The Bias Against Black Bodies

Posted on February 20, 2014 by MZR

Feb 20, 2014

Charles Blow

The Michael Dunn case has caused us to look once again at the American culture and criminal justice system, and many don’t like what they see.

But we shouldn’t look at this case narrowly and see its particular circumstances as the epitome of the problem. They are not. The scope of the problem is far more expansive, ingrained and elusive.

This is simply one more example of the bias against — and in fact violence, both psychological and physical, against — the black body, particularly black men, that extends across society and across their lifetimes. And this violence is both interracial and intra-racial.

A 2011 study found that black parents were the most likely to spank their children. After the study was released, Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who advocates against corporal punishment, and who also happens to be black, told CNN: “We have such damage in the black community. When you add to that parents beating their kids, it’s sending the message that violence is an O.K. way to solve problems.” Poussaint added later, “violence begets violence, anger begets anger, and the loss of control makes it all worse.”

And for many black children, when they go to school things don’t get much better. According to the Center for Effective Discipline, corporal punishment and paddling in school is allowed in 19 states; these include all the states except Virginia in the Black Belt, which stretches across the South. The center found that African-American students make up “17 percent of all public school students in the U.S., but are 36 percent of those who have corporal punishment inflicted on them, more than twice the rate of white students.”

This inequitable treatment in schools is also exerted in other ways. As USAToday reported in May:

“The average American secondary student has an 11 percent chance of being suspended in a single school year, according to the study from the University of California-Los Angeles Civil Rights project. However, if that student is black, the odds of suspension jump to 24 percent.”

It continued:

“Previous studies have shown that even a single suspension can double a student’s odds of dropping out, said Daniel Losen, a former Boston-area teacher and one of the authors of ‘Out of School and Off Track: The Overuse of Suspensions in American Middle and High Schools,’ released in April.”

Even on the streets, they can’t escape it.

In New York City, from 2002 to 2011, the Police Department stopped and frisked millions of citizens, but nearly 90 percent of those were black and Hispanic, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. Eighty-eight percent of those stopped were innocent.

And, according to a 2011 report from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, although black, white and Hispanic drivers were stopped by the police at roughly similar rates, “black drivers were about three times as likely as white drivers and about twice as likely as Hispanic drivers to be searched during a traffic stop.” It doesn’t take a leap of logic to understand that if you search for contraband, you’re more likely to find it.

The inequity continues into the justice system, even for juveniles. As“Frontline” pointed out:

“A number of recent surveys have shown that there are profound racial disparities in the juvenile justice system, that African-American and Hispanic youth are more likely to be tried as adults. They are more likely to receive longer sentences, they’re more likely to be in locked facilities, and on and on and on, even when charged with the same offense as whites.”

In fact, a January study in the journal Crime & Delinquency found that by age 23 nearly half of all black men will have been arrested at least once. This compares to 44 percent of Hispanics and 38 percent of whites.

This disparity continues into the adult prison population. While blacks are only 13 percent of the population, they make up 38 percent of the state prison population nationwide.

Part of this last problem abides in the jury box.

A 2010 report from the Equal Justice Initiative found that “people of color continue to be excluded from jury service because of their race, especially in serious criminal trials and death penalty cases.” And among the people who do make it onto juries, a 2001 study published in Psychology, Public Policy and Law found, white jurors demonstrate bias more often when race isn’t a prominent feature of a case than when it is. So, much of this bias would likely slip by, away from the glare of media attention.

It is no surprise then that many of these young black men, having endured a life of violence and suspicion and inequitable treatment, would have a vastly altered relationship to authority and even the basic concepts of fairness and hopefulness. A small number of these young people, having been baptized in brutality, can internalize it and then act it out, being destructive to themselves and their communities. And pop culture — whether music, television or movies — can amplify the problem by either normalizing violence or glorifying it.

In that context, the repercussion of poor decisions is amplified, and the tiny minority of people who exist within any demographic group who are intent on committing themselves to wrongdoing and disruption could prosper.

That is the conundrum of the current African-American experience: How to unwind all the hurt and damage? How to rescue folks from a system and culture that threatens to drown them?

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. There is no one place to start.

I often advocate that blacks fight this bias on two flanks. First, work every day to eliminate the structural and systematic biases. This is actually easier said than done, particularly since many of the people who, wittingly or not, become instruments of the bias, and in some cases are beneficiaries of that bias, deny that bias.

The second flank is to recognize that the bias is present and not make choices that would make it worse, and in fact try to countervail it. The latter is always the more delicate argument, because it calls on people to redouble efforts to behave nobly in an ignoble — and unjust — context. There is an issue of basic fairness that goes unaddressed in the discussion.

But, sadly, those seem to be the options that exist at the moment. Moving in two directions at once, fighting the system and fighting despair.

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The Prodigal Sons

Posted on February 18, 2014 by MZR

February 19, 2014

David Brooks

We take as our text today the parable of the prodigal sons. As I hope you know, the story is about a father with two sons. The younger son took his share of the inheritance early and blew it on prostitutes and riotous living. When the money was gone, he returned home.

His father ran out and embraced him. The delighted father offered the boy his finest robe and threw a feast in his honor. The older son, the responsible one, was appalled. He stood outside the feast, crying in effect, “Look! All these years I’ve been working hard and obeying you faithfully, and you never gave me special treatment such as this!”

The father responded, “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” But he had to celebrate the younger one’s return. The boy was lost and now is found.

Did the father do the right thing? Is the father the right model for authority today?

The father’s critics say he was unjust. People who play by the rules should see the rewards. Those who abandon the community, live according to their own reckless desires should not get to come back and automatically reap the bounty of others’ hard work. If you reward the younger brother, you signal that self-indulgence pays, while hard work gets slighted.

The father’s example is especially pernicious now, the critics continue. Jesus preached it at the time of the Pharisees, in an overly rigid and rule-bound society. In those circumstances, a story of radical forgiveness was a useful antidote to the prevailing legalism.

But we don’t live in that kind of society. We live in a society in which moral standards are already fuzzy, in which people are already encouraged to do their own thing. We live in a society with advanced social decay — with teens dropping out of high school, financiers plundering companies and kids being raised without fathers. The father’s example in the parable reinforces loose self-indulgence at a time when we need more rule-following, more social discipline and more accountability, not less.

It’s a valid critique, but I’d defend the father’s example, and, informed by a reading of Timothy Keller’s outstanding book “The Prodigal God,” I’d even apply the father’s wisdom to social policy-making today.

We live in a divided society in which many of us in the middle- and upper-middle classes are like the older brother and many of the people who drop out of school, commit crimes and abandon their children are like the younger brother. In many cases, we have a governing class of elder brothers legislating programs on behalf of the younger brothers. The great danger in this situation is that we in the elder brother class will end up self-righteously lecturing the poor: “You need to be more like us: graduate from school, practice a little sexual discipline, work harder.”

But the father in this parable exposes the truth that people in the elder brother class are stained, too. The elder brother is self-righteous, smug, cold and shrewd. The elder brother wasn’t really working to honor his father; he was working for material reward and out of a fear-based moralism. The father reminds us of the old truth that the line between good and evil doesn’t run between people or classes; it runs straight through every human heart.

The father also understands that the younger brothers of the world will not be reformed and re-bound if they feel they are being lectured to by unpleasant people who consider themselves models of rectitude. Imagine if the older brother had gone out to greet the prodigal son instead of the father, giving him some patronizing lecture. Do we think the younger son would have reformed his life to become a productive member of the community? No. He would have gotten back up and found some bad-boy counterculture he could join to reassert his dignity.

The father teaches that rebinding and reordering society requires an aggressive assertion: You are accepted; you are accepted. It requires mutual confession and then a mutual turning toward some common project. Why does the father organize a feast? Because a feast is nominally about food, but, in Jewish life, it is really about membership. It reasserts your embedded role in the community project.

The father’s lesson for us is that if you live in a society that is coming apart on class lines, the best remedies are oblique. They are projects that bring the elder and younger brothers together for some third goal: national service projects, infrastructure-building, strengthening a company or a congregation.

The father offers each boy a precious gift. The younger son gets to dedicate himself to work and self-discipline. The older son gets to surpass the cold calculus of utility and ambition, and experience the warming embrace of solidarity and companionship.

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We Are Just Not Here Anymore

Posted on February 12, 2014 by MZR

By Linton Weeks

Feb 12, 2014

At weddings, guests tweet real-time photos of the festivities to friends far away. At sporting events, fans follow scores of games in other cities. In classrooms, students text with friends in other classes and parents out in the world. At funerals, mourners send out selfies to pals in other places.

Everyone, it seems, is interacting more with people who are elsewhere — and less with the people around them. As technology seeps through society, dampening every dry aspect of our lives, something is happening to: the idea of being present; the desire to be in the moment; the notion of living right here and right now.

Whenever we go anywhere, we are — and we want to be — somewhere else simultaneously.

David M. Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, has been concerned for quite a while about the accelerated pace and overload of life today and how that tampers with our well-being.

In an interview, David says he doesn’t believe that smartphones and tablets and other devices are the “root cause” of acceleration and overload, but rather “expressions of our more-faster-better philosophy of life and our economic system, which privileges abundant and efficient production and consumption over human relations and more contemplative — reflective, intimate, connected — ways of being.”

The Severed Self

For years now, folks have been mulling over the side effects of the fragmented self — and raising questions, such as: How can we ever feel comfortable with others when we don’t even feel comfortable with ourselves?

The 1960s comedy troupe Firesign Theatre put it this way 55 years ago in the title of its recording: How Can You Be Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All?

Philosopher novelist Walker Percy noted the contemporary conundrum in his 1983 book: Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. Percy lamented “the loneliness of self, stranded as it is as an unspeakable consciousness in a world from which it perceives itself as somehow estranged, stranded even within its own body, with which it sees no clear connection.”

Kenneth J. Gergen, a professor at Swarthmore College, has written of the idea of the “absent presence.” In his 2002 essay “Cell Phone Technology and the Challenge of Absent Presence,” he observed people who were sitting in groups, yet were engaged in individual pursuits. And how such a situation affects our feelings. “We are present but simultaneously rendered absent,” he writes. “We have been erased by an absent presence.”

And in a recent New York Times essay about our incessant need to document our lives, Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the 2011 bookAlone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, wrote: “These days, when people are alone, or feel a moment of boredom, they tend to reach for a device. In a movie theater, at a stop sign, at the checkout line at a supermarket and, yes, at a memorial service, reaching for a device becomes so natural that we start to forget that there is a reason, a good reason, to sit still with our thoughts: It does honor to what we are thinking about. It does honor to ourselves.”

Sherry may as well be talking about focusing on who and what is around us at a given moment.

If the people you are with or the event you are attending are not important enough to command your attention, then: Why. Are. You. There?

True Connectivity

It’s more complicated than that, of course. Students are forced to sit through classes. Businesspeople are required to show up at certain meetings. We all wind up at times in involuntary situations.

And, after all, being in touch with people we care about is a deep-down desire of the human species — which explains the phenomenal success of connective technology.

But there is an increasing sense that many people — regardless of surroundings — do not really want to be where they are. They want to be connected to someone else who is somewhere else doing something else.

The superglue is out of the tube. We will never go back to a pre-Firesign Theatre existence. But David Levy says there may be another way to deal with this societal upheaval.

He believes that our dazzling new digital tools can be used in more thoughtful and contemplative ways.

In his course Information and Contemplation, David teaches students the virtues of old-fashioned focus and discipline — and even meditation — in the midst of all our newfangled devices.

As reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Levy’s students play back videos of themselves multitasking and they work to develop new ways to act and interact more effectively and efficiently. They do one task — such as email maintenance — at a time and resist all distractions.

“A good deal of my focus in recent years has been on exploring how to use our digital tools differently,” he says, “to connect us to one another and to sources of information in deeper and healthier ways.”

And that, in the end, may be the Next Great Frontier. Perhaps the great minds and moguls and motivators will invent newer, shinier tools to propel us away from apathy and alienation and toward true connectedness and community and more meaningful co-existence.

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Maturity ’s Victories

Posted on February 2, 2014 by MZR

BEAR in mind that what you’re about to read comes from someone whose
creaky knees protest any run longer than three miles, whose achy left
shoulder just got its first cortisone shot and whose haircuts are more
ceremonial than functional, given that nature is doing a barber’s work. I
have a vested interest in coming up with an argument that older is
somehow better.
But I also have the Super Bowl on my side, because what you’ll be
watching on Sunday is more than the biggest football game of the year. It’s
an affirmation of aging. It’s proof that a youthful stride matters less than a
seasoned mind, and that what happens on the far side of our physical
peaks isn’t a steady decline but a sequence of trade-offs. Our joints may
not be as sturdy as they once were. We have plenty else that’s stronger than
ever.
The Denver Broncos are favored (just slightly) over the Seattle
Seahawks, and for one principal reason: Peyton Manning. He’s finishing

up the best season of his career, maybe of any quarterback’s. For the 16
games leading up to the playoffs, he set National Football League records
for passing yards and for touchdowns thrown. And he did this after four
neck surgeries, following a period when nerve damage had wrecked his
right arm. He did this at 37, which is the cusp of senescence in his
merciless sport.
Certainly, other quarterbacks have flourished in their late 30s. In fact
a few of them, including John Elway, were also Broncos, as Time
magazine noted in a recent article titled “Peyton Manning’s Elder Power.”
But what’s extraordinary about Manning — and what gives his golden
season a resonance beyond the gridiron — is the way he’s flourished, his
careful deployment of certain advantages to compensate for other
disadvantages. It’s a tortoise-and-hare story, sort of, with a similar moral:
Flashiness doesn’t automatically win the day. Neither does fleetness. But
smarts, patience, plotting? These are paramount, and they’re less
pronounced in youth than in the rickety, wobbly expanse beyond it.
Rickety, wobbly — yes, I’m thinking of Manning’s running style. While
he was never much of a scrambler, he’s especially lead-footed these days.
In the Time article, David Von Drehle wrote that Manning’s one short
touchdown run this season “made him look like a man with a bum hip
chasing a taxi in wingtips.” Von Drehle was being generous. Manning
chased that taxi in Crocs.
All of his limbs have limitations they didn’t used to. Even as Sports
Illustrated named him its athlete of 2013, the magazine observed that the
“laser rocket arm” of his 20s was, at this point, “more like a cap gun.”
Ouch. I watched every Broncos telecast — they’re my team, and I relish any
reason to grow roots in the couch — and he threw a great many passes that
floated and fizzled and swayed clumsily, like stoned egrets, toward the
receivers they were meant for.
But they got there. And other passes, more of them, were real
beauties, with both pinpoint accuracy and plenty of zip.
Besides, he has tools now that have nothing to do with brawn, tools

forged in time served.
He has the kind of poise that maturity typically midwifes. He’s
unflappable. When something goes wrong, be it his fault or a teammate’s,
he’ll grimace only fleetingly, shrug just slightly and press on. Panic, he
understands, is a waste of precious energy, a pivot into rushed, stupid
mistakes. With a bit of age has come a better grip on the fact that a game,
like a life, is long. Stay calm. Hang in. Wait for the inevitable break. Trust
your training.
And gather information. The Manning of the moment is known less
for his power, which is diminished, than for his skills as a tactician, which
are the fruits of having survived so many different situations and studied
so many possible scenarios. He can step to the line of scrimmage, quickly
diagnose the defense’s vulnerabilities and instantly change the play that he
was about to call, using a frenzy of code words and gesticulations that
leave opponents scratching their heads, or rather helmets. Ten years ago,
even five years ago, he was nowhere near as deft at this.
It’s no accident that we elect more older than younger people to the
highest political offices, and it’s not simply because they’ve paid dues or
been able to establish the necessary donor networks (though the latter,
sadly, is indeed a factor). We understand that there’s a kind of judgment
that comes only with an accretion of years, and we hope — often vainly —
that it’s manifest in these leaders.
IT’S no accident that Robert Redford, 77, just gave the performance
of his career, in “All Is Lost,” and that Bruce Dern, also 77, did likewise, in
“Nebraska.” The Oscar for Best Actor is likely to go to Matthew
McConaughey, for “Dallas Buyers Club,” who’s doing work in his 40s —
he’s now 44 — that he couldn’t have touched in his hunky 20s.
And it’s no accident that many of us, while remembering and
sometimes yearning for the electricity of first loves and the metabolism of
our salad days, don’t really want to turn back the clock. We know that for
everything that’s been taken from us, something else has been given. We
don’t move as nimbly as we did. But we manage our emotions with greater

dexterity. Our energy may be diminished. Our use of it is more prudent.
We’re short on flat-out exuberance. We’re long on perspective.
Back in college I took a psychology course that I recall absolutely
nothing about, except for the professor’s favorite maxim. Life, he
repeatedly said, is about learning to deal with loss. For decades afterward,
as my mother died and relationships soured and I gave up on my grandest
dreams, I trusted him on the profundity of this observation, which he
could just as easily have worded another way: Aging stinks.
But he was wrong, or, at best, only half right. Life is about learning to
look past what’s lost to what’s found in the process, and that’s Manning’s
season in a nutshell. To watch him now isn’t merely to see new gifts on
display, new tricks picked up. It’s to behold, in his eyes and smile, an
amplified joy in the game he’s playing, an outsize gratitude for his part in
it.
He’ll step onto the field at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.,
not just as one of the best quarterbacks in the history of football. He’ll step
onto the field, with his thinning hair and awkward gait, as a poster boy for
the march of time.

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Three Hidden Ways Wheat Makes You Fat

Posted on January 23, 2014 by MZR
Posted: 02/18/2012 6:53 am

Gluten-free is hot these days. There are books and websites, restaurants with gluten free menus, and grocery stores with hundreds of new gluten-free food products on the shelf. Is this a fad, or a reflection of response to a real problem?

Yes, gluten is a real problem. But the problem is not just gluten. In fact, there are three major hidden reasons that wheat products, not just gluten (along with sugar in all its forms) is a major contributor to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, depression and so many other modern ills.

This is why there are now 30 percent more obese than undernourished in the world, and why chronic lifestyle and dietary driven disease kills more than twice as many people as infectious disease globally. These non-communicable, chronic diseases will cost our global economy $47 trillion over the next 20 years.

Sadly, this tsunami of chronic illness is increasingly caused by eating our beloved diet staple, bread, the staff of life, and all the wheat products hidden in everything from soups to vodka to lipstick to envelope adhesive.

The biggest problem is wheat, the major source of gluten in our diet. But wheat weaves its misery through many mechanisms, not just the gluten! The history of wheat parallels the history of chronic disease and obesity across the world. Supermarkets today contain walls of wheat and corn disguised in literally hundreds of thousands of different food-like products, or FrankenFoods. Each American now consumes about 55 pounds of wheat flour every year.

It is not just the amount but also the hidden components of wheat that drive weight gain and disease. This is not the wheat your great-grandmother used to bake her bread. It is FrankenWheat — a scientifically engineered food product developed in the last 50 years.

How Wheat — and Gluten — Trigger Weight Gain, Prediabetes, Diabetes and More

This new modern wheat may look like wheat, but it is different in three important ways that all drive obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia and more.

  1. It contains a Super Starch — amylopectin A that is super fattening.
  2. It contains a form of Super Gluten that is super-inflammatory.
  3. It contains forms of a Super Drug that is super-addictive and makes you crave and eat more.

The Super Starch

The Bible says, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Eating bread is nearly a religious commandment. But the Einkorn, heirloom, Biblical wheat of our ancestors is something modern humans never eat.

Instead, we eat dwarf wheat, the product of genetic manipulation and hybridization that created short, stubby, hardy, high-yielding wheat plants with much higher amounts of starch and gluten and many more chromosomes coding for all sorts of new odd proteins. The man who engineered this modern wheat won the Nobel Prize — it promised to feed millions of starving around the world. Well, it has, and it has made them fat and sick.

The first major difference of this dwarf wheat is that it contains very high levels of a super starch called amylopectin A. This is how we get big fluffy Wonder Bread and Cinnabons.

Here’s the downside. Two slices of whole wheat bread now raise your blood sugar more than two tablespoons of table sugar.

There is no difference between whole wheat and white flour here. The biggest scam perpetrated on the unsuspecting public is the inclusion of “whole grains” in many processed foods full of sugar and wheat, giving the food a virtuous glow. The best way to avoid foods that are bad for you is to stay away from foods with health claims on the labels. They are usually hiding something bad.

In people with diabetes, both white and whole grain bread raises blood sugar levels 70 to 120 mg/dl over starting levels. We know that foods with a high glycemic index make people store belly fat, trigger hidden fires of inflammation in the body and give you a fatty liver, leading the whole cascade of obesity, pre-diabetes and diabetes. This problem now affects every other American and is the major driver of nearly all chronic disease and most our health care costs. Diabetes now sucks up one in three Medicare dollars.

The Super Gluten

Not only does this dwarf, FrankenWheat, contain the super starch, but it also contains super gluten which is much more likely to create inflammation in the body. And in addition to a host of inflammatory and chronic diseases caused by gluten, it causes obesity and diabetes.

Gluten is that sticky protein in wheat that holds bread together and makes it rise. The old fourteen-chromosome-containing Einkorn wheat codes for the small number of gluten proteins, and those that it does produce are the least likely to trigger celiac disease and inflammation. The new dwarf wheat contains twenty-eight or twice as many chromosomes and produces a large variety of gluten proteins, including the ones most likely to cause celiac disease.

Five Ways Gluten Makes You Sick and Fat

Gluten can trigger inflammation, obesity and chronic disease in five major ways.

    1. Full-blown celiac disease is an autoimmune disease that triggers body-wide inflammation triggering insulin resistance, which causes weight gain and diabetes, as well as over 55 conditions including autoimmune diseases, irritable bowel, reflux, cancer, depression, osteoporosis and more.
    1. Low-level inflammation reactions to gluten trigger the same problems even if you don’t have full-blown celiac disease but just have elevated antibodies (7 percent of the population, or 21 million Americans).
    1. There is also striking new research showing that adverse immune reactions to gluten may result from problems in very different parts of the immune system than those implicated in celiac disease. Most doctors dismiss gluten sensitivity if you don’t have a diagnosis of celiac disease, but this new research proves them wrong. Celiac disease results when the body creates antibodies against the wheat (adaptive immunity), but another kind of gluten sensitivity results from a generalized activated immune system (innate immunity). This means that people can be gluten-sensitive without having celiac disease or gluten antibodies and still have inflammation and many other symptoms.

A NON-gluten glycoprotein or lectin (combination of sugar and protein) in wheat called wheat germ agglutinin (WGA)[1] found in highest concentrations in whole wheat increases whole body inflammation as well. This is not an autoimmune reaction, but can be just as dangerous and cause heart attacks.[2]

 

 

  1. Eating too much gluten-free food (what I call gluten-free junk food) like gluten-free cookies, cakes and processed food. Processed food has a high glycemic load. Just because it is gluten-free, doesn’t mean it is healthy. Gluten-free cakes and cookies are still cakes and cookies! Vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts and seeds and lean animal protein are all gluten free — stick with those.

 

Let’s look at this a little more closely. Gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, rye, spelt and oats, can cause celiac disease, which triggers severe inflammation throughout the body and has been linked to autoimmune diseases, mood disorders, autism, schizophrenia, dementia, digestive disorders, nutritional deficiencies, diabetes, cancer and more.

Celiac Disease: The First Problem

Celiac disease and gluten-related problems have been increasing, and now affect at least 21 million Americans and perhaps many millions more. And 99 percent of people who have problems with gluten or wheat are NOT currently diagnosed.

Ninety-eight percent of people with celiac have a genetic predisposition known as HLA DQ2 or DQ8, which occurs in 30 percent of the population. But even though our genes haven’t changed, we have seen a dramatic increase in celiac disease in the last 50 years because of some environmental trigger.

In a recent study that compared blood samples taken 50 years ago from 10,000 young Air Force recruits to samples taken recently from 10,000 people, researchers found something quite remarkable. There has been a real 400 percent increase in celiac disease over the last 50 years.[3] And that’s just the full-blown disease affecting about one in 100 people, or about three million Americans. We used to think that this only was diagnosed in children with bloated bellies, weight loss and nutritional deficiencies. But now we know it can be triggered (based on a genetic susceptibility) at any age and without ANY digestive symptoms. The inflammation triggered by celiac disease can drive insulin resistance, weight gain and diabetes, just like any inflammatory trigger — and I have seen this over and over in my patients.

Gluten and Gut Inflammation: The Second Problem

But there are two ways other than celiac disease in which wheat appears to be a problem.

The second way that gluten causes inflammation is through a low-grade autoimmune reaction to gluten. Your immune system creates low-level antibodies to gluten, but doesn’t create full-blown celiac disease. In fact, 7 percent of the population, 21 million, have these anti-gliadin antibodies. These antibodies were also found in 18 percent of people with autism and 20 percent of those with schizophrenia.

A major study in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that hidden gluten sensitivity (elevated antibodies without full-blown celiac disease) was shown to increase risk of death by 35 to 75 percent, mostly by causing heart disease and cancer.[4] Just by this mechanism alone, over 20 million Americans are at risk for heart attack, obesity, cancer and death.

How does eating gluten cause inflammation, heart disease, obesity, diabetes and cancer?

Most of the increased risk occurs when gluten triggers inflammation that spreads like a fire throughout your whole body. It damages the gut lining. Then all the bugs and partially-digested food particles inside your intestine get across the gut barrier and are exposed your immune system, 60 percent of which lies right under the surface of the one cell thick layer of cells lining your gut or small intestine. If you spread out the lining of your gut, it would equal the surface area of a tennis court. Your immune system starts attacking these foreign proteins, leading to systemic inflammation that then causes heart disease, dementia, cancer, diabetes and more.

Dr. Alessio Fasano, a celiac expert from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, discovered a protein made in the intestine called “zonulin” that is increased by exposure to gluten.[5] Zonulin breaks up the tight junctions or cement between the intestinal cells that normally protect your immune system from bugs and foreign proteins in food leaking across the intestinal barrier. If you have a “leaky gut,” you will get inflammation throughout your whole body and a whole list of symptoms and diseases.

Why is there an increase in disease from gluten in the last 50 years?

It is because, as I described earlier, the dwarf wheat grown in this country has changed the quality and type of gluten proteins in wheat, creating much higher gluten content and many more of the gluten proteins that cause celiac disease and autoimmune antibodies.

Combine that with the damage our guts have suffered from our diet, environment, lifestyle and medication use, and you have the perfect storm for gluten intolerance. This super gluten crosses our leaky guts and gets exposed to our immune system. Our immune system reacts as if gluten was something foreign, and sets off the fires of inflammation in an attempt to eliminate it. However, this inflammation is not selective, so it begins to attack our cells — leading to diabesity and other inflammatory diseases.

Damage to the gastrointestinal tract from overuse of antibiotics, anti-inflammatory drugs like Advil or Aleve and acid-blocking drugs like Prilosec or Nexium, combined with our low-fiber, high-sugar diet, leads to the development of celiac disease and gluten intolerance or sensitivity and the resultant inflammation. That is why elimination of gluten and food allergens or sensitivities can be a powerful way to prevent and reverse diabesity and many other chronic diseases.

The Super Drug

Not only does wheat contain super starch and super gluten — making it super fattening and super inflammatory — but it also contains a super drug that makes you crazy, hungry and addicted.

When processed by your digestion, the proteins in wheat are converted into shorter proteins, “polypeptides,” called “exorphins.” They are like the endorphins you get from a runner’s high and bind to the opioid receptors in the brain, making you high, and addicted just like a heroin addict. These wheat polypeptides are absorbed into the bloodstream and get right across the blood brain barrier. They are called “gluteomorphins,” after “gluten” and “morphine.”

These super drugs can cause multiple problems, including schizophrenia and autism. But they also cause addictive eating behavior, including cravings and bingeing. No one binges on broccoli, but they binge on cookies or cake. Even more alarming is the fact that you can block these food cravings and addictive eating behaviors and reduce calorie intake by giving the same drug we use in the emergency room to block heroin or morphine in an overdose, called naloxone. Binge eaters ate nearly 30 percent less food when given this drug.

Bottom line: wheat is an addictive appetite stimulant.

How to Beat the Wheat, and Lose the Weight

First, you should get tested to see if you have a more serious wheat or gluten problem.

If you meet any of these criteria, then you should do a six-week 100 percent gluten-free diet trial to see how you feel. If you have three out of five criteria, you should be gluten-free for life.

  1. You have symptoms of celiac (any digestive, allergic, autoimmune or inflammatory disease, including diabesity).
  2. You get better on a gluten-free diet.
  3. You have elevated antibodies to gluten (anti-gliadin, AGA, or tissue transglutaminase antibodies, TTG).
  4. You have a positive small intestinal biopsy.
  5. You have the genes that predispose you to gluten (HLA DQ2/8).

Second, for the rest of you who don’t have gluten antibodies or some variety of celiac — the super starch and the super drug, both of which make you fat and sick, can still affect you. So go cold turkey for six weeks. And keep a journal of how you feel.

The problems with wheat are real, scientifically validated and ever-present. Getting off wheat may not only make you feel better and lose weight, it could save your life.

My personal hope is that together we can create a national conversation about a real, practical solution for the prevention, treatment, and reversal of our obesity, diabetes and chronic disease epidemic. Getting off wheat may just be an important step.

To learn more and to get a free sneak preview of The Blood Sugar Solution where I explain exactly how to avoid wheat and what to eat instead go to www.drhyman.com.

Please leave your thoughts by adding a comment below.

To your good health,

Mark Hyman, MD

References:

[1] Saja K, Chatterjee U, Chatterjee BP, Sudhakaran PR. “Activation dependent expression of MMPs in peripheral blood mononuclear cells involves protein kinase.” A. Mol Cell Biochem. 2007 Feb;296(1-2):185-92

[2] Dalla Pellegrina C, Perbellini O, Scupoli MT, Tomelleri C, Zanetti C, Zoccatelli G, Fusi M, Peruffo A, Rizzi C, Chignola R. “Effects of wheat germ agglutinin on human gastrointestinal epithelium: insights from an experimental model of immune/epithelial cell interaction.” Toxicol Appl Pharmacol. 2009 Jun 1;237(2):146-53.

[3] Rubio-Tapia A, Kyle RA, Kaplan EL, Johnson DR, Page W, Erdtmann F, Brantner TL, Kim WR, Phelps TK, Lahr BD, Zinsmeister AR, Melton LJ 3rd, Murray JA. “Increased prevalence and mortality in undiagnosed celiac disease.” Gastroenterology. 2009 Jul;137(1):88-93

[4] Ludvigsson JF, Montgomery SM, Ekbom A, Brandt L, Granath F. “Small-intestinal histopathology and mortality risk in celiac disease.” JAMA. 2009 Sep 16;302(11):1171-8.

[5] Fasano A. “Physiological, pathological, and therapeutic implications of zonulin-mediated intestinal barrier modulation: living life on the edge of the wall.” Am J Pathol. 2008 Nov;173(5):1243-52.

Mark Hyman, M.D. is a practicing physician, founder of The UltraWellness Center, a four-time New York Times bestselling author, and an international leader in the field of Functional Medicine. You can follow him on Twitter, connect with him on LinkedIn, watch his videos on YouTube, become a fan on Facebook, and subscribe to his newsletter.

For more by Mark Hyman, M.D., click here.

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A Wall Street Man Owns Up to His Wealth Addiction

Posted on January 19, 2014 by MZR

By SAM POLK 

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

Eight years earlier, I’d walked onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston to begin my summer internship. I already knew I wanted to be rich, but when I started out I had a different idea about what wealth meant. I’d come to Wall Street after reading in the book “Liar’s Poker” how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000 bonus after just two years of work on a trading floor. That seemed like a fortune. Every January and February, I think about that time, because these are the months when bonuses are decided and distributed, when fortunes are made.

I’d learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I make a million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold kitchen cabinets. And not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.

Dad believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so did I. When I walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to be — rich.

IT was a miracle I’d made it to Wall Street at all. While I was competitive and ambitious — a wrestler at Columbia University — I was also a daily drinker and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and ecstasy. I had a propensity for self-destruction that had resulted in my getting suspended from Columbia for burglary, arrested twice and fired from an Internet company for fistfighting. I learned about rage from my dad, too. I can still see his red, contorted face as he charged toward me. I’d lied my way into the C.S.F.B. internship by omitting my transgressions from my résumé and was determined not to blow what seemed a final chance. The only thing as important to me as that internship was my girlfriend, a starter on the Columbia volleyball team. But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I’d sometimes end up with other women.

Three weeks into my internship she wisely dumped me. I don’t like who you’ve become, she said. I couldn’t blame her, but I was so devastated that I couldn’t get out of bed. In desperation, I called a counselor whom I had reluctantly seen a few times before and asked for help.

She helped me see that I was using alcohol and drugs to blunt the powerlessness I felt as a kid and suggested I give them up. That began some of the hardest months of my life. Without the alcohol and drugs in my system, I felt like my chest had been cracked open, exposing my heart to air. The counselor said that my abuse of drugs and alcohol was a symptom of an underlying problem — a “spiritual malady,” she called it. C.S.F.B. didn’t offer me a full-time job, and I returned, distraught, to Columbia for senior year.

After graduation, I got a job at Bank of America, by the grace of a managing director willing to take a chance on a kid who had called him every day for three weeks. With a year of sobriety under my belt, I was sharp, cleareyed and hard-working. At the end of my first year I was thrilled to receive a $40,000 bonus. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to check my balance before I withdrew money. But a week later, a trader who was only four years my senior got hired away by C.S.F.B. for $900,000. After my initial envious shock — his haul was 22 times the size of my bonus — I grew excited at how much money was available.

Over the next few years I worked like a maniac and began to move up the Wall Street ladder. I became a bond and credit default swap trader, one of the more lucrative roles in the business. Just four years after I started at Bank of America, Citibank offered me a “1.75 by 2” which means $1.75 million per year for two years, and I used it to get a promotion. I started dating a pretty blonde and rented a loft apartment on Bond Street for $6,000 a month.

I felt so important. At 25, I could go to any restaurant in Manhattan — Per Se, Le Bernardin — just by picking up the phone and calling one of my brokers, who ingratiate themselves to traders by entertaining with unlimited expense accounts. I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game just by hinting to a broker I might be interested in going. The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.

Still, I was nagged by envy. On a trading desk everyone sits together, from interns to managing directors. When the guy next to you makes $10 million, $1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet. Nonetheless, I was thrilled with my progress.

My counselor didn’t share my elation. She said I might be using money the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol — to make myself feel powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating more and instead focus on healing my inner wound. “Inner wound”? I thought that was going a little far and went to work for a hedge fund.

Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant fireball of greed. I’d think about how my colleagues could buy Micronesia if they wanted to, or become mayor of New York City. They didn’t just have money; they had power — power beyond getting a table at Le Bernardin. Senators came to their offices. They were royalty.

I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid “only” $1.5 million.

But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.

From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

DESPITE my realizations, it was incredibly difficult to leave. I was terrified of running out of money and of forgoing future bonuses. More than anything, I was afraid that five or 10 years down the road, I’d feel like an idiot for walking away from my one chance to be really important. What made it harder was that people thought I was crazy for thinking about leaving. In 2010, in a final paroxysm of my withering addiction, I demanded $8 million instead of $3.6 million. My bosses said they’d raise my bonus if I agreed to stay several more years. Instead, I walked away.

The first year was really hard. I went through what I can only describe as withdrawal — waking up at nights panicked about running out of money, scouring the headlines to see which of my old co-workers had gotten promoted. Over time it got easier — I started to realize that I had enough money, and if I needed to make more, I could. But my wealth addiction still hasn’t gone completely away. Sometimes I still buy lottery tickets.

In the three years since I left, I’ve married, spoken in jails and juvenile detention centers about getting sober, taught a writing class to girls in the foster system, and started a nonprofit called Groceryships to help poor families struggling with obesity and food addiction. I am much happier. I feel as if I’m making a real contribution. And as time passes, the distortion lessens. I see Wall Street’s mantra — “We’re smarter and work harder than everyone else, so we deserve all this money” — for what it is: the rationalization of addicts. From a distance I can see what I couldn’t see then — that Wall Street is a toxic culture that encourages the grandiosity of people who are desperately trying to feel powerful.

I was lucky. My experience with drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction. The years of work I did with my counselor helped me heal the parts of myself that felt damaged and inadequate, so that I had enough of a core sense of self to walk away.

Dozens of different types of 12-step support groups — including Clutterers Anonymous and On-Line Gamers Anonymous — exist to help addicts of various types, yet there is no Wealth Addicts Anonymous. Why not? Because our culture supports and even lauds the addiction. Look at the magazine covers in any newsstand, plastered with the faces of celebrities and C.E.O.’s; the superrich are our cultural gods. I hope we all confront our part in enabling wealth addicts to exert so much influence over our country.

I generally think that if one is rich and believes they have “enough,” they are not a wealth addict. On Wall Street, in my experience, that sense of “enough” is rare. The money guy doing a job he complains about for yet another year so he can add $2 million to his $20 million bank account seems like an addict.

I recently got an email from a hedge-fund trader who said that though he was making millions every year, he felt trapped and empty, but couldn’t summon the courage to leave. I believe there are others out there. Maybe we can form a group and confront our addiction together. And if you identify with what I’ve written, but are reticent to leave, then take a small step in the right direction. Let’s create a fund, where everyone agrees to put, say, 25 percent of their annual bonuses into it, and we’ll use that to help some of the people who actually need the money that we’ve been so rabidly chasing. Together, maybe we can make a real contribution to the world.

Sam Polk is a former hedge-fund trader and the founder of the nonprofit Groceryships.

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One-Handed Basketball Player Gets a Shot With Florida By MIKE TIERNEY

Posted on December 21, 2013 by MZR

By MIKE TIERNEY  Dec 21, 2013

MILTON, Ga. — A referee’s whistle halted play during a recent game at Milton High, a school situated among horse farms in an affluent area north of Atlanta. A foul had been called, leaving the culprit’s coach mystified.

“What did he do?” asked Milton Coach Matt Kramer.

Zach Hodskins, a senior guard, was hand-checking with both hands, the official explained.

“Hey,” Hodskins said, “I don’t even have two hands.”

Born without a left hand and forearm, Hodskins was thought to have a better chance to become president of the United States, as a relative imagined when he was an infant, than to play basketball for a college powerhouse. Yet Florida, which won back-to-back national titles in the past decade and reached the N.C.A.A. tournament’s Round of 8 the past three years, recently guaranteed him a roster spot for next season by designating him a preferred walk-on.

After people watch Hodskins sink 3-point shots, lunge for loose balls and unleash his unusual brand of play, what they notice almost as much as his missing hand is the chip on his shoulder. He has converted years of slights, perceived and real, into a continual source of energy that compels him to set lofty goals.

At nearly 6 feet 4 inches, Hodskins is a strong passer with extraordinary range. “He doesn’t have 3-point range; it’s in-the-gym range,” Kramer said. “Cross halfcourt, he’s in range after a dribble or two.”

Hodskins, who averaged 11 points a game last season and is averaging 6 points and 2.3 assists per game this season, would be assured significant playing time, perhaps even a starting role, at a lower-level college. But his nature made him accept the Gators.

“Zach wants the biggest challenge,” his father, Bob, said. “He has such an extreme desire to prove himself at the highest level he can.”

Bob and Stephanie Hodskins did not know that Zach would be born without half a limb. Early on, they pledged to rear him as they did his two older sisters — not that he would have tolerated any coddling.

“If you ever tried to help him up,” Bob Hodskins said, “he wouldn’t have wanted that.”

A daredevil from the beginning, Zach would climb out of his crib with a loud thud, alarming his parents.

Since then, he has dabbled in various sports, from skimboarding to triathlon.

Stephanie Hodskins yielded to one assumed limitation and bought Zach slip-on shoes to spare him laces. Yet he gravitated to shoes with laces, tying them at school as a sort of performance art on request.

When Hodskins locked in on basketball, his footwear of choice became high-top sneakers. He never hid an ambition to play in college, saying recently, “I never doubted myself, even though a lot of people did.” To them, he said, “Just watch.”

For every pickup-game captain who did not choose him and every Amateur Athletic Union program that did not invite him, Hodskins stockpiled motivation.

Concern that he was pushing himself too hard tempered his parents’ pride. Bob Hodskins would tape the calloused fingers on Zach’s right hand when they bled from marathon solo workouts.

“Dial it back,” his father would tell him. “You don’t have to prove yourself every day.”

Zach would hear none of it. “I love my competitiveness,” he said. “It got me to where I am today.”

In middle school, he went out for cross-country, primarily as conditioning for basketball. He promptly placed second in a meet that left him so exhausted his parents feared for his health. Zach’s explanation: “Allowing anyone to beat me was unacceptable.”

His parents removed him from the team. “We tried to tell him, ‘You can’t be perfect,’ ” Bob Hodskins said. “He expects to be so.”

The family found two A.A.U. coaches who helped Hodskins develop a repertory of moves, like a crossover dribble between the legs, to minimize the effect of his disability. Fine-tuning took place at gyms, playgrounds and, most often, the Hodskinses’ driveway. The continual thumping of the ball planted a nagging question: Would the investment pay off?

Zach’s parents never imagined how much it would. A year ago, a scouting service posted a one-minute clip of Hodskins’s highlights on YouTube that has nearly four million views.

Partly to ensure exposure to colleges, the family relocated from South Carolina last year so he could attend Milton, which had drawn scrutiny for the number of scholarship players it had. Just weeks after Hodskins enrolled, the team was barred from the postseason, and the coach was forced to resign after school authorities reported suspicions to the state athletics body that he was exerting “undue influence” on eventual transfers to Milton.

Hodskins will not receive a scholarship to Florida. But his parents were delighted by the message conveyed by Gators Coach Billy Donovan amid speculation on social media that the team’s offer bordered on a publicity stunt.

Bob Hodskins said Donovan had told the family: “We’re first and foremost recruiting you as a player. You are an inspiration, but you are here because you’re a good basketball player.”

(Florida, in accordance with N.C.A.A. rules, is not permitted to comment on walk-ons before they enroll because they have not signed with the team.)

Hodskins has not wavered from his oral commitment, though a call from the coach of a top program in Hodskins’s home state, Kentucky, might have given him pause.

Hodskins was celebrating his choice of Florida with schoolmates one night when his cellphone rang. It was Kentucky Coach John Calipari, who offered congratulations but not a uniform. Calipari also left a message with Hodskins’s father, who initially assumed it was a hoax.

Donovan did not specifically discuss Hodskins’s playing time, but the prevailing thought expressed by Bob Hodskins and Milton’s coach, Kramer, is, “I wouldn’t bet against it.”

Kramer added, “But if all he ever is is a really good practice player, he’ll be good for their program.”

Another endorsement came from Kevin Laue, the most recent, and perhaps only, significant N.C.A.A. Division I player with one hand.

“It’s really impressive what he can do on the court,” said the 6-foot-11 Laue, who graduated last year from Manhattan College and is the subject of a documentary, “Long Shot: The Kevin Laue Story,” which has aired in New York.

“It’s amazing to see what somebody went through, what I went through, to be on that platform,” Laue said, referring to a high-profile college opportunity.

Laue said his primary frustration was coaches who were not sure how to deal with a player without a limb and would set limits. As Kramer drove from Ohio to his new job at Milton this summer, he wrestled with how to coach Hodskins.

“I couldn’t visualize that situation fitting into a program that competes on a national level,” he said of Hodskins.

As the moving van was being unloaded at Kramer’s house, Milton players came by to help, none sooner than Hodskins.

“He wanted to be here first to make sure I would take him seriously,” Kramer said. “There was none of that ‘Treat me differently.’ ”

Kramer soon had his coaching template, with Hodskins as just one of the guys, doing push-ups and lifting weights on top of all his basketball tasks.

“He’s just a mean, nasty competitor — in a healthy way,” Kramer said.

The chip on his shoulder becomes evident when an opposing coach shouts, “Make him go left,” an order that once offended Hodskins’s mother.

Zach welcomed those words.

“I tell them, ‘Keep forcing me left.’ I get more separation when they do that,” he said.

Only once has he taken offense at an opponent’s words. An A.A.U. adversary whom Hodskins was outplaying shoved him and called him a profane name, preceded by “one-handed.”

Hodskins was stung, though not by the adjective, having come to terms with his disability so long ago that he jokes about it, as he did with the referee’s remark on his hand-checking.

Young people with disabilities, or their parents, have contacted Hodskins for advice and requests to meet, sometimes to shoot around.

“I welcome it, more than playing basketball,” he said. “Through basketball, I can reach out to those people. It’s a very humbling experience.”

It is upsetting, too, when he notices young people trying to disguise a disability with bulky clothing or cropped photos on their social media pages.

“I’ve never had that problem,” Hodskins said. “These kids need to be themselves, not hide it all their lives.”

As he proved to those who doubted him: “They never knew I’d get to this point. They didn’t know me.”

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The Appalling Stance of Rand Paul

Posted on December 12, 2013 by MZR

By

I don’t put much past politicians. I stay prepared for the worst. But occasionally someone says something so insensitive that it catches me flat-footed.

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said Sunday on Fox News: “I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they’re paid for. If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers.”

This statement strikes at the heart — were a heart to exist — of the divide between conservatives and liberals about whether the social safety net provides temporary help for those who hit hard times or functions as a kind of glue to keep them stuck there.

Whereas I am sure that some people will abuse any form of help, I’m by no means convinced that this is the exclusive domain of the poor and put-upon. Businesses and the wealthy regularly take advantage of subsidies and tax loopholes without blinking an eye. But somehow, when some poor people, or those who unexpectedly fall on hard times, take advantage of benefits for which they are eligible it’s an indictment of the morality and character of the poor as a whole.

The poor are easy to pick on. They are the great boogeymen and women, dragging us down, costing us money, gobbling up resources. That seems to be the conservative sentiment.

We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the charge.

They paint the poor as takers, work averse, in need of motivation and incentive.

Well, that is simply not my experience with poverty. I have been poor, and both my parents worked. I grew up among poor people, and almost all of them worked. The problem wasn’t lack of effort, but low pay. Folks simply couldn’t make enough to shake the specter of need.

In fact, the poor folks I knew growing up were some of the hardest working people I have ever known — rising before dawn to pack lunches and sip coffee, trying to get the mind right for a day of toil and sweat that breaks the body but not the spirit.

They were people who wanted what most folks want — to earn an honest wage for an honest day’s work; to live a happy, meaningful life that leaves a mark on the world when they are gone from it; to raise bright, healthy children who go further in life than they did; to be surrounded by family and friends and neighbors — a village — where people support and cared for one another.

That is why I have such a hard time with the conservative argument that helping those in need diminishes their desire to do for themselves, that it suckles them to passivity on a government teat. Hogwash.

To buy into this destructive lie about the character of the poor means you’ve either had no experience being poor, or have no capacity to empathize with their plight.

Being poor is a job unto itself. The daily juggle of supplying the most basic needs — food, shelter, medicine — and the stress of knowing that you are always just one twist of fate away from calamity.

James Baldwin put it best: “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”

Most people want to work. But sometimes, bad luck comes calling. Sometimes you have a job, but you lose it. Sometimes, no matter how hard you try, a new one proves elusive.

And following the Great Recession, that is a particular problem. Maybe you are older and employers are less willing to take a chance. Maybe your industry is shrinking and becoming more efficient, getting by with fewer employees. Maybe the jobs you can find are farther from your house than you can travel and you can’t afford to move. The problems are plenty.

But what we shouldn’t do is to tell people who had jobs and lost them, people who want work and can’t find it, that to help them does them a “disservice.”

That is the height of arrogance and callousness. And it’s disrespectful.

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Thinking for the Future

Posted on December 10, 2013 by MZR

By

We’re living in an era of mechanized intelligence, an age in which you’re probably going to find yourself in a workplace with diagnostic systems, different algorithms and computer-driven data analysis. If you want to thrive in this era, you probably want to be good at working with intelligent machines. As Tyler Cowen puts it in his relentlessly provocative recent book, “Average Is Over,” “If you and your skills are a complement to the computer, your wage and labor market prospects are likely to be cheery. If your skills do not complement the computer, you may want to address that mismatch.”

So our challenge for the day is to think of exactly which mental abilities complement mechanized intelligence. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few mental types that will probably thrive in the years ahead.

Freestylers. As Cowen notes, there’s a style of chess in which people don’t play against the computer but with the computer. They let the computer program make most of the moves, but, occasionally, they overrule it. They understand the strengths and weaknesses of the program and the strengths and weaknesses of their own intuition, and, ideally, they grab the best of both.

This skill requires humility (most of the time) and self-confidence (rarely). It’s the kind of skill you use to overrule your GPS system when you’re driving in a familiar neighborhood but defer to it in strange surroundings. It is the sort of skill a doctor uses when deferring to or overruling a diagnostic test. It’s the skill of knowing when an individual case is following predictable patterns and when there are signs it is diverging from them.

Synthesizers. The computerized world presents us with a surplus of information. The synthesizer has the capacity to surf through vast amounts of online data and crystallize a generalized pattern or story.

Humanizers. People evolved to relate to people. Humanizers take the interplay between man and machine and make it feel more natural. Steve Jobs did this by making each Apple product feel like nontechnological artifact. Someday a genius is going to take customer service phone trees and make them more human. Someday a retail genius is going to figure out where customers probably want automated checkout (the drugstore) and where they want the longer human interaction (the grocery store).

Conceptual engineers. Google presents prospective employees with challenges like the following: How many times in a day do a clock’s hands overlap? Or: Figure out the highest floor of a 100-story building you can drop an egg from without it breaking. How many drops do you need to figure this out? You can break two eggs in the process.

They are looking for the ability to come up with creative methods to think about unexpected problems.

Motivators. Millions of people begin online courses, but very few actually finish them. I suspect that’s because most students are not motivated to impress a computer the way they may be motivated to impress a human professor. Managers who can motivate supreme effort in a machine-dominated environment are going to be valuable.

Moralizers. Mechanical intelligence wants to be efficient. It will occasionally undervalue essential moral traits, like loyalty. Soon, performance metrics will increasingly score individual employees. A moralizing manager will insist that human beings can’t be reduced to the statistical line. A company without a self-conscious moralizer will reduce human interaction to the cash nexus and end up destroying morale and social capital.

Greeters. An economy that is based on mechanized intelligence is likely to be a wildly unequal economy, even if the government tries to combat that inequality. Cowen estimates that perhaps 15 percent of workers will thrive, with plenty of disposable income. There will be intense competition for these people’s attention. They will favor restaurants, hotels, law firms, foundations and financial institutions where they are greeted by someone who knows their name. People with this capacity for high-end service, and flattery, will find work.

Economizers. The bottom 85 percent is likely to be made up of people with less marketable workplace skills. Some of these people may struggle financially but not socially or intellectually. That is, they may not make much running a food truck, but they can lead rich lives, using the free bounty of the Internet. They could use a class of advisers on how to preserve rich lives on a small income.

Weavers. Many of the people who struggle economically will lack the self-motivation to build rich inner lives for themselves. Many are already dropping out of the labor force in record numbers and drifting into disorganized, disaffected lifestyles. Public and private institutions are going to hire more people to fight this social disintegration. There will be jobs for people who combat the dangerous inegalitarian tendencies of this new world.

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Giving Thanks

Posted on November 28, 2013 by MZR

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Tuesday morning, I got a call about a girl — now a woman — whom I had gone to grade school with. She was gravely ill. Cancer. It had spread to her brain, I was told. From where, it wasn’t clear. She was on life support. By early afternoon her childhood friend and next-door neighbor had posted on Facebook:

“This isn’t good bye, it’s just see u later. God saw ur suffering n decided u should suffer no more.”

The woman with the cancer was dead. She was 45.

The news snapped the holiday cheer out of me. I realized that I, like so many, get so caught up in the torrent of dinners and parties and sales and gifts this time of year that I sometimes forget how truly ephemeral and precious life is, that life itself is the gift.

And I forget how truly blessed I have been by whatever gods there may be. It doesn’t mean that there haven’t been troubles and trials. There have. But I have had it in me to overcome. And for the mere fact of having enough and to all the people in my life who have informed my character and given me courage, I need to give a measure of thanks. So, here goes:

I’m thankful for the basic things, like food and shelter and warmth when it is cold and medicine when I am sick. I grew up staring poverty squarely in the face, but I fear that far too many have no familiarity — or even empathy — with what it means to be poor in this country, or in any country.

Poverty is a diabolical predicament that not only makes scarce one’s physical comforts, but drains away one’s spiritual strength. It damages hopes and dreams, and having deficits among those things is when the soul begins to die.

I am thankful for a loving mother who hasn’t always gotten things right, but who taught me how to grow in grace and learn from getting things wrong. She taught me what it means to live selflessly and without pride, and to find joy in giving joy.

I’m thankful for the folks at whose knees I spent my preschool days being imbued with wisdom long before I knew what wisdom was — gnarled hands moving gracefully through the air the way a fish’s fins move through water, gently touching my shoulder or grabbing my hands and steering me clear of danger.

I’m thankful for the teachers who saw me when I felt invisible, who reached through my sorrow and my sadness and, in that darkness, lit a fire in me. These are teachers who to this day encourage me like family more than faculty.

They are teachers like Mrs. Dawson, who calls me after every one of my television appearances, and says, “Hello baby, this is your grandma.” She continues with some version of: “We saw you. We were looking right at you. Everyone in town is proud of you. We love you.”

They are teachers like Mrs. Thomas — now down in health, but still up in spirit — whom I called last month. She remembered my first weeks in her fourth grade class after I’d changed schools: “You hardly let go of my skirt hem.” I didn’t recall that, and I asked her how she could. She responded without skipping a beat, “Charles, you never forget your babies.”

I’m thankful for these teachers who refuse to release me, who continue to inculcate me with love and encouragement, teachers whom I will spend the whole of my life attempting to honor.

I’m thankful for my three beautiful children who amaze me daily with their development into smart, honest, loving people, and who remain my reason for rising when I ache and pushing forward when I would otherwise stop.

I’m thankful for great friends and the love of family, the deepest bonds of earthly connection, who provide the greatest defense when the storms of life rage and the walls of the self are buffeted.

I’m thankful for the spirit and resilience and fortitude of this country’s unbreakable slaves of the not-too-distant past, whose blood courses through my veins, whose dreams I live, whose lives I honor.

I am thankful that my work is my passion, and that what I do for pay I would probably do for free.

And, I am thankful for all of you, the regular readers of my columns — and the new ones as well — who affirm me, and challenge me, and chastise me. In the end, you make my voice clearer and my resolve stronger.

Thank you all.

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