Brought to you by the letters "P" and "C"

The letter people used to be cool, man.

In kindergarten we were introduced to the letters of the alphabet by way of the 26-member troupe called "The Letter People." The first one introduced was Mr. M, with his munching mouth easily my favorite, followed by Mr. T, of tall teeth fame.

Each was incarnated in an inflatable doll and sang a song according to alliterative theme. My sister and I listened to the compilation tape for years later as bedtime music. Needless to say, they occupy a foundational niche in my brain.

Recent nostalgia led me to order the songs again on eBay and read up on their history. Not surprisingly, the songs didn't age especially well according to my tastes, although I couldn't get "Mr. V's Violet Velvet Vest" out of my head for a few days.

However, it did surprise me to learn that The Letter People were reincarnated in the 90's (the originals had been born in the 70's). As is characteristic of the 90's, the group's character became completely dominated by political correctness, in all of its identity-confusing, parade-raining, life-sucking anti-glory. Peruse if you will the two versions of the group:

Miss A	A'choo	Ms. A	A'choo
Mister B	Beautiful Buttons	Mr. B	Beautiful Buttons
Mister C	Cotton Candy	Mr. C	Colossal Cap
Mister D	Delicious Doughnuts	Mr. D	Dazzling Dance
Miss E	Exercising	Ms. E	Exercise Energy
Mister F	Funny Feet	Ms. F	Funny Feet
Mister G	Gooey Gum	Mr. G	Gooey Gum
Mister H	Horrible Hair	Mr. H	Happy Hair
Miss I*	Itchy Itches; Incredible Inventor	Mr. I	Impossible Inches
Mister J	Jumbled Junk	Ms. J	Jingle Jingle Jacket
Mister K	Kind Kicking	Ms. K	Kaboom Kick
Mister L	Lemon Lollipops	Ms. L	Longest Laugh
Mister M	Munching Mouth	Mr. M	Munching Mouth
Mister N	Noisy Nose	Mr. N	Noisy Nose
Miss O*	Obstinate; Optimistic Optimist	Mr. O	Opposite
Mister P	Pointy Patches	Ms. P	Pointy Patches
Mister Q	Quiet	Mr. Q	Questions
Mister R	Ripping Rubberbands	Mr. R	Rainbow Ribbons
Mister S	Super Socks	Ms. S	Super Socks
Mister T	Tall Teeth	Ms. T	Tall Teeth
Miss U	Upsy-Daisy Umbrella	Ms. U	Unusual Umbrella
Mister V	Violet Velvet Vest	Ms. V	Vegetable Vest
Mister W	Wonderful Wink	Ms. W	Wonderful Words
Mister X	All Wrong (Mixed-Up)	Mr. X	Different
Mister Y	Yawning	Ms. Y	Yodeling Yawn
Mister Z	Zipping Zippers	Mr. Z	Zipping Zippers

Observations:

• The primary difference is in gender. Instead of occupying different, but equally important roles (consonants and vowels), men and women equivalently occupy all roles (13 men and 13 women).
• Along the same lines, marital status of women is not presumed: female characters are "Ms." instead of "Miss."
• Instead of celebrating delicious and delightful treats, healthy food is promoted. Cotton Candy becomes Colossal Cap, Delicious Donuts becomes Dazzling Dance, Lovely Lemon Lollipops becomes Longest Laugh, and Violet Velvet Vest becomes Vegetable Vest.
• Fun and masculine Mr. R of the Ripping Rubber Bands transforms into feminine-at-best, paper-cut-at-worst Rainbow Ribbons. I assume the logic was that kids could hurt themselves with rubber bands, and classroom distractions could not be promoted.
• Hyper-sensitivity over disabilities: instead of being "Mixed Up," which at least contains an "x," Mr. X is simply "Different."
  

To get very concerned would be a bit silly, but the Letter People debacle is a good illustration of how much more than simple academic facts is taught in school from an early age, and of how pervasive the social changes of the last several decades have been.

Response: Morning again in America

My friend Matthew left a thoughtful post about the "joyful shock" felt at President-elect Obama's victory, and the tough-luck reactions of many conservatives.

Well, I'm pretty conservative. I voted for Senator McCain.

Nevertheless, after a few minutes' disappointment* in getting used to the result, I found plenty of bright side about which I could be happy. I was so glad for all of my neighbors who woke me with their celebrating, and for my student with the proud Obama button the next morning, and for the millions of others like them. And a Barack Obama sand sculpture in India can't help but bring a smile.

I was also so very proud of my country and its election process and peaceful transition of power. I keep picturing the tea that George and Laura Bush will have with Barack and Michelle Obama on January 20th.

And I was proud to hold up our new President-elect to my many disappointed students, and to urge that they respect him and pray for him.

All of that said, I'm mildly to moderately concerned about what President-elect Obama and his Congress will do. I think Matthew is right in saying the joy behind the celebration, and much of the reason Obama was elected to begin with, has a lot more to do with an ideal than it does an ideology. But the two are a package deal.

For instance, I think it would be a monstrosity if the Freedom of Choice Act passed. I furthermore don't want to see the nation enact protectionist economic policies that I think would hurt our global friends and us in the long run. I believe that, while our healthcare system needs major reforming, doing anything like socializing it would make things worse. And there are a whole slew of other issues with which I don't really trust the solutions offered by our President-elect and his Democratic colleagues.

All of that said, I'm willing to give him a shot. Indeed, in the spirit of his campaign, I hope to be a more active contributor to my democracy, voicing my concerns along the way. I think those who are particularly misguided are those who hope that Obama fails and fails big now that he's going to be President.

He's my President now, too.

*Interestingly enough, I voted for Kerry in '04 and was quite bummed out by the prospect of a united Republican government. Four years can bring a lot of change, all right.
**On conservatives who quip that America is finished now that it has elected Obama and his Congress, I don't take them too seriously. It's just the mirror image of those who four years ago threatened to move to Canada.

Foul Ball!

If Connie Mack never heard of it, I don't want to hear about it.

Lee Huang pointed me to an op-ed in the New York Times coauthored by unlikely colleagues Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich, and John Kerry. They advocate the creation of a federal institute for "evidence-based" medicine, as opposed to what they call the "experience-based" approach that most of our care is based on now. Basically, that means introducing a lot of hard statistical analysis into practice.

That may well be a fantastic idea,* but I reject the analogy with which they drive their argument: sabermetrics.**

As their story goes, sabermetrics is transforming baseball, propelling to success teams like the Oakland A's of earlier this decade and the Tampa Bay Rays of today. Furthermore, dinosaurs clinging to the old ways, like the Yankees, Mets, and Red Sox, are sitting at home.

I dispute every step of this narrative. Yes, the A's had a good run from 2000 to 2003, but they never even made it to the World Series. And where are they today? They've finished ten games under .500 the past two seasons.

And the Rays? It's true they're in the World Series with baseball's second lowest payroll. But they haven't done so predominantly by getting hidden gems for a steal off of the trade market. Rather, finishing in last place every year continually presented them with favorable positions in the draft. This standing definitely required deft choices in said drafts, which many other teams failed to do, but they certainly had a leg up by being awful year after year.

In short, if the A's' success earlier in the decade and the Rays' success this year is evidence in favor of sabermetrics, why aren't these teams' failures since and before evidence against it?

Now, how about the "dinosaurs" (my word, not theirs). The article implies that the Yankees, Red Sox, Mets, et. al have gotten where they are by following the "old ways." Quite the opposite. My understanding is that the strategy of building a team out of the most expensive free agents year after year is a relatively new one, pioneered by the Yankees in the 90's.

Again, it's true the hazards of such a strategy have been made manifest, in no team more clearly than the Mets. The result is a team full of players past their prime who all want to be stars - in short, a whole equal to less than the sum of its parts. But these hazards are by no means the result of following tradition and intuition.

If you want to look at a truly traditional approach to baseball, look no farther than Charlie Manuel and Pat Gillick, the Phillies' manager and general manager, respectfully. They have 135 years between them. Charlie's following of his gut frustrated Philly fans for years until they realized our team was winning. And Gillick has done the same miracle work here as he did in the early 90's with the (cursed) Toronto Blue Jays and later on with the Seattle Mariners.

And we're about to win the World Series.

So, I cry foul on Beane, Gingrich, and Kerry. They spun a story about baseball to make an analogy with healthcare seem pleasing, when in fact it is a false one. Not surprising, coming from politicians, but not true.

Now, the fact that the analogy is a false one may be irrelevant. But to the extent that it rings true, I would be very cautious about undervaluing a doctor's intuition.

*It probably says something about me that I was far more incensed about the baseball aspect of this article than the healthcare aspect. Sorry, Health and Societies friends.
**Sabermetrics refers to the statistical approach taken by the Oakland A's (under Beane) late in the 90's. They evaluate players using a lot of new-fangled statistics in addition to traditional indicators like batting average, ERA, and intuition.
*** Though unrelated to baseball, I find hard to swallow their statement that the United States has worse health quality than most industrialized nations. There's no question we need to do a lot better, but my (flawed) understanding is that if you're insured here (a big if, I know), you're a whole lot better off than in most other places.

Now there's a news outlet with its priorities straight.

Hats off to The Philadelphia Inquirer:

A Glimpse Into The Future?

According to Fox News, a Canadian woman lost custody of her children for sending her daughter to school twice with a swastika drawn on her arm.

As deplorable as such an act is, it boils down to deeming a mother unfit because of her beliefs. It's not a large leap to see taking away the children of parents who, say, don't take proper action against global warming.

I have read of other disturbing trends in Canada,* such as essentially losing the freedom of speech. As Canada seems in some ways to be the logical progression of trends in the United States today, I wonder if this country isn't far behind.

*Most of what I hear about the Great White North comes from David Warren, who I believe has many true and important things to say.

False Doctrine on the News

I briefly saw a cable news segment tonight criticizing John McCain for his reluctance to offer an on-the-spot opinion on insurance companies which cover medicine for erectile dysfunction but not oral contraceptives. The logic behind this report peeves me.

We're talking about equivalent situations here, right? Many men need medication for erectile dysfunction in order to have sex; many women need oral contraception in order to have sex. Paying for only one situation is a clear case of sexism!

I disagree. In the man's case, there is something wrong with his body, albeit often a natural result of aging.* In the woman's case, the only thing "wrong" with her is fertility. I resent calling this natural state a condition to be methodically subdued.

Americans today would much rather sex and reproduction were two noninteracting spheres, but nature nags otherwise. Many demand contraception to accomplish this divorce and maintain the modern life, but I do not acknowledge a fundamental human right to be barren.

Deeper than the insistence that sex be enjoyed without fear of attachment to another human being, or of the catastrophe that would be creation of new life, is the loud insistence that all people are exactly the same. For decades academics have obsessed over promulgating the worldview that no difference among humans is fundamental, and therefore any existing difference can and should be eradicated.

Society is constructed, they say. Morality is constructed. Emotions are constructed. Gender is constructed. "If it is constructed, then I will demolish it, and build my own."

Vanity and Babel. No amount of scholarly analysis or advance of medicine will bring a man to give birth.

We are stuck with the we that we are.

*I don't necessarily think ED should be covered by insurance. It probably depends on the situation. As my friend Josh puts it, "if a 70-year-old guy wants to pretend he's 40, he can do it without me picking up any of the tab."

Products v. Producers In Action

To see at work the "products vs. producers" framework I described for understanding liberalism and conservatism, check out this comic, which Stefanie sent me:*

La Cucaracha by Lalo Alvarez, 5/31/2008**
Taken and available online from gocomics here.

Liberal viewpoint: Voting for John McCain is equivalent to sending our children to fight in Iraq. As long as there's a war on, our finest will continue to enlist, and some will lose their lives.

Conservative response: No one is sending anyone out to Iraq. Our young men and women enlist of their own accord. The idea of parents registering their children to ship out is laughable and insulting.

*Aren't friends who send you snail mail and newspaper clippings the best?
**I wonder if this strip would be any less effective if the car was removed and only word bubbles remained. Aside from some comedic timing, this hardly seems to qualify as a comic strip.

Are Prostitutes Trafficked?

In a recent post, I discussed liberal and conservative perspectives on how much choice people have in where they end up. I used this framework to analyze debate about prostitution and human trafficking.

While I did my best there to present both viewpoints accurately, I also wanted to set down separately which narrative I find to be more accurate with respect to prostitution.

I'll start by saying that I have far less knowledge in this area than I would like to. This is especially true when talking about circumstances outside the United States. If you feel I am mistaken, I invite you to correct me in the comments section.

As with most things, I think the neither of the two perspectives presented quite captures the truth. However, I will not be so wishy washy as to say that I find both to be equally valid.

Remember that what I presented as the liberal viewpoint says that people's choices are greatly constrained by their circumstances, and in the case of many at the bottom of society, there often are few choices at all. See page seven of the handbook* I listed before for a survey of some circumstances that those who enter prostitution often share. They include childhood sexual abuse, incest, and physical abuse. In addition, the pamphlet cites that the international median age for entry into prostitution is 14.

In other words, many make this choice when they could still be considered children. True, the childhood that in the United States often extends well into the 20's is much different than the standard present many places in the world. But the forces of puberty are reasonably new to all at these ages, and a defining characteristic of young people is their inability to manage such forces well. And abuse greatly warps anyone's ability to manage these forces, let alone children.

So while these girls are capable of making a choice, their ability to choose wisely is heavily impaired. I conclude that circumstances in the lives of the majority of those who enter prostitution make them unfit to make such a choice. In that sense, since these do not have the protectors that they ought, I am willing to call them "trafficked."

Many might say that parents are responsible for protecting children from choices like prostitution, and legislation cannot substitute for good parenting. I agree, but there is another side to the equation. Forces war with parents for influence over children, and in the absence of good parenting these forces often win out.** Legislation can fight against these forces.

So I say, don't look at those who reap prostitutes' wages as men in an illicit business partnership. Look at them as oppressors. Work accordingly. This goes the same for men who use their services.

My reasoning applies specifically to those who become prostitutes at a young age, which figure to be significantly more than half worldwide. Perhaps there is some room in my reasoning for those who both choose to become prostitutes and who should be considered competent for such a choice, and thus in my view are not victims of trafficking. Should we only work against men involved with "trafficked" prostitutes?

In my understanding, no such distinction exists. Pimps and johns do not investigate whether or not prostitutes make their choices from a healthy context. And really, I am quite skeptical that such prostitutes exist in non-negligible amounts. Then, it makes no sense to differentiate between them when deciding how to act.

In short, I am willing to brand all pimps and the like "traffickers." So color me liberal on prostitution.

*From the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women.
**The language of "forces winning out" is synonymous with the language of determinative circumstances in the liberal framework that I described. As I said, while I don't accept this concept wholesale, I think that children are "impaired choosers" and shouldn't be held responsible for choices of such magnitude. In this case it is appropriate to "blame" forces influencing their choices.

Are We Products or Producers?

Politically speaking, Grandma sits on the left, Grandpa sits on the right,

and Aunt Lisa? Well, she's somewhere in between.

Jonathan has thoughts about the nature of the difference between liberal people and conservative people.* He says that conservatives will always take economic growth if it harms no one, while liberals might not want such growth if it led to more inequality.

Another way to look at the difference, hardly new but nonetheless on my mind lately, is in terms of agency. Put crudely, conservatives tend to believe that where a person ends up in life is principally a result of his or her choices, while liberals tend to believe that it is principally a result of his or her circumstances.

Put succinctly, according to liberals we are products of our environment, while according to conservatives we produce our environment.

For example, this past weekend my grandmother lamented that President Bush's policy in Iraq had killed many of our finest young men. In a separate conversation, my grandfather talked about how the Iraq war displayed for one of the first times in history a professional army - in other words, one in which all of the the soldiers have aspired to be there.

A conservative might counter my grandmother by saying that President Bush did not kill these men, but that they chose to enlist in the army fully knowing that they might die. The conservative might go farther by saying my grandmother dishonors the memory of these men by denying that they chose to lay down their lives - calling them victims rather than heroes.

A liberal might counter my grandfather by saying that the choice anyone makes to enlist in the armed forces is constrained by his or her circumstances. In particular, those of lower socioeconomic standing have far fewer alternatives to the military available to them. To many, the possibility of being killed in Iraq may still be lower risk than the next best alternative. Calling what these people face a "choice" may be misleading - sure, the liberal might say, they made the best with what they had to work with, but what they had to work with was not much to begin with.

Another issue in which this narrative plays out is human trafficking. If you are not familiar with the issue you can read this little introduction I wrote at the end of last year. It's basically another word for slavery, or at least that's what advocates say.

Where a lot of controversy comes in is what you actually consider forced labor, and here is where liberal and conservative voices say different things.

Are prostitutes victims of trafficking? Most conservatives would say that in most cases, they're not. The discussion is once again in the language of choice. As one conservative viewpoint puts it, "...women are, in fact, capable of deciding for themselves what they do with their bodies and their time." Far from slaves, they say, prostitutes are prostitutes because they choose to be prostitutes. What's more, conservatives would argue that saying all prostitutes are victims unable to change their situation and thus needing rescue is arrogant, culturally imperialistic, and even dehumanizing.

Liberals would again point to constraints on choice beyond the women's control. Says this handbook, prostitutes "...use their agency every day simply to survive. But their agency is severely limited by the conditions and context of their lives..." Liberals also point to common histories of abuse and the young age at which many enter prostitution as evidence that circumstances are largely deterministic in these women's lives.

Naturally, these different viewpoints give rise to drastically different opinions on how best to address the problem, if you even acknowledge that there is a problem. For one, statistics like the ones thrown out in my article vary widely depending on what you consider trafficking, and policy discussion is heavily influenced by such statistics.

Within policy discussion, conservatives accuse liberals of trying to give an old problem (prostitution) a new name (trafficking) to push through legislation that they would not be able to if they used the old name.

As for the old problem, conservatives might note that prostitution is called "the world's oldest profession" for a reason. It may be lamentable or even deplorable, but it must be called the problem of human nature that it is. They would emphasize that attempts to work against it must be realistic, and branding it something that it is not is counterproductive.

Liberals would say that the age of a problem is a poor excuse for not addressing it. If human trafficking is a new name (the term originated around the 1990's), working against it is no less urgent. They would return to what they view as the root problem: the constraint of prostitutes' choice by circumstances beyond their control, almost the definition of slavery. Liberals would say conservative ideas of choice and prostitution vanish in the face of the experience of actual prostitutes. If prostitution were understood for what it is, they say, it would be possible to work significantly against it and help millions of oppressed women and children.

Such debate is by no means limited to discussions of prostitution. Very similar discussion surrounds other issues within trafficking, most prominently migrant labor. People in poor families often leave home for work elsewhere. This work often requires illegally crossing borders and often takes place in deplorable conditions. Are these people trafficked, even slaves? See above for the gist of the debate.

So there you have it. A great deal of the difference between liberals and conservatives can often be understood in terms of how much control people have in what they do.

Even so, such differences need not keep us from loving one another. After all, my grandparents have been happily married for 53 years. The rest of us should be able to get along.

*One thing I really dislike about the terms "liberal" and "conservative" as nouns is that, particularly in the case of the former, they are often used to dehumanize. It's easier to belittle your opponents (and their arguments) if you overlook their humanity, but there are fairer and more productive ways to have discourse.

Biofuel: Starving the World's Poor Since 2007

I don't have many original thoughts to share regarding the headline, so please read what David Warren has to say on the subject:

A scheme to kill off the world’s poor, through starvation, has already been launched on the advice of environmental “experts,” and is showing promising results.
...
"Biofuel" is the means. By turning much of the planet’s limited arable land, including especially the lower-cost breadbaskets of the Third World, into grain generators for biofuel, the environmental revolution is creating the conditions for famine on a colossal scale.

Any attempt to use corn to replace or even supplement our supply of petroleum is misguided at best. Proponents hope to capture in our crops amounts of energy rivaling the amount pumped cheaply from the ground in the form of petroleum. The problem is that the amount of energy we get from petroleum is much greater (a gallon of gas contains about 31,000 Calories) than the amount of energy we get from food.*

There is simply no hope of finding enough excess energy in our food supply to shift significantly into our petroleum consumption. We've been trying anyway, and (partially) as a result food prices are climbing worldwide, with results that may prove to be nothing short of devastating.

Biofuels are not a new source of energy. They merely reallocate an old, more valuable source of energy. This is completely backwards, yet it continues to be trumpeted as great progress.

To replace our oil consumption, sources of energy that don't originate in oil must be developed. Nuclear power generates energy from mass (E = mc squared, remember), and we have mass in abundance. The sun radiates more energy to us than we would know what to do with if we could only capture it efficiently. Heck, below the earth's surface geothermal forces move entire continents.

We would be much, much better served in learning to better harvest sources like these, none of which need appreciably emit carbon, if that's what you're worried about. Considering petroleum isn't actually running out at present, there is no need to panic. In likelihood we have a few decades to work things out.

And yes, it would make a lot of sense to stop using oil where we don't need to.

There is much to say on this topic, but for now I'll leave it at this: biofuel is the kind of solution that makes your problem worse, like taking a habanero pepper for heartburn. Except instead of getting indigestion, you make basic nourishment considerably more difficult for billions of people to obtain.

A grave, grave error that should be reversed immediately.

*It's true that to grow our food supply we depend on large amounts of fertilizers derived from fossil fuels. This means it makes even less sense to try to convert crops into fuel, since the way we do things now we are converting fuel into crops to begin with.