It’s 1944, and police escort a 14-year-old boy into the death chamber. He stands just 5’1 and weighs a mere 95 pounds. He is so small in stature that dictionaries need to be stacked on the seat of the electric chair so that when he sits in it his head reaches the height of the electrodes. His chains are loose around his narrow ankles.

This young boy is about to be the youngest person ever to be executed in the history of the United States. Before there was a Troy Davis there was George Junius Stinney, Jr. and the state of South Carolina electrocuted him.

Stinney was accused of murdering two young white girls. They were eleven year-old Betty June Binnicker and 8-year-old Mary Emma Thames. The two girls went missing one day after they were riding their bikes while looking for flowers on the wrong side of the tracks in a small working class town of Alcolu, South Carolina where whites and blacks were separated by railroad tracks. The girls went missing and were later found dead in a ditch, murdered with a railroad spike.

If a state wants to have a death penalty, let them pass a law such that the executioner is drawn, by lot, from the lists used to make jury pools.  Make it a citizenship duty.  Put that on the ballot and if that is what the People want, I will go along with it.

Part of the problem is trying to figure out what the metrics are.  Most education “reformers” come to the problem with solutions in hand and try to find data to support their position.  Other times, the “reformers” have more than solutions in hand.  They have products in hand and are looking to sell said products.  But I digress.

Michelle Rhee made a lot of headlines in the Washington DC schools.  Scores were up.  Way up.  But there might be a problem.  It seems that the cameras used  by McGraw-Hill to grade the tests can also record erasures.  And the Washington DC schools that showed the greatest improvements also showed the greatest number of erasures.  Almost all of them from incorrect answers to correct answers.  How anomalous was that?

McGraw-Hill’s practice is to flag only the most extreme examples of erasures. To be flagged, a classroom had to have so many wrong-to-right erasures that the average for each student was 4 standard deviations higher than the average for all D.C. students in that grade on that test. In layman’s terms, that means a classroom corrected its answers so much more often than the rest of the district that it could have occurred roughly one in 30,000 times by chance. D.C. classrooms corrected answers much more often.

Four standard deviations is a lot of standard deviations.  And the classrooms in question were beyond that.

Was there wide spread cheating in certain schools?  Fraud?  Don’t know.

Read the whole thing.

Unlike his unflappable temperament, his lingering failings should and could be corrected. And they must be if his presidency is not just to rise above the 24/7 Spill-cam but to credibly seize the narrative that Americans have craved ever since he was elected during the most punishing economic downturn of our lifetime.

As long as we have personality driven politics, we will have narrative and the means and need to control it.

It is also patently obvious that personality driven politics are very inefficient.  But as long as we have elections where we elect people, that is the way it is going to be.

The Russians celebrate Epiphany with a ceremonial dip in very icy waters, symbolizing rebirth.  Here is one such celebrant now in her traditional costume.

Sometimes, the event is more involved, as shown below.  Here is one celebrant with a deacon.

It isn’t clear what the whole ceremony is about.  Here is a picture of the priest who will administer the ceremony.  I wonder if he knows.

Yeah, I think he has it figured out.

(Actually, he was the first to cross a river and get the cross the Sava River in Belgrade, but I like my story better.)

The story is about Nathaniel Ayers, an African-American man living in Los Angeles and Steve Lopez, a Los Angeles Times writer.  Ayers was a student at Julliard in New York City and, because of mental illness, ends up homeless on the streets of Los Angeles.

Lopez, played by Downey, happens upon Ayers, played by Foxx, while Ayers is playing Stevie Wonder on a violin with two strings.  Lopez researches Ayers story and starts writing about him.  The story of these two men develops and Lopez learns something about homeless people and about grace.  Ayers learns something about coming back.  The movie doesn’t wrap up the story as it is still going on.

The movie had several sequences of great shot selection accompanied by a great score.  There were so many scenes where the direction really nailed the shot selection.  The director does two things: actor direction and camera direction.  I don’t know how much actor direction was at work here as Downey and Foxx were both great.  Camera direction was also outstanding.

This is one of my favorite movies from the last year.

See the video at the 2.37 mark here.  Neda

There’s a great article in Newsweek about Iran.  It is long and it is hard to find a clip that seems to sum it up.  There is this one:

After Obama videotaped a Persian New Year’s message for the Iranian people, reiterating his offer of unconditional talks, most Western commentators interpreted Khamenei’s lengthy and defiant response as a slap in the face. But what would have been most significant to any Iranian listening was a passage at the very end of the speech, when Khamenei said, “If you change, our behavior will also change.” Iran’s supreme authority had never before used the word “change” in such a context, for up until now the Islamic Republic’s position has been that there is nothing objectionable about its behavior. If the Obama administration truly wants to forge a new relationship with Iran, it will have to learn to hear the things Iranians are saying to them, whether it be the Supreme Leader or the rifle-toting Sadoughi.

Dealing with these civilizations is tricky.  Our temptation is to put it all on the face, and go with a simple interpretation of everything that is said and done.  But these are civilizations that have existed for thousands of years and one needs to listen, not for what we want to hear, but for what they are saying.

Read it here.

McCain’s problem is that he is more fecular than secular.

If you re wondering why a formerly honorable man like John McCain would build his presidential campaign around issues that are simultaneously beside-the-point, trivial, and dishonest sex education for kindergartners, lipstick on pigs , the numbers presented here may help to solve that mystery. Since the conventions ended, McCain has mired the presidential race in dishonest trivia because he doesn t want it to focus on what voters say is the most important issue this year: the economy.

There is no secret about any of this. The figures below are all from the annual Economic Report of the President, and the analysis is primitive. Nevertheless, what these numbers show almost beyond doubt is that Democrats are better at virtually every economic task that is important to Republicans.

I agree with just about everything, except “formerly honorable”.   McCain has been lying whenever and wherever required to stay in office.  I accept that.  But it isn’t honorable.

In short, I trot over to the J-School TV studio as part of the sober, sensible, bipartisan consensus, intending to carry water for Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson.

And what do I find also on BBC/Newsnight when I get there?

I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!! I FIND THAT I AM ON WITH GROVER-FRACKING-NORQUIST!!! WHO HAS THREE POINTS HE WANTS TO MAKE:

• Barack Obama wants to take your money by raising your taxes and pay it to the Communist Chinese.
• Oil prices are high today and the economy is in a near recession because of Nancy Pelosi: before Nancy Pelosi became speaker economic growth was fine–and she is responsible for high oil prices too.
• Economic growth is stalling because congress has not extended the Bush tax cuts. Congress needs to extend the Bush tax cuts, and if it does then that will fix the economy, and if it doesn’t then the economy cannot recover.

I am not paid enough to deal with this lying bullshit. I am not paid enough to deal with Grover Norquist and his willful stream of defecation into the global information pool.

In ‘c’, I think I can write the code that defines Grover Norquist.

#define IS_GROVER_NORQUIST_BREATHING 1

#define IS_GROVER_NORQUIST_LYING IS_GROVER_NORQUIST_BREATHING