Krisya

If you’re looking for just one image that says a thousand words about what’s wrong with America, here’s a contender.  It is a screenshot of the website for the Silver State Schools Credit Union:

Yep, it’s an invitation to K-12 teachers to go into debt to do their job.

Speechless.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Fox News television host Megyn Kelly told viewers on her December 11 broadcast that Jesus and Santa are both white men.

"Just because it makes you feel uncomfortable doesn't mean it has to change," Kelly said. "Jesus was a white man, too. It's like we have, he's a historical figure that's a verifiable fact, as is Santa, I just want kids to know that. How do you revise it in the middle of the legacy in the story and change Santa from white to black?"

Setting aside the ridiculousness of creating rigidly racial depictions of a fictitious character that does not actually exist—sorry, kids—like Santa, Kelly has made a more serious error about Jesus. The scholarly consensus is actually that Jesus was, like most first-century Jews, probably a dark-skinned man. If he were taking the red-eye flight from San Francisco to New York today, Jesus might be profiled for additional security screening by TSA.

The myth of a white Jesus is one with deep roots throughout Christian history. As early as the Middle Ages and particularly during the Renaissance, popular Western artists depicted Jesus as a white man, often with blue eyes and blondish hair. Perhaps fueled by some Biblical verses correlating lightness with purity and righteousness and darkness with sin and evil, these images sought to craft a sterile Son of God.

The only problem was that the representations were historically inaccurate.

Modern Western Christians have carried these images over into their own depictions of Jesus. Pick up a one of those bright blue “Bible Story” books in a Sunday School classroom and you’ll find white Jesus waiting for you, rosy cheeks and all. Or you could survey the light-skinned Jesus in any number of modern TV or film portrayals, including History Channel’s hit series The Bible.

by Bobby Finger and Emma Carmichael

Benedict Cumberbatch is a talented actor. But Benedict Cumberbatch is not hot. Here are 917 people who are hotter than Benedict Cumberbatch.

1. Martin Freeman
2. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. Jeremy Brett
4. Your mom
5. Ron Artest
6. Metta World Peace
7. Prince Harry
8. Prince William
9. Prince Charles
10. This lady who got knocked over by the wind recently
11. Joan Cusack
12. Joan Didion
13. Joan Jett
14. Them
15. Lee Ranaldo
16. Andy Garcia
17. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett
18. Mark Spitz
19. Marc Spitz
20. Danny Trejo
21. Paul Wesley
22. Ian Somerhalder
23. Steven R. McQueen
24. Zach Roerig
25. Michael Trevino
26. Michael Jordan
27. Michael B. Jordan
28. Jordan Knight
29. Jordan Fisher
30. Jules Jordan
31. Montell Jordan
32. Jeremy Jordan
33. Richard Jordan
34. Ben Lee Jordan
35. Jordan Pruitt
36. Jordan Waring
37. Vernon Jordan
38. Matthew Davis
39. Javier Bardem
40. Louis C.K.
41. Tony Plana
42. Tony Danza
43. Sidney Blumenthal
44. Rick Stengel
45. Jimmy Akingbola
46. Alan Igbon
47. Hugh Quarshie
48. Javone Prince
49. Prince
50. Josh Charles
51. Josh Duhamel
52. Josh Turner
53. Josh Hartnett
54. Josh Hamilton
55. Josh Cuthbert
56. Josh Brolin
57. Josh Smith
58. Charles Esten
59. Charles Woodson
60. Charles Kelley
61. Charles Grodin
62. Young Charlie Chaplin
63. Ray Charles
64. RuPaul Andre Charles
65. Beautiful woman on a ladder above the clouds looking far away
66. Roger Klotz
67. Tupac Shakur
68. Tim Tebow
69. Tim McGraw
70. Timbaland
71. This guy
72. Barack Obama
73. Michelle Obama
74. Dominic West
75. Idris Elba
76. Mary Louise Parker
77. Jackie Jackson
78. Tito Jackson
79. Jermaine Jackson
80. Marlon Jackson
81. Michael Jackson
82. Janet Jackson
83. Whoever this was
84. Michael Keaton
85. All of the Michael Keatons in Multiplicity
86. Him
87. Samuel Alito
88. Elena Kagan
89. John G. Roberts
90. Anthony Kennedy
91. Ruth Bader Ginsburg
92. Sonia Sotomayor
93. Stephen G. Breyer
94. Alf
95. Rowan Atkinson
96. Mr. Pibb
97. Dr. Pepper
98. Mr. Clean
99. Mr. Sparkle 
100. Elian Gonzalez
101. Sheryl Crow
102. John Wayne
103. Milton Berle
104. The guy next to me in line for pizza earlier today who ordered his slice “well done”
105. Key
106. Peele
107. Henry Ford
108. Joe Isuzu
109. Doc
110. Grumpy
111. Happy
112. Sleepy
113. Bashful
114. Sneezy
115. Dopey
116. Kid Rock
117. Ronald Reagan
118. Joe Jonas
119. Nick Jonas
120. Kevin Jonas
121. Luke Wilson
122. Owen Wilson
123. The other Wilson brother
124. Elijah Wood
125. Henry Kissinger
126. Dan Hedaya
127. Stan Zbornak
128. Dorothy Zbornak
129. Blanche Devereaux
130. Rose Nylund
131. Sophia Petrillo
132. Diane Warren
133. Celine Dion
134. Rene Angelil
135. Albert Nobbs
136. Glenn Close
137. The original Brawny Man
138. Juror #1
139. Juror #2
140. Juror #3
141. Juror #4
142. Juror #5
143. Juror #6.
144. Juror #7
145. Juror #8
146. Juror #9
147. Juror #10
148. Juror #11
149. Bobcat Goldthwait
150. Juror #12
151. Michelle Williams
152. Michelle Williams
153. Kelly Rowland
154. Latavia Roberson
155. Tina Knowles
156. Solange Knowles
157. The Eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleberg
158. “man slipping and falling”
159. The New Face of America
160. Santa Claus
161. A common elf
162. Gaston
163. Lefou
164. Lumiere as a candlestick
165. Lumiere as a man
166. Cogsworth as a clock
167. Cogsworth as a man
168. The wardrobe
169. Sully Sullenberger
170. Mr. Big
171. Aidan Shaw
172. Jack Berger
173. Aleksandr Petrovsky
174. Richard Wright
175. Smith Jerrod
176. Trey MacDougal
177. Bunny MacDougal
178. Harry Goldenblatt
179. Skipper Johnston
180. Robert Leeds
181. Steve Brady
182. Steve Brady’s Mom
183. This
184. Animal
185. Beaker
186. Beauregard
187. Camilla
188. Fozzie
189. Gonzo
190. Janice
191. Kermit
192. Miss Piggy
193. Rizzo
194. Rowlf
195. Scooter
196. The Swedish Chef
197. The cast of The Real World New Orleans
198. Christopher Walken
199. Sinbad
200. Professor Plum
201. Colonel Mustard
202. Mr. Green
203. Mrs. Peacock
204. Mrs. White
205. Mr. Body
206. Ted Cruz
207. The Candyman
208. The other Candyman
209. Jerry
210. George
211. Kramer
212. Newman
213. Bania
214. Mr. Pitt
215. Larry David
216. Cheryl David
217. Craig David
218. Michelangelo's David
219. David Paymer
220. This block of wood
221. The cast of The Wood
222. The person who delivers your mail
223. The person who delivered you
224. Any clown
225. Sister Mary Clarence
226. Sister Mary Robert
227. Jackee Harry
228. Sister Mary Lazarus
229. Sister Alma
230. Sister Mary Patrick
231. This piece of toast
232. An Oscar
233. An MTV Moon Man
234. A Golden Globe
235. Goldie Hawn
236. Kate Hudson
237. Kurt Russell
238. Harry
239. Any of the Hendersons
240. Laverne
241. Shirley
242. Lenny
243. Squiggy
244. Garry Marshall
245. Penny Marshall
246. Fred Armisen as Penny Marshall
247. Timon
248. Pumba
249. Patrick Wilson
250. Woodrow Wilson
251. Mr. Wilson
252. Wilson
253. Wilson
254. Wilson
255. Phillips
256. Captain Phillips
257. Captain Planet
258. Wind
259. Water
260. Earth
261. Fire
262. Heart
263. Heart
264. The Cowardly Lion
265. The Tin Man
266. The Scarecrow
267. The Wicked Witch of the West
268. The Lollipop Guild
269. A lollipop
270. The Umbrella Man
271. The Lawnmower Man
272. The Orkin Man
273. The Trojan Man
274. The Wicker Man (1973)
275. The Wicker Man (2006)
276. The Music Man
277. The Running Man
278. The Postman
279. The Mothman
280. The Best Man
281. Encino Man
282. The guy who just added you on LinkedIn
283. Gallagher
284. Peter Gallagher
285. Abraham Lincoln
286. Abraham Lincoln’s Cabinet
287. Mary Todd Lincoln
288. Shirley MacLaine
289. Shirley MacLaine
290. Shirley MacLaine
291. Shirley MacLaine
292. Shirley MacLaine
293. Shirley MacLaine
294. Denise Huxtable
295. Vanessa Huxtable
296. Theo Huxtable
297. Rudy Huxtable
298. Clair Huxtable
299. Cliff Huxtable
300. Cousin Pam
301. Cousin Eddie
302. Cousin Itt
303. Cousin Larry
304. The Cloverfield Monster
305. Your RTF 317 Intro to Narrative Film professor
306. Your RTF 317 Intro to Narrative Film TA
307. Most of your TAs, actually
308. Howie Mandel
309. Howie Mandel’s hands
310. Him
311. Jackie Earle Haley
312. A Minion
313. Dorian Gray
314. Meredith Grey
315. The color gray
316. Michael Landon
317. Tyne Daly
318. John Ratzenberger
319. Marg Helgenberger
320. Erin Brockovich
321. Peter Bogdanovich
333. Nosferatu
334. Matisyahu
335. The Englishman Who Went Up A Hill But Came Down A Mountain
336. This
337. The missing link
338. Barton Fink
340. This guy
341. This guy
342. This guy
343. These two
344. Her
345. Ewan McGregor
346. Mamie Gummer
347. Grace Gummer
348. Don Gummer
349. Henry Gummer
350. Meryl Streep
351. Joanna Kramer
352. Sophie
353. Karen Silkwood
354. Molly Gilmore
355. Susan Traherne
356. Karen
357. Rachel Samstat
358. Helen Archer
359. Linda Chamberlain
360. Mary Fisher
361. Suzanne Vale
362. Julia
363. Madeline Ashton
364. Clara
365. Lee
366. Roberta Guaspari
367. Susan Orlean
368. Clarissa Vaughan
369. Abigail Adams
370. Hannah Pitt
371. Eleanor Shaw
372. Aunt Josephine
373. Lisa Metzger
374. Yolanda Johnson
375. Miranda Priestly
376. Joanna Silver
377. Lila Ross
378. Corrine Whitman
379. Corrine Whitman
380. Janine Roth
381. Donna
382. Sister Aloysius Beauvier
383. Julia Child
384. Mrs. Fox
385. Jane Adler
386. Margaret Thatcher
387. Kay
388. Violet Weston
389. The Witch
390. Him
391. Joe Rogan
392. Joe Camel
393. Joe Dimaggio
394. Joe Fresh
395. Joe Scarborough
396. Joe Cool
397. Joe Pesci
398. Cesar Chavez
399. Julius Caesar
400. Little Caesar
401. The Winklevoss twin who stands on the left
402. Taye Diggs
403. Morris Chestnut
404. Terrence Howard
405. Harold Perrineau
406. Eddie Cibrian
407. Sanaa Lathan
408. Nia Long
409. Regina Hall
410. Monica Calhoun
411. Melissa de Sousa
412. The Man Without a Face
413. The Man Who Wasn’t There
414. The Man From Snowy River
415. The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
416. The Man on the Moon
417. The man on the moon
418. The Man of Steel
419. The Man of La Mancha
420. The Man Who Knew Too Much
421. The Man Who Knew Too Little
422. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence
423. The Man In The Iron Mask
424. Juwanna Mann
425. Leslie Mann
426. Whatta Man
427. Crazy Pete
428. Old Man Marley
429. Mean Old Lady Higgenlooper
430. Untitled (Big Man)
431. Woody Allen
432. Woody Harrelson
433. Woody Woodpecker
434. Woody Guthrie
435. Woody the Cowboy
436. Buzz Lightyear
437. Buzz Aldrin
438. This BuzzFeed list
439. The whammy
440. That professor my friend dated in college despite the fact that I did not approve of the relationship
441. The silhouette of a man uglier than Benedict Cumberbatch
442. Usher
443. Ali Go
444. Bruno
445. Borat
446. Boris Karloff
447. Marla Sokoloff
448. Ron Howard
449. Andy Griffith
450. Maria Rainer
451. Captain Georg von Trapp
452. Elsa Schrader
453. Rolf Gruber
454. Liesl vonn Trapp
455. The Mother Abbess
456. Phonte Coleman
457. Her
458. Nelly Furtado
459. Nelly
460. Fergie
461. Gumby
462. That hot dad I accidentally flipped my hair into on the Q train three years ago
463. Most dads in the borough of Brooklyn
464. Your dad
465. Patty Mayonnaise
466. Apple Store Lady
467. Conan O’Brien
468. Conan the Barbarian
469. Xena Warrior Princess
470. The heart-eye Emoji
471. The sunglasses Emoji
472. The devil Emoji
473. The policeman Emoji
474. The heart-eye cat Emoji
475. The grandma Emoji
476. The pair of dancing ladies Emoji
477. The smiling poop Emoji
478. The guy who stole my iPhone 4
479. Nick Carter
480. Brian Littrell
481. Kevin Richardson
482. A.J. McLean
483. Howie Dorough
484. Justin Timberlake
485. Lance Bass
486. JC Chasez
487. Joey Fatone
488. Chris Kirkpatrick (gratuitous)
489. Gandalf the Grey
490. Frodo Baggins
491. Samwise Gamgee
492. Galadriel
493. Aragorn
494. Most hobbits
495. Tom Brady
496. Drew Bledsoe
497. Babe Parilli
498. The Fab Five (Michigan basketball edition)
499. The Fab Five (U.S. gymnastics edition)
500. Fab Five Freddy
501. Josh Lyman
502. C.J. Cregg
503. Donnatella Moss
504. Charlie Young
505. President Jeb Bartlet
506. Dr. Abby Bartlet
507. Zoey Bartlet
508. Toby Ziegler
509. Toby Ziegler’s dad
510. Leo McGarry
511. Them
512. Tinky Winky
513. Dipsy
514. Laa-Laa
515. Po
516. Noo-Noo
517. Sexy Tinky Winky
518. All of the women laughing alone with salad
519. All of the women struggling to drink water
520. Moe Howard
521. Curly Howard
522. Larry Fine
523. Roof guy
524. Spanky
525. Alfalfa
526. Darla
527. Stymie
528. Porky
529. Buckwheat
530. Butch
531. Woim
532. Waldo
533. Uh-huh
534. Mary-Kate Olsen
535. Ashley Olsen
536. Elizabeth Olsen
537. Uncle Jesse
538. Bob Saget
539. Bob Marley
540. Bob Dylan
541. Bob Hope
542. Bob Barker
543. Vanna White
544. Bob Ross
545. Bob Dole
546. Bob Costas
547. Bobby Orr
548. Bobby McFerrin
549. This
550. Keira Knightley
551. Keira Knightley’s lower lip
552. Sage Steele
553. Linda Cohn
554. Hannah Storm
555. Scott Van Pelt
556. This guy
557. Max Read
558. Them
559. Erykah Badu
560. Erika Christensen
561. Erica Mena
562. Eric Dane
563. The Prime Minister of Denmark
564. A cheese Danish
565. Nick Denton
566. Jonah Peretti
567. Chelsea Peretti
568. The Peretti dad, probably
569. Amy Poehler
570. Tina Fey
571. Rachel Dratch
572. Janeane Garofalo
573. Romy
574. Michele
575. Mary
576. Rhoda
577. Thelma
578. Louise
579. John Shankman
580. Doge
581. Kenan
582. Kel
583. Kelly Ripa
584. Kelly Clarkson
585. Gene Kelly
586. Cord Jefferson
587. That guy in corduroys from the Destiny’s Child song “Apple Pie a La Mode”
588. Lou Bega
589. Angela
590. Pamela
591. Sandra
592. and Rita
593. Rita Ora
594. Rita Levi-Montalcini
595. Rita Hayworth
593. Rita Wilson
594. Tom Hanks
595. Chet Haze
596. Chester Cheetah
597. Mr. Peanut
598. The yellow M&M
599. The red M&M
600. The orange M&M
601. The turquoise M&M
602. The green M&M
603. The guy who went on a date with the green M&M in that commercial
604. Flo
605. Flo Rida
606. Florida Senator Marco Rubio
607. Ricky Rubio
608. Ricki Lake
609. My first crush
610. My sixth grade crush
611. My seventh grade crush
612. My eighth grade crush
613. My ninth grade crush
614. My tenth grade crush
615. My eleventh grade crush
616. My twelfth grade crush
617. My freshman year crush
618. My sophomore year crush
619. My junior year crush
620. My senior year crush
621. My current crush
622. Steve from Dream Phone
623. Wayne from Dream Phone
624. Susan from Guess Who?
625. Them
626. Tony Hawk
627. Tony Soprano
628. Carmela Soprano
629. Meadow Soprano
630. AJ Soprano Jr.
631. Livia Soprano
632. Corrado Soprano
633. Dr. Melfi
634. Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman
635. Dr. Oz
636. Dr. Phil
637. Dr. Seuss
638. Dr. Dre
639. Dr. Kevorkian
640. Dr. Luke
641. Dr. Ruth
642. George Baker
643. Pierce Brosnan
644. Christopher Cazenove
645. Daniel Craig
646. Sean Connery
647. Timothy Dalton
648. Bob Holness
649. Michael Jayston
650. George Lazenby
651. Roger Moore
652. Barry Nelson
653. David Niven
654. Toby Stephens
655. The very idea of James Bond
656. Niall Horan
657. Zayn Malik
658. Liam Payne
659. Harry Styles
660. Louis Tomlinson
661. Lily Tomlin
662. Lily Allen
663. Johann Sebastian Bach
664. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, sans wig
665. Frédéric François Chopin
666. Satan
667. Wesley
668. Buttercup
669. Prince Humperdinck
670. Inigo Montoya
671. Fezzik
672. Vizzini
673. The Albino
674. Vladimir Putin on a horse
675. Vladimir Putin in a race car
676. Vladimir Putin doing karate
677. Vladimir Putin snorkeling
678. Vladimir Putin on a yacht
679. Vladimir Putin arm-wrestling
680. Vladimir Putin attempting to bend a frying pan with his bare hands and failing
681. Vladimir Putin on a snowmobile
682. Vladimir Putin driving a helicopter
683. Vladimir Putin holding a puppy
684. Vladimir Putin on a motorcycle
685. Vladimir Putin on a horse, but also shirtless
686. Vladimir Putin, generally
687. The guy at the wine store who doesn’t judge me when I ask for the “affordable” Sauvignon Blanc
688. Most wine mascots
689. Most Moscato mascots
690. Most mascots
691. Andre Leon Talley
692. Grace Coddington
693. David Remnick
694. Ariel Levy
695. Ariel
696. Daryl Hannah
697. Hannah Montana
698. Billy Ray Cyrus
699. Billy Ray Cyrus’s mullet
700. Her
701. Harry Potter
702. Hermione Granger
703. Hedwig
704. Sirius Black
705. Albus Dumbledore
706. Minerva McGonagall
707. Lord Voldemort in Book 6
708. Lord Voldemort in Book 3
709. Lord Voldemort in Book 1
710. Lord Voldemort in Book 7
711. Lord Voldemort in Book 4
712. Lord Voldemort in Book 5
713. Lord Voldemort in Book 2
714. Nagini
715. J.K. Rowling
716. Robert Galbraith
717. Happy Group Of Young Friends Watching Television And Supporting Their Team
718. This guy shredding guitar in a kilt
719. The Loch Ness Monster (Look 1)
720. The Loch Ness Monster (Look 2)
721. The Loch Ness Monster (Look 3)
722. The Loch Ness Monster (Look 4)
723. This guy pretending to pose in front of the Loch Ness Monster
724. Alan Cumming
725. Alan Rickman
726. Alan Alda
727. Agnetha Fältskog
728. Björn Ulvaeus
729. Benny Andersson
730. Anni-Frid Lyngstad
731. Björk
732. Björk dressed as a swan
733. Natalie Portman dressed as the Swan Queen
734. Mila Kunis dressed as the Black Swan
735. Most swans residing in public parks
736. A park ranger in New Mexico named Dave Popelka
737. Dave, Founder of Wendy's
738. Wendy
739. The Hamburglar
740. Most hamburgers
741. This guy
742. This lady
743. Kelis’s milkshake
744. Kelis
755. Rihanna tho
756. Melissa Forde
757. The Ford Fiesta
758. The Daft Punk guy in the silver helmet
759. The Daft Punk guy in the gold helmet
760. Pharrell at 20
761. Pharrell at 40
762. Chad Hugo
763. A lot of men named Chad, unfortunately
764. Like this guy
765. Ed White
766. Edward White
767. Malcolm Read
768. Malcolm Gladwell
769. Malcolm In The Middle
770. Malcolm McDowell
771. A dowel rod
772. Janet Malcolm
773. Sandy Alderson
774. Sandy Dvore
775. Sandy Hawkins
776. Sandy who was Little Orphan Annie's Dog
777. The Rihanna plane
778. Thomas Rogers
779. Rogers and Hart
780. Thomas Gibson
781. Thomas Dekker
782. Brooklyn Decker
783. Thomas Jane
784. Captain Janeway
785. Thomas Paine
786. Thomas Monson
787. Charlotte Ronson
788. Michael Tilson Thomas
789. Thomas Hart Benton
790. Thomas Brodie-Sangster
791. Brody from "Homeland" (pre-heroin)
792. Brody Jenner
793. Bruce Jenner
794. Bruce Banner
795. The dude who wrote Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer
796. #685, but if he also had a buzzcut
797. Bonnie Raitt
798. Bonnie Hunt
799. Your Bonnie lying over the ocean
800. Any mental image of any grizzly sea captain
801. A grizzly bear
802. Gordon the Fisherman from the fishstick boxes
803. Any beard
804. Her
805. Bill Nye
806. Your standard-issue classroom test tube
807. Tia Mowry
808. Tamera Mowry
809. The Flying Nun
810. Theodore Rex
811. Littlefoot
812. Petrie
813. Ducky
814. Cera
815. Michael Cera
816. Michael Caine
817. An anthropomorphic candy cane
818. An anthropomorphic anything
819. The green gargoyle from Gargoyles
820. A cloud that makes you say, “That looks like a man!”
821. A flibbertigibbet
822. A will-o’- the-wisp
823. Ronan Farrow
824. Frank Sinatra
825. Nancy Sinatra
826. The tall one in The Blue Man Group
827. The mouse from Ratatouille
828. Any person saying “Ratatouille”
829. Jesus, most likely
830. John the Baptist, definitely
831. Your neighbor
832. Your neighbor’s best friend
833. Your neighbor’s best friend’s father
834. Your neighbor’s best friend’s father’s mother
835. Your neighbor’s best friend’s father’s mother’s first boss
836. Him
837. Rock Hudson
838. Montgomery Clift
839. Katharine Hepburn
840. Sidney Poitier
841. Jigsaw
842. Michael Myers
843. Mike Myers
844. Denzel Washington
845. Kerry Washington
846. George Washington
847. Martha Washington
848. Martha Stewart
849. A cake made by Martha Stewart
850. A turkey made by Martha Stewart
851. A man Martha Stewart refers to as “The Enemy”
852. Kristen Stewart
853. One of these
854. Your reflection
855. Mulan’s reflection
856. The word “Handsome”
857. Teddy Roosevelt
858. Anyone on a horse
859. Jake Gyllenhaal
860. Maggie Gyllenhaal
861. Peter Sarsgaard
862. Alexander Skarsgard
863. Pitbull
864. A pitbull
865. Sam, an ugly dog voted the world's ugliest dog in 2003, 2004, and 2005
866. Toucan Sam
867. Snap!
868. Crackle!
869. Pop!
870. The Pringles man
871. The Chips Ahoy! exclamation mark
872. An order of eggs benedict
873. An order of eggs florentine
874. An order of eggs, any style
875. Tim Gunn
876. Anna Gunn
877. Anything/anyone that goes by “Anna Banana”
878. The Chiquita lady
879. Carmen Sandiego
880. The ghost from Ghostwriter
881. Patrick Swayze’s ghost in Ghost
882. Patrick Swayze
883. A common household ghost
884. Casper the friendly ghost
885. Gaspar, Casper’s forgotten, unfriendly brother
886. G.I. Jane
887. G.I. Joe
888. Joe Blow
889. Joe Biden
890. Joe Budden
891. A cute button
892. A nice doilie
893. A happy little bush
894. A Richard Hole who goes by the name Dick, and is accordingly known by his close acquaintances as “Dick Hole”
895. Him
896. Her
897. The person nearest to you right now who is not Benedict Cumberbatch
898. The person farthest from you right now who is not Benedict Cumberbatch
899. Adam Frucci
900. Adam
901. Eve
902. The snake
903. Simon Cowell
904. Ryan Seacrest
905. Julianne Hough
906. Arianna Huffington
907. Marissa Mayer
908. John Mayer
909. Mayor Quimby
910. Jeff Probst
911. Jeff Bezos
912. An Amazon delivery drone with a smiley face drawn onto it
913. This
914. Julian Assange
915. Sandor “The Hound” Clegane
916. This
917. Adam Levine

100 Comments

Continuing the close reading of the Complaint in Means v US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

One startling item is # 38, on page 6, in the sequence in which the Complaint describes the chain of events. This is about the second time the hospital sent Means home.

38 After Plaintiff’s temperature went down, MHP sent Plaintiff home again. At the time MHP sent Plaintiff home, Plaintiff’s treating physician suspected she had chorioamnionitis, a significant bacterial infection that can cause serious damage to a woman’s health, including infertility and even death. However, MHP did not inform Plaintiff of this possible infection.

Wow. The physician suspected Means had chorioamnionitis, and didn’t tell her and didn’t treat her. The physician didn’t even admit her.

That’s just staggering.

And yet – when a public health educator in Muskegon working on a federally funded public health surveillance project on infant and fetal mortality discovered the case along with four others, and brought them to the attention of MHP during a meeting with the Vice President of Mission Services of MHP, Joseph O’Meara, O’Meara was fine with the whole setup. Item 57, on page 8:

57 Mr. O’Meara explained to the public health educator that upon review of Plaintiff’s chart by a MHP physician, MHP’s decision not to induce labor was proper because Defendant USCCB’s Directives prohibited MHP from inducing labor in that situation.

A piece of shocking medical malpractice was “proper” because the bishops.

Items 69 and 70 on pages 10-11.

69 Directive 45’s prohibition of “material cooperation” with respect to the provision of pregnancy termination services directs Catholic health care services to refrain from informing patients about the availability of and/or need for pregnancy termination procedures if the fetus is not viable.

70 Directive 45 does not allow providers at Catholic health care services to inform patients about the availability of and/or need for pregnancy termination procedures if the fetus is not viable when the pregnancy itself places the pregnant woman at risk of harm.

The directives don’t permit them even to inform. And some hospitals, and some networks of hospitals, obey the directives. The directives are there, and it’s dangerous and reckless to assume that no hospitals obey them.

73-77 on page 11 spell out the unsettling organizational structure.

 73 Defendant Stanley Urban is the current Chair and Defendants Robert Ladenburger and Mary Mollison are former Chairs of Catholic Health Ministries (“CHM”), an unincorporated foreign entity that required MHP to adhere to the Directives.

74. The decision that MHP would adhere to Defendant USCCB’s Directives was made by CHM in the Eastern District of Michigan.

75. CHM is not an incorporated entity under the laws of any state in the United States or any foreign country.

76. As Chairs of the unincorporated entity CHM, Defendants Urban, Ladenburger and Mollison are personally and/or vicariously liable for the acts and omissions of CHM.

77. In 2000, CHM was established as a public juridic person by an agency within the Vatican under “canon law,” a recognized foreign legal system.

A recognized foreign legal system is telling US hospitals what to do, including not treating or even informing women who need emergency abortions.

This has got to stop.

 

Now I want to single out this one part of the ACLU press release for close attention.

Tamesha Means rushed to Mercy Health Partners in Muskegon, Michigan, when her water broke after only 18 weeks of pregnancy. Based on the bishops’ religious directives, the hospital sent her home twice even though Means was in excruciating pain; there was virtually no chance that her pregnancy could survive, and continuing the pregnancy posed significant risks to her health.

Because of its Catholic affiliation and binding directives, the hospital told Means that there was nothing it could do and did not tell Means that terminating her pregnancy was an option and the safest course for her condition. When Means returned to the hospital a third time in extreme distress and with an infection, the hospital, once again prepared to send her home. While staff prepared her discharge paperwork, she began to deliver. Only then did the hospital begin tending to Means’ miscarriage.

You see it? 18 weeks. Her waters broke. She rushed to the hospital. She was in excruciating pain. The hospital told her there was nothing it could do. She developed an infection.

It’s Savita Halappanavar all over again. Check, check, check, check, check, check. The difference is that she had the very good luck to start delivering before the infection got such a hold that she couldn’t be saved. But it was only luck. It was nothing to do with the hospital. The hospital sent her home to die of a miscarriage.

I hope her lawsuit puts them out of business. I hope it makes such a stink that Congress finally realizes that bishops shouldn’t be forcing women to die of miscarriages. I hope all Catholic hospitals start being told to obey the law or get out of the hospital business. I hope the ACLU eats their lunch.

Another chapter in the annals of harassment, especially harassment of women. A guy called Hunter Moore posted a photo of a young woman that had been hacked from her computer on his Revenge Porn website. Her mother had worked as a private detective, and she got on his case.

I emailed the site owner, Hunter Moore, and asked him to take down the photo in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. He refused.

I was not surprised. By this time, I’d perused Moore’s online TV and newspaper interviews. He called himself a “professional life ruiner” and described his website as “pure evil.” He threw legal letters in the trash, addressed his followers as “my children,” taking a page from the Charles Manson handbook; and regularly taunted victims, encouraging them to commit suicide. People claimed to be afraid of him. He had no fear of lawsuits; he knew a victim would be unlikely to sue because a civil suit would cost $60,000 (according to attorney Marc Randazza), and forever link a woman’s name with the image she hoped to hide.

Moore maintained that his victims were sluts, asked to be abused and deserved to lose their jobs, embarrass their families and find themselves forever ruined. Below photos on the site, his followers posted crude and mysogynistic remarks. Victims were taunted as “fat cows,” “creatures with nasty teeth,” “ugly whores,” “white trash sluts” and “whales.” One commenter said, “Jesus, someone call Greenpeace and get her back in the water.” The website was not about pornography; it was about ridiculing and hurting others.

Sound familiar?

Jill was a kindergarten teacher in Kansas. I knew she was going to be posted. Moore had mentioned it on his Twitter feed — which I had been monitoring — and he asked his followers if they thought she’d get fired. They had responded with the typical landslide of loutish and smutty comments.

An hour later, her photos were visible to the world along with identifying information, including the name of the school where she taught. This was the cue for followers of Is Anyone Up? to bombard the principal and school board with Jill’s naked shots and crude remarks, such as “Fire that slut” and “You have a whore teaching your children.”

“Is Jill there?” I said to the school receptionist. “She’s in class right now.”

“I’d like to leave a message. This is urgent. Please tell her to call me when she gets time.”

While I was leaving my message, the principal had marched into Jill’s classroom and interrupted her lesson.

“Please gather your things and go home,” he said while five-year-old students watched in wonder.

Score. Just like that, some random guy and his random fans can trash a woman’s life.

When it comes to student success, “smaller is better” has been the conventional wisdom on class size, despite a less-than-persuasive body of research. But what if that concept were turned on its head, with more students per classroom – provided they’re being taught by the most effective teachers?

That’s the question a new study out today from the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute set out to answer, using data on teachers and students in North Carolina in grades 4 through 8 over four academic years. While the results are based on a theoretical simulation rather than actually reconfiguring classroom assignments in order to measure the academic outcomes, the findings are worth considering.

The research on class size is mixed, and modest efforts–taking one or two students out of a room with more than 20 kids, for example–haven’t been found to yield much benefit on average. The enormous expense of paring classes down to the point where research has suggested there’s a measurable benefit for some students is simply beyond the fiscal means of most districts. As a result, everyone from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to philanthropist Bill Gates has urged districts to consider waiving class size policies in favor of giving more students a chance at being taught by a highly effective teacher.

To test the merit of that approach for Fordham, senior researcher Michael Hansen of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) simulated what might happen if the North Carolina teachers with stronger track records had more crowded classrooms. (The class sizes in the data set had some variation within schools, from about 21 to 24 students depending on the grade and subject.) The model factored in an estimated loss of effectiveness due to the bigger class size.  Among the school-level findings:

• At the eighth-grade level, assigning up to 12 more students to the strongest teachers could produce learning gains that were equal to 2.5 weeks of additional instruction (gains were more modest at the fifth-grade level). 

• Schools could see 75 percent of that gain just by moving six students, suggesting drastic class size increases aren’t necessarily required. 

• Moving a few students to the top-performing eighth-grade teachers could produce gains equivalent to removing the bottom 5 percent of teachers. 

An important point: Students selected to move from smaller classrooms into bigger ones with more effective teachers would see the biggest gains, according to the simulation. Kids who remained in the downsized classrooms also would see a slight benefit as their weaker teacher’s performance improved with a smaller student load. 

When it comes to research, randomized studies are typically the gold standard. But conducting them in academic settings is costly and frequently requires the cooperation of many parents and school administrators. A simulation is less risky, and can potentially soften the ground for new ideas. However, it often takes a deeper look to identify and explain influences that might factor into the performance of both the students and their teachers.

Much of the research on teacher effectiveness focuses on reshaping the workforce, said Hansen. That’s why he wanted to see what could be done to improve outcomes for students assigned to teachers already on the job.

“What we’re doing here is saying, 'OK, some students are going to be lucky and get the stronger teacher, and some students are going to be unlucky and get a weaker teacher,'” Hansen told me. “By intentionally unbalancing these class sizes, we’re making a few more students lucky.” 

If there was a surprise in the new Fordham report it might be that top quartile of teachers were already teaching roughly a quarter of all the students, said Bryan Hassel, co-director of Public Impact, a Charlotte, N.C.-based organization that works with districts across the country on school improvement initiatives. That statistic meant the schools weren’t distributing students based on teacher talent, but were likely making assignments based on simple math. 

“Ideally, schools would focus on increasing the number of students their best teachers have responsibility for,” Hassel said. “I would think there would be some effort on the part of schools to push in that direction.” 

Hansen said he would like to see the the findings reach school-level administrators (typically principals) with the authority to adjust classroom assignments based on a teacher’s effectiveness.

“What I hope the study does is help them understand there are potentially large consequences to this seemingly mundane task,” Hansen said. “By putting even just one or two more kids in a more effective teacher’s class, it can make a difference. There are meaningful gains from relatively small changes.” 

While the student learning gains simulated in the study are encouraging, the achievement gap remained for economically disadvantaged students. Hasten said that’s because his simulation only moved students within a school. That doesn’t change the fact that some schools have more effective teachers than others, and the ones with the most socioeconomically challenged students are typically more likely to employ new and/or underperforming teachers. As the report concludes, “class-size-shifting strategy alone cannot reduce preexisting inequalities, and some other intervention would be necessary to remediate entirely gaps in students’ access to the best teachers.” The simulation may not solve all of the underlying issues, but it's moving the needle in the right direction, Hansen said.

Some districts are already experimenting with creative approaches to expanding the reach of their best teachers, whether it’s through using video-conferencing to record their lessons or creating new positions where they have opportunities to work with more students without adding to their class sizes. Public Impact is working with schools in Charlotte, N.C. and Nashville on this very issue, said Hassel. Charlotte created 19 positions where teachers would take on additional student responsibilities with a sizable pay bump, and the district received more than 700 applications, Hassel said. 

Sarah Almy, director of teacher quality for The Education Trust, a nonpartisan organization in Washington, D.C. that focuses on closing achievement and opportunity gaps in public schools, told me the premise of the Fordham study is worth exploring. But Almy added that the problem of the weakest teachers often being relegated to the neediest students needs to be confronted. 

Rearranging classroom assignments “is only going to go so far in terms of creating more equitable access for kids,” Almy said. “It’s not just about getting more kids within a building to highly effective teachers, but getting more highly effective teachers into the building.” 

[More]

About the server stiffed by the godbothering couple in Kansas. They too left a note saying they stiffed him for reasons, and holy reasons at that.

A pair of Christian diners stiffed their 20-year-old server at Carraba’s Italian restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas, on the grounds that his homosexuality is “an affront to God.”

How do they know? How do they know people who stiff servers aren’t an affront to god while people who do homosexuality are god’s favorite thing ever? Did god send them a notarized affidavit?

KCTV reports that the server, who asked that his name not be identified, went to the table after the group of customers left and, instead of a tip, found this spiteful message from the diners written on the back of the check:

“Thank you for your service, it was excellent. That being said, we cannot in good conscience tip you, for your homosexual lifestyle is an affront to GOD.

“Fags do not share in the wealth of GOD, and you will not share in ours. We hope you will see the tip your fag choices made you lose out on, and plan accordingly. It is never too late for GOD’s love, but none shall be spared for fags. May GOD have mercy on you.”

Shudder. Imagine being those people. Imagine living in those horrible minds.

The anti-gay message has galvanized support for the server on social media with a campaign underway to flood the restaurant on Friday evening.

Dr. Marvin Baker, a retired pastor who runs a Gay Christian Fellowship ministry, had lunch at the restaurant on Thursday with his partner, and asked to be seated in the server’s section.

“I was angry. I said this is not Christian as I know it,” Baker said.

That mind is a much better place to live, Christianity and all.

 

When veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas retired at 89, after telling a video camera-wielding reporter from RabbiLive.com that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine," the generous interpretation was that the trailblazing female reporter had erred in not quitting sooner.

Richard Cohen of The Washington Post today finds himself in similar circumstances. But instead of becoming a viral-video sensation based on an offensive off-the-cuff riff, he has deliberately chosen over the past year to stake out a series of controversial positions on hot-button racial questions that have eroded the reservoir of public good will toward his work when it comes to interpreting his views on race. He supported New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's stop-and-frisk policy, said "racial profiling" was "proof not of racism" but of the demographics of gun crime, called Trayvon Martin "a young man understandably suspected because he was black," and recently recalled growing up in a world where "I learned that slavery was wrong, yes, that it was evil, no doubt, but really, that many blacks were sort of content. Slave owners were mostly nice people—fellow Americans, after all."

Now the results of that erosion are on plain display.

The most generous interpretation of Cohen's astonishing statement in a column today that "People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York—a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children" is that he was incorrectly imputing views to others that he does not hold himself. But the fact is that 87 percent of Americans, according to Gallup, do not hold the views Cohen suggests are "conventional."

Even in the Deep South, such views are no longer conventional. Fewer than a third of likely Republican primary voters—core conservative GOP voters—in Mississippi and Alabama continue to think inter-racial marriages should be illegal, according to a 2012 PPP survey.

No wonder there's so much outrage greeting Cohen's abrupt aside in a column otherwise about Chris Christie: Cohen in his column took pains to suggest that "Today’s GOP is not racist"—but then went on to blithely suggest that most of America is, instead.

Cohen, who joined the Post in 1968 (when opposition to black-white marriages was conventional—only about 20 percent of Americans then approved of them, according to Gallup) and became an op-ed columnist in 1984, has now been at the paper longer than former publisher Donald Graham. Graham joined the Post in 1971, the same year as Bob Woodward, and sold the publication to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in the spring. Graham was recently feted at a retirement party by more than 600 current and former Posties, who affirmed his standing as beloved leader.

Cohen's send-off, when it comes, is going to be a quieter affair. "Richard Cohen just wrote his retirement notice," tweeted media critic Jack Shafer Tuesday. The only question how long it takes Cohen to realize this.

As chronicled in Noam Scheiber's cover story this week, Elizabeth Warren's unapologetic populism and intellectual credentials have endeared her to those on the left looking for a champion. But it is h

I have enjoyed Star Wars Angry Birds since I first discovered it almost a year ago, at the suggestion of my brother (a fellow Star Wars fan). While I never warmed to the original Angry Birds, I was tickled that I could clearly identify the Star Wars characters the birds represented in the themed version of the game. When Star Wars Angry Birds II released last month, I anxiously dove into the sequel.  On a whim, I decided to use the new store feature to look through the many characters that I might someday unlock.

When I finally scrolled through all of the characters in the game, I noticed something peculiar.

Han Solo (played by Harrison Ford, a white male, in the Star Wars films) is portrayed by a yellow bird. Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill, a white male) is portrayed by a red bird. Qui-Gon Jinn (played by Liam Neeson, a white male) is portrayed by a tan bird. These birds all have costumes or props that identify them as the characters they are meant to represent, but their color is not related to the skin color of the characters/actors in the films.

This pattern held true for every (human) male character with two notable exceptions: Captain Panaka (played by Hugh Quarshie, a black male) and Mace Windu (played by Samuel Jackson, a black male) are both portrayed by brown birds.

So, what’s the message? Well, for white, male Star Wars characters, skin color is unimportant; white characters can be represented by a bird of any color. It is the costuming or props used by these birds that convey the essence of the character. But for black Star Wars characters, their skin color (brown) becomes the defining element conveying the essence of the character.

Likewise, gender is also a defining characteristic for the portrayal of female characters. Princess Leia (played by Carrie Fischer, a white female) and Padme (played by Natalie Portman, a white female) are both portrayed by pink birds. There are no other pink birds in the game.   Again, the color of the bird is unimportant, unless the bird is female, in which case the character’s gender (denoted by its pinkness) becomes the essential element of that character.

This same pattern also appears in the original Star Wars Angry Birds, in which Princess Leia is the only pink bird and Lando Calrissian (played by Billy Dee Williams, a black male) is the only brown bird.

White privilege and male privilege persist, in part, by framing the white, male experience as normal. Even in a game like Star Wars Angry Birds II we see the invisibility of whiteness and maleness and the foregrounding of race and gender for people of color and women.

Galen Ciscell is a visiting assistant professor of sociology at Pacific Lutheran University.  He is also the designer of the cooperative board game Atlantis Rising.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

Here’s a pop quiz: according to the measurements used in the new Common Core Standards, which of these books would be complex enough for a ninth grader?  a. Huckleberry Finnb. To Kill a Mockingbirdc. Jane Eyred. Sports Illustrated for Kids' Awesome Athletes!The

I think it’s counterfeit.

Senator Mike Lee has a bigger incentive than most Tea Party Republicans to put the government shutdown behind him and champion a constructive policy agenda: His constituents weren't fans of his scorched-earth approach to opposition, and Utah's GOP may exploit their upset to mount a 2016 primary challenge. The caricature of a man incapable of working with Democrats isn't right. Civil libertarians across the political spectrum can attest to Lee's willingness to reach across the aisle in opposition to indefinite detention and drones. 

Does he supports anything else that might gain support outside the Tea Party caucus? In a Tuesday speech at the Heritage Foundation, he gave a harsh assessment of GOP failures over the last 30 years, and suggested a forward-looking agenda. 

His diagnosis of the problem:

As the decades pass and a new generation of Americans face a new generation of problems, the party establishment clings to its 1970s agenda like a security blanket. The result is that to many Americans today, especially the underprivileged and middle class, or those who have come of age or immigrated since Reagan left office the Republican party may not seem to have much of a relevant reform message at all. This is the reason the GOP can seem so out of touch. And it is also the reason we find ourselves in such internal disarray.

The gaping hole in the middle of the Republican party today—the one that separates the grassroots from establishment leaders—is precisely the size and shape of a new, unifying conservative reform agenda. For years, we have tried to bridge that gulf with tactics and personalities and spin. But it doesn’t work. To revive and reunify our movement, we must fill the void with new and innovative policy ideas. Today, as it was a generation ago, the establishment will not produce that agenda. And so, once again, conservatives must.

This elides the degree to which the GOP has gotten more conservative over the years. The failure of the Republican Party has been, in large part, a failure of conservatives. But let that pass, for Lee has his own vision for the future:

I submit that the great challenge of our generation is America’s growing crisis of stagnation and sclerosis—a crisis that comes down to a shortage of opportunities.

This opportunity crisis presents itself in three principal ways:

• immobility among the poor, trapped in poverty;
• insecurity in the middle class, where families just can’t seem to get ahead
• and cronyist privilege at the top, where political and economic elites unfairly profit at everyone else’s expense.

A Republican Party that prioritized proposals to reform "cronyist privilege at the top," immobility among the poor, and insecurity in the middle class would be a huge change. What about specifics? What is Lee actually proposing? Four new bills, it turns out. 

Tax Reform Geared at Families

My plan calls for a 15 percent tax rate on all income up to $87,850—or $175,700 for married couples. Income above that threshold would be taxed at 35 percent. Like any good conservative tax-reform plan, my bill also simplifies the code, eliminating or reforming most deductions. But the heart of the plan is a new, additional $2,500 per-child tax credit that can offset parents’ income and payroll-tax liability. This last point is crucial. Many middle-class parents may pay no income taxes—but they do pay taxes. Working parents are not free riders ... my plan eliminates this anti-family bias in the tax code, while improving pro-growth incentives for the economy. Under my plan, a married couple with two children making the national median income of $51,000 would see a tax cut of roughly $5,000 per year.

 The Option of Flex-Time Instead of Overtime

Parents today need to juggle work, home, kids, and community. For many families, especially with young children, their most precious commodity is time. But today, federal labor laws restrict the way moms and dads and everyone else can use their time. That’s because many of those laws were written decades ago, when most women didn’t work outside the home. Because of these laws, an hourly employee who works overtime is not allowed to take comp time or flex time.

Even if she prefers it, her boss can’t even offer it. Today, if a working mom or dad stays late at the office on Monday and Tuesday, and instead of receiving extra pay wants to get compensated by leaving early on Friday to spend the afternoon with the kids, that could be violating federal law... Congress gave a special exemption from that law for government employees. This is unacceptable. The same work-life options available to government bureaucrats should be available to the citizens they serve. In May, the House of Representatives passed the Working Families Flexibility Act of 2013, sponsored by Representative Martha Roby of Alabama, to equalize flex-time rules for all workers. And this week I am introducing companion legislation in the Senate.

Shifting Highway Funds and Planning From Feds to States

Today, the federal highway program is funded by a gasoline tax of 18.4 cents on every gallon sold at the pump. That money is supposed to be going into steel, concrete, and asphalt in the ground. Instead, too much of it is being siphoned off by bureaucrats and special interests in Washington. And so Congressman Tom Graves and I are going to introduce the Transportation Empowerment Act. Under our bill, the federal gas tax would be phased down over five years from 18.4 cents per gallon to 3.7 cents. And highway authority would be transferred proportionately from the federal government to the states.

Under our new system, Americans would no longer have to send significant gas-tax revenue to Washington, where sticky-fingered politicians, bureaucrats, and lobbyists take their cut before sending it back with strings attached. Instead, states and cities could plan, finance, and build better-designed and more affordable projects. Some communities could choose to build more roads, while others might prefer to repair old ones. Some might build highways, others light rail. And all would be free to experiment with innovative green technologies, and new ways to finance their projects, like congestion pricing and smart tolls. But the point is that all states and localities should finally have the flexibility to develop the kind of transportation system they want, for less money, without politicians and special interests from other parts of the country telling them how, when, what, and where they should build.

Making Federal Aid to Students More Flexible

Some combination of higher education and vocational training should at least be an option for just about everyone who graduates from high school. Yet today, the federal government restricts access to higher education and inflates its cost, inuring unfairly to the advantage of special interests at the expense of students, teachers, and taxpayers. The federal government does this though its control over college accreditation. Because eligibility for federal student loans is tied to the federal accreditation regime, we shut out students who want to learn, teachers who want to teach, transformative technologies, and cost-saving innovations. And so, in the coming days, I will be introducing the Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act. Under this legislation, the existing accreditation system would remain unchanged. Current colleges and universities could continue to use the system they know.

But my plan would give states a new option to enter into agreements with the Department of Education to create their own, alternative accreditation systems to open up new options for students qualifying for federal aid. Today, only degree-issuing academic institutions are even allowed to be accredited. Under the new, optional state systems that my bill would authorize, accreditation could also be available to specialized programs, individual courses, apprenticeships, professional credentialing, and even competency-based tests. States could accredit online courses, or hybrid models with elements on- and off-campus. These systems would open up opportunities for non-traditional students—like single parents working double shifts—whose life responsibilities might make it impossible to take more than one class at a time.

They would also enable traditional students to tailor a degree that better reflects the knowledge and skills valued by employers. Innovations in vocational education and training would open new opportunities in growing fields that are hiring right now.

I'd have to study these proposals for some time to weigh in with independent judgments, but on first look they all seem like ideas that could plausibly improve public policy and that could conceivably pass in the foreseeable future. That alone makes them as compelling as any governing vision proposed by his Tea Party colleagues.

But are these mere words? 

Or is Lee going to earn our respect by taking steps to advance this vision in coming months? If he persuades colleagues that these are good ideas; if he manages to build a sizable constituency for them among the public; if he forms strategic partnerships to advance these priorities; if he builds bridges with unexpected allies; especially if he manages to pass one or more of these reforms, he'll earn back some of the respect he recently lost as someone capable of governing.

If he proposes these bills, but doesn't get any farther in advancing the prospect of their eventual passage, it won't take away from his speech; but lots of folks can give decent policy speeches. He was sent to Washington, D.C., to improve public policy. 

[Content Note: Hostility to agency and consent; addiction; medical malfeasance.]

Here is a sequence of events as I understand them:

1. Alicia Beltran, who is pregnant, helpfully informed her doctor during a prenatal visit that prior to her pregnancy she had lived with and eventually overcome a pill addiction to prescription pain meds.

2. The physician didn't believe her that the addiction was over and pressured her to get on an expensive prescription (which Ms. Beltran cannot afford) which would block the opiates that Ms. Beltran isn't taking.

3. After Ms. Beltran reused to take the prescription, the physician sent a social worker to her home unannounced. The social worker threatened Ms. Beltran with a court order if she wouldn't take the prescription.

4. After Ms. Beltran told the social worker to leave, the social worker sent county sheriffs to surround her home and take her to a jail cell in handcuffs.

5. Ms. Beltran was taken to a family court and was denied a lawyer or legal representation of any kind. (Her fetus was given a legal advocate, though! Because of course it did!)

6. One Dr. Breckenridge, who has not examined or even met in person Ms. Beltran, testified to the court that Ms. Beltran lacks self-control and should be incarcerated or the child will die.

“She exhibits lack of self-control and refuses the treatment we have offered her,” wrote Dr. Breckenridge, who, according to Ms. Beltran, had not personally met or examined her. She recommended “a mandatory inpatient drug treatment program or incarceration,” adding, “The child’s life depends on action in this case.”

7. I will note here in response to Dr. Breckenridge's medical opinion, that since Ms. Beltran was only 14 weeks pregnant at this stage, and the Wisconsin limit on abortions is 24 weeks, Ms. Beltran should still have a legal right to termination, should she so choose.

8. The court threatened to send Ms. Beltran to jail if she didn't submit to confinement to a treatment center; Ms. Beltran was placed in the treatment center until October 4th. (She was arrested on July 18th.)

9. Ms. Beltran has lost her job as a result of all this and is looking for temporary work. Her very real fear at the moment, besides not being able to find work, is that the government will take her baby away after it is born.

So just to be very clear, if you are pregnant in the U.S., it is entirely possible for your physician to accuse you of drug use (despite a clean urine test) and incarcerate you until your due date (at which point the baby may be taken from you against your will) and all without you ever being allowed to so much as speak to a lawyer or legal advocate.

I don't know what to add to that except an expression of personal terror and a hope that Alicia Beltran and her child remain safe and together. I am horrified to live in a society which has so thoroughly tried to strip her of her personal agency.

The Redskins have been in the news lately – on the front page of the Times, for example — and not for their prowess on the gridiron. It’s their name. Many native Americans find it offensive, understandably so.  “Redskins” was not a name they chose. It was a label invented by the European-Americans who took their land and slaughtered them in numbers that today would be considered genocide.

President Obama offered the most tepid hint of criticism of the name. He did not say they should change their name. He said that if he owned the team, he would “think about” changing the name. But that was enough for non-Indians to dismiss the idea as yet one more instance of “political correctness.”

Defenders of the name also argue that the name is not intended to be offensive, and besides, a survey shows that most Americans are not bothered by it.  I would guess that most Americans also have no problem with the Cleveland Indians logo, another sports emblem that real Indians find offensive.

In response the National Congress of American Indians offers these possibilities.  The Cleveland cap is the real thing.  The other two are imagined variations on the same theme.

The pro-Redskins arguments could also apply here. The New York Jews and San Francisco Chinamen and their logos are not intended to offend, and a survey would probably find a majority of Americans untroubled by these names and logos.  And those who do object are just victims of “the tyranny of political correctness.”  This last phrase comes from a tweet by Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III, an African American.  His response seems to make all the more relevant the suggestion of years ago by the American Indian Movement’s Russell Means: “Why don’t they call them The Washington Niggers?”

Cross-posted at Montclair Socioblog; HT to Max.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

After reading the human-rights reports issued this week by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, Benjamin Wittes writes that, while he has misgivings about the sweep of their conclusions, "It is impossible for a modestly-moral person to read these reports without something approaching nausea. They are grisly. They involve the deaths of numerous apparently-innocent people. The deaths appear to have taken place at the hands of the United States."

The reports of these incidents "thus raise serious questions about the way at least those drone strikes they cover took place," he concludes. "What went wrong, why, and how we can minimize the chances of such disasters in the future?"

Those are excellent questions, and I'd add one more.

America is engaged in an ongoing debate about the proper role of unmanned aerial vehicles in the War on Terrorism. It won't be resolved in the foreseeable future. But as long as the U.S. is waging drone warfare, it is incumbent upon us to decide what to do after our drone pilots mistakenly injure or kill innocent people.

What happens next?

Earlier this week, I used my Orange County Register column to sketch my preferences. Here's what makes sense to me:

When the U.S. kills or injures an innocent person, our government ought to acknowledge the mistake. It ought to issue an apology. It ought to compensate the person who is injured, or the family of the person who is killed. Investigators ought to identify what went wrong. And changes ought to be made so that the same mistake is better avoided in the future.

The Obama Administration has taken a different approach. It hasn't acknowledged when innocents were killed. It hasn't extended apologies to the victims or next of kin. If there was any investigation at all, it was carried out in secret by insiders with a vested interest in the outcome. It's possible that changes were made to improve future performance. The number of innocents killed in drone strikes seems to have declined over time, and it's possible that operational improvements were partly responsible. But innocents are still being killed, and we're still refusing to acknowledge our role or to atone to the limited extent possible.

Put simply, we are behaving immorally.

Even if you support the use of drones and regard civilian casualties as a tragic necessity, it remains the case that we should apologize to and compensate our victims. Yet we're behaving like the perp in a hit-and-run: The poor families of the innocents we kill are left to pay for a funeral wondering why their loved one was blown up. Little surprise that the little girl I wrote about yesterday, whose grandmother was killed, is left saying, "When they fly overhead I wonder, will I be next?"

The Obama Administration didn't apologize to her family, help rebuild its damaged house, reveal the terrible mistake that led to their matriarch's death, or explain what steps have been taken to prevent its recurrence. Having killed the 68-year-old woman and injured several of her grandchildren, the U.S. government said nothing and did nothing save to continue flying drones over their community.

This is in keeping with the Obama Administration's larger approach to drone strikes. For a long time, it wouldn't even acknowledge ongoing policy to Americans. Operations remain shrouded in secrecy; and the number of civilian casualties have been repeatedly understated by mendacious or ignorant members of the national-security establishment, including legislators like Senator Dianne Feinstein. The climate of secrecy created by the Obama Administration remains the biggest obstacle to good information and accountability. So long as the opacity persists, we're left to draw limited conclusions from what little information we have.

Red flags are everywhere. Usually journalists or humanitarian groups reporting from the ground raise them, but GQ has just published a rare interview with a drone pilot, and it too suggests an inadequate response to mistakes. A relevant excerpt:

He was paired with a pilot he didn’t much like, instructed to monitor a compound that intel told them contained a high-value individual—maybe a Taliban commander or Al Qaeda affiliate, nobody briefed him on the specifics. It was a typical Afghan mud-brick home, goats and cows milling around a central courtyard. They watched a corner of the compound’s main building, bored senseless for hours. They assumed the target was asleep.

Then the quiet ended. “We get this word that we’re gonna fire,” he says. “We’re gonna shoot and collapse the building. They’ve gotten intel that the guy is inside.” The drone crew received no further information, no details of who the target was or why he needed a Hellfire dropped on his roof.

Bryant’s laser hovered on the corner of the building. “Missile off the rail.” Nothing moved inside the compound but the eerily glowing cows and goats. Bryant zoned out at the pixels. Then, about six seconds before impact, he saw a hurried movement in the compound. “This figure runs around the corner, the outside, toward the front of the building. And it looked like a little kid to me. Like a little human person.”

Bryant stared at the screen, frozen. “There’s this giant flash, and all of a sudden there’s no person there.” He looked over at the pilot and asked, “Did that look like a child to you?” They typed a chat message to their screener, an intelligence observer who was watching the shot from “somewhere in the world”—maybe Bagram, maybe the Pentagon, Bryant had no idea—asking if a child had just run directly into the path of their shot.

“And he says, ‘Per the review, it’s a dog.’ ”

Bryant and the pilot replayed the shot, recorded on eight-millimeter tape. They watched it over and over, the figure darting around the corner. Bryant was certain it wasn’t a dog.

If they’d had a few more seconds’ warning, they could have aborted the shot, guided it by laser away from the compound. Bryant wouldn’t have cared about wasting a $95,000 Hellfire to avoid what he believed had happened. But as far as the official military version of events was concerned, nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The pilot “was the type of guy to not argue with command,” says Bryant. So the pilot’s after-action report stated that the building had been destroyed, the high-value target eliminated. The report made no mention of a dog or any other living thing. The child, if there had been a child, was an infrared ghost.

The Obama Administration claims it minimizes civilian casualties as much as possible. Its critics disagree. Wherever one stands in that debate, it's clear that when there are civilian casualties, the typical American response is to behave as if we played no role in the injustice, as if the maimed or dead innocents don't exist. "Unintended collateral civilian casualties are not war crimes, and never have been," Andrew Sullivan writes. "But the moral equation shifts, it seems to me, when the belligerent stops truly seeing these casualties as morally deeply troubling."

What if the belligerent pretends not to see them at all?

Among the first scientists to dig for the roots of political orientation were a couple of pioneering psychologists in California named Jack and Jeanne Block. Back in 1969, the Blocks asked two challenging questions: How deep do our political leanings run? And how early in life do these leanings begin to form within each of us?

In search of answers, they devised a very unusual study, and they began it with kids who were still in nursery school. On the face of it, the premise of the study seemed absurd: What did nursery school kids know about Democrats or Republicans, or about the complicated, hot-button issues of the day? Still, the Blocks were serious researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, and they were determined to break new ground.

For their experiment, the two professors placed a group of 128 nursery-school children under the close observation of several teachers for a period of seven months. Then the Blocks had each of these caretakers measure the three-year-olds’ personalities and social interactions, using a single standardized test. The same children then underwent this process again at age four, with a different set of teachers at a second nursery school. The Blocks tabulated the scores for each child and then locked the numbers away in a vault.

The test scores then sat in the vault for the next two decades, while the children from the study went their separate ways in life. They grew up, completed their educations, and turned into young adults. After 20 years had passed, the Blocks succeeded in tracking down 95 of their original 128 subjects, in the hope of measuring how liberal or conservative each of them had become. This time they asked the young adults, now age 24, to situate themselves on a five-point political spectrum. They also asked them to express their opinions on a number of highly partisan, hot-button issues. In particular, several of these questions measured their tolerance of inequality between the genders and between different racial groups. In addition, they were asked to describe any political activism they might have participated in during the intervening years.

The results, published in 2006 by the Journal of Research in Personality, were astonishing. In analyzing their data, the Blocks found a clear set of childhood personality traits that accurately predicted conservatism in adulthood. For instance, at the ages of three and four, the “conservative” preschoolers had been described as “uncomfortable with uncertainty,” as “rigidifying when experiencing duress,” and as “relatively over-controlled.” The girls were “quiet, neat, compliant, fearful and tearful, [and hoped] for help from the adults around.”

Likewise, the Blocks pinpointed another set of childhood traits that were associated with people who became liberals in their mid-twenties. The “liberal” children were more “autonomous, expressive, energetic, and relatively under-controlled.” Liberal girls had higher levels of “self-assertiveness, talkativeness, curiosity, [and] openness in expressing negative feelings.”

The Blocks’ experiment suggested that the roots of our political orientations emerge as early as the fourth year of life. But it raised further, essential questions: Would children from different regions or socioeconomic backgrounds diverge into similar personality groups? And how much deeper are the origins of these crucial personality traits?

When the Blocks’ findings are connected with other relevant studies in genetics, neuroscience, and anthropology, a composite image of our political nature begins to emerge. As this portrait of ourselves comes into focus, it shows what made some of those nursery-school children grow up to become liberals and some of them conservatives. It shows how deep the roots of our political proclivities extend, and why they have a similar influence on children in America, the Middle East, and most everywhere else.

The reason for these crosscutting commonalities is that political orientations are natural dispositions that have been molded by evolutionary forces. Taken together, those deeply ingrained political orientations form what could be called “The Universal Political Animal.”

The Deepest Origin

To begin with, exactly how far down do the roots of preschoolers’ political orientations extend? Do these roots somehow spring from the hard wiring they were born with? Perhaps W. S. Gilbert, the 19th-century English dramatist and poet, was onto something when he mused:

I often think it’s comical
How nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into this world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or a little Conservative

In the early 1990s, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Twin and Family Research set out to test Gilbert’s humorously posited theory. Armed with a valuable list of 10,000 twin pairs and their family members, these scholars had a unique way to determine whether our genes—as opposed to our environment—exert any effect over our political convictions.

The Minnesotan scientists began their study with a left-right political-orientation test called the RWA Scale. They handed it out to more than 1,400 identical and fraternal twins. Each pair was raised in the same family. In a parallel study, psychologist Thomas Bouchard gave the same test to a very special subset of siblings: 88 identical twins and 44 fraternal twins raised in completely different environments.

Comparing both types of twins is crucial: In the case of twins raised together, the shared environment (such as family dynamics, interactions between twins, and social perceptions) could influence the development of the twins’ personalities. But for twins separated at birth, most of these confounding factors drop away; this makes it easier to chalk up their personality similarities to genetics.

Figure 1 shows the correlations between the left-right orientations of twins raised together and apart. The black bars correspond to identical twins, and the gray bars to fraternal twins. The first two clusters show the twins raised together. Identical twins (who share 100 percent of their genes) had more similar political orientations than fraternal twins (who share only 50 percent of their genes, like normal siblings).

The third cluster shows the amazing finding of Bouchard’s survey: Identical twins reared apart had a strong correlation between their political orientations; but the scores of fraternal twins raised separately didn’t correlate significantly. These results suggest that genetics plays a decisive role in determining political attitudes. In other words, identical twins are more likely than fraternal twins to agree on divisive issues, precisely because they’re more closely related to one another.

To make this idea more concrete, let’s consider a few specific hot-button issues: “capitalism,” “segregation,” and “immigration.” These three words come from the 28 items on the Wilson-Patterson Conservatism Scale, which political scientist John Alford has researched at Rice University. These terms are guaranteed to set off the hidden triggers of political polarization. In the first case, conflicting attitudes toward “capitalism” are essentially what have divided Tea Partiers from Occupiers. Why? Because unfettered free markets reflect and create inequalities, to which people have varying levels of tolerance, depending on their political leanings. Words like “segregation” and “immigration,” on the other hand, evoke opposing attitudes toward tribalism. People’s attitudes toward inequality and tribalism constitute two of the three clusters of measurable personality traits that give rise to political orientations across space and time (the third cluster concerns differing perceptions of human nature).

In 2005, Alford asked 9,000 identical and fraternal twins to agree, disagree, or express their uncertainty toward these three words and 25 others like them. Positive responses to half of the 28 items raise one’s conservatism score, and positive responses to the other half lower one’s score. Negative reactions do the opposite.

Alford’s twins considered these terms and wrote down their answers. Amazingly, for every single item, the identical twins’ political orientations correlated more strongly than they did for the fraternal twins. And in every case, the difference in strength was significant. Alford’s experiment and others like it consistently show that 40 to 60 percent of the variance in our political attitudes comes from genetic differences between individuals. The remaining differences come from environmental factors.

Alford’s findings suggest that the Blocks’ nursery school children weren’t inevitably predestined to become Republicans or Democrats. Nonetheless, their adult opinions on controversial issues ran even deeper than their childhood personality traits; a substantial proportion of their political dispositions stemmed from their genetic makeup.

Because our political attitudes have such deep roots, we don’t normally undergo radical ideological shifts later in life. As people pass through their thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties, their identities stay quite stable; when measured from one decade to the next, the average individual’s political orientation correlates very strongly with itself (at .80). Political attitudes do in fact change over time, but they change at predictable ages, and in foreseeable directions.

The Universality of Left and Right

The left-right political spectrum is universal. It forms a natural, bell-shaped curve—like height, weight, and blood pressure, but unlike income distribution. Some countries have wider or narrower spectra. But how can we know whether the left-right orientations of groups as a whole compare with one another? In other words, are the Blocks’ children as conservative or as liberal as their counterparts in Tunisia?

In psychology, there are a few standard personality traits that have been measured across truly diverse human groups. They belong to a well-tested and widely accepted inventory called the “Big Five” personality dimensions. Specifically, these traits are Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (it’s easy to remember them because they spell out OCEAN). The first three dimensions (O, C, and—to a lesser degree—E) correlate fairly well with left-right voting. Therefore, these traits can serve as a universal yardstick for measuring the dispositions of disparate cultures, which would otherwise be difficult to compare in reference to specific political issues.

Psychologist Robert McCrae, with the help of his colleagues from numerous countries, has collected measures of these Big Five dimensions from nearly 28,000 people from 36 distinct cultures around the world. The participants represented the Indo-European linguistic family, as well as the Uralic (Finland, Hungary, Estonia, etc.), Dravidian (South India), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, etc.), Malayo-Polynesian, Sino-Tibetan, and Bantu (Sub-Saharan Africa) ethno-linguistic groups.

Variation in these Big Five personality traits was greatest within cultures. This finding makes intuitive sense, since a given population has a bell-shaped distribution of left-right political orientation. Moreover, Big Five dimensions such as Openness and Conscientiousness also form bell-shaped curves within a population.

In addition to the large variation within cultures, however, McCrae together with his colleague Jüri Allik also discovered small variations in personality traits between groups. Conscientiousness, which predicts conservative voting, moderately correlated with proximity to the equator. And Extraversion, which is associated with liberal voting, correlated strongly with greater distance away from the equator.

Temperature also mattered. Hotter climates correlated strongly with Conscientiousness. So even though a political spectrum runs through all populations, groups closer to the equator (and in hotter environments) have a more conservative average group disposition than groups living further away from the equator (and in cooler climes).

What happened when groups of very different genetic backgrounds live in the same environment? In this case, each group’s average personality scores differed according to the origin of their ancestors. For example, the personality traits of white South Africans clustered closer to the Swiss, while black South Africans had personalities more similar to Zimbabweans. Likewise, groups that have traditionally lived in geographically adjacent territories have more similar average personalities than groups separated by large distances.

There is a chance that these facts could be explained by culture or by the direct effect of the environment. However, they suggest that populations around the world have personality distributions that are genetically adapted to their ancestral environments.

What an MRI Can Show

A skeptic might question whether it’s really possible to study something as fuzzy and subjective as personalities in a scientific way. Is there any concrete, physiological evidence that could explain the apparent differences in our political personalities?

On a BBC program in 2010, the Oscar-bound actor Colin Firth laid down a tongue-in-cheek challenge. He asked scientists to find out what was “biologically wrong” with people who didn’t agree with him on political matters. In response, researchers at University College London recruited 90 students and had each of them confidentially place him or herself on a five-point political spectrum—just as the Blocks’ 24-year-olds had done. Their choices could range from “very conservative” to “very liberal.” Then neuroscientist Geraint Rees used magnetic resonance imaging (MRIs) to scan each of their brains.

The results were stunning. From the MRIs, the scientists were able to accurately predict which of those individuals was more likely to be a liberal or a conservative. The more conservative students had a larger right amygdala; greater liberalism, on the other hand, was associated with a larger anterior cingulate. Figure 3 shows the correlations between political self-placement and the volume of these brain regions.

Someone who only had the measurements of these two brain regions would be able to correctly guess whether an individual was “conservative” or “very liberal” about 72 percent of the time (no student identified as “very conservative”). Aside from the right amygdala and the anterior cingulate, no other regions showed a significant and independent correlation with political orientation. An additional study later replicated the same findings.

The researchers noted that the amygdala has an emotion-processing function, which could explain why conservatives are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions than liberals are. This variation in the amygdala likely corresponds to differences in our perceptions of human nature, and these perceptions constitute one of the three personality clusters that underlie political orientation.

Finding Ourselves in the Big Picture

All right, so perhaps there are physiological differences between liberals and conservatives. Does this mean it’s possible to think about political conflict from a biological perspective? Surely politics is a uniquely human phenomenon that our species has developed long after we evolved fully modern “hardware,” right?

Not so, according to one of the world’s most renowned primatologists. Academy of Sciences member Frans de Waal has written a book called Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes. His book describes the complex political life of our closest living relatives. De Waal recounts in detail how chimpanzees form alliances between small groups of high-status individuals. And he tells of their betrayals and realignments, and of the brutal murders of chimpanzees fighting for social status (and mating opportunities) within a troop.

In one case, political rivals went far beyond simply killing an alpha male named Luit; they even ripped off Luit’s toes and fingernails, and pounded out his testicles. Most chimp violence occurs between males, however females indirectly support male candidates for high positions by cheering and even intervening during conflicts.

In addition to rudimentary political factions within their troops, chimpanzees have personalities that are meaningfully similar to ours. Groups of human caretakers have separately scored large numbers of chimpanzees on the Big Five factors, and their independent ratings of each dimension coincide with each other for individual apes.

The importance of this discovery is not just that chimps have variable personalities; rather, it’s that they are the only animals known to have traits analogous to all of our Big Five factors (in addition to a sixth factor of their own called Dominance). Biologists have found personality traits similar to Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Extraversion across some twenty primates and other mammals.

But Openness is less common; for example, it’s only partially present in the semi-social orangutan. And full Conscientiousness has only been found so far in humans and chimpanzees. Openness and Conscientiousness, as we’ve just learned, are the personality dimensions that best correlate with left-right voting in human beings.

Science is just beginning to piece together the great puzzle of political orientation. As we look at these and other findings that are emerging from fields like genetics, neuroscience, and primatology, one thing is already strikingly clear: Our political orientations are deeply ingrained natural dispositions, molded within each of us by powerful evolutionary forces. Indeed, these personality traits, and the left-right spectra that arise from them, are intimately connected to the natural history of our species. 

This post is adapted from Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us.

by Emma Carmichael

When we hear the first sound of the alarm, our bodies release adrenaline and cortisol, hormones that wake us, interrupting our natural sleep cycle to make us alert.

Surrendering to the temptation of the snooze erases that hormonal surge: our bodies try to reenter the deeper periods of sleep. Only those restorative levels of sleep take a lot longer than nine minutes to enter, so every snooze confuses our bodies even more. We think three or four snoozes are the equivalent of an extra 30 or 40 minutes of rest, but the patchy, interrupted sleep of snooze is worse than no sleep at all. Instead of the natural sleeping then waking, the snooze drags us into unhealthy, unsatisfying fits of trying to sleep and trying to rise, but failing to do either.

-Casey N. Cep, professed snoozer, wrote about how the snooze button is messing with our sleep cycles and our days and our productivity and probably the very fabric of the cosmos over at Pacific Standard today. Are you a snoozer? I am a snoozer. I used to be a set-10-separate-alarms-er, but on the new iPhone interface you just tap the surface of the screen at first call and it shuts up for nine blissful minutes, and I am once again falling victim to The 9-Minute Snooze. My sleep issues are Tim Cook's fault, is what I'm saying, not mine. [Pacific Standard]

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by Jia Tolentino

At the New Yorker, a piece by Brad Leithauser on "unusable" words:

I don’t know how many auto-antonyms English offers, but the list includes “cleave” (unify or sever—the butcher’s wife cleaves to the butcher, who cleaves the cow’s carcass), “overlook” (oversee or fail to notice), “let” (allow or, as in the legal phrase “let or hindrance,” obstruct), “enjoin” (encourage or prohibit), and “sanction,” as in any sanctioned imports are either approved goods or contraband. A lengthy, but not exhaustive, list of auto-antonyms can be found on Wikipedia. (There’s a special appealing subclass of auto-antonyms that exists only when spoken, as in raze/raise a building or—if muddily enunciated—prescribed/proscribed drugs. Something similar arises in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Crusoe in England,” with its pun on Mount Despair/Mont d’espoir.)

He goes on about words that are problematic* for different reasons, like "awesome" and "totally," "artisanal" and "niggardly," and my favorite, the "Hit It First" category:

Occasionally, a word becomes unusable because some writer wholly appropriates it, embedding it into a jeweler’s setting of such brilliance that any subsequent use seems both allusion and dilution. It’s hard to imagine any writer effectively taking up the verb “incarnadine” after Macbeth’s “The multitudinous seas incarnadine.” Shakespeare owns the word. Robert Frost felt much the same way about Keats and “alien.” The depiction of Ruth in “Ode to a Nightingale” (“She stood in tears amid the alien corn”) put such a memorable, unexpected—indeed, alien—spin upon “alien” that succeeding poets risk sounding plagiaristic when employing it.

What other words do you find unusable? I have forbidden myself from using the word "suddenly" when I write fiction; my blacklist in the freshman writing class I'm teaching includes "basically," "somewhat," "definitely."

[TNY]

*Usage of this word as highly problematic as artisanal Domino's

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Fast Food, Restaurant | New Orleans, LA, USA

(Our family is eating out when we see another parent bring the burgers to their table. The other family’s three-year-old daughter opens her burger and bursts into tears.)

Mother: “Honey, what’s wrong?”

Daughter: “There aren’t any onions!”

Mother: “Well, no, you don’t like onions.”

Daughter: “But I want to take them off MYSELF!”

Today's truly bizarre political controversy is that Speaker John Boehner says there aren't enough votes in the House for a "clean" Continuing Resolution that would reopen the government at the spending level Republicans favor, but without repealing Obamacare or any additional concessions. Various media whip counts disagree with Boehner, and suggest that at least twenty House Republicans have said they would vote for such a bill.

A lot of political controversies are difficult to unambiguously resolve. But this one seems pretty easy. The way to figure out how many House members would vote "yes" on this piece of legislation is to hold a vote. Then the clerk will count up who voted which way and we'll know.

Simple!

So why doesn't Boehner just hold the vote? One view is that he won't hold the vote because he knows his math is wrong. If the vote is held, the bill will pass and Boehner will lose face in the eyes of the more conservative members of his caucus. Another view is that Boehner's math is actually correct. Some of the 20-24 Republicans who've hinted they would support a clean CR might not, in fact, support such a bill if it were brought to the floor. Some of these folks would like to position themselves as moderate and distance themselves from Ted Cruz, but when the chips are down they don't actually want to break with the caucus. If that's right, declining to hold a vote is less a sop to conservatives than it is to moderates. It lets them get away with cheap talk.

The truth is probably a little from Column A and a little from Column B. If Boehner's math is right, then refusing to hold a vote protects moderates. If Boehner's math is wrong, then refusing to hold a vote appeases conservatives. And since nobody is really sure if Boehner's math is right or not, neither the 20-30 most conservative nor the 20-30 most vulnerable House Republicans really want to see a vote held. So by refusing to let the House vote, Boehner serves everyone's interests. With the important exception, that is, of the interests of the country at large which would be greatly advanced by a precise count.

by Emma Carmichael

Researchers from the University of Montreal are getting to the bottom of the perverse I-just-wanna-eat-you-up reaction we hormonal wrecks sometimes feel in the presence of babies. From the CS Monitor:

Apparently it has something to do with the way babies smell. A paper published in the current issue of Frontiers in Psychology describes how researchers in Dresden, Germany, imaged the brains of two groups of 15 women while the women sampled the odors of other parents' newborns. One group was composed of women who had given birth within the past six weeks. The other group was made up of women who had never given birth. The scientists collected the smells from the pajamas of two-day old infants.

The smells were shown to elicit activation in the women's' brains' reward circuits.

Johannes Frasnelli, one of the paper's authors, tells NPR that the attachment that comes with smell helps explain how parents get over what, "if you look at it from an objective point of view, [is] actually pretty annoying." (The "annoying" thing being "raising a child.") It also seems important here to borrow from the Monitor's belated disclaimer:

Based on responses to this story, I should probably make something absolutely clear: You should never attempt to actually eat a baby.

[CS Monitor, NPR]

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Which foreign languages should public high schools offer their students?

Are there some that might be more useful to learn than others? I think you could make a strong argument that Mandarin Chinese and Arabic belong in high schools and administrators would be doing students a favor by offering those courses.

At Daphne High School in Alabama, the sole French teacher retired last year. Instead of finding a replacement, the administrators went in a different direction: They decided to hire Sanaa El-Khattabi to teach an Arabic class:

Alan Lee, superintendent of the Baldwin County school system, said Daphne High, with an enrollment of about 1,400, includes students from 30 countries, and that offering Arabic is one of many ways that the school keeps an international focus and helps its graduates prepare for the global economy.

“If you look at the languages of the world, Arabic certainly would be one of the languages that I would want my own child to learn, because of the opportunities it would provide” in terms of careers and paths of study, Lee said.

That makes insanely good sense. Yet, instead of praising the decision, residents of the community and parents in the district are reminding us that ignorance is still an obstacle to obtaining a world-class education. They’re making an argument that teaching Arabic is somehow pro-Islam and anti-Christian:

“This is America, and English is our language, and while I understand the alleged premise of offering Arabic at our high school, I don’t agree with it,” said Michael Rife, who lives in Daphne. “It is not just another language; it is a language of a religion of hate. I’m concerned about our taxpayer dollars going to fund such a program, because I don’t believe it has a lot of foundational value.

“It just concerns me that we’re headed down a path of further eroding our society to a Muslim-based society, or Sharia law (the moral code of Islam), and I’m not willing to let that happen without … something to say about it.”

…

“They’re trying to indoctrinate our children with this culture that has failed,” [parent Chuck Pyritz] said. “… Why should we want to teach our kids a failed culture when we have a culture that has been successful? All we have to do is follow our Christian culture, which has brought this nation to the pinnacle of success. … I don’t see why they would want to teach this.”

That literally makes as much sense as arguing we shouldn’t teach English because it’s the language of Scientology.

You would think these anti-Islam (or is it anti-Muslim? I don’t think they know the difference) parents would understand how understanding Arabic — and the culture of the countries in which it’s spoken — could be the key to a lot of future jobs in politics, intelligence, and economics. Hell, if the stereotypes are true and these opponents are pro-war and in favor of increased defense spending, then they should be fully supportive of this offering. This could be seen as a chance to communicate with Arabic speakers… for the purpose of defeating the evil-doers.

But the thick fog in their minds is clouding their judgment:

“If they want to speak their language, that is their privilege in this country,” [Daphne resident Donna Rife] said. “But don’t silence another voice, such as Christianity. … We are not a Muslim nation, and yet they’re trying to bring this kind of nonsense into (schools). I am absolutely against it.”

Rife was also disturbed, she said, about the possibility of her grandchildren studying Islam. “It’s a great concern to me, because they’re being indoctrinated with this,” she said.

“Arabic leads right into the Muslim teaching, and that is where the danger is and that is what I am absolutely against,” she said. “Let them teach that in their mosques — but keep it out of our schools.”

I don’t say this often, but the Alabama administrators are doing the right thing. They’re offering the courses because they’re in the best interest of the students. So far, El-Khattabi’s three Arabic classes are full, with 25-30 kids each.

No one tell these parents about the origins of algebra or else the math teachers are going to have to waste a lot of time answering idiotic emails.

Incidentally, there was controversy at a Colorado high school earlier this year when students from a cultural diversity club recited the Pledge of Allegiance, in Arabic, over the loudspeaker. Because pledging allegiance to America in another language is somehow anti-American.

(Image via Shutterstock — Thanks to Lauren for the link!)

by Logan Sachon

All students will now receive free lunches in the Dallas Independent School District, because that’s cheaper than having the state process paperwork for just some students to get free lunches based on family income: “The district made the move anticipating that it will end up saving it money in the long run. As more students qualified for the subsidized breakfast and lunch programs, the district had to hire more workers to keep up with the paperwork while sending out more information and making more calls to families. All of that cost it about $300,000 a year.” This sounds smart. Well done. Bravo.

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It's already in the New York Times, but if you haven't seen it, you have to read Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear making the case for why his state needs Obamacare—and needs it as fast as possible. It's a bracing read, especially because we know that in the state of Kentucky, you don't do yourself any favors by associating yourself with President Obama.

A really important point he makes is that he thinks the program will go well in Kentucky because he's been trying to make it go well. Not only will Kentucky's Medicaid program be expanded—offering insurance to 308,000 people and injecting $15.6 billion of federal money into the Kentucky economy—but there's also this:

The other 332,000 uninsured Kentuckians will be able to access affordable coverage — most with a discount — through the Health Benefit Exchange, the online insurance marketplace we named  Kynect: Kentucky’s Healthcare Connection.

Kentucky is the only Southern state both expanding Medicaid and operating a state-based exchange, and we remain on target to meet the Oct. 1 deadline to open Kynect with the support of a call center that is providing some 100 jobs. Having been the first state-based exchange to complete the readiness review with the United States Department of Health and Human Services, we hope to become the first one to be certified.

Beshear doesn't name names or call people out directly, but this is a brilliant implicit condemnation of the behavior of most of the Republican governors around the country. The attitude they've taken is that since no Obamacare is better than even the best possible version of Obamacare, they should try to engineer the worst possible version of Obamacare in order to hasten its demise. As Chernyshevsky and Lenin said, "The worse, the better." And that attitude, really, has always been one of the worst sins of political radicals of different stripes. A callous willingness to sacrifice concrete human interests in the here and now in pursuit of long-term ideological ends is a great way to make sure people end up worse off than they otherwise could be. Beshear is trying to act like a proper public official and make things go well for people in Kentucky. Too many governors are hoping to make things go poorly and then point fingers.

Oh, silly me. Every day is racism day. A hiring manager wrote this? On a facebook page about a NY Times article?

And 720 people liked it. Oh. 720 people liked the original article. Only 2 liked the comment. That’s better.

by Jia Tolentino

The great Jamelle Bouie wrote about "black names" for the Daily Beast, and it's a solid one if you missed it. Prompted by a question posed to the "Black American parents of Reddit"—“[I’m] just curious why you name your kids names like D’brickishaw, Barkevious D’quell and so on?”—Bouie writes the ever-necessary reminder that black Americans are not a monolith, that the adoption of names that signify difference was an important part of the Black Power movement in the '70s, and that black children are not the only ones with unusual names.

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