Semper Fi

(h/t Boston Globe)

So hard to understand

Eight-year-olds like Martin Richard know that "no more hurting people" is where morality starts. Somewhere along the way, adults forget that.

Ray Flynn's second worst endorsement

Ray Flynn thinks Scott Brown (R-whatever Wall St. wants) is a "regular guy." He also thought that pederast-enabling Cardinal Bernard Law should stay in charge of the Boston Archdiocese.

So... Consider the source.

Enjoy your Fourth, and remember

Get a room

[O]ne person’s vision of a cleaner, safer park is another person’s possible civil rights violation. Some are concerned that the patrols may be targeting gay men, who often use the reeds as cover for their trysts.

Some years ago, the SJC ruled, against all reason, that the police could not raid gay hook-up sites along highways, that to send grown-ups indoors for sex is illegal discrimination.

You be the judge: Am I just unsympathetic to claims that amount to a civil right to have sex in public places? Or am I just jealous that I'm not having sex outdoors too?

Hackneyed hackney hacks

It's bad policy to select the technology to meet mileage goals in a cab fleet. The result is what matters, not how it's achieved.

At the same time, the negotiated bargain between cabbies and the city of Boston to allow a fare increase in exchange for agreement to accept hybrids as mandated should now be repealed. They sued to get out of their side of the bargain? Fine. They shouldn't get the extra money.

Prime defect of liberalism

Liberalism has a lot to offer. Its economic results are better than laissez-faire and much better than a command economy. Its core value of fairness extends to everyone; people can be who they are under a liberal government.

The prime defect of liberalism is that it's not simple-minded, and many voters are. If you have to explain anything beyond the superficial to them, they glaze over and vote for the pandering idiot. Conservatives have proven over and over again to be superficial themselves (Sarah Palin) or at least willing to pander in order to win.

Here's an example: Initial reports indicate that English language immersion for non-native speakers is not working for the Boston Public Schools. It was legally mandated by ballot initiative in 2002, and I voted against it.

There are several points to make about this news story:

• The drop-out rate got worse for foreign speakers, but it got worse for native speakers at about the same pace. I suspect the change is mainly the result of better counting.
• Nonetheless, the new law banning traditional bilingual education has not (yet?) lived up to its promise.
• The school system's failure to make better efforts to provide support services is unconscionable and must be remedied. "Once it's the law of the land, it has to be done well," said Miren Uriarte, ... coauthor of the report.

More to the point, the whole debate is filled with extremes that benefit no one. One commenter (probably more) recounts how his father was immersed in English in the 1920s and emerged with no accent. Most stories like this are bullshit seen through rosy lenses of nostalgia. Most people who succeeded this way started very young and had more help than any of their ideologically committed descendants find convenient to admit. Even if some immigrants did succeed at this, that in no way shows that sink or swim is the best way to learn to swim.

The hard fact about bringing immigrants to English is that it's difficult and complicated, not subject to the easy answers that both extremes want - that the nativist, anti-immigrant bigots want most of all. A few facts:

• Immersion works well for young children. They soak up English without much effort. These children become interpreters for their parents.
• Native language support (where the Boston schools are failing) is essential to give older kids a chance. Even so, it's just a chance, not a guarantee.
• Traditional bilingual education is not a guarantee, either.

My observation: Immigrants I've talked to, often in a patois of my broken Spanish and their broken English, may have given up on English fluency for themselves, but they haven't given up on it for their children.

Chances are, if you got here, you're already a liberal. After all, this was complicated and nuanced.

Unthinkable

... but it's still possible that the Boston Globe might vanish. For the record, this would be a very bad thing for Boston and for Massachusetts. It would also be bad for a close friend of mine who draws his paycheck there, not to mention several other staffers I know to one degree or another.

Big Media often get its nose out of joint because we bloggers flay it for various stupidities and cupidities. It takes the attitude, love me, love my mistakes. Or, give me an A+, when all I've really earned is a B-/C+.

The blogosphere wants the good intelligent reporting that Big Media used to do more of, before it decided to dumb down in a vain attempt to be cable news on paper. We know that we need grist. It's just that we like that grist to be factual, instead of laced with bullshit, the way so much of our culture is.

Remedial web journalism

View Larger Map
Dead tree editions need art departments and photographers to put their stories into easy context. The challenge of TV made this true fifty years ago. Before that, if you read in the paper that a developer had given up on a development on Megunko Hill (might be in the neighborhood shown above since the story puts it near the Ashland commuter rail station), you'd better damn well know where Megunko Hill is on your own. Fifty years ago, we started to get spare little map insets - not enough of them since they cost money but quite a few.

Long-time residents may not need the geographic details that the story of Shepard Fairey's arrest calls for. They may all know where the ICA is. On the other hand, the Institute has moved within the time I've lived in greater Boston. And there's no way I could be sure of the location of the alleged tagging, although I could get to the intersection of Mass Ave. and Newbury St.

In fact, although I've lived in the same small suburban town west of Boston for twenty-four years now, I can always use a map for a real estate story like the Ashland story. After all, there's not yet a building to use as a landmark!

Here's a rule that professionals evidently can't seem to get their heads around: Every story that has any geographical significance should include a link to a mapping site, Google Maps or Yahoo or even one of the on-line phone number sites. In fact, newspapers should either spread the wealth or sell exclusive linking to the highest bidder if anyone would pay for it.

The fact that reporters and editors miss this obvious way to make their stories better suggests that even now they are living in a past journalist world that is not coming back.

Update (2/11): I can't claim credit, but someone at the MWDN is trying to get with the 21st century with a Google Map insert in another story.

"Democrat Schwarzenegger"

This sentence is too weirdly framed not to draw a comment:

He is facing a repeat of the financial crisis that undid Gray Davis, former governor, the Democrat Schwarzenegger ousted in a turbulent recall election.

The efforts required to butt Democrat up against Schwarzenegger must have required almost as many steroids as Ahnuld shot up in his firm-man-tittied heyday.

At the very least, any decent editor would have insisted upon "... Democrat whom Schwarzenegger ...". And if whom is too priggish about pronoun case, I don't care, use who or that. But, even better, how about this?

He faces a repeat of the fiscal crisis that he used in 2003 to oust former Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in a turbulent recall election.

Somebody once said, "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity," but this is pretty stupid even for the AP. (And I say that knowing that a good friend, whose name is already in my keyword list, worked for the AP for years without becoming stupid.)

Fourteenth amendment? Never heard of it

The Federal Appeals Court in the Boston district made this breathtaking statement:

The [jury] instructions also erroneously appeared to equate acting based on any perceptions of a person's race or ethnic heritage with illegal discrimination.

Race or ethnic origin of a passenger may, depending on context, be relevant information in the total mix of information raising concerns that transport of a passenger 'might be' inimical to safety.

Congratulations, you've just legalized racial profiling! How'd you like a trip to Disney World?

Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment states:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

This was not the only issue on appeal. Why did the court go this far?

Carnage in perspective

The Boston Globe has a Google mash-up of homicide data for Boston. With a month to go in 2007, there have been 63 homicides in Boston, which is arithmetically convenient for a city of about 630,000 (metro Boston is much bigger). That's a risk of 1 in 10,0000.

More than 40,000 Americans will die in car accidents this year. Thus the risk to all 300 million of us in America of dying in a car accident is substantially greater than 1 in 10,000, more like 1 in 7,000.

No one I know avoids car travel because of this, but the last time I went to Dorchester people who were supposed to go decided it was too risky to spend one day working on a Habitat for Humanity project.

We as a society can't tolerate murder. But unreasoning fear is not going to help us eliminate it.

Red Sox static

What I want to know is this: The team with the second highest payroll in Major League Baseball and the most loyal fan base has a radio "network" that can't give me a consistent signal from any station, much less from a single station, on short trips in Metrowest, less that 30 miles from downtown Boston. Sometimes the New York stations come in better, which is why I got to hear the Yankees' homer announcers wailing, weeping, and gnashing teeth about the plague of insects in Cleveland. Twenty years ago, before a local station took 1120, I could even pull in KMOX out of St. Louis almost as well as WRKO in Boston. Is RKO putting most of their clear-channel power into the freaking ground?

This is important because I expect to be driving home tonight in the middle of World Series game 3, and I'd like to give a listen. Most days, what with Howie Carr and Rush Limbaugh and all the other wingnut bloviators on RKO, I'd really rather hear static.

When something unfair succeeds

The statistical targets in No Child Left Behind are absurd on their face. Steady improvement forever cannot happen, and expecting it is unfair.

However, I have to admit that the federal threat to sanction school systems for poor performance has stimulated significant progress and creativity. The very act of paying attention socially and politically has paid dividends that previous testing regimes (NAEP, for example) did not provide.

So, maybe I need to eat a little crow and reconsider some of my opinions. Maybe fairness is not a vital aspect of the shared goal of bringing everyone forward educationally. On the other hand, the Massachusetts Ed Reform Act of 1993 brought not just the MCAS but also new state funding to local districts, where NCLB did not, and that's one reason that Massachusetts scores first or second of all states on the NAEP.

It is still true that standardized testing is more limiting than a mythical true measure of educational success. But it works at the low end as a gross measure of progress, and that's where America has its greatest educational challenges.

This reminds me a bit of the basic skills movement in the 1970s. Even though the thinking behind that movement was simplistic and tended to dumb down the curriculum, it provoked public school systems to try at least to give their students those foundational abilities. And it did raise minority achievement.

Perhaps the best way to improve our urban public schools is to focus new programs on them periodically, and maybe the focus matters more than what exactly the ideology is. Of course, do this too often and someone's bound to resort to marketing to respond to a real problem. Oh, yeah, already happened - vouchers.

Update: It's statistically astute to start with the lowest achievers. Helping them can do the most to your average scores. But you'd better start young, and Boston has.

Digging the Dig

Once again, the Boston Globe turns over prime newsprint real estate to David D'Alessandro for ... what exactly? A cab ride in London? At least we know D'Alessandro travels and probably that he reads Tom Friedman. I'd guess that the Globe is blessing us with D'Alessandro's boosterish pablum as a nudge-nudge-wink-wink sweetener for all the advertising John Hancock provides.

As they say, the market has already discounted D'Alessandro's pedestrian (heh) analysis. Putting it in print was a waste of readers' time.

More surveillance

Are there any limits?

Change of season

Here in the Boston suburbs, I can still take the dog for a walk at night wearing shorts or short sleeves - but no longer both. Despite the remnants of summer haze veiling everything in the sky but Cygnus, it's time to change from the bittersweet relief of gin and tonic to the sweet smoke of whiskey.

Shame we can't change our leaders so easily. Of course, I'd never drink the rotgut moonshine laced with strychnine that the Bushists represent in the first place.