Free Range Kids 4

I forgot to mention earlier that, a 13 year old girl was abducted and raped while walking to a school less than 5 miles away from Iris' school. I learned about it after I started to let her walk on her own. By then, she was so proud of her new independence, I didn't have the heart to dampen her enthusiasm.

Like the last time a similar incident occurred in our area, the rapist targeted a girl in a working class Hispanic neighborhood. Criminals believe that those girls are less likely to be quickly reported missing, giving them more time for a getaway.

Oddly, this incident made national news. I found the story on the website of a Long Island newspaper almost 3000 miles away. Read it there, if you must. Why do you think they ran this story?

No mention is made that more than half the Hispanic American girls born recently will develop type 2 diabetes and suffer early death and disability. Regular exercise, such as walking, can help prevent them from coming down with the disease.

I don't stop Iris if she wants to walk alone to school while I finish the dishes. I do walk a few minutes later, to sign her into after school daycare. I give her a hug while she is lined up with the other students in the schoolyard.

Free Range Kids 3

We were at the Lair of the Golden Bear last week. Iris joined a pack of kids that liked to hang out at the creek and look for critters. (The bug catching kit she received for her last birthday saw heavy action all week.)

I was sitting midway between our cabin and the creek, reading a delicious collection of Alice Munro short stories, when another mother came by. She was shouting the name of her boy, roughly the same age as Iris. They belonged to the same pack of kids down at the creek. She asked if I was Iris' mother.

I replied in the affirmative.

She asked if I knew where her son was.

I looked down at the creek and wave my hand in the general direction. "They were down there a while ago, but I don't see them now."

"You don't know where your daughter is and you are fine with that?"

I stared back uncomprehendingly. I didn't think there was anything wrong with that until she asked in that tone of voice.

She walked off, continuing to shout her son's name.

I thought the point of Lair was to let kids run wild in the woods and around the creek. Besides, Iris was with a pack of 5 "Little Oskis" (6-7 year olds). The creek was running very low due to the drought; the risk of drowning was minimal. Mosquitoes were the biggest problem we encountered at the creek.

Read the other Free Range Kids entries.

Aside:
When one of the "Little Oskis" counselors asked the kids to count off, Iris played a smart @ss.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 3 times 3. The girl next to her fired off 5 plus 5 without skipping a beat. Number 11 looked petrified. I told her it was OK to say 11 because it was a prime. The counselor gave a big sigh and said, "Darn UC Berkeley camp kids". He gave them assigned numbers, starting at the other end of the line.

Free Range Kids 2

If you explore the FreeRangeKids link from my last post, you might have seen How children lost the right to roam in 4 generations.

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.

It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.

Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas's eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.

He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.

This graphic is especially telling.

Free Range Kids

Remember the mom that let her 9 year old take the NYC subway alone? Lenore Skenazy started a movement and a blog. Go visit the FreeRangeKids blog.

Today is the second let her walk to school by herself Tuesday. Last Tuesday, I was running behind and let her walk to school while I finished the dishes. I was going to catch up with her, but discovered she was doing just fine. I hung back to give her the satisfaction of making the whole 3 blocks to school on her own.

Today, I ate a bit slowly so I could use the same excuse. I caught up with her in front of her classroom. She was positively nonchalant about it today.

I watched with smug satisfaction as a neighbor struggled to strap 2 of her 3 kids up in her minivan, both older than Iris, to drive them to the same neighborhood school. We live on a one-way street, pointed away from the school. She lives a block closer to school, only 2 blocks to our 3. Yet, because of the one-way street, she has to drive farther to get the kids to school. I offered to walk her kids to school with me, but she declined.

One boy used to be driven every day by his mother while she was rushing off to work. It was silly because we departed and arrived at the school at the same time. We offered to walk him with us each day, but he declined. His mother said it was because he was too cool to be seen walking with such a little kid (Iris). I noticed that, now that he is in the 5th grade, he is allowed to ride his bike or scooter to school each day on his own.

Another boy on our block also gets driven every day, even though the father says he would be happy to walk his son to school. His said that his wife wouldn't allow them to walk for some reason. We leave at the same time, but we arrive before them. Again, they live closer but drive further because of the one way street.

We used to walk with another mother and child, but the mother had to stop due to health reasons. Hopefully, she will be walking again after her illness.

Now guess which family is Black, Chinese, Hispanic and Jewish.

Bowling 1, Health Care 0

I deeply admire Elizabeth Edwards. She speaks the truth when others pussyfoot around it. Read her Op-Ed piece, Bowling 1, Heath Care 0.

The vigorous press that was deemed an essential part of democracy at our country’s inception is now consigned to smaller venues, to the Internet and, in the mainstream media, to occasional articles. I am not suggesting that every journalist for a mainstream media outlet is neglecting his or her duties to the public. And I know that serious newspapers and magazines run analytical articles, and public television broadcasts longer, more probing segments.

But I am saying that every analysis that is shortened, every corner that is cut, moves us further away from the truth until what is left is the Cliffs Notes of the news, or what I call strobe-light journalism, in which the outlines are accurate enough but we cannot really see the whole picture.

Why aren't we having substantive discussions about the state of our health care system and the way it distorts our markets and private lives? How many people die from lack of access to medical care versus acts of terrorism?

Why, in an election year, is Hillary going on about bitter-gate instead of speaking as thoughtfully and eloquently about health care as she did in 2004's Now Can We Talk About Health Care?

Think for a moment about recent advances in genetic testing. Knowing you are prone to cancer or heart disease or Lou Gehrig's disease may give you a fighting chance. But just try, with that information in hand, to get health insurance in a system without strong protections against discrimination for pre-existing or genetic conditions. Each vaunted scientific breakthrough brings with it new challenges to our health system. But it's not only medicine that is changing. So, too, are the economy, our personal behaviors and our environment. Unless Americans across the political spectrum come together to change our health care system, that system, already buckling under the pressures of today, will collapse with the problems of tomorrow.

Twenty-first-century problems, like genetic mapping, an aging population and globalization, are combining with old problems like skyrocketing costs and skyrocketing numbers of uninsured, to overwhelm the 20th-century system we have inherited.

The way we finance care is so seriously flawed that if we fail to fix it, we face a fiscal disaster that will not only deny quality health care to the uninsured and underinsured but also undermine the capacity of the system to care for even the well insured. For example, if a hospital's trauma center is closed or so crowded that it cannot take any more patients, your insurance card won't help much if you're the one in the freeway accident.

This is a very real worry in LA as one trauma center after another closes for lack of funding. Hospitals are closing their emergency rooms and even the ERs that are open have difficulties finding people willing to work in them. The number of uninsured people in LA is staggering. Each insured person supports another uninsured one. If our ERs are overwhelmed on an ordinary night, what chance do they have in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster like an earthquake? We are all at risk, insured or not.

Why is the media feeding us pap about the candidates' wardrobe and font choices instead of showing us the real differences between their health care plans? OK, anyone can have a plan, but it is another thing to get the nation behind them to carry it out. But maybe we can hear about their very different approaches and core philosophies instead of their haircuts and how much they paid for them. Is that too much to ask from the mainstream media (MSM)?

I will quit ranting now, but do read Elizabeth Edwards and Hillary Clinton in their own words.

You will notice this blog has been notably lacking in sewing and knitting content lately. I had a flare-up and have been resting and reading instead. Mark surprised me with a fantastic convalescent present--more on that later.

When I finished reading Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future by Bill McKibben, my first reaction was that I learned nothing new. On second thought, he makes a good point about the old-fashioned notion that the public airwaves are a shared public resource and the people who run radio and TV stations have a responsibility to the citizenry that grants them the airwaves. I have long shared his opinion, but rarely hear that point of view. (Perhaps because the MSM doesn't want us to notice?)

Overall, Deep Economy is a good read, though I do not share his sanguine view of the future of Bangladesh. OTOH, it is a relief to read good news from Bangladesh amid all the doom and gloom about global warming and sea level rise.

In The Black Swan, Taleb mentioned that he stopped watching TV and reading the day to day news. In the time he saves, he is able to read 2 books a week or 100 books a year. After 20 years, that really adds up.

I resolve to read more, even when my health is going along swimmingly.

Katy emailed me a reading suggestion (The Ten-Year Nap), which I am reading instead of packing. I must put it down. If you read a good book recently, please share in the comments.

(Katy completed a triathlon last weekend and will compete in an even longer one in 2 weeks. She sounds apologetic for not having more sewing projects to share. Go to her blog and congratulate her.)

Weather and Beauty

Speaking of weather and news readers and the importance of looks, Daisy Fuentes got her start in television as the weather personality at WXTV. I found this on her Yahoo movies bio:

A neighbor employed in fashion asked a 16-year-old Fuentes to serve as a substitute for a sick model at a photo shoot, launching a career as a print model. While still a college student and not yet out of teens, she landed a gig as a weather girl at Manhattan's Univision affiliate (WXTV Channel 41). Switching to rival Telemundo, she graduated to news reader.

Yes, she became a news anchor at 19 while still a college student.

Years ago, she was interviewed on a late night talk show. I was surprised to learn that she wasn't given a weather forecast to read; she had to write her own forecasts. She was worried about appearing like a fool, so she would buy several newspapers and read all the weather forecasts. She then forecast the average of the temperatures she read. She had stumbled upon ensemble forecasting!

She designs clothes, too.

Speaking of the importance of looks

In monetary terms, beauty pays more than anything.

Read the rest of the interview with Isabella Rossellini.

They've got our daughters

I discovered this in my room last year. Look at the beautiful adolescent girl on the left--she looks like Iris in another 7 years. Look how she has "improved" herself with the help of myscene.com (a division of Mattel, the folks who brought us Barbie).
I asked her why she did this. She replied because it makes her look prettier. I was at a total loss for words.

The blogosphere is not at a loss for words about this book. I agree with some who believe that Newsweek ran the story just to drive traffic to their site. Hey, it worked. A friend emailed me the link and I read it, and now I am linking to it. But consider reading these more thoughtful responses instead:

• New children's book takes on mommy's plastic surgery by Leanne Italie
• Mommy, is that you? New children's book for coping with Mom's plastic surgery by Monica Corcoran
• Newsweek, beautiful mommies & cosmetic surgeon & author, Michael Salzhauer by Writes Like She Talks
• On TV: Botox. Face-lifts. Reconstructive Surgery. by Mary McNamara
  

Do follow the link at the end of Italie's article to American Society of Plastic Surgeons: http://www.plasticsurgery.org/media/statistics. The statistics speak for themselves. 347,524 breast augmentations were performed in the US in 2007, 10,505 on girls 13-19. (786,911 people were injected with Botox, 11,023 of them children 13-19.) What are we teaching our children?

As I have written before, the spread of breast implants follows the pattern of a socially communicable disease. We pick up our notions of "normal" from those around us, sometimes with tragic consequences.

Those are not adults auditioning for a role in a porn movie. These are mainstream Florida teenagers. The one on the left, Stephanie Kuleba, died after undergoing corrective surgery for a prior breast augmentation. She was 18.

Our eyes adjust. As our hair darkens with age, we think nothing of lightning it. Everyone else does it. Blonding is now a verb and I read in Vogue (years ago) that blonding was responsible for 85% of the revenue of NYC salons. Why didn't she stop there?

I wonder how her parents feel? We all make mistakes, but few are fatal. I share their Universal Sorrow.

Let's teach our daughters well.

Serenity now. Let's knit some lace.

Lace Ribbon Scarf from Spring 2008 Knitty out of Blue Sky Alpaca Silk. Notice that the lace repeat is fewer than 20.

False Choices and Jargon

Oonae over at Hopeless but not serious wrote about jargon in academic language in Simple problems, complex solutions. She dissected Russell Jacoby's jargon-filled rant against the use of false “binary oppositions”.

I have been ruminating about both issues (and bullshit) lately.

Why are we either "working moms" or "stay at home moms"? Why are mothers forced to choose? Why do employers demand "ideal workers" who can work at any hour and travel any where at the drop of a hat? Why do most men feel entitled to put their careers ahead of their partner's? All those shirked duties have to get done and who do you think picks up the pieces and keeps the family going?

It's not bad enough that Silda Spitzer felt that she had to quit her demanding job when her husband ran for higher office, but we have to hold her painful and private choices up for ridicule. Read Linda Hirshman's incredibly mean-spirited and unfair attack on Silda Spitzer. I've blogged about Linda Hirshman before, and I agree with her on some issues, but this is beyond the pale.

For those of us who live in the "reality-based community", you may want to read Debating Whether "Stay-At-Home Mom" Is A Worthwhile Profession for levity. (Thanks to Laura at 11D for pointing out this link.) Here is an excerpt but you should read the whole thing.

John Hawkins: I don't know. My last job before I went into blogging was doing tech support. One day they had a big meeting and told us they were laying us all off -- but, we could take huge cuts in salary and benefits to stay on. I said, "no, thanks." That's a bad break. She had a bad break, too.

I see being a stay at home mom as an honorable profession, one that is as good as pretty much any other. It's not everybody's cup of tea, but I think it's a great choice for the women who want and are able to do it.

Allison Sommer: Yeah, but you can take your skills and experience elsewhere. It's harder for a 50-year-old woman to do a lot with her "resume" of bearing someone's kids and running their house and giving dinner parties for their friends.

John Hawkins: True. But, there's more to life than having a nice resume when you are 50 years old.

Allison Sommer: I also think it's a totally legit life choice to be respected, particularly when the kids are small and school age. But I see it as a very problematic way to make it a lifetime career, profession, whatever.

John Hawkins: Depends on your marriage situation.

Allison Sommer: Exactly. Which is why girls should not be raised to bank on it as a "career choice."

John Hawkins: There are probably more women who succeeded in that "career choice" than any other world wide and in the US, over any period in history. That doesn't mean the other ones are bad, or that stay-at-home-mom is the best for everyone, but it works out very well for a lot of women.

Allison Sommer: Depends on your definition of success.

The part about his last job explains everything.

Another false choice harms both scientists who are mothers and our nation as a whole. If you follow the hand-wringing about the lack of females in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields, you are familiar with the "pipeline" analogy. Much ado is made of putting more girls in the pipeline to increase output of women at the end. Actually, the situation is more acute than that. We possibly don't have enough people of any gender willing to enter the pipeline. And the pipeline is extremely leaky.

If we want to rectify the situation, maybe we can start with the way we frame the problem. Who wants to be the output of a pipeline? Why are there no efforts to bring people who have left STEM to come back to work in those fields? Instead, we just import more indentured servants on H1B visas which moves the benchmark "ideal worker" even further away from the reality of working parents.

Wow, this post got long. I will have to write about jargon in a separate post.

Aside:
Do you remember the days when tech support calls from the US were answered in the US? Often they were answered by mothers working at home with young children. (One could hear the occasional child competing for attention at the other end of the call.)

The companies set them up with an extra phone line and a computerized database of common questions and answers. The women could set their status as available or unavailable and calls to 800 customer service lines were automatically routed to workers who set their status as available. They were paid for the time they worked.

Occasionally, when the women collected enough good customer reviews and their children were older, they moved into higher level troubleshooting positions that required more skill and training.

Where are those jobs now?

The truth about bullshit

I kept Iris out past 10 pm on a weeknight because we both got lost in our reading at Border's.

What was I reading? I read several chapters of Laura Penny's rant, Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit. I've been really cranky of late. Reading the hilarious and on-target observations of another crank probably wasn't the best way to get over it.

I then perused some of the current magazines. Oh, my. My bullshit radar went full tilt.

Did you read the Norwich Notes about "Reclaiming children's parties" on page 148 of the April issue of Vogue? I wasn't sure if he was sincere or satirical. The column ostensibly argues that the over-the-top NYC and LA children's birthday parties are so passe. Garden parties at home are now de rigueur.

Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece¹ is shown with her brood at a tea-party in their garden in New York. How lovely.

Jessica Seinfeld² talked about a garden party she gave in which the children painted ceramic pots and planted herbs and flowers which they could take home to plant in their yard or a community garden.

Amanda Brooks took the cake with her description of keeping it real. She suggested forming a ring of hay bales (she prefers the Italian kind) and holding games inside, perhaps with a castle and a wrangler with animals. Add a bouncy house--what more could you need?

For starters, these women live in NYC and/or LA. Having a garden large enough to hold a garden party in either locale is the ultimate status symbol. Who are they kidding?

[1] Another whopper would be calling yourself the crown princess of a country that does not recognize a monarchy. In fact, her husband's family is not even welcome in Greece.

[2] Though calling Jessica Seinfeld a cookbook author also stretches the truth.

Links:
Lie to your children--it's good for them about the terrible premise behind both Jessica Seinfeld's and Missy Chase Lapine's cookbooks.
Lies, damn lies and statistics by moi. Apparently, my crankiness is not a recent development.

Pining for a (purportedly) simpler time

Mardel brings up the point about nostalgia for a purportedly simpler and better time. David Pogue recently blogged about that in How Dangerous Is the Internet for Children? Bad Dad and I wholeheartedly agree.

Iris and I look up things on the internet at least once a day. We shop via internet. She communicates with her aunts via the internet. She even takes a math class via the internet. She has also become a critical reader about things she reads on the internet. She will point out claims that are "marketing" and not true.

KGOY Kids Getting Old Younger

cosmetic companies and retailers increasingly aim their sophisticated products and service packages squarely at 6- to 9-year-olds, who are being transformed into savvy beauty consumers before they’re out of elementary school.

Read more in Never Too Young for That First Pedicure.

Why would you bring your child into a smelly salon? Why would you deliberately expose your children to toxic chemicals? Why is our society so obsessed with nails that nail salons would pop up in every strip mall? Why do we subject poor women who work in nail salons to the chemicals without a gas mask?

(I know the women know that their job makes them sick. They wear the gauze masks thinking that it offers them protection, but it doesn't do anything against the fumes.)

Look at this winning high school science project.

Michael Ding, 16, a junior at Glen Cove High School in Glen Cove, N.Y., decided on his study topic "after my mother complained about feeling dizzy after using nail polish." Ding found that 59 percent of nail products in three drugstores he canvassed contained ingredients known to be harmful to health. Moreover, one in eight nail products had no list of ingredients, in violation of Food and Drug Administration regulations.

Ding interviewed 239 girls at his high school and found that a third had experienced dizziness, nausea, allergies or headaches after applying nail polish. He also found that a third began painting their nails before they were 6 years old.

Aside:
It snowed tonight. At sea level in Virginia Beach! What a time to lose my gloves. Brrr.

Tonight, I sought out a non-smoking restaurant. Last night, I ate in a restaurant that was so smoky, I had to take a shower and wash my hair right away. Because I couldn't stand the offgassing from my clothes, I washed everything I wore except for my coat in the bathroom sink. I put my coat on the balcony to air out. I miss California.

It has been a very productive meeting, though.

Marketing to your target demographic

One particularly revealing passage may surprise some readers about how well-refined political campaigns have become in their research and determining our political leanings and distastes from seemingly superficial tastes. This enables them to "micro-target" messages to numerous niches, which is what is invisibly going on right now and will continue through Nov. 4.

Read about it at Top of the Ticket, the LA Times politics blog.

Speaking of marketing niches, take a look at the Community Tapestry data at ESRI.

Community Tapestry, ESRI's market segmentation system, classifies U.S. neighborhoods into 65 segments based on their socioeconomic and demographic composition. Segmentation explains customer diversity, describes lifestyles and lifestages, and incorporates a wide range of data such as demographic, business, and market potential data.

Type in a zip code. Type in the zip code of everyone you know! It is more entertaining than Tarot.

They are very good at their specialty, gathering and interpreting information. They glean all this from publicly available records and leased magazine subscriber databases.

In 2002, they acquired CACI Marketing Systems, of ACORN market segmentation fame. CACI may also sound familiar to people who followed the events at Abu Ghraib.

CACI International Inc. could be barred from future federal contracts, following revelations that Army officials hired prison interrogators for Iraq from CACI using a computer services contract that the Interior Department administered.

But it looks like the high-stress interrogations were done by the part of CACI that ESRI did not buy. Whew.

Information gathering is a murky business.

The Slow Life and Fast Filesharing

Grandma Ann's comment to The Slow Life brought up an interesting point:

How about Slow Music, too? That's where you spend years learning to play an instrument so you can entertain your friends and family, but most of all yourself, with your own music every day. Get others to join you and have loads of fun!

I have always wondered if musicians are as likely to illegally download copyrighted music files as "laymen". If you have worked years to hone a skill, do you honor the right of someone else to make a living off their skill? Someone else studied this phenomenon and concluded that, unfortunately, musicians are actually slightly more likely to illegally download music. Oh, well.

I think about this more than the average person. I don't really make a product. I live by my wits. I am only worth what people will pay me for my analysis. Respect for intellectual property and copyright law matter to me. Of course, having reasonable IP and copyright laws that are worth upholding are also important to me. We live in interesting times.

If you have access to Ravelry, have you been following the forum about the $94 neckwarmer (stockinette tube)? It has evolved into an interesting discussion about the value of skills like hand knitting and designing. There are 370 posts so far!

The Spirit of the Season

Taken outside Macy's in Torrance at lunch yesterday.

Speechless no more

Remember Speechless? I can finally articulate why I find the toy package so disturbing.

In Richard Florida's book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life, he argues that about 38 million Americans constitute a "Creative Class" that creates ideas for a living. I count myself as one of them.

In his Rant chapter, he described how "creatives" do not see a distinction between work and their "real" lives. Working merely as a means to consume later is anathema to us. I would further add, trading your lifeblood for consuming crap is tragic.

What are women for?

I have quit weeping sniveling and am busily doing research and gathering materials for our big meeting with the school officials in two weeks. I am aghast at the number of "experts" that have suggested that I quit work and home school. Not one suggested that my husband do the same.

She is a girl. I, too, was a girl, full of idealism and spatial skills that rarely occur in nature, much less in the same person. ;-) Through much effort and expense, I trained for my dream career, performing environmental science research in the public interest.

Like I wrote in The Mommy Wars,

One point that is not discussed much is the obligation that women in traditionally male occupations feel to not let down the women coming up after them. Throughout my education, I heard comments about how so and so (professors) had a point in not supporting female graduate students because women were going to quit science anyway when they had kids. Thus, scarce resources were preserved for men who would presumably stay in science. Therefore, if we quit, then we will prove those people right and make it more difficult for younger women.

While I was ill last month, I watched Raise the Red Lantern. Read a description of the movie and the criticism about 'Confusion Ethics' here. The wives depicted in the movie have value only as bearers of male children.

What was the point of educating me if I were to quit (paid, market) work now? What is the point of educating my daughter? Why go through this charade cycle if our only value to society is when we bear a male child/future worker? (Hopefully, one that shares our spatial and analytical reasoning skills.)

Fear

I had lunch with some coworkers and a woman from another company yesterday. She was early in her second trimester, but afraid to ask her company about maternity benefits out of fear.

Why must she be so afraid?

Remember the post, Why don't smart people reproduce?

This woman had recently earned a PhD after many years of struggle with a research project that was more complex than originally believed. (Is there any other type of PhD research project?) Throw in some family tragedy that also slowed progress. If she wants children, she can't put it off any longer.

The birth of a first child, any planned and hoped for child, should be a joyous occasion. Additionally, I would like to see more smart and nice people like this woman and her husband in this world. Why does she have to be made to feel like a criminal?

I have a whole series of posts about birthrates, but What do I tell her? is most especially pertinent.

More statistic manipulation

Read Japan's police see no evil to learn the secret behind Japan's low murder rate. Bad things don't happen if we ignore them.

People are literally getting away with murder.

Police discourage autopsies that might reveal a higher homicide rate in their jurisdiction, and pressure doctors to attribute unnatural deaths to health reasons, usually heart failure, the group alleges. Odds are, it says, that people are getting away with murder in Japan, a country that officially claims one of the lowest per capita homicide rates in the world.

On this side of the world, a rape occurred at our local community college. A female student was grabbed from behind and raped at knifepoint as she left a class. Read El Camino College student assaulted. In the news story, El Camino College (ECC) Police Chief Steve Port said [that] there had been no sexual assaults on campus over the last three years.

"I've talked to sergeants and they can't remember when or if this has happened over the last 10 years, so this is very extraordinary," Port said.

That's another tricky statistic. A former student there told me that men would grab and grope her as she left class there. The men wait outside the classrooms for the women to exit. She fought them off and reported it to the campus police. They told her that boys will be boys. They also told her that, with her figure, she should wear baggy clothes. Of course, they did not take down a report. Once, she was assaulted in this manner while a campus police officer watched and did nothing.

Does being grabbed from behind and being groped while leaving class every day count as sexual assault? In how many ways does the ECC Police condone violence against women? Did the 'boys will be boys' environment that the ECC Police fostered help lead to an escalation of violence against women? Were there more unreported incidents because women knew they would get no help from the police?

No sexual asssaults on campus in the last three years indeed.

"It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

The ghosts among us, Part II

Speaking of the ghosts among us the recent fires have illuminated some of our dirty laundry. We like to keep our insatiable need for cheap, exploitable labor and throwaway people neatly hidden.

The NY Times wrote about how the Glare of Fires Pulls Migrants From Shadows.

Ms. Trujillo and others who help the immigrants said they saw several out in the fields as the fires approached and ash fell on them. She said many were afraid to lose their (agricultural) jobs.

“There were Mercedeses and Jaguars pulling out, people evacuating, and the migrants were still working,” said Enrique Morones, who takes food and blankets to the immigrants’ camps. “It’s outrageous.”

Some of the illegal workers who sought help from the authorities were arrested and deported. Opponents of illegal immigration, including civilian border watch groups, seized on news that immigrants had been detained at the Qualcomm Stadium evacuation center as evidence of trouble that illegal immigrants cause.

The Border Patrol also arrested scores of illegal immigrants made visible by the fires. Agent Fisher of the Border Patrol said 100 had been arrested since the fires started Sunday.

Migrants hide in the canyons at the urban-wildland interface. It appears that many (perhaps most) of the fatalities last week were migrants burned alive in their hiding places. Their remains are being found as the fires are slowly conquered.

Also don't miss another article, Rethinking Fire Policy in the Tinderbox. Here's a graphic from the story.

People outside this region are often not aware that LA is a broad basin ringed by mountain ranges. The basin is built out. The growth has largely been in canyons or in the mountains, at the urban-wildland interface (shown in yellow). The only reason that LA county's percentage is not as high as those of neighboring counties is because of urban infill developments such as the townhouse I call home.

I have mixed feelings about urban infill. I am collecting photos and other supporting documentation for a long post later.

You may want to visit Volker Radeloff's website. He collected the land category data for the map above. His website has a link to the paper, The Wildland Urban Interface in the United States.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), Radeloff and Yi-Fu Tuan are both at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Tuan writes short essays in "Dear Colleague" format. I don't always agree with him, but I enjoy reading him from time to time. When I reread him, I discover thoughts and ideas that I didn't see upon earlier reading. I highly recommend his website! I found this in his archives about the difference between science and magic.

Magic is knowledge and knowledge is power. Magic is full of esoteric knowledge, backed by test tubes, burners, and bubbling liquids, the end of which is power—that is, the ability to change the world or navigate effectively in it. In the sixteenth century came science, toted with great vigor by Francis Bacon. To him, science and not magic is knowledge and power. In the end, as we all know, science displaced magic, not because its knowledge is more esoteric or because it has fancier test tubes or because it is backed by a more prestigious social network, but because it has triumphed in the one area that truly matters to people—power.

At the end of this particular essay, he cautions against studying systems just so we can mess with change them.

Magic predates science. But so did something else—wisdom. Wisdom strove for knowledge about reality, but not so much to gain mastery over it as to enable humans to adapt. Ecological science is thus more like ancient wisdom than it is like modern, technology-driven science. The word "community," which frequently crops up in ecology, suggests that one studies it not to control or change it to something better, but rather the opposite, to preserve or restore it. When "human" is added to ecology, as in human ecology, the word "community" is retained, and with such retention, the implied conservative posture of wisdom. Political ecology, on the other hand, is more dynamic. Implied is a need to alter the socio-political structure of a community. Alter to what? Do ecologists say that a mangrove swamp or a tropical rainforest ought to be something ecologically better? No. But political ecologists do say of any existent human community that, yes, it can and ought to be better. Ecology is like old-fashioned wisdom in that it studies what exists and how creatures ought to adjust and adapt. By comparison, political ecology is more power driven, and is in this regard like modern science. On the other hand, the power it interests itself in is not physical power, like the ability to throw things, but rather socio-political power. So what is political ecology? A science, a wisdom, an ideology? All of the above, none of the above?