Author: A.T.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Tomorrow: A little more on antique food . . . and on the education solution that breaks the cycle of poverty.

But first a little more on “the trade deal.”

I’ve argued previously that those who hate NAFTA should want to fix it.  Which the TransPacific Partnership does, at least in meaningful measure — Canada and Mexico are among TPP’s dozen signatories — by making the unenforceable promises of NAFTA’s “side letter” enforceable.

And I’ve argued that even if a labor leader somehow knew TPP would create more good jobs than it would kill, he would have to oppose it because those losing good jobs would, understandably, be looking for someone to blame (and it would be him!), while those gaining good jobs would mostly not even realize it was the trade deal (and his support of it) they had to thank.

And I’ve posted this really thoughtful Charlie Rose interview that anyone serious about trying to assess the TPP pros and cons should take the time to watch.

Now comes an updated tariff calculator, complete with 7-minute tutorial, that lets U.S. manufacturers see how much easier it should be to sell abroad.

TPP will eliminate more than 18,000 tariffs placed on Made-In-America exports.

(Donald Trump, needless to say, would have eliminated far more than 18,000. A little baby could have eliminated more tariffs than that.  If there’s anything Mr. Trump has the patience, skill, and nuance to do, it’s negotiate multinational trade deals.  He doesn’t say much; but what he does say is so carefully considered he has already won the respect of most world leaders.)

If you’re a critic on the left who deplores the President’s drone strikes . . .

Or a critic who thinks he’s not been tough enough . . .

. . . perhaps the Atlantic Monthly piece everyone’s been talking about will move you closer to my own view:  We could not have a more thoughtful, steady commander-in-chief.

(It’s impossible to read without wondering — with dread — what a Trump or Cruz presidency might look like.)

A tiny snip:

. . . Obama returned to a point he had made repeatedly to me, one that he hopes the country, and the next president, absorbs: “You know, the notion that diplomacy and technocrats and bureaucrats somehow are helping to keep America safe and secure, most people think, Eh, that’s nonsense. But it’s true. And by the way, it’s the element of American power that the rest of the world appreciates unambiguously. When we deploy troops, there’s always a sense on the part of other countries that, even where necessary, sovereignty is being violated.” . . .

Making the point that Obama is a gambler but not a bluffer, Jeffrey Goldberg concludes:

George W. Bush was also a gambler, not a bluffer. He will be remembered harshly for the things he did in the Middle East. Barack Obama is gambling that he will be judged well for the things he didn’t do.

It’s so much easier to just want to bomb a problem until, in Ted Cruz’s words, you make the sand glow.  Or in Trump’s words, get a lot tougher than just waterboarding.  Enough with all the thinking — let’s just do something!  What we need is a tough “dead or alive” shock-and-awe approach like we had in our last macho Republican president.  Yes, true, he didn’t get him dead or alive; and, yes, true, the shock and awe didn’t work and cost us trillions that could have gone into building our infrastructure . . . and caused widespread death and misery while playing into the hands of the terrorists.  But why quibble?  It was muscular.  It was direct.  We need to try it again.  (And 35% tariffs and a trade war would be a good idea, too: bring back Smoot-Hawley!  That’ll show the Mexicans and Chinese who have their boots on our neck!)

If you missed last month’s 2016 TED Conference in Vancouver, you’ll find a nice review of it here: “I’ve Discovered the Antidote to This Year’s Nasty Election: TED.”

And TED’s 20 most popular talks of all time, here.

Free!

Indeed, it is in part to make all its talks available free that TED requires annual conference participants to contribute $6,000 on top of the basic $2,500 conference fee.  Double that if you bring your better half: $17,000.

If you’re not ready to do that — or spring for the airfare and hotel — you and he or she can see the entire 2016 conference at your own pace/s starting today, for just $100.  Here.

Recently, I apologized for some of the awful stocks I had suggested (“Year-End Tax-Selling Buying Opportunities”), concluding:

All that said, would this be a time to buy a little GLDD?  A little PRMRF?  A little BOREF?  Each under $5?  Check back with me in a year or two and we’ll know.

In the 10 weeks since . . .

GLDD is down slightly.  I just wait, and wait, and wait, as the silt accumulates (they are the nation’s largest dredging company) . . . and the CEO, with any luck, gets fired.

BOREF is up by a third.  Sort of.  I mean, it is . . . but it trades so thinly, it could go right back down if some guy decides to sell 500 shares and no one happens to be around to buy them.  But this is not a stock to buy for a small quick gain anyway; it is a stock to buy for either an eventual wipe out (somehow, I guess) or else for a big score.  Two years ago, when the stock was $16.50 and the company less far along, I posted, “BOREF: $338 A Share? Or $2.79?”  To me (and perhaps only to me), the logic still holds.  I wouldn’t sell any at $6.20.

PRMRF is up 50% and depends almost entirely on the price of oil.  My hope is that even at today’s prices, low-cost producers like this one will do okay.  (My even greater hope is that the world will move away from fossil fuels altogether.)  But if in a couple of years oil is back to $70, say, PRMRF could be back into the 20s.  And it was in the 20s that my smart rich friend who had researched it deeply thought it was worth a great deal more.  I’ll settle for the 20s.

As always: my little speculations are only for money you can truly afford to lose.

I’ve not seen “The Martian.”  People told me the book was even better — and the audio book really well performed.  So I listened (it was!), consuming the last four hours in two, at double speed, and realized The Martian is Robinson Crusoe three centuries later.  All alone, stranded not on an island but a planet.  Salvaging tools and supplies from his wreck.  Surviving through ingenuity.

And then that flight home!

When I was five or six, I had a 78 rpm record of the first moon landing.  I played it over and over.  Something went wrong on the return trip.  They were not going to make it.  Too heavy.  But then the boy on the flight — there was a boy on the flight — came up with a solution for lightening the space ship and saved the day.  They made it home!  I listened to that record 100 times.

All that, pre-Sputnik.

And here we are.  We’ve been to the moon.  (Just 60 years after the Wright brothers made their first 12-second flight!)  And it seems pretty clear we’re going to Mars.

What a time to be alive.  How important that we elect truly thoughtful leaders . . . who “believe in” science . . . and not just someone we’d like to have a beer with.

Have a great weekend.

I am enthusiastically neutral among all — now between both — our fine Democratic candidates.

But whatever happens, I was interested to learn this:

It’s possible Bernie will not be our first Jewish president.

LBJ may have beaten him to it!

Click here.

(The pay-off is at the end.)

Thanks, Mel!