Category: Uncategorized

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s won both “A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015” and “A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015”. I covered some of the contents of the book in a couple of previous postings. The subject of this posting is “Why did Americans want to believe that daycare centers doubled as satanic abuse temples?”

The author’s theory is that the root was social change with which Americans were not comfortable:

California became the first state to legalize no-fault divorce in 1969, and since then the social expectation that people get married and that marriage last until one spouse’s death has steadily declined [history]. As divorce rates increased, the fact of having been divorced became less of a social liability for women and even, in some cases, a mark of independence.

And as the presence of women in offices and other professional environments became less of a curiosity and more of an accepted fact of life, new possibilities for the organization of life back at home proliferated: single parents, second and third marriages, cohabitation, second and third marriages to people with children from previous marriages, same-sex marriages. Every stage of this diversification of private life has been accompanied by anxious predictions of moral decay, social breakdown, and sexual anarchy. Legislators have responded to and fueled these anxieties by passing laws designed to shore up the nuclear family’s crumbling walls. But the legislation has had no effect—the percentage of Americans who are married continues its steady decline.

“Marriage as a social institution (an economic partnership, a secure context for child-rearing) only works when it’s more or less compulsory,” Ellen Willis wrote in the late 1980s. By the time she made her observation, many people had decided that what they most wanted from marriage and the nuclear family, in spite of the difficulties involved, was to get out [the uniquely U.S.-style process].

The trouble since then has been to acknowledge this shift, to accommodate it, and to help people acclimate to its effects. This difficulty became especially acute in the 1980s, and it is worth considering that the psychoanalytic theory of repression, so maligned by Roland Summit, Jeffrey Masson, and the recovered memory therapists, provides a detailed description of what happens when people are unable to acknowledge what they already know and want. Repression is not so much an act of passive forgetting but of active mental avoidance, and it isn’t so much events or memories that are repressed but rather ideas and desires. We repress that which we do not want to think about. One of Freud’s most important intellectual leaps was the insight that repression occurs because of a particular desire’s “sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes” and its incompatibility with “the ethical and aesthetic standards of [the subject’s] personality.” On a social scale, the idea of the nuclear family’s decline emerged with an alarming speed and force, and for many people it seemed to be alarmingly incompatible with the rest of society’s ethical and aesthetic standards—its culture, its rhetoric, its view of what made for a good life. The family’s decline was repressed almost from the very moment it began.

Recovered memory and the day care and ritual abuse hysteria drove the social repression of two ideas. First, the nuclear family was dying. Second, people mostly did not want to save it.

Readers: Is there anything similar going on today? What is it that most of us want but refuse to acknowledge that we want? And whom do we try to blame?

My suggestion: Inequality Hysteria. My rich friends on Facebook want their paychecks to be 10-100X what an average American earns. They want to keep as large a percentage of this paycheck to spend for themselves and their kids. They decry “inequality” but consume like crazy. For example, instead of keeping the old car for another few years and giving $100,000 to “the vulnerable” they buy a $100,000 Tesla. Instead of confronting the fact that they spend 5X what would be necessary to achieve a lifestyle they would have considered “comfortable” perhaps 10 years ago, they look for scapegoats to prosecute. Lo and behold, it turns out that there are millions of guilty Trump voters whose crimes include racism and sexism. Is the analogy too much of a stretch?

More: read We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s

 

Full post, including comments

We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s won both “A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2015” and “A Boston Globe Best Book of 2015”. There is a lot of great material in the book, though it would be stronger if the author let the material speak for itself rather than saying, essentially, “it is bad when innocent people spend 100 percent of their assets on a criminal lawsuit defense, are imprisoned for five years, and finally released.”

Much of the book concerns a California case:

In the late summer of 1983, residents of a beachfront city in southwestern Los Angeles began to suspect that their children were in danger. In August, the mother of a child who had attended the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach told the police that her two-year-old son had been molested by one of his teachers. In September, police arrested the accused teacher and charged him with three counts of child abuse.

More than seven years of criminal prosecution was kicked off by the reports of a single woman:

In March of the previous year a woman named Judy Johnson had called the McMartin Preschool to ask about enrolling her two-and-a-half year-old son. She was told the school could not accept any new children for the time being, but Johnson was determined and a little desperate. She had recently separated from her tax auditor husband, leaving her to look after the boy full-time. On March 15 she put a note in her son’s lunch bag explaining who he was, dropped him off at McMartin, and drove away. Peggy McMartin hadn’t previously known Judy Johnson or her son, but she decided the woman must have been under enormous stress to do something so rash. She let the boy stay.

Things briefly calmed down for Judy Johnson. She and her husband made their separation permanent, and she also found a job in retail. In the summer of 1983, however, Johnson became concerned about the condition of her son’s anus. One day in July she took Matthew to the emergency room and told the doctor that her son’s anus was itchy. The doctor wasn’t terribly concerned. Judy and Matthew went home. A month passed. On August 12 Johnson called the Manhattan Beach police. Her concerns were the same as in July, except that now she suspected criminal rather than strictly medical causes. She told police detective Jane Hoag that when she had sent Matthew to school the previous morning his anus had been normal, but when she had brought him home at the end of the day it had been red. There was only one male teacher, Ray Buckey, working at McMartin. Johnson said that Matthew had recently begun to play doctor, running around pretending to give people shots or check them for fever, which Johnson found very alarming. Repeated questioning finally induced Matthew to reveal that he had learned this behavior from Ray Buckey. Johnson believed the “thermometer” had been Ray’s penis. Detective Hoag advised Johnson to take her son to the hospital, and at 8:30 that evening, after examining Matthew at the Kaiser Hospital in Harbor City, a doctor filed a suspected child abuse report. Over the weekend Johnson further questioned her son about what had happened at school, and then on Tuesday she called the police to provide Detective Hoag with two names; Johnson said Matthew had identified these other children as victims of Ray Buckey. On Wednesday Matthew was examined again, this time by two pediatricians at the Marion Davies Children’s Clinic at UCLA. His examining physicians filed a second suspected child abuse report.

Around this time, Judy Johnson began to reach out to other parents whose children attended McMartin. She called the parents of one of the children Matthew had named to inform them of her suspicions. The parents talked to their son and then called Judy back: the boy didn’t like Ray, but he denied having been molested at preschool.

Detective Hoag, by this point, was making inquiries of her own. In the space of two days she called the parents of five other McMartin children, all of whom reported back that nothing had happened to their children. None of this eased Judy’s mind. She was disturbed by an incident in which Matthew had wandered into her room while Johnson was partially undressed. The boy looked at his mother and said, “Matthew wear bra.” Johnson told the police that Matthew had eventually revealed that Ray made him wear women’s underwear at McMartin.

On the afternoon of November 30, Judy Johnson called Detective Hoag again. She said Matthew had revealed more details of his abuse and that McMartin teachers other than Ray had been involved. Babette Spitler, Johnson said, made Matthew vomit by stepping on his stomach, and there was a stranger, an old woman, who came to the school and held Matthew’s feet down while he was sodomized. Matthew had also been forced to perform oral sex on Peggy McMartin Buckey, the school’s administrator. According to Detective Hoag’s report on the call, Matthew also told his mother about “being taken to some type of a ranch far away where there were horses and he rode naked.” Ray took pills. Ray gave himself a shot. Ray killed a dog and put a cat “in hot water.”

As the litigation wore on, the woman kept up her reports:

“I don’t want to hear any more ‘no’s,’” [investigator Astrid Heger] told one girl who had refused to disclose. “Every little boy and girl in the whole school got touched like that.” By this point investigators believed that almost every teacher in the school had been involved as well. Judy Johnson was still making regular calls to the Manhattan Beach police, reporting what she claimed were allegations made by her son, Matthew, who was now three years old. The police reports that document these calls, however, suggest either that Judy was dutifully and neutrally reporting her son’s increasingly surreal allegations, or that her mental health was deteriorating: Matthew feels that he left L.A. International in an airplane and flew to Palm Springs. . . . Matthew went to the armory. . . . The goatman was there . . . it was a ritual type atmosphere. . . . At the church, Peggy drilled a child under the arms, armpits. Atmosphere was that of magic arts. Ray flew in the air. . . . Peggy, Babs and Betty were all dressed up as witches. The person who buried Matthew is Miss Betty. There were no holes in the coffin. Babs went with him on a train with an older girl where he was hurt by men in suits. Ray waved goodbye. . . . Peggy gave Matthew an enema. . . . Staples were put in Matthew’s ears, his nipples, and his tongue. Babs put scissors in his eyes. . . . She chopped up animals. . . . Matthew was hurt by a lion. An elephant played . . . a goat climbed up higher and higher and higher, then a bad man threw it down the stairs. . . . Lots of candles were there, they were all black. . . . Ray pricked his right pointer finger . . . put it in the goat’s anus. . . . Old grandma played the piano . . . head was chopped off and the brains were burned. . . . Peggy had a scissors in the church and she cut Matthew’s hair. Matthew had to drink the baby’s blood. Ray wanted Matthew’s spit. The Manhattan Beach police do not seem to have dismissed these claims entirely. They may not have gone looking specifically for goat men or decapitated infants, but by March detectives believed that the case involved not only teachers at McMartin but other adults in the area as well, and they executed search warrants on eleven residences across the South Bay.

Prosecutors were not dissuaded by apparent credibility problems with their first witness:

Reading [Judy] Johnson’s FBI statements, it is apparent that the investigation was taking a toll on her mental health. She said her other child had also been molested, years earlier, at a different preschool.

The italicized sentence is an example of where the book could have used an editor applying the mantra “show, don’t tell.” Judy Johnson’s behavior and statements should let a reader judge for himself or herself the state of her mental health.

But those effects may have been most pronounced in the case of Judy Johnson, who ultimately found the investigation too much to bear. As her mind deteriorated over the course of 1985, so did her drinking increase. She once threatened a relative on her doorstep with a shotgun, after which she was hospitalized for a voluntary psychiatric evaluation.

Two weeks after she testified, Judy called to report that her home had been burglarized. “Nothing was taken,” Stevens remembered her saying. “However, Matthew was sodomized.”61 Judy said the perpetrator was an AWOL Marine who had removed a window screen from outside and then entered the house. Judy didn’t see the man commit the act, but Matthew’s butt was red—the police needed to come immediately.

He recounted one episode with Judy Johnson in especially vivid detail. At some point in the second half of 1984, Stevens said, Judy Johnson called from Seattle. She was in the hospital, and she didn’t know why. “All she knows,” Stevens said, “is that she was in her Volkswagen bus, and she was with the kids, and, ah, she was driving up to Seattle, and, ah, that they were being followed by a car with the Marine in it.” Then Stevens didn’t hear from her for a few days, and then she called to say that actually she had not been at the hospital—she had been staying with friends the whole time. On the way back to Los Angeles she called Stevens again from somewhere in Northern California and said the Marine was following her. Would Stevens please send an investigator to help? “Judy, you know, why don’t you just get back to Los Angeles,” Stevens told her, and she did. Then she called again to report that her son had been molested by Roberta Weintraub, a member of the Los Angeles County school board. “Matthew saw her on TV,” Stevens remembered Johnson saying, “and said, ‘Mom, she molested me.’” Stevens didn’t explain exactly what it was that set this particular phone call apart from all the others, but it made Johnson’s mental condition real to him for the first time. “All of a sudden,” he told the Manns, “I just wanted to stuff a sock in her mouth.”64 The conversations between Glenn Stevens and Abby and Myra Mann wrapped up by midsummer.

Were prosecutors concerned by this key witness?

“It slipped through everybody’s analytical process,” [Deputy District Attorney Glenn] Stevens [one of the original prosecutors] said, “to sit down and wonder exactly what kind of woman this is and what is going on here.” The Manns asked Stevens whether he and [lead prosecutor] Lael Rubin ever discussed Judy Johnson’s mental health. “Sure, we got a good laugh about Judy,” Stevens said, but he claimed they never discussed any of what Judy’s mental decline meant for the case, the McMartin children, or the defendants.

The prosecution outlasted the key witness:

Half a year later, on the same day a judge denied another of Ray Buckey’s bail requests, police entered Judy Johnson’s home and found her body in the bedroom upstairs [contemporaneous NYT story]. She died of internal hemorrhaging—friends said she had suffered from ulcers for years, and these may have been exacerbated by her alcoholism, which, in the last months of her life, became severe. “She made the McMartin case,” said Bob Currie, one of Johnson’s close friends. When they found her there was food in the cupboard, an empty bottle of rum in the trash, and a subpoena from [defense lawyer] Danny Davis

Full post, including comments

Four of us went to the Fenway 13 movie theater to watch La Traviata streaming digitally out of the Metropolitan Opera.

The orchestra and singing were awesome, as one would expect from the Met. Sonya Yoncheva (Bulgarian, but lives in Switzerland) sings Violetta. The orchestra was conducted by Nicola Luisotti (Italian, but lives part-time in San Francisco). Americans Michael Fabiano and Thomas Hampson sang the roles of Alfredo and his dad.

The opera opens with Violetta living in a Parisian skateboard park, a round empty space with high bare concrete-colored walls and a concrete-colored bench. We infer from the enormous clock that Violetta’s roommate is Flavor Flav. We thought “this is going to be awesome when David Belle comes out to show us some Parkour.” The skateboard park set is used for all three acts and the $400,000/year stagehands don’t bother to sweep up the cash between Acts II and III. This leaves the involuntarily retired cougar Violetta and her maid talking about how they’re down to a few coins when in fact they could just scoop cash off the floor.

All partygoers wear traditional male attire, which leaves Violetta as the only person on stage in a dress. Why does her friend Flora dress in a completely different manner from Violetta when both have the same occupation and position in society? This is never explained.

None of us had been to a “Met Live in HD” show before, but we loved the experience. The sound is arguably better than in a lot of seats at the cavernous Metropolitan Opera House, absurdly oversized compared to the halls for which the music was composed. The balance between singers and orchestra is always in favor of the singers as you’d wish. As the sound is picked up by microphones over the stage you hear more direct sound and less reverb/hall. Our power-recliner seats were infinitely more comfortable than any seat in a Lincoln Center hall.

During a break the Met asks that people who only recently shelled out for tickets call their 800-number and give them money, explaining that ticket sales don’t cover their prodigious and profligate spending (the 2014 IRS Form 990 (Charity Navigator) shows that, with revenue of about $135 million, they paid $2 million to their general manager, $508,000 to an electrician, $462,000 to a carpenter, etc.; presumably 2017 numbers will be higher).

This raises the question of why they should continue operating at all. Given that their biggest talents are European, why not let the Europeans run opera and stream it out of there into U.S. theaters? The Europeans have been putting on opera for centuries without bankrupting themselves. The Europeans can build public transit systems for one fifth the U.S. cost (New Yorker), but the Copenhagen subway system isn’t of much use to a Bostonian. On the other hand, we could just as easily have been watching an opera streamed out of Copenhagen’s magnificent opera house (seats a maximum of 1703 compared to the absurd 3,800 for the Metropolitan Opera House).

More power to the Met if they can survive on their $25-500 per-person ticket revenue plus whatever their local hedge fund managers give them. But if these sources aren’t sufficient will it truly move the needle to hassle theater-goers with an in-their-face fund drive?

Related:

• Review: Boston Lyric Opera Rake’s Progress

Full post, including comments

Massachusetts is typically described as a state with “zero funding” for gifted and talented education. But I’m wondering if it isn’t actually negative funding.

A friend lives in West Roxbury and his kids attend their neighborhood Boston Public School (“we were lucky and won a lottery”; it was possible that the children would have instead spent 1.5 hours each day on a bus to a school elsewhere in the city). He said that 70 percent of the students had performed above grade level on a standardized test and that, as a result, the school’s funding had been cut. “We lost a gym and a music teacher,” he said, “because they want to redirect the funding to an underperforming school.”

Full post, including comments

Multiple friends have sent me this BBC simulation of an airport with a banked circular runway: video.

One idea behind the circular runway is that it is supposedly always possible to land directly into the wind. No more crosswind landings, right? There are a few problems with this idea. First, the airplane’s touchdown point might be plus or minus 1000′ and, since the runway is constantly curving, therefore the heading at touchdown can’t be known precisely. The second problem is that when the wind is strong it also tends to vary in direction from moment to moment. So you could be perfectly set up to land into the wind and, five seconds later, the gusting 40-knot wind is coming from a 30-degree angle off the nose.

A slightly deeper problem is that “landing” is not “touchdown point.” The pilot who stops flying the moment the wheels touch is a… student pilot. The task is still “flying” until the plane slows down to about 60 knots, at which point the aerodynamic control surfaces become ineffective on a heavier plane. Only then does the task become “taxiing” (i.e., driving). With a proposed radius of 1.75 km and a landing roll of about 1 km the pilots would still be flying in a crosswind and it might be a lot more challenging than on a linear runway because the crosswind would be constantly varying.

One thing that might sort of work is the 3.5 km diameter. A plane going 140 knots (final approach speed of faster airliners) needs a diameter of 6,000′ (1.8 km; source) to turn at a bank angle of 30 degrees. That’s less than 3.5 km so in theory this is possible. What about in practice? That’s where we get to the deepest problem with the idea: it forces pilots to conduct a destabilized approach.

The stabilized approach is the core of safe airliner landings and it is what we instructors try to teach, especially in heavier or faster personal airplanes. In the clouds, nothing changes below 1000′ (below 500′ in the clear). The flap setting, gear position, thrust (within reason), attitude (within reason), all stay constant. A conventional airliner with leading-edge slats can be flown pretty much hands-off all the way to touchdown (don’t try that with a Canadair Regional Jet, though!). You’re at 300′ above the runway and, despite having set everything up the way you thought it would work, it isn’t working? Instead of making radical adjustments in an attempt at a last-minute salvage you add power, retract some flaps, nose up, retract the gear, retract the rest of the flaps, and go around to try again.

What makes landing an airliner idiot-proof is that everything is perfectly set up about a minute in advance. Throw a circular banked runway into the mix and now landing requires heroic stick-and-rudder skills. The airplane was trimmed perfectly and flying itself down to the landing zone without even being on autopilot. Then, in the last 15′ of the flight it is time to put the airplane into a 30-degree bank and sync up with the runway circle? On the 4th leg of the day on the 3rd day of a trip after maybe 5 hours of sleep?

If we ignore all of the above and we assume that controllers can tell pilots where to go on the circle, I don’t understand the flow improvements. Airplanes ideally both land and take off into the wind. So the point of a typical departure is the same as the point of a typical landing? Can planes be packed tighter than in the current system where the departure point is about one mile ahead of the landing point?

The good news: it would work pretty well for helicopters! And JFK has a circular taxiway that is where I logged about half of my jet “flying” hours while waiting our turn during the “international push.”

Readers: What did I miss? Is the idea better than it seems at first glance?

 

Full post, including comments

I asked a Dutch voter about “Geert Wilders Falls Short in Election, as Wary Dutch Scatter Their Votes” (nytimes). Here’s the response…

Typical NY Times. The statements in itself or all not too factually wrong, but the picture is way off.

Wilders won even if he didn’t win.

The anti-Islam agenda won big in Holland:

1. Labor, the party that brought us immigration has ceased to exist, from being the largest since I remember.
2. The right has moved very sharply anti-Islam to prevent Wilders to gain a huge victory. They refer to themselves as the “right type of populism”!
3. The center (Christians and what the NYT calls “liberals”) also moved very sharply to the right to save their skins.
4. Wilders will keep dominating the debate, which is what he wants.
5. Whatever is left of the left, is now fractured into special interest, like animal welfare, old people, poor Muslims, and so on, and is unlikely to be able to set the agenda. (Apart from the Muslim party, they are also all anti-Islam now).

Full post, including comments

Since nobody cares about Earth-bound cameras other than the ones built into mobile phones, DxOMark has taken to the skies with ratings of drone cameras. Nothing too surprising other than the GoPro product being so dramatically inferior to the DJI equivalent.

Full post, including comments

My Facebook friends are convinced that they are doing the righteous work of resistance and that, without their efforts (one march/year plus a buttload of Facebook posts deriding Trump voters), Trump would be ruling as an autocrat.

Yet it seems that the lowest level federal judge, 5,000 miles from D.C. in a Hawaii courtroom, has blocked Trump’s latest travel ban (New York Times). When and how does Trump become dictator if, currently, he is less powerful than a judge appointed in 2012?

[Separately, haven’t these executive orders and litigation dragged out almost long enough for Congress, if it wanted to, to pass a new law regulating foreigners’ access to the U.S.? (see below related post)]

Related:

• Should everyone be glad that judges have blocked Donald Trump’s restrictions on entry to the U.S.?

Full post, including comments

My Facebook friends are excited by looking at Donald Trump’s 2005 IRS 1040 form. Does this show the obsolescence of the Bible in our modern age? Exodus says “You shall not covet,” but is silent on the subject of obsessing over someone else’s tax returns.

[As long as we’re on the subject of Exodus, note that “slavery” in Ancient Egypt was being subject to a 20% tax.]

Separately, I looked at Facebook and find it interesting how many inferences people are drawing and how confident they are in those inferences. Friends are saying that these two pages prove that the Trumpenfuhrer was not a billionaire in 2005 and also that they show that today’s King Donald I was heavily in debt (too bad there isn’t a line for “how much do you owe to Russians”). Given that 2005 was a boom year for building and investing in real estate, some of which expenditures would be deductible in the year incurred, I don’t understand what is surprising about returns that show both a lot of income (by my standards at least!) and a lot of deductions, netting out at $50 million.

What jumps out at me is the $6,299 in qualified dividends (what you get when you’re a shareholder in a typical U.S. public company). The S&P 500 had a dividend yield of 1.76 percent in 2005 (source). That implies a taxable public equities portfolio of about $360,000. Donald Trump was 59 years old in 2005. Instead of slowing down and reducing risk by parking money in a Vanguard index fund, this 59-year-old guy may have had all of his assets in projects and enterprises in which he was actively involved (a little tough to say because of the $67 million in Schedule E income from partnerships, real estate rent, etc.; there is no way to know from this form how much of this came from enterprises in which Trump had no active role).

Finally, does this show that we should be taking up a collection for the impoverished Mr. Trump? The adjusted gross income was $48.6 million. If we assume that Trump was like an S&P 500 member at the time and this $48.6 million is the 1.76 percent dividend, the corresponding asset base (net worth) would be roughly $2.8 billion in 2005. The S&P was at about 1,230 during 2005 and is currently at 2,365. So if Trump’s assets appreciated at the same rate as the S&P and he didn’t give away anything to his children or grandchildren during the intervening 12 years, he would have a net worth today of $5.4 billion (Forbes estimates $3.7 billion).

Full post, including comments

On a recent trip to Beaver Creek, Colorado, I unwisely chose to fly to EGE, connecting in Denver, instead of flying to Denver, spending the night at 5,000′, and driving a rental car west to Beaver Creek (actually Arrowhead, at 7,400′).

United Airlines was kind enough to stamp my bag with “VIP” but then they proceeded to leave it in Denver during my two-hour layover. I waited for about 30 minutes after the flight had landed before waiting 15 minutes to talk to the baggage claim lady. The bag made it onto the next flight from DEN to EGE and was then driven to my friend’s apartment. I was reunited with my bag approximately 8 hours after the flight landed. I gave the driver a $20 trip (“this should cover half of your next Starbucks”).

The question for readers is did this grow, shrink, or leave the GDP unchanged compared to if United had delivered the bag on the carousel?

Arguments for growth: United paid the courier to deliver the bag. He also got $20 to spend at Starbucks or elsewhere. The courier company will purchase a new van slightly sooner because they had to drive a little bit extra. The courier company bought more gasoline than they would have. The courier delivered the bag at 8:08 pm, a time at which he might have been relaxing at home rather than working at any job.

Arguments for shrinkage: I had my laptop with me and worked that afternoon while adjusting (poorly) to the altitude. So I did 30 minutes less work while waiting around at the baggage claim. Maybe the courier could have taken a more productive job during the same hours if airlines weren’t constantly losing bags.

Readers: What’s the right answer? GDP grew as a result of this lost bag? It stayed the same? It shrunk?

[Note that the Denver airport was originally supposed to run with an automated baggage handling system. This became one of the world’s most notorious software and systems failures and probably wasted close to $1 billion. See this MIT study. Also this New York Times article.]

Full post, including comments