“Buy Straw Hats in the Winter,” March 31, 2016March 31, 2016 Bernard Baruch said, “because summer will surely come.” Well, I bought eight of these winter scarves on eBay last week — 100% pure cashmere made in Scotland, if the label is to be believed — and they arrived, free shipping, and they’re nice and big and warm, and I may be missing something but I think they’d be $75 each at Saks, and they were $6.97 here on eBay. Go ye and do likewise? (Also of possible interest: oil stocks.) NORTH CAROLINA WELCOMES YOU Have you seen Funny Or Die’s 56-second parody of a tourist-board spot, in wake of the unfortunate legislation passed last month? LEGALIZING DRUGS Judy: “Thanks for Monday’s link to the Harper’s article. If you found this interesting, you really need to read Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari. It will open your eyes while breaking your heart.” “An absolutely stunning book. It will blow people away.” ―Elton John “A drug policy reform book like no other. Many have studied, or conducted, the science surrounding the manifold ills of drug prohibition. But Hari puts it all into riveting story form, and humanizes it . . . lively, humorous, and poignant, it’s a compelling case for why the drug war must end, yesterday.” ―Norman Stamper, former Seattle police chief
Anything To Win March 30, 2016March 29, 2016 Jim Burt: “In your litany of horrible things the Republicans have done in their pursuit of political advantage – e.g., the War on Drugs [Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress ‘Anti-War Left and Black People’] – you forgot to mention that in 1968 LBJ’s diplomats had negotiated a peace settlement with North Vietnam which was indistinguishable from the one Kissinger won a Nobel Prize for five years and countless deaths later . . . but that Nixon’s team told South Vietnam’s leaders to refuse to go along with it, promising them a better deal once Nixon was president. LBJ knew of this because of wire taps on those leaders — and knew that revealing it would destroy Nixon’s chances of election — but kept it secret because of the scandal which would have attached to wiretapping allies. I suggest that there are enough incidents of this sort to indicate a pattern. You can’t just say, ‘Well, sure, that Nixon was a bad boy,’ if he’s only one of a long string of Republican politicians who have dealt with the devil for political advantage to the detriment of the country.” ☞ For more on this Nixon/LBJ history, click here . . . and here (bonus: a riveting account of how LBJ almost crashed the tumultuous 1968 convention in Chicago to run for reelection after all) . . . and here (peace before the election “was exactly what Nixon feared”). Thanks, Jim! *”On the other hand,” Jim goes on to note, “it does not appear that Reagan actively connived with the Iranians to put off the hostage release during the 1980 campaign. The Iranians just hated Carter with a white hot passion.”
On Their Worst Days . . . March 29, 2016March 28, 2016 I am enthusiastically neutral between our two fine Democratic candidates. For all their differences (e.g., free tuition versus debt-free college), Bernie had it exactly right: either of them is, even “on our worst days, 100 times better than any Republican candidate.” Like Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama before them,* Sanders and Clinton are people of serious purpose — each offering to apply him- or herself to the immensely complex task of leading the country and the world. Was George W. Bush up to that task? Was John McCain steady enough?** Who thought Dan Quayle was ready to lead the world? Watch Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday’s “Face The Nation.” Serious and steady. Watch Secretary Clinton at Stanford. Serious and steady. Watch Senator Sanders on the Middle East. Serious and steady. Contrast this with Trump, obviously; but with Cruz, too, who would carpet bomb until the sand glows — and who shut down his own government. I think it will ultimately turn out okay. But, boy, had it better. *Mondale and Dukakis lost to Republicans who quadrupled the National Debt; Gore and Kerry, to a Republican who handed Obama a disastrous, needless war, a near depression and a $1.5 trillion deficit. **He crashed four planes, not one, and chose Sarah Palin to lead the world in the event of his disability.
Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress ‘Anti-War Left and Black People’ March 28, 2016March 28, 2016 Really. Click here for a summary and here for Harper’s Magazine full report: “Legalize It All: How To Win the War On Drugs,” by Dan Baum. It begins: In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? . . . At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door. Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction. As long ago as 1949, H. L. Mencken identified in Americans “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” an astute articulation of our weirdly Puritan need to criminalize people’s inclination to adjust how they feel. The desire for altered states of consciousness creates a market, and in suppressing that market we have created a class of genuine bad guys — pushers, gangbangers, smugglers, killers. Addiction is a hideous condition, but it’s rare. Most of what we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality — derives from prohibition, not drugs. And there will be no victory in this war either; even the Drug Enforcement Administration concedes that the drugs it fights are becoming cheaper and more easily available. Now, for the first time, we have an opportunity to change course. Experiments in alternatives to harsh prohibition are already under way both in this country and abroad. Twenty-three states, as well as the District of Columbia, allow medical marijuana, and four — Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska — along with D.C., have legalized pot altogether. Several more states, including Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada, will likely vote in November whether to follow suit. Portugal has decriminalized not only marijuana but cocaine and heroin, as well as all other drugs. . . . Depending on how the issue is framed, legalization of all drugs can appeal to conservatives, who are instinctively suspicious of bloated budgets, excess government authority, and intrusions on individual liberty, as well as to liberals, who are horrified at police overreach, the brutalization of Latin America, and the criminalization of entire generations of black men. It will take some courage to move the conversation beyond marijuana to ending all drug prohibitions, but it will take less, I suspect, than most politicians believe. It’s already politically permissible to criticize mandatory minimums, mass marijuana-possession arrests, police militarization, and other excesses of the drug war; even former attorney general Eric Holder and Michael Botticelli, the new drug czar — a recovering alcoholic — do so. Few in public life appear eager to defend the status quo. This month, the General Assembly of the United Nations will be gathering for its first drug conference since 1998. The motto of the 1998 meeting was “A Drug-Free World — We Can Do It!” With all due respect, U.N., how’d that work out for you? Today the U.N. confronts a world in which those who have suffered the most have lost faith in the old strong-arm ideology. That the tide was beginning to turn was evident at the 2012 Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when Latin American leaders for the first time openly discussed — much to the public discomfort of President Obama — whether legalizing and regulating drugs should be the hemisphere’s new approach. . . . . . . As the once-unimaginable step of ending the war on drugs shimmers into view, it’s time to shift the conversation from why to how. . . . . . . To minimize harm and maximize order, we’ll have to design better systems than we have now for licensing, standardizing, inspecting, distributing, and taxing dangerous drugs. A million choices will arise, and we probably won’t make any good decisions on the first try. Some things will get better; some things will get worse. But we do have experience on which to draw — from the end of Prohibition, in the 1930s, and from our recent history. Ending drug prohibition is a matter of imagination and management, two things on which Americans justifiably pride themselves. We can do this. . . . It’s a lengthy article everyone should read, because this is something the world can fix. And at less-than-zero cost to the taxpayer. But hey — how about those Republicans? Everybody knows about their Watergate break-in; about the “Southern strategy“; and about their sweeping efforts to make it harder for poor people and black people to vote. But ruining countless lives based on knowing lies about drugs to help win elections? That one was new to me. Belated thanks to John Ehrlichman — and Harper’s — for bringing it to our attention.
Hats Off To Paul Ryan March 25, 2016March 24, 2016 Please don’t miss the last item — something really good House Speaker Paul Ryan did this week — but first . . . SMALL-GOVERNMENT REPUBLICANS In Arizona, the Republican legislature has pushed back municipal ordinances requiring paid sick leave. ‘ In Alabama, the Republican legislature rolled back local increases in the minimum wage. In Texas, the Republican legislature overrode local efforts to control fracking and frack water discharge within municipal boundaries. Who cares what the local people want? If it conflicts with corporate profits — well, as our Republican friends remind us: corporations are people, too. And it’s not just corporate profits Republicans need to protect. It’s so important that some forms of discrimination remain legal that when a local government — the Charlotte City Council, for example — bans one, the Republican-controlled state government steps in to intercede. Posted at Talking Points Memo: . . . In a span of 12 hours, the GOP political leadership of this state called the General Assembly back to Raleigh for a special session, introduced legislation written by leadership and not previously made available to members or the public, held “hearings” on that legislation, passed it through both chambers of the legislature, and it was signed by the GOP Governor. The special legislation was called, ostensibly, to prevent an ordinance passed last month by the Charlotte City Council, from going into effect on April 1. That ordinance would have expanded the city’s LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance, and would have allowed transgendered people to use public restrooms that corresponds with their gender identity. But the legislation introduced and passed into law by the General Assembly yesterday didn’t simply roll back that ordinance. It implemented a detailed state-wide regulation of public restrooms, and limited a person’s use of those restrooms to only those restrooms that correspond with one’s “biological sex,” defined in the new state law as the sex identified on one’s birth certificate. (So yes, by law in NC now, transgender porn star Buck Angel (look him up) will have to use the women’s room…isn’t that precisely what these lawmakers are actually wanting to prevent?). But the legislation didn’t stop there. It also expressly pre-empted all municipal and county ordinances or policies broader than the official state anti-discrimination statute, which does not include sexual orientation or gender identity among the list of prohibited bases of discrimination. So that effectively wipes out local LGBT anti-discrimination protections in numerous NC cities (and, ironically, wipes out the protection of discrimination based on “veterans status” in Greensboro and Orange County (Chapel Hill)). But wait, there’s more. The legislation also expressly states that there can be no statutory or common law private right of action to enforce the state’s anti-discrimination statutes in the state courts. So if a NC resident is the victim of racial discrimination in housing or employment, for example, that person is now entirely barred from going to state court to get an injunction, or to get damages of any kind. The new law completely defangs the state’s anti-discrimination statute, rendering it entirely unenforceable by the citizens of the state. But wait, there’s more! The legislation also prohibits municipalities and counties from passing a higher minimum wage than the State’s. Not that any municipality or county had done that…but in case any of them were thinking about it, that’s now prohibited, too. . . . 12 hours, start to finish. Look: transgender stuff is new to most people and hard, at first, to talk about and understand. But my transgender friends are real people — many of them extremely nice once you get to know them, productive, tax-paying, and born with certain inalienable rights (among them: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness). So if the City of Charlotte wants to make their lives easier, and deems it safe and sensible to do so, why do Republicans have to step in to shut that down? HEAT IN THE CLASSROOM And speaking of thwarting the will of the people — as Congressional Republicans have done on the minimum wage, comprehensive immigration reform, refinancing of federal student, and the American Jobs Act that would have put millions to work revitalizing our infrastructure — how about this? Next summer, in addition to textbooks, laptops and double-strength coffee, Kansas college students will be able to bring something else to class: guns. By July 2017, all six state universities plus dozens of community colleges and technical schools must allow students to carry concealed weapons on campus. . . . While the move enjoys broad support in the [Republican dominated] Kansas Legislature, it’s a different story among the state’s professors and administrators. Mike Williams, president of the University of Kansas Faculty Senate, says his colleagues are less worried about the possibility of an active shooter and more about accidents and simple disagreements escalating between armed students. What’s more, Williams says, that fear of violence could discourage civil discourse, with students afraid to speak their minds “because of their worry that someone might react with armed violence instead of thoughtful debate.” A poll of more than 20,000 employees across all Kansas Board of Regents schools found overwhelming disapproval of the new law. Eighty-two percent said they would feel less safe if students were allowed to carry guns to class. . . . HATS OFF TO PAUL RYAN His budget priorities are terrible, in my view — and that’s a really important thing — but hats off to our House Speaker for having an open mind, and for inspiring Congressional interns with a really good message. Take 10 minutes to watch. Have a great weekend!
Things Could Be SO Much Worse . . . March 24, 2016March 24, 2016 . . . and obviously were. Have you seen this Facebook post? Seven years under Barack Obama: Not to mention gas prices (down), home prices (up), gays (uplifted), Bin Laden (dead), high school seniors (graduating in records numbers), American Ebola victims (nonexistent), global climate change accord (signed!), women on the Court (tripled), weekly American body count (discontinued), net migration from Mexico (halted), stem cell lines available for research that might one day save your child’s life (multiplied). If you’re angry we haven’t put millions more people to work revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure or raised the minimum wage or allowed graduates to refinance their federal student loans at today’s low rates — or signed into law the comprehensive immigration reform the Senate passed 68-32 — you should be. But at the Republicans, because they consistently blocked every one of those things. No?
Better For The Planet, Your Wallet, and Your Health March 23, 2016March 22, 2016 One of the stories in the book I recommended Monday, explains why February has only 28 days, generally. But how are we to explain how hot it was this year? Or last year? February Breaks Global Temperature Records By Shocking Amount. From the Guardian: February smashed a century of global temperature records by a “stunning” margin, according to data released by NASA. The unprecedented leap led scientists, usually wary of highlighting a single month’s temperature, to label the new record a “shocker” and warn of a “climate emergency”. The NASA data shows the average global surface temperature in February was 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for the month between 1951-1980, a far bigger margin than ever seen before. The previous record, set just one month earlier in January, was 1.15C above the long-term average for that month. “NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report,” said Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, who analysed the data on the Weather Underground website. “February dispensed with the one-month-old record by a full 0.21C – an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by.” “This result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases,” said Masters and Henson. “We are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2C warming over pre-industrial levels.” Walk or bike. Eat less meat. Vote Democrat. Better for the planet (Congress is currently controlled by Republicans who believe the climate crisis is a hoax) . . . your wallet (both the economy and the stock market do markedly better under Democrats) . . . and your health (Republicans oppose stem cell research, clean-air-and-water regulation, food safety inspection, and — with 62 votes to repeal rather than improve it — affordable healthcare).
Surprising Your Bride March 22, 2016March 20, 2016 Years before he was freestyling in the Rose Garden with the President of the United States, or even famous, to speak of, Lin-Manuel Miranda was getting married. Here‘s a little five-minute surprise he cooked up for his bride at the wedding reception. (Thanks, Warren!) Wow. And by the way? In case you still haven’t seen “Hamilton” — good. That will give you all the more time to enjoy it, as suggested here, before you eventually do.
One More Thing March 21, 2016March 20, 2016 You are a wonderful person who deserves wonderful entertainment, so you need to read BJ Novak’s book of short stories, One More Thing. And by “read” I mean, ideally, “listen to,” as he performs it, with the help of a few guest stars, better than you can. And because this way you can be pounding the treadmill without sweating all over the pages or walking to work without getting hit by a car. Novak, was “Ryan” on “The Office” and in real life is this guy: writer, actor, producer, stand-up comedian, creator of The List App for your iPhone. I almost never get to read fiction, let alone short stories, but these 62 — ranging from 17 seconds to 34 minutes — are huge fun and immensely imaginative. And a great way to try your ear at “books on tape,” if you haven’t. Audiobooks are expensive if bought singly. But audible.com will let you try your first one free, so make it this one. Allyoucanbooks (which I haven’t tried) has “only” 30,000 books to choose from, not 180,000 (I didn’t have time to check whether One More Thing was among them), but also you lets you try one free — and thereafter lets you download as many as you want for twenty bucks a month instead of just two a month, like Audible.
Continued Success and More Antique Food March 18, 2016March 16, 2016 I write frequently about Success Academy, whose thousands of inner-city students — chosen by lottery — do spectacularly well . . . and at no extra cost to the taxpayer. This is worth coming back to over and over, I think, because replicated nationwide it would have profound positive implications — not just for the kids themselves (and their kids and THEIR kids), but for all the rest of us as well. As noted, the New York Times has been significantly less enthusiastic, most recently highlighting a Success teacher caught on video shaming a student. Well, as it happens, two of the readers of this page turn out to be parents of students in that same school. They write: Clarence Penn: “My kids go to Success Academy Cobble Hill (the school featured in the New York Times you linked to) and they have had an amazing time! It’s agreed the teacher did go too far, but she was suspended and put into further training right away (where else do you see that?). I have a friend who is a substitute teacher in Newark and he says the stuff that goes on in those schools is horrible but for some reason that doesn’t get reported with as much vigor by the Times. By the way, my wife Ellie would like to add something.” Ellie Penn: “The work Success Academy schools do is simply amazing and it is so sad that people (good people) don’t realize that. (Among them, some of my mommy friends.) They are brainwashed by the media. Things like in this video from Chicago happen every day in the Newark school where Clarence’s friend is teaching. The kids will become statistics and the cycle will never be broken for them. Schools like Success are actually changing that.” ☞ Exactly. And here is Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal op-ed by Success founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz. Orderliness in School—What a Concept By Eva S. Moskowitz March 14, 2016 7:27 p.m. ET This year charter-school enrollment grew by 260,000 students nationwide. Most of the fastest-growing charter networks, including Success Academies in New York City, which I run, believe we have a responsibility both to push children to achieve their potential and to protect them from the mayhem that in district schools often robs students of their opportunity to learn. This stricter approach has encountered fierce criticism in certain quarters. The New York Times, for example, has bemoaned Success Academy’s “stringent rules about behavior” that require students to have their “eyes following the speaker” and walk “in formation reminiscent of the von Trapp children at the beginning of ‘The Sound of Music.’ ” Over the past year the Times’s principal education reporter has devoted 34% of the total word count for her education stories, including four of her seven longest articles, to unrelentingly negative coverage of Success. We are hardly perfect and are, like all institutions, a work in progress. Yet the expenditure of such a disproportionate amount of investigative resources on one network of schools that educates just 1% of New York City’s students is curious, given the dire failures of the district schools. In Central Harlem’s district schools, for example, just 15% of students scored proficient on the state’s math exams in 2015. The budget at one Harlem district school, P.S. 241, amounted to $2 million for each of its two students who tested proficient in math. By contrast, 90% of the students at Success’s Central Harlem schools scored proficient in math in 2015. Many education professors are also critical of strict charter schools. But there is at least one group that strongly supports our schools: parents. For the current school year, Success Academies received 22,000 applications for 2,300 spots. Another network in New York City with a similar approach, Achievement First, received 21,000 applications for 1,000 spots. Meanwhile, most district schools with which we compete are massively under-enrolled. This raises an important question: Why are the views of parents about discipline so different than those of Times reporters and education professors? The answer, I believe, is that parents know from personal experience that when schools have lax discipline, particularly in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, children are bullied, robbed of educational opportunities by unruly behavior and even subjected to violence. Indeed, according to state statistics compiled by the pro-charter group Families for Excellent Schools, 2015 was the most violent year in New York City schools in a decade. Unfortunately, reporters and education professors often fail to realize that they are hampered by their own lack of personal experience with dysfunctional urban schools, which most of them didn’t attend—and aren’t where they are forced to send their own children. The New York Times education reporter claimed that her coverage of Success raised doubt about “How much . . . parents know of what goes on in their children’s classrooms.” The message was clear: Parents send their kids to stricter schools because they are clueless and need the help of a reporter to tell them what’s really going on. Really? Even though these parents speak with their own children every day? The unstated premise is that parents are susceptible to being duped because they are poor and unsophisticated. (Once upon a time, this view was known as “false consciousness”—the Marxist critique of how the proletariat could be misled by capitalist society.) But if parents of Success students were complacent and so easy to please, they wouldn’t be taking their children out of district schools in droves. Moreover, even affluent families are increasingly recognizing the value of schools that are academically rigorous. We have several schools in relatively wealthy communities, and our oldest, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, received almost 3,000 applications for 100 seats in 2015. Even the views of students themselves are dismissed by critics. In a 2013 study, Joan F. Goodman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, interviewed 56 seniors from a strict school about its discipline policies. She reported that all but three students spoke favorably about the policies. Without them, the students said, “hallways would be crazy” and students would “act up,” “not do their work” and “mess up in class while someone else [is] trying to learn.” But Ms. Goodman concluded the students’ views just showed how the school had lowered its students’ “self-esteem.” Social psychologists, she later observed in an interview, “call it ‘identification with the oppressor.’ Here oppressor should be changed to authority.” Critics claim that strict discipline stymies students’ creativity and voice. This just isn’t true. Requiring students to wear a uniform, speak respectfully and pay attention in class doesn’t prevent them from developing their identity or thinking for themselves. Our view at Success is that when schools are calm and organized, children feel free to express themselves precisely because they do feel safe. Because of school choice, parents are increasingly determining how children in this country are educated. Schools offering an education that parents believe works are expanding rapidly. Those that don’t are shrinking. This is troubling if you have contempt for parents’ intelligence and commitment to their children, but if you have confidence in parents, as I do, this development is welcome and long overdue. ☞ As I’ve said before, not all charter schools are good, by any means. Some are awful. Many are only so-so. But the ones that work? They should be emulated and replicated as widely and quickly as possible. As I’ve also said before, I’m a huge fan of the New York Times. (Subscribe!). It is indispensable. But no one is perfect; and on this one, they’ve blown it. ANTIQUE FOOD Margie Power: “I’m generally with you on ignoring expiration dates, though salad dressing from 2oo1 goes a little beyond my tolerance. Have you heard this podcast about expiration dates? They have nothing to do with safety at all.” Richard Factor: “I recently found a jar of peanut butter and a jar of Nutella that were 10 years old. The peanut butter was a bit rancid but edible. The Nutella? Good as new! I’m too old to start a new experiment, so [with respect to your 15-year-old salad dressing] I concede.” Have a great weekend.