Happy As Kings

Honk if this is the scenery you'd like to see on your vacation

I-70 between St. Louis and Kansas City is a forest of billboards.  The reason given (that I've seen) for permitting this blight is that business owners will lose customers if billboards don't let travelers know about the companies.  So, how many of you look for fireworks and pole dancers while you're on vacation with your families?  How many of you buy cars on holiday?  Does having kiddies in the car stop you from buying "adult toys" -- presumably for use in your motel room with your kids in the next bed?  Or maybe, the kind of customers the billboards are meant to attract aren't friendly family vacationers.  Way to develop tourism, Missouri.

I took the pictures that make up these images three days ago when returning home from an almost two-week trip.  No other state's stretch of I-70 was this ugly.  

(full disclosure, I wasn't thinking of this blog post while taking photos elsewhere, so the photos are not representative of all the highways BUT we never saw billboards like we saw on Missouri's stretch of I-70)

  Maryland

  West Virginia

 

  Virginia

  Ohio

  Indiana

  Illinois

 

I like coming home to Missouri, but I don't like driving on I-70 to get there.

By the way, this selection is perhaps 3/4s of the images I took, and these are, by no means, all the billboards on the east to west stretch of the road.

Recreational sex

I rarely watch television news, but during this evening's exercise, I did.  When I watch television programs, they're usually DVRed and I skip the commercials. I guess I'm remembering the long-ago assertion that by using cable you'd be paying for your broadcasts and not have to put up with commercial messages, but I digress. 

Tonight, I was able to watch a Cialis commercial and I noticed that the people in the commercial either look as if they're the parents of older teens or college-age students, or at least at the upper end of childbearing years.  Given that, I'm assuming that the uses to which Cialis is intended to be put is for recreational reasons, not so that the couple shown can have more children (if any, since none are ever shown).

Given the outcry from some people [low-end example] about insurance-covered birth control pills meant for women, which allows the women to have sex without the consequence of pregnancy (whether or not that is what the treatment is meant to affect), why is there no similar complaint about insurance coverage for the recreational sex pills for men?

Law & Order's homeschool fixation

A couple of years ago, I stopped watching Law & Order SVU, in part because of the homeschool fixation of the producers and writers of the series.  I almost felt that when "the cellos" kicked in with the suspense music, each time a parent-figure came onscreen, that homeschooling would be part of the story. It wasn't enough that parents-in-general are marginalized by the series -- watch sometime and see who children light up for, who they're shown to be best protected by, who has the kids' best interests at heart (hint:  rarely the parents), but that homeschooling parents in particular are bad guys.  When a series reaches that level of predictability, the theme is a cliché. 

Yes, the crimes of murder and molestation of children happen disproportionally in families, but just because that's where the crimes usually happen doesn't mean that most parents commit such crimes.  After a while, I had enough of Law & Order's viewpoint and stopped spending any time with Olivia and Elliot.

I have not yet stopped watching Law & Order Criminal Intent, but if this series goes the way of SVU, then Mr. D'Onofrio will have to complete the show's final season without this viewer.  Tonight's episode has the homeschooled grad as a political radical, indoctrinated by his single-mother who herself was a '70s counterculture criminal with explosive tendencies. (and I just noticed my kids and I don't have matching wrist tattoos with Korean letters -- have to get on that)  I can tell you, from personal experience, that even kids who graduate from day schools can be strongly influenced by their parents' opinions.

As I've said before, I'd like to see the Law & Order writers feature an observant homeschooled kid who helps solve the crime because she wasn't cooped up in school.  With all the good PR that homeschooling gets, there should be at least one homeschooling family in the nation with a good enough rep to be used on a prime time show as a model for common sense.

Graphically ghastly cop shows

Have all the stories been told? I ask that while acknowledging basic plots, ranging from "a stranger comes to town/the hero goes on a journey" to 20 Master Plots. I understand cop shows use murder as a standard theme -- vicarious excruciating death being one of the strongest stressors a reader identifying with a main character can experience.  With that understanding, I'm finding the programs disturbing. 

A recent episode of Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior featured a killer who dismembered living victims using a bandsaw.  I fast-forwarded through most of the program, and muted other parts.  If I wanted to watch a "chainsaw massacre movie," I'd find an original. (so far, no interest on my part) Tonight's CSI's opening showed one man feeding another man a stew sprinkled with diamond-shredded credit card shards and unidentified gross-looking objects, the impression being, the objects were parts of yet a third person.  Later, the victim was himself shredded. Contemporary R-rated movies I've seen never reached that level of gore, taking into account that I don't seek out violence. Not even the Stieg Larsson trilogy portrayed deaths so disgustingly.

In today's entertainment, are story lines exhausted?  Is carnage required to attract viewers? Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior is already deleted from my DVR queue.  CSI is teetering.

What liberals don't know about guns … and how the NRA kept them from knowing?

Today I saw a piece by a writer whose articles I don't usually read because I prefer a 'dryer' style of writing. I don't get much from articles based on snap and burn, that style of writing produces articles that are too easily refuted. Unfortunately, competing writers can knock down conclusions based on any collection of facts; no writer who wants to be widely read can include everything, and the other writers can choose to highlight omissions to make their own points.

And, oh, the rabbit hole of fact collecting:  "just one more click."  Especially with the Internet, the time needed to break through the surface of collectible information can go on for days if you let it, especially if you do not have a research team.  Then factor in the time for Google-diving in order to delve into hard studies, as well as educating yourself on background so you can read and understand the studies.  I could guess that Internet research is one reason why the eye-drops aisle at the supermarket so big - Systane Ultra is my drug of choice.

Analysts such as George Lakoff say that the writing style of relying on information (such as using statistics and the relationships between them) in order to write articles-that-make-sense results in an epic fail of persuasion for liberals because people identify more with slambook journalism rather than Spockian analysis.  Reading a writer who tells someone he has a pointed head to go with his pointed ears (burn!) is way more amusing than decoding pie charts, graphs and surveys (yawn!).

Regardless of what I like to read, and regardless of how liberals and conservatives write to convince people of their points of view, the article, "What liberals don't know about guns," percolated up to where I could see it:  people must be passing it around.  (you'll have to Google it if you want to read it because I'm not giving the link any traffic)

In the article, Ann Coulter writes, "In a comprehensive study of all public, multiple-shooting incidents in America between 1977 and 1999, the highly regarded economists John Lott and Bill Landes found that concealed-carry laws were the only laws that had any beneficial effect."  Ms. Coulter's reliance on this study for her conclusions jingled a bell - didn't I read something about a scarcity of such studies?  It took a few minutes to hit on the right combination of search terms to find the New York Times articles.  <insert eyedrops>

• "In Firearms Research, Cause Is Often the Missing Element," Michael Luo, 26 January 2011, New York Times
• "N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say," Michael Luo, 25 January 2011, New York Times 

Ms. Coulter referred to a 1997 study by John Lott of Chicago University, and in her article she produces her own small study of the outcomes of attacks by gun-toting mass murderers around the country.  However, in the "missing element" article above, New York Times writer Michael Luo wrote, "Subsequent studies have found serious flaws with Dr. Lott's data and methodology but come up with a range of conclusions - many finding no effect on crime, but some finding it rose slightly."  So, is this a smoking gun to debunk Ms. Coulter's conclusions?  That depends on who you are.

In placing these articles side-by-side, I think that what it comes down to among a general readership is which writer most closely confirms your own belief in the topic.

• Readers who think it is good that we have greater numbers of weapons-on-the street, probably agree with Ms. Coulter.
  (good citizens will work to protect themselves and others)
• Readers who worry that the people who want to carry weapons could (not 'would') include some folks who drive and text while they are cutting others off in traffic and ignoring red lights, probably agree with Mr. Luo.
  (we have too many examples of everyday poor decision-making in traffic alone, much less in Victoria's Secret, to trust todally awesome Josephine Half-caf-soy-latte with a loaded weapon)

Unexamined positive reactions to the articles is called (among other things) "confirmation bias."   It happens to all of us because who has time to research and deconstruct every article each of us reads?

Confirmation bias aside, I think we'll still have trouble deciding whether we'd want our society to regress to a Wild, Wild West model in which VS's new line of clothing is frilly bulletproof undies, or to proceed to a lawless dystopia where only the crooks have guns (or bullets, or butterknives or scissors or letter openers).  Going back to Mr. Luo: "The reality is that even these and other basic questions cannot be fully answered, because not enough research has been done." Both sides are working with data that is more incomplete than is usual in large-scale policy matters.  This subject needs more examination.

No matter who confirms your bias, the story is full of holes.

_________________________________________________________

 

Update

 

Hours after clicking "publish" on this blog entry, I was riding in the car while listening to the book Freakonomics, by Steven D. Levitt.  I was surprised to hear the name John Lott, a reference to his study on carrying concealed weapons, and about how Mr. Lott posed online as a former student of his own, a one, "Mary Rosh."  After arriving home, I Googled Mr. Lott, and the only part of the name I could remember from the passage in Freakonomics, "Mary."

Oh.  My.  Goodness.

• The Mystery of Mary Rosh: How a new form of journalism investigated a gun research riddle, by Julian Sanchez, May 2003, Reason Magazine
• John Lott's Unethical Conduct, by Tim Lambert, 1 February 2009, Deltoid at Scienceblogs.com
• Double Barreled Double Standards, by Chris Mooney, 12 October 2003, Mother Jones

If you need to read more, just Google.

Unschooling in the un-news

ABC News reporter Hyunju "JuJu" Chang has reported once again on unschooling .  This is her second report on unschooling since April 2010 when she filmed a report on the Yablonski-Biegler family.  Her second report features the family of Joe and Dayna Martin.

Critiquing this second report is probably a poor use of time because not only are the subject and the bias not news, they're not new.  Unschooling is so old, cyber-culturally speaking, that the newsletter-magazine devoted to it, Growing Without Schooling shuttered itself in 2001 after 24 years .  As for report-bias, the second report repeated the slant of the first report almost as if the reporter used an outline.  Because of the reach of the program on which it aired, Nightline, many people saw the program, so replies are in order.

Leaving aside unschooling itself, the overall points about the report that come immediately to mind are:    

• sensational presentation
• biased editing
• unnecessary images of school
• reporter's gasps and astonishment

Sensationalist reporting is nothing new, just think of the late 1800s description of 'yellow journalism' .  And sensationalism is almost a requirement in the milieu of 24-hour 'news' channels and 500-channels that must fill their 24 hours of programming with something.  That something must be interesting enough to compete with the programming on the 499 other channels, as well as with daily family life, books, music, movies in the theater and at-home, fitness routines, and the Internet. "Infotainment," as a word dates from 1983 , so that underscores the not-newness of sensationalism.  But even knowing what the network employees are up to, and up against, I find it hard to watch the Nightline segment and then read the online text reports without sputtering, "Wait a minute!"  When the reporter audibly gasps then exclaims at a stay-at-home child's admission that he goes to bed later than the working-mother-reporter's idea of what a child's bedtime should be, that exclamation shows a lack of separation between her reporting and her own opinions.  Or she was hamming.

Keeping the bias in mind is especially important when you're reading a report about something that you're already not inclined to like, such as children who appear 'out of control' .  If 'out of control' kids are the concern, perhaps the reporters should look into the continuing rate of school dropouts, kids who, I presume, are not in a self-directed learning environment with caring parents.  Over the decades the American dropout rate has declined, but it still rests at 8%  of the 16,294,000 high school age teens  (ca. 1,303,520 individuals).

Watching the Nightline report on the Martin family, and the Good Morning America segment featuring the Yablonski-Biegler family confirmed for me why I'm a non-viewer of television news programs:  I recoil at reporters poorly manipulating my thoughts.  I'd react better to a well-planned manipulation that makes me think (which is what most nonfiction writing intends, in one way or another) than to a report that presumes I will go along with sharply edited interviews rolling across the screen in mere seconds-long bursts.

My objections about the editing of the programs stem from seeing the same the 'playbook' particulars within the two reports:

• editing discrepancies between the video report and the written version of each program
• same contrast at the beginning between a schoolroom and kids at home
• same emphasis on 'no X, no Y, in fact no nothing at all!'
• same focus on children's bedtimes when the child is an 'owl' instead of a 'lark'
• same focus on legality
• same truncated interview answers
• same recording of a field trip
• same highlighting of children eating 'wrong' food
• same questions on "what will happen when they're older?"
• same child-quizzing "do you want to go to school?"
• same challenging of the children as to the validity of their feelings and viewpoints

That looks like less like an enquiry and more like a checklist.

One difference between the two programs was of the 'how many homeschoolers are there?' variety.  In the April program, the reporter guessed that parents unschool 150,000 children, but by the June program the reporter had 150,000 families unschooling their kids.  How did the number of children increase so much between April and June?  And why was the quantity the same number?  And, since only 19 states report numbers of homeschooled children, with no breakdown of the unschooled, who supplied the number?  Of course, viewers who see the programs months apart won't distinguish between 'children' and 'families' even if they watched both programs, and even if they remember the number but the questions remain,    

• who put together the number 150,000?
• where did the numbers come from?
• who was that analyst?

Concerning interest in unschooling, the programs could have used different jumping off points - that is, if the producers meant for the programs to inquire into something new to many people.  What these 'news' programs seem to be doing is using the growing freak show television trend, a technique competing hotly with the 'can we shout at people loudly enough to make them cry?' gambit (or maybe gasp them into admitting their social deviance).   Bonus for hyperventilation.

A starting point for reporting on unschooling might be to look at how far schooling itself has branched off from natural learning so that natural learning appears to be radical and irresponsible.  Down through the millennia, people who want to make money from learning have co-opted the process - an example from antiquity being the Sophists .  Today, basic compulsory schooling in America costs over a half-trillion dollars every year.   That's not million with six zeroes, or billion with nine zeroes, but trillion with twelve zeroes. Contrasting an unschooling household with a classroom is comparing two far ends.  The reporter might have contrasted unschooling with school-at-home, summer school, or camp. Will family life without curriculum and classrooms look radical in the shadow of an industry whose yearly cost has twelve zeroes in it?

|<-- If 'just family life' is here …

a half-trillion dollar industry in $1,000 bills face-to-face is about 34 miles thataway -->

Which end is the extreme?

There will always be differences within a group of individuals or among individual data points.    If you line up all the leaves on a tree, some will be lighter, some will be darker, and most will be about the same hue, but you will be able to line them up, lighter to darker.  Same thing with the height of individuals, number of peas per pod, worst-to-best ping pong players and smallest to largest chocolate covered raisins (eat the smaller ones first, save the big ones for last).

Maybe if the USA channel featured the Yablonski-Bieglers and the Martins on a television program the public would find them less threatening.  Too bad that "Characters welcome" turns out in the 'real' world of television to be just a clever tagline.

For information on unschooling, please see: 

• What is unschooling?  
• Unschooling - What's The Real Story  (see comments for discussion)
• Unparenting and unschooling 
• Unschooling Stephanopoulos: Good Morning America Fail
• Unschooling : How Good Morning America Got It All Wrong  

Copyright Valerie Bonham Moon 2010

footnoted article is at: Download 2010 06 Jun 03 critique of ABC News's unschooling reports

Lydia Schatz, via Salon

The Pearls are not "normalized" in the homeschooling circles I'm part of ...

Godly discipline turned deadly, 22 Feb 2010, Salon.com

Because they did not want to admit that a 'normal' home-schooling mom could abuse her child to death, they did not want to admit that a book that has been normalized in home-schooling circles was a factor in the death, ...

 

Copyrighted materials

While my mind was wandering this morning, the eye that never sleeps (sometimes actually) noticed that the blurb on the toothpaste tube, Pepsodent during this shopping cycle, is copyrighted.  Intrigued, the inner homeschooler went looking, and found that the Cortizone 10 left over from the poison ivy incident, the Benadryl cream (bug bites), and the Blistex tube blurbs are similarly copyrighted.

The generic triple antibiotic ointment and the generic 2% allergy cream blurbs are not.

Now, I'm left wondering if it's because of the presence of trademarked names, or specialized ingredients, or ... unique application instructions?  Or maybe high priced lawyers?

In any case, it's a more interesting morning event than finding a spider in your shoe.

All fertilized eggs will become someone great

• Unborn Obama

Point 1:  declining to accept a production for broadcast is not synonymous with banning.  I just watched the advertisement, so it hasn't been "banned."

Point 2:  the implication that all children born to broken homes or in circumstances not conducive to a happy life will overcome the roadblocks in their lives has been around for a while.  The first time I saw this proposition was in a short questionnaire in which the series of negative life circumstances is finished with, "You just aborted Beethoven."

Do you think the same sadness at the loss of Beethoven's work would be feltif we'd lost the work of Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Baby Doc, Jim Jones, Ted Bundy, Mao Tse Tung, Vlad the Impaler, Ivan the Terrible, Saddam Hussein (or his sons), Lucretia Borgia, Typhoid Mary, Lizzie Borden, Ma Barker, Bonnie and Clyde, Al Capone, and others?

My point isn't that abortion is a humdrum non-event when taken out of the personal context, only that the proposition of "abortion kills our future leaders" doesn't hold up logically when the point isn't carried through.  The equation must balance.

Ted Bundy and James Dobson

On a homeschool email list, a concerned member posted a PR-release about an interview by James Dobson of Focus on the Family with Ted Bundy, an infamously notorious serial killer who targeted young women between 1974 and 1978. I was a young woman between 1974 and 1978, so a national crime spree concerning that age group caught my attention, and held it.

The public relations release is curious:

• Why is a 20th anniversary ... observation ... necessary?
• What was Florida-incarcerated Bundy's real motive in talking to a 20-years-ago Coloradan James Dobson instead of someone else? (yes, I've seen the credited reason)
• Are the statements in the press release accurate?
• If it's so important, why did Focus on the Family cancel the public appearance on the Glenn Beck show because it seems that Mr. Beck is a Mormon. (? -- I'm unfamiliar both with Mr. Beck and with the program) If pornography is a national emergency, shouldn't a television host's religious faith be immaterial if our immortal souls are at stake?

I also wonder what application the press release has to homeschooling since I saw the release only on a list meant for local homeschooling parents. I really don't mean to kvetch about what shows up on the list, but the apparent conclusion that anything from Focus on the Family = 'homeschooling concerns' is a niggling pebble-in-a-shoe. [read]-[delete] [read]-[delete] [read]-[delete] [ad infinitum] It also seems petty to send items to the list that I find significant, but that have nothing specific to do with homeschooling. Pointed discussions are discouraged.

=========================

But back to the pornography.

Is the conclusion that pornography leads to evil actions accurate? I don't have any use for pornography,but I also don't like being made to fear things for no good reason because I'm of a slightly nervous temperament, so the fear aspect is personal for me.

I remember when Erich von Däniken's book Chariots of the Gods? was made into a television program in the 1970s. When I watched it in my parent's' living room during one visit (4 channels, no surfing) my husband was sitting on the couch, and I was sitting on the floor between his feet with my back against the couch. Part of the way into the program, my husband startled me by patting me on the shoulder. "It's OK. Calm down. It's just a tv program." I didn't even know I was nervous, and I don't remember believing every single word of the narration. Apparently, though, my body language was obvious, even from the back of my head. I guess, at heart, I'm gullible.

So, do I need to worry about the pornography epidemic? Is a fear-reaction prudent? I hear that pornography is everywhere (especially online -- :::glances around the screen:::) and that I must beware lest I'm trapped in the filth. I wonder about the nudie pictures because I lived in Germany for 18 years and didn't notice rampant sexual violence, while at the same time I did see rampant nekkid ladies (rarely any nekkid fellows);pictured on magazines in the grocery store, and billboard ads with untowelled (non-frontal) families relaxing in their indoor saunas. Then there were the people who changed clothes outside at the swimming pool. Srsly! (I bet Hitler had something to do with it.) How did we escape the vile effects?

Intrigued by the email (gullible, gullible, gullible), I virtually went looking for information, and found a research paper. It is an older paper (in line with the age of James Dobson's interview with Ted Bundy), but the research looks sound.

• Pornography, Sex Crime, and Public Policy, Berl Kutchinsky Professor of Criminology Institute of Criminology and Criminal Science University of Copenhagen Denmark

The paper was part of the proceedings at a criminology conference held by the Australian Institute of Criminology. The page was updated in 2007 (meaning someone still values the information), so I'm happy not to have to sully my hard drive history with more searches for sex crimes.

I don't intend to give the impression that I want to sanitize pornography or give it a Good Housekeeping-style seal of approval (not that the paper does that), so I'll just include brief quotations that seems to reflect my limited observations about differences between sexual attitudes in Germany and in the U.S.:

According to these studies, sex offenders generally reported sexually repressive family backgrounds, immature and inadequate sexual histories and rigid, conservative attitudes towards sexuality.

(I consider this quotation significant because of the suicide of a friend of my sister whose father was like nothing I'd ever heard of before, even though her suicide was by gunshot)

...

At any rate it would seem fair to conclude that overall there could not have been any increase in the actual number of rapes committed in West Germany during the years when pornography was legalised and became widely available.

In this study of the crime statistics in four countries, pornography was not implicated in sex crimes despite James Dobson's assertion ca. minute 4:45.

The paper is just 14 pages long and is readable.

Ted Bundy may have believed that pornography was what fueled his repulsively malignant actions. In the brief look I've taken just now at the online information about him, I would guess that his grandfather's repellent influence had more to do with his character malformation than did looking at 'dirty pictures.' (although, the images must have been a trigger for him -- he would know that)

I find nothing uplifting or useful in pornography, but I don't think it helps matters to blame what is possibly the wrong cause of a social problem that brings such despair to the human spirit. Focusing our efforts in the wrong area only delays finding a solution.