Psych!

From The Lovable Misanthrope.

Dr. Google and I may have caught David Brooks with his pants down, or something like that—I'm not saying plagiarism, but an ethical breach in the plagiarism family, and I'm not kidding—in reference to his Friday column, on its surface a relatively dull specimen of his social science dishing mode, where he attempts to show you how hot new research proves that poverty has nothing to do with our social problems (and therefore, implicitly, government ought to leave it alone and focus on more effective measures like eliminating the budget deficit, because everybody knows the budget deficit is responsible for teenage pregnancy, segregated neighborhoods, and hunger).

This time Brooks is announcing a hip new trend that everybody is dancing to,

the psychologizing of domestic policy. In the past several decades, policy makers have focused on the material and bureaucratic things that correlate to school failure, like poor neighborhoods, bad nutrition, schools that are too big or too small. But, more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning — the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.

But at the same time, they aren't, or it isn't, or they haven't noticed themselves:

The clown Joseph Grimaldi. From Nigeness.

When you look over the domestic policy landscape, you see all these different people in different policy silos with different budgets: in health care, education, crime, poverty, social mobility and labor force issues. But, in their disjointed ways, they are all dealing with the same problem.... Maybe it’s time for people in all these different fields to get together in a room and make a concerted push against the psychological barriers to success.

Yes! They needed Brooks to inform them that now that their attention has shifted, they ought to start shifting their attention. Obama or Romney—it hardly matters who—could institute a Department of Homeland Insecurity,  maybe with Bill Bennett as director, to focus all these efforts on the psychological issues: instead of the utopian socialist dream of reducing poverty, we'll reduce unsuccessfulness!

What interests me, as always, is the research he's reporting on, or trying to report on, and trying to find out if it's really as specious as the way he presents it, and how he found out about it, because I can't believe he's really following the literature; more like it's following him.

In this case, he seemed to be citing a rather wide range of different kinds of work, much in extremely academic publications that would be pretty hard to find if you didn't know what you were looking for; but it gradually became apparent that he was getting it all from two magazine articles by the fine education-beat journalist Paul Tough: "The poverty clinic", The New Yorker, March 21, 2011, and "What if the secret to success is failure?", New York Times Magazine, September 14, 2011; or more likely from Tough's new book, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), which incorporates material from those articles into its first two chapters.

Advertisement for Zan, a 19th-century French cough drop brand. From PostersPlease.

I say "more likely" because the book came out just a few weeks ago, September 5, so you could imagine a copy from the publisher landing on Brooks's desk, without his lifting a finger to obtain it, and then being there when he was casting about for something to write about.

In the event, it was better than that: Brooks was invited to serve on a panel discussion with Tough, plus two scholars (Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth) who play important parts in the book, moderated by Brian Williams for NBC's Education Nation conference, September 24. Brooks showed he had no idea what How Children Succeed is about, rather agreed with Williams that it must be getting rid of all that self-esteem shit where you give every kid a trophy just for showing up,  thought he was agreeing with somebody instead of just confused when he said that most of cognition is non-cognitive, and so on. Anyway, I figure it was around then that he got hold of the book; perhaps Tough gave him a signed copy as they chatted in the green room.

Here is an outline of the first 53 pages (not including the introduction) of How Children Succeed in relation to the first eight paragraphs of Brooks's September 27 column:

pp. 1-9. Introduces the Chicago school principal Elizabeth Dozier and the San Francisco pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris.

pp. 9-11. Introduces (from Burke Harris's point of view) the enormous longitudinal study on the medical consequences of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) on 17,000 Kaiser HMO patients conducted, beginning in 1995, by Vincent Felitti and Robert Anda:

patients... were mailed questionnaires asking them to relate their personal histories in ten different categories of adverse childhood experiences, including physical and sexual abuse, physical and emotional neglect, and various measures of household dysfunction, such as having divorced or separated parents or family members who were incarcerated or mentally ill or addicted.... [and] used the data to assign each patient an ACE score, giving them one point for each category of trauma... (Tough, 9-10)

They asked 17,000 mostly white, mostly upscale patients enrolled in a Kaiser H.M.O. to describe whether they had experienced any of 10 categories of childhood trauma. They asked them if they had been abused, if their parents had divorced, if family members had been incarcerated or declared mentally ill. Then they gave them what came to be known as ACE scores, depending on how many of the 10 experiences they had endured. (Brooks, para. 1)

The correlations between adverse childhood  experiences and negative adult outcomes were so powerful that they "stunned us," Anda later wrote.... the higher the ACE score, the worse the outcome, on almost every measure from addictive behavior to chronic disease.... Compared to people with no history of ACEs, people with ACE scores of 4 or higher were twice as likely to smoke, seven times more likely to be alcoholics, and seven times more likely to have had sex before age fifteen. They were twice as likely to have been diagnosed with cancer, twice as likely to have heart disease, twice as likely to have liver disease, four times as likely to suffer from emphysema or chronic bronchitis.... adults with an ACE score above 6 were thirty times as likely to have attempted suicide... (Tough, 9-10)

The link between childhood trauma and adult outcomes was striking. People with an ACE score of 4 were seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults than people with an ACE score of 0. They were six [sic!] times more likely to have had sex before age 15, twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer, four times as likely to suffer emphysema. People with an ACE score above 6 were 30 times more likely to have attempted suicide.  (Brooks, para. 2)

pp. 11-14. Follows Burke Harris beginning to identify the child's reaction to ACE with the physiology of human reactions to stress through the hypothelamic-pituitary-adrenal system.

pp. 14-15. Introduces one of Burke Harris's patients, Monisha Sullivan, who has had a lot of deeply adverse experiences, raised by a single father and ripped away from him into the foster care system when she was 10, as the father's drug habit went out of control.

Without any warning, she was pulled out of class by a social worker she had never met and driven to a strange new home. It was months before she was able to have any contact with her father. "I remember the first day like it was yesterday," she told me. "Every detail. I still have dreams about it. I feel like I'm going to be damaged forever." (Tough, 15)

Tough interviewed a young lady named Monisha, who was pulled out of class by a social worker, taken to a strange foster home and forbidden from seeing her father for months. “I remember the first day like it was yesterday. Every detail. I still have dreams about it. I feel like I’m going to be damaged forever.”  (Brooks, para. 5)

More than anything, she felt anxious: anxious about school, anxious about her young daughter, anxious about earthquakes. "I think about the weirdest things," she said. "I think about the world ending. If a plane flies over me, I think they’re going to drop a bomb. I think about my dad dying. If I lose him, I don't know what I'm going to do." She was even anxious about her anxiety. “When I get scared, I start shaking," she said. "My heart starts beating. I start sweating. You know how people say ‘I was scared to death’? I get scared that that’s really going to happen to me one day.” (Tough, 15)

Monisha’s anxiety sensors are still going full blast. “If a plane flies over me, I think they’re going to drop a bomb. I think about my dad dying,” she told Tough. “When I get scared, I start shaking. My heart starts beating. I start sweating. You know how people say ‘I was scared to death’? I get scared that that’s really going to happen to me one day.”  (Brooks, para. 6)

pp. 16-19. Burke Harris finds that ACEs have not only strictly physiological effects (Monisha's hands tremble, she loses hair, and feels pains for no observable reason) but are also implicated in cognitive and behavioral problems.

Among her patients with an ACE score of 0, just 3 percent had been identified as having learning or behavioral problems. Among patients with an ACE score of 4 or higher, the figure was 51 percent. Stress physiologists have found a biological explanation for this phenomenon as well.... (Tough, 17)

Later research suggested that only 3 percent of students with an ACE score of 0 had learning or behavioral problems in school. Among students with an ACE score of 4 or higher, 51 percent had those problems. In Paul Tough’s essential book, “How Children Succeed,” he describes what’s going on. Childhood stress can have long lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life. (Brooks, paras. 3-4, in the end using what our teachers called "his own words")

pp. 19-48. All kinds of wonderful stuff.

pp. 49-52. Introduction of the KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy in the South Bronx.

Almost every member of the [first cohort] class of 2003 did make it through high school, and most of them enrolled in college. But then the mountain grew steeper: Six years after their high-school graduations, just 21 percent of the cohort—eight students—had completed a four-year college degree. (Tough, 50)

in its first survey a few years ago, KIPP discovered that three-quarters [sic] of its graduates were not making it through college. (Brooks, from para. 8)

The students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP. Instead, they seemed to be the ones who possessed other gifts, skills like optimism and resilience and social agility. (Tough, 52)

It wasn’t the students with the lower high school grades that were dropping out most. It was the ones with the weakest resilience and social skills. It was the pessimists.  (Brooks, from para. 8)

And then he does get on to some evidence not from Tough: references to Honey Boo Boo, "Alaska State Troopers", and the rapper Tyler, the Creator, evincing I guess Brooks's own research on social dysfunction.* So it seems that the reason he calls Tough's book "essential" is that it was essential to getting this column written.

So: he's copied, almost word for word and without marking it as quotations, a fairly small proportion of How Children Succeed, but a pretty large proportion of his column, three quarters of that without even indirect attribution, and you see that he's scrambled the order of the paragraphs to make it look as if Tough's research is his own.

He has slyly altered the purport to make it agree with his own views, as when he emphasizes that "mostly white, mostly upscale" character of the Felitti and Anda sample, as if to suggest that high ACE scores are evenly distributed across the population rather than being concentrated, as they are, among the poor. Similarly, in that last bit he inverts the focus from the successful KIPP students to the failures (after having exaggerated the number of failures).

He edits out Nadine Burke Harris's existence, Monisha's physical symptoms, the cases presented in contrast to Monisha and to the KIPP Academy, and the whole extremely interesting biological account of what the connection between ACEs and bad outcomes could be. He falsely generalizes statements about Burke Harris's students to the entire population.

I don't know that David Brooks should be busted for plagiarism here, even though he fails to credit Tough for three quarters of his material. But I don't think you can properly call what he's done "fair use" either; to use an author's words to point toward a conclusion that the author would not dream of drawing, as Brooks did with Tough's first book, Whatever it Takes, on Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, in his column of May 7 2009: Robert Pondiscio and other bloggers wondered how he ended up believing that

”the Harlem Children’s Zone results suggest the reformers are right” in arguing that school-based approaches alone can close the achievement gap. It’s a conclusion that’s hard to support based on even a passing familiarity with Tough’s book..... to conclude, as Brooks did, that HCZ proves the “no excuses” case makes one wonder if he even read Tough’s book.

He clearly hasn't read this book either, though he has clearly thumbed through at least 13 of its pages. I haven't finished reading it myself, for that matter—yet—so I won't try to sketch out what Brooks ought to have written; but I can say confidently that his conservative-reformy views are very much at odds with the way Tough is thinking. So shame on you, Brooksie. You are being watched.

Joseph Grimaldi as the clown in Harlequin Padmanada; or, The Golden Fish, a Christmas pantomime produced at Covent Garden in 1811, print, 19th century; in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Encyclopaedia Britannica.

*Tyler, the Creator also shows what I would have thought impossible, that you can have a stage name with a comma in it.

Redlining their own neighborhood

This view of last week's UN highjinks from the great Iranian cartoonist Mana Neyestani, passed on from Richard Silverstein's Tikun Olam.

Also from Silverstein, an excellent rundown of the State Department's removal from its list of terrorist organizations of the Iranian exile group Mujahedin-e-Khalq, which I have fussed about before. Silverstein's post also features a brilliant postography, or whatever you call a bibliography of online writings.

I do think Silverstein is too harsh in calling the delisting one of Hillary Clinton's "great shams". The official notice is pretty honest, anyway—

With today’s actions, the Department does not overlook or forget the MEK’s past acts of terrorism, including its involvement in the killing of U.S. citizens in Iran in the 1970s and an attack on U.S. soil in 1992. The Department also has serious concerns about the MEK as an organization, particularly with regard to allegations of abuse committed against its own members.

—though it doesn't mention very recent acts of terrorism, namely those assassinations of Iranian physicists. But something really had to be done about them, especially those abused members; they are absolutely not welcome in Iraq, now that Iran and Iraq are close allies (thanks, President Bush and Ambassador Wolfowitz and all you cute kids!),  and you're going to have a lot of trouble getting some other country to adopt them if you don't stop calling them terrorists ("Hello, Prime Minister? I've got some Persian terrorists in need of a home, you don't suppose you could—Prime Minister? Are we cut off?").

Mikey Mike, poor little rich mayor

Mayor Bloomberg is getting a little snitty about this and that as his endless reign draws to a close. Man needs a hobby, and, frankly, I don't think tooling around Bermuda in a golf cart or whatever he does there is strenuous enough.

Asked about the NAACP's complaint against the city's Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, he dismissed it with a "Life isn't always fair," and, as the Daily News reported,

“It’s done strictly on merit and it’s one of the bright lights in our school system,” he said. “If you started to get rid of those schools, I think you’d really be destroying something that’s great.”

Bloomberg balked at a suggestion that some families have an advantage because they can afford special tutoring for the test.

“I don’t know how you would take away the right to get tutoring or how the public could pay tutoring,” he said. “We have tutoring for all our kids. It’s called the public school system. We do it five hours a day, roughly five days a week.”

Ah, right, except when it's his tests, eh? That's another kettle of potato chips:

Because tougher state exams meant fewer city students were found proficient in math and English, Mayor Bloomberg has pledged $10 million to state test tutoring.... The money will be distributed to 532 schools where over two-thirds of students failed the tests last year, with schools getting between $6,000 and $65,000.

And on the question of Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson's plan to put some limits on prosecuting people for trespassing in public housing or certain private buildings, according to WNYC,

“If you want to bring crime back to New York, this is probably a good way to do it,” the mayor said Thursday at a press conference in Staten Island.

Well, not so fast. As David Cole writes in the current New York Review,  New York has indeed had a very remarkable drop in crime, going back to when David Dinkins was mayor in 1990,  but nobody knows quite why:

Was it New York’s increase in the numbers of police, started by Mayor David Dinkins, and supported by President Bill Clinton’s initiative to make federal funds available to put more police on the streets? Was it the introduction of Compstat, an accountability system that allowed much closer tracking of crime, particular offenders, and police performance on a precinct-by-precinct basis? Was it the focused targeting of “hot spots” and drug markets, or the emphasis on enforcing gun laws?

Quanell Carwell, Mott Haven Houses, accused of trespassing in her own common corridor.  New York Times, 9/26/2012.

Was it, as the police claim, the city’s aggressive use of “stop-and-frisk” policies, involving hundreds of thousands of searches of young black and Hispanic men? Or was it the “broken windows” policy, in which police broadly enforce minor quality-of-life infractions such as vandalism, public drinking, or prostitution in the hope that by restoring a sense of “order,” more serious crime will also drop?

Apparently the correct answer is "none of the above". They've either been tried elsewhere to little effect,  or not actually tried at all (the Broken Windows policy seems to have existed only in mayors' and commissioners' imaginations), or in some other way fail to explain the very real phenomenon.

As a matter of fact there was something that Cole mentioned that struck me much more than it struck him:

What’s more, New York achieved these outcomes without significant changes in demographic, economic, or social factors often thought to determine crime rates. Between 1990 and 2005, for example, rates of drug use in New York were constant, but drug-related homicides dropped by 95 percent. New York’s black and Hispanic youth population increased over the period, which many criminologists would predict would lead to increased crime, yet crime fell dramatically. And most significantly, New York City reduced crime while also reducing incarceration rates. Between 1990 and 2008, the nation’s incarceration rate grew by 65 percent, but New York City’s incarceration rate fell by 28 percent. By 2008, there were ten thousand fewer New York City residents in prison than in 1990.

It's those last sentences that made me sit up and take notice: to Cole, this is another happy effect of the same mysterious cause, but why shouldn't it be a cause in its own right?

For one thing, who is it that isn't getting jailed? It's not ten thousand people who decided not to murder anybody, because there weren't anywhere near that many murderers in the first place. Given the statement on drug use, it's an easy bet that they are mainly the perpetrators of those "quality of life" crimes that the Broken Windows policy would have addressed if it had ever been implemented: dope smokers, panhandlers, prostitutes, and those youths aimlessly hanging around the projects ("Oh, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?").

That is, mostly male, mostly young, mostly residents of high-poverty districts, and if you need somebody to fill out the "race" blank here, then you're not advanced enough to be reading this (but far from all of them would be African American). They weren't going to jail because they weren't getting busted, and if there's any policy reason for that, it would be the community policing style implemented by Dinkins and commissioner Ray Kelly in his first incarnation (rehired by Bloomberg years later, he has become kind of snitty and arrest-happy himself), and never quite given up in all the waves of policing fashion since then.

Rookie cops, South Bronx. Photo by Antonio Bolfo at Criminal Wisdom.

And then guess what? Then ten thousand boys were available when their girlfriends had their babies, to be called on and nagged into helping out. Ten thousand boys thought about programs for getting your GED because they had nothing better to do. Ten thousand boys looked for jobs, and some of them got one. Ten thousand men did what the mayors and Bill Cosby and above all their mothers are always scolding them to do, because they weren't in jail.

And then guess what else? As a lovely online paper by Randall Shelden explains, ten thousand men had civil rights that ex-convicts may be deprived of: the right to vote, the right to claim parenthood, the right to live in public housing. They were citizens.

There've been plenty of studies showing that raising the incarceration rate doesn't lower the crime rate, most notably in Texas. I don't know that anyone has ever directly asked about the consequences of lowering the incarceration rate (Dr. Google doesn't seem to think so, but of course that could be my fault), perhaps because it's not something governments usually do on purpose. I guess there will be some data coming out of California's prisoner release if the state actually carries it out. In the meantime somebody could try looking at places that emerged from more authoritarian to less authoritarian forms of government in the late 20th century: Spain and Portugal and Greece; South Korea and Taiwan; all those countries in South America; Indonesia and the Philippines.

If I'm right,  DA Johnson's move in the Bronx, in the spirit of Mayor Dinkins and Young Commissioner Kelly, should reduce crime rates further still (more needed in the Bronx than anywhere else). Bloomberg and Old Commissioner Kelly aren't really fighting crime any more, they're just fighting criminals.

A Tale of Two Big Hollywoods

One:

Down the page, two:

Office Life

Visitors to the office are rare and somewhat camera-shy.

Red line district (addendum)

Updated 9/28/2012

From Wide Asleep in America. And read his post!

Prime Minister Netanyahu drew his red line!

He drew it on his own personal copy of Iran's nuclear bomb design, produced by Acme Mass Destruction Products, Ltd., of Monument Valley, Arizona, and brought it into the United Nations General Assembly for show and tell, so we could see how serious the situation was.

If this reminds you of General Colin Powell at the United Nations, keep in mind that the general's pictures were of actually occurring objects that simply happened, as it turned out, not to be mobile biological weapons labs, although if any mobile biological weapons labs existed they would probably look quite a lot like that. Whereas Prime Minister Netanyahu's picture is of an obviously fictional object, because what he is trying to persuade us of is not the empirical truth but the moral truth, which is that people really need to pay more attention to him and that line is really red. Not green, or thin and blue, or what have you.

#Netanyahu has drawn literal 'red line' on his diagram. Powerful message. Powerfull moment. #UNGA
— Tom Rogan (@troganthinks) September 27, 2012

What I'm saying. If he'd just drawn a figurative red line, what kind of impact would that have? Not powerfull, in any case. Just full. Of it.

Update 9/28

Bibi's use of that chart was one of the most effective, gripping, uses of a chart I've ever seen. Is the world listening??
— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) September 27, 2012

If the world's not listening, then "effective" is hardly the word you want; if the world is laughing, as seems to be the case, that wasn't the effect the PM was aiming at. It certainly didn't convince anybody to take the "threat" more seriously, whether they took it seriously at all in the first place or not. However "gripped" Ari Fleischer may have personally felt.

More interesting is the Times reading, that

the substance of his speech suggested a softening of what had been a difficult dispute with the Obama administration on how to confront Iran over its nuclear program.

This by putting some praise for Obama into the speech (maybe not a big thing, but not that easy for Netanyahu to push past his lips), and by an interesting feature of that red line, which is that although it is drawn on the cartoon bomb, it can move around on the calendar, and has now slipped over to next April, so that we can stop worrying about his Iran attack coming before the election. Which I interpret to mean that in the famous September 11 phone call Netanyahu lost the game of chicken, and that is extremely good news.

(The Times also mentions by the bye that

Right now, Iran does not possess enough [medium-enriched] fuel to make a single weapon. In fact, its stockpile of it has declined in recent months, as it has converted some for the research reactor.

Although it is also noted that they've got at least six years' worth of fuel for the medical reactor at this point, so I have to admit that as an excuse it is starting to wear a little thin.)

The only really regrettable thing is the suffering of ordinary Iranian people under sanctions imposed to placate this fool and keep him from causing any greater damage. And there may be a big element of bluff there, too, as I have sometimes imagined. That is, the suffering of Iranians may be caused less by the sanctions than by Ahmedinejad's economic mismanagement. They certainly don't seem to be having much trouble selling oil; I heard somewhere that they are producing less oil than they can sell, in the hope of jacking up the price, but Dr. Google can't seem to find me a citation. Here, in any case, is some evidence:

Iranian supply fell by 50,000 bpd to 2.80 million bpd, matching July's rate, the survey found. Output in July was Iran's lowest since 1988, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Output from Iran is down sharply this year due to U.S. and European sanctions on the country over its nuclear program. The embargo bars EU insurance firms from covering Iran's exports, hindering imports by some non-EU buyers.

Some sources expected a small recovery in Iranian exports this month as some customers, including South Korea, returned. But some buyers say Iran's tanker fleet has been struggling to meet delivery schedules, slowing down exports.

"There is clearly a problem with the tanker issues and over the longer term it's probably going to get more and more difficult," said one industry source, who estimated Iranian exports in September were on a par with August's.

See what I mean? The authors of this don't, but this is a weird kind of embargo ("Sorry, we're fresh out—under embargo, so naturally the stuff is selling like hot, umm, springs").

It will be many decades, perhaps, before it's possible to cut through all this multilateral bluffing to find out what was in fact going on, but I think at that point it will become clear that Obama (or the team of Obama and Clinton) was as refined and ruthless a diplomatic maneuverer as Talleyrand, and that he has prevented some pretty awful things.

Division

Jeff Jacoby:

At every milestone in Obama’s journey to the White House — from the keynote address in Boston that put him on the national radar screen to his inaugural address in 2009 — he held himself out as a healer. Skeptics might note that partisanship and rancor were as old as American democracy itself, but Obama insisted that would change when he was president. The toxic style of politics wasn’t inescapable. Give me the highest office in the land, he assured a rapturous crowd in Ohio two days before the 2008 election, and “we can end it once and for all.”

Millions of voters believed him. They took to heart his vow to transfigure American public life. They looked forward to the uplifting leadership he promised. What they got instead was the most polarizing and divisive presidency in modern times.

Hmm...divisiveness... That reminds me of something, but I can't - Oh wait, it reminds me of this:



On with the argument:

The civility and goodwill that were to be Obama’s touchstone? “I haven’t fully accomplished that,” he concedes. “Haven’t even come close.”

As the 2012 campaign heads into the home stretch, a story in Politico notes that “Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.” The man who won the presidency by decrying “partisanship and pettiness and immaturity” now seeks reelection by deploying slurs and aspersions with abandon: A key aide suggests that Mitt Romney’s financial filings may amount to a felony. The vice president claims that Republicans want to put voters “back in chains.” An Obama campaign video likens Romney to “ a vampire.”

Ha ha! Good one! Yes he is very much like a vampire as he is so very bloodless. But as we are patting Jeff on the back for spreading valuable and fitting slurs from the Obama campaign, notice this:



Mathemagically speaking accusing all Romney supporters of common buttchuggery MUST BE LESS DIVISIVE than Romney's campaign by um, [serious calculation involving full-tongue extension and substraction from forty-seven] a BILLION.

Almost-People Skills

There once was a stuffed suit called Romney, a
Guy who'd emote like a zombie,* a
Big piece of wood, a
Stiff but up-stood, a
Contemptible cure for insomnia.

Via Pupienus Maximus:



*Yes yes, go on.

Girl Group Dolly

Going through the library for the unheard stuff...and here we are in D and E:



There's an iffy production decision in the backups in the chorus - I mean yikes - but in an alternate reality Dolly got signed by Motown.

PLUS:

Maladroit

Alien corny

Recently appearing at American Thinker is a delightful piece by one James Arlandson, Ph.D., one, or possibly all, of the authors of  Answering-Islam, with a massive kvetch about how the "religious left" thinks the government ought to "take up the cause of caring for the poor."

Despite the 126 programs [alleged by the Cato Institute to be run by the US government for the poor], does anyone notice that we still have poor people?  Maybe we need another way.

What does the Bible say about helping the poor?

Well, it turns out—you probably knew this already—that the Bible has a lot to say about helping the poor, and Dr. Arlandson finds that you can use it to prove that God does not want government getting involved.

For example, there's the Miracle of the Loaves and the Fishes:

To begin with, five thousand men followed Jesus to a mountainside in the country to hear him speak.  After a while he saw they were hungry, so he asked what food the disciples could gather from the people.  One boy had five barley loaves and two fish (John 6:9). Working a miracle, Jesus multiplied the food and fed the entire crowd, with seven basketsful left over (Mark 6:30-44).

That is, Jesus did not call Peter, James, and John over to him and say, "Hey, you three! Run like the wind to Jerusalem and report that there are a lot of poor people out here! The Jerusalem central planners need to form a committee and set up a bureaucracy to feed them!"

Exactly. What kind of idiot runs to the government over every silly little problem when you can fix it yourself with one small miracle? Not only is it more efficient, but it helps you feel so much better about yourself!

Cornelius Edmund Sullivan, Loaves and Fishes, ca. 2000. From Icons and Imagery.

By the same token,

Paul also says widows can be cared for, but only if they meet certain requirements, like living a godly life and not being busybodies (1 Timothy 5:9-16).

Whereas the government would be heedlessly distributing it to all the yentes, with the same incomprehensible attraction that our own government feels for Cadillac-driving black ladies. But I digress, or Dr. Arlandson does.

More useful to the inquiry would be the Old Testament, I think, since the ancient Hebrews actually developed an explicit model of self-government, while for the early Christians the power of government was represented by occupying Roman troops, and a faraway emperor who claimed literally to be a bigger god than JHWH, and if they wanted government to do anything they could hardly have called a senator and asked for it.

Boaz encounters Ruth. From the Maciejewski Bible, ca. 1250, Morgan Library.

Arlandson finds even more evidence there, naturally. There's the story of Ruth, which clarifies the principle that the recipients of charity need to work:

the landowners were commanded to leave behind some of the crops and grapes so the poor could go out to get them; in other words, the poor had to work (Leviticus 19:9-10).

The Book of Ruth shows this harvesting law for the poor in action.  Boaz, a righteous man, left part of his harvest for Ruth, an impoverished Moabitess, a foreigner.  She regularly went out to the field to gather in the leftover grain.  Eventually they got married and lived happily ever after.

God smiles on the dumpster diver! I have to admit I hadn't thought of this interpretation before.

Another principle is that assistance to the poor should be physical and local:

In one law, the people are to bring the tithes (one tenth) to the local town, every third year, and store them, so the poor, orphans, widows, and resident aliens could take what they needed.  The Levites who had no allotment or inheritance in the land also received from this once-every-three year tithe (Deuteronomy 14:28-29).  So this act of charity was done locally and physically.

In still another law, about celebrating the Feast of Weeks, people are to swing the sickle on the crops, harvest them, and then celebrate a feast at the place God chooses.  Not only do the well-off celebrate, but the Levites, resident aliens, orphans, and widows do, too, thus breaking down class distinctions (Deuteronomy 16:9-11).

In these passages and others, a big central government, such as it was back then, does not stand over the shoulders of the people and perform charity in their place.  People did it with their own hands.

Obviously! If God had wanted them to write a check and mail it to some bureaucracy in Jerusalem he would have said so, right?

Bernard Picart, Jewish Meal during the Feast of Tabernacles, 1724. 1st-Art-Gallery.com.

But the fact is, alas, that Dr. Arlandson is not getting things quite right. The ancient Hebrews, as a matter of fact, developed a strong centralized state, and one that took responsibility for caring for the needy, and was in all respects quite unlike the Republican platform. That "place God chooses" isn't some random picnic site, either ("Hey, kids, God wants the barbecue pit over here!"), as we shall see—it's more like the main office of the IRS. And these passages from Deuteronomy are where it happens: where you can as it were see the Articles of Confederation of Exodus giving way to the Deuteronomic Constitution. Dr. Arlandson has homed in right to the spot that disproves his stupid point.

We could start with the Levites, who Dr. Arlandson seems to think were some kind of poor folk with a capital letter, like Untouchables perhaps, alongside the widows and orphans. Of course they weren't, though, they were the priestly caste, the descendants of Jacob's son Levi, the tribe from which Moses and Aaron came, and the top of the heap, with Aaron's own descendants, the kohanim, on the tippy-top. The reason they have "no allotment or inheritance" is that

They shall live on the food offerings presented to the Lord, for that is their inheritance. ² They shall have no inheritance among their fellow Israelites; the Lord is their inheritance, as he promised them.³ This is the share due the priests from the people who sacrifice a bull or a sheep: the shoulder, the internal organs and the meat from the head. ⁴ You are to give them the firstfruits of your grain, new wine and olive oil, and the first wool from the shearing of your sheep, ⁵ for the Lord your God has chosen them and their descendants out of all your tribes to stand and minister in the Lord’s name always. (Deuteronomy 18:1-5)

Indeed, the children of Levi are not assigned one part of the Promised Land to dwell in, but dispersed all over it, in towns,  surrounded by commons where they can graze their animals, and take care of religious matters, dispense justice, and provide education for those who live on the land, and the tithe is given to them as compensation for the work they do, which includes passing on some of the goods to the widows, orphans, and resident aliens. The tithe is a tax, in short, and the Levites are the civil service.

This status came to them, according to the story, during the Hebrews' wanderings in the desert, after the incident of the Golden Calf:

²⁵ Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. ²⁶ So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.
²⁷ Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” ²⁸ The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. ²⁹ Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.” (Exodus 32:25-29)

In return, the Levites were given charge of the Tabernacle, the tent in which the Ark of the Covenant was housed, and no one else was permitted to come near it. (Exodus 38:21; Numbers 1:53)  And they were endowed with 48 towns, including the six sanctuary cities where murderers were permitted to hide out from the law. (Numbers 35:6)

The Levites are rewarded for their obedience. From Barbara Griffiths, Moses Saves the People.

Then in Deuteronomy, which completes the narrative of the Pentateuch, bringing the Israelites from Sinai to the east bank of the Jordan and Moses' death, something different happens: the Tabernacle, the Tent of Meeting, vanishes from discussion, and is replaced by a strange new description of something in the future, in full, "the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his name." This place, and no other, is where they are to bring their sacrificial offerings. (Deuteronomy 12:8-14)

What had happened was in an entirely different time dimension, that of real life, in the reign of King Josiah, late 7th century B.C.E. As Norman Cantor slyly puts it,

The official story was the discovery, in the course of purifying and repairing the Temple, of a law book that outlined how the blending of prophetic and traditional practice could be accomplished.

Hilkiah and the Lost Book of the Law. From Charles Horne, The Bible and its Story, 1909.

 What had really happened, it seems, was that Josiah's Levites had put this book together out of some authentic sources and some new ideas, as a way of justifying reforms that the king was busily carrying out, suggesting that what he wanted to do was merely to put into practice the plans that Moses had made so long ago, and that David and Solomon might have been aiming at with the construction of the Temple as a permanent home for the Ark of the Covenant some three centuries before:

the plan to centralize all worship in the Temple at Jerusalem. The shrines that dotted the mountains of Judah were destroyed, and the priests who had attended them were brought to Jerusalem and made subordinate to the priests of the Temple. The Temple itself was purified, and an austere ritual was mandated....

The Temple was, of course, the "place that the Lord will choose"; indeed, Solomon had centralized the animal sacrifices there before. And the book was what we now know as Deuteronomy, the "repetition of the law" (that is the meaning of Greek deuteronomia, though not, they say, of the book's Hebrew name—a mistaken translation with a meaning).

Anyway, it demanded that the whole people of Israel converge on Jerusalem three times a year, at Passover, Shavuot (Weeks), and Sukkot (Tabernacles), with their tithing offerings presented to the kohanim there—except that once in three years they are to bring their own tithes—in other years reserved for partying—to their own local Levites as well. These are the regulations described in the passages from Deuteronomy 14 and 16 that our friend Dr. Arlandson leaps on.

Furthermore, they went for economic stimulus, and redistribution of income,  on a scale that would give your average Democrat a severe heart attack (though it would appeal to Occupy Wall Street, and apparently to our Founding Fathers as well). They took the Exodus provisions for the sabbatical year (every seventh year), when the land lay fellow and debt slaves were released, and added a new one, the remission of everybody's debts!

Comically enough, Dr. Arlandson drives right by that one too, noticing only the debt slaves, whom he takes as more proof that the recipients of Hebrew charity had to work it off (no: just as nowadays, if you have to work it off it isn't charity; the charitable would be to give the debtor a job, with wages and benefits, and say, "Look, pay me when you can").

Well, enough for today. I just want to add that the way Dr. Arlandson and his cohorts read the Bible is exactly the way Justice Scalia reads the Constitution—call it the Scalian Hermeneutic. I might get around to talking about it some time. Meanwhile, may your High Holy Days be as happy as you want them to be, and, leftists, atheists, read that Bible! Only get an edition with footnotes.

The day Edmund Burke died

It's happened, folks. David Brooks has made it through.

Denial, 8/21/2012

The Hose, 7/9/2010

When you look at Mitt Romney through this prism, you see surprising passion. By picking Paul Ryan as his running mate, Romney has put Medicare at the center of the national debate. Possibly for the first time, he has done something politically perilous. He has made it clear that restructuring Medicare will be a high priority.

This is impressive. If you believe entitlement reform is essential for national solvency, then Romney-Ryan is the only train leaving the station.

[jump]

Moreover, when you look at the Medicare reform package Romney and Ryan have proposed, you find yourself a little surprised. You think of them of as free-market purists, but this proposal features heavy government activism, flexibility and rampant pragmatism.

Anger, 8/28

Guardian, 5/19/2011

After a successful stint at Bain, Romney was lured away to run the Winter Olympics, the second most Caucasian institution on earth, after the G.O.P. He then decided to run for governor of Massachusetts. His campaign slogan, “Vote Romney: More Impressive Than You’ll Ever Be,” was not a hit, but Romney won the race anyway on an environmental platform, promising to make the state safe for steeplechase.

After his governorship, Romney suffered through a midlife crisis, during which he became a social conservative. This prepared the way for his presidential run. He barely won the 2012 Republican primaries after a grueling nine-month campaign, running unopposed.

Bargaining, 9/04

Grand Rapids Press, 2/8/2010.

Obama could use his convention to throw himself wholeheartedly behind the general Bowles-Simpson approach. He could argue that America is weighed down by rotting institutions and faces fiscal ruin. He could vow to push through tax reform that would lower rates and reduce loopholes. He could endorse a 22 percent cap on government spending. He could commit to limiting the growth of domestic and defense spending. He could double down on his health care cost containment ideas. He could restructure Social Security and make it more progressive.

This, too, is a big, serious agenda, addressing a real national need. This, too, is an agenda commensurate with the size of the problem that confronts us.

Personally, I wish Obama would use this convention to embrace Bowles-Simpson. That would lay the foundation for decades of prosperity.

Depression, 9/18

Guardian, 9/17/2010

Sure, there are some government programs that cultivate patterns of dependency in some people. I’d put federal disability payments and unemployment insurance in this category. But, as a description of America today, Romney’s comment is a country-club fantasy. It’s what self-satisfied millionaires say to each other. It reinforces every negative view people have about Romney.

Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater. But it scarcely matters. He’s running a depressingly inept presidential campaign. Mr. Romney, your entitlement reform ideas are essential, but when will the incompetence stop?

Acceptance, 9/25

Boring Old White Guy, 3/1/2012

...there was another sort of conservative, who would be less familiar now. This was the traditional conservative, intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk, Clinton Rossiter and Catholic social teaching. This sort of conservative didn’t see society as a battleground between government and the private sector. Instead, the traditionalist wanted to preserve a society that functioned as a harmonious ecosystem, in which the different layers were nestled upon each other: individual, family, company, neighborhood, religion, city government and national government....

It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists....

Some people blame bad campaign managers for Romney’s underperforming campaign, but the problem is deeper. Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens. 

Still hasn't endorsed Obama, though, who knows why. Maybe it's some kind of family loyalty. After all, Burke was only a Whig, and Brooks is a Tory.

Image by Driftglass.

Prairie Fire

Here is an interesting URL. None of the content mentions "prairie fire" so I assume someone consulted the weathermen to see which way the wind was blowing just before/immediately after pushing the "publish" button.

Anyway:

Parents are shipping them to their kids in college. People are dragging their “undecided” friends to theaters on weekend nights by the thousands to watch… documentaries. There hasn’t been anything like this in movie theaters since "An Inconvenient Truth" or "Fahrenheit 9/11"—though these two new movies are outselling those two liberal chestnuts. In fact, they are breaking box-office records, too.

[...] The two top-selling documentary DVDs in America are both conservative exposes of radical leftist ideology on the march: "2016: Obama’s America" and "Occupy Unmasked."

That’s right: In an election season when the mainstream media is already writing up news accounts of President Obama’s acceptance speech, the liveliest action in theaters and online media purchasing is taking place on the right.

And I'll be damned, it's correct. In fact the Amazon list is somewhat loopy:

1.Occupy Unmasked

4.4 out of 5 stars   (16)

Release Date: September 25, 2012

Price: $14.99

2.2016: Obama's America

3.9 out of 5 stars   (25)

Release Date: October 16, 2012

Price: $17.98

3.Dreams From My Real Father: A Story of Reds and Deception

4.0 out of 5 stars   (128)

Price: $12.68

5.Monumental: In Search of America's National Treasure

4.7 out of 5 stars   (69)

Price: $15.30

7.The Isaiah 9:10 Judgment: Is There an Ancient Mystery that Foretells America's Future?

4.7 out of 5 stars   (59)

Price: $25.95

10.Catholicism DVD Box Set

4.8 out of 5 stars   (129)

List Price: $149.95

22 used & new from $63.89

Screenshot from the Breitbart DVD page:



It serves as well for the D'Souza page but the Real Father bit breaks the trend:



So... I can think of all kinds of insulting reasons for such things, so why not be insulting:

1. Conservative book-club type thingie.
2. Kooks and shut-ins buy DVDs while everyone else is streaming them.
3. Scientology-style cult pumping figures (Catholicism box set at number ten?).
4. People just aren't buying DVDs so 2 & 3 operate with few purchases necessary.

That, though, doesn't really explain the Box Office Mojo chart for 2016.



Mind you the Netflix popular picks don't reflect that lunacy, but there's probably less of a frightened-senior-citizen component going on.

A big week

So...it's my wedding week. You know, not a big deal or anything. Which is kind of how I feel considering I'm sitting at work on a typical busy, hard-to-get-motivated Monday. I'm running around like crazy, and then all of a sudden I think "I'm getting married this week." And I have the "HOLY SHIT, IT'S MY WEDDING WEEK!" moment. And immediately start thinking about everything to do. 

But most of what I have to do can't be done until we get to Holmes County. I (with the help of some amazing friends!) have busted my ass in the months/weeks leading up to this week so that I wouldn't be running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to finish last minute projects. Favors? Check. Programs? Check. Seating chart/place cards? Check. Basically all my crafting projects are done. 

When we get back to the HC (Wednesday night), there will be a lot to do- but I also know my parents have been incredibly on top of everything (they seriously are amazing). There is plenty to do- but we're pretty well organized, so it shouldn't be a huge stress inducing disaster. 

So I'm taking the last few days in Cleveland to just relax. Going home tonight to dinner in the crockpot and a bottle of wine. Tomorrow I'm getting a mani/pedi with my sister-in-law and a friend. And Wednesday, we will make our way down to Holmes County to officially kickoff wedding festivities (which mostly includes decorating...at least until rehearsal time). 

Now as long as we remember to get our marriage license on Thursday (I know, I know...waiting until the last minute), we'll be good!

Documentaries That Document the Wrong Thing

The Weird World of Blowfly was hard to watch. I've never understood why Blowfly might be funny so I thought I'd give it a shot, and it turned out that the film didn't have much history but instead followed the now-fairly-infirm Clarence Reid around as a hipster white guy tried to make a buck off Blowfly by being a terrible manager/drummer in a new Blowfly band. And let me put it in a sentence: Tom Bowker is a leaden and uninspiring drummer. Off-stage Bowker comes off like Philip Seymour Hoffman trying to be unfunny and pathetic, which Philip Seymour Hoffman is quite good at but looks very sad in a real person. I don't know what the financial arrangements actually are - maybe Reid comes out ahead (there's a scene in which Bowker complains of his debt and Reid doesn't seem like the kind of guy who wants to incur more of that).

This was somewhat amusing because the excerpt in the film stuck with the part that sounded like straight soul except for the words, so the chorus, uh, came as a surprise:



Later on the song becomes just way too obvious.

Apart from such brief surprises - which isn't actually a surprise in context - he's about as unfunny as Frank Zappa.

Like Zappa, though, Clarence Reid had musical talent:



It's also a reminder that I don't know much about TK Records beyond KC and Anita Ward, and I should do some listening.