, he continues to argue that "at least in theory" people will act a certain way.

I see this as a major failure in the relationship between political theory and reality, as much as a sign of O'Neill's personal intransigence. There are tons of political theories out there that just don't work, because their theories of human nature are all wrong; yet no one's gone back and figured out how to communicate between political theory and how people actually act. Similarly, this policy idea of basing health care on moral hazard isn't just ineffective, it's based on an wrong-headed idea of what it's like to be human; until we have some clear talk about what it's like to be human going on with policy-makers, we're going to keep getting bad policy.

thematic

J.K. Rowling just announced that Dumbledore is gay.

Awesome, but why not put it in the book?

funniest moment this week

There's this one kid, call him Joey, though of course that's not his name, who drives me crazy. Absolutely batty. He does not come on time or sit in an assigned seat or follow directions or behave predictably or stop swearing or stop throwing paper or not sing irritating and obscene Akon songs. He does learn math - like crazy, as fast as I can teach him, more or less - and dance and ask why all the time and smile this wolfy secret grin when he gets caught doing something. I love him.

The other day, while I was dismissing the class one at a time, Joey walked over to a girl three seats over, took the bright red, pointy-toed 3-inch spike heels off her feet, and put them on his own. Then, dressed in black Dickies, a black school logo polo shirt, and red stilettos, he sashayed down the hallway to lunch.

upgrade my classroom

As many of you know, I teach 9th and 12 grades at an under-resourced neighborhood high school in Philadelphia. My school, built in 1939, lacks books and technology, giving my students little chance to develop the academic and technological skills they need. In my second year, I teach 4 periods of 9th grade math a day, plus a senior English class another teacher and I designed to prepare our students for college. We are teaching Beowulf, which is the first text in the senior curriculum, but our students do not have their own books: they cannot read at home, write notes and definitions in the margins, or underline particularly important parts, all of which are critical for college preparedness and basic understanding of such a difficult text.

This can change - not just in the long term, but right now. I set up a donations page through the Amazon Honor System: please consider donating $5 to $20 if you can. I also set up a blog to keep people posted on the projects I'll be doing with the money: the first is to buy individual paperback copies of Beowulf for my seniors (less than $200). You can read about it at laurelsclassroom.blogspot.com, where I'll also be posting pictures.

everything (missed opportunities)

It's 3:45. Ms. Z wants to talk to me. It's about paper for the copy machines. I'm using too much (300 pages a day, she says, though I'd estimate 180, max), and half of my classes aren't even ESOL. The paper comes out of the ESOL budget; I need to go get my paper allotment from whichever unknown administrator controls the department that has it. Is it the assistant principal? Is it the military administrator? The central message is that I need to track down this paper, some way, somehow. It's my job.

This is one of those moments where resource scarcity in the urban schools comes front and center. Not just material scarcity (of paper, of all things!), but time scarcity, knowledge scarcity. Ms. Z is volunteering her time to administer the ESOL program, since the normal administrator was badly injured in a motorcycle accident. She's fine - she's TFA as well, interested in running her own school someday, trying very hard to do good work - but she's never done it before, and she's very conscious of the fact that she's not being paid for it. She doesn't want to be the one tracking down the paper, but she also is absolutely emphatic that it must happen.

In a school that didn't ration paper, this wouldn't be an issue at all. In a school with more time available, I imagine that administrators, several of whom probably have the same issue, could get together and work out some kind of system. If she'd been here for years, we'd know how to deal with this without fuss.

One of the results of a broken public school system is that teachers become responsible for everything. Supplies, funding, real-time curriculum development, meetings, sports: if you don't organize it yourself, there is precious little chance that someone else will. Hence, being awake from 5:30 AM to midnight on Tuesday, with maybe a total of 2.5 hours when I wasn't working. You know what takes 2.5 hours? Eating breakfast, eating lunch, eating dinner, and taking a shower, that's what.

brag

Dear everyone,

My parents are Bon Appetit food artisans of the year for 2007.

That is all.

North

dust and schadenfreude

Context: I'm at school. First day back. No kids yet, a bunch of newbies (even newer than I am! 52 out of 157 teachers have been here two years or less!), not bad, except that the teacher who had my room last year left the detritus of 40 years of teaching here. I'm talking manuals for software for the Apple IIe. If software fossilizes, does it turn into hardware? I just filled two large trash cans and 10 boxes with most of the stuff I'm not keeping, and I'm hoping to give most of the rest of it away on Thursday. I've been at school for ten hours so far. I think I'm going home soon because I'm too hungry to stay, not because I'm done.

Event: I read this article describing the Republican prospects in the Senate for 2008. Each paragraph is better than the last, but these three stand out. First, for sheer color:

"It's always darkest right before you get clobbered over the head with a pipe wrench. But then it actually does get darker," said a GOP pollster who insisted on anonymity in order to speak candidly.

Second, because it's just true:

Nathan L. Gonzales, political editor of the nonpartisan Rothenberg Political Report: "If Idaho ends up the fire wall, they are in deep trouble."

And finally, elegantly summarizing the situation:

"About the only safe Republican Senate seats in '08 are the ones that aren't on the ballot," a GOP operative with extensive experience in Senate races said.

Is it wrong to be this happy that people's careers are being ruined?

same-sex marriage? in Iowa?

So, before we continue, I have a question. If your state representative only lists her home phone number on her official web page, can you call her at home? Because I definitely need to call her. Because today, in Des Moines, two guys got married. You can read the AP story or the Des Moines Register story.

I'm, ah, delighted. Overjoyed. Amazed. Shocked. That's my hometown - I may have visited the courtroom where that decision was made - and if I'd had to lay odds on a state, even a Midwestern one, being next for same-sex marriage, it would not have been Iowa. My faith in my state, sorely tested after the last election, springs up again.

So, of course, homework for everyone. School starts Tuesday, too, so do it now.

1) Call your state legislators, if you're an Iowan. Hell, if you're not, email the governor's office to say how great you think this is for Iowa's reputation and how it's made you think of Iowa in a whole new light. Provincial coastal denizens, I'm talking to you.

2) Look at the Justly Married photo set, and think how damn cute all those couples are. Then look at the pictures of Phyllis Martin and Del Lyon getting married and think how damn cute those two old ladies (who were out lesbians in the 1950s) were.

This is the kind of thing that gets people really excited and then sinks. But you know, it really does mean something to all the queer people in your life if you hear about this and get excited and call your legislators and everything. Not only does it make us all feel a little warm and fuzzy about our friends, but all the legislators on the fence? The ones who aren't sure they can get away with supporting same-sex marriage? Or who don't have much of an opinion but don't want to lose their seats over it? One of the things they look at is how the calls are running. If they get five times as many supportive calls as negative calls, they're going to think they won't get eviscerated for this in the next election, and maybe support the same-sex marriage decision. Or even just not actively oppose it. And that's how things get a little better.

Remember how at the beginning I asked if it was ok to call my state legislator at home? That's how small Iowa is. In a place like that, it's easy to swing a decision by saying something about it. I have a couple of pretty crazy stories about things I did in high school - before I could vote! - that permanently affected state policy. Not just me, of course, but stuff I helped organize.

Hurray for my state! Hurray for political participation!

single-issue voting

Health care is the single most important issue in the primary, and maybe in the general election too. Bar none. More important than Iraq, more important than the environment, more important than education or queer rights or feminism or trade agreements or crime or abortion or immigration or whatever the hell else they're talking about these days.

Here's why: it's urgent, and it's distinguishing.

All the Democratic candidates are pro-choice and have sort of moderately pro-environment positions. None of them are going to do a damn thing for education as far as I can tell - and I don't blame them, since I've never heard of a president doing much that's useful for education other than funding it. I sincerely doubt any of the candidates will negotiate any kind of trade agreement that improves the world.

Meanwhile, Iraq is going to be a disaster from hell no matter who's in charge. None of them have any kind of environmental or energy position that will really protect us from peak oil or climate change. Queer rights? Who cares what they think? There's not going to be much done for queer rights at the federal level for at least another ten years. These are not salient issues right now, because there's no real national consensus that something must change in a particular direction. Even immigration, which I think is maybe the next issue up, is something around which there's tremendous conflict at many levels - it's more like same-sex marriage than health care in that way, and the next president will most likely not have the opportunity to enact major reform.

Health care is different. Since 1992, the last time we had a go at health care reform, the insurance situation for middle-class people has worsened dramatically. Even many upper-middle-class people are finding health insurance dramatically expensive or difficult to obtain. I've been thinking back to my American politics classes, which strongly suggest that when something becomes a middle-class issue (and especially an issue that affects the professional and upper middle class), there's an opportunity for policy change. Some of the most popular, least politically touchable programs are the housing subsidy for the middle class (home mortgage interest tax deduction) and Social Security, which provides benefits to people at all income levels and thus has a really broad base. We don't have a health care program, but the current conditions give the next president a major opportunity to create one. I think our health insurance system has become so problematic that it will change substantially within the next 5 years; whatever we get is likely to become politically untouchable, so it better be good.

Conveniently, the candidates have very different plans. Put the Republican candidates aside, as they have plans that I generally find fairly repellent (ranging from Giuliani's tax breaks to Romney's unsupported individual mandate¹ to Brownback and Thompson with no plan at all) and I wouldn't vote for them anyway. To spell out what I'm looking for: a plan that will provide us with the major benefits of universal health care enjoyed by all other industrialized nations. Those benefits include better public health outcomes because everyone has access to necessary (and especially preventive) care; and lower costs, both because people get treatment before their conditions get too complicated and because the government has negotiating power with the agents who deliver care and supplies.

Let's look at the three major Democratic Candidates. Obama's plan is too complicated, and I think it's unlikely to lower costs or improve public health outcomes in the way that universal health care in other countries does. Clinton doesn't have a [published] plan, which I think is because she got so badly burned organizing the Bill Clinton health care plan in 1992. She's by far the most experienced and knowledgeable of the three about health care, but I'm concerned that she will have the exact same reticence as president that she now has as a candidate.

Edwards has by far the best plan. It would lower the over-all cost of health insurance by spreading the risk through a wider pool (i.e. everyone), and ensure that everyone could get into that pool by mandating that insurers offer coverage to everyone regardless of health history and with no surcharge for previous health problems. He also spells out how he'll support and fund the plan, and dude, it would work.

Go Edwards go!

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1. Romney on mandating that individuals buy health insurance: "I think it appeals to people on both sides of the aisle: insurance for everyone without a tax increase." Hey! Does it really matter whether you pay the money to the insurer or the government? Requiring that people buy health insurance is still a government mandate on how my money be used! I don't so much mind the mandate itself - Edwards's plan includes one - as Romney assuming I can't do the math.

so long, Wallyann!

Kitten status: adopted in record time by someone at the vet's office. All us suckers are way relieved that we're not stuck with her.

You've always wanted a kitten!

WallyAnn Radio Hegemony Cricket is not my cat. But maybe she's yours! She's 13 ounces of adorable gray fuzz with big blue eyes, bat ears, and a pretty little white nose. Her meow will rip your heart right out of your chest. In fact, she's already suckered 5 people who are determined that they (um, we) do not want a cat into feeding, bathing, and flea-combing her, not to mention taking her home and carting her all over town. Wanna take her home?

the importance of math education

There's an article in the New York Times pointing out that it is logically impossible for men and women to have different average numbers of sex partners. Which is a problem, since men and women report significantly different lifetime averages (e.g. 4 sex partners for women, 7 for men in the US, or in Britain 12.7 for men and 6.5 for women). Anyone who is decent at math and remembers the definition of the mean will be able to tell you that in a world with about the same number of men and women, it is impossible for men to have more hetero sex partners than women. Indeed, a mathematician has actually proved it. So, explanations?

1. The researchers say it might be that men have significant numbers of sexual experiences with women who aren't counted in the survey, like prostitutes or women in other countries. That would mean that there's got to be some country somewhere where women have many more sex partners than men, and thus far no one's found it. Also, I question their ability to screen prostitutes out of the survey data.

2. Men and/or women are lying their heads off in what they think are the socially approved directions. I think this is quite likely.

3. Men and women have very different distribution patterns for their data. The mean number of partners must be the same for men and women, but that doesn't mean the median number of partners must be the same. As an example, imagine that there are only 5 men and 5 women in the world, and a total of 13 sexual partnerships. The men have had 0, 1, 3, 4, and 5 sexual partners; the women have had 1, 1, 1, 5, and 5 sexual partners. The mean for both groups is going to be 13/5 = 2.6 partners, but the median number of partners for men is 3, while the median for women is 1. That's a huge percentage difference just because women had a few people with high numbers of partnerships, while most women still had fewer sex partners than most men. Is this likely on a large scale? I don't really think so - it's a lot harder to skew data like that when you're not making it up and there are thousands of people in your data set. But I don't really know, and apparently the social scientists who could find out for us aren't. My best guess still goes to #2.

This is an example of bad math education perpetuating a particular social ill, namely the idea that men get around more than women. To his everlasting credit, the mathematician who inspired the article points out exactly this: that taking this data as accurate works to “reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females" and may skew self-reporting and behavior. If math education were better, and people understood mean and median and interpreting statistical graphs, and if the news media could therefore publish graphs of the statistics in question, there'd be a lot more ways for people to check stereotypes against reality.

When will those darn math teachers do something about it?

authentic schmauthentic

Iowa is a certain kind of hipster heaven. We have trucker hats, dive bars, cowboy boots, soda fountains, and cheap beer. We have craft shows and karaoke.

Only thing is, there aren't any hipsters. This stuff is for real.

being home

Everyone talks about the caucuses. Everyone. Instead of "How 'bout that local sports team?" it's "How 'bout that Democratic candidate?" Or occasionally, "Damn, the Republican field is pathetic." Which it is.

I can pretty much do as much running on the bike path down by the river as I want. With the dogs. Best thing ever in the morning? A big fluffy blonde dog and a smaller, sleek brown dog with green eyes chasing rabbits and messing around in the water.

I like my parents but I'm glad I don't live with them.

People remember me. A state rep I volunteered for in college remembers me. My parents' friends want me to move back. Sometimes it's nice to remember that if I want to move back here, there are things I can do.

I drink more here than I drink anywhere else. The average might be down to 2 glasses a night by now, after I cut back a bit. Glass of wine while you cook? Glass of wine with dinner? Go out for a beer with friends? Yeah, I think I'm safe to drive.

Bull testicles. My friend Aroog's birthday party involved bull testicles and karaoke and his little sister trying to get me to go to church with her the next morning. I ate Rocky Mountain oysters (just a smidgen - beans and rice for real dinner), sang "Goodbye Earl" and "Boy Named Sue," and bought Aroog's mom a rum and coke, which is funny because that's what he pours at his infamous New Year's parties. As far as the karaoke went, two of my high school friends have talent. The rest of us have heart.

how not to apologize

Michael Ignatieff offers the world's lamest admission of being wrong in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. To summarize: "political judgment is about specifics. But let's not talk about the specifics that could have shown us that this war was a bad bet (and thus help us figure out the next one)! Instead let's talk about general principles of political leadership!"

Ignatieff also says, after quoting Bismarck to the effect that good judgment means you hear the horses of history early, "Few of us hear the horses coming." I saw a debate between Leon Wieseltier and Mark Danner right before the war, and the basic summary of the arguments went as follows: Leon Wieseltier supported the war, arguing that Saddam was really damn bad and Bush was the only chance we had to get rid of him; Danner opposed it, arguing that the Bush administration would do such a bad job with it that it wouldn't be worth it.

Guess who was right?

I think what Iraq actually teaches us is that you can't disregard means. You have to have the whole thing thought through before you're done. And you can't support an entity as incompetent, corrupt, and lawless as the Bush administration to tackle a very complicated, high-stakes WAR.

Which is basically saying that wishing doesn't make it so. I wish Ignatieff - who has a Ph.D. and a political position - would maybe express a little actual remorse for the disastrous war he supported.

travel plans

I'm headed to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where I will be held incommunicado through Sunday, and thence to Des Moines, where I'll have most everything the information age can offer. Even cable!

presidential calculuses

So Andrew asked why I'm supporting John Edwards, and brought up some things he's been wrestling with: electability, leadership, and policy positions. All of those things are shorthand for 15 million other things, but here's my best shot at explaining why I'm supporting Edwards. For the people who always read the last page first: it's about policy.

But first, let's talk about something else: experience. Hillary Clinton is the only Democratic front-runner with really serious Washington and policy experience, and even she has very little electoral experience - she's just an insanely savvy person who spent 8 years hearing very directly about the Washington experience of another insanely savvy person. Neither Edwards or Obama has any real experience making day to day government decisions as an executive, or moving bills through Congress in the way a president has to do to be effective. I'm concerned about that, but I'm unwilling to vote for Clinton over it. If Bill Richardson's campaign gets any momentum, I might be interested, but let's put that aside for now.

On to electability. I don't really trust myself to predict who's electable in a general election, and I think that efforts to predict electability have screwed the Democrats six ways from Sunday. Kerry? Gore? Not the world's most electable people (in that Kerry wasn't elected) - yet they were chosen specifically for their electability. So I'm not really playing with that right now. I think Clinton has the most serious electability problem of the three major candidates: the American public is pretty damn sexist, plus she's a very polarizing figure, plus she's kind of varnished, which hasn't been going over well lately. On the other hand, have I mentioned how savvy she and her husband are? Obama's race will likely play against him, but I don't feel completely certain of it. Edwards is doing the worst in the head-to-head general election polls (though Dems reliably beat Reps), but I have some questions about whether the sexism/racism cards would affect Obama and Clinton differently in a polling booth rather than a phone call. I got kind of sick of spinning around in circles about this, so I decided to give up. Also, I think focusing on electability encourages a kind of content-free, passion-free politics that is one of the major problems of the Democratic party.

Leadership: I'm going to talk about race and gender here, since I already talked about my concerns about experience. I feel like I should be supporting Obama or Clinton specifically because I am a feminist and anti-racist. Obama is also super-inspiring for many people, which I think would be great in a president (and speaks some to electability). But ultimately,

It's all about policy. Specifically health, environmental, and economic policies, and specifically because there's pretty good evidence that presidential candidates do what they say they're going to do a lot of the time. Edwards's health care policy is really smart, and I think it could get passed and would work. Universal health care is one of those things that's becoming a middle-class issue in a way that means it'll probably get addressed within the next 5 years or so, and I think it matters a lot who the president is then. Clinton won't put her plan out there, and Obama's is pretty complicated, and I think would have a lot fewer cost-saving effects than the Edwards plan because it doesn't expand the pool of insured people as much, thus keeping risk and premiums higher than they ought to be. Obama's policies over-all are fairly piece-meal: his energy policy is like that as well.

Finally, Edwards has put economic inequality on the table in a way that I think is really, really important.

I would say more but I'm incredibly hungry and I'm leaving town on Sunday. More comparative policy analysis coming in two weeks or so.

(Julie and Andrew: big fat congratulations!)

---

ok, some good news

The Democratic candidates are going to have a gay debate. I mean a debate about gay stuff where Melissa Etheridge and the head of HRC ask them questions. Does the debate itself have a sexual preference? How would we ever know?

I am really really excited about this for some reason. Maybe because I have some hopes it'll cut through some of the not-answering-questions-for-real bullshit that happens a lot with the Democrats. Except for Elizabeth Edwards, of course, but unfortunately she's not running for president.

in which I continue to be appalled

Shorter Bush to Congress: lalalalalala I can't heeeeeeaaaaar you.

Harriet Miers isn't even going to show up. Is there anyone who seriously believes he isn't hiding something pretty damn big?

In other news, the man's approval rating dropped to 29%. How low does it have to go before we can get impeachment?

For serious, call your representative. It is your representative's JOB right now to be submitting impeachment motions. Instructions given here.

p.s. most duh headline ever: White House Is Accused of Putting Politics Over Science.

evolutionary psychology and its discontents

There's an article in Psychology Today titled Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature. Echidne of the Snakes spent some time doing a point by point refutation, which I suggest you read if you're interested in that sort of thing. Basically, the article itself is a particularly genius example of how Evolutionary Psychology as most people use the term is basically a collection of speculation about the lives of early humans, most of which gets used to justify sexism and crappy appearance politics. Refuting it requires slightly less work than shooting fish in a barrel. You don't even need a gun!

My sister studied bioanthropology (basically, the study of humans using biology, which includes quite a bit of evo-psych) in college, and I remember vividly two conversations about it that I had with her. When she was a sophomore and deciding to study bioanth, she argued that I was just wrong not to accept that differences between men and women were biologically based, and that my feminism was blinding me to the strong evidence for it. Two years later, as a senior, she called me up while I was driving through Utah and asked what she should do. She needed to write a senior paper - like a small thesis - to get honors, which she very much wanted, but she felt like she couldn't in conscience write a paper on any of the bioanth subjects she'd studied because the standards of evidence were so unutterably lame and unconvincing. Two years of study brought her to the conclusion that even at a fancy-pants research university, most evolutionary psychology is a collection of speculation about the lives of early humans.

I have a similar problem with a great deal of political theory, including all social contract theory. These theories rely on some kind of imagined history of early humans: life was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short," then we all got together, signed the social contract, and turned our power over to the state. Hobbes is one of the most honest about this kind of thing (he doesn't make up rights without explaining where they come from) but still. Wasn't it great when we all signed the social contract? What a great party! No wait, no one was there. IT NEVER HAPPENED. (One of the things I like about Aristotelian political theory is that, while there's a theory of human nature, there's no just-so story about how we came to be this way.)

We know a little more about the lives of early humans in a factual sense than we used to, but we still have essentially zip about social structure. Among other things, it's pretty unreasonable to argue that social evolution just stopped at some point (which is what you have to say for evo-psych to still be relevant, or to use modern hunter-gatherers to learn about ancient hunter-gatherers), when we have very clear evidence that lactose tolerance evolved in some places as recently as 3,000 years ago. Humans continue, however, to be very good at coming up with reasons to justify whatever it is we want to justify right now, including rights, greed, censorship, free speech, monogamy, polygamy, etc.

Evolutionary psychology and political theory share one gigantic missed opportunity. Yes, it would be very very interesting to know more about how human brains really work and have evolved, and yes, it would be very very interesting to know how the social structure of early human societies developed, and think about what implications those have for our ideas about politics and community. Aristotle assumes that humans are by nature social - he doesn't even really imagine an isolated state of being human - and that seems likely to have some foundation (unlike, for example, his transparently bad justification for slavery). There's some serious work to be done matching up science and archeology about early humans with theories about human nature and society. But political theorists (who have some excuse, since they're not scientists or historians) and evolutionary psychologists (who have none, since they claim to be both) have done a pretty dreadful job of it. Too bad!

decision made

I support John Edwards for president. In case you were wondering.

the course of human events

I drank some very good peach beer, ate some very good Mexican food (restaurant review coming soon), had Queen Anne cherry sorbetto with dark chocolate gelato (Capogiro: still amazing), took the famous outlaw cattens to their temporary home with a very nice woman and a yappy dog. All this with the Political Schmientist. Then I went to the beach! A Feral Hat reunited, plus some excellent people who are and are not getting married. There aren't enough exclamation points to tell you how I feel about boogie boards! Why don't I live at the beach? Then we spent an hour between exits 113 and 120 on the Garden State Parkway and was late to dinner with my parents. And then my parents were in the LA Times, and then there were various not very surprising revelations and some excellent talk at hat-brunch. I had dinner with a food writer and his wife and aforementioned parents. It's hot. The diner for lunch with Fire Boss and a non-practicing Ph.D. with crazy eyelashes decided we didn't need pie. Got described as 'well-behaved' for the first two times in my life.

Then I drove home, read for a while, ate dinner. Listened to some awesome music, if I do say so myself. Drank another peach beer in the shower. Now I will watch TV.

When will someone make Hotel Yorba into a movie? I want it now!

Happy 4th of July. Impeach Bush.

Look. It's the 4th of July. This is a great time to love your country, and celebrate the noble words of the noble documents that started the whole thing. But it's an even better time to talk about how, as people who care what the hell is happening in this country, we have work to do. The gap between the lovely words and the violent and unethical actions should be our concern today. (All links below go to the relevant outrage.)


The history of the present [President of the United States] is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:
--
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
--
He has called together [judicial] bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
--
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected.
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He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
--

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
--

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States.
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For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
--

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
--
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
--
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.


Here's how we do it.
1. Call your Representative. The House needs a simple majority to pass articles of impeachment, and there's a Democratic majority right now. Call your Republican Representative too. Tell your Representative that by not calling for impeachment, he or she is failing to represent you and failing to support and defend the US Constitution, which they swear to do when they take the Oath of Office. Contact information is at http://www.house.gov/writerep/.

2. Call your Senator. Contact information is at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm. The Senate would have to convict, but you're mostly calling to encourage your Senator to support articles of impeachment.

3. Still got energy? Write your local newspaper. Tips for getting in: make it short, find an angle other people aren't using (e.g. a specific reason for Bush to be impeached, not an overview of his crimes).

4. Send this to everyone you know. Better yet, write something to send to everyone you know. Your parents, your friends, your relatives you haven't seen in five years, everyone.

5. Go eat some sweet corn.

Happy 4th of July. Impeach Bush.

gym manners (nobody wants to hear that)

I work out (when I work out) at the university gym, which is mostly pretty pleasant. But dude. I mean you, the one in the muscles. The one grunting. The one who drops his weights after every single set. Say it with me: If you can't put it down carefully, don't pick it up. No, again: If you can't put it down carefully, DON'T PICK IT UP.¹

Every time you pick up a weight, you know you're going to have to put it down. Every single time. You can apparently gauge your own strength well enough to always pick up something you can't put down, so change your calculations. It's loud, it's distracting, maybe someday you're going to drop it on your toe or hit the mirror or my leg. If you can't put it down carefully, don't pick it up.

Oh, and stop with the grunting already. Nobody wants to hear that.

---

1. There are big signs saying that all over the gay gym, where the Gardener used to work out. The gay gym is very very professional. People do things right. You get sessions with a personal trainer as part of your membership. But the guy who used to own it donated to Rick Santorum.

served eleven days cold

All year, there was a group of five or ten juniors who just wouldn't do any work. No homework, no classwork, no tests, no nothing. Eventually I figured out why: they'd made a basically rational calculation that it would be less work to pass summer school than to pass my class. 20 days, easy tests, low standards. It drove me crazy, because they were right; but because they didn't care about my class at all, they had no incentive to sit down and shut up or learn anything or care about a goddamn thing I said.

Today, eleven days after the end of the school year, I got a call from the person who's teaching Algebra II at my high school this summer. He's in the same program I'm in, and he's planning to make them work. This ain't your usual summer school.

Revenge, mothafuckas!

natural selection

A partial list of selective pressures that modern medicine has made irrelevant to humans in the developed world (and the technology that fixes them):

Good eyesight (glasses, contacts, LASIK)
Easy childbirth (C-section)
To some extent, high sperm count (fertility treatments)
Lactose tolerance (lactaid, abundant and varied food)
Resistance to smallpox, measles mumps rubella, tetanus, diptheria, pertussis, chickenpox, polio, and meningitis (childhood vaccinations)
Resistance to black plague, streptococcus, cholera, infant diarrhea (antibiotics and water treatment)

Is this relevant information? If so, how and why? If not, why not?

intellectual communist

Rebecca Charles, owner of Pearl Oyster Bar, where I have never eaten, is suing someone who runs a similar restaurant on the grounds that he is taking her intellectual property. Yeah, he was her sous chef. But gray wainscoting is her intellectual property? Oyster crackers at a seafood restaurant are her intellectual property? Puh-leeze.

This just displays why the whole idea that intellectual property is somehow the same as physical property is silly. There are two macro-level reasons to protect intellectual property: so people have an incentive to invent and design and come up with cool stuff because they'll be able to make money off it, and because it's unfair when someone steals your idea and makes money off it. Unfortunately, that whole incentive thing is kind of getting lost and law is getting reshaped to value only the second one.

This is really what the internet radio copyright issue was about: internet radio stations, most of which make little money, are being required to pay SoundExchange, the royalty organization, a lot more than they previously had to. Worse, their decision is retroactive, which will probably put some of them out of business. This unambiguously reduces the flow of ideas and music and general awesomeness, and is opposed by many smaller artists, who get a lot more exposure through internet radio than regular radio. Similarly, early hip-hop artists could do crazy awesome sampling in which they used little bits of dozens or hundreds or thousands of songs to make a track or an album, which is instrumental to Public Enemy's early sound. In 1991, copyright restrictions tightened; in 2004 the 6th Circuit ruled that NWA sampling an unrecognizable bit of George Clinton constituted copyright infringement. Legal radio play for that kind of sound is over. Now if someone is going to sample another song, they're going to make damn sure they get what they pay thousands of dollars for, so you actually get a less creative sound from sampling as artists play bigger, less altered parts of the sample.

Enforcing the "it's unfair for people to steal your stuff" goal of intellectual property is particularly dumb because it's not like it hurts George Clinton to have an unrecognizable, heavily altered 3-note guitar riff show up in an NWA song. That's very clearly new innovation, new art, the kind of thing that should be a major goal of intellectual property laws, that it makes me a little despairing about the stupidity of the system. It also shows up why it's so dumb to treat intellectual property like an exact analogue of physical property: when someone 'steals' your intellectual property, you can still use it. If you take my electric pencil sharpener, I can't use it anymore. Intellectual property law needs to differentiate more clearly between situations where someone takes your intellectual property and you lose some important use of it (e.g. selling bootleg DVDs) and situations where something you made becomes inspiration (restaurants, books, musicians do this all the time) or part of a new art form in a way that doesn't limit your use (sampling).

By these standards, I think it's pretty clear that Ed's Lobster Bar gets to have gray wainscoting and a marble bar. And he may win, but I wish people would stop with the rhetorical equating of intellectual and physical property already. Especially since just about everything owes some kind of intellectual debt to someone, including all those musicians SoundExchange alleges to protect, making it almost impossible to tell where these lines should be drawn. Are we now going to prosecute all the Beatles rip-off bands? Every angsty teen-age girl who covers an Ani song at an open mike night? There's a telling moment in the NYT article in which Rebecca Charles, whose number one complaint about Ed McFarland's restaurant is the Caesar salad, whose recipe she says he stole, describes where her recipe came from: "She learned it from her mother, who extracted it decades ago from the chef at a long-gone Los Angeles restaurant." Does she owe her mother royalties? Does her mother owe the chef? Where is this silliness going to stop?

In the Public Enemy interview linked above, Chuck D gets asked what he thinks about fans remixing his tracks without permission. He says, "I think my feelings are obvious. I think it's great."

I <3 Elizabeth Edwards

So. Everyone hates Ann Coulter. Too bad most of her critics aren't as classy or resolute as Elizabeth Edwards,¹ who called in to Hardball to "ask her politely to stop the personal attacks," which thus far have consisted of calling John Edwards a faggot, wishing "he had been killed in a terrorist assassination plot," and claiming (in a column!) that he drove around with a bumper sticker that said "Ask me about my son's death in a horrific car accident." Seeing Coulter's response to Elizabeth Edwards asking her repeatedly and politely to stop saying horrible things about her family blew my mind. Coulter's responses were basically 100% lies, irrelevant, or ad hominem attacks: "I didn’t say anything about him," "I don't have enough money" to hang out with the same people as the Edwards family, "Why isn't John Edwards making this call?", "The wife of a presidential candidate is asking me to stop speaking."

I mean seriously, why is she getting invited on Hardball? Or anything? She's famous for being mean, and I know a lot of funnier, smarter, more interesting mean people I could recommend if Chris Matthews is fresh out of ideas.

Elizabeth Edwards's response was something you recognize if you're from the Midwest, or apparently the South: the polite, mild-mannered lady who will not let you walk all over her and will hold her line no matter what.² Edwards just kept saying that Coulter's nasty personal attacks "are not legitimate political dialogue," "debases political dialogue," etc. She's a force to be reckoned with, even if she's being resolutely polite. There are a number of people like that among my parents' friends, but I don't think I've ever seen it done that well. Coulter's response was all spluttering and vitriol, and the contrast could not have been more clear.

Unfortunately, the people who commented on that Think Progress video and transcript were neither so restrained nor so effective. There's plenty to hate about Ann Coulter, but insinuating that she's transgender or talking about her "deteriorated face" or calling her a coke whore - these are ad hominem attacks that mimic the worst of Coulter's own rhetoric, not to mention being horrifyingly anti-feminist. I feel like I need to take a shower just reading the thread. Remember, the problem isn't what she looks like, it's what she says and how she says it. The way to fight her is to pull an Elizabeth Edwards: pointedly courteous, consistent, honest, clear, letting Ann Coulter make herself look foolish.

---

1. The more I learn about John Edwards as a candidate, the more I like him. There was that NYT magazine profile about his focus on poverty, which was fairly satisfying. I also read and dissected his health care proposal with Abramorous. It's really good. If he could get it passed, it would totally work: cover everyone, reduce costs, take some of the burden off businesses. I feel conflicted about how much I like Edwards, though, because I kind of want to be supporting Obama. Yes, because he's black, but also because he does a kind of policy-oriented politics that I like, because he's not tainted by previous elections, because he's different from the political mainstream in a way I like. Hrrumph.
2. Another courageous Elizabeth Edwards moment: she (1) attended a San Francisco Pride kick-off breakfast for the Alice B. Toklas LGBT Democratic Club and (2) remarked off-handedly that she supports same-sex marriage. Word.

No wonder I like Goslings so much

It's aged in bourbon casks.

In other news of summer decadence, I've been to Capogiro twice in the last two days. Holy hell, that place is amazing.

Monday: strawberries and cream gelato with cucumber sorbetto; the person I was with had Charentais melon and grape sorbetto.

Tuesday: rhubarb sorbetto with rosemary honey goat milk gelato, which, whoa; the person I was with (someone different) had gooseberry and lychee.

Who wants to go with me tonight?

read The Omnivore's Dilemma

I've read something like 5 books that really changed something about my life or my thinking. I've read them all since I turned 20, and together they make up a good part of how I think about the world. They were significant not because they radically changed everything about how I thought, but because they consolidated and added to some understandings I already had, and got me started thinking in new directions.

One of them is The Omnivore's Dilemma, which has the disadvantage of being pretty trendy right now. But let me tell you why you should read it anyway. Mostly because it's awesome, and a little because it's about to come out in paperback.

It's subtitled "A Natural History of Four Meals." Michael Pollan - the author of basically all the local food articles for the NYT magazine in the last few years - investigated four ways of getting and making food, then cooked a meal from each. Significantly, he originally planned to make it three: industrial (meal at McDonalds), organic (Whole Foods, etc), and wild (hunting and foraging the ingredients). As he got deeper into the research about organic farming, he realized that enormous, single-crop organic operations like Earthbound Farms (proud producers of that fancy lettuce mix) are wildly different from small local farms that integrate different kinds of plants and animals.

That tiny insight is the seed of what is so important to me about this book: the recognition of farms as ecosystems. They've got plants making sugar from the sun, animals eating plants (insect pests or farm animals), animals eating each other (predators of insect pests), nutrient cycling, all the features of any ecosystem. Once I started to see a farm as an ecosystem - a small one, dependent on the other systems around it, but an ecosystem nevertheless - the whole way I thought about responsible farming changed. I'd been very focused on an idea about how much absolute energy it took to produce a food item, which led me to be a vegetarian for about 10 years. Reading The Omnivore's Dilemma shifted my focus to trying to eat in a way that contributed to the existence of sustainable ecosystems.

Sustainable ecosystems are sustainable by virtue of the fact that they can keep going. Whatever they are doing doesn't hit a dead end or run out of steam. To do that in the temperate zones of the US often focuses around soil: keeping erosion pretty minimal, keeping a fairly closed loop in which nutrients leave the soil, go into plants, and somehow get back to the soil. Without the closed loop, the value of the soil erodes and the land needs external fertilizers to be usable; farmers end up dependent on expensive inputs, so they have to maximize production to make it, so they deplete the soil, so they need more inputs. This isn't a sustainable system. You need to do real nutrient cycling. It turns out that animals are by far the best way to do this, because they eat plants and parts of plants and then poop out easily composted fertilizer. Do this right and you can actually restore a piece of land to health by farming it, as Pollan describes Joel Salatin doing on Polyface Farm. This makes a lot of sense when you remember that this continent was managed for food production by Native Americans even when they weren't using agriculture.

This took me in two directions. On a practical level, I decided I wanted to support healthy farm ecosystems. Since farmers need animals to do nutrient cycling, that means supporting small-scale animal production. It would be nice to say that this is why I originally started eating meat again. Actually, I was sleeping outside 150 nights a year and was just cold all the time. Bacon? It'll keep you warm at night. I kept eating meat after I gave up my wilderness job because I'd rather get my protein in a way that helps small-scale farmers have healthy ecosystem than eat industrial soy, which is planted in monocrops that are ruining the unbelievably fertile prairie ecology of the Midwest. I see my food choices differently: partly because of The Omnivore's Dilemma, also partly because of the Gardener and my parents. Wendell Berry said "eating is an agricultural act." Eating is also an ecological act, because farming is an ecological act.¹

The other, maybe more interesting, direction my mind went wandering while I read The Omnivore's Dilemma was to thinking about the sort of complexity that is at (maybe beyond) the limit of human understanding. In one of his articles, Pollan lists the known antioxidant compounds in a sprig of thyme: it goes on for a full paragraph. In the book, he describes the NPK revolution, in which agronomists believed they had discovered the only nutrients plants needed: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Feeding plants only these three things is roughly equivalent to feeding a human a blend of pure fat, carbohydrate, and protein. Even if you eat the right proportions, you're missing tons of minerals and vitamins and compounds we know almost nothing about right now. Also interesting is that the meat of a grass-fed cow is nutritionally very different from the meat of a corn-fed cow, and has meaningfully different effects on your body; there are also differences among vegetables grown in different circumstances (unsurprisingly, organic vegetables have more and more complex nutrients).

It reminded me of a conventional banana plantation I visited during a study abroad program in Costa Rica. The banana plants were tied to each other: bananas aren't actually trees, but a type of large herbaceous plant; the fruits of commercial banana plants are so large that they will actually knock the plant over if it isn't tied to something. The dirt was gray and clay-ey and looked dead. Nothing grew on the dirt in between the trees. The plantation was constantly sprayed with pesticides. I remember it as a place where the banishment of other life forms made it feel like a wasteland. An organic banana plantation just felt like a farm. Birds, insects, ground cover - stuff lived there.

Humans now know that we need biological complexity much more strongly than we can describe how it benefits us or even how it works at all. We're using very blunt tools to deal with a biological world that is totally awesomely complicated. In this context, some of our best resources are intuition and tradition. I find it paradoxically wonderful is that we often can't pinpoint why something works using science, because there are too many variables; but traditional methods of farming and eating often turn out, when analyzed, to work for scientific, provable, identifiable reasons. Sometimes not, like slash-and-burn, but even for slash-and-burn agriculture we can understand why it doesn't work: it's based on the assumption that more land will always be available. Partly because of The Omnivore's Dilemma, I'm really interested in understanding these valuable mental shortcuts we all seem to have.

Did I mention that you should read that book?

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1. There's some privilege involved in being able to eat like this, but maybe less than you'd think.

Yards: now cheaper at the pump

In college I drank terrible alcohol, because it was free. I also developed a working philosophy that the crappiest beer I'd pay for was Yuengling Lager. Which is not that crappy, but pretty cheap, and thus holds a special place in the heart of any Philadelphian. If you want to order it at a bar, you ask for lager. No specification required.

The other beer we love in this city is Yards. It's "the oldest and only surviving brewery within city limits," and it's definitely one of those hipster revival kinds of deals. Whether you drink Yards or Yuengling might say something - or might not - about which part of Philadelphia you identify with. Yards is a little more expensive, more in the price range of something like Magic Hat - maybe not quite as exciting a brewery as Dogfish Head, which describes itself as "off-centered ales, for off-centered people" and is probably my favorite local brewery. But Yards gets the love, because it's from here, and because the Yards Variety Pack? It's exactly what you want for a party.

I went to the beer store today because we're having a party, and what do you know? Yards is no longer in the same price range as Magic Hat or Dogfish Head. It's a lot cheaper. Not as cheap as Yuengling, but Yards is now cheaper than Blue Moon. Yards is now cheaper than Corona. I asked the guy at the store about it, and he says Yards has started doing their own distribution locally. No distributor knocks off $4 a case.

People, this is fucking genius.

doing right

It's the last day of the school year. Thursday, the custodian on my hall asked why I work here. Why didn't I go somewhere else?

I started teaching because of this girl, call her Anastasia. It starts before that, of course, with the many accidents that got me leading wilderness courses in Philadelphia. But the teaching part, that's because of Stasia. Stasia is awesome. She's smart, she's motivated, she's responsible, she's got great interpersonal skills. Once, I saw her pull a kid aside at the beginning of a trip and calmly, politely ask him to stop making sexist comments because it made her angry. He stopped. Another time, she was the leader for the day on a trip. She was uncomfortable because she'd have to motivate people in the morning and she thought she'd be scattered if she was trying to pack herself. She asked me to wake her up half an hour early that morning. So when Stasia needed someone to tutor her for the SATs, of course I said yes.

She couldn't add fractions. Or multiply or divide or define them. She said the last time she'd learned any math was 8th grade. She had As and Bs in her math classes.

It still makes me angry to think about it, though I understand it a lot better now and I'm not as angry at her teachers as I was. But I started teaching in order to do right by Stasia and kids like her, kids who just need the chance to learn something, who are self-motivated enough to really do well but aren't getting what they need. That's why I stayed this year, even when it was hell. It's someone else this year, of course - a few someone elses, not many - and while there are a lot of kids I didn't do right by, I do think in the end I did right by Stasia. If she'd been in my class, she would know how to add fractions by now, and a hell of a lot more. And that's something. Not everything, but something.

who's classy?

I think my favorite ridiculous NYT article of the last month is the one about how important it is to save money. Anyone who's looked at compounding recently knows that time makes a huge difference - that's not what's ridiculous.¹ But check out this question:

"How would you like to try to live on $40,000 a year in Washington or San Francisco?"

Once you regain your composure, let's talk about reality. Not even the reality of poverty - don't forget that the poverty line for an individual is $9,800, and that to be eligible for food stamps you can't make more than $12,744 a year - but the reality of college-educated, middle-class identified single (or married-no-kids) people like the ones that article speaks to. I live in Philadelphia - much cheaper than Washington or SF (where I've lived briefly), certainly much cheaper than NY - so my qualifications are somewhat limited. Except check it out: I lived on $11,000 for a year here, and I know people who've lived on less. That is less than a third of what the author describes: Washington, NYC, and SF are at most twice as expensive as Philly, and then only for housing. Food costs in the Bay Area are way less than anywhere on this coast. And I do not want to do it again, but I had a CSA share and I went out for brunch and I lived in a sweet apartment that I liked (and where the pipes froze every winter), and the next year I made about $15,000 and that was fine. I didn't pay for health insurance, and there my class status comes into play: my parents could afford to pay for my health insurance so they wouldn't end up bailing me out if I got seriously injured. But $40,000 a year? And you're wondering if you have enough to save a little? You need a reality check. ²

Some caveats. Abramorous pointed out, in heated discussion with Deb and me, that I didn't work in the business world, and that people who do so have expenses that I didn't. Clothes, meals out that are optional but will substantially benefit your career, haircuts, whatever. And that's true, but he and I disagree on how optional those things are. I work with people who make that much now, and let me tell you, people spend a lot of money on things they don't need. I know what most of those things cost, and really? $40,000 buys a lot of fancy haircuts. He also pointed out that before judging all these people so harshly, we should consider that some of them may have major expenses like student loans or health issues that aren't just for entertainment value. So, yes. If you make $40,000 and need to see a therapist or pay off student loans or travel cross-country to see your ailing family members, no judgment that the money's tight. But that's not the situation Damon Darlin envisions.

Fundamentally, this article reveals the class status of the people Darlin is writing for. The audience of the NYT Business section is upper-class, not middle-class - people who are used to having easy access to luxury goods and few or no limits on what they spend. And that's not reality for most people, so it's not surprising that when they make a semi-realistic salary, it pinches a little. But it should be surprising. We have a duty to empathy, a duty to try to understand how other people live and feel, and I think it's a pretty sad testament to our societal failure in that duty that people are so surprised by other people's situations.

Don't even get me started on governors going on food stamps. Not that it's bad, just the way they talk about it. Like no one knew! OMG!

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1. What, you're not messing with compound interest functions in your spare time? You should try it. It's pretty enlightening. Try modeling your credit card balance and your savings on there.
2. I don't share the general squeamishness about talking about how much people make. In fact, I think openness about salaries is an important workplace fairness tool, and an important way of dealing with the weird class undercurrents of pretty much everything.

make me the drug czar, please

Over breakfast this morning, Abramorous and I revamped American drug policy. Our goal was to devise a system that restricted access to dangerous drugs without a lot of collateral damage, and to reduce the violence that characterizes the illegal drug trade. It's a harm reduction and consumer protection perspective, not a moral one, and it's based on the fact that 35 years of a drug war aimed at restricting the supply of drugs (thus driving up their prices and making them harder to get) have been an abysmal failure. Street prices of most drugs have been flat or falling since the 70s, with the exception of acid, which is now harder to get. Drug use rates fluctuate, but don't seem to have been affected much by drug war policy.¹ Meanwhile, the federal government and the states spend millions of dollars jailing over 250,000 people for drug offenses, at great cost to those people's lives and families as well as to taxpayers, and with no discernible social benefit.

We need to get real and address the demand side. Start with drug education, which needs to be revamped to talk realistically about addiction as the real problem, and the fact that smoking pot is different from taking mushrooms is different from meth. Meth will ruin your life; smoking pot on weekends won't, outside of our stupid regulatory regime. Real, intensive drug education would address that and help folks analyze what risks they can live with and what they can't. We also need to provide tons more access to rehab - most rehab programs are full or expensive or both, and there's not nearly enough access even for people who want to get clean.

We also need to change the afore-mentioned stupid regulatory scheme. Here's a better one.

Class I drugs: Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana. Fully legal, limited restrictions on sale in the same vein as current restrictions on alcohol sale, age limit at 18, increased restrictions on advertising. Marijuana is a much smaller public health threat than alcohol: it's no more addictive, you can't overdose on it, it doesn't make people violent, it has long-term health risks for heavy use at about the same level. There's no real reason to regulate it more intensively than alcohol. So under the new plan you'd be able to buy it at liquor stores with proper ID. Also, drop the age for all of these to 18: the biggest consequence of having the drinking age at 21 is that 18-21-year-olds don't have the option of drinking in some of the best ways (e.g. having a delicious beer or two at a bar with some friends) and instead drink a lot more bad alcohol. Bump up the penalties for drunk/stoned driving, and the resources for getting home safely, since that's a big public health issue.

Class II drugs: peyote, mushrooms, LSD, Ecstasy, coca leaves (not cocaine), probably opium. These are drugs that have much more serious highs than pot/booze/tobacco, some of which I've been told (but not had confirmed) can trigger psych problems like schizophrenia (hallucinogens) or depression (E). Coca is only on this list because it can be used to manufacture cocaine - otherwise it would be Class I. Class II drugs would be fully legal to posses (maybe you have to be 21?), no advertising at all outside of trade publications that review different types, heavy licensing requirements to sell, high taxes. They should be available at pharmacies behind the counter (like Sudafed) or at liquor stores behind the counter. Exceptions to those restrictions for grow-your-own and religious use - restrictions should be on sale, not on use. Tax E more than hallucinogens, since the reason hallucinogens are not widely used is that they're freaky, not that they're pricey/unavailable, and even if they're legal they'll still be freaky. E, being pure pleasure, is much more susceptible to abuse. The point is not to make these drugs unavailable, but to provide barriers to access that slightly discourage heavy use.

The arguments for dropping the Class I age to 18 don't really apply to Class II drugs, because people substitute highs. You can see that now in the way people drink if they don't want the risk of using pot because it's illegal. With pot and booze widely available, there will be less incentive to circumvent the law because there will be substitute goods available. They're not fully equivalent, but I think people will substitute anyway.

Note that legalizing coca would be a huge benefit to Andean countries, where there are sustained, highly destructive campaigns to eradicate coca production by spraying fields with pesticides by air. These campaigns often hit the wrong fields or spray people and houses, and they also create environmental and agricultural damage. Legalizing coca, on the other hand, would allow farmers to grow a crop that's well-suited to marginal land and that has a significant role in traditional culture.

Class III drugs: cocaine, heroin, meth. These drugs are illegal to possess, manufacture, or sell, because they can ruin your life and they can do it pretty fast. However, ruining your own life and ruining someone else's life are two different things, so they call for different punishments. Get rid of possession charges: instead, anyone who possesses C-III drugs gets a ticket. This turns an expensive process of arrest, prosecution, and incarceration into something that actually generates revenue. It also addresses the public health issue of overdoses by taking away the fear that if you bring your ODing friend to the hospital, you'll get arrested.

Meanwhile, possessing anything over some specified limit gets you charged with dealing. Dealing is a mid-level offense if you're small-time and a hugely serious offense if you're big-time, have weapons, or use violence of any sort. This creates a major asymmetry in the market for these drugs, which I think would lead to small-time, non-violent dealers being able to have better success because their risks would be so much lower.

Since coca and opium are now C-II drugs and legally available, cocaine and heroin can now be manufactured in the US. This would break up the cartels and the dominance of violent gangs in that market by making it more like the situation with meth: any bozo with a basement could start manufacturing coke/heroin out of legal ingredients, and dealers wouldn't have to work with the sorts of people who can get illegal drugs past customs. Again, this opens up options for small-time, non-violent dealers while reducing the power of organized crime.

My dad points out that the most important part of this whole system is looking at the actual goals and the actual effects of drug policy, and drawing distinctions between different drugs and situations. Which is not at all what we do now.

Someone put me in charge of drug policy. Or maybe of everything.

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1. Again, except for acid, which is less available and less used than it's been for 30 years. I'd attribute this partly to drug war policies that make it riskier to make, but also to the fact that most people making acid have Ph.D.s in chemistry and thus have a lot to risk, and that acid is kind of a niche drug. This isn't a model that works for other drugs.

on second thought

Now that I'm a little less angry about Giuliani's ginormous lie (partly because I'm angry about something else¹), it occurs to me that this is exactly the sort of issue Plato was addressing in the Gorgias.

For those who are rusty on their Plato, the Gorgias (reproduced here, discussed here) is about rhetoric, and people who teach rhetoric. It starts out as an argument between Socrates and Gorgias about whether teachers of rhetoric are responsible for the misuse of what they teach by unscrupulous politicians. Halfway through, Gorgias, more or less defeated, hands the argument over to Callicles.

Callicles wins. Socrates gets him into a corner in which he must either accept that certain desires are more important than others, or lose his argument. Callicles tries to wiggle out of the corner, but ultimately, pinned down by Socrates, accepts all of the potentially unpleasant ramifications of his argument. Socrates objects that Callicles doesn't really think those things; Callicles feigns total sincerity. After Callicles has shown that he will say anything to win, the tone of the argument turns and Socrates is suddenly markedly less convincing.

Part of the point, we decided in that political theory seminar, was that if you are willing to say anything to win an argument, you're going to win the argument. Giuliani (like Bush and some others) seems to be literally willing to say anything to win an argument. In Giuliani's world, we had to go to war with Iraq because Saddam Hussein kicked out the UN weapons inspectors; in reality, we had to pull the UN weapons inspectors out because we wanted to go to war with Iraq. Those sentences contain many of the same words, but they are not equivalent. Giuliani is willing to say either, depending on which will be most politically useful - right now he's betting that the false version is more politically useful, and, like Callicles, insisting that it's true.

I hope we can all agree that having candidates for president say things that are blatantly false is bad, but maybe not. If we do agree, we need to put some serious thought into how we prevent such lies. One way is to change the stakes, change the incentives: Giuliani, Bush, and the others don't necessarily want to lie (they may prefer not to or they may not care), but they've made the reasonable calculation that lying will not damage them politically. So, it needs to damage them politically. Blog coverage is a start, but someone has to have the job of keeping candidates honest. Wait, didn't someone have that job? Wasn't it newspaper reporters? Right, and they're not doing it. So now we have someone to pressure other than Giuliani. I don't know how best to do that. Again, blog coverage is a start but no more. An option that has occurred to me is to write gazillions of letters every time a candidate says something that is clearly factually untrue, and ask why the paper is not reporting on it. My question, oh luminaries of the lighthouse, is what else we can do to change the stakes.

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1. All right, I have to go into detail. My principal decided, in her infinite wisdom, that on Friday the entire school should watch Stomp the Yard in the auditorium. I actually don't think that's a bad idea: it's the Friday of finals week, it's a half-day, very few people are actually doing any work. However. Four of my students were working on a project (a difficult project! about exponential functions! that required my help and a graphing calculator!), and wanted to finish it instead of watching the movie. So I said they could stay in my room, that I'd help them, and that whenever they finished I'd walk them down to the auditorium. I arranged for the teacher next door to keep an eye on my students in the auditorium. And for 45 minutes, until the principal found out, we had a great time and they learned quite a bit. When the principal discovered this example of student investment in learning, she screamed at me because I was not authorized to keep them out of the assembly. Yes, you read that correctly. I got in trouble for helping students learn.

She's like a tinpot dictator of a country too small to mean anything, so she has to search high and low for things to yell at people about. Like teachers helping kids learn.