school of no: pyramids campus

The tourist hassle at the Pyramids is intense.

"Excuse me madame! Hello madame! Excuse me! Hey!"

Don't look don't look don't look.

"Would you like to buy a postcard/headdress/miniature pyramid/scarf/sphinx/camel ride/horse ride?"

La' shukran (no thank you).

"Maybe next time?"

La' shukran.

Direct methods have failed. Next tactic: pretend to be friends.

"Where are you from?"

America.

"I love America!"

Mmm.

"You look Egyptian."

Raised eyebrow.

Eventually I just started saying, "Soy de España." Luckily none of them spoke Spanish.

I almost didn't go to the Pyramids, because it seemed like a hassle (which it wasn't, really). But then I realized they're the Pyramids. So I went. And dude. They're pretty damn cool. Also, the boat museum there is amazing. Absolutely amazing. Seriously. Out of control. And it's just one boat.

egypt #1

Some photos I would have taken, but couldn't:

At Wadi Rum, a man in a white robe and a red keffiyah leads 8 camels, all saddled, on a string of leads through red sand desert in the slanting evening sunlight.

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At Petra, a Bedouin family packs up for the evening. An old woman and a young woman are putting away the trinkets they've been selling; a young man and two little boys have brought up the donkeys they rent to tourists; a toddler sits beside the path.

(click)

The minibus from Taba - loosely packed with me, an 18-year-old Austrian, one world-weary 20-something each from Moldova and Ukraine, two quiet Jordanian men, and a security guard in a purple tie and mirrored sunglasses - careens down the middle, the actual center, of the Sinai desert road.

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The Austrian, the Moldovan, and the Ukrainian haggle the poor bus driver into accepting shekels, dollars, and euros rather than the previously agreed on 100 Egyptian pounds. People! There is an ATM in the Egyptian arrivals hall, and the charmingly named Israeli 'Change Place' will change your money as well. Use these services!

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One of the quiet Jordanians makes sure the minibus stops where I can get a taxi to where I'm staying and offers to let me use his phone to call the person I'm staying with.

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A houseboat on the Nile at dusk, ashtray upon ashtray on the table. A guitar. Radiohead on the speakers. Just like you'd think it would be.

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Sunlight through the high windows at the Egyptian Museum. Most of the display cards look like they were made on a typewriter in the card catalog era by someone who spoke good English but was only a fair typist. A few of the cases have cards written on lined notebook paper in ballpoint pen - these are only in Arabic.

(slideshow over)

I haven't spoken to anyone all day, except for some stilted efforts at telling a taxi driver where to go. Traveling alone is weird. Also, as a solo woman in a place with a lot of harassment, I'm not willing to talk to men at all unless I start the interaction (i.e. I hail a taxi). Mostly, this has been very very easy to enforce. It also means I'm not willing to sit and have tea when it's offered, even though that kind of hospitality is something for which the Arab world is (justly, as far as I can tell) famous.

I'm glad to be adventuring, but I still kind of want to go home.

where can you see lions?

Only in Cairo! and that's where I'm going today. I predict awesomeness and exhaustion. Thanks to everyone who gave me thoughts and advice.

good and bad

Petra is incredible.

I don't like my travel partner. He's a fine person, but we're not compatible. He's much more price sensitive than I am (and would probably sleep out in the desert if he were alone) and kind of hard to communicate with.

Petra is amazingly beautiful. Remind me to write about the Bedouin later. I think I'm going to go to Egypt alone.

grumble grumble grumble bah

My traveling partners have both bailed on me, so if I go to Egypt I have to go by myself (which I don't want to do). I can't reach the person I'm trying to call in the United States and it's too early to call anyone further west. No one has answered my beg for information. I don't know where I'm going to sleep tomorrow and all my clothes are dirty. I might want to come home earlier and it might cost $250 to change my ticket.

Harrumph.

israel #2 + bonus request

Now I'm in this crazy Orthodox mystical artists' community called Tsfat. A couple three quick observations before I let the 15 people behind me get on the computer, and then a plea for you to find information for me.

1. It is actually damned impressive that the Jews are still around. Not so many peoples with thousands of years of more or less recorded history who still have not only their genetic material here, but their culture. And that didn't happen because of secular humanist people like me. The Kabbalah artist who talked to us said, basically accurately, that until a couple generations ago the (or some of the) physical ancestors of the people in the room prayed daily that they or their descendants could someday return to Israel, and here we are, and that's crazy. To him it's the fulfillment of prophecy and prayer. To the Arab inhabitants of this land, it's the Nakba, the catastrophe. To me?

2. Whoa I'm so exhausted. There's much more to digest than I can possibly do before I leave. I'm looking forward (already, less than halfway through my trip) to getting back home where I can drink a cold beer in a hot shower and then sit down for a few hours and write and think.

3. Group dynamics with 40 people for 2 weeks - even when all those people are pretty chill - are still kind of intense.

4. Quick bleg: There's a new warning out for Israelis to not travel to the Sinai and to come back if they're there for fear of kidnappings, and there are tons of rumors going around about Iran. Does anyone know anything about the political situation in the Middle East over the last two weeks and want to send me some articles or a quick digest of what's going on (in comments or by email)? Also, does anyone know if the warnings are confined to Sinai or include Egypt proper? And finally, does anyone know how the status of American tourists with Israeli stamps on their passports fits in to these warnings? And finally finally, how should this affect my chosen mode of transportation (air/bus/service taxi) to Cairo?

israel #1

Two days ago: flew to Israel. Rode a bus with 40 other people to Jerusalem and got talked at about Abraham and this being the Jewish homeland. Walked through the Old City to a place where we could see the Dome of the Rock; more talking about the First Temple, the Second Temple, Nebuchadnezzar, the diaspora, and this being the Jewish homeland.

Yesterday: got up at 4:45 to take a bus with 40 people to walk up a mountain to a fortress in the hot desert (breezes feel like they just drifted out from a furnace) and get talked at about Herod and this being the Jewish homeland. Floated in the Dead Sea: it's bouncy! and warm! Weird! An attempt at discussion with 40 people.

Today: got up at 3:30 to walk up a different mountain in the slightly less hot (because earlier) and get talked at about David and this being the Jewish homeland. Then one of the most unearthly lovely places ever: an oasis. Trees moss water waterfalls caves swimming! Swimming! In the desert! You have no idea how good it feels (unless you do). Then took a bus to Jerusalem with 40 people to a hotel that connects to the intertubes. Tonight we will get talked at about Shabbat and this being the Jewish homeland.

Is anyone starting to see patterns here? Also I am having a lovely time and will write much more when I get home.

gone

I'm traveling in the Middle East for the next month. Wish me luck and give me suggestions, unless you're one of the fifty people I've already hit up for luck and suggestions.

stupid

Three guys showed up in the alley by my house today with a ladder, banging around and knocking over the trash cans, so I stuck my head out the back door to see what was up. They're taking down this big tree in the back of the house, which is covered with poison ivy. Covered. All the way up. These guys are not arborists: all they've got is some work gloves, a rattle-trap ladder, a chainsaw, and a rented moving truck. No protective gear of any kind. So I tell them about the poison ivy, and one guy starts freaking out, but another, who seems to be in charge, says naw, it's just regular ivy. Off they go. I told the guy who was worried about it to scrub himself in the harshest soap he can find when he's done, but they're still going to be absolutely covered with it. But what kind of person hires three dudes who don't know how to identify poison ivy - or much else about trees, from the looks of their work - to take out a big tree covered in a vine?

At least they're not going to burn the slash. Poison ivy in the lungs is nothing to mess with.

conditional ocd

If you know me, the idea that I could be obsessively organized about anything is kind of laughable. My room's a mess, my 'files' are stacks of paper in cardboard boxes or on the floor, and my strategy for keeping people from breaking into my car is to have so much random, essentially valueless crap in there that it's not worth breaking the window to see if there's something valuable under there.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty damn organized for any backcountry trip. It's not a conscious decision, but I'll take it - as far as places to get a little OCD, backpacking's a good one. Turns out that a month of travel in the Middle East gets me feeling the same way. I leave for Israel on July 7, and I won't be back until August 7. I'm making lists and trying to remember absolutely everything I could possibly need. It's spilling into grad school planning: I just made an excel spreadsheet to track my applications.

Maybe someday I'll fold my laundry.

driving up to New Hampshire

Some people like driving alone. It's a thrill. Good for thinking, with the red line of taillights like a guide to your thoughts, and the whole country linked up through the Eisenhower interstate system, and you're alone with your rattly engine and some meditative work. Not me. I want someone there to change the tape and read the directions and pass me a water bottle. But I can do it, and I take a certain grim pleasure in the doing - mostly in my ability to do it. The apex of that particular masochism came in 2006: 2500 miles over 5 days, one of them the 14-hour haul from Des Moines to Vail. That spring I put over ten thousand miles on my car, including 1500 in one particular weekend, almost all of them driven alone. It's exhausting work, strangely, to sit in one place and stare, carefully, ahead and behind and to the side while making small adjustments to a wheel and some levers.

Sunday night I left home at 5 pm and drove more or less north until 1:38 in the morning. Up through New Jersey and over the George Washington Bridge and across the Bronx. I stopped at a little gas station in northwestern Connecticut, did jumping jacks while I pumped gas, and laughed at some teen-ager who told me he liked my car. Got sweaty and exhausted and that feeling - does anyone else get this? - that my eyes are something like the robot's in Wall-E: set way back in the middle of my head and taking up half of it, maybe more.

It's so awful but it feels good.

worst. columnist. ever.

The David Brooks approach to social commentary:

1. Identify two opposing stereotypes.

2. Use them to describe a situation which is manifestly irreducible to stereotype.

3. Claim that using these stereotypes gives you special insight into the situation in question.

4. Ignore any inconvenient facts, which is to say most of them.

Tim Burke is correct that this is calculatedly dishonest. See Sasha Issenberg for further details.

last day

Two years ago, I was getting drunk with the entire Teach for America South Dakota corps in Valentine, Nebraska, after the last day of school.

Last night, I was playing ultra-competitive flip cup with a good chunk of the TFA Philadelphia corps after the last day of school. Earlier in the evening, people had been drinking and smoking cigars on someone's back patio when one of the people there called the principal and got her to come. She stayed for one drink and tried to get some of the teachers there to come work for her.

It was totally fun. I got home at 1:30. Now I have to go to school to be professionally developed. I'm not sure I'm going to make it.

expertise

There's an entertaining anecdote in one of the American political science books - I think it's John Kingdon's Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies in which a transportation researcher arrives at a conference on public transit by bus. All the other transportation experts gather around him and pepper him with questions about the bus. They are experts on buses who have no experience of buses.

It's the kind of thing that actually happens all the time - happened to me last weekend, at a party where I met an education researcher who wanted to ask me questions about teaching - but it reached perhaps its lowest state in the absurd situation of Chris Matthews claiming that Obama didn't understand diners. It's old news, over two months old, in fact, and too stupid to be worth resurrecting, except that goddammit it makes me mad.

The situation: Obama is at a diner in Indiana; he's offered coffee; he says he'll take orange juice. According to Chris Matthews, this is something that is not done in diners, and based on this fact alone I will guaran-goddamn-tee to you that I spend more time in diners than Chris Matthews does. Obama asked for orange juice for crying out loud, not pomegranate white tea or whiskey or something else you shouldn't expect a diner to have, and not for chicken-fried steak or something else you shouldn't substitute for , and he did not launch into a tirade about how coffee is bad for you. He asked for another drink which is usually available at diners, which is a completely normal response to being offered a cup of coffee.

Chris Matthews blathers about this violation of diner etiquette at length. He appoints himself as an expert on diners, and in doing so makes it blindingly obvious that he doesn't know what he's talking about. No experience whatsoever.

And then, icing on the cake, Matthews tells his correspondent, "You could do this. Shake hands at a diner. What a regular guy."

Recap: Chris Matthews - TV personality, estimated income over $5 million/year, married to an executive at J.W. Marriott, graduate work in economics - is telling us who counts as a regular guy.

Not him.

end of an era

It's the end of the year - end of 2 years, end of my time as a high school teacher - so I'm going to write a little about my students. It'll probably be cheesy. I'm writing it for myself, so don't read if you don't want to.

failure
Selene said, when I talked to her about her disruptive shouting and insistence that she wanted to go to the principal, that she hated failing my class, and particularly hated that she felt unable to stop failing. "Sometimes I want to fail myself, so I know I did it and it's not just you failing me."

So human. Also such an incredible thing to be able to articulate.

happiness
There was a little awards assembly and I gave two girls - the only ones there who had earned anything particular in my class - achievement awards. They hugged me: I was the only teacher to get a hug (I was also the youngest by about 30 years). Later, one of them came to talk to me in my class. She was practically glowing. She wanted to tell me something but didn't have the words, so I told her to say it in French. "I want to say - sorry, pour tout mal que j'ai fait."¹ It was probably the loveliest most heartfelt apology I've ever received.

being cool
I played spoons for about an hour with 8 of my favorite students this morning. I dealt and they were all impressed by my shuffling skills and fought madly over the spoons whenever the scuffle started.

A girl who is, as my mother would say, the glass of fashion saw me a few weeks ago with my glasses and said, "What is this?! It's not cute!" Monday and Tuesday she wore her glasses to school.

I am all over the yearbook, including one absolutely characteristic photo of me standing in front of a full class of students with my finger on my lips.

but not that cool
Speed Scrabble was a poor choice of game for people who don't speak English fluently.

statistical self-congratulation
84% of the students in my senior class are going to college or community college. The rate schoolwide is 30%.

Graduation is tomorrow.

McCain Watch: Taxes

McCain's tax plan is, ahem, bad.

Here's a handy graph (stolen from The Reality-Based Community showing the benefits to each income quintile of the McCain and Obama tax plans.

The benefits from Obama's plan are in blue, the benefits from McCain's are in red, and if it costs a quintile something that appears as a downward bar. It's clear that Obama's plan benefits lower- and middle- income taxpayers while costing the top 1% and top 0.1% quite a bit (all this is measured relative to 'current policy' - i.e. extending the Bush tax cuts - rather than 'current law,' which includes a sunset for the Bush tax cuts.) McCain's plan give everyone a little bit, but gives the top 20% more (and the top 1% and top 0.1% do even better); Obama actually costs the top quintile something, but is superior for everyone else. In addition, Obama's plan increases revenue (again, relative to current policy rather than current law) by 2%, while McCain loses 2% (not to mention his non-tax policy of maintaining troops in Iraq indefinitely, which will be very expensive and contribute to large deficits). The Tax Policy Center, which is a center-left, definitely academic, generally reliable entity (partnership of Brookings and the Urban Institute, gives this analysis of economic effects:

McCain's reduced individual and corporate rates would improve economic efficiency and increase domestic investment, but the larger deficits he would incur to do so would reduce and could completely offset any positive effect. In contrast, Senator Obama's proposed new tax credits could encourage desirable behavior, particularly if the childless EITC and payroll tax rebate encourage additional labor supply among childless low-income individuals. However, he would also direct new subsidies at an already favored group - seniors - and an already favored activity - borrowing for housing-which could probably be better directed elsewhere.

I think it's worth pointing out that it is not pro-business to cut taxes and increase deficits, which McCain is essentially inevitably proposing.

Obama does not get a pass here from me. Subsidizing home equity borrowing has been way overdone, and, like the Tax Policy Center, I think there are better ways to use that money. However, his proposals are far more fiscally responsible than McCain's 'cut taxes on the rich in war-time' plan.

The bottom line is that McCain isn't even good for business interests, just for (maybe) the top 1% who benefit so dramatically from his tax plans that it offsets the damage to the overall economy. And in fact his plan is so skewed that Obama's plan is prima facie better for the bottom 80% of the income distribution. If, as economists like to believe, we are all constantly making economically rational choices, I expect to see an 80 - 20 vote split this November.

negritude

There's a very interesting article about African immigrants in France, something I'm particularly interested in because I have several Malian students who grew up in Paris. The article describes both Obama's rock star status and his effect as a catalyst for conversations about race in traditionally race-blind France, as well as the growing movement among black immigrants to France to address race.

Personal note: My students have said, very clearly, that it is better to be African in Paris than in Philadelphia. My mother's response to that was: the deepest racism in France is against Arabs.

The article is worth reading not only for its fascinating look at race somewhere else - where race officially does not exist, but where far-right xenophobes were second in the 2002 presidential election - but also because it contains some excellent snippets.

For example, a summary of the trouble with ignoring race:

"The idea behind not categorizing people by race is obviously good; we want to believe in the republican ideal," he said. "But in reality we’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal."

France does not have particular trouble with educational inequity, but economic inequality persists:
The percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.

And for sheer color:
Youssoupha ... [a Sorbonne-educated Congolese French rapper] was nursing a Coke recently at Top Kafé, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant in Créteil, just outside Paris, where he lives. Nearby, two waiters in yarmulkes sat watching Rafael Nadal play tennis on television beneath dusty framed pictures of Las Vegas and Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. A clutch of Arab teenagers smoked outside.

That's right, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant just outside Paris. Beat that! (No seriously - what does beat that?)

dead past

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has been writing about trying to survive in Europe around 1000 AD with a secondary question about other time periods, still in Europe. Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East have obviously come up - people have suggested, wisely in my view, that someone whose primary skills are academic might do better in the Middle East or East Asia around that time.

I find this particular question totally fascinating, but the discussion makes me scratch my head. First of all, there's a blind assumption that the traveler in question is male and white. Much discussion of how much taller and stronger than everyone you'd be (I doubt I'd be taller than most of the men), little discussion of the relative rape risk, assumption that the obstacles will be those faced by an ill-informed foreigner, not by a woman who may legally be property. Similar for race: if you look dramatically different from anyone the people there have met (not just taller/stronger/healthier/better teeth, but completely different skin color) you might have some interesting reactions.

Second, most of the advice is about how to take over the world. I find this kind of laughable, especially when people assume that some small piece of knowledge would be immediately influential, or that you'd be able to somehow leverage your vastly! superior! knowledge of marketing! or your basic understanding of something very technical like telescope lenses in order to revolutionize the society. My favorite might be the person who suggests posing as a wizard (which in and of itself might get you killed) by using 'a magnet, some wire, and a water wheel' to produce electricity (where will you get a magnet and some wire? also, educated people may already know about electricity: the Greeks did) or by using a lighter (basically a fancy flint and steel, which is a very old technology). Also foolish is the idea that a modern person with no fighting expertise or reputation would be able to convince the nobility that your military strategy would be better than theirs. Still, there are some pretty good ideas in this category: selling boiled water, working on camp sanitation for your local ruler's military (reduce disease casualties in wartime? very useful), bookkeeping, a few simple technologies.

All of them ignore the most important thing. I think most of us would find that we have a lot of potentially usable information, but it's not going to do you a damn bit of good if you get killed (as a witch, as a heretic, just by pissing someone off). Since the original question was about what to do to prepare, here's my advice. Start by learning wilderness survival stuff: shelter-building, basic navigation and time-telling, how to build simple snares, gutting small game, edible plants, fire-building (flint and steel is your best bet here - bowdrill is a royal pain). Most people of the time will probably be much better at it than you, but it'd be nice not to look like a total fool; also, I think people are likely to be the most dangerous condition you face, so being able to ditch people for a while would be pretty useful. Second, learn as much self-defense as possible. In both situations, don't concentrate on our stereotypical ideas about what knights and other nobility do (swords? not your friends): instead, learn knife and hand fighting for self-defense, focus on small game in hunting, etc.

Remember that people don't have the scientific method as an integral part of their culture yet, so even if you start doing something that improves health outcomes or whatever, they may not be able to fully notice or understand those improvements. That's a real liability if you're trying to develop a sanitation infrastructure or do medical work: it's not going to be 100% effective, and the first failure may call your entire work into question, depending on the explanatory model people are using. These kinds of cultural differences probably cannot be overstated, though of course human commonalities remain.

Personally, my only real skill is medicine. And not just boiling water or basic anatomy, where the benefits are not immediately obvious: because I have some wilderness medicine training, I'm pretty decent at treating sprains, breaks, cuts, and other day-to-day emergencies where the pay-off is fairly immediate and not just epidemiological. Depending on where I landed, that's probably the type of work I'd try for; if I were in Christian Europe, I might also head for a convent.

I do not think it means what you think it means

Stephen Dubner, on the Freakonomics blog argues in favor of specialization and against eating local. The argument makes some sense: transportation costs, according to some recent work, don't account for that much of the carbon emissions created for food. Here's where my understanding breaks down. Dubner describes making orange sherbet, which was expensive and produced crappy orange sherbet: unsurprising. He concludes from this that growing one's own food is likely to be resource-intensive in money, labor, and waste, and that therefore specialization is a better deal. Which, fine, but it's based on some fundamental misunderstandings of the local food movement.

1. Eating local doesn't necessarily mean growing your own. I certainly grow fairly little of my own food (the Gardener of course has a garden, with lettuce and greens and tomatoes and herbs), but I eat mostly local, including items like eggs and milk that are totally impractical for me to raise myself.

2. Specialization can mean different things. The farmers I buy from have a specialized job as farmers, but they maintain the ecological health of their farms by growing a variety of crops which they rotate, and by incorporating animals into their farms. So their job is specialized, but they are generalists within that specialty: being a true specialist as a farmer means planting a monocrop, which then exposes your crops to greater disease risk and reduces your ability to let the ecology do the work of keeping the land healthy. Dubner conflates specialization of labor with specialization of crop, and they're very different.

3. Bizarrely, Dubner argues that growing your own will rarely be cheaper. This is just untrue overall, although there will always be exceptions. Herbs are a great example: a window box with marjoram, sage, thyme, oregano, rosemary, etc will run you something like the cost of 2-3 bundles of each herb. There are certain things where that's not true, obviously (eggs and milk are easy examples, but corn is expensive and takes a lot of land), but Dubner doesn't really investigate the costs: he just assumes that it's similar to his orange sherbet. What's particularly funny is that the NYT food section has a current article about how people are gardening to reduce their food costs, which does include some actual information.

4. Growing your own means using excess capacity. Walk around any city: there's tons of space to grow food, including patios, vacant lots, roofs, windowboxes. Because this increases the net food growing capacity of the planet, growing your own, especially for city dwellers using it as a supplement, is a pretty clear benefit for overall efficiency. Similarly, Dubner claims that people are bad at growing their own food, but this isn't a fixed point: the best way to get better at gardening is to do it for a few years.

As an aside, if I were trying to do what Dubner did with the orange sherbet, but in an efficient way, the first thing I would do is abandon the idea that it needs to be orange sherbet, and instead make something with some excess: this week, that'd be strawberry-buttermilk ice cream with jam strawberries that you can sometimes get at the Farmstand and the buttermilk that's left in our fridge from making butter out of cream that was going to go bad. Part of the point of eating local and being ecologically efficient is turning waste into food. Compost, buttermilk, yogurt, jam, dried tomatoes: take what you have too much of and make it useful.

small success

Weeks ago, one of my students, an extraordinarily dedicated girl from Sierra Leone, was in class when the rest of the students on a field trip and said, "You have to help me with my spelling homework. I don't understand it and my mother doesn't know how to read." I told my dad this story and he said that lots of Americans don't know how to read, but as far as this girl knows her home language doesn't have a written form. Not just, has trouble understanding Dickens. This is, has trouble with using symbols to represent sounds in order to communicate.

Last week, she got a B on her math final.

you know it's hot

1. I bought an air conditioner after 4 summers in Philadelphia.

2. I've been wearing skirts for the last 4 days. In fact, I bought a dress last night because the idea of wearing pants to school today made me want to vomit.

3. They let school out at noon yesterday and today.

McCain Watch #4: Less jobs, more wars

1. McCain called his wife a trollop and a cunt. Sixteen years ago, but yowzah. In front of reporters and everything, because she teased him about his thinning hair. Actual quote: "At least I don't plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you cunt." Hello, impulse control. You can read about it, apparently, in The Real McCain.

2. Speaking of the same pun, please watch the video below, from The REAL John McCain: Less Jobs, More Wars. This is what I meant when I said the anti-McCain ads practically write themselves.



Then you can watch the second one:


My favorite part is at the end, right before he starts falling over his own feet talking about the tax cuts, where he says he thinks the US is better off than we were 8 years ago and then says we aren't. Please watch them both. It's worth 6 minutes and 4 seconds of your life.

half right

California is denying water permits to development projects that don't have an adequate water supply, which turns out to be quite a few of them. While this NYT article, as usual, omits some important information (where are most of the permits being denied?) and is a short newspaper article so you don't get much background (have I told you to read Cadillac Desert? I'll tell you again), it's still pretty interesting. Adequate water supply in this case means meeting a 2001 rule that you need a 20-year water supply: California already relies heavily on water imported from the Colorado basin, so it's not clear where any new water is going to come from, especially since climate-change predictions have the Colorado basin and California both getting dryer.

The problem, as the article does mention, is that agriculture - mostly though not entirely heavily subsidized, environmentally devastating, corporate agriculture - uses much more water than residential and office uses. So the water boards are absolutely right to prevent developments - especially developments with golf courses! which should never exist west of the 100th meridian! - that lack an adequate water supply, but at some point agriculture will have to pay too. It's a sign of the lunacy of our agricultural system that we have dammed rivers and exterminated salmon in order to grow and heavily subsidize crops that destroy the topsoil, pump chemicals into the Pacific, and end up with land whose inadequate drainage concentrates selenium and other heavy metals and chemicals in swamps that then kill migratory birds and are essentially permanently unusable. And then we have to refrigerator-truck those crops across the country, exacerbating global climate change and further reducing the available water for California.

Smart.

McCain Watch #4: Candidate Rundown

Clinton: I can't believe she didn't withdraw from the race. I don't want to hate her - some of my first political memories are of the sexism in '92, and I want her to be the person we were so excited about then - but damn. She's making it hard.

Obama: While, like a friend who said this, I'm weary of being excited about Obama, I'm still really excited that he actually got the nomination.

McCain: In his speech last night, he committed one of the classic blunders, right up there under "never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line." (Come to think of it, McCain does want to get/keep us involved in a land war in Asia, so I guess more blunders are unsurprising). He criticized Obama extensively, and at the end of many paragraphs said, "That's not change we can believe in." It's a mistake to do that: it reminds his audience of Obama's slogan, in the same way that telling someone not to stick beans in their ears would bring up the idea in the first place. Moreover, when you hear an instruction like that, your brain has a tendency to edit out the 'not.' All McCain is doing is giving Obama a bunch of free publicity.

As an aside, it's pretty impressive that Obama's slogan is now so well-known that McCain can use it freely in his speech and assume his audience will know it. The other candidates certainly don't have that kind of recognition for particular phrases.

McCain Watch #3: small and scary edition

McCain's staffing decisions are one of the least impressive things about his campaign. The guy who claims to be against lobbyist influence hiring mostly lobbyists? Check. The guy who claims to be deeply experienced in foreign policy and "need no on the job training" being corrected about basic strategic facts in the Middle East? Check.

Now, we learn that McCain's Deputy Communications Director, Michael Goldfarb, believes that the president has "near dictatorial powers in foreign policy and war." Aside from that pesky bit where the right to declare war is reserved to Congress by the US Constitution, along with raising, governing, funding, arming, and disciplining the military; not to mention that the president's powers in foreign policy are to be exercised with the advice and consent of the Senate. Constitution? What constitution? Now, it's true that Goldfarb said those things before he joined the McCain campaign, but there's no indication that it was not his true belief - or what passes for belief these days. I expect - well, I hope - that this sort of thing will catch up with McCain. If he can't choose decent staff for his campaign, why should he be allowed to pick federal government staff?

McCain: now with even more terrification.

disc!

My brother and I are looking at getting Obama discs printed: good discs, 175 g, white with the blue and red logo in the middle, printed pretty large. Half the profits would go to the campaign.

I need to know, though, if anyone wants the damn things before I put in an order. So - do you want an Obama frisbee? Do you want it enough to pay $15 for it? Would it be cooler with plain red and blue or with sparkle red and blue for the logo?

surreal

Teaching is consistently surreal, but Tuesday might have set a record. A senior - Mon, who asked me out in all apparent seriousness last winter - was walking by my car when I got to school with a three-year-old, a little boy in one of those adorably adult jacket and floppy hat combinations, holding onto his left hand. It was his son.

Mon was there to give his senior project presentation on gangs, which he managed to do around 1:40. Most of the presentation consisted of a history of the Crips and their relationship to the Black Panthers, along with some pseudo-academic filler and quite a bit about gang signs and symbols. I sat in my classroom watching him draw gang signs on my chalkboard and explain which ones were for Crips and which for Bloods, and at the end he gave a rather incoherent plea to keep kids out of gangs through better parenting.

Afterwards, I asked him about it. Let's get real - you're in a gang, or you've said you are, and you have a son. Are you trying to keep your son out of the gang? Do you actually think gangs are bad?

No, he said. Around my way, it's more like a family - we look out for each other. And it might have some bad things to it, but it's a way for people to come together and I really don't see nothing wrong in it.

Then he went upstairs to collect his son from the ELECT office where he was napping, and I emailed him and the other teacher his grade.

glass houses; stones

Today, Bush called for a "culture of responsibility."

After you, Mr. President.

problems with industrial farming, in brief

The New York Times has an op-ed out about industrial animal farming. It's actually very good - it hits, briefly, all the major problems with the meat system, from rural impoverishment to labor exploitation to antitrust issues to environmental damage to antibiotic resistance. You might not actually know what all of the problems were from reading it, but any given sentence could act as a starting point to learn more about why, exactly, our food system is so totally fucked.

flabbergasted

I appear to have stepped into bizarro-world somehow. My students came up from lunch screaming and crowding around my door - I don't have a class right now - because, get this, they were arguing about whether someone had done a math problem correctly. I opened the door and 8 students flooded in and started screaming at me and each other - just trying to be heard, not aggressively - to demand that I a) referee the dispute about this particular order of operations problem and b) listen to the 10th and 11th graders claim mathematical superiority over the 9th graders. Following which a number of students demanded copies of the final review packet with which to demonstrate their claimed prowess.

Students are sneaking out of class to get math problems! The world has gone mad!

when cultural distance is horrifying

A student of mine - a really really nice Jamaican kid - said, "He's homo!" in class. Which, of course, triggered the predictable lecture on how there's nothing wrong with being gay and the real problem is that the other kid is touching him without his permission, which no one should do, gay straight female male etc.

"Where I'm from, it's different. If you have two brothers, and one is gay, they kill him. No one act gay because they know they'll be killed."

What do you think about that?

"I think it's good to kill them. It's the rule and I follow the rule. Besides they give you money."

As an afterthought, he adds, "We don't have no problem with lesbians, though."

a new way to waste time.

Go play Budget Hero.

In addition to being totally entertaining - if, like me, you're easily entertained - it's surprisingly instructive to see the costs of various things in context. Arts education? Small change. A good example of how a game is a great way to communicate some kinds of information.

My personal budget reduced debt from 38% of GDP to 16% of GDP, provided universal health care, capped carbon emissions, and generally made the world awesome. Somebody call the White House. Actually, scrap that, better wait til they care.

(from the Freakonomics blog)

more inherent problems with poverty

While I was home last weekend - digression: it was so great - a friend saw the post about stress causing asthma and pointed me to this Financial Times article which discusses the effects of stress via low social status on developing brains. Quick summary: it's bad. This suggests to me that if Teach for American and other education policy people are interested in eliminating the gap between rich and poor in educational attainment, they're going to have to eliminate (or at least dramatically reduce) the low social status and stress associated with poverty.

This also suggests one possible source of the Scandinavian 'bumblebee economy' (discussed, very briefly, in the Iceland article - basically, high taxes and high growth!): the Scandinavian states - with their excellent social services, low inequality, and strong safety net - more efficiently use and develop the increasingly valuable mental capacity of their citizens. This could also explain some of the findings on Sweden that Lane Kenworthy recently discussed.

As an aside, he writes about school choice in Sweden being a surprise for the left - I'd argue that Sweden in this situation doesn't hold lessons for the US, because inequality is so much lower that the risks of school choice are correspondingly lower. My concern about school choice is that it will leave low-income/low-status students stranded in schools that get worse and worse; if there is less social inequality, I would similarly expect less inequality in educational options.

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how to mock Clinton without being sexist

This is clever, hilarious, and depressing. In other words, Saturday Night Live at its best.

(from the Monkey Cage)

new life plan

I'm moving to Iceland. Next week, if possible. Who's in?

micro music review

Almost a month ago at probably the best yard sale ever - fancy little bowls, champagne flutes, lamps for $2, and two weeks later a free Kitchen Aid - I bought a box of tapes for the last tape player in the country, which lives in the dashboard of my car. One of them was Lucinda Williams Lucinda Williams, from 1988. She's up there on my list of all time favorite musicians (and in fact is my stock answer when my students ask, on the bet that they haven't heard of her and in the hope that maybe someone has) and the whole album is great because you can hear where her sound is going but it's more straightforwardly country, not how she sings now. Also it turns out that she wrote two songs I first heard other people sing: Passionate Kisses, which is on Mary Chapin Carpenter's Come On Come On and is a staple of family road trips, and Crescent City, which Emmylou Harris sings on Cowgirl's Prayer and which I have always loved. I love it even more now - partly because the way Lucinda sings it you're practically living the whole song, Crescent City and zydeco right up ahead and the first thing you do is go to your mama's house in Mandeville and then your brother takes you out to the bar and the weather's hot but the beer is cold. Emmylou sings it more like a party, no homesick ache underneath to tell you that even if you make it home, it's never really the same. And that's the other reason I love Crescent City more than I did when I was a teen-ager itching to get out of town.

Everybody's had a few,
Now they're talking about who knows who,
I'm going back to the Crescent City,
where everything is still the same.

I go home to the Midwest on Friday. I know exactly how Lucinda feels.

health and poverty

We usually think of poverty's contribution to ill health as being something to do with the ability to afford a particular diet or to get preventive care. Some new research, written up in the BBC suggests that stress during pregnancy increases the baby's risk of asthma, and amplifies the effect of other risk factors. Poverty is certainly a risk factor for asthma. Even absent the material stressors involved in being poor, having low social status relative to the people around you leads to stress; and poor people feel more pain, which is its own stressor. Here's poverty making people sick, not just preventing them from getting the material resources they need to be healthy.

Not like having more/better stuff wouldn't help. All the links along the side of the BBC article are to material factors that affect asthma risk, like pollution and breast-feeding (a time resource) and maternal diet.

humans who don't look human

Really interesting post about how photo retouching, combined with plastic surgery and intensive cosmetics - is making pictures of real people look kind of other-worldly and creepy - that is, putting supermodels and b-list celebrities in the uncanny valley of 'almost human' that hyper-realistic robots, prosthetic hands, zombies, and corpses also fall into. Not to just steal everything the article says, but there's a link to a photo shoot of Madonna that exemplifies the problem. This is the same thing that made Beowulf not just a really bad movie, but also creepy: they were doing motion-capture, so the stunts didn't move quite right and people's eyes looked dead. The uncanny valley: where Madonna, zombies, and really bad stunts meet up.

(got it from Marginal Revolution.)

New Adventures in Pandering

All right, last week I started McCain Watch '08, in which I point out something dumb John McCain has recently done. This week, it's ponies and sunshine week at the McCain campaign: McCain both gave a speech and ran an ad in which he essentially promised that if he becomes president, all our problems will be history in 5 years.

Here's the ad.

While my mother likes to say that you can never be too thin,¹ too rich, or too cynical about the stupidity of the American electorate, I honestly think that this ad is such dramatically awful pandering that, like the gas tax, it will actually make people feel condescended to, and they will therefore lose respect for McCain. I mean come on. This is the Straight Talk Express? McCain's political identity is falling all over itself.

The only other thing I have to say about it is that McCain's plan for reaching this fantasy world is primarily composed of 'setting goals' and 'having expectations,' a strategy which Gail Collins enjoyably eviscerates, squeezing in an anecdote about Republican congressmen in mohair sweaters while she's at it. This whole goal-setting, expectations-having business has been the dead center of education reform for the last umpteen years. There's a lovely moment in a generally interesting Atlantic Monthly article about rebuilding the New Orleans schools in which a business man who has started a charter school begins, in a very small way, to see that simply demanding excellence will not deliver it. Actually, and this is one of the many sad parts in that article, perhaps he doesn't begin to see it any more than McCain can see how hollow his vision is. But to the rest of us, it's crystalline.

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1. Please note: this contains irony, and does not require any sort of invective against my mother's fat phobia.

best week ever

Sunday: we got the first of the Meadow Run eggs - tiny, laid within the week, with deep gold-orange eggs - and one of them had two yolks.

Monday: Great meeting with a professor about me going to graduate school. She said, "I'm glad you've come around." A delicious dinner with Abramorous and the Gardener of home fries with good local bacon, collards, and another egg. Then I made chocolate sauce.

Tuesday: A complete stranger gave me a Kitchen Aid on the street.

Wednesday: I went running for the first time in ages, then made caramel sauce, which is now sitting in my refrigerator next to the chocolate sauce. Who's coming to dinner on Saturday? Also, Edwards endorsed Obama, one of my students told me I was a big help and that she would keep my email address when she goes to college next year, and I found a girl some summer programs at college club.

Today: The California Supreme Court overturned the gay marriage ban! California: now an even more perfect place to live. I'm reading the opinion right now. Most of my ESOL kids are on a trip today, but the ones who are here, when I told them they could go watch a movie down the hall, asked if I wanted to come and when I said I'd rather help them get ready for the final, decided they'd rather learn.

Who knows what tomorrow might hold? At this rate, I might become an optimist!

!!!!!!!

Today, a complete stranger gave me a Kitchen Aid. It's cobalt blue and shiny and I love it.

enterpreneurship

I dislike large-scale capitalism, but small business is (often) rad. Which is why it's particularly depressing to me that the United States, idolator of the entrepreneur, makes it much harder than other post-industrial countries to start your own thing. Not only because small business owners and the self-employed have to buy their own health insurance, but also because if you sink your money into your business and it fails, you're tied to your debts more tightly than you would be in other countries. Not to mention that if your business fails because of a health problem, you'd be one of the more than half of all bankruptcy filers who got there because of their medical bills.

McCain Watch 2008: the beginning

Having said that McCain does a stupid thing every week, I'm going to post the ones I hear about. I'm betting it'll be one a week easy.

This week: McCain allies himself with another lobbyist, this time one whose lobbying firm got $348,000 from Burma's military government in 2002. Not that McCain of all people has any reason to know that military prison in Southeast Asia is no fun. Or that Burma/Myanmar's junta is in the news this week for obstructing and diverting aid that could prevent tens of thousands of people dying in the post-cyclone catastrophe.

As hilzoy at Obsidian Wings says, "You have to admire not just the McCain campaign's tin ear, but their impeccable sense of timing." All you need for an ad is the Newsweek headline: "McCain's Convention Chair Worked for Burma's Military Junta."

The Democrats have an extraordinary knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, but at least they have plenty to work with.

contrasts

A McCain aide, on some reports that McCain did not vote for Bush in 2000:

"She’s a flake and a poser and an attention-seeking diva.... I know neither actor, but I assume they were acting."

In other words, he called a blogger names and impugned the honesty of two actors because they're actors.

Meanwhile, among the Democrats, "Mr. Obama’s top aides have also issued a directive to treat Mrs. Clinton — and her supporters — with respect and make clear that the decision to remain in the race is up to her." Which is not, like, a sign of total amazingness, but could hardly be a clearer contrast.

why I dislike David Brooks

He ends up on the wrong side of reality a lot of the time. He also writes about social science without bothering to know anything about it. I like this description of the kind of standard journalists and columnists should be held to, though I'd add that anyone who writes regularly on one subject (as Brooks does about sociology and political science) should have some kind of basic understanding of the academic ideas in that field.

first time for everything

Newt Gingrich is right about something: the Republicans are in deep trouble. Losing on every issue poll, the least popular president in the history of measurable presidential popularity, record-breaking Democratic primary turnout and registration throughout the country, and their candidate says a new dumb thing every week.

Don't get too positive on Newt, though. All his ideas are still bad.

something I wrote a long time ago

Are you interested in going into the wilderness to find yourself? Don't be like this guy. Dude quits his insurance company job and "went into the woods [to] find a way back to my roots and creative intelligence."

Signs this is going to go badly: dude goes by an Egyptian word for phoenix. Dude takes a queen-size air bed with him. Backpacking. With a queen-size air bed. On his back. Dude knows nothing about backpacking but decides to fast during his adventure. Apparently including minimal or no water.

Predictable result: dude has to get rescued by a helicopter and taken to a hospital.

Don't be like this guy. If you want to go on a backcountry trip, ask some people who know what they're doing how to be safe. I guarantee you know someone. Especiallly if you live in Berkeley like phoenix-man. I hereby offer to answer your questions about backpacking and canoeing, and anything more technical than that in the backcountry probably means you want someone with some experience with you.

The whole point of wilderness is that it's not controlled by humans. So if you're a city person, it's got a whole new set of dynamics and resources, and until you understand those pretty well you should be careful. Ed Viesturs climbed 12 of the 14 highest peaks in the world without oxygen. He's never climbed Annapurna. He said that he's never seen coming home as optional, so he's willing to walk away from anything that's too dangerous. This is a man who takes risks that for most of us would be off the charts, but it's the exact same mentality as [safe, reasonable] people who go out on weekend backpacking trips.

Second thing: the people rescuing that guy in California. Some of them are volunteers - I can't tell how many, but at least one organization that got called out. This is part of what burns me about people who recklessly put themselves in a position to be rescued. Most of the search and rescue people in remote areas (maybe less in Monterey County and other more densely populated areas) are volunteers. They give up their weekends to go to trainings, get familiar with the area, and pick people up who get lost; they buy most of their own gear. You'd be surprised how many search and rescue groups are volunteers: if you get lost in the Tahoe resort, you get rescued by paid people, but if you get lost skiing in the backcountry where it's a lot more dangerous it's Tahoe Nordic S&R that'll come look for you, and they're volunteers. I mean come on. You're going to ask volunteers to put in many hours for training and rescue because you didn't do some minimal research?

one item off the to-do list

I'm done with my master's program. IT IS AWESOME. (to be done, not the master's program. are you kidding?)

schools, prisons, and soldiers

Sara Robinson is really good. I read four articles by her today, all of them interesting. (Yes, I was avoiding something, why do you ask?) I don't really know what a social futurist is or whether it's a type of academic training that makes any sense, but her writing on the FLDS is worthwhile, especially if you have any kind of personal interest in what happens when Mormons go nuts.

However. What you should actually read is the one about the GI Bill - her basic take is that without good incentives to join the military, it will rapidly decline in quality, so that no one with any better options will join. You end up with chaos and violence, no discipline, and officers being unable to hold it down - you know, kind of like the public schools in bad neighborhoods. Like prison, this kind of situation will breed gangs, some racist, some religious, some based on drug-running and other economic activities. Those soldiers get out and they bring it all back home, turning most of the country into something closely resembling the neighborhood where I teach.

While I love my students, this is not the world you want to live in.

joy and trouble

A huge blacksnake, maybe 6 feet long, coiled and motionless on a tree. The secret language of porcupines: yowling, mewling, and complaining like a baby animal. Descendants of Malian kings. Two hours making a contract with a student, only to have it broken in all but the most technical sense because "I'm me, every day, 100%" - which apparently means talking shit about everyone else. Learning bits of French and Haitian Creole. Stories about Montparnasse and Bamako, soccer and football and the beaches in Ghana. Adolescent romanticism. The most beautiful views. Sleeping outside under a full moon, river and mountains shining below. Another blacksnake. A weird guy who found a huge turtle. "I want to go home, and I'm not going to change my mind" - "Ok, we'll talk about it more at camp:" at camp, "I don't want to go home anymore." Learning break-dancing moves. Standing on my head. Being back in my wilderness family. Yoga on a ridge top. A bear, 20 feet away, walking along like we weren't even there. Climbing a rock face and being first to the top, so other people got inspired to go again. Mac and cheese with nutritional yeast. More than you ever wanted to know about adolescents' bathroom habits. Five kids want to go back for two weeks. Facilitating the hell out of a group conversation for an hour and a half. The sweetest group journal. "When you go to Mali, you can stay with my father. He will do everything for you. You can go to Timbuktu with my uncle. He goes every time." Insight and recalcitrance. Signing a kite. Plans for a dinner, soccer games, popsicles. Venison on the grill.

"Can I come back next week?"

culture of poverty

Harry at Crooked Timber has a piece up about the deficit model of poverty. Which, more or less, is the idea that poor people have deficits that need to be fixed, and is, depending on who you are, either absolutely obvious or terribly offensive. There are some obvious ways in which poverty creates deficits: lack of time, money, knowledge of how to manipulate the system or what to say to get a response. Also, as Harry points out, poverty is a stressor, which makes it that much harder to adapt to situations effectively and make long-term plans. In addition, I would agree that, for example, inner-city African American culture has certain aspects which can disadvantage its members in terms of mainstream social success.

So yes. Deficits abound, and as far as I'm concerned it is foolhardy to ignore the problems in a culture simply because the group of people with that culture is oppressed. But it's the way this theory gets used, as well as the specific ways it gets promoted, that are troubling. For one thing, most cultures have significant deficits. My mainstream middle class culture sure has a lot of problems, but because we have social privilege, no one worries about those deficits. But glass houses and all that.

For another thing, when people talk about the problems with various cultures, they end up conflating problems with differences. As an example: current mainstream rap and hip hop promote a violent, supremely materialistic view of the world, but that's not all that rap and hip hop are, and it's not a problem with the style of music itself - in fact, I'd argue it's a problem with the record labels that choose that kind of content to promote. Another example: Amish culture values craft skills far more than academic skills; while this value disadvantages the Amish in terms of economic competitiveness, it's not a problem per se (especially since as far as the Amish are concerned, economic competitiveness is close to meaningless). The assumption that everyone should value the same thing is the road to cultural impoverishment, and also to something like the cultural equivalent of monoculture: a world in which, if conditions change, our culture collapses because it has become too specialized.

There's more to say, but I'm having trouble articulating it clearly. Something about the way people use irresponsibility, a quality present in all communities, to essentially wash their hands of the problems of poverty; and something about the way cultures develop, and the adaptive quality of certain cultural values in an environment under pressure. And maybe something about how if you're part of the oppressing group, you're probably not the best person to be telling the oppressed folks how they ought to act.

I miss my old job

I just spent 5 days in the woods with my kids. I came back happy and sunburned and loving my students and dissolved into tears in the middle of 3rd period because the teacher relationship is so limited and sad compared to the wilderness instructor relationship and I love my kids in class too but I don't get to feel it, almost ever, at least not during class.

I was always worried about what would happen if I started crying in class, and now it's happened and it was ok. I'm glad it was that class. Four girls stayed after to say they were sorry and it will never happen again and are you ok and please please please just don't cry, ok? Don't cry.

It's a good reminder both of why I don't want this job again next year, and why I do, desperately, want to be the instructor for next fall's wilderness course and go to soccer games and help kids get into college and send them pictures of trips for their myspace pages and yeah. All that. Everything but teaching math, which is the only reason I know any of them to begin with.

teacher turnover

I'm in my math methods class, talking about how most of us are leaving teaching at the end of our two years in TFA and how worried we are about education and its systemic problems. One woman talked about how she's always wanted children, and the terrible state of education makes her feel like having a child is a bad idea. We're talking about our guilt about abandoning our schools. And what it would take for us to stay.

While the things we talked about - feeling valued, feeling effective, being able to learn to be better teachers - matter, what it would take for me, as a baseline, to even consider it is very simple: it would have to be a better environment. People being nicer to each other. Less yelling. It's hard for me to concentrate on being a better teacher, on learning, on students learning, on having good relationships with kids, when kids are yelling at each other and other teachers (and sometimes me) and administrators are yelling at kids and other teachers (and sometimes me) and I need to yell to be heard in the hallway. It's just really stressful all the time. Make my day feel better. I still probably wouldn't stay, but I would think about it, at least for another year.

I think a lot of us feel this way, but it's hard to admit that we can't handle the environment, that we're not tough enough to hang - that it's not ok with us to get punched or threatened or cursed out or belittled or yelled at in front of students, and have that just be the cost of doing business. (All of those things have happened to me or teachers I know, and all but the punching have been done by both students and administrators). So we talk about professional development and observations. Not that they're unrelated. Just one is more important than the other, for me anyway, and it's the one we're not talking about.

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I wrote this mostly on Saturday and a little on Sunday, and then yesterday school was awesome and I feel like a rock star. But all of this is still true, even when things are great.

correct

"Hillary Clinton is not an attractive personality for a lot of people," said O'Brien, who noted that it's "very convenient that the same people who have a sense of discomfort with female authority they prefer not to examine" also object to her personality and record in specific terms, an antipathy they feel comfortable voicing. "What you get," said O'Brien, "is the energy of the first expressed in words of the second." (from Salon.)

guns and money

The United States outspends every other country on defense by $509 billion. Which is a pretty awesome statistic.

Except it's not the most relevant one: France is really part of the EU, so all EU defense spending should be lumped together. The US is at about double EU defense spending, which is still absurd but not quite as absurd.

(via Bitch, Ph.D. who lists the top two countries for defense spending.)

home dairy production

In the last couple of months, the Gardener's been bringing home unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk from grass-fed cows (and once from goats!) that was about to expire, and turning it into food.

So far she's made cultured butter, regular butter, halloumi, sour cream, yogurt, paneer, buttermilk quark, whey ricotta, cottage cheese, rice pudding, and chevre. All of it free.

Sometimes my life is awesome.

signaling devices

My students ask me about Obama all the time. They themselves are pretty much evenly split between supporting him intensely and having no idea what a political party is. For the first crowd, my endorsement is like a signal - about me, not him. It's like, maybe that white lady's ok. Maybe she really is on our side.

in honor of spring

If you are considering sending livestock, we would like one of these



and one of these



both of which were recently born to farmers in this area. The Atlas of American Artisan Cheese is full, as my girlfriend points out, of people who got one goat and ended up with a dairy. You can kind of see why. Also, she wants to get a goat. Just one. And she's been making cheese. Please make space in your fridge for our future dairy.

(They're both interesting breeds, too. The goats in the picture/link are Nubians, who have really excellent, high fat content milk. The calf is a Devon-Highland mix, and, as you can tell from its fuzziness, is going to be perfectly happy living outside, mostly on pasture, year round.)

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being female in public

Maybe a month ago I was walking downtown in the early evening, with traffic bunched up. There was a woman ahead of me wearing heels and a skirt, and a guy in a car leaned out the rear window and, clearly drunk, started talking to her, "You know, you're very sexy right now."

I couldn't help it. I shouted, "You're an asshole!" The woman, her friend, the Gardener, and I all cracked up.

A couple days later I told a friend - another teacher, about my age - about that incident, and he said, "What if that was the nicest thing she'd heard all day?"

I hate this. I hate it when people (well, men) act like it's totally cool to say things to women on the street, as long as the comments are nominally complimentary. (Similarly, last night some guy said, "Nice belly," to me, and acted offended when I flipped him off. "I just said nice belly.") It's not hard to hear something nicer than "You're very sexy right now" from a drunken stranger, because that's not a nice thing to say; in the context, it's harassing and possibly threatening. It's a claim laid to her body, to judge and appraise it, and "Here's your change" would be a nicer comment.

critter

The toad fish in this picture looks fake, like somebody made it out of old carpet scraps and foam and two fancy antique mother of pearl buttons. In fact, it looks very much like several creatures that live in my parents' basement, legacy of my grandmother's costume and set projects.


Also, my household has become obsessed with baby goats. And dogs. It must be spring. Please send livestock! They can live on the half-roof out the kitchen door.

bad planner

I have never yet managed to hand in a major end-of-semester paper without taking a sick day. This makes me feel bad about myself.

irritating hypocrisy

Stock prices are down, CEO compensation is up.

At least when people complain that teachers (average salary: $47,602) should get paid for performance, they can blame the unions. Maybe what teachers need instead is a board of directors.

dinner at the Experimental Cafe

You know those elementary school cookbook fundraisers where everyone puts in a favorite recipe, and inevitably one of the recipes is for 'puppy chow' and another is for 'mud' made from chocolate pudding, oreos, and gummy worms? or, and this I find truly disgusting, kitty litter cake. Well, there's a new recipe in town. It's delicious, disturbingly realistic, and what the Gardener made for our dinner last night.

Poop in the Grass
(for 4, or 2 plus lunches)

1 pound Jamison Farm merguez lamb sausage, defrosted
1-2 pounds baby sweet potatoes, scrubbed well and trimmed
spring mix and maybe some microgreens

dressing
goat yogurt (and maybe some sour cream for body)
herbs (rosemary and thyme)
salt to taste

Put the sweet potatoes in a lightly oiled pan, and roast at 425 until soft.

While they're roasting, make the dressing: whirl the goat yogurt in a food processor with the herbs, or just chop the herbs and mix with the yogurt. Put in sour cream if you think it would improve the texture. You could also use buttermilk or regular yogurt thinned with buttermilk if goat yogurt doesn't happen to end up in your fridge.

Cook the sausage in a pan over medium-high heat with a tiny bit of oil until it's browned on the outside and no longer raw in the middle.

Arrange the spring mix in a circle on each plate. In the middle of the circle, put sausages and sweet potatoes. Garnish with microgreens, and serve the dressing at the table.

(local: everything but the salt, which is from Maine, and the olive oil, which is from Trader Joe's.)

the flexible economy

Mobility is down 27% year to year, likely due to the housing bust: people can't move if they can't sell their homes, and are much less likely to move if they can't get more for the homes than they owe. In economic hard times, it makes it even harder for people to get work.

Here's the thing. Constraints on mobility and innovation are also long-standing results of our health insurance system. Fear of being unable to get or afford health insurance is one of the biggest existing deterrents to starting a small business, free-lancing, or otherwise innovating in ways that free-market economic principles would seem to support. I don't understand why universal (preferably single-payer) health insurance isn't the single biggest issue for the Chamber of Commerce and every small-business organization out there, as well as for anyone who has ever considered starting a business or has free-lancing skills.

Big corporations should be in on it too, seeing as their competition throughout the industrialized world already gets the huge subsidy of paid-for employee health insurance. They have to pay taxes for it, yes, but, unlike health insurance, that's a predictable expense that grows fairly slowly.

why I should stop teaching K-12

My brain isn't on at 7:55 am. It just isn't. Knowing that today I had 3 hours of state testing to wake up made me practically skip for joy this morning.

buy organic

I keep meaning to write about how I look at food in the grocery store and decide what to eat (which may or may not have any relevance to your life - mostly, Em asked me to, and I said I would), but this story is the kind of thing that makes me so uncomfortable buying conventional produce, especially out of season. It's an article about songbirds dying or having severe neurological problems from high concentrations of pesticides used on produce in Latin America. Setting aside my strong suspicion that anything that kills birds is probably bad for my long-term health, it's a serious downer to sit down to dinner and start thinking about poisoned songbirds.

Similarly, I can't buy conventional strawberries anymore because I just think about sea otters having immune problems and being poisoned by toxic algal blooms from all the pesticides and fertilizers dumped on the strawberry fields outside Watonville. So, no strawberries since last spring, except maybe at a catered event or something where I didn't buy them. I can't wait for May, when I get to have them again.

Addendum: The article also specifically mentions organic coffee and bananas as priorities. Having seen coffee and banana plantations firsthand, I agree. A conventional banana plantation is a horrible place - dead land made of eroding grey clay with plants so weak they have to be tied to guy lines to stay up. The organic plantation I visited was like a very managed forest, with leaf litter and little plants and other live things. Shade-grown coffee is especially important because it's a cash crop that allows farmers to maintain forest cover, which is just unbelievably ecologically valuable, especially in the tropical regions where coffee grows.

What you get for ... $3 trillion

You get a lousy, mismanaged war.

I meant to post this the day after it was published, but somehow forgot (and in the meantime got the book for my birthday, but haven't read it). Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel-prize-winning economist, takes a stab at the messy, corrupt accounting of the war, and, well, it's an oyster carnival.

I guess I should stop being surprised.

not 'how much', but 'for whom'

I read the title of this article and thought, exactly! Which is always satisfying. Title in question: "Parties Differ on Whom Economic Aid Should Help."

The Republican Party has pretty clearly abandoned its efforts at non-intervention in the economy: instead, its policies are trying to support 'markets' - which often means, big players in markets - instead of individuals. These supports are often framed as 'loans' or 'tax cuts' but are no less direct aid to a specific segment of the population than welfare is. A well-known example is the home mortgage interest tax deduction, which lets home-owners reduce their tax payment because of the money paid in interest on a mortgage. This is a fairly extensive subsidy, worth quite a bit of money, but because it is framed as a tax exemption (rather than a transfer payment) and because it mostly affects relatively well-off people (since you only get it if you itemize your tax deductions, which few low-income people do) who own homes (and is more valuable the higher your income), it's not framed as government assistance in the same way that Section 8 housing vouchers are.

The credit-crisis aid is a similar situation: Democrats frame their argument in terms of assisting individuals who bought homes; Republicans have defended huge loans to Wall Street - which is a big subsidy to banks and firms that might otherwise go bankrupt or be unable to secure credit. At the consumer spending and recession level, the Bush tax rebates are similar to the home mortgage interest tax deduction: assistance for people who pay taxes on income, not for the unemployed or very poor, and becoming more valuable (to a point) as income increases. Democratic proposals, by contrast, mostly focused on higher transfer payments.

The Republicans like to claim that they're not providing government assistance - that they're working for small government - when they reduce taxes. The truth is, it's still assistance, whether by giving people money directly or reducing the amount of money they have to give you. But there are three things about tax-based assistance that are very different from transfer payments:

• Assistance provided as a tax break systematically advantages wealthier people, who get a greater reduction in their taxes (and, because of the tax rate goes up as income goes up, often a greater percentage, not just absolute, reduction).
• Because family wealth confers significant advantages on children and young adults (see the problematic but very interesting The Hidden Cost of Being African-American), even a tax/benefit code that does not systematically advantage the wealthy will perpetuate and perhaps increase inequality just by allowing families to pass on advantage. Neutral is not neutral.
  
• Tax breaks are not stigmatizing or difficult to receive. You just do your taxes. No showing up at the office or waiting in line or having a different way to pay for things from the other people at the store or needing to find a Section 8 - friendly landlord.

Assistance is assistance. It's just who you help. If you're Bush or McCain, you focus on banks and people who pay a lot in taxes. If you're Clinton or Obama, you focus on people who make less. The money still gets handed out.

a more perfect union

A little before 10 pm on a school night, when I really should have been asleep, I started playing this speech. I'd read it, and heard snippets; the Gardener hadn't heard it at all. The first thing she said was that she didn't think she could pay attention to the speech right then and maybe she could listen to it later. Then the speech started. Then she sat down in a black folding chair, wrapped a blanket around herself, and stared at the screen for the next 37 minutes and 26 seconds. We could not have stopped the speech, any more than we could have photosynthesized. It might be the best speech I've ever heard. No politician has ever talked about race honestly in my hearing before; there's a single off moment, when he talks about Israel, but the rest is extraordinary. It is simultaneously about reality and about ideals, about accepting pain and messiness and working towards the best in each person.

It's worth watching, even if you've already read the transcript. The New York Times has better quality video and a linked transcript. It's worth sending to everyone you know. It's worth watching again.

paging califloridans

This is one of those pieces of legislative arcana that has the potential to be bizarrely meaningful in the lives of many people. It's called Farm Flex, and Jack Hedin, a Minnesota farmer, wrote about it in the NY Times about a month ago. (I'm late. Shut up.) Our current farm policy, which is massively fucked up in about 15 dimensions, directly subsidizes commodity growers for I think 5 crops: corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, and cotton. I'm going to resist the intense temptation to complain about these subsidies in ways irrelevant to the topic at hand, and note instead that various other crops are subsidized indirectly (for example, by building expensive dams that provide cheap water - now go read Cadillac Desert). The direct subsidy crops, though, carry a specific penalty if you switch off commodities to, say, grow fruits and vegetables. A farmer who makes that switch has 3 costs: loss of the subsidy for the acres in question; a fine based on the value of the crops grown; and future loss of the subsidy for the acres in question.

The first cost is reasonable, even in crazy commodity-subsidy world: if you're not growing commodities, it makes sense not to be subsidized to grow commodities. But the second cost makes it very difficult for farmers who switch to make any money, and the third cost is a huge future risk. Farmers who would switch are mostly not in viable parts of the country for large-scale production to compete with, say, California - the climate in Iowa wouldn't work - so they'd be supplying local markets. That's what makes this a nationally meaningful policy issue. There's a bill - Farm Flex - to cut out the second and third penalties, to make it more possible for farmers to try food production, and it's a good bill. It's pretty dumb that the federal government is actively protecting large-scale ultra-commercial growers just at the time when people are really interested in local food.

The opponents to Farm Flex are mostly California/Florida-based businesses, which makes it your job, my California/Florida-based friends, to call your member of Congress, or, if the bill makes it to the Senate, your Senator. Texans should also call. And everyone else.

You can know when that's happened by looking at this nifty widget, which I just discovered. (OK, never mind, the widget isn't working. You'll just have to google H.R. 1371 yourself.)

blur: gender

It was interesting to read Elizabeth Weil's article about single-sex education immediately after reading Women Don't Ask (a book about gender and negotiation that I very much recommend, for reasons I'm about to go in to). Weil splits the world of one-gender education advocates into "two camps: those who favor separating boys from girls because they are essentially different and those who favor separating boys from girls because they have different social experiences and social needs." The first camp relies primarily on some very sketchy brain and development research - that boys and girls hear differently, smell differently, draw different kinds of pictures, prefer different temperatures - and comes to the conclusion that boys will learn better actively, and girls will learn better through interpersonal connections.

Some of this research purports to control for socialization because it is done with young children - interesting in light of the fact that parents describe boy and girl babies differently (girls as more frail, boys as more robust) when there is no discernible medical difference. Women Don't Ask also cited one study with very interesting implications for research design: young children who are offered the choice of playing with 'boy' toys or 'girl' toys (trucks/dolls, etc) make the gender-appropriate choice when an observer is in the room, but disregard gender when they think they're not being observed. There are a couple of other, similar studies that suggest that such choices persist (women make higher demands in negotiation letters when they think no one will know if the author of the letter is male or female). When the research that suggests that boys and girls draw different pictures or have intrinsically different preferences was done, was there an observer in the room? Was that observer's gender considered? The research the 'intrinsic difference' folks are using to justify single-sex education is not only a very crude sorting tool (great example of this in the article from Giedd), but also has serious observer bias problems.

Which leads me to the same damn conclusion I always make about gender: we don't know a damn thing about what's innate and what's learned. Maybe a damn thing. But not more than that.

two unrelated statements

Darth Vader, Richard III, and Hamlet are the names of my grandmother's stove, dishwasher, and refrigerator, respectively.

I still love California and I never want to leave.

bad math education

Student: "I don't want to understand, I want a calculator!"

Me, in my head: "This is why you and I don't get along."

good math education

In case some of the two or three people who read this blog don't also read Crooked Timber, I highly recommend Lane Kenworthy's post on how to visually display income inequality levels over the last 40ish years. To me, this is a more mathematically complex version of what I would like students to be learning in math classes: how to represent real-world information in abstract terms so that the information is communicated clearly and can be understood and analyzed better than it could with a verbal description. Kenworthy also articulates the representational choices he made, notes other possibilities, and explains why he showed the information as he did.

If you can do that - which practically none of my students, and damn few adults I know can do - you're less vulnerable to bad data or misleading claims in news accounts; and you can have some idea how to break down public information to find what's noteworthy about it. Of course, Kenworthy's a professional, so maybe he shouldn't count.

If I could have a couple of ideas stuck in every math student's head, here's what they'd be:

1. Numbers only mean something in context, and that context has to be meaningful. If 121 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans committed or charged with murder, is that great or catastrophic news given the general homicide rate? Given the homicide rate for veterans of previous wars? Given the homicide rate among non-combat veterans? Nobody knows from that article. As a subset of this, you need to read the context and justification for any data - including rates - that you read. Should incarceration rates be of US adults? Of all residents?

2. Dollars are an arbitrary unit whose value varies. Same with other currency. You need to adjust for inflation to understand any economic data.

3. Translating real-world information into mathematical terms always involves some simplification. It's important to check what simplifications happen, and whether you buy into them. Do you count someone as unemployed if they're not looking for work because they got sick of it? Current answer: no. What if they're working part-time and want a full-time job? Current answer: still no. These simplifications are incredibly helpful, but they can also be really tricky.

Christianity rubs off on Judaism

The Chief Rabbinate of Israel probably doesn't think I'm Jewish. My mom converted (from nothing in particular) when I was 4 - she had me converted by an Orthodox rabbi at the same time - and we're not all that observant. Ahem. As in my parents make pork for a living. The Rabbinate, controlled by ultra-Orthodox Jews, has come to question the Jewishness of non-observant Jews. They've started demanding proof, and not accepting testimony from most American rabbis. Even Orthodox rabbis are suspect, since the ultra-Orthodox feel that if you're not observant, you're not a legitimate convert - conversion, in their eyes, entailing a commitment to following Jewish law. They're not really concerned that they'll exclude some 'legitimate' non-observant Jews who just can't prove their Jewishness, because in their minds those people have given up their Jewishness.

What's interesting about these restrictions - aside from the way that the lack of civil marriage leaves mixed or Jewish couples in an unmarriageable limbo disturbingly reminiscent of Nazi Germany's anti-miscegenation laws - is that they don't seem very Jewish to me. Judaism isn't really an ethnicity or a religion, though it straddles both. It's a tribe. You can be adopted in, but you can't ever really leave, not matter how much you want to. Your piety, while relevant to your relationships with God and your grandmother, isn't a factor in deciding whether you're Jewish. Historically, once you're Jewish you're Jewish. Become a Catholic priest and eat pork for every meal? Still Jewish.

You can, however, leave Christianity and Islam, both newer religions that use faith, not family, as their primary marker for belonging.

Not only that, but Jews have a several-thousand-year history of arguing about exactly what Jewish law says and should be, and how important it is to follow them. That's how we stopped with the stoning for adultery and a bunch of other stuff, and that's why the ultra-Orthodox may be slightly (but only slightly) less hypocritical than the Christian biblical literalists who aren't practicing Levirate marriage and selling all they own to follow Jesus. The ultra-Orthodox at least have several thousand years of Talmudic debate to rely on for any departures from the behavior prescribed in the Torah. But the existence of that debate, in and of itself, tells us the ultra-Orthodox don't have a monopoly on how to be Jewish.

I think we should start telling the ultra-Orthodox they're philosophically assimilated.

you know I'm right

You can read about it here.

the bully pulpit

It's things like this that make the prospect of an Obama presidency so damn exciting. He gets up in front of an African-American crowd, lectures about parenting and education, and they cheer him like mad. He's got the ability to tell people they need to do something and make them feel great about it. So Obama with the bully pulpit could actually inspire people to change aspects of their own lives.

You should read the article I linked to. It's hilarious. And awesome. I got it from here.

The whole thing just makes me want to have a TV, so I can watch events.