Outrageously inaccurate headline at The Washington Post: "'It’s embarrassing to the kids': Students who owe lunch money will only get a cold jelly sandwich, district says."

I talked about this headline with Meade for about 10 minutes before I read the text of the article. I was saying things like... What do you think a school should do about kids who are not qualified for free lunch but just don't have any money to pay for lunch? They  show up and say they're hungry. What if you just give them a jelly sandwich? After much talk, I took the position that it needs to be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just a jelly sandwich is kind of mean — though it's not that bad if they also get milk — so make it peanut butter and jelly and it's fine. Meade considered letting them go hungry — they'll learn something — and I was proposing that schools just give free lunch to everyone — that's how we skew here at Meadhouse — but we both agreed that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would be an unassailable solution.

Now, I'm reading the actual text of the article:

When students in Warwick, R.I., line up in the cafeteria next week, they’ll have no shortage of lunch options. Do they want a chicken Parmesan melt? Hummus and fresh vegetables with tortilla crisps? Pizza? Sweet potato tater tots? A burger? Something from the deli bar? Or, in the popular all-day-breakfast category, pancakes with a cheese omelet and a side of bacon?

But for some, making a decision won’t be necessary. Starting on Monday, any student with unpaid lunch debt will be automatically given a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food, the city’s school district announced on Sunday. Officials told the Providence Journal that the policy is necessary because the district is owed tens of thousands of dollars in lunch money, on top of contending with a budget deficit in the millions.

What?!! A sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food! It was never a jelly sandwich at all. It was one-up on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich! Well, what is the problem??!

But critics argue that since children have no control over their parents’ finances, they shouldn’t be penalized or potentially subjected to public humiliation because of their inability to pay.

“I just don’t think it’s fair to hold the kids responsible,” Heather Vale, who has two children attending a middle school in the district, told WLNE. “I think it’s embarrassing to the kids because now everyone’s going to know why these children are receiving the lunch that they are.”

It's not that it's a bad lunch, it's that it's a stigmatizing lunch. Having a sandwich for lunch is humiliating, embarrassing? A sandwich is the classic American lunch. A sandwich is what I had for lunch at school every day throughout childhood. I brought it from home, like nearly every kid in the school. But in the framework of Heather Vale, it's embarrassing because the child is deprived of choices that were available to other kids. It seems to me, every kid is eating one lunch and the lunch a child is seen eating doesn't scream out this child is eating this lunch because he had no other choice. So how can it be embarrassing?

Here's an idea for the deep empaths of the Vale variety. Make a nut butter and jelly sandwich for your child, wrap it up and put it in a bag, and send the little darling to school with it. If the kids with conscientious parents are eating sandwiches too, they'll provide camouflage for the the kids with school-imposed sandwiches. And here's another idea for you empathetic parents: Pool the money that you're saving by not buying school lunch, and see if you can accumulate the amount that will eliminate the tens of thousands of dollars in shortfall, and then donate it to your lovely city of Warwick, which has been patient with your deadbeat neighbors so long and has been charitably handing free lunches to kids who are not even low-income enough to get in the free-lunch program.

Anyway, I'm irked about the headline. I spent a lot of time thinking about how bad it was to offer a child a mere jelly sandwich as a lunch, but that was not the case at all. There's so much difference between a jelly sandwich and a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich. Fake news!

ALSO: It's funny to say "cold jelly sandwich." No one wants a hot jelly sandwich. There's just this idea of "hot lunch." You see that in the phrase "a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food." But what is important about hot food for lunch — or for any meal, really? This is a separate issue, the emotional meaning of hot food. I'll just gesture at it for now.

IN THE COMMENTS: I am informed that I am out of step with the times: You can't have peanut butter in school anymore. Of course, that's why it's sunflower seed butter. And note that I did say, "Make a nut butter and jelly sandwich." Make a nut butter sandwich that's not the dreaded peanut.

I get totally sidetracked by the figure of speech in "Republicans are eating our lunch. I want a 2020 Democrat tough enough to eat theirs."

That's a headline at USA Today for a column by Jill Lawrence that I'm not interested in. What new could it say? I don't care. But the headline caught my attention because of the silly expression "eating our lunch" (which isn't used in the column itself).

"Eat your lunch" should not be confused with "have your lunch handed to you." If you "have your lunch handed to you" you are getting your lunch. With "eat your lunch," you're losing your lunch. Ha ha, no. "Losing your lunch" means vomiting. But you know what I mean. If someone eats your lunch, you don't have lunch. You are lunchless. If you "have your lunch handed to you," it means you're shown the door, which means you have to leave. Or did you think that when you are "shown the door," you can stand your ground with pleasantries like, "That is indeed a lovely door"?

Looking up "eat your lunch," I stumbled into this fascinating question that is (supposedly) from the GMAT. Reading it made me remember how much these things are really a test of how well you can control your emotions.

An old Russian proverb says you should "Eat your breakfast alone, eat your lunch with your friend, give your dinner to your enemy." A new school of dietitians would have it, therefore, that missing dinner twice a week actually contributes not only to the patients' weight loss, but also to their general health.

The new school of dietitians' argument is based on which of the following assumptions?

A. While the Russian proverb argues that dinner is a problematic meal, it does not promote forsaking it altogether.
B. Eating dinner with enemies is a sign of reconciliation, which may improve one's health.
C. While eating solids is to be encouraged at breakfast and is permissible during lunch, Dinner should contain only fluids.
D. The Russian proverb states that one should give his dinner to his enemy, so that one never has dinner.
E. Russian metabolism works differently from western metabolism, and therefore while for the Russian the evening meal is merely problematic, the westerner should actually do without it.

Who can do that without the static of distracting thoughts like...

A. They are sadistically posing impossible questions.
B. When do we get to eat lunch?
C. Do I need to go on a diet... maybe this diet?
D. Russians, yes, the Russians are interesting and strange....
E. There are other people who love this sort of puzzle and I'm different, maybe because I'm worse but maybe because I'm better... I'm more of an artist, more like the Russians... Who am I?... Am I fat?...

Let's take a closer look at that Cambridge, Massachusetts elementary school librarian who rejected the gift of Dr. Seuss books from Melania Trump.

You've seen the story, I'm sure. Here's Vanity Fair: "An Elementary School Librarian Doesn’t Want Dr. Seuss Books from Melania Trump/She wrote that Seuss is 'a bit of a cliché, a tired and worn ambassador for children’s literature.'" I've seen some abuse of this woman, Liz Phipps Soeiro, and here's something, in particular, that set me off:

Hello, Central Casting? I need a Rosa Kleb-style totalitarian children's reeducation camp schoolmarm pic.twitter.com/d8K5kGmwOc

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 29, 2017

I want to say Phipps Soeiro looks great. This is a fabulous, beautiful librarian look, and if this says Rosa Klebb to you, I guess you're just not into the glory of librarians. I love the scarf, the bright-lipstick/no-eye-makeup look, the pinned-back hair, the glasses. It's utterly charming, well constructed and a lot of fun, like a character in a children's book. Perfection.

Now, let's read her words on the occasion of her school's getting selected — as one school in each state is selected — to receive a set of Dr. Seuss books:

"We ate their lunch!"

Exulted Nancy Pelosi, quoted in "‘We ate their lunch’: How Pelosi got to ‘yes’ on Trump’s trade deal/After tough fights, the speaker cut a deal that unions, the president and Democrats all like."

ADDED: I did some research into the idiom "ate their lunch," because I was just talking about last weekend's SNL skit showing Trump getting bullied by the popular kids in a school lunchroom. I said it makes me sympathetic to Trump to see the smug "cool" kids doing whatever they could to humiliate him, so it was interesting to me to hear Nancy Pelosi triumphing in a way that I thought evoked schoolyard bullies who steal lunch from their victims. But is that the source of the phrase "ate their lunch"?

Researching, I see that "ate their lunch" is a popular idiom in business. Investopedia says:

Eating someone's lunch refers to the act of an aggressive competition that results in one company taking portions of another company's market share.... This can be achieved through the release of a better or newer product, aggressive pricing or marketing strategies or other competitive advantages...

That doesn't explain the origin of the metaphor. What are we talking about? Next, I notice the very similar phrase: ate him for lunch. Are these 2 phrases of the same lineage? If so, which is the corruption?

I saw this at Urban Dictionary and thought it was very funny:

Many don't believe me, but in March of 1967 a buddy and I were sitting in a local bar. Something was said about lunch, I responded by saying, "I'll eat your lunch". All laughed and went on. The group that was there started using that line. Next thing I know everyone is using it. Believe it or not.

Looking for another way into this problem, I try googling "did the phrase eat your lunch originate in a bully who steals other student's lunch."

"What got me so mad is, number one, don’t tell my kid I’m not packing her lunch box properly."

Says the mother of a child in North Carolina whose home-packed, turkey-sandwich lunch was deemed insufficiently healthful by the school authorities, apparently because there was no vegetable. The child was given cafeteria food, which included a vegetable, but the child only ate the chicken nuggets, and the family was charged $1.25. I was going to say the family should send the school a bill for the cost of the confiscated food, but the forbidden food was sent home with the child.

What is the best lesson learned here?
	When you pack the kid's lunch, throw in a carrot to ward away the nannies.
	It's good to flip the power by going public and getting people angry at the school.
	Just give your kid the money to buy the school lunch.
pollcode.com free polls

Jesus Lunch update.

A couple weeks ago, we were talking about the "Jesus Lunches" in the Middleton, Wisconsin park next to the high school. I'd said:

The district superintendent and the high school principal in Middleton, Wisconsin are trying to end this activity, which started in 2014, when some parents began meeting with their own children and their children's friends, and has grown to the point were the authorities are worrying about whether it's legal (and not worrying enough about whether stopping it is illegal).... A city park is a traditional speech forum where free-speech rights are at their strongest.... These are private citizens, not government employees, and they're speaking on a subject of their choice with their own point of view. That's plain old freedom of speech. You can't discriminate against it because the religious message is making some people uncomfortable or because you're reminded of things like prayer in the classroom that would present a problem under the Establishment Clause.

A fine point was that the school had some kind of lease on the park that let it impose school rules on the students, but the park was still open to the general public, to whom the school rules didn't apply.

The news today is that the school officials are planning to ask the city to cancel the lease, so the school will have no authority over the park. Email from the district superintendent Don Johnson to employees and parents suggested that this was the best move, in view of the potential for lawsuits from both sides of the controversy.

Johnson wrote in his message that Fleming believes the district’s authority to enforce school rules in Fireman’s Park under the lease “is questionable, and that the city has no interest in litigation to resolve the ambiguities in the language.”

[City attorney Matt] Fleming didn’t disagree. “The only legal problems they might have right now, they brought on to themselves,” he said. “Their school rules only apply to school people. It is a public park, and I don’t think anything untoward was happening.”

In Fleming's view, canceling the lease doesn't make a difference. But I'd say that since some people thought the school's lease mattered, getting that out of the picture could help them adjust to the reality of life in the United States of America.

Fleming says the situation "needs to calm down," but "there isn’t anything the city will do, if there’s no lease, to fundamentally change anything." He's right about that. The city shouldn't do anything (other than enforce the neutral rules that apply to everyone using the park, whatever they're talking about Jesus or geometry or whatever).

Some Chicago public schools ban bringing your own lunch to school.

The Chicago Tribune reports:

"Nutrition wise, it is better for the children to eat at the school," [school principal Elsa] Carmona said. "It's about the nutrition and the excellent quality food that they are able to serve (in the lunchroom). It's milk versus a Coke. But with allergies and any medical issue, of course, we would make an exception."
Carmona said she created the policy six years ago after watching students bring "bottles of soda and flaming hot chips" on field trips for their lunch. Although she would not name any other schools that employ such practices, she said it was fairly common....

Any school that bans homemade lunches also puts more money in the pockets of the district's food provider, Chartwells-Thompson. The federal government pays the district for each free or reduced-price lunch taken, and the caterer receives a set fee from the district per lunch.

So is it for the benefit of the children or somebody else? Note that the kids think the food is bad, and the competition is crushed, so there's no pressure on the food service to make something the kids would prefer to whatever is they bring from home. But the schools' providers are required to present healthful foods, and maybe it's not fair for them to have to compete with whatever enticing treats the kids get bring in from the outside.

Who gets free school dinner in Madison, Wisconsin?

"Unlike the lunch program, eligibility for a free dinner is based on whether the school qualifies for the program based on school poverty rates, rather than the income level of an individual student. So any student participating in an eligible after-school program can eat the dinner meal for free."

Eligible schools for the dinner program must have at least 50 percent of students qualify as low-income. In Madison last year, 18 elementary schools, seven middle schools and East and La Follette High schools met that requirement.

To be eligible, students must take part in an academically focused after-school program, not an after-school sport. Memorial is looking into setting up a homework club for athletes between practice and the free meal so that they can participate in the free meal.

When does an argument against vegetarianism become harassment akin to racial harassment — based on someone's belonging to a particular group?

Eugene Volokh calls attention to the case of a 6th-grader who was punished — 5 lunch-hour detentions — for telling a fellow student "it’s not good to not eat meat" and that "he should eat meat because he’d be smarter and have bigger brains" and "vegetarians are idiots."

An administrative judge wrote that the boy's statements "were reasonably perceived as being motivated by a distinguishing characteristic between the two boys, namely vegetarianism, which substantially interfered with the rights of K.S. and had the effect of insulting or demeaning him."

Volokh observes that the judge did not stress the empty insult "vegetarians are idiots," but "treated this statement as on par with polite factual and normative claims (whether accurate or not), such as 'it’s not good to not eat meat' and '[you] should eat meat because [you]’d be smarter and have bigger brains.'"

So would the boy have been punished if he'd limited himself to a substantive argument against avoiding meat? Isn't it significant that vegetarianism can be part of a person's religion or religion-like in its importance to a person? Are children allowed to proselytize in the lunch room? Does it depend on whether they can refrain from insults or do we just not want them arguing about things that go to the deep core of human identity? The question is: How big is this notion of harassment and how small — by contrast — are the free speech rights of school children?

Can't I just not eat my waffle?

I'm reading "Opinion: The unjust shaming of a little girl highlights the broad issue of institutional food waste" (WaPo):

On Nov. 21, a 9-year-old student of color at Palm Elementary School in Lorain, Ohio, didn’t want to eat the packaged waffles that had been put on her lunch tray. When she threw them away, a White cafeteria monitor forced the girl to retrieve them from the trash and sit at a table until she ate them. Within weeks, the monitor and the school principal were both fired. But the story did not end there. In January, the district released video of the event, and it is being used as evidence in a civil rights lawsuit against the district. 

Whatever the outcome of the case, this incident has exposed cracks around race and class as they play out in the country’s long-standing commitment to feeding the more than 30 million public school students who rely on the National School Lunch Program every day....

ADDED: Sometimes your teaching of a lesson becomes the lesson.

"We understand the purpose of education is not a career and a technical job, the purpose of an education is to teach young people how to think, which scares the hell out of Scott Walker."

Said Paul Soglin at the Democratic Party gubernatorial forum on Wednesday, quoted in "At Democratic forum Matt Flynn says Scott Walker will eat Tony Evers for lunch" (Wisconsin State Journal).

Here's the Isthmus report on the forum:

The mostly collegial conversation took a turn toward the end of the 90-minute forum, when Flynn took aim at Evers, criticizing him for supporting Walker’s most recent budget and calling him “Republican light.” Evers pushed back against the attack, calling Flynn’s characterization a “cheap shot” and pointing out that he praised the budget as “pro-kid” because Walker adopted 90 percent of the funding Evers had proposed. “I’ll never back off from that,” Evers said. “That is, frankly, an outrageous comment from somebody that I respect. We can win this race without this type of diatribe."

Flynn responded by suggesting that Evers couldn’t stand up to Walker. "If you ask an open question to a liar — to Scott Walker — he'll have you for lunch," Flynn said.

Tony Evers is the state school superintendent, and he's leading according to the latest Marquette poll. The primary is next Tuesday. It's a shame there are so many candidates. The forum was very hard to watch — technically amateurish to the point of absurdity. We watched and here's the comment I dashed off in my own comments section last night:

We watched the whole thing. Laughed a lot. At what??! They weren’t funny but we laughed anyway. Something about the mikes malfunctioning, Evers mumbling, that guy who seemed like Andy Kaufman wearing a yellow suit that turned green as the time wore on, Vinehout getting so gosh darn excited over everything and rocking back and forth, Flynn being so weirdly gruff, etc. It all seemed so rinky dink. At one point, a fedora floated by. No one took care of the technical side of this show. They were all seated, yet they stood up to talk and the camera had to tilt up and down woozily.

And you want to be my governor?

"A fedora floated by" literally refers to a man in a hat walking in front of the camera. Figuratively, it's a bit like an empty suit.

Floating Fedora from Natasha Kirke on Vimeo.

ADDED: Scott Walker won't eat Tony Evers for lunch because he's famous for eating the same thing for lunch every day, and it's not Tony Evers. See "This Governor Is Getting Mocked for Brown-Bagging Lunch Every Day" (Money):

Walker tweeted that for 26 long years in a row, he has eaten not one, but two ham-and-cheese sandwiches almost everyday for lunch. “Like millions of Americans, I bring my own lunch to work,” Walker wrote in the tweet.

Walker eating lunch is not a good metaphor for his opponents. It's long been part of his political rhetoric, and they're making me think of it.

"Jesus Lunches" — free lunch and talking about Jesus, in the city park next to the high school.

The district superintendent and the high school principal in Middleton, Wisconsin are trying to end this activity, which started in 2014, when some parents began meeting with their own children and their children's friends, and has grown to the point were the authorities are worrying about whether it's legal (and not worrying enough about whether stopping it is illegal).

“We believe that religious or political events do not have a place in our school or on our campus, except when sponsored by a student group in accordance with our rules, which require prior approval,” the email [from Superintendent Donald Johnson and Principal Stephen Plank] said. “In addition, many students have conveyed to us their concern about a group offering free food to incentivize participation in a religious event on campus.”

A city park is a traditional speech forum where free-speech rights are at their strongest. And what's wrong with "incentivizing participation" with free food? It sounds like nothing more than objecting to the message. These are private citizens, not government employees, and they're speaking on a subject of their choice with their own point of view. That's plain old freedom of speech. You can't discriminate against it because the religious message is making some people uncomfortable or because you're reminded of things like prayer in the classroom that would present a problem under the Establishment Clause.

The school district leases the park during school hours, the email said, so policies that apply to the school campus extend to the park during that time....

“Fireman’s Park — a public park owned by the city of Middleton — remains accessible to everyone in the public for the purposes of assembly and free speech,” the statement [from the parents] said. “By law, the lease agreement between the city and the school district of Middleton does not privatize the park.” 

In the sun.

It's 70 degrees here in Madison as we head out for lunch. Walking back, we do some browsing at Urban Outfitters. The sun in the window makes the retro-hippie tatters glow:



The street vendors are out all over Library Mall, including this one in a big, feathered hat:



The choice window seats of Memorial Library are all taken:



The leafless trees cast the last wintry shadows:



Crossing the Park Street bridge, we see the shrinking ice of Lake Mendota:



Dotting Bascom Hill: readers!



More readers:



More readers on the hill, just in front of the Law School:



And at least one sleeper!

UPDATE: An emailer writes, "What, no lovers?" And I answer, "Actually, we were talking about the solitariness of the 'hill people.' There were no lovers!" In fact, at lunch, we were discussing the way the way primary and middle school teachers appreciate the behavior of girls (and don't see their misbehavior) and punish the boys for not acting more like the girls. Girls end up more accommodated to academia and flock to college, which may need to do affirmative action for males to keep the male-to-female ratio in balance. Does this mean that in college, males end up with lower GPAs? What effect does this have on law school admissions? What is going on?

This is one of the main things we talked about at lunch. I described my heartfelt opposition to the way schoolteachers treat young boys, but at the same time, I am utterly opposed to affirmative action for males! There are some big problems that we are barely beginning to notice. The seeming loneliness of the women on the hill is, perhaps, just the beginning of a huge problem.

Later in the day, Glenn Reynolds linked to this post and made an observation about women outnumbering men. He's surely right that I was not looking for women to photograph, just randomly capturing the view of the hill.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The theme of the imbalance in educated males and females -- the "reverse gender gap" -- is continued in this post.

Somebody at Cornell Law School stole a law student's Ruth Bader Ginsburg lunch bag.

Email sent to everyone:

"If you let my lunch bag go now that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you, but if you don’t, I will look for you, I will find you and I will kill yell at you. To the low life who literally stole my lunch and dinner, please have the decency to at least return my WLC lunch bag to the kitchen. I just want Ruthey to get home safely."

The sad thing about this, other than that theft exists, is that if anybody else has an RBG lunch bag, they can't use it without looking like a thief. And I would think that a lot of people, upon learning that there is such a thing as a Ruth Bader Ginsburg lunch bag might want to get one...



... and now — at the very point of desire formation — they must leave that desire unrequited, because it is linked inextricably with looking like a thief.

Sir Archy, archy, and blogging cockroach.

In the early morning hours yesterday, this blog received a visit from our ghost commenter Sir Archy -- dead these 260 Years and more.

As a ghost, he had something to say about Barack Obama's first press conference, in which the prez-elect claimed to have spoken to all the living Presidents and quipped "I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing about doing any séances." (That quip -- for which Obama's had to apologize -- would surely have inspired warm chuckles in a law faculty room.) 

In the comments, Amba said about Sir Archy: "I get him mixed up with the cockroach." By "the cockroach, she means our delightful insect commenter blogging cockroach. (Click the "blogging cockroach" tag below to see old posts with writings by the industrious arthropod.)

Amba adds: "I wonder if they aren't the same person, though, and 'Archy' is a clue." She's thinking -- I happen to know -- of archy of archy and mehitabel, the literary creations of Don Marquis:

Archy is a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel is an alley cat with a celebrated past -- she claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life.... "expression is the need of my soul," declares Archy, who labored as a free-verse poet in an earlier incarnation. At night, alone, he dives furiously on the keys of Don Marquis' typewriter to describe a cockroach's view of the world, rich with cynicism and humor. It's difficult enough to operate the typewriter's return bar to get a fresh line of paper; all of Archy's dispatches are written lowercase, and without punctuation, because he is unable to hit both shift and letter keys to produce a capital letter. "boss i am disappointed in some of your readers," he writes, weary of having to explain the mechanics of his literary output. " ... they are always interested in technical details when the main question is whether the stuff is literature or not."

Marquis' George Herriman's ink drawings are sublime. See, here is archy putting in the immense athletic effort needed to type a short column: 

Now, blogging cockroach is surely a tribute to Marquis' archy, and we appreciate his explanation of the the mechanics of his literary output by computer even as we contemplate whether the stuff is literature or not. (Perhaps someone can make a drawing in the Marquis style of blogging cockroach at the computer or photoshop this drawing somehow.)

But Amba's question is whether Sir Archy is named to connect him to the cockroach. (Bonus points if you you do that drawing/photoshop and replace mehitabel with Sir Archy.) Are these writers one and the same (and, if so, are they also anybody else that we see around here)?

Well, the cockroach saw Amba's musings and dropped by the comments thread. Here is what he wrote:

well all i can say is that there are some advantages to being a cockroach one of them is i don t have to worry about my hair or clothes anymore having the transmigrated soul of a composer i can look back at all the troubles i had when i was a music professor to buy the right suits and keep my shirts ironed etc in those days they paid us a pittance and so i drove a 56 studebaker but had to wear a suit on campus every day which cost me as much as the damn studebaker i hated clothes not to mention haircuts i was actually kinda glad to go bald except maybe for the combover which frightened away my female students damn but now i don t worry about any of that and other than molting now and then life is simple and i sure don t want to mess it up with a powdered wig but having spent a little time on the astral plane myself i can tell you archy s right about seances etc you just settle in and some idiot comes and bothers you about something really stupid reminded me of office hours anyway one day my ex wife showed up wondering where the key to the safe deposit box was now some exes hire private detectives but mine hired a medium tells you a lot anyway i screamed let me out of here let me slouch somewhere to be born and presto the next ticket said cockroach cambridge mass so here i am maybe i ll tell you about the safe deposit box next time

So here's another clue for you all:

Plus, cambridge mass... Harvard/MIT? Some bald professor with a penchant for nudism?

ADDED: And at last night's Crossroads Café, Chip Ahoy said:

What I know about the Kennedy administration was learned by reading. Smithsonian used to be so interesting. My favorite part was letters from the readers remarking on articles. What an erudite bunch. It ran a couple of pages. Then they got another new editor who cut that section back to just a few letters and to about half a page. That told me all I needed to know about the new editors attitude toward his readers. Then they ran an article in relation to the John Kennedy assassination anniversary. Readers were asked where they were when the event occurred. That series of letters then ran for several pages. All the remarks were about how glorious the age of Camelot was, how idealistic, youthful, energetic, positive, and optimistic everyone was. How amazing incredibly beautiful the time was. Every single one glowed with praise and rued a lost past. Except for one. A response from Tom Clancy. He had a wee on their little party. He remarked the administration wasn't all that remarkable. He reminded readers of several notable failures and obvious shortcomings. He suggested had the administration lasted, it would not be remembered so fondly. This caused me adore Tom Clancy, even though he's a schmuck. I was so put off by the whole thing, the rebuff to the readers, the hard leftist turn, the ceaseless pontificating, the whole desktop publishing look, I ended the subscription I held since junior high school. It occurred to me though, reading through all those responses, those writers, were recalling an idealized, sanitized youthful optimism -- their own youths. Their optimism was entirely of their own making and had little to do with facts on the ground. As is their present pessimism. And now, I'm seeing that phenomenon occurring again right before my eyes. I'm going to enjoy this. As an observer. But this will not affect my own naturally occurring cheerful optimism nor my own self-indulgent satanic pessimism. I'm just going to watch my wonderful country, the less wonderful world, willfully create their own optimism. Myth making. That's what is happening. Observe a new myth. This is how it's created. Begin by overlooking faults, dismissing them, excusing them. Next exaggerate any gain, whatever actual good there is, suddenly is really REALLY, REALLY everlastingly good. Yay! Dance! Glee! Canonize! Deify. Mythologize. Expect comparisons to Camelot, and know then you're in the arena of myth. But know also, this is all occurring within the minds of the mythologists. But know also, optimism is very real. Just as real an uplifter as pessimism interprets into very real and actual drag. Therefore, I choose to enjoy the optimism in my fellow Americans, no matter how ridiculous it is. I could go for another Camelot myself, even though I know it's all occurring entirely within the minds of all you silly dumkopfs, present company excepted, of course. I vastly prefer my fellow citizens as silly little shits, than as obnoxious unbearable cnuts. <--- a="" about="" and="" before="" company="" completes="" delusional="" did="" different.="" disguises="" entirely="" even="" for="" href="http://bour3pages.blogspot.com/2008/11/hummus-on-romaine.html" i="" in="" it.="" letter="" mixed="" my="" mythos.="" now="" one="" optimistic="" polite="" remarks="" ridiculously="" s="" see="" self-constructed="" something="" than="" the="" there="" this="" transposition.="" unacceptable="" what="" word="" worse="">Here's what I made for lunch.

Sorry you couldn't be here, I'm sure you'd have been wonderful lunch dates.Go to Chip's lunch link for all the steps, but here's his last pic:

That brought the cockroach over:

yes chip ahoy that was a beautiful lunch i adore hummus if you don t eat those lettuce leaves completely and leave the remains on the plate or better yet drop one on the floor well i ll have a beautiful lunch too now about the beautiful kennedy administration i was a young grad student when camelot happened the main thing i remember is seeing kennedy getting off an airplane looking really snappy or hot as they say today and thinking man that guy must get some action then i thought naw he s the president of the u s that s really sick to think those thoughts hoo boy was i wrong

And here's what Tom Clancy wrote:

I never voted for the guy. I was only 13 when he got elected. I was a junior in high school when Kennedy got whacked. I was in the Waverly Theater on Green Mount Avenue in Baltimore watching Shirley MacLame and Jack Lemmon. I had a half-day of school. It was a Friday. I heard it on the way coming out of the movie. The ticket-taker said the president got shot. Then followed four days of nothing but a dead president. They didn't even show the Colts play. He was the president of the United States, so I didn't want him murdered. I wanted him to lose the next election. I mean, what did he accomplish? He has been canonized by the media, which I think is a bit unseemly. He was a handsome guy. He had great style. He meant well. It was Lyndon Johnson who got the civil rights movement rolling. He was a patriot and he put his life at risk in World War II, and that's something to be admired, but I don't see anything historically significant that he did other than the space program. For the space program, I'd buy him a beer.

ADDED: Thanks to Jeff with one "f" for correcting me about the ink drawings. I love George Herriman -- and even blogged about him back here. Mehitabel's resemblance to Krazy Kat is clear... clearer than Sir Archy's resemblance to blogging cockroach.

AND: Dear, sweet Palladian has sent me the illustration I wanted!

   

"Parents of a New Jersey sixth grader who killed herself last year after months of bullying sued school officials this week..."

"... stating that the school failed to take their repeated complaints seriously... At one point, the school asked Mallory and her bullies to 'hug each other,”' according to the lawsuit. When Mallory was bullied at lunch, the suit says, the school directed her to eat in a counselor’s office. Hours before Mallory’s suicide on June 14, 2017, at a meeting about the bullying, her principal handed Mallory a poker chip and asked her to inscribe her initials and the date on it, and used a poker metaphor to address the situation, according to the lawsuit. 'Are you all in?' the principal asked Mallory, according to Ms. Grossman. 'There is this attack on the victim to suck it up,' Ms. Grossman said. 'I knew they weren’t taking it seriously.'... She wanted help, but she didn’t want to draw attention.... She didn’t want to be labeled a tattletale.'"

From "Sixth Grader’s Parents Say School Didn’t Do Enough to Stop Her Suicide" (NYT).

7 schools in Madison, Wisconsin get federally funded free meals for all students.

This is the Community Eligibility Provision, which funds meals at schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families.

Officials say eliminating the distinction will reduce the stigma associated with receiving subsidized meals and also improve the nutrition of students school-wide, which could improve academic performance....

Even assuming this is a good idea, how do they get the numbers to put into the calculation? I guess they don't have to force everyone to tell their income to the authorities, just enough to hit the percentage. Once everyone in the school is getting free meals, everyone has an interest in the continued flow of free food, which could end if X number of families begin to make too much money. That's a strange situation! How can they keep track?

Enrolling the schools in the federal program was one of several strategies the Madison district is deploying to make its food service budget more sustainable, and less dependent on the district’s general fund to remain balanced.

If it weren't for the bad punctuation, I'd think that was intended as comic writing. Next time you're dining out with a friend and the check arrives, sit calmly with your hands in your lap and observe that you are deploying a strategy to make your budget more sustainable. Maybe your dinner companion will laugh, but if he doesn't, and he pays, you ought to wonder what conditions are attached.

ADDED: A reader emails:

[At the Wisconsin school where I work, we] too are going to the totally free meals for our students (about 400). We currently have about 80% of our students on Free Lunch so from the perspective of reducing paperwork for our staff in makes real sense.

How it works is that about now as school starts, and then periodically through the year schools will submit a file to the state. That file will be matched against state data bases and return a file showing what students are eligible based on family enrollment in a variety of “welfare” programs. This is called Direct Certification. If parents are not identified as being eligible they receive a letter telling them they are not and allowing them to complete an application to demonstrate their eligibility. So to answer your early question of how they are determined, the bulk are from the Direct Certification process.

Once in the program I believe you are in for four years. At the end of those four years you will have to reapply based on the current situation of your families. Again, because the basic information come from the state based on enrollment in programs there it will be relatively easy to do.

I have mixed emotions about the program, but as a school official it would be malfeasance to not attempt to use a program that is eligible to us and would save us money....

Begging Michael Bloomberg — who just gave $80 million to the Democratic Party — to run for President but as a Republican.

I'm reading "Yes, Mike, run — as a Republican: If Bloomberg tries to become President as a Democrat, it'll backfire" by David Freelander (Daily News). I wonder who it will "backfire" on? You can't know what the "backfire" is unless you know what way he's aiming the metaphorical gun.

But if Bloomberg really wants to put the billion or so he can spend on a presidential run to good use, he will turn in his new party membership, re-register as a Republican, and do battle with Trump in the GOP primary, not the Democratic one.

"Good use"? It depends on Bloomberg's conception of the good.

Bloomberg... combines the liberal social views of a wealthy Manhattanite (pro-gay rights, anti-gun, pro-charter school and so on) with the economic views of, well, a wealthy Manhattanite (pro-immigration, pro-trade, pro-corporation), at a time when the party is powered by a young, diverse and populist cohort and trying to figure out how to regain its appeal among lunch-bucket voters in the Heartland.

So? There are a lot of people who sometimes vote Democratic who'd like an option like that. In fact, it was the option the Democratic Party chose to nominate the last time around. By the way, I haven't seen the term "lunch-bucket voters" in a long time. It's funny to be touting the young and using such an old-time-y expression. What percentage of living Americans possess an object they call a "lunch bucket"? Even the most lunch-bucket-y item on Amazon is called a "lunch box."

Back to Freelander:

Bloomberg gave as a reason for his party switch that the GOP was out of step on his issues: on climate change, gay marriage and guns.... It is almost inconceivable that Mike Bloomberg would win, and go on to be the Republican nominee. He is surely unwilling to stoop to Trump’s level to win over his base. But it is almost inconceivable that he would win the Democratic nomination either. Far more likely is that his money weakens the eventual Democratic nominee. Bloomberg says that Trump must be stopped at all costs; far better, in that case, that his dollars and his candidacy go to weaken the eventual Republican one.

I can see why many Democrats would like Bloomberg to spend his money weakening Trump in the primaries, but how is he a credible candidate after giving all the support to the Democrats? I guess he could say he's just anti-Trump and helping Democrats take over the House was the most effective anti-Trump strategy in 2018. He can say he stands for a good set of values that either party would be wise to adopt, and then the question becomes what's the best strategy for his set of values in 2020. Is it wearing down Trump in the primaries and allowing the "young, diverse and populist cohort" of Democrats to come up with what they can without having to fight Bloomberg? Or is it vying for the Democratic nomination? Freelander says that winning either party's nomination is "almost inconceivable." But Trump's 2016 victory was not just "almost inconceivable." It was inconceivable! Bloomberg is way richer than Trump, and Trump already showed that bizarre billionaire dreams really do come true.

What if Roe v. Wade were overturned?

I'm here in St. Louis at the St. Louis University School of Law, where I'm a panelist responding to a lecture given by lawprof Richard Fallon on the subject of what things would be like if Roe v. Wade were overturned. He's speaking now, so let me keep you informed.

Fallon says he's never taken a position on whether Roe should be overturned, and his point here is to examine the various legal problems that would arise if it were overturned. He identifies four fallacies about overruling Roe:

1. There's a belief that overruling Roe would wipe the slate clean. In fact, there are old statutes on the books of the various states outlawing abortion. Would these statutes spring back into effect? Could these statutes be enforced retroactively?

2. There's a belief that overruling Roe would necessarily return the question to the states, but there's "almost no doubt" that Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause to pass laws that trump whatever the states might want to do.

3. There's a belief that overruling Roe would extract courts from the abortion controversy -- "get out of the abortion umpiring business," as Justice Scalia once put it. But really, the courts will just have to deal with a new set of abortion-related questions. What if a state outlawed abortion even where it was needed to save a woman's life? Don't women have some right to defend themselves at the constitutional level, quite aside from whether there's a broader right to abortion? And then there would be all sorts of questions about the scope of that right that would haunt the courts endlessly. And what if some states tried to restrict their citizens as they sought to travel to other states to obtain abortions? Complicated legal questions would arise here too.

4. There's a belief that Roe v Wade could be overruled without having much effect on the rest of constitutional law. What would be the ground for overruling the case? Even if the Court took a "modest" approach to the overruling and merely found no fundamental right to abortion, it would represent a triumph of "popular constitutionalism," and this might inspire new political efforts to exert pressure on the Court to change things to respond to political pressure.

Now, the commenters. Panel 1 is up. I'm on Panel 2, after lunch. Susan Appleton of Washington University Law School is speaking now. Also on this panel: Stephen Gardbaum (UCLA School of Law), Michael Greve (American Enterprise Institute), and Mark Rosen (Chicago-Kent College of Law).

FINALLY FINISHING THIS POST: Panel 2 was Anthony J. Bellia, Jr. (Notre Dame Law School), Alan Howard (Saint Louis University School of Law), and me. I said I thought that to collect all the possible post-Roe legal troubles is, implicitly, to make an argument against overruling Roe. Overruling Roe would create a new set of problems, and it is natural (and conservative) to prefer to the known problems to the unknown, but I think those who like Roe have a motive to underestimate the problems we have now and to exaggerate what the new problems would be. I support preserving Roe myself, but I don't think those who support overruling it should or will be pushed back with hypertechnical legalistic puzzles that essentially say: this is all too complex for you to fathom, so you really aren't competent to have an opinion here.

At the end of the first panel, a woman asked: If there really are all these problems without Roe, why didn't we see them before Roe? Afterwards, I said to one of the other law professors, that was a great question, do you know who that woman was? Answer: Phyllis Schafly's daughter.

"Lo and behold, the great philosopher’s number was listed right there, next to those of mere mortals. But who should be the one to call Rawls?"

"No one volunteered for this daunting task. So Anjan nominated me. 'You should talk to him,' he said, 'because you guys have a lot in common.' The idea that a world-famous political philosopher would have anything in common with an obscure high school sophomore struck me as ridiculous. Still, a part of me was flattered by Anjan’s suggestion that I should be the one to call Rawls. So I let him persuade me. With trembling fingers, I dialed Rawls’ number, half-hoping that he wouldn’t be home. It turned out that Rawls was home. Somehow, I managed to work up the courage to explain who I was and ask my question [about an argument they wanted to make in a high school debate]. Rawls listened carefully, and then modestly admitted that he simply hadn’t thought about that issue before. Still, he stayed on the phone with me and talked about it for more than half an hour. I didn’t get much out of him that would be useful for the tournament. He really hadn’t thought about our issue before. Nonetheless, I was moved by Rawls’ thoughtfulness and even more by his willingness to treat a lowly high school student as an equal and take my questions seriously. He didn’t become impatient even when I took issue with one of his points. I still think that most of Rawls’ major ideas were probably wrong, brilliant though they undoubtedly were."

Writes lawprof Ilya Somin in "A Road to Freedom," which I'm noticing this morning because Somin is calling attention to Rawls's 100th birthday, which was yesterday. See "Happy 100th Birthday, John Rawls!/Today is the 100th birthday of the most influential political philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century" (Reason). 

Somin also calls attention to a commemoration of Rawls by Larry Solum (at Legal Theory Blog). Excerpt:

Rawls... spoke at the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting in New Orleans.... [Cass] Sunstein and Rawls engaged in an important exchange on the relationship between the ideas of public reason and overlapping consensus and Sunstein's similar notion of incompletely theorized agreement. After the lunch following the lecture, I remember that Rawls expressed a desire to gamble but no one else wanted to go! This moment haunts me still — surely I could have found time to accompany Jack (as he was known to his friends) to the Riverboat Casino for a few hours. Time passes. It is now the 100th anniversary of John Rawls birth....

I would especially love to see comments that connect Rawls's "Theory of Justice" to the topic of gambling. 

Also, feel free to imagine fictional scenarios that parallel Solum's missed opportunity: You're in some city where you intersect with a famous person who wants to do something that you wouldn't do if your usual travel companion suggested it, but you really ought to do because you'd have the chance to spend more time with this famous person.  How would that go?

And I'd love to hear about times when you were a high school student and you got some real conversation time with an eminent person you were surprised would talk to you at all.