the boundaries, they are not so clear

“You African. You Jamaican, but you’re African to me.”

After a whole buncha finagling, I get Studley there to listen to me explain that I find it offensive and I get to speak on it, even though I’m not African. He tells me he is African.¹

Oh yeah? Where you from?

“Niberia.”

I appear to have won this round, so I get to tell him that I find it offensive to try to insult anyone based on who they are (female, queer, black, white, African, American, whatever) and can he please make future insults without dragging in some whole group of random people who aren’t involved?

He tells the original girl, “You a Monday. You know why? Because don’t nobody like Mondays. That’s what you are. You a Monday.”

I love this. I think it’s a fucking brilliant insult: not offensive, not profane, absolutely clear in conveying how inevitably useless the insulted person or thing is. Then she starts explaining why he’s mad at her. They went to a dance together and she wouldn't leave with him because she had a white boy's number.

“White boys fuck like poodles and they’re not circumcised.”

This is where Studley officially jumps the shark as far as I’m concerned. So I drag him off to the internet to show him that actually more white men are circumcised than African-American men and can he please make his insults without talking out his ass? Only the statistics I get are actually from San Francisco and somehow had slightly more African-American than white men in the survey sample circumcised. Whatever. Because this matters. Why is being uncircumcised something he objects to anyway? The world may never know.

Then I start in on how he knows how white boys fuck. Are you a white boy?

“I am not.”

Have you ever had sex with a white boy?

“Absolutely not.”

So the only way I can think of that you know how white boys fuck is that you’re watching porn, and let me just tell you, if you get your ideas about sex from porn, you’re going to be wrong all the time. You’re telling me you have no personal or academic experience about this. When you start having sex with white boys

“And I never will.”

or when you become a sexuality researcher, then you’ll have something to back up what you’re saying.

I love Studley, actually. He’s super-interesting, and wrote his college essay about a childhood featuring appalling dysfunction, and how he got out of the crazy through sports. He’ll also listen to me talk about stuff and say, “you right,” which I confess I enjoy. And sometimes I think he’s actually listening.

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1. African and African-American are not the same thing at my school.

defending the caucus

There's no way at all to argue that Iowa and New Hampshire accurately represent the country. They're both pretty much entirely white, they're small, there's not a single major city in either one. The Iowa caucus process shuts out anyone without transportation, childcare, or a schedule flexible enough to take a night off. And yet those few voters who are eligible to caucus in Iowa and vote in New Hampshire have a wholly disproportionate effect on the presidential nomination.

I still think there are good reasons to have those two states go first. All you have to do is look at the race now: Clinton and Obama are doing national media buys, spending $2 million a week to raise their profiles in 30-second sound bites; the rest of our candidate access is debates and whatever free media gets generated by manufactured controversies and horse-race journalism. That's what a national primary would look like, but all the time.

Because Iowa and New Hampshire are small and have no major cities, politics works differently. You hear about retail politics: what that means is that if you want to succeed in Iowa (and New Hampshire, as far as I know) you have to make your case to small groups of people at a time and actually answer their questions. My brother, who has decided that it was a priority for him to personally interact with candidates, has seen all the major Democratic candidates, asked a number of them questions, and met many other people who have had the same experience, not to mention reading eight or so months of constant local news coverage that described the candidates making their pitch to small groups of people and answering their questions.

Personally, I think that having this element to the campaign is invaluable. Anyone who wants to, anywhere the country, gets to watch news coverage of candidates actually interacting with actual people. You can't buy success in Iowa and New Hampshire, as Romney learned by trying to; you have to convince people a bit at a time. People might be dumb, and they might make dumb decisions, but that's democracy. At least these decisions are substantially less mediated by money than they would be in any large state, and certainly in a national primary. The big problem with our quasi-national Feb. 5 primary this year is that it costs; the only way to make that worse is to cut out the smaller early states, which at least provide a greater diversity of required campaign attributes.

Why specifically Iowa and New Hampshire? Because that's how it's set up. I can't bring myself to care much that it means that some people have more influence on the political process than others. Some people always have more influence on the political process than others. At least in the early caucus/primary system it's not only the wealthy who have more influence.

creeping relativism

A student got suspended last week for being disruptive in class, then not showing up to detention. He came in with his father today. The father is an African immigrant - Nigerian, I think - who speaks perfect school English and wears a collared shirt and a wool coat every time I've seen him. He's deeply concerned about his son's education. He asked what the school could do if his son misbehaved, and was dismayed to learn that his son could not be physically prevented from leaving the school building, nor could we beat him. He quoted Proverbs - "train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it" - and told me that when he was in school, a student who misbehaved would be held down by eight other students and whipped. He told me he had never embarrassed his father as his son was now embarrassing him.

I can't agree with him, really, and I'm obviously not going to beat the kid, but I don't judge him for it. I'm surprised to feel that way - with an American parent, I don't think I would. But this is a man who obviously cares about his son, and wants what is best for him, even if what is best for him in the long run involves some short term pain. My parents would have said the same thing, only the pain would have been mental rather than physical. It made me wonder: Americans often think that caning or other physical punishment is barbaric, and sometimes laugh at traditional cultures that punish wrongdoing with a specified fine (especially if the fine is denominated in livestock), but is it really worse than jails as we use them? We look away from the damage caused by confinement: the loss of productive years, the internal violence, the gangs that form on the inside, the physical damage caused by infections, rape, and assault in prisons. Who's to say it's better?

Obama: right on with his right on (at least now)

The whole mess about Clinton's comments on Martin Luther King (see this article for a run-down) is beyond absurd. Basically, Clinton argues that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act required major work from Johnson, and a bunch of people jump on her by claiming she's minimizing Dr. Martin Luther King's contribution. But what she said is, well, true. Johnson got the legislation passed. As I recall from my international politics class, part of the trade for getting civil rights legislation was keeping the Vietnam war going; another part of it was that Johnson was a parliamentary procedure genius. So. Talking up Johnson's adroitness with the Senate and his ability to get legislation passed doesn't diminish King's extraordinary power to build social movements and effect huge social change, or say that Johnson started the civil rights movement; just, you know, the road from social movement to federal policy isn't all that direct. It's a pretty natural comparison for Clinton to make, seeing as she's running for president based on her experience and political adroitness - i.e., the ways in which she resembles Johnson.

At first, Obama's response was lame. (Aside: Dear presidential candidates: do not tear each other down; all the Democratic candidates are pretty good, and you're damn well going to endorse the nominee if it isn't you; try to imagine, in everything you say, whether someone could make an attack ad contrasting it with your later endorsement.) But his most recent statements? They're awesome. Including, but not limited to, the following:

"I think that I may disagree with Senator Clinton or Senator Edwards on how to get there, but we share the same goals. We’re all Democrats. We all believe in civil rights.... They are good people, they are patriots....I think that Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have historically and consistently been on the right side of civil rights issues. I think they care about the African-American community and that they care about all Americans and they want to see equal rights and justice in this country."

Right on with your right on. And now I swear I'm going to write about something other than why you should vote for Obama. In California. Where you just registered to vote.

brilliantly obvious policy

I was reading Barack Obama's website in search of more reasons to convince the Political Schmientist to support him, and came across two proposals that are the kind of thing that make you go, why haven't we been doing that for years?!

First, he proposes that instead of spending hours and hours calculating your taxes, the IRS take the W-2 and investment information that businesses already send them, do a data merge, and send you a preprinted tax return to verify and sign. If you want to do it yourself, you still can.

Second, and this is maybe even more genius, he's proposing having a checkbox on your tax return that will authorize the IRS to use your tax information for the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, instead of making you spend hours filling out a separate form.

They're technically simple enough not to get screwed up in implementation, and they make perfect sense. Why don't we do them already?

what to eat, #5

Our cooking gas got cut off last Thursday and didn't come back on until a week later (long story involving some confusion about the lease and a gas leak), so we were eating whatever we could make in a toaster oven, electric water boiler, and mini food processor. This is one of the tastier meals. Mostly we ate frozen pot pies.

Black Bean and Goat Cheese dip
black beans
garlic goat cheese (or chevre + raw or roasted garlic)
sundried tomatoes (oven dried in this case, from the summer's adventure with a case of seconds)
salt/pepper
chopped parsley
bread and vegetables for dipping (pepper, fennel, carrot, spinach leaves...)

Heat water in the electric water boiler. Pour it over the dried tomatoes and let them steep a few minutes.

Dump black beans, goat cheese, garlic, and tomatoes in the food processor. Whirl. Taste. Add more of anything it needs more of. Don't add the tomato liquid, because you'll make the dip too soupy.

Add parsley and whirl a tiny bit.

Toast some bread. Eat the dip with toast and sliced vegetables.

Note that this recipe is completely independent of the stove if you use either canned beans or a slow-cooker.

what you feel v. how you vote

I was 10 when Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, and I still remember how mean people were to Hillary. That's how I experienced it, too: people being mean. People hated her hair, her clothes, her make-up, her last name - she couldn't be feminine enough, she wasn't enough of a woman. The same flak continued right through the 90s, with the extra dose of hatred because she didn't leave Bill: now she wasn't enough of a feminist, or she was nakedly careerist. The media-fueled hatred comes straight out of the inability to categorize her as either a super-feminine woman or an ultra-feminist hard-ass. She's a gender-bender, in a very broad sense, and it makes people uncomfortable.

All of this makes how you feel about a candidate a particularly unreliable guide to non-sexist (or non-racist for that matter) voting. All this is part of why I ignored non-policy issues at the beginning of the campaign: I think most of the way people evaluate character and electability is through their own feelings about the candidate, and that seems both unreliable and really vulnerable to bias.

I'm still not voting for Clinton, on policy and judgment grounds, and also with some concern for the kind of support she would have. But I have no sympathy for the "I just don't like her" argument. Shame so many people do.

Obama for President

A few months ago, I decided I was supporting Edwards based on his health care plan. I still think he has the best health care plan, though Hillary's is awfully similar, and I still think Obama's plan is terribly flawed in its lack of a mandate. Over at the Political Schmientist's, Andrew argued in comments that the mandate's not that big a deal; Am said what I would have said: "the lack of mandate is... a fundamental difference in the way the plans would operate, namely, that it would drive the average cost of insurance up because people could wait to sign up and pay in until they needed to (i.e. were sick). one of the key reasons that other universal health care plans actually work is that they contain mandates on both ends."

But now I'm supporting Obama. A couple of things changed my mind. I'd made my earlier decision based entirely on policy, on the grounds that all politicians are fake, so I couldn't evaluate character or judgment that effectively, and that electability was anyone's guess. I've changed my mind about both of those things. Obama's life has been consistently dedicated to his espoused principles, and that sheds really powerful light on his character. I still think policy is important, but I also think that judgment and the future of the progressive movement count an awful lot. More than that, I don't think Edwards is a viable candidate: he's not polling well in South Carolina (his home state!), he's not that well-funded, he's not polling that well nationally. I don't even think Edwards would be a good VP candidate. He doesn't balance Obama in terms of experience, and while he's a white Southerner, he doesn't pull much voting power in the South considering that he didn't even carry SC in 2004. So the race is between Clinton and Obama, and I think a Clinton nomination is the worst of the three quite good options we have available.

Clinton and Edwards have both talked good talk about economic justice, but all of Obama's choices - from his career decisions to his votes - have fallen right in line with what he says he believes in. Contrast this with Edwards's stint at a hedge fund (which he's said was for research into the inner workings of the financial world, for whatever that's worth), Clinton's private law career, and both of their voting records. They're centrists. Clinton votes right-wing on defense issues, and made some very troubling foreign policy votes: authorization for force in Iraq, voting to declare Iran's Quds Force a terrorist organization (which managed to be extraordinarily hypocritical and intemperate at the same time). You can explain those as political calculation or you can explain them as bad judgment, but you can't explain them as a reason to support Clinton. In fact, for me it's a deal-breaker for primary support. Edwards did not focus on economic issues in the Senate - Am argues that it's because he was representing a conservative Southern state, but he never ran for reelection; his rhetoric is consistent, but his actions are not. The word about his career in law is that he chose cases he knew he could win, and it seems like he may have done that in the Senate too (patients' bill of rights, minimum wage increases) - that's not the road he's on now, so it's hard to tell how he'd do. Regardless, I think that the consistency of what we hear about Obama's values, priorities, and decision-making counts tremendously in his favor.

Policy counts, but the worst aspect of the disastrous Bush presidency has not been any specific policy; it's been the fact that Bush has organized his administration around secrecy, personal power, and corporate greed, and fed an ultra-polarized rhetorical climate that allows fools like Ann Coulter to argue that political disagreement is tantamount to treason. Obama is the only candidate whose actions speak clearly against that culture. Clinton is closest to Bush in staffing her campaign with disciplined, secretive folks driven by loyalty; she would be an incredible improvement on Bush, but not as clear a change in this specific way as Obama.

Enough about this. Honestly I think all three candidates are pretty decent people for politicians who are trying to get elected to office, but Obama's exceptional. Moving on.

There's also a lot of new information out there on electability, all of which suggests to me that Obama is not just someone who can win, but a movement-building opportunity for the Democratic Party. Many of us have complained about lack of investment in the future by the Democratic Party, as exemplified by the Terry McAuliffe/Howard Dean fight over having Democratic organizations in all 50 states - this is our chance to do something about it just with a candidate. Obama's base of support is amazingly young: 36% of his support in Iowa came from people under 30 (by my calculation from this data). Through actual political science, someone found out that people form their party IDs young; with Obama, we'll have a lot of young people coming in who will be Democrats for life. Not only that, but he has great support from independents, and pretty good support even from Republicans. Clinton has stronger support from hard-core Democrats and older people, but voting for her misses a tremendous opportunity for the future of the party and the country.

I'm also concerned by the tremendous amount of hatred for Hillary out there. I really think most of it is sexism, or was originally sexism and has acquired some more legitimate trappings. However, and I say this with great reluctance and a lot of uncertainty, I still think the visceral hatred of her might be a good reason for her not to be the nominee. One of my best friends in Des Moines from high school has said he'd vote for McCain or Huckabee over Clinton; I got really angry about that, but I also think it points to Obama's value as a movement-building candidate who appeals to a lot of people personally and is a progressive. This is not a narrow effort to go for the most moderate candidate, but a search for a candidate who will depolarize the country (as Obama is doing not only rhetorically but through his support base) while building a long-term progressive movement. Edwards and Clinton have been deep, deep in the hateful muck of the last few years; Obama might get us out of it. Their policies are still fairly similar, and I don't think a health care policy - necessarily subject to Congressional battles about its details - is worth this trade.

On the other hand: like Am said, we have a great, great candidate pool. I'd love to vote for Obama or Edwards for president, and be pretty darn happy to vote for Clinton. Even more exciting, the Democratic front-runners are approximately seventy-two million times as attractive as the Republican front-runners. Because that is what will help us in November.

Tomorrow/when I get to it: more about blatant media sexism and why people hate Hillary (Gloria Steinem was right, but that doesn't change my vote); why the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries aren't so bad as a way to get the nominations started.

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Please leave comments! They make me want to write more!

no good options

Last week, this week, both wild. We came back to school on Wednesday; by Friday, there was a fight in the lunchroom that ate my 7th period class. Maybe six kids just didn't make it back up; another two or three left in the middle of class, either called by a vice principal or too angry to stay in the room; two kids had an argument that led to one of them threatening to shoot the other; four kids were screaming so they couldn't be calmed down at all. Maybe eight kids got suspended in all.

While I'm generally pretty inclined to tell my students to suck it up and conform to school expectations (be quiet while I'm talking; get to class on time; yes you have to do homework), this isn't one of those times. Turns out they're in an untenable situation in which normal high school drama meets a community with a lot of casual violence. Two kids were dating, now they're not; one of them won't let it go, and it's making their friends take sides. Some of the friends think (correctly) that this is the type of petty bullshit that will be forgotten within six months, so they don't want to take sides. Except that the kids who have taken sides respond to that by saying that if people won't take sides, they're on their own if they get jumped. The security situation in the neighborhood is such that kids who don't have other people 'riding' for them are vulnerable to getting bruises and maybe worse if a rumor starts, or they argue with someone, or they're just in the wrong place at the wrong time. So keeping your friends is a safety issue. And how do you keep your friends? You ride for your friends, escalating this petty bullshit so there are more fights, less learning, more chances for someone to really get hurt.

It's striking to me how much this matches what I know of civil war violence (especially from the Political Schmientist, who is hereby invited to weigh in). Slightly less polarized, because most of these kids are not involved in any kind of national gang factions, but the same risk in trying to sit out the conflict. Historically, this city has had less presence from national gangs than most, partly because there was a strong Mafia presence (or so I'm told), partly because we've been busy tearing ourselves apart (like Baltimore in The Wire).¹ That may be changing - I've heard a lot more national gang talk this year than last year at school, which is about as anecdotal as you get, but hey. In a chaotic environment in which people are used to having to take sides to protect themselves from violence, adding a national gang presence would be immediately polarizing - like adding an ideology. Instead of primarily local conflicts, there would be more sources of enmity and violence, with the same high penalty for non-involvement. Same petty bullshit, even more ways to get killed.

A good chunk of this originates in the extent to which my students and the other people in their neighborhood are marginalized and denied necessary resources by mainstream economic and governmental insititutions. As a tiny example: this NY Times article lists the average student load for counselors in public schools as about 311 students, and describes that as a very high load for a suburban New York school. At my public inner city school, where parents are by and large unable to get their children desperately needed therapy for learning disabilities, trauma, and mental health issues, there are four counselors for 1800 students. That's a student load of 450, almost 50% higher than the student load in affluent suburbs, in a situation where counselors need to provide far more services (not because kids are crazier, but because parents have fewer resources on their own). Multiply this many times, and you get the school system; throw in a criminal justice system that has alienated and angered the community, and the difficulty of getting jobs, and it's no wonder people have no love for the mainstream. In this environment, gangs flourish as state competitors, offering state services like security and support in bad times, and economic opportunity unavailable through mainstream sources. The neighborhood has a lot of state contact, but it's almost all negative - unsurprising, then, that alternatives become available, competitive, necessary, even when they are absolutely poisonous.

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1. The Wire is probably the best TV show ever made, and I've only made it through Season 1. I haven't watched that much Sopranos, so I'll make that disclaimer up front, but here's the thing: the Wire has vast social commentary, minutely observed characterization, beautiful filming, some of the best acting I've ever seen, incredible moral complexity, throw-away lines that say more than an entire season of some other show. And it has that in every episode. I'd argue for The Wire over The Sopranos if only for the critical importance of understanding urban poverty. And if you want to know what inner city poverty is like, you could make a worse start than working your way through it. It's violent, it's depressing, it's complicated, it's about half in dialect, and it's worth every second. Now go back to what you were reading.

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.