Month: May 2016

The horrifying realization that the election is just beginning is brought into high relief every time Trump talks about an actual issue. The GOP nomination process was so utterly devoid of substance that up to this point we've mostly been talking in circles about his sanity and his sincerity.
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Where he actually stands on issues is only now and in the near future going to become apparent, and if you think he's an asshole now you're going to have to invent some new insults by November.

He appears to be going from state to state telling the local population of reactionaries whatever they most want to hear. He told Iowans that ethanol (a certified boondoggle and massively expensive welfare program for agricultural interests) is the key to his ideas about energy independence before flying to California to tell the state's substantial population of complete assholes that there is no drought, only a lack of will to stand up to The Environmentalists who won't let water be diverted from wild rivers for economic activity. This literally is an argument straight from online comment sections.
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Your dumbest uncle and friend from high school have posted it on Facebook at least once, guaranteed.

The argument ("argument") is as follows. All urban water consumption in California adds up to about 9 million acre-feet annually, and the state's enormous agricultural industry uses about 34 million. Wild rivers in the state handle about 25 million per year, none of which is dammed or diverted for economic use.
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So, if those pussy libtard tree huggers would just let agribusinesses build dams and diversion channels on all the wild rivers, problem solved.

This is precisely the kind of logic that appeals to people who have no real understanding of a public policy problem. They glance at some numbers on a chart and anoint themselves Fully Informed on the subject, insisting that it's "really simple" and "not hard" and the solution is "obvious." These are people who think the Federal budget could be balanced if someone would just take a pen and cross some things out. It's Common Sense! Unfortunately these oversimplified ideas from simpletons ignore all reality, context, and consequences in whatever mental calculus underlies them, if any. In this case the logic ignores the location of the wild rivers (generally nowhere near population centers) and the consequences of damming them. I'm not talking about the consequences to some endangered fish that Trump types clearly do not care about under any circumstances, but the long-term consequences to the climate and landscape of the state. Southern California, in case anyone has forgotten, is a desert. That is the root of the problem – not environmentalists hugging trees in Berkeley.

Listening to that California speech (if you can stomach it) makes it perfectly clear that Trump has thought about this issue for all of about ten minutes in his life but, as usual, is now 1000% convinced that he has the solution. What leadership! Like a college student trying to bullshit his way through a speech by browsing the internet five minutes before it is due, Trump's ideology (if it can be so called) is starting to look like an overarching ultra-short sighted, scorched earth approach to any issue that he thinks a crowd of yokels might be mad about. There is no future, there is no reality, there are no considerations that need to enter into the decision-making calculus. The answer to everything is whatever some guy who is furious about an issue he fundamentally does not understand thinks is the Common Sense answer.

Someone joked a long time ago that Trump is like a comment section running for president.
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That is going to prove more accurate a prediction than anyone realized.

This is the kind of data release sure to go viral and put the internet into a frenzy, so let me be the first of many to tell you that Pew has done an analysis concluding that "at home with parents" is now the most common living arrangement for 18-34 year olds. It is the plurality winner at 32.

1%, edging out the long-time leader "with spouse or partner." The trend is not unique to America but is affecting Europe and the rest of the industrialized world as well.

It's hard to tell where sociopolitical attitudes begin and where one's defensiveness and projection end, but I've been involved in a lot of conversations lately with older adults observing that The Youths aren't buying homes, getting married, or pumping out grandkids like they used to (or are expected to). As a childless, single 37 year old male living alone in a rental unit, it's hard not to engage in such conversations with a broad perspective rather than just making my own excuses. The Pew report predictably – not to say unwisely – includes a discussion of the job market. Logically, young people who can't find decently paid work are likely to be living with someone who can at least partially subsidize their basic costs. This is obvious enough not to merit any in-depth discussion.

What is under-appreciated, in my view, is that the relationship between the economy and the life choices of young adults goes beyond how hard it is to find a job or what said jobs pay.

Finding a job is not easy and finding one that pays well is even less so, but the real culprit behind the trend Pew highlights is the lack of stability that young adults have had beaten into them over the past three decades. Everyone is aware that lots of young adults aren't "settling down" because they can't find good jobs.

I'd argue that at least as many have a good job but have no job security beyond day-to-day. We've heard all our lives how the days of spending 40 years at one company/employer are over, and that much is obvious. Despite the fact that some of us (OK, I'm 3 years over the limit but I'll lump myself in there nonetheless) are doing somewhere between "OK I guess" and "pretty well." Without anything to rely on for the future, though, who's going to take out a 30-year mortgage and have kids?

The sea change in our economy has not been one of wages and salaries (although those are stagnant since the 1970s outside of the top 1%) but of job security. We've been told that in order to compete in the Global Economy we have to work cheap and hard; to work anything less than 50 hours per week for the good of our employer is a moral failing, a shirking of economic and patriotic responsibility, yet they owe us nothing whatsoever in return. There is no trade-off in terms of stability. If they can find someone to do our jobs for less tomorrow, even halfway around the world, Third Wave capitalism demands that they fire us in the name of Efficiency and Shareholder Value. And that new reality – the knowledge that no matter how hard or well one works, the financial rug could be yanked out from under us at any minute – is one that actively discourages young adults from doing the very things (investing, saving, home-buying, and consuming) that this new economy needs us to do in order to grow. This system doesn't work unless we spend; we don't spend when we're insecure about the future; we have to be kept in fear so we're too afraid to demand better compensation and treatment; we spend less to compensate for stagnant compensation.

And that is why this whole Rube Goldberg machine of cheap credit, disposable labor, and a consumption-based American Dream is irredeemably goddamn broken.

I can't handle much cable TV news these days, and I rarely see any outside of a public setting. Walking past one of the many flat panels in the gym last evening I caught about three minutes of CNN, bringing my total number of CNN-watching minutes in 2016 to approximately five, plus or minus three.

The network was doing what it and every other network have been doing and will continue to do all year: "analyzing" the election. You know the drill. Very Serious People giving the Beltway Consensus take on why this or that happened, who said what, what it all means, and a bunch of nonsense pronouncements about non-events that will be forgotten as soon as others crop up tomorrow to replace them. The pro-Trump pundit was unknown to me, some D-list Howard Kurtz wannabe who bore an uncanny resemblance to a younger, less physically fit Paul Blart. Everyone played their parts well. He said some stuff. The CNN anchor nodded, listening intently. The other pundits waited their turn to say something insipid. The exchange got "spirited," culminating in that throbbing pulse of healthy political discourse that is Crosstalk.

It looked and felt…strained. Everything about it was familiar, both to me as the viewer and to everyone involved directly. Hell, the script hardly changes except for the candidates' names from election to election. This time, however, it really feels like someone is going to snap. One of these people will go full Howard Beale. It's only May and their professional demeanor as a group is already strained to breaking with the thought, "Are we really going to sit here and pretend that we're taking Donald Trump seriously?" That flower of suppressed rage might not bloom until later this year, but – perhaps this is only wishful thinking on my part – it seems ready to happen eventually.

We got close in 2008 when CNN's Jack Cafferty had a moment of brutal honesty about Sarah Palin while seated directly next to Wolf Blitzer, who played the Very Serious Person role to the hilt and got a withering "Don't make excuses for her" for his efforts. "I'm 65 and this is one of the most pathetic pieces of tape I have ever seen" is about as honest as you're likely to hear anyone get in mainstream TV news.

The Trump people are right about one thing: despite the media's ratings-driven infatuation with Trump, not a single news outlet including Fox News is pulling for him. Murdoch & Co. may come around in the long run, but regardless we can already see the strain this is putting on the veneer of Both Sides Do It mainstream Beltway journalism. This unspoken sense of, "Really? We have to pretend this isn't totally idiotic and insane? Are you serious, people?" is the undercurrent to the transition from primary to general election storylines. Nobody wants to say it. Maybe nobody will say it. Plenty will rush to heap insults on him after he loses. Hopefully someone has the courage to do it before that. The odds may not be great, but they're greater now than at any point in my lifetime that somebody is going to lose it on camera when the thought of furrowing their brow and pensively discussing the merits of an asshole reality TV mannequin who once wrestled Vince McMahon and has no issue positions of any kind overwhelms them. Everyone has a breaking point, even the blow-dried careerists who pass for journalists these days.

(Great song. Really.)

International relations is not my strongest area, but most of you know how much I love me some Cold War era history. And so it is with considerable interest that I've watched China replace the US and USSR in their former roles as patrons of the Third World during that lengthy conflict. For decades the two Cold War superpowers went around the world trying to outdo one another in generosity – primarily with massive packages of free military gear that sketchy leaders of newly independent and unstable nations saw as a means of staying in power – in return for swearing off the competing scourge of (communism/capitalism). Oh the Soviets are offering 100 MiG-17s? Those are obsolete, bro. Call Uncle Sam and he'll send over some F-4s. That's the good stuff.

China isn't providing military aid for the most part. Instead, they offer cheap loans for infrastructure projects and (foreshadowing!) the promise to get to work on them right away. China's view is and always has been, "Screw environmental impact studies. We have too many mouths to feed.
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You need power? Build a dam." Whereas Western investment often comes with multiple competing goals and interests ranging from social development to economic growth to political stability, China is more narrowly economically focused. If it's good for business, do it. If China's industries need lumber and copper they hand over the cash without asking the pesky questions Western nations tend to ask. China doesn't have environmental groups that matter.
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And African leaders have a long history of self-inflicted environmental degradation if the price is right.

Despite the Chinese economic slowdown, they announced $60 billion in new loans and investment in Africa as recently as January of this year including a single $13 billion infrastructure project in Kenya alone. This leads us to the $64,000 question: what exactly is it that China wants? The Cold War superpowers didn't lavish gifts on small countries out of the kindness of their hearts; it was quid pro quo aid. Most of the sober analysis agrees that China's motives are economic. That's never a bad guess. A more optimistic view is that Chinese firms recognize the limits of growth within their own borders and are looking elsewhere. Cynically, China sees cheap and abundant natural resources they want to extract and they see these projects as little trinkets that will curry favor with less sophisticated governments.

I'm not sure if this qualifies as a conspiracy theory, but I look at it differently. In the long term I don't think China has its eye on African resources so much as it has its eye on Africa.

For all their recent "Come to Jesus" talk about understanding the importance of sustainability and the environment, there is no nation on the planet that has trashed its own house quite like the Chinese have. Since Mao and his friends took over and put the country on an often calamitous crash course toward industrialization, China has polluted like no other nation on the planet can even hold a candle to – not even the CO2-belching US.
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The priorities have been feeding a billion people and becoming a modern industrial and economic colossus in record time. The environment wasn't even an afterthought. The growth of China's economy has indeed been impressive and rapid, but there have been costs. About 1/3 of all arable land in the country is heavy-metals poisoned, as is roughly 1/3 of their drinking water. They burn coal like Americans burn gasoline. Their cities are choked in air pollution that is the country's single biggest public health issue.
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Ever wonder why they were able to take the lead in so many manufacturing sectors, particularly electronics? It's not just cheap labor. Lots of places have cheap labor. It's the fact that in China you can pay someone almost nothing to melt down used motherboards and PC components without protective gear (Because who cares if the worker dies at 37? The government doesn't.) and then dump the results in a river. They simply don't care. Or if they do care now, they waited too long.

So we have a nation with a billion and a half people, and that number is still growing. This nation has exhausted its natural resources for the most part and done staggering damage to its ability to produce food thanks to desertification and toxic soil in industrial areas. Either the nation is going to undertake the single greatest environmental remediation and sustainability turnaround in human history or they're going to need to find someplace else for their population to spread and grow. I don't mean that China will show up, guns in hand, to annex half of Africa. But this steady stream of Chinese emigrating to Africa now is likely to continue growing. While the motivation for that movement ostensibly is economic, I can't help but think there's a strategic long-term demographic strategy at play as well.

The way America pollutes is ultimately of more consequence because our carbon emissions affect the whole planet. China, conversely, has been the primary victim of China's environmental inaction. England went through this on a smaller scale during the Industrial Revolution and Victorian Era, the point at which they had to confront as a nation the possibility that London would be uninhabitable if they didn't stop pumping coal fumes into the air and pouring industrial waste in the Thames. The British certainly looked beyond their own borders as a partial solution to their problems, and China is in the process of doing the same.

Salon is running a particularly poorly thought-out piece, even by Salon standards, about the inability of college students to use the English language to express themselves in writing. I'll let the author off the hook for the stupid title ("Death to High School English") and the tagline, as an editor probably chose those. But the argument overlooks such an obvious explanation in favor of a more complicated one that it's difficult to take whoever she is seriously. When the tagline asks, "My college students don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay. Is it time to rethink how we teach?" We could do that, I guess. Or we could rethink how we grade them in high school.

There is a tendency, even among educators, when outcomes are not as they should be to assume that teachers as individuals or the educational system writ large must be to blame. In this case we're hypothetically dismantling all K-12 English education and starting over from scratch with some sort of newer, better method. What this overlooks is the reality that most students in college – the same ones the author rightly points out are terrible at writing – have no idea that they're terrible at writing. They think they are quite good at it, in fact. They do not believe this because of simple arrogance or Those Darn Millennials or any other popular explanation. They believe they are good writers because they have been getting good grades on written assignments and in English throughout their educational careers.

Grade inflation and the reasons for it are too much of a Pandora's Box to open here, but I'll argue to my grave that students are rational even if not "smart" per se. They are very good at figuring out, for example, the least possible amount of work they can do while still getting the grade outcome they want. I have nothing but respect for K-12 teachers, and they face a problem that I have the luxury of ignoring: parents. Parents, students, government regulators, administrators, and state legislators all put constant pressure on teachers (who are told they are overpaid and underworked to boot) to deliver results. Schools that serve wealthier areas have parents who flat-out demand that their child graduate with a 3.9 GPA or there will be hell to pay, while schools serving poorer areas have an incentive to inflate grades to make it look like their students, many of whom are in terrible situations outside of school, are better than they really are. The dynamics are different but the end result is the same: students reach college having received many A and B grades throughout their lives for really mediocre (or worse) work.

I worked with a guy a long time ago who was famous for giving everyone A's. He often complained to me in private how frustrating his classes were – the students didn't read, they didn't participate, they rarely bothered showing up, etc. – yet never made the connection to the fact that they all rationally decided that there is no point in trying if they're getting an A no matter what. In competitive, academically strong high schools students very quickly figure out that the grades tend to distribute in a narrow range from a high of A+ to a low of maybe C+. A and B are perfectly good grades in the minds of almost any student, so when they get to college having gotten nothing but A or B in English and composition classes for their whole lives, why would they even suspect that they might be bad at writing?

In the reality in which K-12 teachers are actually underpaid and overworked, not the opposite that is so often claimed, the only real incentive they have to offer is the grade. If a student doesn't care if he or she fails or gets a D, then the teacher cannot do much to influence that person. If, on the other hand, we create a system in which giving a student a grade lower than B creates such a headache and so much hassle for the teacher that it's easier simply to give everyone A's and B's, then the teacher's hands are equally tied. This doesn't stop at the K-12 level; I wrote just last week about the pressure to do what is easier and less of a hassle, which makes me part of the problem. Students (and parents) understand this and exploit it. Some students learn that if they complain to enough administrators – which creates a headache for the teacher even when the complaints are groundless and the administrators are supportive – they can create incentives in exactly the same way teachers do. We tell students "Do X amount of work and I'll give you a B", and in return now students tell us in so many words, "Just give me a B and I won't cause any trouble."

Again, that's only one angle on the problem of grade inflation, and it's too complex an issue to untangle in a small space. The most obvious issue with English education, though, is not necessarily one of method of instruction, material, or teacher performance. It is that we have created this system of incentives that results in the vast majority of high school students who are likely to go on to college getting high grades for work that is often deeply flawed. We can tell them "Do better!" until we're blue in the face, but if they're walking out of the class with B or A grades they have every reason to believe that whatever level of performance and effort they're at is just fine.