The New York Times has a ‘Holiday Gift Guide’, with pages covering all kinds of things, from the “10 best books of 2009″ to “Holiday DVD’s” [sic] to ’smartphones’ from each of the major carriers in the U.S.

And then they have a page of gift ideas for colored people.

Oh, no, wait, pardon me. ‘Colored people’ is of course a euphemism from the 1800s that is now considered fairly offensive. The Times‘ gift guide is for ‘people of color’, which is somehow different even though the entire point of the phrase is to lump together people of drastically different histories and cultures and pretend that they’re the same thing. Because doing this is not, somehow, racist. Yeah, whatever.

What do ‘colored people’ like, according to the New York Times? Apparently:

• Children’s books about Barack Obama
• Children’s books about Sonya Sotomayor
• ‘Wise Latina’ t-shirts
• Gospel cruises
• Bindya scarves
• ‘Baby Jamz’, a ‘hip-hop and rhythm-based toy line’ that includes a ‘Mix Master Music Chair that allows children to be their own D.J.’s’ [sic] and a ‘Jammin’ Microphone’.

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

And while scores at Hanna Woods [Elementary School] have improved over the last few years, the gains have not been good enough for the federal government. The [No Child Left Behind] law, enacted in 2002, requires states to set testing goals that get tougher every year. By 2014, every student in the nation, including the poor, minority and disabled, is expected to pass all tests.

You will note that the decidedly left-wing Post-Dispatch more or less equates being a ‘minority’ with being disabled or with being poor — and certainly with being too stupid to pass the tests. Every student — even black ones — will be expected to pass the tests: goodness! The Post does not say so directly, but the tone of the thing makes it clear that they believe that reading and basic arithmetic is pretty much beyond the abilities of most ‘minority’ students. Lovely outlook, that.

From the Washington Post, in an article about the ‘digital divide’ and how it’s harming schoolkids:

But even in Fairfax, the digital divide lives on in the study carrels of the Woodrow Wilson public library in the Falls Church area. Most afternoons, it is crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families using the computers.

It’s crowded with students from low-income or immigrant families. All those Indian anesthesiologists, Chinese engineers, Korean entrepreneurs, not buying computers for their kids even though they can afford it. Oh, wait, they do buy computers because they can afford it. Certainly many immigrants are relatively poor; but it’s interesting that the story equates being an immigrant and being poor. A better newspaper would have written that the libraries attract ’students from low-income families, many of them recent immigrants.’

The USDA released its annual report on Food Security (i.e. whether people can secure enough food to eat, not whether Chef Boyardee is an Al Qaeda mole) this week, and the media have temporarily stopped writing stories about the crisis of Obesity among the poor to write stories about how the real problem is that they’re starving.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith approaches his job of revising The Times to ensure that the government’s predictions always can be shown to have been accurate:

For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, marked the figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps half the population of Oceania went barefoot.

We seem to be living in a kind of strange mirror image of Oceania here, where everyone has a different pair of boots for every day of the week but where the newspapers are full of hand-wringing editorials about the boot shortage.

The New York Times reports on the USDA Food Security Report:

Hunger in U.S. at a 14-Year High

WASHINGTON — The number of Americans who lived in households that lacked consistent access to adequate food soared last year, to 49 million, the highest since the government began tracking what it calls “food insecurity” 14 years ago, the Department of Agriculture reported Monday.

The important thing here is to note that the Times uses the common and easily understood word ‘hunger’ in the headline; but the lede backs off from this quite a bit, putting the actual thing being measured in quotes, and interjecting a ‘what it calls’. It seems to have occurred to someone at the Times that what is at an all-time high is not hunger, exactly.

A better headline, really, would be: Some People Too Stupid To Use Food Stamps because there’s absolutely no reason for anyone in the United States not to have enough to eat. If your income is $0, the government will feed you. If your income is greater than $0 but less than an amount that’s almost impossible to figure accurately, the government will partially feed you.

The Times again:

About a third of these struggling households had what the researchers called “very low food security,” meaning lack of money forced members to skip meals, cut portions or otherwise forgo food at some point in the year.

The other two-thirds typically had enough to eat, but only by eating cheaper or less varied foods, relying on government aid like food stamps, or visiting food pantries and soup kitchens.

It falls to Tino to do the reporting that, for whatever reason, the New York Times won’t, and explain what these terms mean.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has four categories for ‘food security’:

1. High Food Security
   Pretty much what it says. USDA says ‘no reported indications’ of food access problems.
2. Marginal Food Security
   Basically: anxiety. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of changes in diets or food intake.’
3. Low Food Security
   Poor. Buying store brands. USDA: ‘Little or no indication of reduced food intake.’
4. Very Low Food Security
   USDA says: ‘Reports of multiple indications of disrupted eating patterns and reduced food intake.’

You are sorted into these categories based on your answers to the questions in this survey. The questions are like:

I worried whether my food would run out before I got money to buy more: Often, sometimes, never

I couldn’t afford to eat balanced meals: Often, sometimes, never

In the last 12 months, did you ever cut the size of your meals or skip meals because there wasn’t enough money for food?

In the last 12 months, did you ever eat less than you felt you should because there wasn’t enough money for food?

I relied on only a few kinds of low-cost food to feed my child because I was running out of money to buy food: Yes, no

Basically, you get a point for each ‘Yes’, ‘Often’, or ‘Sometimes’ answer. So if you’ve worried, and eaten a small meal, and eaten what you think is an unbalanced meal, or relied on ‘only a few kinds of low-cost food’ to feed the kids at least once any time in the past year, you have ‘very low food security’. That might be a valid thing to measure, but it certainly is not ‘hunger’.

Incidentally, it’s notable that the people in the survey report markedly better ‘food security’ in the 30 days immediately prior to the survey than they do when asked the same questions about the past year. This strongly suggests that people are remembering things as worse than they really were. On top of the vagueness of the questions, this renders the survey almost totally pointless.

The official victim class (to which a lot of ‘food-insecure’ people certainly belong) would all be pretty skilled in being sure to always tell the government survey that everything’s terrible; this is, after all, the job of the professional victim.

In the United States, if you can’t afford food, the federal government will subsidize your eating, usually on the spot. When you apply for food stamps, unless something goes wrong you generally leave the office with your EBT card. In 2007, Nicole and I tried the food stamp diet to see whether it was possible to eat well on it, and the conclusion is that you need to know how to cook, but that other than that, it’s pretty damned easy.

What we actually did was the $21 per week diet. At the time, the average food stamp benefit came to $21 per person per week. You’re not actually meant to spend only $1 per meal; as your income rises, your benefit is cut. If you actually have no income at all, you got $155 a month, which is $38.75 a week. Given that it’s entirely possible to eat a healthy and tasty diet on $21 a week, $38.75 would be a piece of cake. Literally: on $21 you can only afford cookies.

The benefit has increased since then, and if you receive SNAP benefits (the actual name for the food-stamp program these days), any kids you might have are eligible for free breakfast and lunch at school.

The Times story goes on, eventually leading here:

Some conservatives have attacked the survey’s methodology, saying it is hard to define what it measures.

Considering that the statistics don’t make sense and that even the New York Times feels a need to distance itself from the weird terminology involved, I’d say that ’some conservatives’ might have a point.

It’s a truism that the more you know about something, the more the media seem to screw it up. This is particularly true of any story involving aviation; after an airplane crashes, for instance, nearly all the news stories are full of things that clearly show that the person writing it had absolutely no idea what the hell they were saying.

A Washington Post feature story today about a kid learning to fly is up (down) to the usual standard, but with a difference: the inaccuracies can’t possibly be down to misunderstanding, general cluelessness, or confusion. The passage in question:

First, Colin has to check out the airplane: a 27-year-old Cessna 172 Skyhawk. He runs his finger along the propeller blades, checks the oil level and looks for dings or nicks on the wings. He looks over the flaps and the airbrakes. Once inside with the instructor, he fiddles for the right key and starts up the plane. Minutes later, he’s heading for the runway, talking to air traffic controllers: “Potomac Tower, this is 511236 rolling to runway 2-4.”

Problems:

1. Potomac Airfield doesn’t have a control tower. It’s what’s called an ‘uncontrolled field’.
2. Nobody would be talking to air traffic controllers while taxiing at an uncontrolled airport.
3. 511236 is not a valid registration number in the United States.

Number 2 I’m willing to forgive, because when you’re taxiing at an uncontrolled field you often do announce as much on the radio, and there’s no reason for a newspaper features writer to know who the guy’s talking to.

Number 1 I might be willing to forgive, because the kid in question is a student pilot (and probably nervous as hell with a Washington Post reporter along) and he might have actually said ‘Potomac tower’ instead of what he should have said, which is ‘Potomac traffic’.

Number 3 is just ridiculous, though. There’s no way he said this. FAA registration numbers all start with N (which you don’t say on the radio in the U.S.) and up to five numbers and up to two letters, but with a maximum length of five. So N1 is a valid registration number, as is N12345 or N1234A or N123AB. N511236 is just not possible. The Post just needed something that sounded airplane-y, and so they made this up.

In a photo gallery accompanying the story online, the Post has this picture of Colin pre-flighting the airplane:

And this one of him taking off:

If we squint real hard, we might be able to make out the registration number.

The story at one point also says ‘His next hurdle is winning a coveted commission to the U.S. Air Force Academy’; but you get appointments, not commissions to the service academies. This is likely simply an error, though, and not fabrication.

Now, really, you can easily say that this isn’t important at all. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to the story, which isn’t about the registration number of that airplane, or the phraseology for announcing your actions on the radio at Potomac Airfield, or the specific terminology used for getting into the U.S. Air Force Academy.

But it does show that the Washington Post is okay with just making up details (or quotes) when the reporter didn’t make a note of them, even when they would be easy to check (call the flight school, or look at the Post’s own photos).

So what else are they just making up when it’s convenient?

I am reading Cory Doctorow’s Makers, which, in the version I’m reading, carries a preface about copyright.

In case you don’t know who Doctorow is: he’s a sci-fi author, anti-absolute-copyright activist, and general left-wing complainer, possibly not in that order. He’s originally from Canada and now lives in the UK; as with pretty much all such people, this gives him a special insight as to everything that’s wrong with the United States.

Doctorow’s main issue is copyright, or, more specifically, absolute copyright. Himself, he gives away all (most?) of his writing via his website while at the same time selling the stuff through normal channels. His intention is to be a one-man experiment to prove whether it’s possible to make money from intellectual property without hiring a team of lawyers to sue your fans. So far, it seems to be working.

In the course of explaining why he does this — he quotes Tim O’Reilly in saying that his, and most writers’ — biggest problem isn’t piracy but obscurity — he writes

I have always dreamt of writing sf novels, since I was six years old. Now I do it. It is a goddamned dream come true, like growing up to be a cowboy or an astronaut, except that you don’t get oppressed by ranchers or stuck on the launchpad in an adult diaper for 28 hours at a stretch.

First: astronauts do not spend 28 hours on the launch pad under any circumstances.

Second: note here that he uses cowboys as an example of people who are oppressed. Now, I’m sure that there were and are some bad cowboy jobs. But to see a cowboy — the very symbol of independence and self-determination — as oppressed takes a special kind of view of the world.

And I’ll be forever indebted to Cory Doctorow for illustrating this so perfectly, because his illustration has allowed me to put words to a concept that’s been annoying me for a while.

The activist’s credo is: everyone’s fucked but me.

The argument goes something like this: Things are just fine for me, but everyone else is getting the short end of the stick, and so it is up to me and other similarly comfortable people to fix all of this for them. In many cases, you can add to that: because they are all too stupid to see the truth.

This is why I can respect Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, the Tea Party people, etc., but find ACORN and WTO ‘protests’ disgusting. There’s a big difference between a group of people looking out for itself, making its opinions known, and attempting to influence the government or the culture so that its members will be better off on the one hand, and organizations of the Professionally Outraged, abstractly arguing the cases of other, usually unseen people on the other.

The logical conclusion of this way of thinking is that People in general either

1. do not know enough to run their own lives (search for ‘voting against self interest‘ for many examples) or
2. the real majority supports X, even though the most accurate measures seem to indicate that people support Y.

Either one in the end justifies autocratic rule by a ‘benevolent’ dictator, and the best part is that you don’t actually have to demonstrate that people are hungry/oppressed/being shipped to Gitmo/whatever: you just assert that they are from your perch of middle-class comfort.

Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a lot of people proposing the amendments to the U.S. Constitution that they’d like to see, and that they think would make the world a better place. I have two.

So I’d propose:

Commerce between the several states shall be understood to mean: only commercial activity wherein some good or service is sold by one party to another party in exchange for money, other goods or services, or other valuable consideration; and only that commercial activity that is not conducted entirely in one state.

We need this because of an argument over 239 bushels of wheat.

In 1941, Roscoe Filburn planted 23 acres of wheat, in defiance of a New Deal quota system that only allowed him to plant 11.1 acres. He fed the excess wheat to his chickens.

The government argued that this was nevertheless interstate commerce (and thus regulable by the federal government), even though the wheat in question was never sold, and even though it never crossed a property line, much less a state line.

The government’s argument, simplified, was that had Filburn not grown this forbidden wheat and fed it to his chickens, he would have been obliged to buy chicken feed, and that had he bought this feed from another farmer in the same state, this would have in any case affected the market price for chicken feed, and thus have been interstate commerce.

Plainly, this is insane. The Supreme Court said:

Home-grown wheat in this sense competes with wheat in commerce. The stimulation of commerce is a use of the regulatory function quite as definitely as prohibitions or restrictions thereon. This record leaves us in no doubt that Congress may properly have considered that wheat consumed on the farm where grown, if wholly outside the scheme of regulation, would have a substantial effect in defeating and obstructing its purpose to stimulate trade therein at increased prices.

By this logic, anything is regulable as ‘interstate commerce’ (and, indeed, this is pretty much how the Congress has chosen to see things since the 1940s). The stimulation of commerce is a use of the regulatory function quite as definitely as prohibitions or restrictions thereon. By that logic, the federal government could conceivably order you to take two baths a day, in order to stimulate trade in soap. They could order you to get up earlier, and so push up the market price of coffee. For that matter, they could dictate a specific breakfast menu to you, in order to favor the producers of eggs, bran muffins, bagels, orange juice, or whoever has spent the most money on lobbyists recently. This is utterly insane.

The Constitution, in Article I, Section 8, grants to the federal government the authority to regulate foreign commerce and commerce ‘among the several states’. If the real intention of the Founders was for commerce ‘among the several states’ to be anything, even activity that is neither ‘among the several states’ nor commercial, presumably they would have just said so.

So. Interstate commerce means interstate commerce, and not anything else. I expect that this amendment would mean a lot of vacant office space on K Street.

My second amendment is:

Section 1.
Having voted for, in the case of a member of the House of Representatives or of the Senate, or having signed, in the case of the President, any law later found by the Supreme Court to have been partly or wholly contrary to the provisions of the Constitution or any of its amendments, shall be cause for articles of impeachment to be brought against that person in the appropriate body.

Section 2.
In cases of impeachment brought under this article, a one-third vote in favor of impeachment shall be required for conviction.

The president and members of Congress all take oaths to uphold the Constitution. It has become very common, though, for them to see the determination of whether an action is or is not Constitutional as solely the Supreme Court’s job.

This amendment would basically require anyone thinking of voting for or signing an unconstitutional law to be pretty sure that their party would be significantly in the majority for the rest of his political career.

Today, Merlin Mann writes on what he knows about women. It’s seems like it’s all pretty sound advice, like:

Listen. Hear what she’s saying. Synthesize what you hear in your head, but be slow to offer advice or “solutions.” Women (like many men, including me) often think by talking — or, if you like, by being heard. Shut up and listen. Seriously. Shut the fuck up sometimes.

No woman wants to be your Mom. Give more than you get and be a grown-up about asking for sacrifices — especially if making that sacrifice goes against something she’s kinda unsure about, but which sticking to until she IS sure is making her feel stronger and more whole. Don’t be a dick.

Do things without being asked. Even things she maybe didn’t know she wanted you to do.

Be extremely clear in your own mind about the very very tiny number of things only you are allowed to ever be right about. Keep making that list smaller every month.

and he does preface it with

Yes, a lot of this goes both ways. Obviously. Give it a rest

But. When’s the last time you read something like this, but with the sexes reversed? Once in a while, some women’s blog might post a list of a few tips with ‘dealing with your Neanderthal’, which is pretty much the same advice in reverse, but usually with a lot of references to how men are stupid children, and with a comment thread with hundreds of posts about how all of this is wrong and that what’s really required is basically more emotional abuse.

And what little you get isn’t nearly as good as Merlin’s advice. You never see the corollary of the first advice-cule above, with women being encouraged to talk through their decisions bit by bit, because men think by talking and that this might help them understand what’s going on. Once in a while you might see women being advised to listen to men, but usually the goal there is for the woman just to better understand exactly how the man is wrong.

And you never, ever see women being told that they’re only allowed to be right about a small and ever-shrinking number of things, even though a whole lot of Advice For Men essentially amounts to ’shut up and take it’.

Because nothing quite says ‘Christmas’ like… an flying pig on the lawn.

Click on that thing to see a bigger picture. Go on. I dare you.

Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe there’s some pop-culture relationship of flying pigs and Christmas that I’m unaware of. If that’s the case, this is an ignorance that I am proud to flaunt.

Perhaps I can buy a T-shirt or trucker cap with a flying pig on it and the words ‘I have no idea what this has to do with Christmas’.

In what is becoming something of a tradition around here, I offer a few of the horrible Christmas things I saw while out and about today. You can’t really appreciate the full horror of these things without sound and video:

The full description of each one can be seen on YouTube.

Until recently, chocolate was usually involved in any desserts described as ‘decadent’. Apparently pumpkin pie is now also emblematic of decay.

Someone wrote in to Glenn Reynolds with a point I’d been thinking about yesterday, and planning to write about today. Speaking of the Obama administration, he wrote:

These people are so steeped in Saul Alinsky that they fail to realize that they were written for people trying to topple the system and mau-mau the flakcatchers. But now THEY ARE the flack-catchers and they obviously never really understood the problems of governing.

Reynolds comments:

Yeah, Alinsky’s a set of rules for annoying The Man. Not much help once you are The Man.

I don’t know whether I’d go so far as to say that Obama & Co. ‘never really understood the problems of governing’, but the rest of this rings true. The Left, and the Democrats in the US in particular, have become something like a dog chasing a car. The dog is just acting instinctively and chasing after anything that moves; he doesn’t really have a plan for what’s going to happen should he actually catch the car.

The Democrats, from 2000 to 2008, blamed all of their problems — hell, all problems full stop — on George Bush. Couldn’t get their policies enacted? It was all the fault of George Bush (spit) and those corporations (spit) and talk radio (spit)!!!11 It’s all just lies and fear that are fooling the people into a false sense of complacency!!!1 so that Halliburton (spit) can get richer (spit)!!1

And so on. Before George Bush, it was just corporations and talk radio and the vast right-wing conspiracy etc.

Some lefties actually seem to understand that their real problem is that the majority of the people don’t like their policies. Once in a while, this slips out, as in these examples from just after the election in 2004, but in general you have to keep this kind of contempt for the electorate under wraps if you want to have a snowball’s chance in hell of actually winning elections.

By spitting at the straw-man enemies of George Bush and Fox News, though, the left was able to forget about, or at least to paper over, its differences; this is how you have a ‘coalition’ that include both billionaire capitalist George Soros and the Berkeley Marxist League. What did they stand for? Well, a lot of things, many of them directly contradictory. But more than anything, they stood for opposition to Bush, hatred of Fox News, etc., etc.; many of the Democrats’ troubles now are the direct result of their confusing this emotion-based unity with genuine agreement.

The left now controls the universities, TV, movies, nearly all major newspapers, NPR, PRI, all TV news except for Fox, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the White House, and yet you have Valerie Jarrett saying

I think that what the administration has said very clearly is that we’re going to speak truth to power.

Their ideology has become so wrapped up in ’struggle’ and ‘organizing’ against some more powerful force that you wind up with a person with an office in the White House who reports directly to the President of the United States talking about how she and her colleagues are going to speak truth to power. It’s like a tic.