What Does Burning Down a CVS Have To Do With Racial Injustice?

This was quite literally a question I was asked recently when trying to put some context to some very racist statements about what's happening in Baltimore right now in the wake of the murder of Freddy Gray (and let's not mince words here: Gray's death, regardless of the outcome of the investigation being conducted by the very people responsible for his death, is murder. He entered the police van with an intact spine and exited with a severed spine, due solely to the intentional actions of the officers involved. That is murder, no ifs, ands, or buts).

While the person who actually asked it was being facetious, not actually wanting an answer and thinking they had stumbled onto some sort of incredibly witty rejoinder, I want to actually answer that question.

For one, as this great Al Jazeera piece from last year points out, riots have actually been extremely effective in creating social change throughout American history. Or as many pointed out in the wake of the murder of Michael Brown, the world probably would have known nothing about Brown's death had the community not poured into the streets demanding justice. One could pretty easily make the same argument that Gray would just be another statistic in our ever-expanding list of citizens killed at the hands of police were it not for the good people of Baltimore loudly proclaiming they've finally had enough.

But what the titular question of this post most often refers to (at least in my experience) is that the employment of violence and property damage will result in bad optics; that is, the great white American public hive mind will be turned off from what is otherwise a legitimate cause because of the actions of a few (if you've read anything about Grey that hasn't invoked this argument, you're doing a very good job seeking out a very particular kind of media source).

Beside the obvious fact that that it's pretty fucked up for one to be more upset over a CVS being on fire than one is about a person begin murdered by the very forces that are supposed to protect them, the optics argument is at best incredibly over-optimistic, but more likely disingenuous. Because the very premise of the argument is quite easily proven false; the only way you can argue violence and property damage may damage the chance at achieving some measure of justice is if you assume white America was primed and waiting to fully tackle our nation's vast and entrenched racial injustices. But now they're changing their minds because of the unrest in Baltimore. But if not for that unrest! Oh, if only the CVS hadn't been torched, then the majority of white Americans would have been pouring into the streets, demanding change and not settling for milquetoast reforms. If only! But alas, because of some minor violence, all good people must simply turn up their noses at what's going on and ignore the underlying issue. There's no other choice!

In case my dickish sarcasm hasn't made the point clear enough, the assumption underlying the optics argument is demonstrably (and frankly, laughably) false. In fact, it's pretty easy to view the history of police violence as a natural experiment: we as a nation are certainly not short on instances of unarmed Black people murdered by police. And in the vast majority of those instances, there are no resulting riots, violence, or property damage. Yet somehow, even without these damaging optics, there haven't been widespread demands from white America for tearing down the edifice of racial injustice. Why, it's almost as if the presence of violence and property damage doesn't cause people to not call for changes but instead gives people an excuse to justify their racist views!

To steal a great quote I saw on the face books this morning (attributed to a Dr. Kevin Browne, though a quick google search tells me there's a lot of people with that name and I don't know which one it said it): "When police departments protect white property BETTER than they protect Black people, they're actually punishing us for NOT wanting to be white property. 'How dare you not want to owned by us?' 'How dare you think yourselves more valuable than things?' 'Look how well we protect our things.'"

And as I've noted previously, what other choice is there? How are you supposed to calmly and politely ask for some form of justice when the people murdering you are literally subject to a different set of laws than everyone else? A set of laws that result in the murderers not only not being prosecuted, but rarely even losing their jobs. Let me throw out an obviously loaded hypothetical question of my own: how does asking a murderer to politely stop murdering accomplish anything? Especially when the murderer is legally protected from prosecution for their murders?

But the bigger point of all of this is to ask where are these people calling for calm and nonviolence when the police are routinely beating and murdering innocent citizens? Why are they only concerned with calm and order the second it's Black people who are causing damage (damage which pales in comparison to the actions of the police)? As the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates argues:

When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is "correct" or "wise," any more than a forest fire can be "correct" or "wise." Wisdom isn't the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the rioters themselves.

So what does burning down a CVS have to do with racial injustice? Seems like quite a bit from where I'm sitting.

I Apparently No Longer Look Like Chelsea Clinton

Followers of this blog will probably remember the time I stumbled across this batshit crazy blog that was using a picture of me thinking it was a picture of Chelsea Clinton. Since then, I occasionally check back in on said blog to see if I'm still repping as the younger Clinton, and occasionally to read the hilarious screeds that populate it (seriously, it will bruise your brain to try to figure out what's going on there, but it's kinda fun at the same time).

Well, sure enough, wouldn't you know I'm once again featured in this person's indecipherably weird fever dreams. Once again, the me-as-Chelsea photo is used, but this time I'm apparently not the former first daughter. Now I've graduated to my actual name, but am now credited as being the son of Steve Wozniak (note: I am not the son of Steve Wozniak. Although I am a loyal Apple user, so…you know, pretty close). This is actually a bit of confusion that makes some sense; unlike Chelsea Clinton (who both spells and pronounces her name differently, and I would like to add again, looks nothing like me), the Woz's kid and I have the same name (I think. Google is pretty inconclusive on this one right now, but I believe I learned that factoid sometime previously).

But the funniest thing about this post is that it manages to use a different (even less unflattering) photo of me, claiming me to be the son of Woz. Funny enough, it's used directly next to a photo of Woz's actual kid, and other than the fact that we're both white dudes, we don't seem to look anything alike. But you can judge for yourself:

So now this crazy person has not one, but two, separate photos of me, attributed to being two separate people, neither of whom are actually me. And I've got admit, I'm more than a little creeped out. Does this person know something I don't? Am I actually both the only daughter of a former president and the eldest son of a computer magnate? Am I actually leading two secret double lives that even I don't know about? Am I really living in an incredibly weird and mostly boring episode of The Twighlight Zone? Can wealth be transferred between these various realities? Because I'm pretty sure both of those people have more money than this Jesse Wozniak will ever have in his life.

If nothing else, I hope someday someone else is googling me for some reason, and they slowly go insane trying to piece together how I manage to be so many people doing so many different things at once...

Penis Phrenology and Darren Sharper

Right on the heels of my previous post on the technofallacy of the criminal justice system comes a story of our justice system relying on an even less reliable form of technology: Plethysmography, or as it should probably be known, penis phrenology.

While plethysmography is something so obviously insane it should have gone out of type years ago (or never been introduced in the first place), it's in the news in connection with the plea deal agreed to by Darren Sharper, the former NFL player who was on trial in four separate states for a years-long string of drugging and raping multiple people.

The entire concept of plethysmography is explained in great detail in this article, but for the most part it's a combination of old school phrenology and a blood pressure machine. But that goes on your penis. Phrenology, of course, was the "scientific" study of human behavior which held we could understand someone's thoughts, motivations, and life course by examining the shape of their head. Here's a handy chart if you'd like to check yourself:

I think phrenology is dumb, but then I have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter, so what do I know?

Plethysmography is a combination of what is basically modern phrenology (using this technology we can tell what you're sexually excited by, which we then assume to tell us something about your deep-seated desires) combined with Clockwork Orange-style attempts at re-wiring someone's thoughts and desires (in fact, the method was first used to "cure" homosexuality). But lest you think it not scientific, look at how complex this chart is. Surely science is going on here!

Pictured: Science!…probably

Thankfully plethysmography of this kind if not commonly employed, but the fact that it's employed anywhere is a horrible indictment of our collective barbarity. Hopefully it won't be long before it goes the way of the polygraph before it, kicked out of the courtroom for its completely unscientific and unreliable nature, but for now, if convicted of a crime in the right state, you too could find yourself being forced to watch violent child pornography while electrodes attached to a penis monitor shock you. In the year 2015.

It's funny -- as someone who researches our criminal justice system for a living, I often feel like I've seen so many horrible things, things which have no business in the dark ages yet somehow persist in current day America, that I feel like nothing can surprise or disgust me anymore. And yet somehow I keep getting proven depressingly wrong about that...

The Problem With Body Cams

My undergrad advisor and good friend Kent Sandstrom had a mantra which pretty perfectly encapsulates all of sociology: social problems require social solutions.

This simple phrase gets at the heart of why things like "sensitivity training" or "intercultural communication training" or all the other various effects to combat institutional racism in the workplace have typically failed -- because they treat a social problem (systemic racism) as an individual problem (people as discrete units either being racist or not). In fact, this phrase more-or-less argues that no such program will ever make a meaningful difference, as they will leave untouched the social foundations of racism, causing it to simply adapt to new parameters (witness the rise of "colorblind" racism).

Unfortunately, the calls for the use of body cams by police officers falls into this same trap of attempting to solve a social/institutional matter by treating it as an individual failing. And sure, in a very technical sense, racial disparities in our criminal justice system are initiated by individuals, but the notion that the rampant murder of Black Americans at the hands of the police is just a coincidental result of selected bad apples acting improperly is so laughably simplistic I'll leave Lord Google to explain it to you if you're having trouble grasping it.

The increasingly wide-spread call for body cams falls under the umbrella of the delightful term coined by Ronald Corbett and Gary T. Marx in this paper from a few decades ago. In it (and hey, I managed to find a free link, so you can just go actually read it, which is fairly rare for academic publishing, but that's another rant for another day) they decry what they see as the "technofallacy" of the police world. Actually, they note 10 separate technofallacies (seriously, go read the paper. It's eerie how prescient it is for being nearly 30 years old now). The very basic essence of the paper is that we can't technologize away social problems, no matter how good the technology seems to be.

More specifically, they're simply demonstrating the fallacy with the logic, long employed in basically every call for changes in policing, that this new form of technology will solve the problems we're having. As they note, new technologies, once thought panaceas to previous problems, often bring an entirely new set of unanticipated problems (in the case of body cams, one could note they will drastically increase the surveillance of Black Americans, which seems like a particularly Orwellian way to supposedly help someone).

But the central problem I have with the call for body cams is that they do nothing to address social conceptions of Blackness as inherently criminal, nor change unjustly crafted laws which specifically target the poor and communities of color. In other words, much like sensitivity training, body cams may make police incrementally less violent (though are by no means assured to do so), but they'll still being enforcing racially unjust laws.

Not to mention the fact that body cams will do nothing to change the culture of police specifically or the wider cultural assumption that police are acting in good faith and their word should be as good (or more likely, better) than the word or video of any citizen. Look at how before clear video evidence surfaced, police, local media, and much of the local population were more than happy to accept the officer's unbelievable (and empirically false) version of events in South Carolina. And as the Onion so perfectly points out, it's basically dumb luck such good video exists and we shouldn't experience much comfort that basic justice proceedings were only initiated after such unlikely video surfaced.

A nicely-sourced summation of many of the arguments against body cams can be found here (seriously, it's a great piece, go read it). As that piece notes, body cams were originally designed to exonerate officers, and are still much more likely to be used to help an officer than to punish them for bad behavior. For one, much like the Obama White House will gladly leak info making it look good while doggedly pursuing prosecution against leaks that make it look bad, police officials across the nation have been happy to share body cam footage when it exonerates officers, but claim the footage can't be released or doesn't exist when it conflicts with the official version of events.

For an especially glaring example of this, the New Orleans PD recently instituted the use of body cams. In 145 incidents of violent behavior committed by police wearing body cams, only 49 have footage available, meaning that in the majority of such situations, the cameras were either not on in the first place, or the footage just happened to disappear after the incident.

Of course, none of this is to mention that no one is happier about the increasing demands for police to wear body cams than the Taser corporation, maker of the AXON body cam, the most popular model of body cams for police. Granted, a broken clock can be right twice a day, but I'm always going to be a little hesitant to support anything that makes a weapons manufacturer salivate.

Here I need to preemptively argue against Corbett and Marx' 10th technofallacy that by arguing against the means I may be misperceived as arguing against the ends. Obviously, I want a solution to our horrid racial injustices in the criminal justice system (and elsewhere) as much as the next person.

But that's actually why I'm concerned about the major push toward body cams; because not only are they incapable of solving the problem (or, I would argue, making a significant difference), but they sure seem like a good idea. And the danger of something that sounds so intuitively effective but which does actually not work is that it will allow people to forget about the problem. The sudden rise in discussions of police violence and racism dominating so much media is not because the problem has gotten especially bad recently, but because for a complex mix of reasons, white America is finally paying attention to these issues (Black Americans did not need Michael Brown or Eric Garner to show them that police violence is highly racialized). With the institution of a simple and attractive (yet ineffective) solution such as body cams, I fear (and history largely backs me up on this), that a large chunk of these folks who have just discovered police brutality and racism will now consider the matter solved, and move on to other things.

And then we'll be back to where we were before, except now our cities will be spending even more of their limited budgets on more fancy tech for the police, while slashing budgets elsewhere to pay for these toys. Which is an almost inevitable outcome of attempting to solve a social problem through individual means. So until and unless body cams are considered only a small part of a much larger reshaping of our forces of social control, I'll remain wary about calling for their use.

Updating This Blog -- Now With Content!

So I've been posting to this particular blog for...
/checks posting history
…holy shit! A little over a decade! That is considerably longer than I would have thought.

Anyway, in that time this space has undergone a great deal of reconfigurations, some more successful than others, and it's high time it happened once again.

It turns out that being an assistant professor comes with a somewhat busy lifestyle, which has caused my posting to slow to basically nonexistent. In addition to the lack of free time, other (significantly more important) deadlines have kept me from maintaining any potential blogging schedule. Not that I ever faithfully posted on schedule, but I used to be significantly more active about it.

So in a hopefully less-is-more kind of change in thinking, I've decided to set a twice a week schedule for myself (roughly Tu/Th, but let's not get carried away here), in the hopes that dedicating myself to a small but regular output will get my ass in gear much better than a theoretically more involved posting schedule that doesn't actually materialize.

And hey, it's Tuesday and I've got one post for the week. So far this experiment has been a rousing success! Can I keep up this torrid pace? Check back Thursday-ish and find out!

David Brooks Could Not Be a Bigger Piece of Shit

That David Brooks is a complete moron is neither a new nor noteworthy thing to say. A simple cursory google search for his name turns up literally thousands of think pieces about how backward and idiotic basically everything he says is. He's the kind of guy who makes Thomas Friedman look intelligent (well, more accurately, he's the only thing in existence that makes Tom Friedman look intelligent).

But he may have outdone himself in a way even his most ardent critics could not have conceived of. Recently he has been repeatedly (in what is supposedly our nation's leading newspaper) explicitly calling for the support of probably unsavory groups as our way to defeat ISIS (and by extension, Islamic extremism in general).

Because David Brooks has apparently never read a history book or newspaper, here's a quick and handy primer on why that's not a good idea. Remember when the Soviets were trying to take over Afghanistan, so to fight that scary enemy we trained and funded a group that many critics noted was probably a bit shady? I'll give you a hint: the group was led by a Saudi businessman named Bin Laden, and they turned out to not be super great.

Ah, but Brooks is specifically calling for nationalist groups, which put their faith in a state rather than religion, so the Bin Laden comparison isn't fair, one could argue. Ok, it might not be the exact same thing Brooks is calling for. But you know what is? This one time we funded and supported one side of a protracted war, the side that was "nationalist," as a way to defeat a scary enemy. How did that one turn out? Maybe you can ask Donald Rumsfeld, pictured below meeting this nationalist leader who would solve all our problems in the Middle East and certainly never go on to do anything unsavory:

Totally turned out great!

UPDATE: I was wrong. Brooks doesn't manage to make Tom Friedman look smart, because here's Tom Friedman suggesting that we should arm and fund ISIS. God damn, you can't even satirize this shit.

UNI Fight! (Or: Rank Hypocrisy is Fun!)

Fresh on the heels of complaining about the horrid cartel which is the NCAA, let me take a minute to talk about…NCAA basketball.

As you can see from the graphic there, my beloved Panthers finished their season ranked in the top 10 in the nation and are on their way back to the big dance for the first time since Ali Faroukmanesh scored one for the literal and figurative little guys with possibly the gutsiest shot in the history of college basketball. And as the top 10 ranking attests, this year's squad is significantly better than the one that went to the Sweet 16 five years ago.

The ironic thing is that now that I have a big boy job with a real income, I've been able to splurge on a fancy cable sports package, which has allowed me to watch more Panthers games this year than I did when I was in college living about two blocks away from the gym.

And while I'm excited about the upcoming tourney and think the Panthers at least have a shot to make some noise, maybe even make it further into the tournament than they did last time, this is one of those situations that reminds me how silly it is to judge a sports season on whether the team won a championship or not (though I guess they technically kinda won a championship by winning the MVC tournament, but not the same thing).

I've written a lot in this space about how cheering for small-market teams means you have to necessarily have a different metric for success, but the longer I've lived with it, the more I've come to see it as the superior way to view sports. For instance, look at Kentucky atop that list -- undefeated, full of A-list players, and with the weight of years of tradition, if they don't at least get to the Final Four, this will be remembered by many as a wasted season for them.

But with the Panthers, Final Four speculation is probably a step too far, and a championship run, while it would be the coolest thing I've seen in a very long time, is pretty much entirely out of the question. And while that might be discouraging for some sports fan, it's actually kind of nice. Because the Panthers have had an amazing year so far, but more importantly, they've just been super fun to watch. The play a gray game of basketball that features a lot of really well-designed plays, off-ball cuts, sharing the rock, and all that which is, to this humble blogger, far more entertaining than the 5 guys clearing out so they can play one-on-one that seems to dominate the bigger programs.

So with neither the weight of a winning tradition nor inflated expectations, I've been able to just sit back and watch some kids play some awesome basketball this year. With the added bonus of my tiny li'l alma mater occasionally being mention on ESPN (sometimes they even correctly note it's located in Cedar Falls, not Cedar Rapids as most of the national media seems to think. Must be because CR has the airport.).

If nothing else, when UNI goes on a magical run this year and becomes the darling of the tournament (hey, it could happen), I get to say I was there before the bandwagon formed. Even if that doesn't happen…well, at least it gives me an excuse to get drunk in the middle of the day on a Thursday in March, because you have to cheer on the ol' college...

It's a Snowy Day and the NCAA is a Horrid Cartel

I hate you. I say that not out of anger, but as a fact. It's 67 degrees outside, and I hate you.

The massive East Coast snow storm has got me quite literally trapped at home today, so in addition to shoveling and baking, I figured it would be time to dust off an old nugget I've been meaning to get to for awhile: the fact that the NCAA is one of the worst organizations in the world (I'd put it above NAMBLA, but probably neck-and-neck with the Klan).

When I say how horrible the NCAA is, it's not because something particularly terrible has happened recently (well, the NCAA is always doing something pretty damn terrible, but nothing gallingly out of the ordinary lately), it's because it's just an empirical fact that it's a horrid organization. Much like in the clip above.

So I figure a snow day in which I'm going slightly crazy from cabin fever (the biggest downside to living on the side of a mountain is that I've had a number of days this year in which I've not been able to get my car out of the driveway), I figured it was time for a rant about the evils of the NCAA. If nothing else, it will help salve my conscience as I watch hundreds of hours of college basketball games over the next few weeks, hating myself the entire time.

Why is the NCAA so damn evil? Other than the fact that they constantly make up rules that make no sense and then punish college kids for not intimately knowing their code, which approaches the US legal code in length and obtuseness?

Well, for one, they insist that we simply cannot pay college athletes. Sure, NCAA football and basketball are both literally billion dollar industries. But how could anyone ever pay the people actually responsible for generating that money? For a full breakdown of how stupid that argument is with all sorts of math and details and whatnot, read this. But for a much simpler way of understanding it, just note that during his last contract restructuring, Nick Saban (currently head football coach at Alabama) was reportedly offered $100 million to take over the program at Texas. This would have made him the highest paid sports coach in the entire world. Not the highest paid college coach, not the highest paid American coach, but the highest paid coach in any sport in the whole fucking world.

I don't think it takes a super math genius to note that if one college team is able to shell out 9 figures for one person, they can probably figure out how to slide a few dollars the way of the people who risk permanent injury and life-long debilitating degenerative brain problems.

But no! You can't pay them! In fact, if the NCAA finds out you so much as gave a player a bagel with some schmear, they'll come straight after you. Even in the most ridiculous cases that only a stone-hearted asshole could even think were plausible. Like the case of a homeless Baylor football player who got booted by the NCAA because one of his relatives helped him afford an apartment. You know, so he didn't have to sleep outside and be homeless. For the record, Baylor's head coach will earn over $4 million this year alone. But he sure as shit better not give any of that to any homeless football players! Well, as long as they're not current football players, like the UNC football alum who is now homeless and scraping by, despite helping bring a good chunk of revenue into his university.

But of course, if the school wants to pay money to anyone but the player to make sure they can play, that's totally ok by the NCAA. Like Texas A&M, who paid a $60,000 insurance policy for a star player so he'd return for another year. Which is fine, you see, because the player didn't get any money, just an insurance agency.

And don't you feel more comfortable with that? I sure as shit don't want kids working 40+ a week smashing their brains to nothing getting money for it. That might lead to some sort of unsavory outcome...

Mocking Bad Students From A Bathroom Stall (Or: I Rarely Trust a 'Sconnie)

There's been an article making the rounds of Facebook (well, at least my Facebook, which is full of academics) concerning the Dear Student feature in Vitae. Dear Student is a somewhat humorous collection of profs venting about common student bullshit and often takes the form of the emails most profs wish they could send to their students. But since such honest replies would typically get one fired, they're instead collected at this little niche website read only by academics.

As with anything even slightly amusing in the academic world, of course the humorless scolding had to come sooner rather than later. This specific humorless scolding comes from a dude named Jesse, so I feel a special need to comment, so as to attempt to save the reputation of academics named Jesse (we're not all humorless scolds! I promise!).

You can read the piece, but the gist of it is that students are special magical snowflakes and anyone who ever says anything bad about them, no matter the reason, is a horrible person who hates the idea of education. I think. It's kind of a disjointed piece that tells us a lot about what we shouldn't do, but completely glosses over the fact that these are real issues which require some sort of response. But then again, moral grandstanding is rarely oriented toward practical activity. So it goes.

I'll leave aside the fact the piece in question was written by a white guy at an elite institution chiding a column organized by a woman of color, which regularly features many contributors of color, and is almost completely populated by academics at less prestigious institutions, because at this point, no one should be at all surprised by the tone-deaf instructions of our social superiors telling us how to behave.

But the fact that dude is working at one of the most prestigious public universities in our nation (UW-Madison) is actually pretty important to understanding the rank hypocrisy and uselessness of dude's complaints. For instance, when chiding profs for being upset that students try to add a class 6 weeks into the semester, pretending nothing of importance could have already happened, and if it did, could sure be made up in a day or two, he writes : "The work of gatekeeping is anathema to the work of education. Our classrooms should have more doors and windows, not less."

Which is a really easy argument to make when you teach in a gated community! Hey, you don't need to do any gatekeeping, great for you. But that's because your university has already done the gatekeeping for you! Contrast this with my institution -- when we fail to meet our enrollment quotas for the year, our administration fully admits they dip into the stock of applicants who (and again, this is fully admitted in the open, no matter how unconscionable it may be) are neither college-ready nor expected to finish their degree. I haven't researched the application requirements of Bucky, but I'm guessing you won't find many students at UW-Madison deemed not college-ready by their own administration.

He similarly scolds profs who are upset by student grade-grubbing, writing grades are "a red herring. Any teacher that regularly gets caught up in power and control struggles with students over grades has missed the point." Cool, thanks man. You're so zen. I bet at the end of every semester, you write the registrar telling them to take their grade bullshit and shove it up their asses instead of submitting your final grades. Anyway, here's where I assume that teaching at an elite institution means he probably has TAs that take care of such emails for him. But even if he doesn't, what exactly does he suggest I then do instead of engaging with the students who complain about their grades? Maybe I should calmly explain to them that grades are not the point and they should't be concerned about them. Well, I can report that is not an effective tactic, because I've tried it repeatedly. Maybe instead I should point them to this column with the advice that some dude says we shouldn't be arguing about this, so discussion over, I guess?

But what really takes the cake in this missive is the incredibly snotty coupling of these two paragraphs:

Everyone that comes into even casual contact with Vitae’s “Dear Student” series is immediately tarnished by the same kind of anti-intellectual, uncompassionate, illogical nonsense currently threatening to take down the higher education system in the state of Wisconsin.
The word "entitlement,” used pejoratively about students in two of the four articles, needs to die a quick death. College students ARE entitled -- to an education and not the altogether unfunny belittling on display in the “Dear Student” series. 

It would take years to unpack everything wrong with this hyperbolic handwringing, but I'd like to note that I've met several people who have read the Dear Student series and they don't appear to be tarnished at all. But dude seems to a literary person, so I'll forgive some rhetorical flourishes. But the second part there really sums up my problem with his kvetching, as I think he's got in entirely backward.

Complaining about students who have no interest in their education is not anti-intellectual -- it's a defense of the importance of education. It's a defense of the idea that learning takes real effort and sacrifice. It's a defense of the idea that if you come into a class 6 weeks late, you're not only doing damage to your own ability to learn, but harming the general dynamic of the class and hampering your fellow students (who are also dealing with all the same life problems and whatnot) because they have to wait for you to catch up. Saying I should bend over backward for that student for no reason other than that they're a super special snowflake is horridly anti-intellectual, because it assumes all that missed information is unimportant and unnecessary. In fact, I can hardly think of anything more anti-intellectual than saying "So what, the student missed half your class? Whatever, they'll be fine. Can't have missed that much in multiple weeks of class time and readings."

Saying students are entitled to an education is the complete exemplar of Scott Walker's consumerist model -- these kids paid to be here, given them the commodity they paid for! Sorry dude, I'm not going to commoditize education no matter how snotty you are.

Saying students are entitled to an education belies the most fundamental misconception of what education even is; I can't "give" someone the education they're "entitled" to because education is not something that can be given. Education is something that can be guided, can be encouraged, can be assisted, etc., etc., but it can never be given. It's something that has to involve extensive work on the part of the student. Saying otherwise is like saying signing up for a personal trainer entitles you to be physically fit. No, it entitles you to someone who will help you get fit, but you've got to do a lot of work. And if you ignore all of their advice, belittle the methods and techniques they're trying to help you learn, and constantly skip your meetings with them, I think the personal trainer is well within their rights to decide they don't want to help you anymore.

He ends the piece by noting that teachers need a safe place to vent. However, like the rest of his diatribe, while he never says where that could be, he does make sure to tell you all of the places it shouldn't be. In the following places, according to Jesse "Not The Fun Jesse" Stommel, it is inappropriate to complain about your students: your office, your teacher's lounge (do universities even have those? Maybe at the elite places, I guess), the library, the bar.

As someone who loves to complain about bad students, this really leaves me in a bind. If I can't complain in my office, in my department, or at the bar, you've eliminated about 90% of the spaces I ever occupy. So where is this safe place you claim profs can have? What about my own personal blog read by about 6 people? No, if my office is too public, surely this is too public. What about in the comfort of my own home? No, that can't be. If my office, with my door closed and no students present is too public a place to complain, then my house must be, too. What about when I'm in the bathroom? That's the most personal, non-public place I can think of (and no student has ever been in my bathroom. Well, none has ever been to my house, but maybe outside the bathroom they could be walking by a window and hear me or something?). That must be it. If only a humorless scold were here to tell me whether I was right or not!

But I kid. Kinda. I read things like this with a weary sigh and remind myself that this is the kind of thing I for some reason voluntarily signed up to deal with when I became an academic. So if you need me, I'll be in the bathroom complaining about stuff. I think it's ok in there...

Mountain Living

An artist's rendition of my current situation

An atypically large snowstorm has left the mountain roads around here practically impassable up where I live. For someone who grew up in the upper Midwest, I can't help but find some irony in the fact that the very first time in my life it's impossible to leave my house due to the snow, it's when I'm living in a place that considers 2-3 inches of snow to be a major disaster.

There wouldn't really be much of a downside to being snowed in normally; I typically do most of my work from home (pajamas + dog = always the best option), but I just got back from vacation. And had my travel plans gone as they were supposed to, I would have had plenty of time to get groceries before the storm hit, but instead I ended up having multiple canceled flights and getting somehow routed through Atlanta for a flight from NYC to Pittsburgh, which ended up eating the entire day, dropping me home in the middle of the storm. Luckily, the li'l car made it up to the house, but considering the snow hasn't let up since, I know I'm not making it anywhere else soon.

But on the plus side, this will really encourage some creative cooking. What can be made out of some old potatoes and flour? Hopefully a lot, because that's pretty much all I have in the house...

Offally Good, Part III -- Brains. BRRRAAAAAIIIIINNNNSSSS!

After a busy week full of stupid administrative crap (seriously, I'd be about a thousand times more productive if not for meetings which appear to serve no purpose other than be annoying), I finally was able to carve out some free time to get to the crown jewel of my cow organs -- the brain.

Brain is something I've had before on several occasions, but only prepped i ways I couldn't even begin to replicate, so I'm trying something different here, prepping it two ways. One is apparently a Cuban tradition (based loosely on this recipe) and the other is a much simpler way of preparing it.

One of the first things you learn when working with brain is that no matter how well the butcher cleaned the brain before you get it (and this one seems to have been cleaned pretty thoroughly), there will be a lot of blood in the brain. Like, a lot. Like if you left it in your fridge to thaw but the bag is not perfectly vacuum-sealed, you will have blood all over your fridge. Kind of annoying, but enjoy the moment -- after all, how many times have you have to scrub blood out of the nooks and crannies of your crisper? It's an adventure! Unless you do it a lot. Then it's probably not an adventure. But then again, if you're regularly cleaning large amounts of blood out of your fridge, you're probably a serial killer, so...In any event, I suggest opening the bag in the sink, preferably in a colander or something else than be used to rinse it.

This is a cow's brain, mostly thawed.

 Then you put the brain in some sort of bowl where it can soak for awhile. Again, like every other piece in this series, most of the work is in the prep. The cooking of brains (at least in these two recipes) is actually pretty quick and easy. Heck, even the prep isn't that bad; more annoying than difficult. Anyway, here's your brain in a bowl:

Yup, definitely a brain.

 Then it needs to chill out and soak for a few hours, to help get all the rest of the blood, hair, skin, and whatever other detritus might be hanging out to shake loose. After two or so hours of soaking, you can see this was necessary, as a ton more blood will have leeched out of the brain by this point:

Bloody brains. At this point, your inner 13 year-old boy is very excited.

Then you need to clean the brain of any remaining skin, hair, and whatnot. It's kind of hard to know what does and doesn't belong, so you attempt to remove the parts that are...well, I don't want to say "gross looking," because it's all gross-looking. But you know, the parts that are even grosser...er. Anyway, then the brain needs to be either boiled or simmered, depending on who you believe. If you ever want to get down a weird internet rabbit hole, there are some strong opinions on the internet about the proper preparation of cattle brains. Since I couldn't find a definitive source on the subject, I figured I'd split the difference, so this brain got a few minutes of boiling, several minutes of simmering. The point of this is apparently to firm the brains up a bit, which it definitely did. Most sources said to just use boring old plain water, but I jazzed it up with some beef stock (made from the oxtail leftovers!). Here's what a boiling brain looks like:

It may also be what your brain looks like on drugs.

After this, you need to let your brains cool a bit (so many steps of this process sound like something a faux-badass 80s action hero might say to their rad teenage sidekick). I chose to put them into a bowl, but you can decide where your brains cool. It's a wonderful world of opportunities like that. In any event, much like the tongue, there ain't no confusing what you're working with here.

BRRRRAAAAAAAIIIIIINNNNNNNSSSS!

It's at this point you notice that while the brains aren't terrible aromatic to you, they must be the best thing that has ever existed in the history of smells to a dog. My dog began begging for some scraps of brain they second they were unwrapped, and this has been her polite begging position for the hour or so I've been working on the brains so far:

Excuse me, sir. I would like to eat some of that and am sitting ever-so-politely.

 So at this point your brains should theoretically have already cooled. Im far too impatient to actually wait for them to actually cool, so I began chopping them pretty much right away. The only difference waiting makes is that you drop fewer pieces on the floor while shouting a string of expletives after burning yourself. So, you know, choose accordingly. At this point, the brain is largely falling apart anyway, so it's pretty easy to chop. I was going for bite-sized pieces given the recipes I'm working with, but you probably don't want a bigger chunk anyway. Here are some brain chunks pre-chopped:

Some sort of witty caption here.

 For the first recipe, I'm making Cuban-style deep-fried brain chunks. For these I'm mixing up some of the firmer chunks of brain (chosen because they seemed most likely to hold up in the frying process) with some cumin and salt, then dipping it in a "slurry" (seriously, that's the word the recipe used, and is pretty much why I went with that one. Few more delicious-sounding words in the English language than "slurry") made of roughly equal parts flour and water. I subbed in a little lime for some of the water and threw some more cumin in the mix, because…well, those things taste good. More good tasting things always help. Then post-slurry, the brain chunks get rolled in crumbs of some kind. Panko would probably be best, but in this case, you're using crushed up whole wheat Ritz crackers. Because you're fancy.

Seasoned brains, slurry, pulverized snack crackers.

That process leaves you with some fryer-reader chunks of battered brain. At this point, they start to resemble chicken nuggets to a great degree:

You only notice the difference when you bite in.

 Perhaps Dog has finally given up after not getting any food? Nope, still politely holding strong, wondering when you're going to share:

Thought maybe you couldn't see me, so I inched a bit closer.

 So now there's nothing to do but fry those little suckers. You use a tiny pot and fry in small batches because you don't have much experience frying things, so you expect things to go wrong. Makes sense to give yourself multiple options to get it right, which would not surprisingly turn out to be helpful in this instance:

This is what stuff looks like whilst frying.

 Then you eventually end up with some delicious, golden-brown fried bits. Which again, resemble chicken nuggets. Or pretty much anything small thing that's fried. I mean, there's only so much one can do with deep-frying. This is also when you notice you're out of paper towels, curse a bit, and then figure a paper bag is pretty much the same thing.

Fried stuff.

 For the record, here's what they will look like on the inside, once they have been bested by your mighty incisors. While they were hot, you should have sprinkled some good freshly-ground sea salt on them. Also, if you don't have any good Cubano-style hot sauces, you can approximate one with some sriracha and lime.

I am a half-eaten chunk of brain.

 The other style I'm trying for is a much simpler preparation, traditional amongst European types that eat brains. This method involves simply melting a bunch of butter, and then sautéing the brains with some sage. Super simple prep, but in case you're curious, here's what a sauté pan full of brains looks like. For all that is good and holy, use a non-stick pan. Brains are incredibly soft and basically fragile, so any sticking is going to completely ruin them:

Kinda looks like brown cauliflower.

 After a few minutes of sautéing, you have a plate full of brains, which looks not too different than it looked while sautéing. But hey, I took a picture, so here's the picture:

Now they're on a plate.

 It's been two hours. Has Dog given up on begging?

Never! I shall beg 'til the day I die!

But Was It Any Good?

Fried Brains: FUCK and YES. I was pretty apprehensive about this because I don't usually fry stuff and didn't know if the brains would hold up, but they did. Like little savory champions. Granted, being an American, I can eat basically anything if it has been fried. But these were not something to be survived for the sake of novelty, these were incredibly delicious. Think chicken nuggets, but instead of being full of chicken, they're full of melt-in-your-mouth, super savory marshmallows. The majority of them were gone before I even got to the sautéing. If you ever come across some deep fried brains, eat them. Eat them all. You will not be disappointed.

Sautéed Brains: Yes, but I should have planned ahead. The thing about brains is that they are delicious, but incredibly rich. Like think of the craziest thick cheesecake you've ever had, and they're about 20 times as rich as that. Seriously, your mouth will be coated in brain after one bite. Which is not a bad thing given how delicious they are, but just an indication of how rich they are. So you don't really eat brains as main course, but instead use them with or on top of things that could use some delicious richness. Being that I was spending all this time on prep, I never got around to anything to go with the brain. I saw a recipe that called for adding eggs and tomatoes during the sauté process, so I'm going to try that next.

Have We Learned Anything So Far?

Yes. Cooking with offal and various other organs and muscles is difficult and time-consuming. But it's also more entertaining than a lot of other things you could do with your day, so all-in-all, I recommend it.

Racists Gonna Be Racist

The video above is not terribly unusual, though it should make you a little angry (or a lot angry, depending on how much outrage you can still muster up over illegal police behavior). It's a video of a William Wingate, 70 year old man (who happens to be a veteran) being arrested for threatening a police office with a weapon (a golf club he regularly uses as a cane).

If you watch the video, you'll note that he does not seem to be threatening her in any way. If you possess even the most simplistic understanding of physics, you'll note that it would be difficult for an elderly man to threaten someone who is inside of a car (as the officer was when the interaction began) with a golf club.

Turns out the Seattle PD and city prosecutor agreed, as they decided to drop all charges against Wingate. This little case is really important for two reasons: first, note that Wingate had already plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of unlawful use of a weapon. One thing most people not familiar with the criminal justice system have a hard time grasping is the number of people who plead guilty to crimes they have not committed (hell, according to the Innocence Project, nearly a third of all people exonerated from death row had confessed to the crimes they didn't commit). Why would an innocent person confess to a crime they didn't commit? There are myriad reasons (read the Innocence Project list for a rundown of the common ones), but in this specific case, I'd be willing to be it's a combination of the fact that Wingate probably had to rely on a public defender (as do roughly 80% of all people charged with crimes) and was in a he said-she said situation until the video was recaptured. And who do you think any judge or jury is going to believe? The officer or the person charged with attempting to assault an officer? Especially if the accused is a Black man.

But the other, more important takeaway from this is that video is not a cure all, and is only effective when combined with community pressure to reshape our police departments into forces for the protection of all citizens. Because you'll note that in the video, the arresting officer is well aware she is on camera. Hell, she even tries to use the fact that the interaction is being recorded to intimidate the innocent person she's arresting on false charges. This is obviously not some mistake the officer made, but an obvious and blatant abuse of power committed by someone who was sure they could get away with it. And, of course, she has; her entire punishment for such a blatant disregard for the law consists of the incredibly harsh method of "counseling from her supervisor." I'd sure love to see those counseling sessions. "Let's see here, it looks like you're willing to completely disregard the law you took an oath to uphold just so you can harass an elderly man who is doing nothing wrong whatsoever. Umm…don't do that again. On camera, I mean."

Finally, I've barely touched on race here. Because if you possess even the most simplistic understanding of American race relations and the role of police in enforcing them, you know the role race played. But if you need further evidence, here's a Facebook post from the arresting officer in this case:

Take a second to savor the sweet, sweet irony of a racist prick complaining that Black people unfairly say they're targeted by police for no reason going out and unfairly targeting Black people for no reason. Would almost be funny if it weren't real life...

Always Ahead of My Time

Once in college I was riding in a car with some bandmates on the way home from practice late at night. Being that a car full of college-aged boys will always lead to someone doing something stupid, at one point we drove by a police car and a buddy of mine dared me to flip off the cops. Because I am nothing if not a bad ass rebel (NOTE: I am roughly as far from being a badass rebel as is possible), I took him up on the dare and flipped off the cruiser as we drove past.

Fast forward a few blocks and suddenly we get pulled over. Given that several minutes had passed, none of us had yet made the connection that this was the same police car, so we didn't really know what was going on. As in any routine traffic stop, an officer appeared and asked for the license and insurance of the driver and for some reason my license, even though I was in the passenger seat. After running our info, the cop came back to the car and asked me to step out of the vehicle. I actually had to have him repeat the order, because I was incredibly confused as to why I was being asked to step out the of the car when I wasn't driving.

As soon as I did step out, though, the other officer from the cruiser was standing about 6 inches from my face and while jabbing a finger in my chest asked if I flipped him off a few blocks back, to which I admitted that yes, I had. He then asked me why I did it, and I gave him the honest answer of "my friends and I were being stupid and thought it would be funny." This obviously angered him in some way, as he became even more belligerent and we had the following exchange. I obviously can't guarantee this is verbatim, but both my buddies and I have told the story so many times over the years, I can say this is pretty much what was said:

Cop: If there was someone just walking down the street and you flipped them off, would that be a crime?

Me: Uh...no?

Cop: (obviously not hearing what I said) THEN WHY SHOULD IT BE ANY DIFFERENT FOR ME?

Me: (having no idea how to answer) Uh...it shouldn't?

Cop: You're damn right. I could arrest you and take you in right now.

Me: For what?

Cop: Assault of an officer.

Me: Uh...no, I'm pretty sure you can't? Like, I don't see at all how gesturing at you from 100 feet away makes an assault.

Cop: Oh, I can definitely arrest you for that.

We then went on to argue for a few minutes about whether he could arrest me for assaulting an officer or not, and I have to give myself credit for being able to hold back laughter then entire time (quick legal tip: assault, by definition, has to include physical contact). Eventually he told me I could either apologize or be arrested, so I gave a half-hearted apology and told him we were just being stupid, didn't mean anything by it, etc. He seemed kind of disappointed that I apologized instead of continuing to be an asshole, but he stayed true to his word and let me go (well, "let me go" is a generous assessment, since again, there was literally nothing he could have actually charged me with).

And while I've found this entire exchange hilarious for quite some time, I now get to officially have the last laugh, as the 2nd circuit federal appeals court has ruled giving cops the finger is free speech protected by the Constitution.

So to you, random Waterloo police officer, out there somewhere -- I'd like to use my legally-protected right of free speech to let you know how I feel about you harassing kids for being kids:

Offally Good, Part II -- Tongue

Today (well technically yesterday) we're tackling beef tongue. Unlike oxtail, I've actually had tongue before several times, but I've never actually prepared it myself. I knew in advance that it's somewhat tricky and that doing it wrong leaves you with a weird, rubbery substance that's not remotely appealing. Was I successful in avoiding this? Kinda! Read on as we prepare some delicious tongue tacos, or tacos de lengua if you're fancy. Here's the recipe I'm kind of following if you want some specifics, but this one allows more room for improvisation than the stew did.

First things first, we need to thaw and unwrap the ol' tongue. I actually happened into possession of two separate tongues. The other tongue was much more picturesque and probably would look a lot better in shitty phone pics, but that one is also vacuum wrapped all nicely, while this one was just wrapped in plastic and butcher paper. So I figured the other one would keep a lot longer. Anyway, this is what a beef tongue looks like (albeit one that's already had a bit of pre-butchering):

A tongue

 Unlike the oxtail, there is zero doubt what you're working with here. The second you touch it to wash off the excess blood and whatnot on it, you instantly know you're holding a tongue. It's…well, off-putting would be a word that comes to mind, but doesn't accurately describe it. Anyone who has a dog will already be quite familiar with the sandpaper-like texture of the tongue of most mammals, but damn  if it still isn't weird and creepy.

The tastebuds. It's most definitely a tongue.

I started to write about this in the previous post but deleted it for space, but cooking with offal really reminds you that you're cooking with something that used to be a living animal. I'm sure plenty of people have already written about the phenomenon, but the modern grocery store really divorces you from the fact that meat used to be a living thing, not just some shrink-wrapped pieces in a refrigerated display case. Handling tongue there is zero way to not be conscious of the fact that there was once a living cow using its tongue for cow stuff which was then killed and its tongue was chopped off and put into some wax paper.

Anyway, much like the oxtail, the tongue needs a nice long bath, simmering in various flavorful things to make it both tender and tasty. Here it is enjoying some soaking time:

Celery, onions, bay leaves, peppercorns, tongue

 After a few hours of simmering (I went for 3 and a half, probably could have used a bit more), it's pretty good to go. However, the very outter layer of the tongue needs to be removed before eating, so you root around a bit in that milky white part with a knife, but once it gets loose, it sloughs off pretty easily. Most of the bumps on the tongue go with it, but there's still plenty there to remind you of what you're working with:

May not look like a tongue, but again, it most definitely feels like one

After removing the funky white covering (which probably has a name, but you have the same access to google that I do if you're so damn interested), you chop the tongue up into roughly half inch or so slices. Here's where you relearn a lesson about how heat dissipates, as the outside of the tongue will quickly feel cool enough to work with, but as you start to slice into it and burn your fingers, you remember that heat doesn't move evenly through objects like that. So after swearing a bunch and occasionally running your fingers through cold water, you end up with tongue slices:

Don't let the remarkable resemblance to dog food throw you.

 Then it's time to cook again! I'm beginning to realize the one through-line of working with offal (other than the fact it will take you all day) is that it will need to be cooked in a minimum of two different ways. Starting to understand why people do not gravitate toward these parts of the cow. Anyway, you take those slices and pan fry for awhile, till they're nice and browned:

This is what something looks like in a frying pan.
This picture was probably unnecessary.

 So now we've got some nicely fried cow tongue slices, but since we're going for tacos, they need another rough chop to make them tiny little taco-ready cubes. Once again, you think you've waited plenty of time, but you most definitely burn your fingers again chopping until you have this:

Hi! I'm a pile of tongue!

Then you're pretty much ready to go. Every recipe I read indicated the salsa verde was the go-to condiment for tacos de lengua, so I went with a healthy pile of that. I also saved some of the raw onion, most of which ended up in the simmering pot, to put on them. And then cheese, of course (more on that below). Throw that all in a fresh tortilla, and you get something that's not nearly as photogenic as the stew:

Yup, those are tacos alright.

But was it any good?

Well…kinda. I mean, they definitely weren't bad, but they weren't spectacular. However, I think I made a few key mistakes that could easily be avoided in future tongue cooking. Specifically to the tacos, the grocery store was out of queso fresco when I was there, and I'll be good God damned if I'm going to go to two grocery stores, so I just went with some generic "mexican blend" packaged cheese. This was a big mistake, as the queso fresco would not only have tasted better, but the salty fattiness of it would have really complemented the tacos in a way they could have used. Similarly, I didn't have any limes, and these things were just screaming for some acidity.

In more general tongue preparation, there seemed to be a split opinion on the google machine as to whether tongue needs to be brined before cooking. I skipped it mainly for time concerns (and I'm honestly getting sick of washing dishes -- this shit makes you use a lot of dishes), but I imagine it would have gone quite a way toward solving the acidity problem as well as softening the tongue up more to get rid of the rubberiness. You can't ever completely make tongue loose that rubbery texture, but I think I could have done more. Mine was still fairly rubbery and at the very least probably could have used another hour or so of simmering (but it was getting late, and I was hungry). I'm going to try making the leftovers into a quesadilla incorporating a few more ingredients, though, which I think will make it significantly more palatable. One other problem was that even though I chopped up the tongue as soon as I possibly could (probably sooner than I should have, given how I repeatedly burnt my fingers), by the time the tacos were all assembled, the tongue had cooled quite a bit. Like to basically room temp. While I still could have done more to make the tongue less rubbery, I'm guessing consuming it at room temp probably doesn't help.

Finally, as alluded to above, there is no mistaking you're working with a tongue here. If you had just given me these tacos and not explained what the meat was I might have thought they were a tad rubbery, but not really cared or noticed. But after you've had to handle the tongue for quite sometime, it's simply impossible to push that…feeling out of your head. I think when I have the leftovers and haven't just recently been handling a bloody tongue it might go better.

Have we learned anything from this process?

Yes. Cooking is fun! This is something I already knew, but it's been a long while since I've tried to push myself into really different foods/recipes than I normally cook with. It's a fun hobby, and typically leaves you with something delicious at the end, so it's nice to occasionally just do it for fun rather than for utilitarian purposes.

Also, I don't do much day-long simmering like this very often and I've forgotten how awesome it makes the house smell. I've always been too young and/or single to own a crockpot, but this is making me rethink that. My house has smelled pretty awesome all week. Drives Dog nuts, though.

Coming soon:

A friend passed along a tasty-looking recipe for beef heart, so that's going to happen in the near future. But the true golden grail is brain, which is probably my favorite of all the organs. I'm going to try making it two ways, so that should be a fun entry. I'll either end up with the most delicious thing I've ever made or a really fun blog post about how I wasted a day ruining food. Or I'll get mad cow and post nothing but insane gibberish. In any event, that oughtta be a fun one.