bearing blog

"My Life as a Prison Wife."

Fascinating.  Inspiring.  Perspective-producing.  This short guest piece by Nicki Stapleton on the "Dear Wendy" advice column is worth a read.

We got married on April 4th and just over a month later, on May 13th, my husband was arrested for armed robbery of two pharmacies. He didn’t take any money — just pills (and he didn’t actually have a weapon). I knew that he had a prescription drug problem but had been clean for over three years (he got clean about six months before we started dating) and I thought he was still clean. I was livid that he broke the law. I was livid that he didn’t come to me for help, but he said he was worried I would leave him because three things I don’t tolerate are abuse, cheating, and drugs.

I was a criminal justice professional (I lost my job because of my husband’s arrest and conviction) and have a Master’s degree in criminal behavior. In four years of working with offenders, I have seen relationships survive prison but I have seen many more fall apart. If I had known that he was going to be arrested a month after our wedding (or at any point), I wouldn’t have married him. I love him, but love isn’t always enough. Less than nine months after he was arrested, and eleven months after we were married, my husband was sentenced to prison….

The main question I get all of the time is “How do you remain faithful?” I used to take offense to this question, but I realize people are just curious. The answer is simple for me: I meant my vows. 

Read the whole thing.

An interesting clarification about her job loss from the comments:  

I worked in a halfway house for sex offenders and had worked there for over 4 years. After he was convicted, I filed a fraternization exemption request (one of our policies was no one was allowed to be in a relationship with/live with/be involved with anyone who was under the supervision of the Department of Corrections) and they basically told me that they refuse to make any exception to the rule and told me either I had to not live with or speak to my husband or I had to leave. Thankfully I was already working elsewhere full time and was only working there on weekends.

The rest of the comments are worth reading too.  I wish her and her husband well.

The cost of shouting.

You know, I had a sort of "McQueary moment" a few years ago, when I was driving.  I witnessed what I assume was an episode of extremely dangerous domestic violence.  

I, instinctively, yelled out the window of my car.  

If I had been thinking instead of reacting instinctively, if I had intellectually known or even reasonably predicted what was going to happen next, maybe I wouldn't have gotten involved.  The immediate aftermath was to put myself and my three children (and an unknown number of nearby pedestrians) in serious danger.  Thankfully -- briefly.

 I told the story in a blog post later that day.  I can remember my fingers shaking as I typed.  I can remember peeping out the window for a few weeks afterward, senselessly afraid that somehow the danger would follow me home.

I can imagine the scenario, post-shout unfolding in a few different ways, none of which was "safe" for me or for my kids.

But I keep thinking now about the instinct to yell.  It was immediate and involved no thought.  I saw violence -- someone endangering someone else.   

I shouted.  

I had my own young children with me.  I had reason to have physical fear for all our own safety.

And I still shouted.

"F*ck cancer. Seriously."

Powerful comic at xkcd today.

Occasionally Randall produces novel, visually interesting, crisply communicative graphical displays of information in the webcomic medium.  Today's was sobering.

 

Internet safety lesson.

So, you'll recall that I have been teaching history and Latin to two families besides my own, right?  

I wrapped up my three-year American history program (more on that again later) with a few weeks' study of mass communication in the twentieth century, and finished that off with a discussion of social media and email.  

Why did I put this in the context of history class?  Well, for starters, for our family anyway, the timing is just about right.  My ten-year-old is ready to have his own email address and to be a little bit freer to use and find things on the Web -- and you know, before you send them out in the world you have to have "the talk," right?

It's also something that is very different for these young people than it was for us.  I didn't have to rely very much on books here, because Hannah and I could be the primary sources.  We sat down and told them what it was like to read and contribute to Usenet groups, or to look for information using Gopher, or how hard it was to filter out the irrelevant junk before Google revolutionized the search engine.  

Anyway, I ran the "Internet safety" lesson as a sort of discussion group.  I thought I'd provide the outline here.

+ + +

Part I:  The part that fits neatly into an American History context

A.  Definition of social media:  "Places" on the internet where people can virtually meet and communicate with each other.

B.   How do people communicate using social media?  

     1) By sending files to each other 

            --files can be messages (long or short), documents, photographs, audio files, video files

      2) Or by storing such files where they can be accessed by others

      3)  Or by playing games with each other which they access through various websites

      4)  Or by real-time chat or videoconference

 

C.  Imagine a metaphor of a big room with lots of bulletin boards where messages may be left behind for all to see.  I used this to emphasize the lack of real privacy.

D.   Discussion question:  How does the advent of easy, cheap social media change American culture?

     (Looking for concepts like:  people can make friends they've never met in person; people can form associations based on common interest regardless of geographical location; more international interaction; people may be more connected to "strangers" than to their own families; changes family culture; people can get addicted to being on line; business models change; people expect to connect to the internet everywhere so free time changes; advertisers have new ways to reach people; it's much easier to find information; etc.)

Extension:   Watch the 90-minute PBS documentary Frontline: Digital Nation (available streaming through Netflix or here for free).

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Part II.  New risks to be aware of because of social media.

Kinds of risks, ranked from the most dangerous to the most benign (in my opinion).

1)  The risk of being physically harmed  in "real life."  Someone who wants to harm you for fun -- an online predator -- might try to use the computer to find kids like you, to trick you into telling him where you can be found, or to trick you into meeting him in person.

Discussion questions: 

• What kind of information can be used to find out that you are a young boy or a young lady -- the sort of person the predator wants to harm?
• What kind of information can be used to find out where you are and when your parents won't be supervising you?
• What kind of lies could a predator tell to trick a young person into revealing where she could be found?
• What are some danger signs of online predators?

 

(2) Harming you non-physically via computer communication.  Another kind of online predator might try to harm you, for fun, even without actually meeting you in person. A person can do this by sending you harmful messages or videos, or just putting it where you'll see it.  

• What kind of messages, pictures, or videos can harm you if you read, see, possess, or watch them?  
  •  lies; 
  • cruel speech about yourself or others; 
  • obscene material; 
  • material that encourages you to do things that are wrong or illegal; 
  • material that is illegal to possess, like sexually explicit pictures of minors; 
  • frightening or disturbing material

• What are ways that you can avoid receiving harmful files?
• What can you do if you realize that a message, chat, picture, or video is dangerous?

 

(2a) Some things may be harmful to you even though the person who made them available did not intend to hurt anyone.  What kinds of things are these?  (material that's meant for adults but not appropriate for children; incorrect facts)

 

(3)  Stealing your identity or your parents' identity. If a thief can successfully pretend to be me, she could gain access to a lot of my stuff.  What kinds of things could such a person gain access to?

• money in my bank account
• charge things to my credit card
• use my membership to get into organizations I belong to

Could such a person also break the law and get me in trouble for it? (yes)

Could they borrow money and then I would have to pay it back? (yes)

Could they send nasty messages that look like they came from me and then I might get in trouble or lose my reputation? (yes)

Discuss:  What kind of information can be used to steal your identity or your parents' identity?

 

(4)  Spreading things that you wanted to keep secret or private.  Suppose you had a secret that you wanted to share with one close friend and nobody else.  You told the secret to your friend and made her swear that she would never tell anyone.  But suppose that this friend wasn't as trustworthy as you thought she was.  She told your secret to one other person.  And then that friend told another person.  And before you know it, everyone you know knows your secret.  How would you feel?  Could some secrets even put you or your family in danger?

There is nothing new about this.  Secrets have gotten out for as long as people have been keeping secrets from each other.  But secrets that are passed around by computer can be a problem  in a new and particularly dangerous way.  Do you know why? 

• you might accidentally reveal the secret to many people instead of one; 
• they can be passed very fast to many people at once all over the world; 
• exact copies can be made of them, even if the "secret" is a photograph or a video; 
• they can be altered to make them look or sound even more embarrassing or incriminating than they really are; 
• copies may be stored on other people's computers for a very long time and so the secret may come out when you least expect it

Discussion question:  How can you protect yourself against online spreading of secrets or secret pictures or secret videos?  

• don't send secrets by email or in any other electronic form; 
• tell secrets only in person; 
• assume that any message you send over the internet can be read by anyone

(5)  Harming your computer.    Computer viruses can infect your computer.   Any file that you download from the internet may contain a virus or a piece of malware.  How can you protect your parents' computer against unwanted programs?   

(6) Selling you stuff you don't want.  There are many advertisements on websites.  You need to be cautious about the things that advertisements on the internet say, just as you need to be cautious about claims made on TV.   Some of it is there to trick you into spending your money.

(7) Gathering information about you so they can figure out what stuff to try to sell you.  You know that when you type words and numbers into a form on a website, or when you send an email, some information leaves your computer and goes out into the world where someone can get it.  On many websites, information can be gathered just from a mouse-click. Some companies gather information about what you like to read or look at, and they use this information to send you advertisements that they think you will respond to.  

 

General Discussion and Assessment: 

What risks are there in each of these places?  What precautions should you take?

• Chat room
• Online gaming
• Social media like Facebook where you reveal information to a group of people you select
• Social media like Twitter where your information is revealed to anyone who wants to see it
• Photo sharing site like Flickr 
• Browsing for interesting videos on YouTube
• Searching for information for a school report
• Shopping at a large secure online store, like Amazon.com
• Online auctions, like eBay
• Buying items from a local bulletin board, like Craigslist
• Email messages 
• Writing a blog
• Online discussion groups for fans of a TV show

Justice for Henry.

Katie Allison Granju is finally going public.  Last year her teenage son Henry was severely and permanently disabled from complications after an assault and a drug overdose.  He later died from his injuries.  Katie has maintained that, contrary to Tennessee law, the local authorities have refused to thoroughly investigate her son's death as a homicide, and believes that because he suffered from drug addiction, the authorities simply did not care about pursuing the people whose criminal actions or inactions may have helped kill him.

Katie has been writing about her grief and at the same time, carefully, about her interactions with the investigation.  She has not shared details until now.

Here is an excerpt from her introductory post:

Over the coming week, I will for the first time be sharing here on my blog every single specific detail of what happened to my teenage son, as well as all the information regarding how authorities have handled the case thus far.

I have waited nine long months for Knox County [TN] authorities to do the right thing. Polite, well-behaved southerner that I am, I have continued to err on the side of discretion and silence over all these months, in hopes that by being “good,” things would be made right. But I am no longer willing to do that.

My son did not die of an “accidental” overdose, and the investigation into his death has been inept and callous. The people who killed Henry are still free, and unless they are arrested and prosecuted, I have no doubt that someone else’s child will die.

Here is the latest update, "Justice for Henry, Part 6" which contains links to the previous five installments.  You may judge for yourself, but I find her descriptions of the official communications from the prosecutors breathtakingly appalling.  

There's a lot of perspectives from which we can be outraged about Henry Granju's case.  I hesitate to write anything political about it, because what it has to mean above all is a terrible grief, for one real family of real people who are really hurting. 

So the only observation I wish to make is that it looks to me like a terrible reversal of what ought to be.   People suffering from drug addiction and trying to escape it are dismissed as useless trash, their deaths shrugged off as being only what they deserved.  Violent assailants who beat a young man up until he bleeds from the ears are ignored. 

Meanwhile, the public servants whose job it is to prosecute criminals -- dangerous ones in particular -- sneer at grieving parents in their official correspondence.  I don't think it's too much to ask government workers to pretend in their official capacity as if they have a shred of respect for the members of the public they ostensibly serve.

UPDATE:  the latest post is now "Part 8."  Please read.  I am beginning to understand why Katie has so urgently insisted that she believes other young people will be harmed if the local authorities don't investigate.

Shahbaz Bhatti, RIP.

The only Catholic member of the Pakistani Cabinet was assassinated today, probably because he supported freedom of speech in the face of those who wanted the death penalty for blasphemers.  The Taliban has claimed responsibility.

"Wakefield's article linking MMR vaccine and autism was fraudulent."

Wow. If the allegations referred to in this British Medical Journal editorial are true -- that scientist Andrew Wakefield, who was being paid by law firms who wanted to sue vaccine companies, deliberately manufactured data linking vaccines to autism  -- then Wakefield has blood on his hands.

Count me in among the mothers who (back in 2000 when my first child was born) chose to vaccinate on a delayed and modified schedule in part because of the doubts engendered by reports like Wakefield's 1998 paper in the respected British journal Lancet. 

It has been suggested for a long time that the preponderance of the evidence since Wakefield's report tended to refute the alleged vaccine-autism connection, and I had come  to believe that it was in error -- one of those common dead-end pathways in scientific research.  Eventually, the paper was even retracted, as does happen sometimes when there prove to be mistakes.   I no longer had a concern about vaccines and autism specifically.  I hadn't been following the story closely since then, and so I wasn't expecting a finding of fraud.

Full disclosure:  I'm still unhappy with vaccines that have a fetal-tissue connection.  I still prefer to give kids one vaccine at a time the first time they get one, so that the cause of any reaction can be known.   I'm supportive of religious- and philosophical-exemption laws.  And I am aware of the concerns about vaccine reactions of other kinds, and am understanding of the nervousness with which many parents approach them, as well as being generally sympathetic with a low-medical-intervention and individual- rather than population-focused medicine.  

But this?  Outright falsification of medical data that affected vaccination decisions (and possibly disease outbreaks) in several countries, as well as influencing the direction of autism research?  

I can't figure out whether I'm outraged more as a mother or as a scientist.

(Knowing me, probably as a scientist.)

Mainstream-type folks often like to characterize alternative-type folks as crackpots.  Homeschoolers know this.  Home-birth mamas know this.  Mothers who practice extended breastfeeding know this.  Consumers of alternative medicine of all kinds know this.  People who source some of their food outside the mainstream production/processing industry know this.  Hey, religious people know this.  It's annoying to see experts whose knowledgeable advice you rely on, referred to as crackpots, or evil.

It's even more annoying when some of the  "experts" DO turn out to be  crackpots, or evil, or both.

Chemistry blogger Derek Lowe weighs in:

The 1998 paper that linked MMR vaccination with autism has had a long way to fall. It made, of course, a huge media sensation, and energized the whole vaccination/autism controversy that still (in spite of evidence) goes on. But it didn't look very robust from the start, scientifically. And over the years it's gone from "Really needs shoring up" to "hasn't been reproduced" to "looks like there's something wrong with it" to "main conclusions retracted" to the final, lowest level: outright fraud.

Here's a good history of the whole affair in the BMJ. And here's the first part of a series of articles by Brian Deer, the journalist who dug into the study and found how fraudulent it really was. Not one of the 12 cases in Wakefield's original study hold up; the data were manipulated in every single one to make it fit his hypothesis. His hypothesis that he was getting grant money for. His hypothesis that he was already planning lawsuits around, before the study even started.

His hypothesis, I might add, that has led to completely unnecessary suffering among the unvaccinated children this scare has produced over the years, and has diverted enormous amounts of time, energy, and money away from useful study of autism. This sort of deliberate action is really hard to contemplate, as a reasonable human being - it's like some sort of massive campaign to persuade people to throw bricks through the windows of ambulances.

In a better world, we'd be getting expressions of sorrow and contrition from all the celebrities and others who've profited from this business. But that's not going to happen, is it?

Don't hold your breath.

Hazard handling: corn syrup alternatives edition.

Mark pointed something out to me this morning about high fructose corn syrup that I hadn't thought about.

I am what you might call a skeptic about HFCS.  

• Yes, its availability as a cheap sweetener probably increased its use in packaged foods over the last thirty years.  
• Yes, there's some dumb politics involving international tariffs and agricultural subsidies entangled with its production.  
• Yes, obesity rates are correlated with HFCS rates.  
• Yes, corn monoculture is an environmental problem and demand for HFCS is part of that.  
• Yes, I'd rather eat "real food" on principle and so when I have the option to buy, for example, cane-sugar-sweetened ketchup, I typically do.  

But I'm not strongly convinced that HFCS is really a root cause of the obesity epidemic, I am not strongly convinced that overconsumption of HFCS is significantly different from overconsumption of other sugars, and I don't treat the stuff as a special kind of poison.  I think the jury is still out on it (which is reason enough for many people to avoid it altogether; fine with me; that's how I feel about soy phytoestrogens, so I get it).

Of course, right now there is a sort of a trend for companies to market "HFCS-free" stuff -- I assume that consumers are getting warier of HFCS, and seeking "natural" sweeteners (like sucrose), otherwise I wouldn't be able to buy national brands of ketchup with "No High-Fructose Corn Syrup" splashed across the label in big letters.  I view it as a marketing phenomenon, mostly.

So, Mark was talking to an engineer who handles pneumatic transport of dry materials, and he commented that the switchover from HFCS-sweetened products to sucrose-sweetened products is hugely, hugely expensive from a capital standpoint because of safety precautions and associated regulations.   Thirty years ago when food packagers and processors decided to save money by switching from cane sugar to HFCS, the change would have been significant; but a lot has happened since then in safety regs, and surely it would be far more expensive now to switch back.

I hadn't even thought about that, but when Mark explained the conversation to me, I instantly knew what he meant. 

Automated liquid handling of sugar syrups is pretty tame.  You can hook your tanker truck up to a pipe and pump it right into a food plant.  The stuff can sit around in tanks and be delivered via ordinary food-grade piping, controlled by fairly ordinary food-grade valves.  An operator in a HFCS-handling facility isn't necessarily going to have to take extraordinary materials safety precautions when working among these pipes and valves.  Whatever the risk that HFCS poses to his endocrine system when he sits down in the employee cafeteria, at least the stuff doesn't explode.

Crystalline sucrose, on the other hand, has a much more colorful history.

When you handle dry sugar, you create aerosolized sugar dust as the crystals sliding past each other knock micron-sized corners and edges off each other.  Not such a big deal if you are a batch operation and your workers are slitting open bags and dumping them into a vat.  But if you have automated lines and the sugar is moving by means of, say, screw conveyors or conveyor belts or pneumatic systems -- as there were at the Imperial Sugar plant explosively profiled at the link -- there is the potential for quite a lot of sugar dust to enter the air.  Combustible, high-surface-area material + oxygenated air + equipment spark = kaboom.

So when you switch from HFCS to dry sugar, there are going to be layers of safety precautions that have to be installed to prevent your plant from blowing up, and to document that your plant is not likely to blow up.  All these things cost real money -- mostly capital money, since it goes into the buildings and the machines and the duct work, but also some ongoing regulatory and operating expenses. (I was  going to link to some of the relevant regulations, but can't figure out how to read it without paying $37.)

So:  It's not just the difference in cost-per-pound of corn syrup vs. sucrose.  Handling the stuff, and meeting regulatory requirements, have different costs too. 

And still, even with perfect compliance everywhere (as if!) there will be a nonzero risk every year, created by a switch from HFCS to sucrose, that some food plant somewhere will explode and kill an operator or even a bystander.  Unintended consequences are everywhere, if you only look.

I would guess that the medium-sized processors have the toughest row to hoe.  The giants can afford to absorb the costs of ensuring safety compliance.  The small producers are morelikely to be using batch operations and are handling sugar in bags, not pneumatic transport systems.  It's that "sweet spot" in the middle where it will be hard for processors to change over from HFCS to sucrose without going bankrupt or skirting anti-dust-explosion regulations.

Still, though, there's a silver lining in this for people who are eager to see the demise of HFCS.  If Big Food is spending the money to switch over the lines, and is touting "HFCS-free" product on supermarket shelves, then Big Food (some of it anyway) must see the writing on the wall, or at least in the focus group, and they are betting that consumers believe there's a significant difference between the two.   If you've been wondering why every food producer isn't doing the same, then maybe this is one piece of the puzzle. 

Prayers for LeeAnn and her family.

You may remember one of my commenters, LeeAnn, who blogs at Apostle to Suburbia.  I found out this morning that LeeAnn recently lost her husband David in a tragic accident.  She has posted an obituary on her blog here.  

Truly we do not know the day or the hour.  Please add your prayers to mine for her and her four children.

How do you make sure you'll never forget the baby?

Sobering post on hot-car deaths by Erin Manning.  

Every year as many as 40 children die this way. Most of the children are under the age of two, still buckled up in car seats, which have to be in the back seat and which sometimes, in the case of the youngest victims, are turned to face the back of the seat. Much of the time, the child was not left in the car purposefully (which is obviously a bad thing to do, even if the parent only intends to be away momentarily), but was overlooked somehow.

Many of the cases involve the kind of change in parental routine that's easy to understand. A father might not usually be the one who drops the baby off at the sitter's house or the day care--but today he is supposed to. A stay-at-home-mom always goes to the grocery store alone while Daddy watches the children--but today the eighteen-month-old asked to come along, then fell asleep in his car seat on the way there. Are all of these cases fatal? N0--and that's one reason why we can maintain the comfortable illusion that it only happens to one kind of parent: the bad kind. We never hear about the cases where mom and dad enter the house or the grocery store and realize five minutes later that the infant or toddler is missing.

The one thing that most parents don't want to accept is the one thing that could save children's lives: it could happen to anyone.

As I wrote in the first comment, no denial here:  I always read these stories with the horrible knowledge that I might be the sort of person to make such an awful mistake.  I know all too well what it's like to run on autopilot.   

The other hypothetical that I worry about is arriving at the gym with all the kids, late for swimming lessons, and Mark and I each taking some kids, and each of us thinking the other one has gotten the baby out of the car.

 I might seriously consider buying one of the alert systems she links to in her post.   For now, I think I'll vow never to unload groceries before unloading the baby, and I'll commit to wearing the empty baby sling when I drive as a reminder that I'm supposed to put a baby in it after I park the car.