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.

another use of numbers

Obama just passed the million donor mark. Another way of thinking about this is that 1 of every 300 Americans (not American adults) has donated to the Obama campaign. Another way to make sense of this is to say that about 1 of every 234 Americans over 16 has donated to Obama's campaign. Maybe the best way, since you have to be 16 to donate.

That is a stunning statistic, though I don't have much to compare it with (other than the number of people in jail as listed in the post below). Obama's on track to potentially have 1% of the US population actually giving him money by November 4. That's, that's, I don't know what that is except great. A great use of basic math.

US criminal justice: still racist

Not to mention just plain bad news and a waste of people and time.

The NYT reports that 1 in 100 US adults is in prison (actually slightly more - 1 in 99.1). Worse, it's 1 in 15 black adults, and 1 in 9 black men between 20 and 34. I don't really know how to say how appalling that is. People, it is really really really bad. 23% of black men between 20 and 29 are in contact with the criminal justice system at any given time (cite: Sentencing Project). For white men the same age, it's 6.2%. More depressing information and links to actual scholarly research at Crooked Timber. I don't have anything like enough energy to talk about how totally fucked up things are at school about this.

To me, this is why it matters whether presidential candidates have used drugs. The core of the issue is this: do the recent candidates who've used drugs - George Bush, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, Barack Obama - think they should have been arrested and jailed? If not, why the hell do they want to arrest and jail African Americans, especially poor African Americans, for exactly what they did? More to the point, why the hell do we accept that bullshit from them? Obama is not clean on this score, people. Despite having advocated decriminalizing pot in his Senate run, despite supporting prisoners' rights and reintegration programs and lower sentences both in word and deed - despite, in other words, being probably our best hope - he accepts this disparity in consequences, at least in public. Based on his actions, I'd guess he cares about this stuff personally - this is the man with the brass balls to stand up for the rights of accused criminals with no public reward - but he too is constrained by the 'acceptable' political rhetoric. And we all put up with it.

A nation of laws, my ass. Not if you're poor and black.

social science research

1. A lovely article by someone I'm reading in my grad school ed policy class about the limits of social science research: to wit, the data are unreliable and crude, the rules and structures governing the system don't stay the same across place and time, and randomized field trials are usually impossible. And yet I still want to get a Ph.D. in social science.

2. A consequently unreliable social science article about the correlation between socioeconomic segregation and achievement. I'll read it in more depth and perhaps have more to say about it later. On an anecdotal basis, I think that at my school the high concentration of people who expect little mainstream economic success and thus little need for academic success works to reinforce a prevailing norm of underachievement. The same students, in an atmosphere where most of their peers were focused on achievement, might behave very differently.

Being sick apparently makes me write.

someone is wrong on the internet

I managed to get myself involved in one of those irritating blog-comment arguments over on I Blame the Patriarchy. I was defending the idea that it was possible to make an ethically informed decision to eat meat. If you want to read the stuff I said, I'm North. It's a perfect example of this phenomenon.

It's funny how, in this kind of argument, people act like family farms just don't exist. They're gone! Jude Becker, Joel Salatin, and the Fishers are a myth! Your only options are mass-produced meat or mass-produced vegetarianism!

That would be depressing. Luckily it's not true, and the more people remember it's not true, the less true it is. Like fairies.

US health insurance: still a bad deal

Further evidence that a national health system is the way to go.

drug policy revisited

I talked a while ago about a different option for drug policy. Recently Argentina has had an influx of cheap cocaine, which has had devastating social consequences at least according to the NYT). Guess what? Cocaine is bad for you! The anti-drug activists in the community they profile seem to want more restrictions and enforcement on drug use, which, to me, confirms that having totally legal hard/addictive drugs is probably a bad idea.

Reading the article, I questioned my assumption that having the facilities for processing a drug in the US would improve things. But a couple of things: we already have a situation in which people are adulterating cocaine and mixing it with dangerous additives to produce a cheap high (a major issue cited with paco, and here with crack). Second, getting rid of powerful and violent cartels benefits both people here (though I'm not sure how much) and, more obviously/significantly, people in developing countries. We could have fair trade coca! Cooperatives instead of cartels. Maybe also corporations, but I'd guess they're not worse than cartels.

if you eat this you will be happy

This was so good it made me want to call everyone I knew and tell them how amazing it was. So good that when my dad called as I was finishing one I waited to talk to him until I was done thinking about the last bite. My really amazing girlfriend made this really amazing dessert and came up with the really amazing topping. You will be so happy you made it.

Maple custards
2 cups cream
1/2 cup maple syrup (or maple sugar)
6 egg yolks

Preheat the oven to 325.

Warm the cream. Stir the syrup or sugar into the egg yolks. Mix in a little of the warm cream, then mix in the rest of the cream, stirring constantly. The recipe says to strain into a pitcher, but you should just pour it into a liquid measuring cup. Pour into six little ramekins and arrange them on a baking dish. Heat some water, put the baking dish in the oven, and pour the hot water in the baking dish so it comes about halfway up the sides of the ramekins. Lay a sheet of foil on top to lightly cover them. Recipe says: bake for about 40 minutes or until the custards are set in a ring about 1/2 inch wide around the outside edge. They should still be soft in the center.

Make this dessert with the best ingredients you can get. There are only 3 ingredients and the taste is really subtle and comples, so it's worth buying farm eggs and super-quality cream and dark dark maple syrup (grade C even, since maple syrup grades are based on color not quality). We get unpasteurized double cream which is kind of like a revelation in dairy fat.

The recipe is from Chez Panisse Desserts, by Lindsey Remolif Shere, which is worth owning if you like dessert. Which is to say, worth owning.

Then, since you live on the East Coast and have local cranberries available, make a compote for the top. The Gardener came up with this.

2 cups of cranberries
2 tablespoons of sugar, about - or to taste
a little port or red wine or something


Heat the cranberries in a little pan with a little water or port. Put the sugar in - you can put less and then adjust it. You want it tart so that it contrasts with the creamy nutty sweetness of the pudding. Keep simmering the cranberries - not too much water, let them dry out so it's cranberries not sauce, add port and water as needed - until they're ready. Put a spoonful on each pudding before you serve them. Grate a tiny bit of orange zest on everything.

Have I mentioned how amazingly delicious this is?

meat

Another big beef recall: 143 million pounds. This time because slaughterhouse employees were caught on film being mean to sick cows so they ended up in the meat supply (bad idea for health reason).

I totally teared up talking to the Gardener about this, partly because it's sad for the cows, partly because it's sad for the people, partly because this so not the ok bargain with an animal.

Partly because the ground beef in our freezer comes from Daryl, who would never ever be mean to a cow, and sometimes I forget that that's the exception.

She's drafting an autobiographical essay to apply for Upward Bound. It's lunch. I'm sitting with her, reading her essay: the first part is about moving here from Sierra Leone. I ask her to tell me how things were different there, see if we can put it in the essay. You have to hear this in her voice: big round vowels, all the rs dropped, liquid, Sierra Leone by way of the American inner city.

"Of course. There was more kids. The walls - you know - like that sliding thing in Mr. D's room? Like a door but you slide it out of the way? Like that. You have to get there early. If you was late you would have to sit on the floor. I had - like this, like a desk, but made out of board - that I brung from home. If your people had money they could give you one. You didn't learn as much. There wasn't opportunity, like there is here.

"If you was late you would get beaten. No one would cuss at the teachers. You just - no one did. All the kids want to be in school. You don't want to have the life of your mother and your father. If you can't pay your school fees, and maybe you get kicked out of the school, then you would be selling things, like cold water in plastic. Roasted peanuts, candy, anything, just to help your mother pay the fee. Or then maybe you go back and you get kicked out for two weeks - some of the teachers understand. Sometimes a principal understand and they let you have an extra week to pay.

"It was hard to get used to the kids. When I came here I was surprised how the kids act, like they don't care about they education. Well, sometime I act like that too now.

"Sometime I think I want to go back to Africa. You get your education here, you work for a little bit, you can go back and have plenty. Build a house - it's not even that much. But my mother she say get your education here. If I go back to Africa I be spoiled - no mother, no father, live with my grandmother in the big house. I be just like my sisters and brothers."

She wants to be a prosecutor, like on Law & Order, or maybe a counselor to help teens and married people.

question of the day (Valentine's Day special)

(from across the room, 3 students:)

"What's your definition of love?"

Hilarious discussion ensued re: difference between loving someone and being in love; whether you can be in love with your mom; whether Mon is in love with his mom because no girl is going to come between them; the relationship between love and sex; the concept of attraction.

I love teaching seniors.

question of the day

"How do you spell 'run'?"

character, integrity, peace

I really want to like Lawrence Lessig's endorsement of Obama: all about moral courage and integrity. Except mostly he talks about how Clinton lacks them, which is kind of disappointing: Obama, not Clinton, is exceptional, and talking about how Clinton has the same problems as all other politicians isn't a great reason to vote for Obama. By implication, yes, but I wish Lessig had talked about the details of ways that Obama is different.

And then come the last two minutes, at which point he starts talking about the international symbolism of an Obama presidency. While he says that Obama's original opposition to the war would shape people's perceptions, he also has this long section on 'seeing the photograph of this man' which, to me, seems very much like a race-trumps-gender argument. Which, huh? There's a similarly compelling narrative to be found about Clinton's picture.

also, wow

Read Michael Chabon's endorsement of Obama. Not for a reason to prefer Obama to Clinton, not really, but for what it says about our country.

"The point of Obama's candidacy is that the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy."

Word.

capitalism + regulatory capture

Wachovia apparently continued doing business with some fraudulent telemarketing companies (the kind of people who try to get your bank account information over the phone) after they'd heard many, many complaints about them. For the obvious reason - "We are making a ton of money from them." Partly in fines for all those returned checks.

What's interesting about this is that Wachovia's positions is perfectly sensible, within the assumption that companies should maximize only profit. The people who were asleep at their jobs here were the regulators:

"In the last three years, government agencies have sued several companies accused of routing telemarketing thefts through at least nine banks, including Wachovia, the largest company named in those lawsuits. However, Wachovia and most other banks accused of involvement in similar frauds have never been publicly fined or prosecuted by federal regulators for aiding telemarketing criminals."

Regulated companies, etc, in the US tend to have significant power and negotiating ability with the regulators, a situation referred to as regulatory capture (i.e. regulators serve the interests of those they regulate). One consequence of regulatory capture is that situations like this need to be resolved in the courts because they can't be prevented or addressed by enforcement agencies.

Best way, for my money, to reduce litigation and related expenses is to have effective regulation. Prevent problems or fix them through enforcement - then no one needs to sue.

Super Duper Obama

Anyone who thinks Obama is all hype and no game (all hat and no cattle, ...) needs to read this blog post.

I am impressed beyond words that Obama pushed for videotaping police interrogations, and managed to make it happen. To quote the article quoted there:

"1. Obama was completely right, and on an issue directly relevant to the more recent debates about torture. Taping interrogations is an issue that really only has one legitimate side, since there's no reason to think it prevents any true confessions, while it certainly prevents false confessions (over and above the legal and moral reasons for disapproving of police use of "enhanced interrogation methods").

2. Pursuing it had very little political payoff, as evidenced by the fact that Obama has not (as far as I know) so much as mentioned this on the campaign. Standing up for the rights of accused criminals in a contemporary American legislature requires brass balls.

3. Getting it through required both courage and skill. The notion that Obama is "too nice" to get things done can hardly survive this story: he won't face tougher or less scrupulous political opponents than the self-proclaimed forces of law and order. Yes, in this case the change was helpful to the cause of crime control, since every innocent person imprisoned displaces a guilty person. But that didn't make the politics of it any easier."

Can anyone really imagine Hillary Clinton doing something like this? I will vote for her with a happy heart and a clean conscience if she's the nominee, but Obama's got substance and style both. Also, the Jesse Dylan/will.i.am video gives me goosebumps.

NCLB is a bad law

There are actually good things about NCLB. The requirement that schools and districts disaggregate their data by race and income level is awesome, as is the requirement that those subgroups count when districts evaluate the data. It's underfunded, but that's, well, that's education. It's true - John Kerry said it - that "Resources without reform is a waste of money, but reform without resources is a waste of time." But there's not a candidate out there who really wants to fund education the way it needs to be funded. So that's just normal badness, not the extra special badness that would prompt me to write something here.

NCLB is bad because it makes schools spend many hours and great expense collecting basically useless data. Every state gets to make its own test, so the test data aren't comparable. As if that weren't bad enough, the disaggregation all happens differently. Disaggregation is when schools and districts report the scores of subgroups (race/ethnic groups, income categories, special ed), which they are required to do; but if a school has less than a certain number of students in a subgroup, they don't have to disaggregate that subgroup. It's a good system, for student privacy and fairness reasons: if a school has only two students in subgroup x, it doesn't make sense for the school to fail that round of testing because 50% of them (i.e. one student) failed their test, nor is it cool to publish the information that one of the two students failed, since other people in the area can likely figure out who it was. So, ok. For subgroups below size n, you don't have to report the scores of those students. Except wait. What is n? Do we have a national number? Of course not! States set numbers between 5 and 100.

Similarly, every state has to report on its persistently dangerous schools. As of June 2004, there were 38 schools so designated in the whole country. 27 of those are in Philadelphia. None were in Chicago, Detroit, or LA. Artifact of different measurement systems or accurate assessment of reality? I report, you decide.

Every kid between third grade and eighth grade is taking achievement tests, and every district in the country is collecting statistics on violence; this is potentially one of the greatest boons to educational research ever. Except the data are trash, so no go.

---

Much of this information comes from No Child Left Behind, a reasonably neutral, non-evaluative primer on the law by Frederick M. Hess and Michael J. Petrilli. Hess works at the American Enterprise Institute, Petrilli was a former Bush appointee, but the book is basically an explanation of the law's requirements and how states are dealing with them. I'm reading it for class.

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.

---

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.