A complete anti-racism curriculum for all ages

by philg

In case your local school is mostly shut down and you want to make sure that your kids get the essentials, from the front of a house in the Boston suburbs…

(the neighborhood welcomes People of Color as long as they can afford the two-acre zoning minimum (about $750,000 for a vacant lot, and don’t forget to set aside $20-40,000 per year for no-longer-deductible-unless-Biden-gets-elected property tax))

Should children give their lunch money to the Massachusetts Bail Fund? “Mass. Bail Fund Answers Criticism After Freeing Convicted Sex Offender Accused Of New Rape” (WBUR):

A bail fund in Massachusetts is defending itself after freeing people facing serious crimes, including a convicted rapist who has since been charged with a new rape.

The Massachusetts Bail Fund said in a statement Wednesday that it bails out people based on financial need “regardless of charge or court history” because it believes pretrial detention is “harmful and racist.”

The Cambridge-based organization, whose motto is “Free Them All,” said criticism over its practices only serves to “prop up a white supremacist institution” that studies have shown imposes higher bails on people of color than whites for the same crimes.

From boston.com, “Convicted rapist let out after bail fund pays for his release allegedly rapes again”:

On July 15, the Massachusetts Bail Fund paid the $15,000 in bail to release a registered Level 3 sex offender awaiting trial on rape and kidnapping charges stemming from a 2018 case, according to authorities.

On Wednesday, he allegedly raped again. And authorities are now openly criticizing the fund for setting Shawn McClinton free, referring to him as a “sexual predator.”

McClinton, 39, was arraigned Thursday in the Dorchester division of Boston Municipal Court on new charges of aggravated rape, kidnapping for the purpose of sexual assault, strangulation, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. His bail was set at $500,000 on these charges, and Judge Lisa Grant revoked his open bail from the 2018 case, according to a news release from Suffolk District Attorney Rachael Rollins’s office.

On Tuesday night, McClinton allegedly met up with the victim, and they went from Quincy to Dorchester. When she tried to leave on Wednesday, McClinton allegedly wouldn’t let her and raped her at knifepoint. The victim reportedly suffered cuts and bruising and ultimately was able to escape. A passerby saw her afterward and called 911, authorities said.

(see also Richard Pryor regarding racial injustice in imprisonment: “I thought Black people killed people by accident”)

How about M4BL The Movement for Black Lives? Their May 2020 “vision” and “policy demands for Black power, freedom, & justice” says that the Jews in Israel are committing “genocide … against the Palestinian people.” If there is a full-scale genocide being perpetrated by Jews, why should the top priority of the righteous be the behavior of the police in Minneapolis, Baltimore, Portland, and some other U.S. cities? Nobody has accused these police departments of genocide. Why not give money to Hamas so that they can #Resist the Jewish-run genocide?

Let’s look at the reading list with some excerpts from Amazon…

I Believe I Can is an affirmation for boys and girls of every background to love and believe in themselves. … [the author] Grace was bullied throughout her childhood

Why is this limited to affirming “boys” and “girls”? What about children with other gender IDs?

Farmer Will Allen and the Growing Table: Will Allen is no ordinary farmer. A former basketball star … he can see what others can’t see. When he looked at an abandoned city lot in Milwaukee he saw a huge table, big enough to feed the whole world. No space, no problem. Poor soil, there’s a solution. Need help, found it. Farmer Will is a genius in solving problems. In 2008, the MacArthur Foundation named him one for his innovative urban farming methods, including aquaponics and hydroponics.

Might this mislead youngsters regarding farming economics? How can a hydroponic farm built by Will Allen compete with a regular farm in Mexico plus a truck to bring the produce to Costco? (Wikipedia says that at least one of this guy’s urban farming projects went bust.) If the answer is “we need to eat it right after it is picked” then might it still be cheaper to airfreight the produce than to grow it in a city with exotic life support? (NPR says that I’m wrong: “How Hydroponic School Gardens Can Cultivate Food Justice, Year-Round”)

Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You is an adaptation for youngsters of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America: (from a reader) This is one of the greatest history books I’ve ever read. I was highlighting passages on pretty much every page, mostly because so much of what’s here was new to me. Hey, I’m an upper middle class white guy who’s trying to examine my own privileges, understand more of why there’s so much racism in this country and learn how I can do better. This book, which was undoubtedly extremely difficult to write, is an amazing resource, one I’ll be referring back to probably for the rest of my life. We all owe Ibram X. Kendi a tremendous debt.

Wikipedia says Ibram Kendi is director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. So people who don’t want to spend $20 on these books can pay $77,662 per year to watch a video by Dr. Kendi. (If “privilege” is all about being white, how is it that “in 2016, Ibram X. Kendi became the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction” (“How to Be an Anti-Intellectual” from City Journal)? Shouldn’t Americans who identify as Black need to work harder and for more years in order to get to the same places as Americans who identify as white?)

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Volkswagen ID.4 versus Tesla Y: Did the Empire Strike Back?

by philg

The Volkswagen ID.4 was unveiled today. The base price is $40,000. After middle-class taxpayers work a few extra months to subsidize the rich with a $7,500 tax credit, for which Teslas are no longer eligible, the vehicle will cost only about half as much as a slightly pimped-out Tesla Y.

Although the VW does not have as large a charging network as Tesla, presumably, charging is free for three years.

Car and Driver says that the price will come down to $36,000 in 2022 when production comes to Tennessee. This can’t be good for predicted resale value! And, indeed, the lease price is not that low, nearly $500/month for 36 months with the up-front costs amortized.

How about the dashboard? Did Volkswagen copy Tesla and stick a Chinese touch screen in the middle of the two front seats and call it good? No. There is a real dashboard, according to Car and Driver:

All versions of the vehicle feature VW’s 5.3-inch ID Cockpit. The digital dash cluster uses three frames in the display to show speed, driver assistance information, and navigation. Drivers can opt for all three or just two of the three, with the speedometer always available. The automaker has moved the gearshifter directly to the right and attached it to the display. Twist it forward to go forward and back to go into reverse. A button on the side places it in park.

How about the size? From electrek:

In other words, these cars are the same size.

The VW should be better for driving in the city due to a tighter turning radius. (But how many people with enough money to buy a new car will want to drive into American cities anymore?)

One glaring deficiency from Mindy the Crippler’s point of view: No Dog Mode. At least based on the VW web site, there is no way to park the car with instructions to keep the climate control going. From Cadillac Mountain, below, speaking of landmarks named after car manufacturers….

Is this the beginning of the end for Tesla? The company cannot make cars profitably at current prices, right? And the current prices cannot be sustained when the real car companies are offering excellent electric cars at just over $30,000, right? The competitive analysis by VW shows that the Tesla can charge faster in ideal circumstances and can accelerate more dramatically (not here in Boston; traffic jams are back!), but presumably those advantages are balanced by a lot of disadvantages in areas where traditional car manufacturers have expertise.

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Do we have the energy to fight both coronaplague and cleavage?

by philg

In the same vein as Time to love smokers again? … “Paris Musée d’Orsay sorry for barring visitor in low-cut dress” (BBC):

Temperatures reached 26C on Tuesday, and Jeanne, an art-loving literature student, told of her desire to mark the end of a hot afternoon at the Musée d’Orsay. “It was far from my mind that my cleavage would be the subject of any disagreement,” she says.

Although her friend had a cropped top that showed her navel, Jeanne says attention was fixed on her breasts even before she had had a chance to show her ticket. “Oh no, that’s not going to be possible, that’s not allowed, that is not acceptable,” she quotes a ticket agent as saying.

If society has the energy for this, can we infer that coronaplague isn’t so bad?

Related:

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Amy Coney Barrett will inspire Americans to get fit?

by philg

“To Conservatives, Barrett Has ‘Perfect Combination’ of Attributes for Supreme Court” (NYT):

“Amy Coney Barrett meets Donald Trump’s two main litmus tests: She has made clear she would invalidate the A.C.A. and take health care away from millions of people and undermine a woman’s reproductive freedom,” said Nan Aron, the president of Alliance for Justice, a liberal group.

It is unclear to me why people who live in properly governed “Blue states” worry about health insurance and the availability of abortion (on demand at up to 24 weeks here in Maskachusetts, and, after that, available if a single doctor believes that “continuation of her pregnancy will impose on [the mother] a substantial risk of grave impairment of her physical or mental health.”) A repeal of Roe v. Wade would not prevent a state from offering unlimited free abortions right up to 40 weeks of pregnancy. A repeal of Obamacare would not prevent a state from using state funds to offer unlimited free health insurance to every resident.

What else do we know about this judge?

Judge Barrett and her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former federal prosecutor who is now in private practice, have seven children, all under 20, including two adopted from Haiti and a young son with Down syndrome, whom she would carry downstairs by piggyback in the morning. Judge Barrett is known for volunteering at her children’s grade school, and at age 48, she would be the youngest justice on the bench, poised to shape a generation of American law.

So she’s kind of busy. Does that stop her from working out?

Judge Barrett and other university faculty members have been known to work out together at a CrossFit-type program, sometimes with their former provost.

Seven children and a job as a Federal judge do not stop Amy Coney Barrett from going to the gym. What is stopping the rest of us?

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Teachers at our local high school may go into work soon

by philg

One of our local high schools was supposed to start up on September 16, providing two mornings per week of in-person instruction (total of 6 hours per week of free daycare!) and the rest via Zoom (“hybrid”).

From the principal of Lincoln-Sudbury High School, on September 12:

I am very disappointed to share that I learned this morning that there was a crowded indoor and outdoor student party Friday evening that involved alcohol and complete lack of safety precautions to protect against the spread of COVID. Police were called to the scene. An estimated number of 15 students ran into the woods. They collected names from 32 other individuals. 13 of those turned out to be made up names. That means at least 13 plus 15 (28) known to be on site are unaccounted for. If these students had been identified they could be requested to be isolated from school, monitored and tested.

The Sudbury Board of Health is stating that we must start school in remote learning for 14 days from the known incident. On the assumption that students involved are more likely juniors or seniors I asked if we could bring in just 9th and 10th graders. The answer is no, because we don’t know that no younger students were involved or that students involved were not siblings of younger students. … We plan to return to in-person hybrid on Tuesday, September 29th.

I agree completely with the Board of Health that this is the most prudent course of action to take given what has taken place. After the intensity of hard work and planning that has been done to be able to start school with students in-person we are profoundly disappointed at this sudden change of plans. I know you must be as disappointed.

… If one person assumes risky behavior upon themselves it is not fair or safe to bring that risk upon others in a shared community.

So… because roughly 50 of the 1500 students chose to exercise what had been their First Amendment Right to Assemble (off campus, presumably at a parent’s house), the teachers don’t have to run any risk of in-person exposure.

(Masks and all-afternoon sanitization prevent coronavirus from spreading student-to-student or student-to-teacher, which is why tremendous efforts are put into masks and why the school is closed all afternoon every afternoon for sanitization. On the other hand, just in case a single student at the party might have had coronavirus, we can’t possible open up our masked-and-sanitized school.)

I wonder if they can keep this going for the rest of the school year, as a friend’s daughter predicted: “Dad, they’ll eventually find a way to have remote only.” Suppose that a teacher says that he/she/ze/they saw a student in the local supermarket. The student looked familiar, but it was difficult to tell who he/she/ze/they was due to the mask. Said mask was being worn under the nose, rendering him/her/zir/them completely unprotected against coronaplague. The teacher also saw some other customers in the supermarket with loosely fitted bandanas and under-the-nose masks. The school needs to be shut down, right?

Related:

  • “Parents And Teen Charged Over Party Which Forced High School Into Remote Learning” (Newsweek), noting that the school was forced to close: Sudbury Police Chief Scott Nix … said the large group of youths were allegedly “disregarding state mandated social distancing and face covering protocols” and several party attendees “made threatening comments towards the responding officers”. Sudbury Police Chief Scott Nix said that the parents involved as being responsible for the party have been charged in Framingham District Court with providing alcohol to minors and violating Massachusetts Social Host Law. Under the state law anyone “who is in control of the premises and who furnishes alcohol or allows it to be consumed on those premises” constitutes as a social host and may face fines, imprisonment or both.
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Blacks and Jews band together to fight the Blondes

by philg

“United Sued for Packing NFL Charters With Young, Blond Crews” (Bloomberg) warms my heart on so many levels, and not simply as a proud former Delta employee.

United Airlines Holdings Inc. packs its charter flights for sports teams with young, blond crews and bars older flight attendants from working the plum routes, according to a new lawsuit.

The attendants — a Black woman who has worked for the airline for 28 years and a Jewish woman with 34 years of tenure — say that they both tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to get assigned to work the charter flights.

Sharon Tesler and Kim Guillory said they were told by supervisors that they were unable to get work on the charters because they weren’t on “preferred” lists that were based on team preferences, according to the complaint.

They said they later discovered that young, white blond attendants — with less seniority — were given the assignments.

United Airlines “has adopted and continues to implement procedures that are designed to ensure that young, white, blond/blue-eyed, female employees receive positions with the charter program, while more senior, and Black and Jewish employees such as plaintiffs, do not,” they said in the complaint.

Is it fair to say that this repairs all of the damage from the Jesse Jackson Hymietown incident?

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#MeToo would like $3.5 million (where your donations to nonprofit organizations go)

by philg

Feel better about your charitable donations to the nonprofit Metropolitan Opera: “The Met Opera Fired James Levine, Citing Sexual Misconduct. He Was Paid $3.5 Million.” (NYT) Excerpts:

After ill health forced Mr. Levine to repeatedly cancel performances and miss two full seasons, he had reluctantly agreed to become music director emeritus. He would continue to oversee the young artist program he had founded and to conduct many of his signature operas, with a gala celebration of the 50th anniversary of his 1971 Met debut on the horizon.

Mr. Levine’s continued role came at considerable cost to the company. In addition to his $400,000 salary, the Met agreed to pay him his customary $27,000 fee for each performance he conducted — $10,000 more than what the Met usually described in public as its top fee.

That arrangement came to an abrupt end in December 2017, after The New York Times published the accounts of four men who said that they had been sexually abused by Mr. Levine as teenagers; Mr. Levine denied the accusations.

Just a good business decision?

The Met’s multimillion-dollar payment to Mr. Levine came before the coronavirus pandemic forced the company to close its theater — leaving many employees, including its orchestra and chorus, furloughed without pay since April. Even when the deal was struck, the Met’s finances were precarious. Now the company is fighting for its survival.

Related:

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Invest in BLM sign-making company?

by philg

“Some Protests Against Police Brutality Take a More Confrontational Approach” (NYT):

The protests are moving into white residential neighborhoods, where activists demand that people choose a side.

Terrance Moses was watching protesters against police brutality march down his quiet residential street one recent evening when some in the group of a few hundred suddenly stopped and started yelling.

Mr. Moses was initially not sure what the protesters were upset about, but as he got closer, he saw it: His neighbors had an American flag on display.

“It went from a peaceful march, calling out the names, to all of a sudden, bang, ‘How dare you fly the American flag?’” said Mr. Moses, who is Black and runs a nonprofit group in the Portland, Ore., area. “They said take it down. They wouldn’t leave. They said they’re going to come back and burn the house down.”

Nearly four months after the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, some protesters against police brutality are taking a more confrontational — and personal — approach. The marches in Portland are increasingly moving to residential and largely white neighborhoods, where demonstrators with bullhorns shout for people to come “out of your house and into the street” and demonstrate their support.

Can investors make money by investing in companies that produce BLM and other social justice signs? And then, once every house in the U.S. has a BLM sign, how will the protesters sort out the true believers from the sham sympathizers who merely place signs as protection?

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COVID-19 false positives, explained by the Oxford evidence-based medicine folks

by philg

In dealing with coronaplague, Americans have taken a mechanistic view of the human body. Swab an infected human and you’re guaranteed to capture some virus, which will then be amplified by Kary Mullis‘s magic PCR machine and we’ll have a positive/negative result that is as reliable as if we’d checked the tire pressure on a car.

I had always thought that the main failure of humans to conform to this machine-like model was a lot of false negatives. A human is infected, but the virus does not end up on the swab. See “False Negative Tests for SARS-CoV-2 Infection — Challenges and Implications” (NEJM) and “COVID-19 false negative test results if used too early” (ScienceDaily, reported on a Johns Hopkins study).

From “Carl Heneghan, Professor of Evidence Based Medicine and Director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, and his colleague Dr Tom Jefferson, a Senior Associate Tutor,” writing in that august journal of science… the Daily Mail:

And increased Covid testing is picking up dead – entirely harmless – fragments of virus as well as genuine infections. So many of the positive results we think we are getting might not be positives at all.

So Kary Mullis’s machine works as advertised, but we don’t know what we should be looking for. Thus our obsessive testing program might end up giving us millions of false positives in addition to tens of millions of false negatives.

Separately, the rest of the article is a lot of fun. American academics, ever-fearful of being canceled and cut off from the river of government cash, would never be able to write anything this harsh.

Today, our bewildered Prime Minister and his platoon of inept advisers might as well be using the planets to guide us through this pandemic, so catastrophic and wildly over-the-top are their decisions.

Why is it that the Government is once again in the grip of doom-mongering scientific modellers who specialise in causing panic and little else?

Yet our PM, and his Dad’s Army of highly paid individuals with little experience of the job at hand, continue to behave as if they are acting on the basis of certainty.

Instead, they move from one poorly designed, rash decision to another, driven by the misguided belief that we are experiencing a ‘second wave’, following Spain’s ‘trajectory’ and just ‘behind the curve’ there.

Our latest study, out yesterday, shows that nearly a third of all Covid-19 deaths recorded in July and August might have actually been the result of other causes –cancer, for example, or road traffic accidents.

It is unfortunate that Mr Johnson is surrounded by mediocre scientific advisers.

It is strange and concerning, that the Government is still relying on mathematical modellers who have a 20-year track record of getting things wrong and have been particularly wrong in the past six months.

And the result is a confused, rudderless Government lost in a swamp of poor statistics and ill-informed recommendations.

But for now the only ‘circuit break’ we need is an end to the current cycle of bad data, bad language and shockingly bad scientific advice.

Related:

… and some photos from a 2014 trip to Oxford. Note the unmasked un-distanced sitting ducks for COVID-19:

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Does Cardi B have more concrete policy ideas than Joe Biden?

by philg

The rapper Cardi B interviewed Joe Biden and a full transcript is available from Elle:

Cardi B: And also what I want is free Medicare. It’s important to have free [healthcare] because look what is happening right now. Of course, I think we need free college. And I want Black people to stop getting killed and no justice for it. I’m tired of it. I’m sick of it. I just want laws that are fair to Black citizens and that are fair for cops, too. If you kill somebody who doesn’t have a weapon on them, you go to jail. You know what? If I kill somebody, I’ve got to go to jail. You gotta go to jail, too. That’s what I want.

Biden: There’s no reason why we can’t have all of that. Presidents have to take responsibility. I understand one of your favorite presidents is Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt said the American people can take anything if you tell them the truth. Sometimes the truth is hard. But right now, we’re in a position where we have an opportunity to make so much progress. The American public has had the blinders taken off.

Cardi B: I’m always so focused on Medicare and college education, and I never really thought about how important child care is. Nobody is more motivated than a mom. Nobody wants to go hustle out there and get the money for the kid like a mother. [But] how are you supposed to do that when you probably don’t have a babysitter for your kid? Fortunately for me, I have my mom to help take care of my child, but a lot of people, their mom cannot retire and take care of the kids. The mom has to work, too. I feel like this country is so hurt, to the point that this year, a lot of people couldn’t even celebrate July 4th, because not everybody feels like an American. A lot of people feel like [they’re] not even part of America.

Joe Biden: Absolutely. One of the things that I admire about you is that you keep talking about what I call equity—decency, fairness, and treating people with respect. John Lewis, one of the great civil rights leaders, used to say the vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool you have. Look, I’m a lot older than you, to state the obvious. When I was in high school, the civil rights movement was just being started, and along came Bull Connor and his dogs. He thought he was going to drive a wooden stake into the heart of the civil rights movement. But when all those folks saw what was happening in the South—[when] they saw Bull Connor with dogs [attacking] elderly Black women going to church and kids being knocked down with fire hoses—all of a sudden, as Dr. King said, we had the second emancipation. We had the Voting Rights Act and we had the Civil Rights Act. It changed things because people said, “Oh my God, that’s happening.” [Today], the cell phone has changed America. Because we’re at a point where some brave kid can stand there for a total of 8 minutes and 46 seconds and take a of a Black man [being] brutally murdered. And people around the world were saying, “My God. This really happens?” And now they’re demanding change.

What strikes me about the interview is that it seems to be Cardi B, the 27-year-old rapper, who has the concrete policy ideas. The 77-year-old Joe Biden, on the other hand, is mostly silent and/or vague on what he would actually do as president.

Readers: What do you think? Cardi B for President 2028?

Related:

  • “Nobody wants to go hustle out there and get the money for the kid like a mother. [But] how are you supposed to do that when you probably don’t have a babysitter for your kid?” said Cardi B. Hunter Biden’s plaintiff shows one straightforward way to solve this problem. See “Hunter Biden’s child support is finalized with his stripper baby mama” (Daily Mail, regarding a mom who was smart enough to move to Arkansas, which offers unlimited child support profits, prior to giving birth to a baby conceived in Washington, D.C. (practical child support revenue limited to about $2 million))
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