Fake News and Statistics Don't Make Your Denials Plausible

When I was in high school, we studied a little of statistics (for which I am grateful), and there was one girl in class, Lacey Bigford, who insisted that no one should "believe in" statistics.  I've been thinking about her a lot lately.  You look at the comments on any story with a poll and Trump-folks say that you can't believe any poll or any statistic.

I get that it's annoying to not see the nuts and bolts of how figures are put together, but when you don't want to go to college or learn more on your own, or "believe in" an entire field of mathematics, you're putting yourself at a disadvantage.  And then you're voting and screwing other people.

A few big fault lines in thinking between liberals and Republicans (conservative?  yeah right) are becoming obvious to me.  Many Republicans are claiming that protests against Trump and his policies are stocked with "paid protestors."  Which is crazy.  It took me a few weeks to figure out that they think organized political action is cheating.  And then when the Lacey Bigfords of the world hear about global warming (for example), they won't believe in it.

It's fine with me if you're not into climate science or a statistician, but stopping paying attention in school in 8th grade is no excuse to fuck up the work of the people who do care.

If Lacey read this, I'll bet she'd tell me that she's doing just fine without statistics.  Surprisingly, we're not close, so I have no idea how she's doing, but I'll be damned if a good understanding of statistics in the people around her never had an effect on her.

It's not a lot to ask that we trust that the obvious and provable is true, even if someone else put the case together.

It takes humility to study something (at least an admission of ignorance), or even connect with a stranger, and a huge number of Americans have apparently rejected the notion that there is anything they don't already know that's worth knowing.  Getting polio and seeing Florida sink into the sea are just going to be happy surprises along the way.

Yates was an example

The hypocrisy demonstrated by Trump's firing of Sally Yates is pretty astounding.  But it's not an accident.  Under a regime that seems determined not to be constrained by checks and balances, any official that will act according to them is unwelcome.  To fit in, a person needs to be able to pretend like they care about the constitution, but then act only in deference to Trump.

Further, the hypocrisy is part of it.  It's an act of humiliation to prove loyalty.  When no one knows whether to take you literally or seriously, they ignore you and hope that you're on their side.  Until they're detained in an airport for trying to come home.  

A Farewell to Language

Photo via Arnold Chao

Do you prefer the ACA or Obamacare?  Trick question.  They're the same thing.  If you're reading my blog, you knew that already, but it's becoming apparent that not everyone does.

My first thought about this seeming impossibility was that something was being lost in translation (From English to English?  I guess that's what we've come to.).  Yet it keeps coming up all over the place.

A quick recap of what I've learned over the last year: facts don't matter in elections.  You can hem and haw over whether Trump should have been taken literally or seriously or neither, but either way our country is facing literal and serious problems.  Millions will lose access to health care.  The European peace since World War II is not as stable as it could be.

Constant disinformation has done major damage to how people communicate in the United States of America.  It hasn't been many years since people went ape over an "atheist Muslim" Barack Obama.  If you want me to explain why that's idiotic, you're out of luck, and not acting in good faith.

Over the campaign of 2016, I was  amazed at Donald Trump's manner of speaking.  A lot of times he sounds like his speech has been run through a few different languages on Google Translate.  In the infamous "grab em by the pussy" tape, he used an expression, "I moved on her like a bitch."  That's not an expression.

A lot of people are expressing disappointment that the ACA is being dismantled, even when they voted for that to happen.    I can only conclude that this election was not about health care or foreign policy.  On those issues, Americans have pretty clear preferences that align with the candidate for whom they voted.

Trump's campaign was just a scream of status quo entitlement.  Republicans have stood in the same place since 1968 and shrieked in frustration any time the wrong kind of person gets any benefit out of being part of our society.

It's no surprise that they've thrown their lot in with the nihilistic Russian outlook that says "Yeah we're bad corrupt assholes, but at least we're honest about it."

Don't be fooled: this isn't a new development.  It's not even honest.  This voluntary aphasia is a project Fox News has been working on for decades.

I don't know how we come back from this.  All I can say is that it was not worth destroying civil dialog to immiserate the American people.    

Bad Timing

I'm scared for reproductive freedom in America.  Actually, I'm scared for almost all freedom in America.

This election has scared me off of making political predictions, but if we do indeed see Roe go away, it would happen at a really bad time.  There has already been local transmission of Zika in Texas already.  Given the upcoming administration's apparent attitude toward people with disabilities, and disinterest in maintaining a social safety net, THIS WILL BE VERY BAD.

Unfortunately, it will also give people a lot of opportunity to think about how medical exceptions should or should not be written into laws about abortion.  People tend to use very rare cases to illustrate why the freedom to choose whether to carry to term is important, but if those cases become less rare, maybe people will be more practical.

Fault vs. Responsibility

I just read Elizabeth Grattan's piece on Medium, "The Decent Woman Who Voted For Trump (Does not exist)."  That's deliberately provocative, and I clicked.  Mostly, it's just about how there's no good excuse to vote Trump.  So far, so good.  Then it goes into some not really convincing flagellation of white women, including those of us who didn't vote Trump.  Just when I think I'm getting to why I should be just as guilty as a Trump voter, all I get is

While I did cast my ballot for Clinton, this is yet another example of the white woman bathing in her privileged perched pedestal of denial. Because women of color weren’t taken by surprise by the divide in this nation. They live it. All their lives. It is a divide that has been witnessed by women of color for generations. 

This doesn't explain a damn thing to me.  Is voting for the better candidate a form of denial?  I guess it was a little polyannaish to think that running a decent campaign against an indecent candidate would let us keep what we've been working for, but it certainly wasn't the wrong move to vote Clinton.

This rush to blame someone, even nobly blame ourselves, is farcical.  It isn't my fault Trump won, but it is my responsibility to fix everything I can about this mess.

This is navel-gazing rather than taking responsibility.  

What

Today I have watched a woman, in tears, be THOROUGHLY patted down by a TSA agent.  I have also watched an anti-democratic coup go down in North Carolina.  THIS IS HAPPENING IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  

Reasonable Generosity

Photo via Jon Feinstein, creative commons

A couple of years ago, Andy and I were walking down the street to a sandwich shop and ran into a guy asking for money or food.  We promised to bring him a sandwich after we ate, and Andy gave him some advice about using Google Voice if he was looking for a reliable way to be contacted by social services or an employer, which is a good idea.

Over the next week, I was walking down the same street and hoped that the same guy would be around and I'd run into him, but then I was like, "You can't hang out with that presumably homeless guy!"

But why not?  I guess there's stranger danger (eyeroll), but we'd found a few sort of intimate things in common when we talked, so it wasn't fair of me to assume we wouldn't connect.  I was also afraid of taking on a charity case that I didn't know much about.  If I was going to hang out with him, I'd feel obligated to try and help him fix his problems, and I didn't know if I'd be able to do what was necessary to be a friend to him, if he wanted one.

I do my best to share and be generous with my time and money, but if I had this fellow over for dinner one night, I'd feel terrible to let him find a place to sleep later that night.

It's not right that I just keep people out of sight and out of mind.  There are practical limits to sharing,  but they're very hard to see in the moment. As of now, I can't exactly see why it would be unreasonable to offer my couch up to anyone who wants to sleep on it at night.  It's not like I'm sleeping on it at night.  But that's not how things work, I guess.

I'm going to keep pushing until I feel like I am serving my fellow man, regardless of which kleptocrats are in charge.

Pumpkin Spite Latte

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

If someone is not nice to those who serve them, they are just not nice.  Ordering your drink at Starbucks as"Trump" is a way to tell a barista, "I own your ass,"  while enriching the corporation that employs them.  

On the one hand, I like how ineffective it is at hurting Starbucks' bottom line.  On the other, it's a meme meant to humiliate people in the service industry.  Maybe if I wind up in  Starbucks I'll say my name is Miranda, as a nod to the patron saint of no-nonsense niceness Lin-Manuel.  

Skeptical but Hopeful on Infrastructure

Donald Trump has a long record of graft in his real estate dealings, so his push for infrastructure improvement feels not-so-altruistic to me.  This is the area where he's confident that he's got everyone outsmarted, but there's a lot more scrutiny on this than he's ever had.  This is an important problem that needs to be treated seriously, and I'm going to have to have faith that checks and balances will keep it from being a boondoggle.  

Am I The Only One Trying To Have a Society Here?

I honestly believe that most Trump voters don't really care about race.  That's a double-edged sword, because it doesn't take being a Klan member to be a part of the problem (or as some people say, "racist.").  Often you don't care about race because you're white, and race is something for liberal crybabies to scream about.  It may not be our fault that America's systematically racist in many ways, but as Americans, it is our responsibility to stop it.

I am jumpy about white supremacy's footholds in the White House (not to mention truly ashamed).  Donald Trump doesn't strike me as a guy who truly hates people of color - he seems like a guy who will use racism as a tool when it helps him out.  I hated it when Clinton did it, but she seemed to regain the trust of people of color in the interim, so I followed their lead.

I loved Patrick Thornton's piece on how isolated rural America can be.  I identified with it strongly.  My childhood was spent in a notoriously-white area.  The general etiquette about race was not to mention it ever, since we're all colorblind.  To learn racial slurs, I had to read them in books.  I didn't want to be grouped in with the Aryan Nations just because I grew up close to them.  I know a vanishingly-small number of people of color very well, and it's not because I avoid people who don't look like me.  This all amounts to me being passively racist.

I realized that mass incarceration and the achievement and wage gaps between races in America are problems that are being maintained by a racist system that needs to end, and colorblindness has no effect on those problems, so it's not good enough.

It's not just in my libtard imagination that nonwhite votes are suppressed.  Maybe that's not enough overt racism to convince you that you have a responsibility to act, but that's the half-assed attitude that kept me safely self-respecting in my white bubble 50 miles from the Aryan Nations compound.

I trust the instincts of oppressed people more than I do the white guys who are telling them to calm down.  It's not possible to really get into the feel of moments in history when things went bad, but I think it would behoove us all to be slightly paranoid about things looking eerily similar.  We still haven't really answered the question of how any number of human atrocities happened, so it's not safe to assume that we're safeguarded against doing it again.  Maybe the PC culture is a pain, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.  The way this campaign ran, I think it's safe to say that Trump's ideology vacuum was left open for exploitation by white supremacists.  He said things that were racist enough that the alt-right felt welcome and validated, and moved right into his organization.

It reminds me a lot of hostile responses to Black Lives Matter.  Being a police officer must be challenging, but if the people who do it aren't up to that challenge, they should quit.  Same goes for the people trying to make a fair and equitable society.  If they can't see the problem with the hateful rhetoric in this campaign, they haven't done their due diligence.

If this all seems imprecise, that's because it is.  I'm sticking with the methods that have worked and working against the ones that have failed.  Maybe we're seeing some returns diminish on some methods, but I don't have the perspective to really tell.  In that case, I like to keep it simple.

We can't prevent people from exploiting their power over others, but we can try and empower everyone so that it's a fair fight.  I am allowed to vote, but that can be taken away.  I'm not allowed to assault anyone, but I still might have the power and inclination to do it.  Donald Trump has shown no interest in maintaining a fair society, and that's why this is scary.  In fact, his whole persona consists of exploiting his power over others.    That can be a fun fantasy once in a while, but it's not an ethos a free society can glorify.

Pity the Swing State Voter

This isn't one of those elections you just let happen.  You make it happen.  You head down to the volunteer office of your candidate, and ask how you can help out.

There's a Democratic Volunteer Center just around the corner from me, and I've been doing a lot of phone banking on behalf of Hillary Clinton.  We know that California is locked up for Democrats, but Nevada's got some swing to it.  Harry Reid is retiring, and I'd like to see that seat keep its D designation.  So would Catherine Cortez-Masto.

Phone banking is the kind of thing I like to do.  I like talking to new people, and helping them participate in the political process.

If you're in a swing state (or even a safe one) you've probably gotten a few calls from people like me.  You might have gotten a lot of them.  And may I please say: I am so sorry to disturb you.  There are a lot of wrong numbers in the system, and sometimes I'm just sifting through a giant pile of them.  The bummer is that I don't know exactly what happens after I mark the "wrong number" box, but I can tell whoever is on the phone that I've done that.

This afternoon, I probably got 75% wrong numbers of the people who actually answered.  The good news is that most people who I talk to at that point have already decided that they're willing to talk to a phone bank volunteer, and are either going to give me a piece of their mind or just deal with yet another call.  I'll happily talk to either person, but I don't like annoying people so much.

The setup is a lot like I've heard telemarketing is.  Usually I'm set on an autodialer that screens disconnections or voicemail.  It's strangely compelling in a gambling kind of way.  I keep thinking "I should get up and blah blah blah, but what if the next call is a good one?"  I guess they're not kidding about that intermittent reinforcement thing.  So it's a good thing that gambling never appealed to me.

TL;DR I'm sorry if I'm driving you insane, but as far as I can tell, this stuff works for getting people elected.  PLEASE VOTE ON NOVEMBER 8.  

When Time is Money, Cash Assistance Only Does So Much

I'm a little ashamed of it, but I subscribed to Blue Apron.  I love cooking, and I don't have a job, but planning meals stresses me out a lot.  I grew up in a home with one income-earner, where cooking food at home made an enormous difference in the household budget.  When I was little, my family relied on food stamps from time to time, and my parents made it work.  It takes a lot of discipline and patience to feed a family on a budget.

One of the meals I made a while ago

I don't always have that discipline and patience (thus the shame), so I figured I'd give this program a shot.  It turns out it's really fun!  (It feels like being on a cooking show, with all the perfectly-portioned ingredients.)  It distills all of the things that are fun about cooking - new ingredients, new recipes, new techniques - and lets some schmuck deal with the shopping and menu planning.

This is how we should do food stamps and WIC.  The current system of cash assistance (if you can get access) feels slightly punitive and has almost no room for error, but Blue Apron is empowering.  You can come home from work, open a box, cook for a half hour, and then a healthy dinner is on the table.  No more low-blood-sugar panics in the grocery store, and you pick up recipes and skills along the way.

I haven't done any kind of CBA, but I suspect that the costs involved in packaging and distribution would stack up pretty well against what mere mortals waste in their kitchens.  (And anecdotally, it's instructive to bear in mind the number of people who rely on prepared foods every day.)  Maybe the math doesn't quite work, but I would argue that the convenience and learning opportunity that come with the program are worth paying something for.  (Note that it's a viable business already.)

The moral hazard objections are pretty obvious, but I suspect that a lot of it could be ironed out in implementation, and most of them are already present in the current system.  I'm sure we'd see a hell of a lot better outcomes for poor families than we get from the way we spend TANF funds on marriage counseling, even if it just comes down to better nutrition and more time for kids to interact with their parents.

So hey, Blue Apron, if you want to hire me to propose this to HHS,  I am completely untrained in business, but that would he one hell of a contract.

P. S. If you want to know how I really feel about Blue Apron, it really is fun and convenient, but I am underwhelmed when it comes to the veggies.  The amount of vegetables in a given dinner usually seem to be about half the mass I would try for, and probably 50% of the tomatoes I've gotten have not been any good at all.

P.P.S. As of the end of September, I've quit the service.  It's a little bit hard to keep up with all the food, and I only really am excited about one meal per week.  I have gotten a few good ideas, but I've been feeding myself for a while now, and I kind of want to go back to choosing what I eat.

Two-Party Pooper

Medicare for all makes sense.  So does paying for college for Americans.  And better regulation of financial institutions.  I have no real argument with this stuff.  The details deserve a close look, but that's not something we get from Sanders.  As long as some loud, white political junkies are pleased, he's got a campaign on his hands.

It's possible to make these things work, but if we only do it halfway, we end up with a total disaster.  There's definitely an element of the sunk-cost fallacy in there, but that's a theme in American elections.  "Am I better off than I was 8 years ago?" is the too-simple frame that our too-simple party system forces us to use.

I loved this interview with Barney Frank.

I am disappointed by the voters who say, “OK I’m just going to show you how angry I am!” And I’m particularly unimpressed with people who sat out the Congressional elections of 2010 and 2014 and then are angry at Democrats because we haven’t been able to produce public policies they like. They contributed to the public policy problems and now they are blaming other people for their own failure to vote, and then it’s like, “Oh look at this terrible system,” but it was their voting behavior that brought it about.

He's not being diplomatic, and probably not taking enough credit for government dysfunction, but overall, he's right.  It takes some work to support an ambitious agenda, but Americans should be honored to be a part of making things better.  If we're not going to bother, we are effectively signing on with the Republican self-fulfilling prophecy of broken government.

People have needs that are being unmet. Polarization along party lines has become its own end, which may in fact be the end of the parties.

Bernie Sanders tells us he's part of a revolution, but when he fails, he's giving us a nice feeling while we burn a potential movement down.  And we'll just blame him (like a lot of Bernie supporters blame Obama), instead of looking at why nothing changed.  A president is just an administrator.

So maybe I'm not just mad at Bernie, but the asinine black-and-white system that produces lightweights like him.  If the opposition party didn't basically live on another planet, it might work to refine the details of good ideas.

You could say a lot of this about Barack Obama, but I'd respond that his administration has given us about as much progress as possible in the system we have, with the electorate we are.

So what exactly do I think we should do?  For now, I think electing Hillary Clinton President is our best move.  Keep people like Wyden and Warren in the Senate, and concentrate on actual lawmakers before we let presidents break our hearts again.  

Disrupting Social Mobility

There's a company I've seen a lot of advertising for lately, called SoFi, which creeps me out mightily.  It's a bank, but won't call itself that.  Kinda like how Uber doesn't have any employees.

SoFi aggregates a bunch of information about its clients and then bestows on them the honor of SoFi's approval for loans and refinancing - for life.  They pick the best financial bets and give them loans.  (Isn't that what a bank does?  Yes, except a bank does this on a loan-by-loan basis.  SoFi signs you up for life.)

The for life  part is what I hate.  I don't think it's bad business, but it seems like an ideal way to permanently separate members of different economic classes.  

And I didn't even get to the most dystopian part yet: they want to create a dating platform for their clients.  Forget about subtle class markers like accents or dental work.  

The most insidious part of this is that it makes perfect business sense.  SoFi offers unemployment insurance to its clients, so that they don't lose their big bets to the random financial setbacks that throw careers into chaos.  

Granted, taxpaying Americans all have access to unemployment insurance, but the public program is not always sufficient to keep people afloat during bad times.   I imagine that SoFi's offering is significantly better than what you'd get from the government.  

But if availability of unemployment support makes Poors too lazy to find work again, why won't it foster indolence among the SoFi class?  

The better we get at figuring the odds, the better we get at stacking them.  

More than an Oopsie

I fit in pretty well to the category of cissexual woman.  My phenotype, and I assume genotype, are pretty easy to read.  I have occasionally gotten lazy about how considerate I am to those who don't quite fall on one side of the spectrum.  But I've decided to shape up, mostly spurred by Naomi Gordon-Loebl's essay on The Toast.   I usually think that if you don't comform very well to a gender binary, people will occasionally misgender you, and it's probably on accident so it's no biggie.  However, I've heard many times that it's almost always hurtful, regardless of whether it's an accident.

I have a few trigger issues like that, so I'm going to be extra-sensitive about the things I know are others' sore points.  To that end, I was reading some stuff about gender-neutral language and found a pretty exhaustive guide to making languages less gender-binary.    The languages I am acquainted with are not very accommodating to gender-neutrality.  In fact, when I have taken Spanish classes, I've gotten somewhat stern lectures telling me to shove my feminist sensibility, and I have to admit I've just accepted highly-gendered language as the way of the world.

But now I'm inspired to pay more attention, and not just retreat into a safe ignorance of these issues.  I don't expect that the whole of the Spanish-speaking world will ever go for it, but the way I've seen English pronouns like "zie" or "hir" take off in some parts of the Internet gives me hope that degendered language variants could have viability.

I can't speak much for languages other than English, but if I use new gender-neutral pronouns, I feel I can safely assume that anyone who has a hard time understanding what I'm saying is playing dumb in the hope that I'll switch to their preferred pronoun scheme.  People learn words by context, and a gender-neutral pronoun is a simple concept.

I am not sure exactly what I'm committing to here, but I'm trying to be more careful.  I am not quite ready to give up "he" and "she."  On the one hand, it seems like it would be ideal to use gender-neutral pronouns in situations that demand formality, but on the other, formality usually comes alongside conservatism.  When I think about the way I tend to speak and write, it will probably be sort of random.  I've always liked to keep a variable tone in my writing and speech - it keeps people paying attention, and adds an element of humor.  

Now, as a reward for reading a long discussion of pronouns and their gender politics, here's a song I loved from the 90s, from a band that really seemed to rebel against gender expectations.

Reporting about Sexual Assault Sure Seems Hard

Buzzfeed has come up with something alarming and strange: a huge number of customer support contacts made with Uber include the terms "rape" or "sexual assault."  Buzzfeed got some screenshots from a former Uber customer support representative.

In one screenshot, a search query for “sexual assault” returns 6,160 Uber customer support tickets. A search for “rape” returns 5,827 individual tickets. Other variations of the terms yield similarly high returns: A search for “assaulted” shows 3,524 tickets, while “sexually assaulted” returns 382 results.

That seems like an awfully high number of criminal acts happening in conjunction with Uber rides.  Uber suggested that the search used was returning a lot of typos or out-of-context text strings (and has now been shown to be wrong that this would be why these results are coming up in a search of their software.).  Since I am not a huge fan of the company, my first instinct was to jump on the "They're scum!  Hang 'em!" bandwagon. But a few hours later, it struck me that this is a really strange find.  There do seem to be a strangely-high number of Uber horror stories out there, but the indication of the Buzzfeed findings is that Uber drivers are engaging in an up-to-now invisible, systematic campaign of sexual assault on customers.  It's not impossible, but I'd be truly surprised if that were the case.     

This was brought to my attention on Jezebel, where the implication is that Uber is doing a terrible job of to cover up a huge problem with sexual assault in the face of damning proof.     

Uber did respond to Buzzfeed's piece, but then retracted some of its claims about how the search worked.  

So that's the story so far.  

This all seems very weird.  In my experience, high-profile stories about sexual assault tend to fall apart in strange ways.  That's probably to be expected, given the sensitivity of the subject and the pressure on the parties involved.  

I've learned not to draw conclusions as these stories spin up.  Usually, it's fair to assume someone did something bad, which may or may not rise to the level of a criminal act.  

Given Uber's clumsy attempts to save face in this, I am growing ever more secure in that assumption.  

Voting my Conscience

Hillary Clinton is too much of a hawk, and has caused thousands of unnecessary deaths.  She's also a weird rich person, with whom I have almost nothing in common.

I still admire her ability to keep a strong, progressive career going in the face of opposition at every turn.  I suspect a lot of that ability is related to the things about her I really despise.  The personality and way of thinking it takes to be a truly powerful politician are fundamentally a mystery to most of us.  Ultimately, I think she has what it takes to be a good President, and I'm voting for Hillary Clinton this year.  

I'd be happy to vote for Bernie Sanders in the general election, and I like how he's kept a lot of focus on economic equality in this primary.  But I hate how his campaign has mutated into a Hillary Hatefest that's convinced otherwise smart and strategic people to think they should vote for Donald Trump instead of Clinton.  The overtones of voting to punish Clinton for her sins just come off as delusional.  Voting is a lot more like a duty than a joy, and that's okay.   Maybe my calculations are wrong, and Clinton is a horrible bet for the presidency this year, but I don't think so.               

I can't make the powerful feel anything in particular by casting a ballot.  It reminds me a lot of when the ACA was painfully being cobbled together and progressives wanted to kill the bill because it was going to let those assholes get away with what they've done.

They already have (and had, in the case of the ACA) gotten away with it, and revenge is not just around the corner.  It will probably never come, and even if it did, some truly bad people would be living in truly bad circumstances.  The idea of making them sorry is not a fantasy I am so attached to that I can risk contributing to the Trump agenda.  

I think there is a nonzero chance that Trump could be elected president, and I want no part of that.

Don't be a Backlasher

Top Image from #SharesFromYourAunt

People hate change.  I hate it too, especially when I'm not expecting it.  Whenever a magazine I read changes format, I flip out a little. (That's the least-embarrassing example I can think of in my life, and I'm sticking to it).  You wouldn't know it from populist movements, but change is hard for everyone even when it's for the better.  It requires you to actually think about all your behaviors you'd set on automatic.

Beyond protecting their privilege, this is why people love complaining so much about political correctness.  They were used to a world where they could assume that everyone was straight and or white, and now they have to put new steps in their system before they're being polite.  In that world, no one had a chance to point out that they're getting screwed.  There's an impulse to react with a lot of anger at being asked to change, and that's where backlashes come from.

I, like everyone I've ever met, hate it when somebody tells me to "calm down."  But sometimes I need to calm down.  In calmer moments I've decided that if somebody tells me to calm down, I should consider that I am not calm, and need to be.

But sometimes people do upsetting things they shouldn't do.  America's laws are unfair to minorities, and sometimes majorities.  "Unfair" is an understatement.  I'm reading The New Jim Crow, so that's what's on my mind at the moment, but I don't really want to make this post a list of injustices.

If you'll allow me to make a generalization, there are two types of populists: those trying to correct an injustice and those trying to sabotage progress made by the first group.  The latter are backlashers, and they are loud right now.  They want they're country back - you know, to make it great again.  They don't want to change their pronouns or bother with social and professional circles that truly include nonwhite non-hetero people.

I was horrified when I realized that a lot of people truly value white supremacy and/or patriarchy.  They don't want to call it that, but they are so used to the results that they don't notice what the root cause is.  When you don't want people to understand the facts about sex, you don't want people (but mostly women, since they're the ones who get pregnant) to have a say in their sexual and reproductive lives.
   
So maybe the SJWs aren't just whining and making your life difficult.  Take a moment to think about it later on tonight.  

15 years on birth control and I had no idea

I have teeny tiny muscles.  I've always been a weakling, and it turns out that taking birth control pills has not been helping me out.  I just figured it was genetic.  Then I stopped taking birth control and started lifting weights and all of a sudden I had a muscle or two.  It wasn't a coincidence.

I don't have a fun tangent, I just wanted to inform the masses.  

Ragequit the Machine

I hoped in 2008.  Things changed a little.  I got frustrated when it came time to put together the PPACA.   I thought I was just burned out, and distanced myself from politics for a while.  The political process has broken my heart a few times, but I also can't ignore the world around me.  I can definitely vote, but I can't promise much more than that.  For now, this is going to have to be what I do instead of fully burning out.

It makes me nervous when a politician gets me excited.  Sometimes I am proven to be too pessimistic, and I love it when that happens.  Who really expected Sanders to get this far in the nomination process?

As it stands, I don't think I'll vote for him in the primary.  He's got a few positions on policy I prefer to Hillary's, but he doesn't seem to have any strategy to speak of.  If he sought to change the dialog in the primary, he did that, but I get the feeling it's flaming out into general Hillary-hatred.  The political seems to be just turning personal, and once a campaign veers into a popularity contest, it's just running out the clock.  When you're still telling people that "If people got to know me, they'd vote for me," you haven't made your case, and it's too early to coast.

Read a book, you uncultured dummy

It's hard not to react badly in a discussion about a prejudice you don't face when you ask somebody a question and they respond that it's not their job to educate you.  They're right, but it's hard to take when you are also told that the burden of the prejudice is not something you can understand, due to your privileged position.

A lot of people don't want to explain their burdens to you because the explanation is frequently just rejected.  I think it's pretty understandable that women would like to walk down the street without hearing strangers' opinions of their bodies, but drawing this conclusion is apparently a feat of intuition and logic that escapes a good amount of the Internet.  So I don't want to explain it again, just to hear that I've made a stupid mistake in thinking that my comfort is relevant to my comfort.

Sometimes, a banal metaphor for a concept gains traction on the Internet, and I usually don't get what the hubbub is.  There is value in finding new ways to explain a concept, but I don't really think that (e.g.) "consent is like tea" is much different than "consent must be given."

Maybe I should be a little kinder about things like "spoon theory" since we're all just trying to get this down, and maybe it takes a fresh look for some of us once in a while.  

One Weird Trick For Gun Safety Around Children

Lots of small children find guns in their homes and hurt or kill with them as a consequence.  This is an idiotic problem that Americans are tolerating.

It's pretty apparent that being a responsible gun owner doesn't immunize you from this problem.  In fact, I don't know precisely what better safeguards would look like.  If research on gun-related accidents weren't basically impossible to conduct in the U.S., I might.  And I hope that this functional  ban on gun-related research is coming to an end.  

So, once somebody comes up with a fairly reliable way to keep guns away from kids, I'd like to see parents helped with implementing it.  (And even if we just made sure parents comply with current best practices, that's not nothing.)  It would be a lot like the way that local police will inspect car seat installations for new parents, but someone trained in safe storage of weapons would come to your house and see if your storage practices are up to snuff.  Ideally, these consultations would be paid for by gun manufacturers.  And while we're at it, why can't they pay into a fund for research?  

Nothing will prevent all accidents, but I think this idea has a significant chance of saving lives, as well as being Constitutional as all get-out.  

Real Housewives of Silicon Valley Make Gazpacho

It's hot today.  I say that calls for gazpacho, which means a trip to the store before it gets truly hot out.  I'm lucky enough to live about a mile from a really great produce/specialized import food stand, so once I slept in a bit and got some cool chai (which I also got at the Milk Pail) in me, I set out to get my groceries.  By 11:00 it was already over 80 degrees, so by the time I lugged everything home, I was dripping in sweat.

Hot weather is my favorite weather.  This kind of morning is my favorite kind of morning.  A little walk and some writing, looking forward to a nice no-cook dinner in the evening.  Maybe some time in the pool in the afternoon.

The fruits of my labor.  The tomatoes are all yellow and at the bottom of the bag.

I used Alton Brown's recipe, but subbed red wine vinegar instead of balsamic and added fresh oregano and chives.  My tomatoes are all yellow, so I didn't add any tomato juice.  When I've mixed tomato colors in the past, it looks horrid.  Despite the modifications, I like the recipe a lot.  The method of straining all of the cores and seeds for juice adds some nice thickening pectin.

A Western Liberal's Views on Guns

It kind of blows my mind that the second amendment to our Constitution is (now, explicitly) about an individual right to bear arms.  It just doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me.  Freedom from search and seizure (e.g.) seems like it would come before that.  

But I grew up in country where people care.  

My spouse once idly mentioned that in Idaho, prosecutors can be issued firearms as part of their office.  I said that he would not be reviving that quaint tradition, because I want to keep the risk of in-home gun injury as close to zero as possible.  I do admit to having a little bit of residual culture-war distaste for guns, since I associate them with Republicans and toxic masculinity.  Frankly, they seem sort of tacky.  

Then again, that is a sort of appeal. A Republican's concealed-carry license is a hipster's ironic moustache that raises your risk of suicide by at least three times.  So if you want to push the standards of cultural signifiers and taste, a firearm is not a prudent way to do it.     

I'd think this might increase your suicide risk by a lot more.
CC Timo Luege from Flickr.

But prudence is not everyone's watchword.  A lot of people have dangerous hobbies, but we try and keep them dangerous only to the participants.    I am not about to go out hunting, but I respect a person's desire to be that intimately involved with feeding her or himself*.   

Accidents happen to everyone, including the responsible and well-trained.  It's folly to rely on them not happening.  (The only person I can think of that I've known to die by a gun did so by accident.)  I'm really really risk-averse, so I tend to try and keep myself away from situations where the stakes of accidents are as high as they are with weapons.   

But the really sticky part when it comes to firearms for personal use is self-defense.  It's only sticky because of how hard it is to assess the risk of really scary stuff.  My experience with people who really push this is that they're willing to tolerate or ignore the risks that come with firearm ownership for the extremely small likelihood that they will truly need a gun to defend themself.  I have some pop-psychological theories as to why this is, but they're so uninformed that I will just skip those in favor of simply saying that it does not add up for a person like me, or indeed most people.  There are almost certainly circumstances in which having a gun around for self-defense is going to help you a lot more than the risk of suicide or accident is going to hurt you.  

These numbers are kind of hard to untangle, since there are a lot of things that make you "the kind of person who would keep a gun in their house" that are also things that make you likelier to be in a violent conflict.  So, I'll leave sorting this out to the professionals.  A study in the American Journal of Epidemiology says 

 

Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home (adjusted odds ratio = 1.9, 95% confidence interval: 1.1, 3.4). They were also at greater risk of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person was living with others at the time of death.,

I like this bit because it acknowledges the way that the risk factors affect each other.  Young people die due to injuries (violent, interpersonal, or not) a lot more than people who live long enough to acquire diseases.  In fact, young people die almost exclusively due to injuries.  

I am talking about "kinds of people" as in statistically-important populations.  I am "the kind of person" whose marriage doesn't last, since I got married pretty young (among other things).  I hope I'm an exception (It was just my 11th anniversary this weekend), but what happens is what happens.  So don't feel like I'm painting a picture of who you are with this stuff.  

As it happens, I am not the kind of person to keep a gun in her home, and I am not the kind of person likely to die by shooting.  Anyone could have told you that, but when you put together my demographic profile, common sense is born out.    Neither were Mayci Breaux or Jillian Johnson.  

TL;DR Guns are dangerous and I don't really want one around me when I can help it.  People assess risk in wildly different ways, and that's natural.   I'm willing to live and let live, but it's irresponsible to mince words about the risks that guns present.  Again from that paper: 

Results show that regardless of storage practice, type of gun, or number of firearms in the home, having a gun in the home was associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home.

*This is about as far as I respect hunting.  If you feel like testing your coordination, play ping pong or Nintendo.  If you want some fun explosions, find a place where you can enjoy them in safety.  

NYT Magazine Scoops NASA

NYT January 2015

NASA July 2015

Coincidence?  Maybe some of us were wrong.

If You Actually Cared About the Environment

Problem: Obesity
Problem: carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere leading to global warming

Do the math.  One of these problems solves the other.

Fat contains a lot of carbon.  If people are getting so obese, they're a fantastic carbon sink.  So do your part and order a pizza today!  Everyone acts like we're in the middle of an obesity crisis - I say we're in the middle of an environmental solution.  That Michelle Obama probably doesn't mean to be hurting the environment, but that's still the effect she's having.  Every lost kilogram is 850 g of carbon dioxide, sent straight into the rapidly-warming climate.  It may be unorthodox and untested, but so was widespread burning of fossil fuels.  One environmental experiment demands another.

If we're going to give it a shot, we at least need to get the theory down.  According to Wikipedia, the fat stored in human adipose tissue is in a semi-liquid state, and is composed primarily of triglycerides and cholesteryl ester.  The triglycerides undergo lipolysis to become glycerol and free fatty acids.

Doing his part

For a human being to be considered obese (as over a third of Americans are), their body is supposed to be more than 25% fat by weight.  And sorry Mr. Universe but you're not sequestering carbon as well as Homer Simpson is.

Not helping.

I can't find a good molecular formula for myosin or a representative fatty acid without pulling out a paper book, so I'll just use calorie content as a proxy.  Each gram of fat contains about 9 calories, each gram of protein about 4.  I'll admit that there's a lot of information out there about the specific chemical composition of adipose and muscle tissue, but I can't access it for free, so I'm going to wing it until I'm actually writing this into law.  

Links and Add The Words

I've decided to turn a corner on things, and stop being such a layabout.  In accordance, I am going to post something at least once a week.  Here's what's been on my mind:

Infant bones will straighten themselves out as they heal.  

A new chemical bond has been discovered.    It sounds like a kind of special case, but it's not nothing.

Germ-free zebrafish have interesting immune changes as they're colonized by microbes.  

xxx

I also may no longer live in Idaho, but I do keep up on the goings-on.  This week the legislature finally heard testimony about adding the words "gender identity and sexual orientation" to Idaho's standing Human Rights Act. 

The thing that I've found really interesting about this conflict is how people in Idaho have long wrongly assumed that these protections are already written into state law.  They say they act as though that's the case, but I don't trust them.  Unfortunately, this is something I heard on the radio, so I don't have a good link, but when you think about it, people are generally paranoid about an overly-litigious society.  

I know when I was trying to go back to work several people told me that no one would dare screw with me for fear of ADA complications.  In short, that's bad advice.  If you're already in a disempowered position, it's not always straightforward what protections the law affords, and accessing them requires making and proving an illegal imposition on your rights.  

Thus, the mistaken impression that The State protects LGBT Idahoans is not enough to ensure that happens. It may usually be the case, but when it's not, someone gets screwed.    

xxx

In not-exactly-biology, I was really into this article by Olga Khazan, and it made me think a little:

I always thought it was weird/insane when coal miners claimed that they were the ones disregarding safety rules and not using equipment by their own judgment, not under the orders of supervisors requiring unsafe work practices to help the bottom line.  But in this article, it says, 

Coal workers are supposed to be offered masks to wear, Smiddy said, but “for a 12-hour shift in a coal mine, there's almost nobody who can wear a mask. They say, ‘It's heavy on my face, I can't breathe with it on.’”

That got me to thinking about how many news stories I ran into this summer about the difficulty of dealing with PPE in the ebola outbreak, and how no one says, "The gowns were just too uncomfortable, so we just took them off."  In fact, I spent a lot of time last summer wondering at how people seemed to be transmitting ebola so easily.  I've used BSL 3 PPE in a relatively low-pressure environment and it didn't strike me as a particularly big deal.  Ebola is the next step up, but it still seemed like people who should know better were getting sick all the time.  Then again, from the sounds of it, health workers were doing their work without the aid of gowns and masks quite a lot as the outbreak spun up.  I'd really love to hear from someone who's been there about how that comes to pass, and whether it rests on ignorance or a mixture of carelessness and bravery.  I wonder what the difference is between health care workers and their PPE, and coal miners and theirs.  Ebola kills you quicker than black lung, but still.  Even if this tangential thought isn't all that interesting to you, read this article.  It does a good job of showing the intersections between poverty and disability and how our country's safety net isn't constructed in a way that can quite handle those complications. 

Oh, and if you've made it this far, please leave a comment saying you're reading, or hit me up on social media.  I'll keep shouting into the void if you don't, but I'd appreciate it if I knew someone was reading.    

Neither articulate nor clean

I have a habit of losing track of how well I'm articulating myself when I speak, but it turns out that I'm definitely not the only one.  For some reason, I have always been hugely amused by the ambiguity in language, and respond to misinterpreted words with embarrassing fits of laughter (like how my sister always thought NPR's Bob Edwards was Bob Backwards.)  I just hope no one interprets my amusement as language snobbery.  I don't think these mistakes are dumb - I think they're kind of brilliant, and give insight into how people think about language.

I noticed how lazy I can be about articulating myself soon after I graduated college and started working closely with a woman who'd grown up in China.  She was a great phonetic speller (which I imagine is true of most people who grow up speaking Chinese) and wrote down exactly what she heard people around her saying.  To Xun, Anthrax was antruas.  This was about ten years ago, and I've slipped considerably in the interim.  

I have to wonder when being inarticulate becomes an accent or dialect in itself.  

Security without passwords

This idea strikes me as right.  Passwords are unwieldy and hackable in ways that location isn't.  However, it's kind of hard to give myself a visceral sense that this would be more secure.  It's like how people a generation older than I am like to have documents printed out.  I've always felt like something is more secure if it's stored in a digital format somewhere.  I lose paper all the time.  What if I spill something on it?

HT to D for the video.

I don't really tell my spouse my passwords, but I also don't really care if he uses my devices, usually.  I wonder how the actual implementation of this new authetication regime deals with shared devices.  

FYI: If this seems like a weird subject for me to be taking on, you might be interested to know that my spouse has taken a job at Google, and we're now living in California.  So this kind of thing is on my mind more now.  

The Elephant in the Drawing Room

I work with animals in captivity, and I love it.  There are things about it that make me uncomfortable, and I've been wrestling with them for a while now.  I found a movie on Netflix called The Elephant in the Living Room which told the story of a pretty impoverished guy who kept a lion as a pet.  My first reaction to the idea of a guy keeping a pet lion in Ohio was, "That's horrible!"  The movie also followed the activity of a police officer who responds when exotic animals kept in situations like that get into trouble.  He was portrayed as the enlightened savior, the reasonable one.

Then I got to thinking that there are lions at "my zoo" whose lives aren't very much like the lives of wild lions.  What makes it so much better for a zoo to keep an exotic animal than for some schlub in middle America to do that?  He's not a zoologist or vet, but that doesn't mean he's not a clever and sensitive guy with a sense for what animals need.  My intuition tells me that he can't provide for a lion what it needs (namely, space and other lions).  I'm just curious about how much of my intuitive revulsion at the idea of keeping a lion as a pet is informed by my social class.  My experience among animal lovers tends to have been that the more affluent an animal-lover, the more they feel like an animal needs its space.  But even people who take the hardest line against pettification of animals have a hard time resisting nuzzles from an animal who's giving them.

Overall, the movie really seemed like a study in class-differentiated attitudes towards animals among Americans.

The thing that blew my mind was when Lambert's owner ended up taking in a female lion, and since he didn't really have the right facilities for Lambert (the original lion he'd raised) and the female, he ended up keeping them in a grimy horse trailer for a period of time.  The female lion got pregnant and ended up having a healthy baby.  I was shocked that things turned out so seemingly well in what looked like deplorable conditions.

The real shock came when Lambert was accidentally electrocuted.  The movie depicted this, and it was sickening and terrible.  I think it just goes to show that caring for exotic animals requires a lot of resources.  Accidents happen, but the rules that accrediting agencies come up with will help prevent them.

I don't think wild animals should be treated like pets and hand-raised to be human companions.  People really get excited about animals, and want to snuggle them and keep them as pets.  I don't believe that an animal necessarily needs to be in its natural environment to be "happy."  It's a difficult thing, when the natural environments aren't as available as animals need them to be.

Then there's the issue of access to the animals: I think zoos do a good service in giving people the chance to see animals close-up and really understand what it is we're working to conserve in the wild.  There are lots of people out there who are driven to be up close and personal with wild animals, and I'd prefer they do something like get educated and maybe become a vet or find a wildlife sanctuary to work at.  But there are people who don't have access to that kind of thing and will do things like bring home a lion cub.  I'm glad that the law doesn't side with them, but I just wish that the man in this movie had a better outlet for his desire to be with animals.        

I'm cheating on you with another blog

But I swear, it doesn't mean anything to me!  If you've been reading my blog, or just know me, you probably know that I'm not religious.  A friend of mine mentioned that she wanted to read the Bible and see what she thought.  I told her I'd be happy to do the same and blog it with her.  We current non-believers have joined up with a Christian to go through the Bible and respond.  If you're interested, check out The Pragmatist, The Perplexed and The Prophet.  I'm Pragmatist, and Perplexed is the one who initiated this project.  She's doing some nice cliffs-notes TWOP-style recaps of each chapter, so I've hardly touched my own Bible, I have to admit.  

A Crackpot's Views on Nutrition

I like like like food.  Cooking it is fun, but often I find myself balking at cooking due to laziness and a lot of pressure I put on myself to EAT RIGHT.  Plus, I tend to panic when I get hungry.  If I have a bunch of things like Kind bars sitting around, I can go days where 75% of the food I consume comes in bar form.  It's carby and low-effort and sort of expensive, but it makes me stop worrying about how I'll get my hunger sated.  I read a review of Soylent, the nutrition shake that everyone somehow is convinced is much cooler than Ensure  (Via Andrew Sullivan.) and it sounds to me like Soylent is a gateway to orthorexia.  If I'm going to replace my fun, stimulating food with a goo, I think plumpynut sounds much yummier.

I have some sort of crackpot ideas as to why living on Soylent won't work out very well.  I don't have any good links, but I have gotten the impression over time that an entire diet of nutritional supplements generally won't cut it for maintaining good health.  If we're going to accept that as true, then I can move on to why I think it doesn't work.

At Zoo Boise, I got to hang around some giraffes a lot (I miss you, Julius and Jabari!), and the giraffes were fond of chewing on the fence of their exhibit.  A guy who was watching that said he was a vet and that some herbivores will just chew on things because there's a behavioral-physical loop where if the animal's body doesn't do enough chewing, it doesn't feel like it's sated.  In that case, they just chew on whatever's around.  This comes up when herbivores eat food that's too soft for them.

I find that I don't feel very "full" after processed food gets to digesting inside me.  I wonder if it's the same mechanism working in me.  The same goes for when I am eating a lot of yogurt or cottage cheese or other semi-solid food.

The other thing that I imagine influences why "whole foods" tend to work differently in our bodies than what I'll call "constructed foods," is some research that showed that the RNA found in the organisms we eat can control  the transcription of our own genes.  

Lucy in the Sky Without Anxiety

I use antidepressants, and have for years.  I was resistant at first (mostly due to some ableist nonsense about being one of those people with something wrong.  I also didn't understand that I had any kind of problem.)

Popular ideas about "happy pills" are so wrong about how these drugs work.  A "happy pill" would be basically useless, I think.  The thing that makes a good antidepressant useful is that it makes depression manageable, so you have the strength/insight to deal with symptoms as they come along.  

I had to learn a lot about psychoactive drugs when I dealt with a lot of anxiety and depression as my life turned upside down in 2008.  This is not to mention insomnia, which has been a problem for most of my life.  I ended up using a lot of sleep aids then, and looking into anti-anxiety meds.  My impression of anti-anxiety meds like benzodiazapenes wasn't a good one.  They seem more like traditionally-recreational drugs, where they just push a psych symptom out of view for a while, until the drug wears off.  

I don't see how that helps very much.  It's the difference between a hand up and a handout.  Then again, these drugs are widely used for an illness I don't know that I've truly experienced.  However, Andrew Sullivan points to someone's anti-anxiety experience with psilocybin that sounds precisely like my description of why antidepressants are useful drugs.  

Hallucinogens and other recreational drugs that aren't alcohol or marijuana are pretty taboo in the world of psychology, but I wonder if they need to be.  

Add The Words Idaho

So I was pretty busy as I got close to moving from Boise, but I regret not being a part of the Add The Words campaign.  Check out this really amazing trailer, but be warned that it starts with a metaphorical punch.

  

Be Careful, but Don't #CancelColbert

I just love Stephen Colbert.  Let's get that out of the way first.

Because of that, I don't think his show should be canceled.  He regularly plays with fire, and it's both brave and reckless of him.  I do wish he'd stop with the transphobic jokes, but I watch and enjoy his show.  He's a biting social critic, and generally a voice for morality in public life.

Sometimes he steps over the line of decency, but almost always in a way that ridicules others' cruelty, rather than joining in it.  When he makes a joke that goes, "Ha ha, how can Dan Snyder not know he's being an asshole?" by employing an ugly and hurtful stereotype, he's doing something inherently risky.

I think I've reversed my position on hate speech being necessarily worthy of legal protection.  I used to believe that it needs to be, because it is speech.  Now I believe that it's a luxury of my position to be able to laugh off a slur.

When I say this humor is "risky" I don't mean, "at risk of offending liberal crybabies."  I mean it risks the safety and comfort of marginalized people.  Correlation isn't causation, but the specter of a more-racist society is enough to scare me off of saying the n-word even in private.  A society where the n-word is frequently used is probably an especially dangerous society for black people. I'd  rather not be comfortable with the hallmarks of white-supremacy, in case there's a causal relationship I don't quite understand.  It takes a lot more than just not using a particular word to evolve beyond our legacy of white supremacy, but I think good-hearted people generally agree that a racial slur is something we can give up in service of that goal.  In fact, it's possibly the very least that can be done. It is a limitation on expression, but I find it to be truly tiny.

The joke was unnecessarily offensive.  Stephen Colbert the man did not choose to highlight it, probably for that reason.  

I Signed Up for Obamacare

...and it was not a good experience.  It took me hours, and a few phone calls.

Looking back, I'm not quite sure what the problem was, but apparently Chrome and healthcare.gov don't play together well.  I spent a lot of time on something unresponsive, just figuring it was slow.

Click login, see nothing is happening, and come back later to find that my click wasn't registered.  Finally log back on with a new browser, and get an error saying that I need to log out and try again, then get stuck looking at the login screen again.  That was a mistake.  I made an account, applied for the ability to choose a plan, and got to the point where I thought I was finished, but realized I hadn't chosen a plan.

If you need to do this too, you might want to see Sarah Kliff's guide to signing up with healthcare.gov.

In the end, I was able to enroll in a plan, but I was very determined to make it work.

Ebb

I've been wondering why I don't write any more, and decided I can of course blame Republicans.  They're a terrible opposition party.  There's no back-and-forth to follow; only back.  I also need more stimulation than I get hanging out in my apartment.  (When I leave it's very cold out and I am likely to spend money.)

However, it appears that I may be moving to the Bay area very soon, and a new environment should be pretty stimulating.  

Honesty and Decency are Superhuman

I wrote this post a long time ago, and I'm not sure why I never published it.  Luckily, Ta-Nehisi Coates' new piece about the capacity for evil in any run-of-the-mill person made me think of it.  I wonder how many things I do unconsciously that are as bad as complicity in Nazi Germany.  I have some ideas, but I am more interested in what it takes to be good in the world.  From where I sit, it takes a lot of courage and energy to be merely decent.

Amanda Marcotte pointed out how extremely cool it was that Charles Ramsey stepped up to make a difference in what seemed like a run-of-the-mill domestic violence incident.  It turned out that he stepped in at a time that allowed several kidnapped women to escape their decade-long ordeal, but there was no way he could have known that.  (Amusingly, he says in an interview that he knew something was really really wrong when a white lady ran into his black-man's arms.)

Amanda nicely takes this incident as a reminder that we need to pay attention to the world around us and intervene when we can.

She's right about that, but it bumps up against the progressive tradition of mocking "cookie-seeking."  If you don't know what that is, it's doing something normal and decent (like not raping people) and asking for praise.

Decency takes a significant amount of self-confidence and bravery.  It's hard.  We may as well be generous with our cookies.  There's a reason that people keep reading inspirational tales of heroism so they can internalize the ability to act.  

To be clear, I think that Ramsey did something that should be expected of all people, but I also think it was brave.  It's an action that deserves commendation, but shouldn't be exceptional.  If we were all half as good as we think we are, every day we'd do four or five things that would impress a stranger.  

Donde el caucho se une con la carretera

I took two years of Spanish in high school, and felt like I learned a lot then, but it's been 13 years since I graduated and I've let that knowledge atrophy.  Enter Duolingo.  I've pretty much run through the stuff that I learned in high school and am learning new things now.  I was almost able to write the title of this post in Spanish without googling the translation!  (In English it means, "where the rubber meets the road".)  It's interesting how my interaction with the program has evolved over time.  There are a lot of steps where one has to listen to spoken Spanish and transcribe it, also in Spanish.  At first, I would have to listen to the recording over and over to get it right.

Now that I've been practicing a while, the recordings are starting to sound like words to me so I don't have to just memorize the syllables I heard and write them down.  I know I don't have the best working memory, so at first I just chalked it up to that.  It turns out that my problem was that I didn't (don't) know Spanish, not that I'm a special snowflake with an unusually bad memory.

The program also involves a fair amount of speaking into the microphone, and I'm extremely glad it does.  An English speaker doesn't roll her R's very often, and once I am out of practice, I sound absurd when I try to do it.  According to Duolingo, I am able to read about 50% of Spanish-language articles.  That seems a little too optimistic to me, but I'll see what I can do when I finish the program.  

Food-blogging February: The Peanut Butter Cookie Trials

I haven't written much over the past few years - I figured I should get back to my roots and do some food blogging.  I intend to write something every day, so it is likely to stay pretty pedestrian and home-cooky.  I know it's not February yet, but I made some cookies today and wanted to be sure I get going on this project.

Peanut butter is a big part of my diet.  I love it, but have a hard time finding peanut butter cookies that aren't too sweet.  Maybe it's time I develop them.  I'm starting with this recipe, from Simply Recipes.  In the comments, someone says that they cut the white sugar down to 1/4 cup, and I followed that advice with a little twist inspired by overmeasuring - I just used 3/4 cup of packed brown sugar for the total sugar.  Another variation from the recipe is that I didn't get to baking the dough until it had rested for about 36 hours in my fridge.  From the taste of the dough, it may be a little too sweet, but I'll bake them and see how they come out.

Baked them 13 minutes at 350 degrees, they spread a little further than I expected, and they are somewhat overcooked, but the sweetness is about perfect.  The peanut flavor is not perfect - that will need a boost, maybe with some chopped peanuts.  Maybe the long resting time was too much for the baking powder, and they expanded horizontally instead of vertically.

The problems with the usual peanut butter cookie recipe that I'd like to solve are:

• Long resting time
• Lots of butter

I have a few modified recipes that I could try out next time.  Recipe A, to address the butter content, will be:
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup peanut butter
1/4 cup RT butter
1 egg
1.25 cups flour
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt

Note that the volume of wet ingredients stays the same here.



I suspect that replacing some of the butter with peanut butter will result in a better PB flavor and less spreading.  It might also make for tougher cookies that don't rise as well, but I'll just have to bake them and find out.  As for the time variable, I'll try one batch after a half hour's rest, another after an hour's, and if neither is satisfying, I'll try two and three hours' rest batches.

I originally conceived of this as an experiment to work on in the near future, but I don't know that I want to eat that many cookies in a short time.  Once this batch gets eaten, I'll use my modified recipe and resting times.