Shava Nerad's Comments

Obama; Uncensored Society is healthy? by Dan R.

Nov 16, 2009 | rating: 10 | comments: 26

Shava Nerad Nov 16, 2009, 1:12pm EST

If you can't tell the difference between media management and censorship, you must live in a free country. Be grateful.

Really, accusing the Obama camp of *censorship* rather than being media savvy with a large stick just makes you look like a person who doesn't understand media AT ALL. I was executive director of http://torproject.org, which produces software used in China (among other places) to circumvent government censorship.

In this country, Obama's people can call Fox "an arm of the Republican Party" and criticize them. In China, a government official might review news before it is published. If a newspaper or blogger publishes undesirable messages, those messages will be "harmonized" (deleted, made unavailable to the public, removed from network searches and access), and the author may be harmonized too -- which can mean beatings, torture, and decades of prison time.

You do a great disservice to compare media gaming by politicos in this country to the DIRE situation of our Chinese democracy advocate friends, election protesters in Iran, and other folks in countries with real problems.

Shava's Kitchen: Aztec Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe by Shava Nerad

Mar 12, 2009 | rating: 10 | comments: 8

Shava Nerad Mar 12, 2009, 6:14am EDT

Chocolate and chili are great together -- look at Mexican mole's for a savory example. Mole sauce is cocoa and nuts and chili and various roasted and ground together. It's *wonderful.* Sort of the Mexican cousin of Thai peanut sauce. But a bit of hot pepper is traditional in drinking chocolate in a lot of central America.

Shava's Kitchen: Aztec Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe by Shava Nerad

Mar 12, 2009 | rating: 10 | comments: 8

Shava Nerad Mar 12, 2009, 6:12am EDT

Dutched cocoa (or "dutch cocoa") is cocoa that is processed with alkalai to remove the acid/bitter flavor that can be part of the chocolate flavor. The result is a chocolate/cocoa that tastes milder even when prepared without milk or as much sugar.

A Photo by Shava Nerad

Feb 27, 2009 | rating: 10 | comments: 5

Shava Nerad Mar 3, 2009, 5:30pm EST

This is Haymarket, in Boston, in Haymarket Square, near the Haymarket stop on the Green line, just across highway 93 from the old North End, and around the corner from Faneuil Hall.

A Photo by Shava Nerad

Feb 27, 2009 | rating: 10 | comments: 7

Shava Nerad Feb 28, 2009, 11:22pm EST

Haymarket isn't a farmers market, actually. The vendors go to Chelsea produce market and pick up the produce that the supermarkets won't take -- pears a little too small, cantalope that need to be eaten within a few days,... So although some of the produce is local, it's not from the farmers. You'd never get farmers market prices this cheap, unfortunately!

A Photo by Shava Nerad

Feb 27, 2009 | comments: 3

Shava Nerad Feb 28, 2009, 11:17pm EST

Radishes get eaten on the table with little dishes of salt. Watercress -- some will get munched fresh, but I'm doing something with chicken soup with the rest. If you haven't used watercress as a cooked green, try it! And brussels sprouts we typically split, boil, and serve with a seasoned butter. They are one of my son's favorite vegetables!

Iconoclasm: Responding to Boing-Boing comments by Shava Nerad

Oct 1, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 3

Shava Nerad Oct 1, 2008, 3:46am EDT

lol! What a compliment! TY!

Iconoclasm: Wall Street -- the chickens come home to roost by Shava Nerad

Sep 15, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 1

Shava Nerad Sep 29, 2008, 9:47pm EDT

Welcome, Boing-Boing folks! I'll be monitoring comments on Boing-Boing too, but feel free to join us here and comment on this entry.

Iconoclasm: Tough on crime, pathological society, or police state? by Shava Nerad

Mar 2, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 62

Shava Nerad Mar 7, 2008, 8:35am EST

There was a great experiment with the "three strikes" and "mandatory minimums." This has clearly not deterred crime, unless you think crime would be that much worse without them. It seems to me we need a clear re-examination of these laws which, along with bad fiscal policy, a huge debt, trade imbalances, and a terrifically expensive war, are draining us dry -- often for no clear reasons.

Perhaps if we put more subprime lenders in jail, and fewer pot smokers, we'd be better off as a society? ;)

Iconoclasm: Tough on crime, pathological society, or police state? by Shava Nerad

Mar 2, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 62

Shava Nerad Mar 6, 2008, 3:02pm EST

Greg, how many of the recent administration honchos have come from Ivy League schools? They say "grandes ecoles" -- that's not one school, it's plural. It refers to a system cognate to the Ivy League here.

Add folks like Brown, MIT and the military academies (elite schools, but not traditional "Ivies") and it's well over 80% for US presidents, going all the way back to Harding.

The only relatively recent exceptions are Reagan and Truman.

I'm sorry, that's just not compelling, as a comparison. We do not so much better. Yale Law School, Harvard Law, Annapolis, all have their elite status, and are not so integrated. I live a stone's throw from Harvard, and have known students who felt more pressured by the culture of conformity than by the academic demands. Even the Harvard Crimson documents the less lockstep but still strong admissions of the elite 16 prep schools in the northeast, here.

I was a scholarship student at Bryn Mawr College, and my dorm mate first semester was a "legacy." We had disagreements, and although it was proven that she was breaking every rule in the book, she got the favorable outcome -- because she was a legacy. This was 1977, which isn't quite ancient history.

There is *plenty* of elitism and classism in the good universities in the US, although it is somewhat fading.

Iconoclasm: Tough on crime, pathological society, or police state? by Shava Nerad

Mar 2, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 62

Shava Nerad Mar 6, 2008, 8:11am EST

Greg, I have been in France, away from the tourist attractions, and I dispute several points of your comment, including the elite being from one University (easy to dispute, as the elite come from many countries with many institutions in their local countries they graduate from). And Frances objections to the Iraq war were never monolithic -- anyone who tells you an entire country or even a faction has a single focused casus belli is either willfully simplifying or a conspiracy theorist at heart.

The class system you are describing is largely based on immigration policy, which is orthagonal to class. Socialist systems are easily overwhelmed by refugees and such, so there is a structural reason for them to be shy to accept immigration regardless of race/origin. There are shortcuts for skilled and educated workers regardless of skin color or origin; those people are highly respected, even when their French is mediocre. ;)

Crime stats information I find varies from your a lot, perhaps because yours talks about rate of growth and mine talks about rate of crime per thousands of people.

I invite you to consider that your sources may not be as balanced as you think.

Iconoclasm: Tough on crime, pathological society, or police state? by Shava Nerad

Mar 2, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 62

Shava Nerad Mar 4, 2008, 5:31pm EST

I was a single mother for seven years, and I have to agree with Greg, for the most part on the single parent issue. As a single mom, I not only had to drop my kid at a program before school, and pick him up at 6pm after school -- so really, I only saw him for breakfast and dinner/bedtime -- I was also exhausted much of the time trying to support us, keep the house by myself, and keep some tiny modicum of social life and social engagement for myself. Without good social engagement in my family of origin (church was a huge lifeline for me while Joseph was little -- and as soon as he was old enough to stuff envelopes, he got to come with me on volunteer gigs) I'd have ended up a TV zombie, completely disengaged from my community, raising a second-generation zombie.

Not every kid in a single parent household grows up without an investment in the social contract, but there's a far higher chance. It's not the fault of the single parents or the divorce laws per se, I think -- but it is the fault of all of us, that we take relationships (even those that involve kids) casually.

For example, if you go back a couple generations, my family is very "old country." I have two ex-husbands who both left me for younger women. In days of old, my older relatives and in-laws would have had a pretty un-gentle talk with my husband if he wandered. These days people just say "oh, well, he was following his bliss!"

It's not our business to interfere with the breakup of a marriage, any more than in previous years it was anyone's business to interfere if a husband beat the living crap out of his wife and/or kids. Well, the liberalization of divorce laws was supposed to give women the freedom to escape bad relationships, to a large extent. But what it has done, to a large extent, is been co-opted by men to preserve their freedom from having to cope with personal responsibility.

Although I consider myself left of center, I am socially conservative in that I believe we have issues with the culture and family that have destroyed social capital and the integrity of the social fabric. Our social contract is under attack from media-dazed generations who have no social skill, and only feel that they need to do what is required to get paid, not what is best for their communities. In this, I will say that the kids in jail are no more culpable than many suburban yuppies who give minimum effort at their work, no contribution to their community, and just add to the burden of the ecosystem disproportionally without giving back squat.

Unfortunately most liberal and conservative strategies are firmly planted in symptoms rather than causes -- because you can measure symptoms. So we incarcerate people, but we don't try to determine why they behave poorly. If we do, we say "product of divorce" as though that were the last step -- or go one step further to say "product of liberalization of divorce laws."

What we don't do is ask, "How can we reach young people and get them plugged back into community?"

I teach a class at MIT's Educational Studies Program called "How to Save the World in Your Spare Time." It's a non-ideological course on community engagement, community organizing, and applied civics.

The first image the kids see is a little stick figure at the base of a brick wall, and behind the wall a menacing gray cloud labeled "Government." I ask, "How many of you think this is the world you live in?" Generally every hand goes up.

I tell them, "My job in the next two hours is to teach you how illusory this is." And in two hours I can take a classroom of 7th-12th graders, and show them how society really works -- interested parties engaging in dialogue, media, and politics to change the world in the way they want to see it change.

We think it's terrible that we don't teach kids to balance a checkbook, but we don't think twice about the fact that children have NEVER learned real civic engagement in school (even my 1960's civics classes were taxonomic -- 50 states, 100 Senators, 9 justices,...).

But so long as we produce poor kids for incarceration and well-off kids as Enron employees, the system will be rotten to the core, and deteriorating.

So what can you do to change that? Do you volunteer in the schools? Do you go to city council meetings? Participate in a political party, or at least issue-related nonprofits, in your community (and don't start me on MoveOn and such -- that's an illusion of engagement -- connect with people who are already plugged into your community, please!) Do you even vote?

Iconoclasm: Tough on crime, pathological society, or police state? by Shava Nerad

Mar 2, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 62

Shava Nerad Mar 2, 2008, 9:36pm EST

For information on the breakdown of the US prison population by charge type, look here. 53.6% of the population are in for drug charges.

In 2006, the government says:

About half of all probationers had been convicted of a felony (49 percent), about half were convicted of a misdemeanor (49 percent), and 2 percent were convicted of other infractions. More than 7 in 10 were on probation for a non-violent offense, including more than a quarter for a drug law violation and a sixth for driving while intoxicated.

Here's a fun fact from the feds: "If incarceration rates remain unchanged, 6.6% of U.S. residents born in 2001 will go to prison at some time during their lifetime."

One in eight prisoners has a current or prior drug offense only.

You can find a million sources on the web that show that there are disproportionate incarcerations by class and race. Is that even in dispute these days? You can mine source data here.

Whether you are liberal or conservative it should be obvious that what we are doing now is simply not working.

From the liberal perspective, we are not remediating the inequities of education, race, and helping the hardships of the poor, addicted and mentally ill.

From the conservative viewpoint, we have a radical failure of the social contract, and an evaporation of personal responsibility on the part of a huge swath of the general population, and the burden of incarceration is becoming uncontrolled.

So regardless of your political bent, shouldn't we be searching for solutions?

Iconoclasm: Tough on crime, pathological society, or police state? by Shava Nerad

Mar 2, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 62

Shava Nerad Mar 2, 2008, 1:24pm EST

Actually Greg, many states have mandatory minimums for very small thresholds of marijuana possession. Even then, prior convictions (which can include misdemeanors) can up mandatory sentences, and invoke atrocities such as the three-strikes law in California. Federal law lists the first offense as 1 year, even though it is a misdemeanor (you can vote when you get out).

Felony convictions serve not only to stock our jails and prisons, but also to remove huge numbers of folks with an inside view, as it were, of the justice system from our voting rolls. Think about 1% of the adult population -- perhaps 5% of the poor or so, on speculation -- removed from the voting rolls.

And, if I got the numbers in the first paragraph off, the "eight times 1970" is apples-to-apples straight from the Reuters report, which also said the population had tripled since 1987. But thanks for the check.

According to the US DOJ, in 2006 about three quarters of a million were incarcerated in local jails, putting this number at 33% of the total incarcerated population, so that is significant.

I'll say that tripling since 1987 and up eight times since 1970 is sufficient for worry, though, wouldn't you?

Hillary Nomination Will Disaffect More Voters Than McCain's Has by Christopher K. Leavitt

Feb 24, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 15

Shava Nerad Feb 25, 2008, 2:52am EST

She started out as a reformer and became a machine power politician, and the same progressive democrats who wore "Give 'em hell, Hillary!" buttons when Bill had his first run for the presidency, now feel she left them in the ditch.

So she has people who hate her on the right, and people who feel betrayed by her on the left. Not a good place to be, but it's that "nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos" thang.

Iconoclasm: The economics of hope by Shava Nerad

Jan 4, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 10

Shava Nerad Jan 7, 2008, 1:22pm EST

My point was that Kennedy was young -- and that although he didn't have much time to have a distinguished presidential career, he planted some seeds, and he was popular with younger people. And Kennedy is claimed to have taken the presidency despite his youth and catholicism *because* of that year's "new media" -- television. The whole Camelot thing around his White House and such has a lot of parallel's to Obama's mystique with younger folks.

Iconoclasm: The economics of hope by Shava Nerad

Jan 4, 2008 | rating: 10 | comments: 10

Shava Nerad Jan 6, 2008, 10:29am EST

Ron, I'm 48, and I remember JFK, bet you do too. Young people full of ideas -- with great teams around them -- can do great things.

8 things by Shava Nerad

Jan 4, 2008 | rating: 8.2 | comments: 5

Shava Nerad Jan 4, 2008, 2:37pm EST

Thanks, Jennifer! Why don't you make an 8things post, and post it to a bunch of your groups, and we'll spread the fun! :)

Iconoclasm: San Diego burns, friends of the Big Easy smoulder by Shava Nerad

Oct 24, 2007 | rating: 10 | comments: 22

Shava Nerad Oct 28, 2007, 9:00pm EDT

Lynn, the Army Corps of Engineers admitted to negligence in New Orleans.

A contrite U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took responsibility Thursday for the flooding of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and said the levees failed because they were built in a disjointed fashion using outdated data.

"This is the first time that the Corps has had to stand up and say, `We've had a catastrophic failure,"' Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, the Corps chief, said as the agency issued a 6,000-page-plus report on the disaster on Day 1 of the new hurricane season.

I don't make these things up...:)

The locals in New Orleans had been denied funding by the Bush administration for infrastructure they had no jurisdiction over. They wouldn't have been *allowed* to fix the levees, any more than Port St. Lucie could decide to patch a pothole in I95.

Iconoclasm: CSI:NY shows bad understanding of law and SL by Shava Nerad

Oct 25, 2007 | rating: 10 | comments: 10

Shava Nerad Oct 27, 2007, 3:30am EDT

(footnote: After all of that, I've tried running Second Life through Tor. Don't bother trying...! Tor works best for low traffic applications -- web browsing, chat -- that tolerate lag. It doesn't work well with most games, voice apps, etc. if at all)