Lizardbreath picks up on a hobby horse of mine:

Generally, talking about getting a job today, it’s a commonplace that you can’t get looked at for anything unless you have experience doing exactly that thing. It’s a Catch-22 for job-seekers: you can’t learn how to do anything useful in school, you need on the job training, but employers don’t voluntarily do on the job training anymore. And it’s not great for the employers either, because it’s hard to find people with perfectly tailored experience for your openings, so if you don’t expect to train your hires, you end up hiring any idiot who fits the slot.

I’ve backed off of this stance in recent years a little bit as I’ve looked back on working for more and more companies. I still don’t see anything like “willing to train” (and in the current economy, there’s not much incentive to). But thinking about it more, I have seen cases where people are promoted from entry-level jobs and trained to do something new. The key difference here would be that when the person is a competent mailroom clerk or something, they show up on time and so on, that they are more likely to be worth investing the training in for a better position within the company. The training is less likely to be worth it if they are a complete unknown, regardless of their resume.

Football: Syracuse Orange(men) 36, Kansas State Wildcats 34

I have to agree with Mike Hunt on this one. The excessive celebration call was lame, lame, lame. I was actually prepared to defend it on the basis that even stupid rules (and I think anti-celebration rules have reached that point) are rules, but it was essentially no different than pointing to God, which a lot of players do but has not yet gotten the wrath of the NCAA. The call, which came after a closing-minutes touchdown by K-State with the opportunity to tie it with a two-point conversion, sealed the deal for the Wildcats. In a situation like that, you give the players the benefit of the doubt.

Incidentally, it was mentioned (in passing) that NYC couldn’t plow the streets but sure took great care of the stadium (for a game not all that many people really cared about). It was mentioned jokingly, but it’s not entirely a joke.

Also, the reason I add the (men) is that I thought Syracuse’s transition to being just the Orange was stupid and it was my way of registering protest.

Football: North Carolina Tar Heels 30, Tennessee Volunteers 27

This was another case of the refs deciding the game, in a sense. In this case, the replay refs. The field refs announced the game over after UNC allegedly failed to down the ball in time to save another play. However, instant replay revealed one more second on the clock. Tennessee was already out on the field celebrating. UNC made the field goal and went on to win the game. It’s tempting to feel bad for the Vols, but they really put their black hats on at the end of the game. One atrocious penalty after another, including a salute. The salute, as well as a late hit, went uncalled.

Women’s Basketball: Connecticut Huskies vs Stanford Cardinal

During the end of the UNC-Tennessee game, they kept splitscreening to show UConn’s likely first loss in a record 90 games. By the end of the game, they didn’t give us a choice and left the UNC-UT game in overtime so that they could show the closing seconds of the basketball game. Part of me thought that this was dumb because they had said, over and over again, that the game was available on ESPN2 so anyone watching who was interested could have switched away. The other part of me was glad because we couldn’t switch away. We were watching the football game on DVR time-delay and couldn’t switch over. So we actually got to see it. Which, given some of the obnoxious comments of the UConn coach in recent weeks, was really quite satisfying.

Football: Nebraska Cornhuskers vs. Washington Huskies

During a half-time show, Lou Holtz and Mark May were asked who they thought would win this one. May immediately said Nebraska. Holtz dithered, pointing out that rematches usually go the other way and that Washington is going to be monumentally motivated and that they underperformed and Nebraska overperformed last time. But he never actually answered the question, which the woman who asked the question pointed out, asking again “But who do you think will win?” Holtz responded, without hesitation, “Nebraska.”

Washington won, 19-7.

Basketball: Southern Tech Packers vs. Southwestern Muscogea Meerkats

I timed the trip so that I would be able to go to two Sotech basketball games. The latter of the two, a conference game, is one that the Packers are unlikely to be able to win. So I went to this game against a no-name school so that I could go back with at least one victory. Mission accomplished. Our players had a good half-foot on the other guys on average. Near the beginning of the game, they gave the stats of SWM. Which was good, because it was a school that nobody in the crowd had ever heard of (despite it being a school in an adjacent state).

Less than five years ago:

Innovation in the manufacturing sector means that the jobs require greater skills than ever before. According to an analysis by economists Richard Deitz and James Orr at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, employment in high-skilled manufacturing jobs rose 37%, or by 1.2 million jobs, from 1983 to 2002. At the same time, low-skilled factory jobs dropped 25%, or by approximately 2 million workers.

“The time when you can be relatively unskilled and work in manufacturing for a long time with just a high school degree and make a good salary to support a family is gone,” National Association of Manufacturers chief economist David Huether says.

But finding people with the right skills isn’t easy.

“It’s limiting my growth,” says John West, president of Fox Valley Metal-Tech in Green Bay, Wis.

Earlier this year West turned down a $1.5 million contract with Kraft Foods because he didn’t have enough welders. That order would have grown his business by 10%. {…}

“Culturally, we have browbeaten manufacturing to such an extent that we don’t have people interested,” says John Sinn, interim director of the Center for Applied Technology at Bowling Green State University.

Sinn and others say it is now up to people in manufacturing to change that perception, particularly among younger people and their parents.

“Everyone wants their kids to be doctors, lawyers and dentists. … (But) all of us can’t be that,” says Lloyd McCaffrey, director of manufacturing technology at Williams International, a gas turbine manufacturer in Ogden, Utah.

My first job out of college (well, a semester away from graduating) was at Wildcat, an engineering and fabrication company. Wildcat would occasionally have some real difficulty attracting people to work in the warehouse (about 2/3 to 7/8 of the company’s workforce at any given time). A lot of that, though, had to do with constant ramp-ups and layoffs depending on the contracts. That seems to be a lot of what’s going on here. Basically, Wildcat would get some big contract and suddenly the warehouse labor force would need to double. Then, when the contract was over, about half would be laid off. There was a lot of this sort of thing going on at the industrial park where I worked. Essentially, people would make a living hopping from one job to another. In addition to the perception of fabrication work, I suspect the somewhat inconsistent nature of it also makes it less attractive than some of the alternative.

Some tasks, though, were so important and it was so hard to find people to do them that they would keep them on even when there was nothing for them to do just so that they would be there for the next ramp-up. This was particularly true of the machinists, which were less interchangeable than the welders and fitters. But even with welders it was difficult. Wildcat would have to hire non-English speakers, which creates some pretty significant logistical problems. On one major product, they basically had the English shift and the Spanish shift. Everyone was crossing their fingers and hoping that nobody would call the EEOC (the Spanish-speakers because they were stuck working overnight and the English-speakers because the Spanish-speakers were pulling in some extra off-hour money, though to be fair since everyone was working 60-hour weeks nobody was hurting for money).

In addition to the language-logistical difficulties, it also left Wildcat having to do a fair amount of training. Typically, the “relatively unskilled” would get hired on to carry stuff around or put with Assembly while they learned what they were doing. The entry-level jobs were not easy to come by, though. Nearly everyone that got in at that level was somebody’s son, step-son, or nephew. Since the aforementioned huge job required using special metals, the company had to bankroll certification for a lot of people to handle these metals. But mostly, as with so many other industries, Wildcat wanted the people to already be trained and ready to go. With comparatively little notice.

Ordinarily when people freak out that a political leader “didn’t do enough” in the fact of a disaster acting like they should have been on the front lines tossing sandbags onto the makeshift dyke, I roll my eyes. But I think Mayor Cory Booker has set a new standard:

Trapped in Newark after Blizzard 2010? Mayor Cory Booker wants to rescue you - and he’s only a tweet away.

Booker has been tweeting up a storm, personally responding to tweets from citizens stranded by snowed-over streets. For days, Newark’s hero mayor has helped dig out buried cars and snowy roads - and even delivered diapers to a stranded Newark family.

“Highland Ave b/w Bal and Berk not touched yet. My sis can’t get out to get diapers,” Timothy Hester frantically tweeted Booker. Hester lives in Virginia and tweeted the mayor on behalf of his snowbound sister Barbara, who lives in Newark.

The valiant mayor tweeted back, “I’m delivering the diapers now. We will get to her street soon.”

After this, people were saying that it’s the kind of play you only get away with once. For that school, maybe, but apparently Euless Trinity in Texas (the same state as before), didn’t get the message:

This was a more transparent play than the middle school one in Corpus Christi. The object of confusion was almost certainly the fact that the offensive line was in a standing position. I found the Driscoll play to be more problematic because it’s the kind of thing where a defense is much more likely to be reasonably afraid to tackle the player for fear of an unsportsmanlike penalty. In this case, it’s hard to imagine that after the proper snap that they would be penalized even if it were a mistake.

It’s always helpful to have a good plane story to tell when you’re seeing a bunch of people you don’t know all that well. It’s the sort of stuff that everyone can relate to. Being held for three hours by Canadian customs was actually a godsend, in a sense, because I was attending a wedding where I knew virtually nobody and being able to tell the story of my experience provided a social lubricant far less uncomfortable than having to defend my country in the face of Canadian self-superiority (they weren’t that bad, though of course American craziness came up… a lot).

This time around I was able to tell people with whom I don’t have a lot to talk about that I got the Freedom Grope at the Deseret airport we flew out of. It was not nearly as long and interesting as the Canadian airport story, but it was more topical.

So yeah, I failed the full-body scan somehow or another. The TSA agent asked if I was sure I emptied my pockets. I had. So there was nothing to do but for him to feel me up. It was really rather anti-climactic. Authority positions in Deseret are unfailingly filled by Mormons and they’re not likely to get their jollies with such things. So it was about as cursory as you can imagine. In fact, had I any sort of small device taped up there, there’s no way he would have found it. Incidentally, the crotch area was the only area he felt as well as the thighs. It was as though there was a checklist with only that area on it.

I am tempted to say that maybe that’s where the bodyscan led me awry, but it seems unlikely. He was asking about my pockets. I have no pockets on my thighs or around my crotch. Despite wearing a baggyish shirt, my armpits went untouched. Ditto for my butt, which would be another place to hide something if I were so inclined.

On the whole, the intrusion was less obnoxious than when I am (relatively certain) I was on some nasty list that involved a more intrusive search (sometimes in a separate room) on several consecutive flights from 2004-06 (or so).

If you’re interested in the philosophy and ethics of marriage and divorce, this post may be worth your time:

Early on in our relationship, we had a conversation – theoretical at the time – about divorce. While I’m not quite as absolutist as Christopher Lasch’s recommendation of a constitutional amendment banning divorce, as a child of multiple divorces on both sides, I don’t view marriage as something that should be “gotten out of” simply because one of the (or even both) partners believes the marriage to be a mistake. My takeaway from childhood was not the modern – “there are all kinds of families” or “children are better off with two happy parents living separately than two miserable married people;” my takeaway was that the option of an out leads to constant insecurity. That the replacement of a sort of quiet and mundane contentment with the never-satisfied need for fulfillment leads to unhappy people who never find what they’re seeking and too often hurt those around them while seeking it. That casual divorce turns marriage into some kind of balance sheet in which people expect to get an approximate return on what they put in and are always open to a better option if one should come along.

Everyone’s opinions are based on life experience, and for every person who has had my experience of the familial revolving door, there’s someone who has life experience that leads to the questions I often get on the subject: would you recommend an abused wife stay with her abuser? Well, obviously no. Should a married person who comes to acknowledge they’re homosexual be forced to stay with their spouse (of the opposite sex in this scenario)? Honestly, I do think it’s the honorable thing to do, although I would imagine in most cases the other partner would put an end to it anyway. Simply put, in very large part, marriage is marriage (as opposed to dating or cohabitation) because there is no going back. It’s permanent. The selection of a spouse is based on choice, but once the vows are taken, the spouse becomes family, and it should be as difficult and infrequent to divorce them as it is to divorce relationships of blood. Obviously, there are people who are estranged from parents and siblings, but the rates of that kind of estrangement are nowhere near the rates of marital separation and divorce.

The ensuing discussion in the comments may also be.

The two main things I like to do when I make a return trip to Delosa is to see Southern Tech athletics contests (a football game earlier in the year, two basketball games this trip, maybe a baseball game later in the year) and live music shows. The Gulf Country Rock scene isn’t what it used to be, so the pickings are somewhat slimmer than they used to be. Musicians from other cities are less likely to be able to make the trip to Colosse and some have stopped touring altogether.

One exception is Gus Rierson. Rierson was an up-and-comer from back when I was a Colossean, though he hit a ceiling while his wife went on to superstardom (whether you’re a country fan or not, you’re familiar with her work). As she became more successful, he ended up touring less and releasing CDs only when the inspiration struck. I only got to see him a couple times before moving to Deseret. However, the marriage has since fallen apart. Now he seems to be playing in Colosse with such frequency I wonder if he’s actually moved to the city.

I’m sorry his marriage didn’t work out, but I’m looking forward to being able to see him.

The other show I am planning to go to is the New Years Eve show at the Stockpile, my favorite country music bar. The last several years I’ve passed on it because the band that they’ve lined up is one of those Pretty Boy bands that looks great on a CD cover and has some genuinely good recordings but can’t play live to save their life. I left the last couple shows of theirs I’ve attended early and simply listened to their CDs on the way home.

For whatever reason, they lined up an old favorite this time around. I stopped buying his CDs several years ago, though, after a disappointment or two and my interests shifting away from the GCR indy scene. I’m hoping that seeing him live again will spur some new interest in his newer stuff. Even if not, though, I will at least get to hear some of my old favorites.

Things happen, but writing and publishing articles about them are not inevitable.

Such a sweet love story:

What happens when love comes at the wrong time? Carol Anne Riddell and John Partilla met in 2006 in a pre-kindergarten classroom. They both had children attending the same Upper West Side school. They also both had spouses. Part “Brady Bunch” and part “The Scarlet Letter,” their story has played out as fodder for neighborhood gossip. But from their perspective, the drama was as unlikely as it was unstoppable.

Awww. How sweet! Except for the two families destroyed in the process. And making the humiliations public.

Oh, the things we will do (to others) for love…

-{via Unfogged}-

I am back in Delosa for the next couple of weeks. Posting will be a little more intermittent than usual. Some days I may have more than one post, other days I won’t have any. Rather than timing out daily posts in the morning, I am going to simply post observations and links as they come to mind or I run across them, instead of tagging them for future posts, Randomania, or Linkluster. We’ll see how this goes.

Merry Christmas!

Last season, three of the four fattest coaches in FBS (Division I-A, the highest division) college football were fired (Mike Mangino during the season, Weiss and Leach after). This year, the last of the four, Ralph Friedgen, was let go. When Mangino was fired, I wrote the following:

People are willing to put up with a lot when you’re winning or doing a great job. Texas Tech coach Mike Leach can be a weird Mormon Pepperine Law graduate in a part of the country that doesn’t think a whole lot of Mormons and educated people, but as long as he is winning, nobody will care. That’s not to say that it won’t hurt your career when it comes to advancement (like Mangino, Leach doesn’t get the job offers his records would indicate), but you’re not going to lose your job over it without some other justification.

Unfortunately, this applies not only to people with significant attitude problems, but people that for no fault of their own defy people’s perceptions of what they should be. This is where Mangino’s weight comes in. The guy does not look like a coach. He looks like somebody whose only exposure to sports is getting hot and sweaty when standing up to cheer for a team from a college that he never went to.

Of course, people look at the fact that there are obese coaches and black coaches* and suggest this proves that there is no discrimination going on. And further, if Kansas was willing to hire an obese guy, they’re not going to fire someone for being obese, are they? Most likely not. But that doesn’t mean that he is necessarily going to be given the same opportunity to succeed and the same margin of failure.

I didn’t realize at the time that Mike Leach (who was actually the fourth most overweight coach, though to be fair the other three are in a class all my themselves in terms of sheer volume) was going to be fired at the end of the season. Here is a rundown of the success level of each of the four coaches involves:

• Mike Mangino - He had a .510 winning percentage, which is higher than any coach since the 1940’s at Kansas. He produced the first 10-win season in the program’s history, going 12-1 in 2007. In seven seasons, he produced four of the team’s nine winning seasons in the last thirty years. His successor, Turner Gill, posted a 3-9 record this season.
• Charlie Weiss - He was marginally less successful than his two most recent predecessors, posting a .564 winning percentage compared to .583 for Ty Willingham and Bob Davie. His successor, Brian Kelly, posted a 6-6 record this season (bowl game pending).
• Mike Leach - He had a .661 winning percentage, the highest Texas Tech has had since the 1940’s when they were in the Border Conference when they were playing West Texas State and Arizona State Teacher’s College–Flagstaff. He posted 8 or more wins in eight of his ten seasons (a feat only accomplished three other times since 1975) and the program’s only 10+ win season (11-2 in 2008). His successor, Tommy Tuberville, has a 7-5 record this season (bowl game pending).
• Ralph Friedgen - He had a .596 winning percentage, the best the Maryland program has seen since the early 80’s. He was the ACC Coach of the Year this year.

So were these coaches fired for being fat? Not in any individual case. Even so, it’s quite interesting that only the Weiss firing seems strictly justified. Also noteworthy is that Leach and Mangino, despite their extraordinary success, were both regularly passed over when it came to better job opportunities. On the other hand, Maryland seems poised to replace Friedgen with Leach, suggesting that extra heft doesn’t bother them.

With the exception of Weiss (again), they all had another thing in common besides their girth: they didn’t fit in. Mike Leach was not west Texas material. The administration there technically fired him due to some allegations of player mistreatment, but internal memos surfaced that they wanted to fire him the season after he posted the best record Texas Tech has ever seen. Being slim wouldn’t have helped him much, but being less odd would have. He wasn’t the good ole boy that the program wanted. All he did was win games. The same applies to Mangino, whose feat was far more impressive than Leach’s, in my opinion. Neither fit the mold of being the good old ball coach, which both programs believed they were entitled to. Friedgen, on the other hand, very much fits that profile and were he not from New York (and perhaps not so heavy) would almost be exactly what Texas Tech would have looked for. But they wanted the very thing that Texas Tech detested in Leach: a spark of the odd. Someone that draws fans. Because of this, one imagines that they will give Leach more leeway than Friedgen and Texas Tech will give the slim and accented Tommy Tuberville a few more losses than they gave Leach.

Coming from a school with a sporadic football tradition at best, this whole thing is pretty alien to me. In fact, I tend to root against programs that pull stunts like this. Firing a good coach not because they couldn’t win but because they didn’t fit some pre-conceived role of what a coach should be. Absent actual misconduct, let the coach be a Mormon Pirate or a tub of lard.

Ultimately, though, the coaches often seem to become victims of their own success. The schools start thinking that the victories are owed to them. They take them for granted and start thinking that it’s the greatness of the institution and the program rather than the efforts of a single coach. And taking the wins for granted, they start becoming more concerned with how they win. So they become embarrassed by Mike Leach’s defense, or lack thereof (there’s no accident that they hired a defensive coach as his replacement), not thinking that it might be hard to recruit great defensive players to Lubbock. They wonder why Friedgen isn’t drawing from the fickle fan base in Maryland*, nevermind that it’s the fickleness of the fanbase that’s part of the problem. They start thinking that they can get a winning coach with a winning personality, forgetting that any such coach is not likely to want a whole lot to do with them.

Of course, such thinking can really lead you astray. Southern Tech ran into this when, after a string of success with innovative coaches with innovative offenses, the administration started wondering why they couldn’t win the old fashioned way. After years of mediocrity, they found out that the success was not owed to the Packers but was a product of coaches finding the right formula for the right school and changing that formula meant futile efforts to try to out-recruit programs with athletics budgets twice our size. When it happens to other schools, I get a feeling of schadenfreude. Kinda sucked when it happened to mine, though**.

* - I shouldn’t pick on Maryland too much, since the coach they seem to be eyeing is a coach that may well help with attendance and they seem more aware that they need the trickery and weirdness to draw fans and win because they’re not going to do it based on Terp tradition and fanbase. It’s really Kansas that I believe misread the situation the most. Texas Tech falls somewhere in between.

** - The fiasco started before I enrolled, but I happened to be there during the nadir. My high school and college teams both went winless in conference/district my senior years.

This actually isn’t hypothetical, because it happened to a classmate in my college phys-ed class. About a third of our grade was based on overall physical fitness (our ability to run the mile-and-a-half, life weights, and so on), a third based on participation (were you at least trying?) and a third based on classroom work. That second part was also based on physical fitness, to some extent, because you started getting docked whenever you stopped jogging or when you had to call it quits for lack of physical fitness. The classwork was dreadfully easy. Obviously, for someone not in good physical shape, the fitness tests were hard.

My friend-for-a-class Ned was in overall pretty good shape (well, much better shape than me - and I was not a smoker at the time). The thing is that he was a smoker. He could start and stop at will and so for the fitness tests (most specifically the running test which was the hardest) he would actually stop smoking for a few days before the run. So on the jogging test, he kicked my posterior and actually came in 7th (out of 30). He beat me by some margin on every physical test.

When we got our grades, though, I got a B- and he got a C. When he talked to the instructor about this (I was with him to verify that we showed the same effort in class), she said that she docked him because he was a smoker. She’d seen him smoking first thing after class or before class. He smelled of the stuff. In her mind, his smoking was indicative of a lack of commitment to physical health. Ned’s counterpoint was that it was none of her business. He ran the laps, lifted the weights, and did everything he was expected to do. On what basis could she dock him points? She said that his “participation” grade was low because he really wasn’t giving it his all (usually working at the same pace that I did). If it weren’t for the cigarettes, she said, he could have done more. And since smoking was his choice, he lost participation points. And yet I (Will) didn’t, Ned argued, despite showing the exact same effort.

The difference, she argued, was that what was a greater effort for me was less of an effort for him. It’s graded on a curve.

He argued that he was then being punished for being in shape (in terms of effort) more than I was being punished for being out of shape (in terms of fitness challenge performance).

She shrugged it off, saying that physical fitness was about appreciating your body and that there was no sign that somebody didn’t appreciate their body like smoking, and so ultimately he deserved a worse grade than he got. Did he want that? The conversation ended there.

So, the question is, should phys-ed be able to punish someone for being a smoker if it doesn’t show up in their ability to practice and perform? Even though I later became a smoker, I can actually somewhat appreciate her perspective on the matter. Smoking, as compared to excess weight (my problem at the time) is a more binary decision. And as difficult as it is to quit smoking, the quit-success is much higher for smoking than dieting is for overweight people.

On the other hand, it seemed pretty apparent to me that this declaration was pretty arbitrary. She was punishing him for a habit that he found disgusting. Nowhere was it written down that smokers are penalized (beyond the physical toll it takes). Presumably, if it had been written down, he would have at least taken more care not to show up smelling like smoke. Maybe he should have done that anyway to be considerate, but being considerate is not a factor in his grade.

Of course, all of this comes back to the difficulty when it comes to grading people in PE. In no other college course is “effort” graded directly, nor should it be. Or maybe it is, since that’s what attendance grades and a lot of homework assignments are. Ultimately, though, most of your grade is supposed to come from the degree to which you demonstrate mastery over the subject matter. That’s hard to do for PE because you can understand the subject matter of running very, very well and yet still not be able to do it. It’s difficult to make up for lack of ability (over the course of a single semester) with determination and discipline. Most classes, determination and discipline are going to be, if not sufficient to overcome all, at least sufficient to overcome some of it.

And, ultimately, being able to run the 1.5-mile over a period of time isn’t really what people go to college for. Even classes like Comparative Folk Dancing offer something in terms of learning how to communicate ideas (regardless of the frivolity of the subject-matter). I suppose the ability to take care of oneself physically does matter to future employers, but that has to be viewed as a lifetime project and not something you’re going to pick up in class. It’s easy to translate term papers into something useful in the business world, but more difficult to translate squats.

All of this is of course contingent on viewing college as vocational training. I suppose if you disagree with that on a fundamental level, you can view phys-ed as a more abstract good. Of course, those that view college as a sort of a self-improvement thing apart from vocational training are also the types who hate jocks for all of the wedgies they got when they were younger.

An interesting story from the Boston Globe:

Geneva Fielding, a single mother since age 16, has struggled to raise her three energetic boys in the housing projects of Roxbury. Nothing has come easily, least of all money.

Even so, she resisted some years back when neighbors told her about a federal program called SSI that could pay her thousands of dollars a year. The benefit was a lot like welfare, better in many ways, but it came with a catch: To qualify, a child had to be disabled. And if the disability was mental or behavioral — something like ADHD — the child pretty much had to be taking psychotropic drugs.

Fielding never liked the sound of that. She had long believed too many children take such medications, and she avoided them, even as clinicians were putting names to her boys’ troubles: oppositional defiant disorder, depression, ADHD. But then, as bills mounted, friends nudged her about SSI: “Go try.’’

Eventually she did, putting in applications for her two older sons. Neither was on medications; both were rejected. Then last year, school officials persuaded her to let her 10-year-old try a drug for his impulsiveness. Within weeks, his SSI application was approved.

“To get the check,’’ Fielding, 34, has concluded with regret, “you’ve got to medicate the child.’’

There is nothing illegal about what Fielding did — and a lot that is perhaps understandable for a mother in her plight. But her worries and her experience capture, in one case, how this little-scrutinized $10 billion federal disability program has gone seriously astray, becoming an alternative welfare system with troubling built-in incentives that risk harm to children.

I suppose it’s only a sense of ethics that would prevent Fielding from simply throwing the drugs away (and the law from selling them). It’s an interesting dilemma. I don’t have any problem helping out parents with kids that have disabilities. My ex-sorta Delsie ended up marrying a man with a disabled (like, seriously disabled) daughter and even though she’s very positive and upbeat it sounds like a real handful. And really expensive.

Of course, when you implement these programs you always have to be on the lookout for perverse incentives. Whether Fielding is genuinely doing wrong or not is unsure. That’s part of the problem when it comes to issues like ADHD, depression, and other things. With Down Syndrome, it’s an up-or-down thing. A kid with serious autism pretty obviously has something abnormal about them. But a lot of psychological issues are difficult to nail down. There’s no good blood-test and brainscans and the like are expensive and as much a product of learning about disorder (through subjective diagnosis) than objective diagnosis. This has (unfortunately) lead some to believe that the entire disorder (ADHD in this case) is really a “disorder” or simply a product of or metaphor for our times. Or that it’s simply a matter of laziness.

Daniel Carlat is a doctor frustrated with parents coming to him for the reasons cited in the Globe article:

As a psychiatrist besieged by patients asking me to diagnose them with ADHD so that they can get a prescription for Ritalin, I both agree and disagree with Dr. Klass. Yes, there are clearly some patients at the extreme end of the severity spectrum whose brains simply won’t allow them to focus. These are the patients who end up being enrolled in all the “convincing” neurobiology studies outlined by Klass — the studies that suggest that ADHD might involve frontal lobe problems and dopamine deficiencies. But for every child or adult with obvious ADHD, I suspect there are several who have a “soft” or even, yes, a “mythical” version of the disorder.

The prototypical mythical case is the parent of an ADHD child who comes into my office saying that he or she tried their child’s Ritalin and found that suddenly they were incredibly productive at work. “I think I must have ADHD, doc.”

I then have to explain that Ritalin is a version of that old college term-paper completion engine — speed — and that studies show that just about anybody who takes an ADHD drug thinks more quickly and focuses more acutely. That doesn’t mean you have ADHD.

But what does? The inability to really answer that question is as much the problem as SSI, video games, medication nation, and a host of other things. That doesn’t, as Carlat notes, make it entirely mythical. But the ambiguity of it all is pretty problematic. It can be an attractive excuse for failure for some. If your kid having ADHD or not having ADHD is the difference between a few hundred dollars a month and better medical care, it’s not difficult for even honest and well-intentioned parent to determine that their kids probably have it. The ambiguity around diagnosis may make it hard for a psychiatrist to argue otherwise (and they can always find another psychiatrist if they do). It’s really not surprising that people would respond to these incentives. Some are dishonest, some are conflicted like Fielding, but a lot will simply believe what it is advantageous to believe.

I just started listening to the audiobook of Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six. The opening scene involves an airline hijacking. I didn’t need to look up the date to know that it was written before 9/11. The protagonist of the book is CIA Agent John Clark, who happens to be on a plane getting hijacked. I knew instantly that it was written before 9/11 because we enter Clark’s mind and nearly every thought he had was refuted just a few years after it was written. The best thing to do in the event of a hijacking is to sit still (Clark ultimately doesn’t, owing to special circumstances). Smart and capable terrorists don’t hijack planes. Just do what they say, keep your head down, and let the professionals do their job. That was, up until 9/10/01, the conventional wisdom.

Frequent Hit Coffee commenter Peter often criticizes the fliers on the planes from 9/11 for not having risen up as those on United 93 did. I give them a pass for the above reason. It’s difficult to imagine, however, anything approaching that level of compliance in the near-decade since. We’ve learned that the worst thing they can do is not blow up the plane, but rather turn it into a weapon. In which case, not only do you (and everyone on the plane) die, but so do a whole lot of other people (and a nation goes into chaos). Combine that with the reinforced cockpit doors, and while we may have reason to fear terrorism, another 9/11 is not likely to happen no matter what they get on the plane.

I think of this as we deal with the TSA’s new policies. Many on the right are outraged and view this as a manifestation of creeping tyranny, but in many ways it’s simply the next logical step in a walk started by Obama’s predecessor. To be fair, many on the right admit this. Many others argue that this is why we need profiling and the like*. Some argue that we need security like the Israelis have. Many on the left, formerly outraged by the TSA policies when Bush was in charge, argue that these safety measures are required for the public safety (and all argue that profiling is not the way to go about it). To be fair, many on the left are as outraged with Obama as they would be with Bush.

On this debate, I sit on the sidelines, more-or-less. I look at the Israeli system as being non-scalable (Israel has conscription and relatively few airports), exceedingly expensive, and intrusive in a different way. Profiling I view as perhaps effective but something to be avoided. I view the scanners and pat-downs as a few steps too far. Whenever I do mention this, with the exception of some libertarians and ACLU types, I get “Well, how should we keep our airports secure?!”

But really, how secure do we need them to be? There are a lot worse things that terrorists can do than blow up a plane. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be noteworthy and tragic, but the real tragedy occurred because of what they did with the planes. And at some point, you have to look at the relative safety of flying versus driving and say “some risks you’ve got to take.”

Beyond which, I hope that they keep trying to hijack planes. Jokes about TSA incompetence aside, it’s an iffy target at best as most potential targets don’t have the kind of security that we had before 9/11 and hijacking as a method of terrorism was, as John Clark noted, on the decline**. I can’t imagine anything worse than that they bypass airplanes and get creative. They could bomb a levy. Another WTC-style bomb attempt (except, obviously, somewhere else). Murray Federal Building except a bigger target. Or worse yet, they could attempt death by a thousand drops. A man and a boy with a sniper rifle shut down an entire city. A few anthrax letters had the entire US on its heels***. Bomb a bus here, a market there, and they could do some real damage. Not necessarily in the form of a casualty toll, but a psychological one. And that’s what’s really important.

The psychological toll is, perhaps, what the TSA is trying to prevent on planes. I doubt that they haven’t considered what I’ve said above. I’m sure their response would be to imagine the psychological toll of another actual (successful) hijacking. People won’t want to fly. It’s a fair point, but in some ways I think the psychological effect of security theater is worse. They think it screams “Trust us. You’re safe.” but as much as anything I would say that it suggests the opposite. Particularly as they have to justify these procedures and inform us of any and every way that they could hide a Play-to bomb up their arsecrack. The cynical part of me thinks precisely that instilling fear, rather than concern for future fear, is the point. But I guess I’m not that cynical.

* - I was looking for a way not to bring up this word, but I know if I don’t then someone else will. Keep in mind that I am not arguing that this form of security is better than that form of security. Rather, I am arguing that we are too obsessed with security to begin with whether we’re contemplating inconveniencing everyone a little or inconveniencing certain demographics a lot.

** - Prior to 9/11, I struggle to find any flights originating in the US that were hijacked in 20 years. There was an interesting attempt, however, in 1994.

*** - I am reminded of how the band Anthrax hired a letter-opener because, as they put it, “we do not intend to die an ironic death.” Quote of the decade, easily.

On my Loose Change post, I commented “Or maybe they were trying to bribe me to move closer to my job so that I wouldn’t have such a bad commute (something Pam would pester me about).” (Pam being the wife of my boss, the CEO of Wildcat).

This was actually an area where my failure to cash my paychecks would actually come up. Pam was always frustrated with my commute. More frustrated with it than I ever was. I think it was a motherly thing as much as anything else because I can’t think of any instance where my commute actually affected my work. But my daily drive from Midlerth (30 minutes to work, 45 back unless I worked late) wasn’t remotely bad by my standards. Because I avoided the freeways, it was actually predictable, which was worth a little extra time. Before, when I’d lived in La Courneuve, my commute was anywhere from 20 minutes to 60. Usually shorter, but the inconsistency was maddening.

So Pam would pester me about it and I would quite simply say that I needed to have a roommate for financial reasons and that made moving closer to work difficult because he worked in a different part of town (for my former employer, kinda*, Providence Technologies) and we were situated about halfway in between. She would comment that maybe I could afford to get my own place IF I WOULD CASH MY BLEEPING PAYCHECKS (she said bleeping… a lot, she was a very Christian woman). She had a point. It was less than 48 hours after I got my raise before she asked if me this meant that I would finally move closer to work. I hedged, but I was sort of getting the feeling that this might have factored in to my raise.

In actuality, I was already thinking about living on my own. Then it became easier when Karl lost his job at Providence and shortly thereafter took a job at Bregna (leaving a former kinda employer for a future employer), which happened to be right down the street from Wildcat. Also, rent had - in the course of a year and a half - gone up over 50% in Midlerth. So we were looking for a place to live when he started having doubts on account of the fact that Bregna was one of the worst employers on the face of the earth (literally in the top five in the country, according to a survey) and he decided to go back to college. So I started looking for a place on my own. Kind of slowly, though, as I started feeling uncertain in my employment situation. Sure enough, before I found one, I was fired.

One of the first thoughts that went through my mind as I was driving home with my office belongings** and $6000 worth of uncashed checks was how fortunate I was that I had been fired precisely when I was and not a month later when I would have had a new lease to contend with.

* - I worked for a company called Orion Systems, which sold the core of its business to Providence. He was doing for Providence what I had done for Everglade in a collaborative job-arranging effort.

** - This included a motherboard/CPU combo. I am still amazed that he simply believed me when I said that I brought it from home. I can’t remember why I did, but it was genuinely work-related and a pressing enough issue that I just took one of my computers apart in order to test something or another.

Jaybird gets honors for the comment of the day:

Anyway, don’t expect *TOO* much of me on Facebook. I’ve promisciously friended people. Not in the “please help me and get a free cow” sense of the word, but I’ve friended:

High School Friends
Current Friends
Work Friends
and
Relatives

Some of these people are evangelical christians. Some of them are evangelical atheists. Some of them are flaming lefties. Some of them are unreconstructed reactionaries. This means that I can’t say so much as “Happy Easter! Eat the ears of your chocolate bunnies first!” without starting a fight.

The first comment would be “Easter isn’t about chocolate or bunnies, Jay. Christ is Risen! CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED!”
And the second comment would be “HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR MITHRAIC FERTILITY SYMBOLISM!”
And, god knows, the third comment would be “I haven’t had any chocolate since I found out I was diabetic! I am hurt that you weren’t more sensitive in your status today.”

So I generally just talk about movies or videogames or trivial crap about the state of my day.

According to some quiz I took, about half of my friends (that filled out the profile entry) lean in one direction and about a third lean in the other direction with the final sixth being libertarians or other. I don’t know the Christian/Athiest/Other distribution, but I’ve got some loud members of each of the first two. Nearly everybody hates the BCS except one… and, of course, me.

Inspired by Ms Nomore, a collection of shows I greatly enjoyed in my younger years.

For a cartoon, it actually had a pretty fleshed-out world. A bit of the Freak of the Weak plotting, but fun nonetheless. I’m afraid to go back and watch any of it for fear that my fond memories will be tarnished.

Who couldn’t like a kid show about war? I watched a few of my favorite episodes in the run-up to going to see the movie and was pretty deflated by what I saw. It’s amazing the mundane stuff that will touch a child’s imagination. But seriously, who couldn’t like a kid show with guns and crossfire (that never seemed to hit anyone, but still)?

Nothing more need be said.

My friend Clint and I used to watch this one for reasons I do not recall. It was on, I suppose, and Tiffany Brissette and Emily Schulman each became kind of cute, each in their own way. Brissette became a 700 Club Christian. The last I ever saw of Schulman was flipping through channels on Dr Quinn Medicine Woman.

I still play the old Nintendo game from time to time. Darkwing was the inspiration behind the design of a superhero I drew up in junior high.

I was big into private investigators and Chip and Dale were two of my favorite Disney characters, so this was a pretty natural match.

They cracked me up. Still do.

Masks so realistic they’re arresting the wrong guy:

Expensive, realistic masks — the kind that are the hit of the costume party — are increasingly being used out of season, and not always for laughs.

A white bank robber in Ohio recently used a “hyper-realistic” mask manufactured by a small Van Nuys company to disguise himself as a black man, prompting police there to mistakenly arrest an African American man for the crimes.

In October, a 20-year-old Chinese man who wanted asylum in Canada used one of the same company’s masks to transform himself into an elderly white man and slip past airport security in Hong Kong.

Authorities are even starting to think that the so-called Geezer Bandit, a Southern California bank robber believed for months to be an old man, might actually be a younger guy wearing one of the disguises made by SPFXMasks.

News coverage of the incidents has pumped up demand for the masks, which run from $600 to $1,200, according to company owner Rusty Slusser. But he says he’s not happy about it.

“We’re proud of the fact that our masks look real, but I’m not proud of the way they were used,” said Slusser, a 39-year-old former makeup artist. “We’re very embarrassed this has happened. We were shocked that this happened.”

Rotten.com has an amazingly harsh article on Mother Theresa. There are two main things it focuses on. The one it spends the most time on is their perception that she was willing to overlook certain abuses from people who treated her well - Indira Gandhi’s imposition of martial law in India in 1975, the son Sanjay’s program of sterilization for the poor, and the Haitian Duvalier regime given as examples. I’m sure there are other details involved, and I’m sure that she (like many people at the time, and similar to the way in which Castro and Chavez routinely have managed to pull the wool over idiotic hollyweird celebrities with more teeth than brain cells) was duped and would probably have said differently had she not been on the wrong side of the dog-and-pony show.

The second point on which it attacks her is the fact that, following the 1971 war which created Bangladesh, she called out for thousands of raped women not to abort the resulting fetuses. This is one of the ongoing items which tends to be a very hard question to answer: should abortion be allowed/encouraged for a woman impregnated as the result of rape?

The question itself lends a hint as to why it is so hard to answer. The circumstances - the rape, the condition of the mother following rape, the fact that the pregnancy will inevitably remind the woman of what happened in a very obvious way - are nothing but grotesque. Depending on one’s beliefs, the options are no less vile.

On the one hand, you might believe (as do most religions) that “human life begins at conception.” In this case, there are a few very ugly points to consider:
1 - Having to carry to term (or even just long enough for a caesarean or induced labor) means the constant reminder of what happened, which may drive the mother to self-destructive acts, possibly up to suicide.
2 - On the belief that the fetus deserves the full rights of any human being, and as a baby is innocent of the circumstances of its conception, ending its life is at worst outright murder and at best the killing of one innocent to try to save the life of another victim.
The question from this perspective then becomes: what is the risk to the mother, and what are the chances the fetus/baby can be carried to term and then given some form of a life (foster/adoption care, etc) to live?

On the other hand, you might believe (as a sizable portion of the population does) that human life begins at some arbitrary point; when the heart first beats, brainwaves first appear, “when it could survive outside the womb” (which keeps getting earlier and earlier as medical technology advances, and may eventually reach the point where an “artificial womb” could raise a human from zygote to birth without the need of a mother at all), or so on. In that case, the calculation inevitably turns to “get rid of it before it reaches that point, since it was forced into the mother against her will.”

To my perspective, none of the options are (at present time) particularly appealing. Bad choices tend to stem from bad circumstances, and these being particularly bad circumstances, I’m not sure that an agreement could ever be fully reached on the “right” thing to do in general. I don’t necessarily think that her calling out to try to prevent the abortions was either evil, or unjustified (especially by the teachings of her church). Neither am I fully convinced that removing the option entirely, especially for those who might be driven to desperate measures, is necessarily the wisest course.