Aszilvasy

Pop star's comments after a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam is not his first controversy on this European tour

Teenage heartthrob and recent controversy magnet Justin Bieber has again left the internet slack-jawed, this time over comments left at the Anne Frank House.

The Canadian pop star used part of his downtime from touring the cities of Europe to visit the Amsterdam hiding place of the young Holocaust victim, which has since been turned into a museum.

Alas, in comments left in the Anne Frank House guest book, he opened himself up to ridicule and online anger.

"Truly inspiring to be able to come here," he offered. So far, so acceptable. Then came the hand-slap-forehead moment: "Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."

Referring to the young diarist, whose documenting of life under the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands made her a poignant symbol of the suffering of Jews during the second world war, as a "great girl" was in many minds glib to say the least. Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945 at 15 after her family's hiding place was uncovered by the SS.

But it is the suggestion that had she been alive at the same time as the Canadian singer, she would have devoted herself to his music – fans of the pop star are commonly referred to as Beliebers – that had most online commentators venting their anger.

"She would've been a WHAT? That little idiot is way to [sic] full of himself. She's an important historical figure so show some respect," read a typical post left on the Anne Frank House's Facebook page, which first reported the guest book comments.

It isn't the first bit of negative publicity that the 19-year-old has attracted during his stint in Europe. To date, the tour has been hit by incidents of Bieber angrily confronting photographers in London, having his monkey seized by officials in Germany, concerts cancelled in Portugal and school officials in Norway rescheduling exams to avoid clashes with his shows.

• Justin Bieber
• Anne Frank
• Second world war
• Pop and rock
• United States

Matt Williams
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Dear Teach for America:
I trust that this letter finds you in excellent form. I write concerning a subject that concerns us both: your excellence. You see, I am in receipt of this recent announcement regarding your excellence, this one, this one, as well as this one, and would like to let you know that I will require no further communication on this topic. I get it. We get it. TFA is excellent.

And by excellent, of course, I mean REALLY excellent. Like SAT score *crushing,* GPA pefecting, top college of your choosing, 22nd century career readying kind of excellence. While we were still lying in our state-schooled beds of mediocrity this morning, fantasizing about school vacation or worse, retirement, you were up early, achieving excellence excellently. In fact, in the time it took me to type that last sentence you exfoliated one layer of excellence, only to reveal another layer of even more excellent excellence underneath. In other words, enough already. I get it. We get it. So please stop.

Middle school students of corp members received more than half a yr of additional learning than students of other new teachers.

— Wendy Kopp (@wendykopp) March 8, 2013

The latest study to find @teachforamerica teachers have outsized impact in the classroom, this one from TX. bit.ly/15CCaME

— Wendy Kopp (@wendykopp) March 8, 2013

Students of TFA alums received almost one yr of additional learning than students w teachers who had the same level of experience

— Wendy Kopp (@wendykopp) March 8, 2013

Here’s the thing, Teach for America. Every time you pronounce your now well-established excellence, every time TFA founder Wendy Kopp tweets ecstatically about yet another study proving once again that Teach for America is even better than we thought, you drain a little more life blood from the teaching profession. You suck the marrow from it. Think I’m exaggerating? That extra half year of learning Kopp refers to above translates into a single additional correct answer on a standardized test. Which is another way of saying that the *value added* of teaching can be reduced, not just to increased test scores, but to a single bubble shaded in correctly.

And it’s worse than that. Every time you toot the horn of triumph, alerting us to the good news that your new teachers are better than our new teachers, even though the evidence is indisputable that all new teachers struggle, or that your handful of alumni teachers are better than our experienced teachers, you hammer the nail in a little deeper. You fan the illusion that temporary teachers who jet in from elsewhere are just as good, are in fact more excellent, than real teachers who are in it for the long haul.

Consider this exchange I had last week with an opinion writer from the Boston Globe. Boston is poised to eliminate the cap on the number of charter schools that can operate in the city, and if current trends are any indication, we are likely to see a teaching force that is now mixed in age, race and years of experience, replaced by one that is overwhelmingly white, young and temporary. I asked him if this concerns him at all.

As to the idea of young teachers leaving the profession after a few years, that’s something to watch, certainly, but at this point I’m not sure it’s a bad model to have some young people teach for a few years and then move on to something else if they want, particularly if the schools they are teaching in are yielding strong results.

I couldn’t help but think of my sister’s school in poor, rural Illinois, a school that is “yielding strong results.” But these are tough times in Illinois. And much as predicted, administrators are using the new “flexibility” given to them by the Stand-for-Children-crafted Senate Bill 7 to go after the most expensive teachers. Teachers of “nonessential” subjects are the most vulnerable; the loudmouths who stand up for them are vulnerable too. For much of the past year my sister and her colleagues have waged a passionate, public fight to ensure that students at their school don’t get short changed.

Would temporary teachers do the same, I wonder? Would they be brave enough to attend school committee meetings and deliver speeches or hand out fliers, even when it’s scary? And who could blame them if they didn’t have the nerve, since temporary teachers have no protections at all, not even their own excellence. For now, at least, the teaching staff at my sister’s school remains intact and students still have a gym teacher, an art teacher and a music teacher. How different might the last year have looked, though, if the school were merely a stopping place for temporary teachers who were en route to become lawyers, consultants, investment bankers or education reformers…

The idea that it’s possible to replace our entire teaching force with TFA-style excellence is a fantasy, of course. There are more than 3 million teachers in the country and fewer than 6,000 new TFA corps members each year. And yet the steady drum beat, the constant horn tooting, hat raising and praise singing, creates the illusion that such a thing is not just possible but a worthy goal.

So please stop, Teach for America. I get it. We get it. The question is do you get it?

Send comments to tips@edushyster.com.

The next stop on TFA’s “listening tour” should be CEO Matt Kramer’s hometown: Minneapolis

Minnsanity combines cronyism and contempt for democracy served up with a cherry of condescension.

If there is a single city in the US that perfectly exemplifies the insanity of the corporate education “reform” movement it has to be Minneapolis. The particular brand of reform here—let’s call it Minnsanity— combines cronyism and contempt for democracy in a neat, corporate-funded package topped with a cherry of condescension. But why take my word for it (or the word of the Minneapolis parents and teachers who seem to contact me daily asking what the @#$% is going on in their city)? Let’s climb aboard the education rephorm express and head to Minneapolis, whose name I have just learned was coined by the city’s first schoolteacher, who combined mni, a Dakota Sioux word for water, and polis, the Greek word for city.

The first stop on today’s Minnsanity tour is the Minneapolis board of education, a topic of near EduShyster obsession due to the recent purchase of a school board seat by Teach for America, whose co-CEO happens to reside in the city. So what do board meetings look like when everyone agrees that the achievement gap is the civil right$ issue of our time? At one recent meeting:

• Eli Kramer (brother of TFA co-CEO Matt Kramer) urged the board to sell a shuttered public school to Hiawatha Academy, the outstanding and innovative charter that he runs.

• Hiawatha Academy’s expansion is backed by Charter School Partners, which employs TFA co-CEO Matt Kramer’s wife.

• The TFA-backed school board member who moved to Minneapolis to run for office had to recuse himself from the vote because his girlfriend will be the principal of the new Hiawatha facility.

• A second board member also recused himself from the vote because he formerly chaired the board of Hiawatha Academy.
  

• The board voted to sell the shuttered public school to Hiawatha Academy. According to the MinnPost, the newspaper owned by TFA co-CEO Matt Kramer’s father, the sale heralds a new era of collaboration. I’ll say.

Now playing at a theater near you: the achievement gap
If you’re still craving more excellence, we can stop by a local movie theater where trailers about, what else?, the achievement gap and “proven strategies” to close it are now airing thanks to the generous support of the Minneapolis Foundation and a dozen community “partners” incuding TFA.  According to the newspaper owned by TFA co-CEO Matt Kramer’s father, the RESET campaign, which will include broadcast and print ads, is excellent:

The idea is to sound an alarm about the size of the problem and then to give parents, taxpayers and others enough information about things that work to allow them to evaluate the policy debate for themselves.

The campaign materials are filled with reform-related facts, like the fact that teacher expectations account for 42% of the difference in achievement between white and African-American students. TFA-alum and blogger Gary Rubinstein takes a look at these and other “facts” here, concluding that the entire RESET project is reformy propaganda.

The definition of Minnsanity
At the heart of Minnsanity is the true fact that charter schools are excellent and that their expansion is urgently necessary in order to close the achievement gap and instill low-income minority kids with the skills needed to thrive in the 21st century workplace. Except that there is an inconvenient actual fact that you will never hear a Minneapolis reformer mention. Minneapolis is already home to 40 charter schools. They perform worse than the public schools and are highly segregated by race and income. That is why Charter School Partners, the organization that employs TFA co-CEO Matt Kramer’s wife, has launched an ambitious plan to open 20 new charter schools in Minneapolis.

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Implementing the same corporate reform strategies over and over but expecting different outcomes deserves its own name: Minnsanity.

Note: teachers and parents in Minneapolis have set up a new Minsannity website to document what is happening to their public schools. Please visit and show your support. They need it.

Send tips, comments and lutefisk recipes to tips@edushyster.com.

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“Because he’s the hero the network deserves, but not the one it needs right now. So, we’ll promote him with lines like ‘he fights for family’ and ‘lives for love,’ and make it look like he’s in one of those movies where a single mom discovers the true meaning of Christmas. Because he can take it. Because he’s not the network’s hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A guy who’s real smiley and likes to kiss. He's Batman on ABC Family.” [via UPROXX] 

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In an Orwellian fashion, law enforcement groups have called for Congress to mandate all SMS messages be recorded and kept on file by wireless companies. This would be one of the editions to the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, currently under review by Congress.

Your basic for-profit business firm is a loosely incentive-compatible institution. Nobody's going to make any money unless people want to work there, and employees aren't going to be able to to keep their jobs unless the company makes money. But within that broad terrain there's ample room for conflicts of interest and struggle over the control of organizational resources.

As Henry Farrell says:

The obvious consequence is that the owners of capital will not have an incentive to design organizations to solve problems. Instead, they will have an incentive to maximize the returns to their investment. This will mean that they will, as a general rule, prefer organizational rules that are lousy at problem solving but that increase their profits to organizational rules that are less lucrative and more efficient. Similarly, managers will prefer rules that increase their personal returns and protect their jobs to rules that are better at furthering organizational goals but likely to put their economic benefits at risk. And if the owners of capital, and, to a lesser extent, the managers, are  setting the rules, then these aren’t problems that one can design around, or even decide that you reluctantly can accept. The actors doing the designing – the “you” of Tim’s phrase – are the owners or the managers. From their perspective, the problems aren’t actually problems. They are not bugs, they’re features. They are part of what the Org is supposed to do, from the perspective of its most important designers.

What pops out of that analysis is the theory that employee-earned firms should outperform ones where ownership and labor are strictly separated. When profits are bound to be internalized by the staff, the conflict between worker goals and owner goals will be greatly diminished and the organization will be better equipped to solve problems. Of course the workers might lack capital—not being capitalists—but this isn't 1872. We have an elaborate financial system that's capable of making loans to finance takeover schemes. But while there are certainly plenty of employee-owned companies in America, employing tens of thousands of people, they're not exactly lighting the world on fire.

I think the most likely answer is that the most serious intraorganizational conflicts have to do with managers rather than owners. Small-business owners are disproportionately likely to be happy and attribute their own happiness to being their own boss and setting their own schedule. The difference between being one guy who owns 100 percent of a small firm and being one of 5,000 guys who owns one-five thousandth of a big firm is that the sole proprietor is free from management in a way that the employee-owner never will be. In an increasingly prosperous future, my bet is more people will opt for the psychic benefits of self-employment over the pecuniary benefits of large-scale productivity-maximizing organizations in part for this reason. As a result, per capita GDP growth will tend to stagnate as people self-select into work roles with high amenity value.

This arrived in response to the post about the poor results of charters in Ohio:

“My first teaching job out of university was a charter high school in Toledo. The director’s husband was convicted of stealing public funds and sent to prison. The politically connected company that held the charter cut off the faculty’s health insurance without telling us midway through the year and didn’t plan on paying us once summer hit. The charter company closed the school immediately after the last day. If those who run charters are willing to steal and lie and cheat teachers out of their salaries, they’ll be willing to cheat on graduation rates and in-house test scores too.

“One more note: The Ohio Alliance for Public Charter Schools just sold my current charter school a “data collection system” that we’ve spent every single PD day working with, and in conjunction with the Ohio Dept. of Education, both enthusiastically push vendor assessment on us as the best path. If I could find a public school position, I’d leave and never enter a charter again. 90% of the charters I’ve worked with or subbed at in Ohio are an affront to our system of education.”

I think it's pretty clear that if you stare deep into the eyes of Obama administration officials, they would like to do more than they've proposed to shift spending out of programs for the elderly and into programs for children, infrastructure, and research. And David Brooks wants Republicans to call them on it:

In this framework, Democrats would get a lot of the good ideas that are in the Obama budget, but they’d be bigger and more aggressive. We’d take the pre-k initiative, the spending on scientific research and the infrastructure spending. But then we’d throw on top other programs. Make more men marriageable (by helping them earn a reliable wage). Rebind the social fabric in atomized communities (social entrepreneurship funds). Maybe expand a national service program to give more young adults discipline, orientation and connections.

Republicans would get structural entitlement reform. Here, too, we could build on the ideas in the Obama budget, like chained Consumer Price Index for Social Security and the expansion of means-testing for Medicare. Then we could throw on other modest structural reforms: Combine Medicare Parts A and B and further limiting Medigap plans in order to induce seniors to make more cost-conscious decisions. Repair federal pensions and the disability system. Means test Social Security and raise the Medicare eligibility age for affluent workers.

I'm quite curious as to how Obama administration officials would respond to something like this. Their official position is that anything with no tax hike element is a nonstarter with them. That position plus utter Republican intransigence on taxes has helped hold the Democratic coalition very solidly together. In a way, the rigidity of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell has been an enormous favor to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. I think a more flexible and more tactically savvy GOP that was willing to make a Brooks-like offer would provoke some serious splits.

Because why not: pics of athletes playing ball games, with the balls replaced with cute kittens.






Sport Balls Replaced With Cats

via

A Nebraska man has been charged with 6 counts of illegally selling firearms to known felons. Even though he is not even licensed to sell firearms, Ashley Gerbig claims that since he was selling from his ‘personal collection,’ what he did was perfectly legal. This personal collection is a very extensive one, as the ATF recovered 678 guns and 13 grenades when they raided Gerbig’s home.

When Republicans wage opposition to stricter gun laws, they may be compounding the party's already precarious standing among women.

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released early Thursday morning found a majority of Americans -- 55 percent -- expressing support for tougher gun measures. That finding is mostly par for the course, as polls conducted since the December mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. have consistently shown majority support for stricter gun laws. But dig deeper in the post-Newtown polling, and a similarly consistent trend emerges: women are far more receptive to gun control than men.

The NBC/WSJ poll was no exception. It found that while 65 percent of female respondents favor stricter gun laws, only 44 percent of male respondents felt the same way.

"It's easily one of the largest policy gender gaps we've seen in years," NBC's "First Read" team wrote of the finding.

But it was hardly the first poll to show such a gap. A national poll from Quinnipiac University released last week found that a whopping majority of 61 percent of women support stricter gun laws, while a slight majority of 51 percent of men are opposed.

In fact, Quinnipiac's two previous national polls showed similar numbers. March's poll from Quinnipiac showed 57 percent of women supporting stricter gun laws, while half of men said they were opposed. In February, more than 60 percent of women again said they supported tougher gun measures while, again, a majority of 55 percent of men were opposed.

Ditto for a CNN/ORC International poll in January that showed 65 percent of women favored stricter gun laws and 55 percent of men said they were opposed. A national poll conducted in late-January and early-February by Democratic-leaning Public Policy actually found a plurality of 48 percent of men supporting stricter gun laws, but that was still much lower than the 58 percent of women who took the same position.

At a Senate hearing on gun violence in January, much of the testimony from pro-gun advocate Gayle Trotter was predicated on claims that "guns make women safer" and women at home need a "scary-looking gun." But the polls suggest that Democrats may have a wedge issue to exploit the same gender gap that benefited them so much in last year's election. A poll in February from the progressive group Women Donors Network found that the gun issue could motivate many women who don't normally participate in midterms to vote in the 2014 elections.

I'm relatively bullish on the American economy, but I do worry that the prolonged downturn has created some odd mental blocks among American CEOs. Today, for example, the Wall Street Journal has a long story about how even though McDonald's did fairly well at the depths of the recession they're now having problems with the quality of the customer service they provide. I'm no management genius, but even I know that how much you pay people is relevant to how demanding you can be about the quality of the work they do. The Journal writes that "achieving speed and friendliness of service across the chain has been a particularly elusive goal" but it seems obvious that if you want people to work faster and better you're going to have to be willing to shell out more money.

I would just dismiss this as bad journalism, but it comes on the heels of a remarkable article about how Wal-Mart is selling lots of stuff but can't keep the shelves stocked in which "hire more people to stock the shelves" doesn't seem to be under consideration as a corporate option. Strange stuff.

But as I say, I'm bullish. Part of what you're seeing here is that the prolonged weak labor market has in some ways been a sweet ride for managers. As things bounce back, it gets tougher. You might need to add staff. And to add high-quality staff you might need to offer better wages and working conditions. It's tough out there. But someone will figure it out.

Anti-cancer groups and the tobacco industry have effectively joined forces to prevent some of the new insurance exchanges from implementing a surcharge for smokers. Thus, in the name of anti-discrimination (tobacco lobby) and ensuring access for the poor (the anti-cancer groups), non-smokers will be forced to pay higher premiums in order to pay for people's terrible lifestyle choices. That's just grand.

C.G.P. Grey explains the unusual case of Vatican City, the smallest state in the world.


CGPGrey

The story goes:

With the baby shark costume your little human will look down right vicious at any costume party he attends. This comfortably fitting costume is equipped with fins and some adorably ferocious teeth that will combine for one very charming looking land shark. Buy It $18.28 via Amazon.com

Meena Vathyam sent in this photograph from Shanghaiist:

This one is very easy to solve. The sentence actually means:

huíxiāng chǎo bènjī dàn 茴香炒笨鸡蛋
("fried free range eggs with fennel")

The translator misparsed the last part as bèn jīdàn 笨 鸡蛋 ("stupid egg") instead of the intended bènjī dàn 笨鸡 蛋 ("eggs from free range chickens").

Bènjī 笨鸡 ("free range chicken") is a northeast topolectal word for what in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is normally referred to as tǔjī 土鸡 (lit., "local / native chicken").  I've also heard this type of fowl referred to as cháijī 柴鸡 (lit., "firewood chicken").  In Shandong this type of poultry is called cǎojī 草鸡 (lit., "grass chicken").

The semantics of the epithet "stupid egg" were discussed at length in "Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping: presidential language notes".

[Thanks to Cao Lin, Cheng Fangyi, and Rebecca Fu]

A cool primer for those unfamiliar with the futuristic currency:

A reader responds to our previous post:

It seems the main way Bitcoins are used is for the Dark Web, that part of the Web that is unregulated and used by many folks to get unregulated materials. You can buy nearly anything there, from drugs to chemicals or other materials that you can use for good or nefarious ends. Bitcoins are used because they are a legitimate means of commerce that is not easily traced. And pegging the coins to the gold standard is one of the reasons for that. You can store your coins with a bank in Switzerland as an actual lump of gold and get that gold sent to you when you want to cash out. So, in a sense, it’s not like other currency.

I confess to being really curious about this other world of gold and less than legitimate commerce. My fantasies have turned it into something out of a Philip K. Dick novel. You can access this world safely and away from prying eyes – if you have the knowledge about how to do so. But I’m not going to dip my toe in.

By CRACKED Readers  Published: April 10th, 2013  The Internet is bullshit's natural habitat. We asked you to take some of the more popular lies the Internet loves to tell, and vandalize them with the truth. The winner is below, but first the runners-up ...

Because what college students really need is for their professors to nag them about doing the assigned readings:

Flickr/PinkMoose
Starting in the mid-1950s, closeted gays were targeted by a ring of extortionists who posed as corrupt vice cops. These extortionists successfully blackmailed prominent Americans by threatening to expose their homosexuality. Their victims included "a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities," William McGowan wrote in his brief history. The FBI and NYPD put aside their anti-gay prejudice, teamed up, and busted the ring in 1966. The extortionists were guilty of awful behavior, and law enforcement deserves kudos for stopping them. In hindsight, it's also easy to see the role that anti-gay prejudice played in their crime. Gays were blackmailed in part because being out meant censure, ridicule, even violence. There's still anti-gay bigotry in the U.S., but not enough to sustain a blackmail ring of that sort.

This week in Tennessee, three high school boys face charges of aggravated sexual exploitation after allegedly soliciting naked texts from female classmates under the guise of romantic interest, uploading the images to an email account, and threatening to send the photographs to their parents and other students unless they sent more naked photos of themselves. Law enforcement often overreacts to sexting, filing child pornography charges against teens engaged in consensual sharing with a boyfriend or girlfriend. But if the charges prove accurate in this case, police deserve kudos for intervening, and the boys deserve to get jail time. 

As in gay blackmail cases of bygone decades, however, the problem doesn't end with extortionist depravity. It's a sad commentary on society that nudity remains so stigmatized that photos of breasts, vaginas, and penises, which are as ubiquitous on the Internet as silly cat photos, remain powerful enough to have anxious teens cowering in fear of their own bodies being exposed. Evidently, sharing naked photos of oneself with romantic interests is now common. I'll spare you the list of celebrity examples. Folks who do this seem to feel okay about it at the time.

Yet nude photo blackmail is common, says Kashmir Hill, who recalls an Indiana case where a 14-year-old was lured into the woods and assaulted by a boy who threatened to release a breast photo. Adults are victims too. "The Web is littered with stories of hackers and jerks getting access to adults' nude photos and blackmailing them," Hill writes. "One San Francisco woman had her iPhone stolen at a bar in December; according to ABC News, six days after the phone went missing, a man in Peru who purchased it emailed her naked photos she had on the phone and tried to extort her for $6,000, threatening to send the photos to contacts in her phone."

Obviously, blackmailers should be prosecuted.

What seems less evident is that we'd be better off living in a society where images of a naked celebrity or coworker or high school classmate weren't met with reflexive opprobrium, fear of which makes the blackmail possible. True, there are things people aren't ashamed of doing that they wouldn't want their parents to see. Most married couples would be horrified if a sex tape of their wedding night, the most culturally acceptable time to have sex, were sent to their parents or broadcast on TV. But in so many instances of nude photo blackmail, there's no sex, just a grainy nude image. And nudity alone, without even a provocative pose, is enough for stigma and blackmail.   

In "Pointless Shame: The English Speaking World's Issue with Women's Breasts," I told the story of young teen Amanda Todd, who committed suicide after a photo of her exposed breasts, initially obtained by an extortionist, was circulated among her peers, who bullied her mercilessly. "As a parent," I wrote, "I'll warn my kids about the permanence of the Web and its perils. I'll particularly want them to understand the potential consequences of naked images of their bodies winding up online. It's prudent to teach kids how to navigate prevailing social norms, whatever they may be. But don't stories like this one demand something more from us than cautioning? When a child is bullied to the point of suicide partly because a photo of her breasts was circulated to her friends and family, shouldn't we ask ourselves why the Anglosphere retains social norms wherein being seen topless is regarded as horrifying and shameful?"   

The cruel bullies are the worst.

But the mindset that makes bullying on this subject possible is pervasive. It tempts most Americans. Seth McFarlane's Oscar song, "We Saw Your Boobs," could've only been performed in a country where it's common. It caused us to treat Anthony Weiner as if his dick photos were more scandalous than pols who had sex with women not their wives but whose packages never made Twitter. It's the mindset that caused People magazine to headline a story about a beautiful princess photographed topless while sunbathing at a private home with her new husband, "Inside Kate's Nightmare." It's the mindset that caused Americans to sit through the hypersexualized content of countless Super Bowl commercials and halftime show choreography without objecting, only to freak out at the split-second exposure of Janet Jackson's nipple.

The typical exasperated comment would be, "What a bunch of absurd prudes we are," but that isn't right. At least if we were prudes, stigmatizing nudity would make some kind of internally consistent sense. We'd be on constant guard against sexual arousal, premarital sex, and lusting after the opposite sex in our hearts. But the stigmas against all the things nudity might lead to in the minds of concerned traditionalists have fallen away. Nudity is almost alone in remaining shameful.

In other words, the stigma makes less sense than ever.

Ridiculing the exposed isn't a last redoubt of social conservatism or religiosity. There are, of course, consistent traditionalists who counsel physical modesty, among many other things, as part of a life well lived. That's fine. I am not advocating any kind of imperative to strip off one's clothes. Modesty is fine. But show me a college student being ridiculed as a "dirty slut" after topless photos circulate on campus and I'll show you bullies who are perfectly comfortable with the sexual revolution, birth control, abortion, and thong underwear. And as they perpetuate this stigma, they treat breasts and genitals as dirty objects to fetishize, not as a lovely part of the human form. For that reason alone, God-fearing traditionalists ought to understand these bullies as particular enemies.

What does contemporary American society gain from a stigma against nudity?

I'd argue nothing very worthwhile. If you're already living in a secular, hypersexualized country where sex is routinely used to sell consumer products, most naked bodies people see are air brushed models who look nothing like the average person, body image anxiety results in epidemic anorexia and bulimia, and effectively limitless images of naked bodies can be accessed on any computer or smart phone at a moment's notice, what possible case is there for a stigma?

Meanwhile, the costs are so evident that urging change seems like common sense. In what direction? Present attitudes are so confused and indefensible that it's easy to make the case for more conservative, more liberal, or more libertarian mores. Think of naked bodies as God's beautiful creation. Think of them as biological reality that showcases individual diversity. Think of them as something to be used however their owners please, so long as no harm is done to others. Just stop treating them as something to keep closeted out of shame or fear of ridicule. Sure, lots of us might feel that, if someone tried to blackmail us. But there's no excuse for perpetuating the stigma. People who blackmail others with naked photos can be prosecuted. Those who merely react to a naked text by ridiculing the person in it? They're the ones who ought to face ridicule. No one should be made to feel that a mere image of their own body is cause for shame.

It isn't.

That isn't to say that the stigma against nudity will ever be fully extinguished, or that people will ever cease being averse to their parents seeing a naked photo was meant for their boyfriend or girlfriend. But a stigma so powerful and ridicule so intense and reflexive that it empowers blackmailers and extortionists in multiple cases all over the country? That's something that can be overcome.

ATLANTA (AP) -- National Republican leaders made waves recently with a dim view of the party's future if it fails to expand its core support beyond white males and social conservatives. But weeks after GOP Chairman Reince Priebus unveiled the "Growth and Opportunity Project" report, many party players maintain that the problem often is more about flawed messengers saying the wrong things at the wrong times than the policy positions at issue.

The distinction between policy flaws and communication problems is at the crux of the GOP's soul-searching as the Republican National Committee convenes this week in Los Angeles for the first time since the report's release. And it's a discussion that won't end anytime soon as conservatives, moderates and pragmatists struggle for control of the GOP megaphone. The dynamic has been highlighted in the weeks since the chairman's call for outreach, with succession of conservative party figures voicing positions that may alienate the very voters national party leaders want to capture.

Alaska Rep. Don Young was forced to apologize after referring to Hispanic migrant workers as "wetbacks." Media titan Donald Trump, who flirted with a presidential run in 2012, warned against compromising with President Barack Obama on a citizenship path for anyone already in the country illegally, saying they'll just become Democratic voters.

Using social media, Republican National Committee member Dave Agema of Michigan redistributed controversial writings that were harshly critical of gay Americans. Agema dug in after many Michigan Republicans called for his resignation.

Days later, the head of the Georgia state party, Sue Everhart, said that if same-sex marriage were "natural," then gay couples "would have the equipment to have a sexual relationship." She predicted that if the Supreme Court allows federal employee benefits for gay couples, then individuals who are "straight as an arrow" will enter same-sex unions just for financial perks.

Comments like those have some Republicans reeling.

"It's extremely, extremely frustrating," said Gregory Steele, a University of North Carolina senior who leads his state's college Republican organization. "We want the party to have a serious policy discussion about all of these issues going forward, but it's hard to get to that point with all of these mistakes."

Former U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine, who retired in January as one of the GOP's last elected New England moderates, deplored the "intolerance" that she says has driven a "slow and steady erosion of a strong political base."

"It's very exclusionary," Snowe said. "For anyone who isn't already a Republican, how are they going to be drawn in right now?"

At Log Cabin Republicans, a national group of gay GOP loyalists, Gregory Angelo said the flaps reinforce the image of an inflexible organization. But he also noted Ohio Sen. Rob Portman's recent embrace of same-sex marriage, and described the party right now as going through "growing pains."

"We are no longer walking in lock-step on these (social) issues," he said.

White House losing streaks -- like the one Republicans are in nationally -- aren't new. Democrats lost four out of five presidential elections -- all by wide margins -- from 1972 to 1988, before then-Arkansas Bill Clinton styled himself as a "New Democrat" to win the presidency in 1992 and 1996.

But current trends are foreboding for Republicans. They've lost the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections. In the last two, Obama has won overwhelming majorities of non-white voters and younger voters, while the anchors of Republican support -- older white voters -- have become an increasingly smaller share of the electorate. Neither Clinton nor Jimmy Carter ever drew popular vote majorities. Obama has twice cleared 51 percent.

Republicans also lost several winnable Senate races in 2012 after conservative nominees made controversial statements about women and abortion.

Top Republicans both acknowledge the damage such comments have caused and remain careful to defend the party's official positions as they call for a wider tent.

Republican Governors Association Chairman Bobby Jindal memorably called for the GOP to "stop being the stupid party," but the potential 2016 presidential candidate from Louisiana said in the same January speech to the RNC, "We do not need to change what we believe ... our principles are timeless."

Henry Barbour, a Mississippian who helped write the post-election analysis for Priebus, emphasizes that the document shouldn't be read as a call to change the Republican position on abortion, same-sex marriage or immigration. "In politics, you need to be what you're for," he said.

Louisiana Republican Chairman Roger Villere, a conservative who is also national party vice chairman, said, "To be Democrat-light will not win us elections."

Both Villere and Barbour said fixing the party starts with softening the way that Republicans talk about hot-button issues and emphasizing economic and fiscal policy.

In Georgia, Everhart makes the conundrum clear. She says the party should emphasize the economy, but added: "I don't like to refer to 'social issues' as much as I say that they're just my beliefs, and I'm going to talk about them," she said. "If you change your views for one group, you just lose another."

The one policy position where many Republicans are eager to give ground is immigration, where Senate Republicans are negotiating with Democrats on a comprehensive overhaul. Yet, they couch these policy shifts on immigration as more of a shift in message. Over the weekend, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina went so far as to call Romney's arch-conservative position on immigration "impractical" and "offensive." He was referring specifically to Romney urging immigrants in the country illegally to "self-deport."

Perhaps the strongest call for policy shifts -- as opposed to tweaking the message -- comes from New England Republicans.

Snowe said that conservatives in Congress, she said, have gone from "original Republican principles (of) fiscal responsibility and economic opportunity" to "eviscerating government."

"That scares people," Snowe said.

Steve Duprey, a Republican National Committeeman from New Hampshire, said any meaningful shift on policy issues ultimately must come from Republican presidential candidates. Nominees always have that power, he said, noting that Romney's march to the right on immigration and other issues helped define the party in 2012.

Snowe agreed, but noted that Democrats' resurgence in 1992 came only after Clinton had spent years building a centrist anchor for the party through his Democratic Leadership Council.

Duprey offered one more ingredient: "It usually takes a few elections of losing before you figure out that singing to the choir isn't the way to grow a party."

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

(Shutterstock/Yuri Arcurs)

Whitney Mallett looks into the origins and usage of marijuana brand-names:

The demand for all these different strains is relatively recent. Once upon a time, pot was pot and you bought what your dealer down the street was selling. But a new breed of cannabis connoisseur has emerged alongside increasingly nuanced legal restrictions. In the Netherlands in the 1970s, coffee shops dispensing marijuana tolerated by the government started cropping up. For the first time, there were dozens of different strains on the menu. Today medical marijuana dispensaries in North America offer a similar range of choices.

But crops of the same strain can vary:

Marijuana Man [aka Greg Williams] agrees that increased legalization will lead to a more regular product. But he also points out that Mother Nature is still bound to create unpredictability. “Each crop is going to be a little bit different,” he explains. “In Amsterdam, I would go in and buy Haze and then go in again and ask for the same thing, and the guy would say, ‘It’s not as nice this time.’” Just as wine from the same type of grape and the same vineyard varies dramatically year to year, marijuana of the same strain and same growing conditions varies too.

If I live that long, I fancy a retirement to Colorado or Washington or perhaps even Ptown where I can blog as a legal canna-critic. We have wine critics. And food critics. Why not a critic of the thing that makes food and wine even more blessed? By then, the subtleties, the mixes of CBD and THC, the nuances of sativa and indica strains will all be turned by the genius of the free market into something quite marvelous. We will finally have made of this weed what was long made of the simple grape.

And we will all be happier. Which is the point of America, right?

(Photo: Dave Warden, a bud tender at Private Organic Therapy (P.O.T.), a non-profit co-operative medical marijuana dispensary, displays various types of marijuana available to patients on October 19, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. By David McNew/Getty.)

I'm not the world's leading Rand Paul fan, to put it mildly, but good for him for speaking at Howard University. Now if he can only refrain from explicating why Lincoln was wrong about the Civil War …

Readers — The Sex Offender Registry exists to protect children…ostensibly. It is a list of  dangerous predators, not just plain jerks….ostensibly. And being placed on it is not a “punishment”…ostensibly. I leave that to you to determine, with below as Exhibit A. If you feel, as I do, that the criteria for landing on the Sex Offender List need to be changed — drastically — I hope you will consider signing this petition, as I did.- L

Dear Free-Range Kids: Six years ago my husband, Bruce Darrell Crosthwaite, was accused of putting a $5 tip down the shirt of a 17-year-old girl on a small-town, Michigan golf course. The prosecutor turned this into “touching the victim’s breast with sexual intent.” That’s all it took. She never actually said those words. The prosecutor did. There was no evidence presented against my husband, other than this girl saying “yes” to the prosecutor’s leading, sexualized questions. Our attorney advised (wrongfully) that my husband not testify.

He was found guilty but the case seemed so minor, the judge opted to give “no punishments.” He said he didn’t want to see him lose his job. Instead, as the law required, he just placed him on the Sex Offender Registry.

Just.

We live in the Chicago suburbs and have two girls now, ages 6 and 4. It is hell having their dad on the list. My daughter has been kicked out of preschool. My family was just asked to leave the neighborhood sports center where my daughter was in the middle of her dance session. My kids can’t have other kids come over to the house to play. How do I explain that? I already have a hard time driving them to all their activities and daycare because, as a registered sex offender, my husband is not allowed to. It will only get worse as my kids get older and their dad can’t attend anything extracurricular. A small mistake or indiscretion costs a person and his family 25+ years? The registry is not punishment? I would rather have had my husband do a little time and come out able to live a normal life!

We have exhausted our efforts with the legal system. Here is an article about our appeal, which was denied. Our sole hope is that the young lady herself will ask the judge to reconsider the crime as an “assault” rather than a sex crime, because that could get him off the list.

Recently, my mother found the young woman on Facebook and wrote her this note:

Dear B.: Thank you for replying. We have been overwhelmed with the affect this has had on the girls. The oldest was “kicked out of preschool” because of this.  Can you imagine? Not to mention the friends she can no longer play with…. Bruce is not allowed to attend any school performances and recitals for the next 20 years.

After going through the trial transcript I agreed that you were assaulted but I wanted to ask you if you felt that the intention was to sexually abuse you.  Through talking with my friends, they felt if there was no intent, we could address the court to consider an assault and battery charge.  I do not want to diminish what transpired but want to ask you if you thought that sexual abuse was his intent or if he was just acting like a “jerk.” Did you even know that this was being treated as a sex crime?

I am sorry to bring this up again and make you rehash the whole thing, but I am just watching these two little girls and I know it is going to get worse when they go to regular school and this becomes well known.   Bruce is a loving and attentive father. They are already asking “How come?” a lot. If you feel that his original intent was NOT sexual abuse it might give us an avenue to pursue to possibly get this charge changed to assault and battery.

Please let me know.

So far, she has not replied. We are hoping that maybe some media attention could help not only my husband but so many others on the list who pose no predator threat to children. – Julie Crosthwaite

Readers — Lenore here again: I hope that the grandma’s letter has some effect. Meantime, reading some of the comments under the article about the appeal left me dismayed. For instance, ”….where did he think he was, in a strip club? Which, by the way, would also be inappropriate. The young girl had every right to be upset.”

Upset? Of course. But in our overreaction nation, we often leap from minor incident to major consequence as if that makes us safer, smarter, etc. It just makes us more hysterical, and not in the ha-ha sense. – L.

 

It all began at a golf course…

BLOOMFIELD, Conn. (AP) -- Police in Connecticut say they arrested a man who pulled out a rifle-like BB gun as President Barack Obama's motorcade passed by him.

Authorities say the man was pacing back and forth and then pulled out the gun Monday as the motorcade went by in Bloomfield while returning to Bradley International Airport, after the president gave a speech on gun control at the University of Hartford.

Bloomfield police have not released the man's name or the charges against him.

Police say officers noticed the man acting suspiciously and took him into custody by force when he pulled out the gun.

The man is expected to be arraigned in Hartford Superior Court on Tuesday.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Authorities say a 4-year-old boy grabbed a loaded gun at a family cookout and accidentally shot and killed the wife of a Tennessee sheriff's deputy.

Investigators say Wilson County Deputy Daniel Fanning on Saturday was showing his weapons to a relative in a bedroom of his Lebanon home when the toddler came in and picked up a gun off the bed. Sheriff Robert Bryan says the weapon discharged, hitting 48-year-old Josephine Fanning.

She was pronounced dead at the scene. The child is not related to her or her husband.

Bryan says the shooting was a terrible accident and that within seconds of Fanning placing the gun on the bed, the toddler picked it up.

The gun was not Fanning's service weapon and the sheriff says the deputy's weapons are normally stored in a safe.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press.

The other day I tried to tease out the difference between African Americans with conservative politics, and African Americans who promote themselves at the expense of the community from which they hail. To understand what it once meant to be an African-American conservative, it's worth checking out this old Washington Post piece on former Rep. J.C. Watts, who represented his beliefs but wanted to be something more than the guy who assured Jesse Helms that he was not racist.

Negroes are human, not superhuman. Like all people, they have differing personalities, diverse financial interests and varied aspirations. There are Negroes who will never fight for freedom. There are Negroes who will seek to profit for themselves alone from the struggle. There are even Negroes who will cooperate with there oppressors. These facts should depress no one. Every minority and every people has its share of opportunists, profiteers, free-loaders, and escapists."

Cynthia Haven dug up a 1996 David Foster Wallace review of the first four volumes of Joseph Frank’s behemoth biography of the Russian author. An excerpt:

[Dostoevsky’s] concern was always what it is to be a human being – i.e., how a person, in the particular social and philosophical circumstances of 19th-century Russia, could be a real human being, a person whose life was informed by love and values and principles, instead of being just a very shrewd species of self-preserving animal. …

So, for me anyway, what makes Dostoevsky invaluable is that he possessed a passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we, here, today, cannot or do not allow ourselves. And on finishing Frank’s books, I think any serious American reader/writer will find himself driven to think hard about what exactly it is that makes so many of the novelists of our own time look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so impoverished in comparison to Gogol, Dostoevsky, even lesser lights like Lermontov and Turgenev. To inquire of ourselves why we – under our own nihilistic spell – seem to require of our writers an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of profound issues or else try somehow to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or juxtaposition, sticking them inside asterisks as part of some surreal, defamiliarization-of-the-reading-experience flourish.

I'm down in the Texas Hill Country visiting with my in-laws, and yesterday we drove out to the LBJ Ranch National Historic Park. Then this morning I learned that Margaret Thatcher has passed away. Thatcher and Reagan both strike me as fascinating figures—icons of the Anglophone right who were elected before I was even born and whose substantive legacies in public policy seem to me to be far more praiseworthy than their later influence as icons.

LBJ made me think of this in two ways. One is that because of Vietnam, Johnson never became a heroic figure to American progressives despite Medicare, Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, federal aid to education, a raft of new national parks and environmental legislation, and a whole truckload of "lesser" bills that would count as major achievements of nearly any other administration. Another is that though Johnson was very much an FDR Democrat, his policies were quite different from FDR's. Most of all, the central theory of FDR's domestic policy was an obsessive need to duck and cover on issues of racial justice while LBJ's policies were all about aiming squarely at the race problem. LBJ didn't repudiate FDR's successes, but he didn't try to replicate or repeat them either. He knew that 1964 wasn't 1934.

Thatcher, like Ronald Reagan in the United States, became what Johnson never was—more than an influential politician but a generation-defining icon.

And yet while the policies of the Thatcher and Reagan revolutions have been largely successful, the political legacy seems to me to be quite mixed. Listening to contemporary conservatives, you often get the sense that they want to just rerun the policy agenda of the late 1970s and early 1980s. But today the leading global problem is climate change, not Communism. That's not because Communism isn't bad, it's because the Cold War is over. Privatizing state-run industrial companies won't jump-start growth. That's not because state-ownership of industrial firms is a good idea, it's because we don't have any. Reducing the power of labor unions to curb cost-push inflation doesn't fix anything because labor unions aren't powerful anymore. When you triumph, you triumph. But history doesn't end, new issues come to the front of the stack. We have a crisis of inadequate demand. We have the problem of providing health care to an aging population. Trying to apply the "lessons of Munich" to Vietnam was a disaster. Trying to apply the economic policy solutions of a generation ago to the problems of today is equally inappropriate.