Shine a light in dark places: NCC DE Moms for Liberty -- crusaders or useful tools??

 

This is what the national Moms for Liberty organization says on its "Who We Are" page:

This is what they don't tell you:

THIS is one of the most dangerous websites in America

You probably don't WANT to visit RatedBooks.org, which is an unspoken product of the whacko Moms for Liberty, but maybe this quote will convince you that you need to do so:

"Unlike books' much younger cousins in the media family - movies, television programs, music, and video games - books remain unrated."

This is the website that tells you that the following authors are purveyors of "pornography" and their works should be restricted in K-12 education:

Margaret Atwood

Judy Blume

Robert Heinlein

Bernard Malamud

Toni Morrison

Jodi Picoult

Philip Roth

Kurt Vonnegut

Richard Wright

... and many more ...

This is also the website that is helping to coordinate organizations across America to have these books removed from library shelves or placed in restricted sections ... and not just in school libraries ...

There are more sites than this which are doing the same, but you have to start somewhere.

This is a nationwide attempt to eliminate not just LGBTQIA+ voices, not just Black voices, to the marginalize and shame some of America's most beloved and important writers ... as PORNOGRAPHERS.

You need to pay VERY CLOSE ATTENTION to this page and its fellow travelers, because they are intent upon dulling the minds of your children.

Book Riot makes a pretty conclusive case that we are losing the war against censorship and book banning

This becomes more and more chilling ... as the censorship karens are being augmented by the book banning vigilantes who are expanding their sights beyond public school and college classrooms into public libraries ...

You will not want to read this all, but you NEED to do so ...

Watch this space: I intend to start providing tools to fight back that go beyond opposing legislation or signing up to speak at a public meeting.

American Censorship -- a case study of comic books

For the last few years of my active teaching career I used this slide show to explore both how censorship works -- and doesn't work. The last time I actually taught this was about a year before Covid struck, which seems today like a long, long time ago.

But as the censorship karens and the serious book banners are coming after literally everything, it seems more important than ever to pass along two major messages ...

First, we have been here before ... and ...

Second, free people may be temporarily bamboozled into supporting them, but there will emerge new heroes to fight them ...

A note: if you'd like to use this presentation yourself, please reach out instead of trying to pirate it here. I will provide you with a slideshow or pdf with appropriate attributions, as well as copyright/fair use notices that you can use.

Also, please visit/support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, which has been fighting for freedom of expression and against censorship in this venue for a long time.

Debunking that Freakonomics "hit piece" on local food movements

This is particularly disappointing to see, as I have in general loved the material that Dubner and Leavitt put out in their books, but I suppose I should take some comfort in the fact that this piece is by Steve Sexton, a PhD student at UC Berkeley. Other sites, like Mother Jones, have already reacted to Sexton's intellectually thin gruel, but I don't think they did him justice.

Sexton essentially sets out to argue that "locavore" food strategies--favoring local producers over far-distant corporate farms--are both more costly in terms of food prices and detrimental to the environment:

My conservative estimates are that under the pseudo-locavore system, corn acreage increases 27 percent or 22 million acres, and soybean acres increase 18 percent or 14 million acres. Fertilizer use would increase at least 35 percent for corn, and 54 percent for soybeans, while fuel use would climb 23 percent and 34 percent, for corn and soybeans, respectively. Chemical demand would grow 23 percent and 20 percent for the two crops, respectively. 

In order to maintain current output levels for 40 major field crops and vegetables, a locavore-like production system would require an additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals. The land-use changes and increases in demand for carbon-intensive inputs would have profound impacts on the carbon footprint of our food, destroy habitat and worsen environmental pollution.

This sounds incredibly damning, until you realize that the "conservative" in Sexton's "conservative estimate" is functionally more of an ideological label than a statistical descriptor.

Since this piece has been getting such enormous traction at sites like "scibabe" [she calls it a "great read"], it's actually important to devote the time to fisking it, and to revealing the nature of Sexton's "conservative estimates."

First, consider this:

It is difficult to estimate the impact of a truly locavore farming system because crop production data don’t exist for crops that have not historically been grown in various regions. However, we can imagine what a “pseudo-locavore” farming system would look like—one in which each state that presently produces a crop commercially must grow a share proportional to its population relative to all producers of the crop. I have estimated the costs of such a system in terms of land and chemical demand. 

Ok, we can only hope that Sexton does better in his eventual dissertation than the first link suggests, because the definition of "truly locavore" comes from a Wikapedia page entitled "Local Food" that (A) carries this disclaimer at the top:

This article is written like a personal reflection or opinion essay that states the Wikipedia editor's particular feelings about a topic, rather than the opinions of experts.

... and (B) the only definition of "locavore" refers to individuals, not production systems, and is itself sourced back to a 2006 Time magazine article that never actually provides a working definition in the sense that Sexton uses it.

Forget about "pseudo-locavore"because, uh, Sexton just made it up.  It's a synonym for "straw man," as a matter of fact.

Here's the key paragraph where he palms the card:

It is difficult to estimate the impact of a truly locavore farming system because crop production data don’t exist for crops that have not historically been grown in various regions. However, we can imagine what a “pseudo-locavore” farming system would look like—one in which each state that presently produces a crop commercially must grow a share proportional to its population relative to all producers of the crop. I have estimated the costs of such a system in terms of land and chemical demand.

Notice here the definition, which is in bold.  Got that?  The implementation of Sexton's imagined "pseudo-locavore" system REQUIRES each state to produce commercial crops in proportion to its population.  In other words, Sexton is saying, "I'm going to require (by law, presumably) my pseudo-locavore system to deliver EXACTLY THE SAME DIET that is currently being produced, and then compare efficiencies."

He's not going to examine any system that any advocates of changing food production and/or distribution have ever put forward; no, he's going to create his own clown-car, Gestapo-mandated system, attribute it to them, and then tear it apart.  Sort of.  Turns out he doesn't even do that "tearing apart" thing particularly well.

Here's where you find his "estimates."  Let's note at the outset that his "analysis" is published by the Gianni Foundation of Agricultural Economics, and lacks any footnotes or source citation.  You can't actually reproduce Sexton's numbers because (A) he never tells you where he got the underlying stats, or (B) what statistical process he used to massage them in order to develop his argument.  He also attributes multiple arguments to "locavores" without ever bothering to quote anybody, name anybody, or provide any material for additional reading beyond other Gianni Foundation publications.

Again, let's hope he does better on his dissertation.

His assumptions, even if one spots him the lack of documenting his evidence, are wonderful:

These assumptions reallocate production so that each state produces an average “diet” for each if its residents. Because of data limitations, production is reallocated in this analysis for each crop only over those states for which a complete set of data exists. For instance, yield data for a given crop do not exist for states that are not currently producing that crop, so it is impossible to determine input demands.

This is truly amazing, as Sexton fails to tell us how many states this would entail leaving out, which states he uses, or how the develops the regions that he will mention in his following paragraph. Moreover, Sexton decides that the total impact of his "pseudo-locavore" system can be modeled through only four crops:  corn, soybeans, oats, and milk.  Leave aside that any such system that doesn't include wheat production or produce couldn't possibly pretend to bear the weight that Sexton wants his model to carry, he also leaves out such niceties under input demands as the impact of the existing Federal milk price support system or the percentage of soybeans utilized in the production of ethanol and therefore grown (and presumably modeled in his system) but not consumed as food or fodder.

Sexton palms many other cards in his presentation, including

These assumptions reallocate production so that each state produces an average “diet” for each if [sic] its residents. ... 

Using the regional mean production costs and state-level data on yield ... 

If a national price for inputs is assumed, these input cost changes can be interpreted as changes in input demand ...  

Table 2 reports the states that gain the most farmland under local production and those that lose the most, in absolute terms. Extrapolating this change across the 2.26 billion acres of farmland in the United States, the agricultural land base would grow by 214.8 million acres— an area twice the size of California. ...

None of these assumptions is either sourced or quantified, nor is there any validation for his methodology.  For all any skeptical reader could know, Sexton reaches up into his head and picks out numbers that sound good.

And he has to stumble past a number of problems in his conception without trying to draw attention to them.  Consider milk:

Notably, however, results for milk suggest that production costs decrease under the “pseudo-locavore” scenario, and purchased feed is substituted for grazing and feed produced in the dairy farm. The changes in feed consumption suggest carbon savings relative to the status quo, but the increased number of cows would induce more carbon emissions. Because of the way data for milk are reported, the change in head of cattle accounts for efficiency differences across states, where as input costs do not.

Actually, Sexton hasn't proven at any point that more cows would be required, nor does he do more than thinly swipe at the impact of Federal price controls on input costs.

Or there's this:

Large monocropped farms are more dependent than small polycrop farms on synthetic fertilizers and tilling operations to restore soil nutrients. They also face heightened pest pressure because they provide a consistent environment for breeding of crop-specific pests. Higher pest pressure increases demand for chemical damage control agents. Disposal of farm residues, like animal waste, also becomes a significant environmental challenge on industrial farms. The direct environmental costs of large-scale agriculture are clearly non-trivial. What is unclear, however, is whether the environmental benefits of small, poly-cropped farms outweigh the loss of efficiencies that are equally well-documented to accompany the increasing scale of production. 

In this case the card may not be where you think it is.  Sexton admits the comparative environmental damage of large monocropped farms, but then then says that it is "unclear" whether the environmental costs are offset by the environmental benefits of small poly-cropped farms.  It's that UNCLEAR where Sexton palms the card.  In an entire essay in which (without benefit of source or methodology citations) he has been arguing exactly that IT IS CLEAR (and even more forcefully in his Freakonomics one-off) that large-scale farming is economically and environmentally beneficial in a comparative sense, he hides a hedge that threatens to invalidate his entire argument.

I think the card just dropped on the floor.

Here's one of my other favorites:

For instance, agricultural economists have rejected the notion that farm policy is to blame for the obesity epidemic in America. While policy has made grains relatively cheap, it has also made sugar more expensive. 

Yep, it's made sugar more expensive in order to create a demand market for high-fructose corn syrup. Which, of course, has NOTHING to do with the obesity epidemic in America.

Here's my favorite card. Remember that Sexton's straw man "pseudo-locavore" system is designed to examine the costs of delivering exactly the same diet that the average person eats now, which makes this not only disingenuous but intellectually dishonest:

Would a local food system improve American diets? In two key respects, the likely answer is no. First, as this analysis has shown, a local food system would greatly increase the costs of food production by imposing constraints on the efficient allocation of resources. The monetary costs of increased input demands from forsaken gains from trade and scale economies will directly bear on consumer welfare by increasing the costs of food. Research shows that as incomes rise, fresh produce as a share of diets increases. Therefore, given that locavorism would effectively make consumers poorer by increasing the cost of food, it is hard to see how local production improves diets or health outcomes. 

What Sexton knows (and we know he knows it because of the few sources he cites for his Freakonomics article) is that local food advocates (A) make arguments about the quality and freshness of food; and (B) have, as a part of their strategy, CHANGING both the kinds and qualities that people consume.  In other words, he has created a system that locavores don't support, analyzed it to find it wanting, and then applied to it to other than the objectives the local food movement is trying to achieve.

All the while pretending he's actually doing serious research.

Finally, he ends with the assertion that local food advocates--not lack of population control, not climate change, not governmental policies, not trade regulations not market manipulations--but local food advocates (think of the woman in the denim skirt ahead of you in line at the farmer's market) will cause mass starvation and/or the clear-cutting of the rain forests in order to avoid mass starvation by 2050.

And, yes, he really does say that:

If mass starvation is to be avoided in the current century, then we must either forsake natural land, including tropical forests, or renew our commitment to crop science ["crop science" is here used as a surrogate for current monocrop corporate agriculture]. 

Ironically, I'm an agnostic on the whole locavore thing, from a whole variety of perspectives.  But when I read about a piece of garbage "research" being floated as somehow authoritative when it is essentially one large assertion backed up by ... more assertions ... then I can't resist the urge to point it out.

Poverty in Delaware: the hole that digs itself--Part 1: meeting Stella

I have not used this platform at all in the past two months because I have been focusing on Facebook and, oh yeah, real life.  But I want to do some longer articles, and while people will click to longer articles on FB they often will not read long FB posts.  Go figure.  So I'll post these and then link to them on FB.

In particular I want to deal in a fact-based but highly individualized manner with the many ways in which our society (specifically in Delaware) not only declares war on poor people, but conspires through a variety of governmental and private-sector actions, to keep them safely impoverished while blaming them for their own condition.  The stories I am going to tell you are true, and based on a person close to me, whose identity I'm going to protect.  I'll change names and some other identifying information, but the misadventures of this individual will be absolutely factual.

I'll call her Stella.  She's not the perfect poster-child human being, but then who is?  Currently in her early 30s, she was abused (both physically and sexually) as a child; she has severe Learning Disabilities but by dint of great effort graduated high school and is functionally literate (if barely); she suffers from PTSD from the abuse, is Bi-Polar, and has chronic depression.

Until the middle of last  year, Stella has always worked.  The high-school counselor from the Division of Voc Rehab (and this is the ONLY good thing I will say about this division, ever) was excellent and made sure she ended up with a Home Health Care certificate right after graduating high school.  Later she managed (thanks to Del Tech in Dover, with a great big raspberry to Del Tech in Wilmington) to get a Certified Nursing Assistant credential.  She originally aspired to move up to something like an LPN slot, but she just doesn't (and won't ever be able to) read well enough.

Stella started working in high school because she wanted a car.  Worked fast food for three years, rising to become a Shift Manager, never (this was the late 1990s) making more than $8.50/hour, which ain't too bad for teenagers.

Out of school, she started working as a Home Health Aide for a visiting nurse outfit--one of those where you go to people's houses.  Despite being willing to work as much as possible, she soon discovered that (a) they will fire you if they find you moonlighting for another company; and (b) they are dead determined that you will never get more than about 20-22 hours per week because benefits they don't even want to think about.  (Oh, and while you're thinking about it, these jobs paid then $8.50-$10.00/hour with a lot of driving that you never got compensated for.)

After a couple years, tired of the driving and the never knowing what she'd walk into at a client's house, Stella moved into working as an aide at a nursing home that was pretending to be an assisted-living facility.  We have a lot of them in Delaware.  They pretend to be assisted-living facilities because that way they can use one RN to boss around a bunch of Residential Care Aides who aren't CNAs (as they would have to be in a real nursing home) and who get paid $3.00-4.00 less per hour. Put that over 12-15 people and the difference adds up on the bottom line if not the quality of care.

Eventually Stella managed to acquire her CNA and went to work at a real (if really low-rent) nursing home, full-time, supposedly with benefits.  She stayed there for four years, occasionally winning excellence awards, until (as we will see in a later chapter) getting the shaft last year.  Other items you need to know:  since age 21, when she has had health insurance it has been Medicaid (we'll discuss those economics in a subsequent chapter); at various times she's been on Food Assistance (another jungle); and she had a child in her early twenties.

So, roughly, you got the picture?

Here's installment number one:

The State of Delaware does not want people to get on, or even stay on, Medicaid.

I'm not kidding.  You can talk all you want about Medicaid expansion, or the people at DHSS and DPH who talk about extending services, but at no time in the past decade have there been fewer than 28,000 people in DE who were eligible for Medicaid but not covered.

First, getting on:  this requires a plethora of documentation that most people who need the service do not have--at least not readily available.  Birth certificates.  Social Security cards.  Two most recent pay stubs.  This all sounds simple, right?  Ah, but you haven't met the Delaware Medicaid bureaucracy.

Take the two most recent pay stubs.  Stella went to the Medicaid office over in Newark and presented them.  It was a Wednesday, and she was to be paid that Friday.  So she brought the two prior pay stubs based on the day she applied.  But there was a hiccup in the processing, so the case worker didn't submit her documents until the next Monday.  At that point the reviewer noted that her last pay date should have been the Friday two days after she applied, and ruled that she had not provided the two necessary pay stubs, and denied the application on that basis.

(You've got this, right?  On the day she applied she gave them the two most recent pay stubs, and she was denied based on a pay stub she had not yet received.)

Did they call her?  No.  She received a Notification of Termination of Benefits (a great concept, terminating benefits she'd never received), with three pages of instructions on how to appeal the termination.  She tried to call her case worker.  In case you did not know it, Medicaid case workers in Delaware DO NOT EVER return phone calls from the numbers listed on these notices; most will claim that they never got them.  Eventually Stella took a day off from work (that she could not afford) to go sit again in the Medicaid office for THREE HOURS to be told by another worker (hers had the day off) that she had to file an appeal, because she couldn't file a new application until 30 days after her Termination, so if she didn't file an appeal she wouldn't be eligible to re-apply for at least another month, and very possibly two.

So, the appeal.  There's this wonderful form that tells you in very plain English to put down why you think the decision to terminate the benefits you never received was in error.  Unfortunately, Stella discovered when she got back home to fill it out, there's one thing missing from the form:

The address of where to send the appeal.

Nobody answers the phone.  Take another hour to go back to the office WHERE THEY WON'T ACCEPT THE FORM because IT MUST BE MAILED IN, but they'll finally give her the address, while telling her, "You should have asked for that the last time you were here."

Three weeks later the appeal is granted, but Stella is not covered by Medicaid, just given the ability to immediately apply again (with TWO NEW PAY STUBS since she might have come into millions--who knows?--in the last month), which she does again ...

... and gets terminated again.  This time they tell her that providing the birth certificate for her child is not sufficient and that she must re-apply and PHYSICALLY BRING THE CHILD to the Medicaid Office.

She then goes through another two-week delay in getting coverage because they find the father's name (all of a sudden) on the birth certificate and now (on the third time around!) demand all the custody and child support papers (he is at that point $25,000 behind in his payments) for yet another application.

Three weeks later she finally gets coverage.  But don't think that solves anything.

Three weeks after she gets her coverage, she gets another document in the mail.  It seems that she got covered first in mid-August, and everybody on Medicaid has to completely re-certify their eligibility four times a year, every year.  September is a recertification month, and no matter how many days you have or have not been on Medicaid (in Stella's case three weeks) you have to PROVIDE ALL YOUR DOCUMENTATION ALL OVER AGAIN.  Or they throw you off.  And then you're only on for three more months.

There is an important corollary to all this bureaucratic rigamarole, which makes it apparently more palatable to pay salaries and benefits to morons who don't answer phones or provide return addresses than to provide health-care benefits ...

You see, this Medicaid runaround would eventually cost Stella the best job she ever had.

Why?  Remember I told you that Stella suffers from PTSD, is Bi-Polar, and chronically Depressed?

Well, in order to keep functioning, Stella needs to stay on a really steady diet of anti-depressants and even anti-psychotics that over-the-counter without prescription assistance cost in total around $1,300/month.  After about 3-4 days without the meds, Stella becomes withdrawn and moody.  Within a week she's seriously depressed, has wide mood swings, and starts into really erratic behavior.  In two weeks ... let's just say (and we'll find out later in detail) it's not pretty.

Nor is she capable of working at that point.

You may think to yourself, why am I (joe taxpayer) forking out $1,300 a month to keep some low-rent chick working a just-above minimum wage job in anti-depressants?  Let me spell it out to you:

1.  With them, she's working and earning at least most of her living.  That's critical.  We're talking somebody here with a strong work ethic, and a burning desire NOT to be dependent.

2.  Without them, in a month, she's going to be hospitalized (whether she has insurance or not, because she's potentially a danger to self and others) and that's going to cost you (joe taxpayer) at the very least $2,500 PER DAY.  Got that?  Six days of hospitalization (which, if you know anything about mental health institutions is the bare minimum for stabilizing somebody in Stella's condition) equals the cost of ONE YEAR'S MEDICATIONS.

Oh, there are programs to get the meds for free or low cost. The one from the manufacturer has a 17-page application that must be counter-signed by your employer, two doctors, and a pharmacist; requires an additional ten pages of medical records appended; and takes 6-8 weeks for the company to process.  I've talked to more than a dozen psychologists and psychiatrists in Delaware, and NONE of them have EVER seen ANYBODY meet the requirements for this supposed program.

There is exactly ONE free clinic in the Wilmington area where you might be able to find a psychiatrist who can get you an emergency two-week supply of these meds at little or no charge if you don't have insurance.  Of course you have to be able to get there, and you have to be able to land one of the few available appointments, or just wait six hours for the possibility that somebody MIGHT OR MIGHT NOT be able to see you today without an appointment.  (There are only two days a week that you are allowed to do this.  No guarantees.)

Over a fourteen-year period of always working, Stella never made more than than $25,000 in any given year (and remember, she's got a child) and was usually in the $16-17,000 range.  In those fourteen years, Medicaid canceled her coverage for periods ranging from two weeks to four months on TWENTY-ONE DIFFERENT OCCASIONS.

When the gap was 2-4 weeks or less, Stella found ways to stretch her meds, or help getting them from family or friends, or even (exactly twice!) the free clinic.

But then, about a year ago, Medicaid cut her off for nearly six months ...

What happened then was not pretty.

Stay tuned.

Karen Weldin Stewart: idiocy or hypocrisy?

"OMG ... look at the time! I'm late for
my morning meeting with my
corporate overlords to rubber-stamp
whatever plans Highmark has for
screwing Delaware customers today!"

Today's inane op-ed by Delaware Insurance Commissioner Karen Weldin Stewart perfectly exemplifies why even the Libertarian idea of voting for "none of the above" and leaving the office empty would be better than having her in power.

First, here is KWS explaining her idea of her job:

DOI exists to regulate the state's insurance market, protect consumers, and ensure that the insurance carriers who operate in our state are able to generate enough income to remain solvent and pay claims when claims come due. It is my duty as the Insurance Commissioner to strike a balance between protecting consumers and ensuring that the insurance companies are able to operate a stable business model. When insurance companies see that Delaware provides a fair and balanced approach to regulating the insurance markets, it attracts and retains good companies that compete for your business.

Notice that protecting consumers is NOT a primary mission of her office, as interpreted by KWS--she is to strike a balance between the interests of consumers and insurance companies, because then Delaware attracts and retains good companies that compete for your business.

Really?  Then explain, please, Karen, why 93% of the private health insurance market in Delaware belongs to a single company--Highmark Blue Cross/Blue Shield--and why you just forced another company out of the Medicaid market to allow Highmark access to another 230,000 captive customers in that market?  (A foonote:  Aetna, the company that KWS and others drove out, actually planned far lower rate increases than Highmark.)  Where, exactly, is all this competition?

That's what makes this platitude particularly offensive:

What can you do to keep your rates low? The most important thing to do is to shop around and compare prices. 

Uh, Karen?  There is no competition in health insurance in Delaware.  Delaware is nationally recognized as having the 4th least competitive health insurance market in the US.

So if that's what we can do to lower costs, then you're a f--king failure.  Unless, of course, your definition of success is (as it seems to be) pimping for corporate interests:

How exactly do the insurance companies come up with the rate requests that they submit? The various insurance sectors (life, health, auto, home, etc.) use complex formulas to predict future costs. Insurers consider data from past claims and other state-specific factors, such as state-required minimum levels of coverage, the percentage of uninsured drivers, the likelihood of severe weather that can cause accidents or damage buildings, the state's legal climate, and the level of competition among insurance companies. 

This is such utter horsecrap that I'm surprised even the News Journal would print it (wait, no I'm not).

Highmark of Delaware's parent company last year recorded $14.9 BILLION in revenues and had a bad year of only racking up a $372 million profit.  Still, not bad for an empire supposedly built on non-profit enterprises.  Highmark uses a very simple, very traditional formula for calculating next year's rates:  whatever the market will bear (which is a LOT when you're a monopoly) and whatever your tame Insurance Commissioner will approve (in this case about 9.9%).

Karen has done such a great job as Insurance Commissioner that, besides having no competition, Delaware has suffered the highest insurance rate increases in the nation under the Affordable Care Act:

For the individual insurance market (plans sold directly to consumers); among the ten states seeing some of the sharpest average increases are: Delaware at 100%, New Hampshire 90%, Indiana 54%, California 53%, Connecticut 45%, Michigan 36%, Florida 37%, Georgia 29%, Kentucky 29%, and Pennsylvania 28%.

 In Delaware, folks we have exactly the government we deserve and that the corporations paid for:

--An Insurance Commissioner gouging customers as a proxy for corporate interests ...

--A Secretary of Education destroying our schools for corporate interests ...

--DNREC committed to the continued gutting of the Coastal Zone Act for corporate interests ...

--A Department of Homeland Security and Public Safety that spies on law-abiding citizens and shares the information with corporate interests ...

If you're beginning to see a pattern here, you're correct.

Unfortunately, you're too late, because you just voted the bastards back into office again, and they're confident that you'll keep doing so.