When should a partisan vote against party?

At what point do you vote against your preferred party?

I've been thinking a lot about this question, mostly because I hope several million Republicans will do so come November 6. 

So, in the spirit of intellectual honesty, I've thought about the times I haven't voted for the Democratic candidate. I've lived and voted in five states, so I've got a decent sample size. Here's what I've got:

- The Democrat is corrupt. In a House of Representatives election for a safe D seat, I voted against an incumbent that was under federal investigation for corruption.

- Voting even though there's not a plausible Democrat running for office. I will still vote in an election even when Democrats don't field a serious candidate. (I figure if someone cared enough to put her/his name on the ballot, I owe the courtesy of taking each office seriously.) One of my deal-breaker criteria is that whoever I cast my vote for should, at minimum, be able to handle the rigors of the office. The Basil Marceauxs of the world, sadly, don't quite make the cut. (He's a Republican, but plenty of nutters run on the D line, too. I just like this video.)

- The Democrat is an idiot. In one gubernatorial election, I had met both the Democratic and Republican candidates. I thought the Democratic candidate, while nominally a serious candidate, would've been a disaster if elected. In this case, the GOP candidate was a moderate and, more importantly, wasn't an idiot. Being governor matters more than most other offices in terms of being able to execute on basic, non-ideological governing functions. Therefore, I put a high priority on a candidate who is diligent, fair-minded, and competent. Ability to do the job matters more than ideology. 

Essentially, I'll vote for a Republican when there's clear corruption or incompetence. 

For Republicans who loathe Trump or just think he needs a more aggressive check on his power, what's your criteria for stepping away from the party line?

Bernie Madoff and a lack of imagination

'Cause this is a man that done stole more money than anybody else, we're talking about anybody else, one old man done took everybody. He done beat the record on everybody. He done went to the top of the list in criminality. Everybody is in there for money. The majority of the cases is about money, do you know what I mean? And here you got a man that done did it, done took it all. He's more important than Jesse James, you know what I mean? Bonnie and Clyde.   

The quote above comes from a man who was in prison with Bernie Madoff, the man behind a $60 billion Ponzi scheme -- the largest fraud in U.S. history. 

It's from Reveal's podcast "How Bernie Made Off: Are We Safe From the Next Ponzi Scheme?"  (Short answer: no). 

It's worth revisiting the Madoff scandal because it's not hard to see how it could be repeated -- and not just in the financial sector.

A couple facts stuck out to me about Madoff and his crimes:

- He was already wealthy before he started the Ponzi scheme. Not as wealthy as he would become, but he was worth plenty. He was also a former chair of NASDAQ. So why did he start the fraud? According to Madoff:

'Cause it feeds your ego. You say to yourself, "All right, all of a sudden, these banks which wouldn't give you the time of day, some of them all of a sudden, are willing to give you a billion dollars." I had all these major banks coming down, and entertaining me. It is a head trip.

- The scheme was simple. He employed a few people with high school educations, paid them enough money to put them in mansions, and they would spend their days scanning the stock quotes in the Wall Street Journal (dead tree version) and reverse engineer plausible trades. No actual trading happened -- he just paid older investors with new investors' money. Then he employed two programmers to write software that printed statements. That's it. 

- He was almost caught by both the feds and Wall Street firms. He fooled them, though, and it's worth examining why. 

First, the feds missed problems with Madoff's firm in part because he had a brand. He projected an image of being an old-school, trustworthy investor. Therefore, the Securities and Exchange Commission went soft on him. They sent newbie staff to investigate his firm. They missed basic stuff, like not knowing to check the amount of his cash holdings in the federal clearinghouse where money sits while both sides verify a trade. If they had a made a simple call, they would've realized his balance there was far, far below what it should've been for a firm worth tens of billions of dollars. 

The Wall Street banks ignored red flags with Madoff's operation because they took a cut on the money they steered to Madoff's firm. Therefore, they didn't want to check under the hood, so to speak. One major investor, a Spanish bank,  asked an employee, Rajiv Jaitly, to conduct due diligence. He wanted to do something simple: go to Madoff's firm and watch them execute a trade from beginning to end. Yet Madoff refused to let him do that. Was that a red flag for the Jaitly's bank? Far from it. Madoff called his bosses, who called Jaitly and told him to back off. 

When I then rang up to sort of see how it was going, he says, "Oh, no. No. We haven't done that." He said, "Look, Rajiv. We all know you're a difficult guy. We had to calm you down at that particular point, so we agreed to it. There's really no need to do it. We're all over this. We understand the investment strategy. It doesn't need this."

Jaitly resigned in protest. The fraud continued for several more years and the Spanish bank lost an undisclosed sum to Madoff's con.

In the end, what exposed Madoff was not the work of investigators, but the Great Recession and its massive losses. Madoff couldn't make the fake numbers work anymore, so he confessed to his sons, who then turned him in. 

***

Bernie Madoff ran his scam for two decades in part because of a failure of imagination from those whose job it was to catch him. No one could picture someone with his stature committing fraud at this scale. Because they couldn't imagine it, they missed or intentionally overlooked obvious signs. 

What else are we lacking sufficient imagination to fully consider?

You can't just order people around (Well, you can, but it's surprisingly ineffective)

The Milgram experiments

A few days ago, I listened to Radiolab's podcast "The Bad Show." It explored bad behavior in a couple of different ways. The segment that stuck with me was their take on the famous Milgram experiments on the lengths people will go to follow directions. 

First, the context. An fake experiment on using electric shocks as a motivator for learning is staged. A regular citizen is brought and instructed by an administrator to give increasingly high shocks to a "learner" (actually a voice actor on a recording) if that person incorrectly answers parts of a memorization exercise. The "learner" purposefully starts making mistakes, forcing the regular citizen to decide to administer the shocks.  

The real experiment is to see when the person administering the shocks stops the experiments. That person is forced to hear the "learner" scream in pain and beg to stop. Labels on the "machine" show that the person is administering deadly shocks to the learner. 

The experiments were spurred by examining the idea: "How could so many German citizens be cogs in the Final Solution?" Nowadays, the experiments have been applied to subsequent genocides and also cover territory like: "How could so many Enron employees participate in a massive fraud?" 

The headline of the experiment is that a disturbingly high percentage of people will basically do what they're told by a person in authority -- or even one who looks like she or he is in authority. 

Milgram conducted dozens of variations of the experiment. Did it make a different in what the "administrator" was wearing? What about the age of the person giving instructions? What happens if the administrator gives rationale? What about if the administrator issues an order? What "The Bad Show" discusses are two important, oft-overlooked subtleties in the findings: 

1) What got the highest rates of compliance was when the administrator justified the experiment in terms of contributing the greater good. If the citizens thought they were doing their part to advance the science of learning, around two-thirds of them were willing to shock the learner enough to kill them. 

2) Giving direct orders was the least successful way of gaining compliance in killing people. About two-thirds of all citizens rebelled when giving a direct order to keep sending deadly shocks. 

***

The implications of these results are exciting and horrifying. One could take them in a dozen different directions. For example, I couldn't help but see echoes of them in the Maryland football scandal where a coach inadvertantly ordered a player to exercise himself to death.

For today though, I want to focus on way the experiments' implications could be used in a positive way -- managing people, specifically students. (Writing this blog has a way of quickly exposing the limits of my lived experience.) In a way, me learning how to lead a classroom more or less confirmed Milgram's results.

When I was a rookie teacher, one of the benchmarks that I set for myself was being able to give an behavior instruction with no rationale and get compliance from the students. An order, basically. 

I'm not sure how or why I got in my head that being able to order kids around was a mark of a teacher with a well-managed classroom. Then again, a lot of my ideas back then of what made for a good teaching were 100 percent wrong. I was always able to get a few to comply, but enough would rebel that in short order the lesson would go off the rails.

I never got to the point of being able to consistently, successfully order kids around. This is because as I got better at my job, I realized I didn't need to do it. 

It's sort of similar to the famous photo of cyclists smoking cigarettes while riding in the first few Tour de Frances. Turns out smoking cigarettes is counter-productive if one is riding 100 miles a day! Also counter-productive: barking orders at adolescents. 

Not a successful racing strategy

What I learned from much better teachers is that well-managed classrooms have a rationale -- implicit or explicit -- for everything that happens in executing a lesson. The teacher has set things up so the class doesn't need to rely solely on the authority of an adult for it to function. This creates a virtuous cycle where the teacher can achieve maximum compliance with a light touch. The students trust the teacher's direction, therefore the teacher can do all sorts of other things -- give suggestions, solicit peer feedback, restating rationale, clarifying or simplifying directions  -- instead of issuing a series of orders (with explicit or implicit negative consequences) to achieve the day's goal. 

Great leaders get the behavior they want by investing people in a clear vision, giving simple directions, depending more on persuasion than authority, and setting up strong systems to create a culture where people want to be best their best selves. If you observe one of these classes (or team or working groups), then you'll notice something interesting when there's off-task behavior. The person or people doing the non-compliant behaviors quickly give up because it's exhausting -- like swimming against the tide. 

Thanks to Milgram, we better understand the power -- for good and for ill -- of investing people in a grand vision. The experiments showed that we are hard-wired to follow directions more often than not when we believe we a part of something big and great. It also illustrates the power and perils of being the person in charge. These are morally neutral observations. 

What is up to us is our awareness of what we're asked to do and conversely, what we're asking of others when we lead.

The difference between knowing we humans have a tendency versus treating behavior as fait accompli is what makes a moral choice so hard in the first place.

Reading Twitter: In the end, the justifications won't matter

I have every confidence this will be remembered as the era Republicans cut marginal tax rates for corporations. https://t.co/AhtKigE1HC

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) August 22, 2018

I'm a realist when it comes to self-interested human behavior. On some level, I understand the mechanisms that keep the overwhelming majority of congressional Republicans from exercising the barest levels of oversight. However, the piece I keep coming back to is this: history is going to take a harsh view of those who ignored the criminal behavior of this president. No matter the motive -- fear of losing one's job, the desire to stock the federal judiciary with right-wing jurists -- I believe the epitaph for these politicians will be  " __________ turned a blind eye to criminality." In the end, the justifications won't matter.

I just want to state for the record that the response to this from the president's supporters is actually going to get worse from here, not better. https://t.co/CA6ra557Cm

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) August 22, 2018

Pretty much. 

Mollie Tibbetts was murdered b/c she told a man to leave her alone while she was jogging. Her murderer happens to be undocumented. This isn’t about border security. This is about toxic masculinity. Mollie Tibbetts lost her life b/c a man couldn’t take her saying no. Full stop.

— Symone D. Sanders (@SymoneDSanders) August 22, 2018

Pretty much.

I wonder if we're going to start seeing more and more special concurrences like this one.  https://t.co/5hvnSdmhkt  h/t @steve_vladeck pic.twitter.com/oc9RSRFAjI

— Raffi Melkonian (@RMFifthCircuit) August 22, 2018

A popular myth is that once Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed (a nomination I oppose), the Supreme Court will choose the "death by a thousand cuts" method of defanging Roe, but technically keeping it as precedent. 

I don't see it happening that way. My hunch is that Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and a justice to be named later pull Roberts along in overturning the precedent. 

I also would also bet good money that regulating abortion won't return to the state level. GOP congressmen don't seem to give much credence to federalism when it gets in the way of getting what they want. 

Buckeyes to play 13 games without pay. https://t.co/oJWhnz2nlN

— Stefan Fatsis (@stefanfatsis) August 23, 2018

The ongoing theft of 18-22-year-olds' high-risk labor in order to support a multi-billion dollar sports entertainment industry is not our greatest national scandal, but it's not nothing, either. 

$600 million is enough to pay an entire 120-man roster $50,000 a year for 100 years https://t.co/o1RmNaWbMk

— Jon Bois (@jon_bois) August 18, 2018

A school's wraparound services are wonderful, necessary, and shouldn't be confused with teaching

A few assorted thoughts before I get to the point of this post:

- Wealthy people spending money to help at-risk kids get a better education is a Good Thing. 

- Wealthy people focusing education philanthropy on young kids instead of, say, funding a fancy collegiate athletic facility is also a Good Thing.

- It is astonishing that LeBron James has such a sterling reputation despite being in the spotlight since middle school, contending with God knows how many people attempting to profit off of his talent, plus handling the various pressures a world-class professional athlete faces, AND raising a family. The only minor public misstep he's made was a tone-deaf television special when he was 26. I made all sorts of dumb decisions when I was 26. Thankfully, none were broadcast on ESPN.

***
I wanted to expand on comments I made in response to some questions about the Akron public school LeBron James funded (and is providing some ongoing operations cash).

The school, called iPromise, is a regular public school in Akron. It's charter-ish in a couple of ways. It's a selective school, though not in the way "selective" is commonly known. Kids who are a year or two behind are eligible to attend. Also, the Akron school board has given permission for the school to have a longer school day, some additional staff, and some summer sessions. Classes are limited to 20 students, which is smaller than most public schools (traditional and charter), though slightly larger than most private schools. There's also some social-emotional support programs that, at first glance, seem similar to best practices piloted by Nashville-based charter Valor Collegiate Academies. (Full disclosure: I used to teach there before I was hired as an administrator at another school.)

To ensure long-term opportunities, James has partnered with the University of Akron to underwrite the students' tuition if they complete the middle school program and choose to attend U of A. 

***

In addition to what's above, the iPromise' school's "wraparound services" have garnered a lot of press. I follow school news pretty closely so I've heard the term in a variety of contexts. Sometimes it's by charter advocates when a new school is being proposed. On the opposite end, I've heard from folks who are trying to turn around a persistently struggling school-board controlled school (usually before the state or district begins action to shut the school down). The most frequent use is a sort of hand-waving from people who argue that additional wraparound services are what's needed to improve a given school's mediocre academics. 

Because the term is vague and sounds nice, it gets tossed around by people advocating for a bunch of different ed policies. So, let's break down what should and shouldn't be expected of wraparound services.

First, a better definition and some stipulations: 
1) In most cases, wraparound services focused on students are: school counseling, school-based social workers, after-school childcare, and some basic health care. 
2) All of these services are great and necessary. 
3) Every school needs more of them.
4) The outcomes of these services are notoriously hard to measure.
5) The best result of most services is when they help mitigate reasons why a student wouldn't be able to fully participate in a class. 
6) Providers of wraparound services can a do a terrific job with a kid and that student will still likely exhibit some significant challenges -- low grades, behavior issues, inconsistent attendance, etc. 

What I want to shout any time I read articles that describe a school's wraparound services but say little about a school's instruction: Wraparound services should not be confused with the main purpose of any school: teaching kids.

At different junctures in my career, I oversaw some wraparound services at a few different schools. I can say that nearly every counselor and social worker with whom I've worked has gone above and beyond to provide care beyond their job description. (Even then, some students have needs that exceed a school's capacity to meet. This could be where, for example, specialized schools or inpatient treatment programs come in.)

But even at their best, counselors shouldn't have to shoulder a teacher's responsibility. Sometimes it's a victory for a student to be present at school and doing just enough to pass a class.

Once a kid is in class, the overwhelming factor in determining how a student does is the teacher. From there, the major factors in ensuring a teacher does her/his job well are the leadership, instructional coaching, and culture of the school. (I'm simplifying a lot here. Scores of books have been written on what it takes to do each of those factors well and, even then, I've never seen or worked in a school that has it completely figured out.)

So, a school could have the greatest wraparound services in the world, but if the school's focus isn't on instruction, then the school isn't fulfilling its mission. 

The cool thing about education is that when another school succeeds, it's good for everyone. School achievement is the opposite of a zero-sum game. I'm rooting for the iPromise school because it could improve the lives of thousands of Akron kids over the years. Kudos to James for providing startup funding and ongoing support**. 

Just keep in mind that the main -- though not only -- determinant of success will be the factor that's gotten the least media attention: the teachers and administrators doing the work of teaching the kids. 

**I've read some criticisms of James because he isn't funding the whole thing. Ohio law sets limits on how much a private citizen can fund a public school.

My second major teaching mistake: trying to be the smartest kid in the room

Every teacher sounds like Ben Stein after a few minutes. 

This the second post in an occasional series about what I've learned from teaching and how it intersects with parenting. The first post is here. I'm not an expert in either teaching or parenting, but hopefully, 1) you find something useful below, 2) can laugh at the many mistakes I've made, or 3) both.

***

I have a terminal case of "smartest kid in the room" syndrome (hereafter SKR).This is not news to many of you who've known me for years. (In some cases, you were actually in a classroom with me. God bless and I'm sorry.)

The telltale sign is needing to say something about everything. This behavior is merely obnoxious from a student. If it comes from the teacher, it kills learning. When the teacher is the one over-explaining, editorializing, going off on tangents or dominating the conversation, it will choke off all but the most superficial learning. 

The consequence of me endlessly talking is that I did the bulk of the thinking, rather than the students. Moreover, once I started down the path of monologuing, it was tacit permission for students to tune out. When I've observed classroom where this happened, I'd turn my attention to the students' body language. It was akin to seeing people in a hospital waiting room with a TV. There's noise and motion, but almost no one is processing it. 

***

As a frequent offender, I use these guidelines to hold myself accountable when leading a class:

1. A tight agenda with short time segments and a visible timer keeps me on track. Even when a segment runs over, it was easier to switch them around because I'd thought through the rest of the class in a purposeful way. (I never truly appreciated the power of this sort of agenda until it was drilled into my head during the first summer I worked at DSST, where it is sacrosanct. DSST just won the Broad Prize. Holding all teachers to solid fundamental pedagogy is a major reason why.) The timer helped discipline me in a lot of ways, the most useful being that after 10 minutes, kids (and adults) need to shift gears. It forced me to distill what I was teaching to its most essential elements. 

2. Include directions on the materials I wrote so I don't have an excuse to monologue when introducing an activity. The temptation to editorialize or over-explain is overwhelming. Moreover, many kids won't overtly signal they're bored because 1) they're  polite and 2) I was the authority figure. A corollary to that is that when I had classes with lots of off-task behavior, over-explaining directions was one of the most common root causes. 

3. Answer a question with a question. This is useful on a couple of levels. If there was genuine confusion, I could quickly ask questions to a couple of students so I could discover if it was a whole-class issue. If it was just a few kids, I'd start with basic questions. ("What does the first question say? Read it to me." "What is it asking you to do?") It's also non-confrontational way to call the bluff of kids who ask endless questions in order to delay starting an assignment. 

***

So what does this have to do with parenting a threenager? Wilson, do you post a detailed agenda for your toddler? No, not quite, but I use timers to transition him from playing to bathtime, nap, bedtime, etc. Maybe it's just my kid, but he responds better to seeing timer tick down than he does to me verbally counting.

Giving simple directions is vital, too. More times than I'd like to admit L is confused as to what I want and not just being defiant because he's three.

Finally, responding to L's endless questions: It's great and wonderful and appropriate for three-year-olds to ask a ton of questions. It can also be exhausting to address. (And, even with Google to assist, my ability to truthfully answer many of his questions runs shallow pretty quick.) Therefore, meeting them with some of my own questions is useful. At best, he explains his thinking. At worst, he says, "I don't know," and we move on. 

I will stop now, lest I give in to my love of droning on and on. Hey, after a couple of decades, maybe I'm learning!

The first thing is seeing what's in front of you

First lesson of classroom management: Let 'em think you're always watching.

One of the underrated parts about being a stay-at-home dad is that infants sleep a lot. Consequently, I've had a fair amount of time to reflect on how a decade-plus of teaching impacted my life. Because this blog is nothing if not self-indulgent, I'll write about it every so often. 

Running a classroom forced me to learn skills that I would've never picked up otherwise. Teaching a roomful of adolescents has a way of forcing one to quickly adapt.

What follows is meant as part reflection and part mediation on how skills learned as a teacher can also be useful outside of a classroom. If you're an educator (or just spend a bunch of time around kids) and reading this, you likely know this stuff already. 

***

I had to learn to see the class. 

There are a lot of tricks and techniques to running a classroom. I first, though, had to develop the skill where kids get the sense that the teacher "has eyes in the back of his head." 

I was initially awful at this. You know those people who say they're natural multitaskers? Maybe they joke about having ADHD? I'm the opposite. I can tune out the world in an instant. (N confirms this.) It helps when one is grading papers or wants to finish reading a book. It's kryptonite when one is managing 28 or so adolescents at once. 

When I was struggling as a teacher many years ago, my principal observed one of my classes. He listed several misbehaviors that I hadn't addressed. As he was doing so, he looked at me and paused. "You didn't even see any of this, did you?" 

I shook my head. No, I wasn't even aware they had occurred. 

So began a crash course in something basic, yet taken for granted. Here's what I learned about truly seeing the classroom:

1. Stop talking so much. I couldn't talk and effectively observe at the same time. I learned to give directions in under three minutes and break up directions if they lasted longer than that -- or if I noticed kids getting the glazed look on their faces. (Sometimes the glazed look came on so quickly, especially in a post-lunch class, that I had to get a direction out in under 30 seconds.)

2. Use the corners of the room. This is one of the techniques that seemed obvious in retrospect, but I was like most teachers -- anchored to the front of the room. Standing there meant that I had to cover 180 degrees of sight-lines and there was always a section I couldn't see. The corners allow a person to see the entire classroom with only 90 degrees of head movement.

3. Empty my hands. Don't try to do anything when kids are supposed to be working. Don't write on the whiteboard, check my computer or phone, or grade papers. Organize the class so that everything I needed was out and ready. (This took quite a bit of effort for my naturally disorganized self.)

4. When there's even a minor disruption, observe for a few seconds (at least 10) before intervening. Often the student I thought instigated the disruption was actually responding to someone else. 

***

I've learned a bunch of other lessons, too, but everything flowed from first seeing what the children were actually doing in my class. I found it translated to parenting, too. My three-year-old can barely process one direction at a time, so talking to him for any longer than that just wastes time and builds frustration for both of us. 

Pausing a few seconds and watching him, even when he's misbehaving, is useful in figuring out the root cause of the behavior. He also has a radar-like ability to know when I'm paying more attention to my phone than to him -- this is when he magically finds something that 1) will break or 2) is sharp or 3) both. 

Learning to focus my attention and curtail distractions has probably saved my child several trips to the emergency room. That thought is simultaneously gratifying and frightening. God only knows what would've happened if I had done something else other than teach.

A trillion dollars is noisier than you (or me)

Norman Rockwell, Four Freedoms

"The cure for bad speech is more speech."
- Popular saying derived Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis' 1927 opinion in Whitney v. California, "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."

"We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
- Louis Brandeis, also

Apple made news the yesterday as the first company valued at a trillion dollars. Tennessee also held its primaries Thursday, setting the slate for the fall elections. These events have more in common than just taking place on the same day. 

I don't have anything specifically against Apple. It's more about what the company now represents as one of the richest companies in the world -- a massive amount of money controlled by relatively few people. Apple supports some things I agree with -- gay rights, net neutrality and more open immigration laws. They also lobby for massive tax breaks that result in me paying a greater percentage of my income in taxes than Apple does on its profits. 

It's the principle of who has the ability to be heard in our democracy. Plenty of corporations support some things I like. Many others don't. All well and good, except that we aren't on an even playing field.

Thanks to Citizens United, Apple and other corporations have the same right to free speech as you and I do. Since one way we interpret political speech is to make money = speech, Apple (and other gargantuan enterprises, mega-wealthy individuals, or exists-only-on-paper shell companies that could, among other things, hide foreign contributions)  are free to contribute unlimited amounts in order to sway voters. 

Sure, any of us are also constitutionally free to form or contribute to the same dark money groups, but it's not likely that you or I are ever worth a trillion dollars.

And that's the thrust of the issue.  

***

Louis Brandeis' famous argument against overly limiting political speech is cited at the top of this post. It's a sentiment I generally support regarding content of speech. One of the greatest virtues of this country is the incredible latitude to say what one wants.

But as a practical matter, not all speech is treated the same. Money can amplify speech in ways that weren't imaginable in Brandeis' day. Now, a little less than a century later, many more incredibly rich companies and people vying to influence the world's richest and most influential government. This is why we should return to laws that constrain money's power to act as a force multiplier for certain types of speech. 

We have limited bandwidth. I, like every other voter, can pay attention to only a few things in a given day. Spouse, children, how am I going to eat, job, ESPN....there's a lot of stuff on the list before one gets to politics. And I'm a political news obsessive! People with far healthier news diets go entire day -- weeks! -- without thinking much about politicians and their machinations. (This is a good thing. One of the under-appreciated luxuries of living in a stable democracy is the ability to occasionally tune out. Sadly, not the era we live in now.) 

What unlimited and unchecked amounts of money allow is to fill up our bandwidth with noise. One effect of the bazillion negative ads we'll see and hear until November 6 is that they crowd out other speech. Not only are advertising slots on TV, radio, and Facebook limited, our attention span can only take so much. 

One of the more effective ways to shut up speech you don't like is to deny others the ability to hear and process it. 

***

Among other results from Tennessee's primaries, Phil Bredesen and Marsha Blackburn are now officially set to square off to be the state's junior senator. The winner of the election may determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. Obviously, much rides on whether Mitch McConnell remains the second-most powerful person in government. Perhaps longest-lasting impact will come from whether far-right conservatives or moderates make up a good chunk of the judiciary for the next three to four decades.

The judges appointed in the next few years will likely either be able to build on the Citizens United decision or curtail its excesses in our lifetimes. Another way to think about is that our government will decide how much average citizens' voices can be shouted down or filibustered by the mega-wealthy. 

Though it's hard to discipline our attention spans, we should pay attention to this. 

Jan Hus, Pope John XXIII, and the evil always with us

Jan Hus' execution

I just finished Stephen Greenblatt's book The Swerve. The thrust of the book is how an ancient poem, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, was nearly lost during the Dark Ages, but was accidentally discovered by out-of-work papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini, who then copied and spread it throughout Renaissance Italy. 

That's not what this post is about.

A fascinating side story in the book is about one of the popes Bracciolini served, the notoriously corrupt and worldly John XXIII, and how the pope dealt with one of his enemies, Czech priest Jan Hus.

At the time, the Catholic Church's epicenter of corruption was the selling of indulgences and papal bulls for massive bribes. (It was no accident Bracciolini became a wealthy man while working in the papal court.) A few priests and laymen dared point out the rampant amorality:

Forty-four-year-old Jan Hus, a Czech priest and religious reformer, had been for some years a thorn in the side of the Church. From his pulpit and in his writings, he vehemently attacked the abuses of clerics, condemning their widespread greed, hypocrisy, and sexual immorality. He denounced the selling of indulgences as a racket, a shameless attempt to profit from the fears of the faithful...In all matters of doctrine he preached that Holy Scripture was the ultimate authority...He argued that the state had the right and the duty to supervise the Church. Laymen could and should judge their spiritual leaders. (It is better, he said, to be a good Christian than a wicked pope or prelate.)

Hus' last point must've stung his superiors just a little bit. 

Because the Church had been riven by a schism with several people claiming to be pope, the various powers-that-be arranged a meeting in Contance (Konstanz), Switzerland to sort it out. Hus saw an opportunity to make his case for reform. He wanted to be cautious, as heretics could be burned at stake.

...He applied for and received a certificate of orthodoxy from the grand inquistor of of the diocese of Prague, and he received as well a guarantee of free passage from the emperor Sigismund...The Bohemian nobles who accompanied him rode ahead to meet with the pope and ask whether Hus would be allowed to remain in Constance free from the risk of violence. "Had he killed my own brother," (Pope) John (XXIII) replied, "not a hair of his head should be touched while he remained in the city."

The pope lied.

...[B]arely three weeks after (Hus) arrived, he was arrested on order of the cardinals and taken to the prison of a Dominican monastery...There he was thrown into an underground cell through which all the filth of the monastery was discharged. When he feel seriously ill, he asked that an advocate be appointed to defend his cause, but he was told that, according to canon law, no one could plead the cause of a man charged with heresy.

As a small matter of justice, John XXIII lost control of the conference, tried to escape, was caught and tossed into the same prison as Hus, and was formally deposed and stripped of his title. 

Alas, Hus was still brought before the council of church officials. He was tried, convicted of heresy, and formally defrocked. Then it got much worse:

A round paper crown, almost 18 inches high and depicting three devils seizing a soul and tearing it apart, was placed upon his head. He was led out of the cathedral past a pyre on which his books were in flames, shackled in chains, and burned at the stake. In order to ensure that there would be no material remains, the executioners broke his charred bones into pieces and threw them all into the Rhine. 

Hus was executed even after the main person driving his persecution was arrested himself for precisely the crimes Hus accused him of committing. While John XXIII's actions towards Hus were horrific, he had help.

Nazi Germany is our culture's go-to reference for evil, but the fear of the other and the temptation to cast out those who look, act, or say different (not to mention critical) things has always been with us. German citizens in the 1930s and 1940s were not uniquely evil in human history. In this case, a bunch of purportedly religious men in the 1400s jailed, tortured, and murdered a person primarily because he correctly denounced them.

At no time and place is evil unique.

The slow progress of bad decisions or 'Who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000?'

The guy on the left probably isn't evil, but this is not a good look

Despite what movies and cop procedural TV shows would have us think, I don't believe most people who do terrible things are intrinsically evil. Sure, the Stephen Millers of the world exist, but he's an exception. (Even real jerks don't usually make speeches to their high schools arguing kids should be slobs because the school's janitors can clean up after them.)  A good chunk of people in positions of power believe on, some level, they're doing good, or at least, they're not actively evil. 

That's why I was fascinated a by Planet Money episode that profiled a white-collar convicted felon. The cumulative effect of the episode is more like a dark comedy than a business podcast. Then again, this isn't a new feeling since most serious news these days plays like Dr. Strangelove.

LONDON: The people back in the studio on TV after this - they were talking about it. Like, who risks their half-a-million-dollar-a-year job for $70,000 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says his friends asked him that, too. And he does not have a great answer. He can't say exactly why he did it. I asked, was it exciting? Was the thrill part of it? 

LONDON: No - wasn't exciting at all. 

GOLDSTEIN: Was he trying to get his friend to like him more? Is that what was going on? 

LONDON: No. That didn't ever pass through my mind. 

KESTENBAUM: Scott says he was kind of overworked and unhappy with his job, so everything felt a little less important. Maybe that had something to do with it. But he says crossing over that line was somehow just not as hard as it should've been. 

GOLDSTEIN: Scott says what he did was just dumb. He says that. But he says, you know, as best as he can figure out, as best as he can reconstruct, he did it to help out his friend. And he says he didn't think they were going to get caught.

What struck me about Scott London's story was the ease of making increasingly bad choices. Of course, people make ruinous choices all the time and often for reasons as banal as what London describes in the interview with journalists David Kestenbaum and Jacob Goldstein. In this case, London's choices led to criminal behavior, a guilty plea, and jail time. 

***

Some backstory: London was a CPA and partner at the giant firm, KPMG. He led teams that conducted massive audits of Fortune 500 companies. As he said, he made more than $500,000 a year. But he had a friend in the wholesale jewelry business who was struggling. It was during the 2008 recession and his friend asked him for a favor - can you tip some stock info to me? He proposed trades in the five figures, a small amount considering the tidal wave of money moving through stock markets.

LONDON: You know, it's a battle. The simple version of the one side is that I knew it was wrong. It was stupid. And then the other side is, all right, well, he's a good friend. I trust him. You know, if you are trading, and, you know, you're only going to make 10 or $15,000, who's going to know?

The answer to that last question? The feds. (The picture above was taken by FBI agents.) He was arrested in one of those 6 a.m. knocks federal agents pull. London didn't fight the charges, but he also didn't fully understand the ramifications of his actions. 

KESTENBAUM: It got worse. Scott got a lawyer. And one day, they were on their way to court in the lawyer's car. Scott's reading the news on his phone, and he sees this story about his case that has something he says he didn't know. His friend Bryan hadn't been just making small trades for a few thousand dollars. The story says Bryan had been placing much bigger trades, says he made $1.27 million. 

LONDON: And I almost threw up right there in the car. And I actually told my attorney, you got to pull over. He was driving. But I just - you know, I was just fearful that I was just going to lose it right there. So I just couldn't believe it. And once I saw that, I said, holy hell. This is - you know, this is obviously going to be a lot worse.

One would think a top-tier CPA, an expert in fiscal compliance, wouldn't need a reminder that a stock tip can used as easily for million-dollar trades as $10,000 ones. Greed is a funny thing, though. What we assume about others' decisions involving the seven deadly sins is usually wrong. 


***

I'm fascinated in a "can't look away from a car wreck" sort of way by the ostensibly well-off, competent people who've humiliated themselves working for this White House. Sean Spicer, for example, had a decent career as a press flack for Congress, then the RNC before becoming a punchline. Rex Tillerson ran the 10th-largest company in the world and then was fired while taking a call on the toilet. (Side note: Who answers the phone on the toilet?)

It's not hard to see similarities between London and the retinue of folks who've sold their soul for a nominally prestigious position. Take John Bolton, the national security advisor. This is a guy who's made his name pushing U.S military intervention is most every world conflict since Reagan was in office. (A short list of countries he's wanted to bomb: North Korea, Iran, Syria, Russia, Iraq two different times.) 

Reminder: last year John Bolton called the Russian election interference "an act of war."

Now as national security adviser he puts out an official statement calling investigation of said act of war "witch hunt."

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) July 25, 2018

Note how quickly Bolton reversed himself on a fundamental view. I wonder if he even acknowledges the switch to himself. In a way, I thought of Scott London when I read that tweet. Both guys made decisions that seem counter to everything they've done up to that point. 

I'm not sure Bolton (or Spicer or Tillerson) could articulate the rationale for the series of choices they led them to hypocrisy and humiliation. But they -- educated and ambitious men, all -- did what they did. 

It's a bleak comedy, sure, but since we have the live their consequences, there's not much for the rest of us to laugh at.

Except for Paul Manafort -- I will be laughing all week at that crook getting methodically destroyed in a federal courthouse.

***

Update on John Bolton's continuing humiliation:

Lol John Bolton just tore out his own mustache https://t.co/FOxH13GhI3

— David Klion 🔥 (@DavidKlion) July 30, 2018

Cake and genius

The next time I go to NYC, I'm eating this. All of it. 

Notwithstanding all the terrible stuff in the news, let's celebrate the greatness of a nation where people can demonstrate their brilliance (and make tons of money) through creating baked goods.

We live in remarkable times. For better and for worse.

***

With the whole newborn thing happening, I've searched for mindless TV to watch. One of my favorites is Netflix's Chef's Table. It's beautifully shot and features talented people doing their best work. It's not normally a show where words amount to much. That's why Christina Tosi's rant on cake is so startling.

It's superficially about cake, but there's so much more here. You can hear her frustration about toiling decades in the high-end NYC restaurant scene. You notice the barely-veiled astonishment at how off most judgments are regarding the way a given dish should be. 

You can't help but apply the spirit of what she's talking about to topics far away from baking.

Sometimes the genius is in recognizing obvious things everyone else misses.

***

The scene opens with Tosi seated alone in an industrial kitchen. We've just seen nostalgic scenes from her midwestern hometown in her mom's kitchen. She starts talking about food's role in celebrations and it's mostly forgettable until her monologue takes an unexpected turn:

...I never really thought much of cake. Cake is the thing that you're raised as a child in America to be like the most exciting most celebratory dessert you can have. And it was just okay. It’s spongy. Usually there’s not much flavor. It’s usually a little dry. There's a not lot of texture. It’s just like a world of missed opportunities. I knew I needed to define my own relationship with cake and that cake could be a lot better than what it was.

One of the underrated, yet defining features of expertise is that subtle, gnawing sense that something isn't quite what it could be. 

Also from being in culinary school, around all these insane masters of beauty and perfection when it comes to finishing a cake. They had, like, tired me completely. To the point of like, ‘I don’t think cake should be frosted.’ I’ve seen how obsessed you can get with frosting a cake and that time should be spent elsewhere. That time should be spent in the actual layers of cake, in the frostings or fillings or whatever it is, but it shouldn’t be spent on a turntable trying to make the perfect, perfect, perfect frosted cake. For what? We’re not in pottery class.

“I don’t think cake should be frosted” is an astonishing statement from a woman who spent the previous decades of her life, among other things, training to master cake decoration. Not content to stop there, she -- against her high-priced culinary education -- reimagined cake as whole. 

Also worth noting is that she did this when shows like Cake Boss established the trend of elaborate frosting designs and customers expected to see something Renaissance-level in their colored sugar. Through this cake, Tosi essentially said to her customers, "What you think you want isn't actually what you want." That's a hard argument to make to spouses or children. Telling it to NYC diners requires a level World Series of Poker-level of "put your money where your mouth is."

There’s a world of flavors. There’s a world of texture. Cake should be delivering more than that. And when I start to think about all these different moments and decisions and time and work put into making the most delicious cake and cake soap and frosting and crumbs and filling...why would I cover it up? It is that dollhouse moment of looking in and being like, ‘I want to see the world of amazing things that’s happening on the inside. The little intricacies of how I’m thinking about your perfect bite of layer cake.’ So we don’t frost the sides of the cake. That’s my diatribe on cake.

Here she takes something thought to be sacred about her profession and strips it back to reveal its original purpose - creating the perfect bite. The elaborate (and often unappetizing) designs that command high prices -- and therefore the attention of most pastry chefs -- are a distraction. A dessert should first be fantastic to eat.

Because she sees what a cake should be, she is also clear on what it shouldn’t be. Because she knows what she wants in her cake, she doesn’t spend any time paying heed to someone else’s idea of cake. She reallocates the time spent doing stuff that doesn't further the goal of making delicious cake. 

The substance is cake, but the principles and creativity could be applied to anything.

A newborn and a threenager

So we brought home a newborn the other day.

This is our second child, so the lifestyle switch isn't quite as brutal. (We already weren't going out much.)

Our first child is a three-year-old boy. So, between the two kids, we can never fully focus on any one task at a time. Please take that into consideration as you read my posts going forward.

***

So, some just-brought-her-home reflections:

• A major parenting shift with the second child is that N and I are surprised by less. This doesn't make stuff like "baby wakes up six times at night" physically easier (especially not on mothers), but we can mentally take more stuff in stride. We know that day/night reversal eventually ends, no child cries forever, and that she will someday take a bottle from me.

• Our three-year-old has been all over the place. He wants to be helpful and also senses that he's getting less attention. We've had to be creative in finding ways for him to help -- fetching the nursing pillow and throwing away dirty diapers have been our go-to moves. Even so, he's had some epic meltdowns. A common precursor is delaying behaviors -- for example, he'll go back and forth f-o-r-e-v-e-r when choosing his PJs. The root cause seems to be wanting sustained attention from N and me. We've had to balance a careful line of giving him attention versus not reinforcing undesirable behaviors. Like a lot of parenting moves, the outcomes are delayed, inconsistent, and hazy.  

• N and I are incredibly fortunate to be able to take lengthy breaks from our jobs. Many people don't have that luxury. Family leave policies in this country are awful for babies and parents. We reap the costs of inadequate childcare in this country in all sorts of ways -- a national birthrate that is lower than replacement level, all sorts of negative health outcomes resulting from inadequate early childhood care, to name a few. I can't help but see this as a part of a general political trend of sacrificing the future to cut costs for the present. (Also known as "cutting off one's nose to spite the face.") This is why it is maddening for politicians to treat family leave policy as a "women's issue." If we want men to better partners and fathers, give them time to do so.