A new federal report on hunger issued Nov. 15 found that Vermont and Alabama have had the highest increase in “food insecurity” during the past 10 years.
The term “food insecurity” is a useful and specific term from a policy perspective– it’s more accurate than “starvation,” though it does lack the emotional punch.
So let me give a little perspective.
My direct experience with this is short lived– I had a short-term experience in the early 1990’s where money was bad enough that I had to scramble for meals. This lasted about three weeks. It’s the only time in my life I looked for support from a food pantry. I also volunteered for Clinton’s campaign on evening shifts, primarily because the volunteers got free pizza. Before that, on several occasions I had popcorn for dinner because it was cheap and available. Once I was willing to accept food from a pantry, I started eating real meals again, but it was incredibly difficult for me to accept that this was necessary.
People go through bad experiences in life, for a variety of reasons. I’m not writing this to reveal personal information and not interested in discussing the specifics of how this came about. That’s not the point.
The point is this: food is one of those things that we often take for granted. When the expectation of consistent meals is lost, it changes your mindset. You start thinking of food as something to hoard, to grab, to hold. It puts you outside of “normal” society and, to an extent, at least in my experience, has a kind of decivilizing effect.
In my case, it made me feel isolated– I felt separated from the people around me like there was something I needed to be ashamed of. Getting donations from other people, despite their best intentions, made me feel kind of… violated, I guess, is the word for it. This isn’t a criticism of anything or anyone. It’s just the way it worked in my head. I needed the food, and knew I needed it, and yet it was humiliating and left me shaken. The experience left a kind of fracture on my sense of the world around me and my place in it.
I say all this because I want to be clear: this is what happens when it’s short-lived and you know it’s going to improve in the near future.
What happens when it’s long term and you don’t know the way out?
The thought of that simply horrifies me. It should horrify you, too.
I love living in Vermont. Our birds aren’t as exotic as the Southwestern Species, and we don’t commonly get the coastal excitement that they do over in NH and MA, but we get birds that are adaptable to the cold. Fall in Vermont is especially interesting because we get boreal birds passing through as well as some occasional surprises. One surprise happened to me just the other day in the form of this Barred Owl
I didn’t photograph it for long, but apparently it’s been hanging out in this one spot, not far from my house (I could walk there without too much hassle), for months.
Below the fold, I’ll share some of our other local Fall birds, as well as a fairly major surprise/life bird.
These are all smaller versions– the large sized versions are linked.
In a few weeks, I’ll be doing a trip to New Mexico, which is the only place I’ve ever taken a plane to see birds. We hadn’t planned to go back to Bosque Del Apache this year, but the sweetie got called to work in NM for a week, so I’m joining her partway through; will bird while she works and then we’ll head over to Bosque for two days and stay there for the weekend before heading home. We see American Coots here and there in New England. The first I ever saw was on a wet and not particularly useful birding day at Parker River Wildlife Refuge and it carries a special place for me because I was relatively new to birding and managed to ID it without help from other birders, so I kind of love seeing coots, even if they are fairly unexciting to a lot of other birders. In Bosque, however, they are everywhere. Funny thing, though. Right after we learned about the whole New Mexico thing, I saw this bird pop up in our local marsh:
I take that as a sign.
On of our most common birds in Vermont, year round, is the Black Capped Chickadee:
Strange factoid about these adorable little birds: not only do their calls vary dramatically depending on time of year, the part of their brain that remembers their spring calls shuts down temporarily in the winter. They don’t just not use their Spring calls in Winter. They’re physiologically incapable of doing so.
Blue Jays are generally considered a bit of a pest, but they’re still amazing birds to watch. Being corvids, they tend to be fairly smart. They, along with our grackles, form a kind of a birder mafia in our yard. In nesting season, they protect the area from larger predators (crows, primarily), which allow our baltimore orioles and black-and-white warblers to nest with less risk, but will mob the feeders and occasionally (though we’ve never seen this happen in our yard) predate on smaller birds:
Fox Sparrows are very much migratory for us– I’ve never heard of one sticking around, but we get them occasionally in the Fall. This year, two hung out at our feeders for a couple weeks, but I haven’t seen them in the last week. This photo was taken in late October, at nearby Herrick’s Cove
The Hairy Woodpecker is another year-long resident here. I include this photo just because I love the look of it:
Northern Cardinals also hang around year-round here. Older birders have told me that this used to be too far North for Cardinals, but in the last 30 years, their population has slowly increased to the point where they are commonplace. I’m not sure if that’s due to warming or an increase in the number of people feeding birds and providing them with usable seed. I suspect it’s a combination of both.
A couple years ago, Pine Siskins invaded. By “invaded” I mean that we had hundreds in our yard. Literally, you could walk through the yard and think there’s a bunch of thistle under the feeders and suddenly the whole scene would explode with birds flying everywhere– not thistle– just birds with black wings all over the place. This year, we appear to have three, which I appreciate better than 200
The Red Bellied Woodpecker was a challenge bird for me– I’d seen one in Northern Vermont but failed to photograph it, but it was a horrible look, and it took me a few years to finally photograph one. In the last year, however, I’ve had multiple unexpected sightings of them, managed to get some decent photos and now actually have one actively making a daily trip to our feeders:
Song Sparrows are also year-round for us. I don’t have much to say about them, but I love this photo. Any time I can get a very common bird in an unusual pose, it makes me happy:
The Tufted Titmouse is another bird that, like the cardinal, never used to be seen in Vermont. Now they breed here:
I was very excited the first time I ever saw a White Crowned Sparrow. They’re not rare here, but they’re not common either. In Bosque, I expect to see them everywhere.
The White Breasted Nuthatch is another year-round bird for us. They nest in our yard as well. The babies are kind of adorable, but that’s to be expected, since the adults are as well:
Perhaps the most exciting bird for me this fall was the Townsends Warbler that appeared in Westmoreland, NH, a few weeks back: an e-mail went out to the NH-bird group and suddenly there were birders everywhere.. I had thought I was done with warbler season, but apparently it wasn’t quite done with me. Not only did this bird stick around for a few weeks, but I managed to get this photo without anyone’s help finding the damned thing.
It’s been a strange fall for me– I’ve been dealing with a rotator cuff injury, so photography has been trickier– holding an 8lb camera isn’t as easy with significant pain in the shoulder, but it’s improved dramatically through PT combined with not being a moron.
There’s an unrelated project I’ve been working on: this animation is 45 minutes of time compressed into 30 seconds:
It’s a practice run for a project I want to do in December, creating an animation of a series of shots that start in daylight and move into darkness, with the exposure time changing accordingly so that as it gets darker, everything takes longer to expose, creating some very odd timing effects in the overall effect. The December project, if done properly, should involve people as well as other objects, which could make it a lot of fun. I may also try it in a more populated area, such as Boston when I visit there next month.
I’m going take a moment to do the personal plug thing– I have, as I do every year, a birding calendar available. Every year, I go through my photos and find, for each month, one of my favorite photos of a bird that was be found (usually in New England) in that month. There’s an embed of the calendar here:
I also have a series of note cards that I’ve created. If anyone’s interested in purchasing these for the holidays, they’re at Chickadee Cards.
What’s everyone else doing this Season? How are the birds where you are?
There’s a certain aspect in which the “Medicaid Enterprise Solution” (MES) being sent out for bids (see full bid here) is a good thing: it seeks to integrate multiple systems that do not work in correspondence into a single one.
And that’s pretty much where it ends, which is probably why, on a week in which we’ve heard of people waiting for ridiculously long hours, people having their benefits delayed during the worst of seasons, this has been sent on a Wednesday evening before a four day weekend.
So what’s their solution? More outsourcing:
The State intends to establish a public and private collaborative partnership with the Vendor to jointly develop the desired MES… Emphasis should be placed on the most cost-effective and efficient suite of systems and services that allow the State to fully meet the needs of its citizenry now and into the future…
This piece is intended as preview, as I just got this bid last night and am posting this primarily to get it up and out there so it doesn’t get lost in the long weekend. I am working on a longer, more detailed, piece which helps to translate some of the coded language in this proposal, as well as illustrates some pitfalls in this sort of proposal that the Shumlin administration will seriously need to think about before implementing it.
Under a court ruling from the early 1990s, the state must process applications for food stamps and welfare benefits within 30 days. However the state’s own data indicate that more than a third of Vermonters applying for food stamps (now called 3SquaresVT) have been forced to wait longer. Waits have exceeded the 30-day threshold for about 30 percent of people seeking access to health-care programs; 28 percent of applications for Reach Up, a program that provides cash assistance for basic needs, are past due.
“The problem is that thousands of Vermonters are turning to the state at a time of serious economic crisis and the state has an obligation to process their applications for assistance,” says Christopher Curtis, a staff attorney for Vermont Legal Aid. “It’s absolutely essential that the problems be addressed. These families can’t afford to wait.”
And:
Steve Dale, commissioner of the Department of Children and Families… attributes the problem to an increase in the number of Vermonters seeking assistance and some logistical logjams in a $3 million modernization program intended to make the application process more efficient.
[…]
“The primary driver for the timeliness issues is first and foremost sheer numbers,” Dale says.
So… here’s the thing about those “efficiencies.”
There are good and bad ways to design the sort of system we’re discussing, and none of them should cost anywhere near $3 million dollars. But even if they did, they should be done right.
It’s easy to make big broad claims about efficiency and implement new systems to review applications, but if the people staffing those systems aren’t properly trained to use them, if the systems themselves are designed in a fashion which is clunky and burdensome and if the state servers themselves are not up to the task of handling the workload, you’ve end up with a system which is no more efficient than the original, but has managed to eliminate personnel who can help when the machines fail and removed the human support face from the process.
Note: if I seem ranty about this, it’s for a reason: it intersects two of my major pet peeves. Screwing the poor is one. Bad technology is another.
If you design a database structure properly (and this is not rocket science), it is easy to use. I don’t mean that it’s acceptable or functional. I mean easy. I mean, application review takes two minutes in a properly handled system. But let’s grace it out and say five minutes to make room for the complicated applications. I mean that follow-up requests from those reviewing get automatically sent to a server which generates a point of contact for the people who submitted the original (whether it’s via e-mail, postal mail or phone).
I mean that a team of ten well-trained people, should be able to process 600 applications in a single day without any issues whatsoever. If, and this is a big if, the technology is done properly and implemented well.
There’s a number listed in the piece above– 24,000 people between July 1 and November 15. That’s just under 140 days, and just under 100 working days.
That’s 240 new applications per day that we, as a state, are apparently incapable of handling, despite our efforts to become more “efficient,” all because we rushed to implement a new structure that was not ready to go, was not fully functional and was properly vetted.
This isn’t just frustrating, annoying and pathetic.
In a stern letter sent Monday, Legal Aid says the state Department for Children and Families must comply with a previous federal court ruling and process applications within 30 days with an error rate of no more than 3 percent.
Department figures show that as of the week of Nov. 8, 35 percent of applications in the 3SquaresVT program — formerly known as food stamps — were taking longer than 30 days to process.
Now, let’s be clear about this: DCF head honcho Steve Dale claims that these problems result from an increase in caseload with more benefits being requested. But I thought our new technologies and improved, streamlined systems were going to fix all this? What happened to the “change” we were “challenged” to enact? There’s a whole online application form and everything. Wasn’t technology supposed to solve all our problems?
There are two pieces currently on the front page talking about taxation, specifically focused on sales tax and sin taxes. I’m going to throw out a different perspective and make an argument that may surprise a few people.
I’ve been trying to run the numbers on this to get a clearer perspective on it– I would have written this much sooner had I been successful at that, but I’m still trying to find the numbers I need to be as thorough as I’d like with this. So until then, treat this as a “this is something I’m pondering” rather than “this is a serious policy proposal.”
So what if we were to eliminate sales tax, at least for certain types of business or sales?
Mind you, I’m not coming at this from an anti-tax perspective. I very much believe that if we eliminate the Vermont sales and use tax, we’d have to make that up elsewhere. One option would be increase in income tax. Another would be an increase in corporate taxes, or possibly Motor vehicle fees. It might require a combination of those things.
What I have worked out is that if we were to eliminate sales tax entirely, we’d be able to make up for it by doubling Gasoline taxes, Motor Vehicle Fees, Purchase and Use Fees, Corporate Taxes and Insurance Taxes, which is kind of a lot of tax increases.
But there are other options:
eliminate sales tax for any product which is manufactured and pays taxes to Vermont;
eliminate sales tax for any store which has paid taxes to Vermont for the previous five years;
This could also be used as an enforcement tool– businesses which get the sales tax exception could lose the exception if they’re convicted of selling cigarettes or alcohol to minors.
I want to be clear: I’m not anti-tax. I’m not even anti sales tax. But I do have concerns about regressive taxes that unfairly go after the poor. Taxing purchases as opposed to income has two big problems with it. It (a) taxes the poor unfairly and (b) fails to stimulate the economy.
Right now, we want people to be spending money and exchanging goods. But currently, most people I know will go to Keene or Hinsdale to do Christmas shopping in order to benefit from New Hampshire’s zero sales tax. That fails to help Vermont’s economy or tax base, and it puts money that could be going into Vermont’s coffers into New Hampshire’s.
But if we could increase local purchases from local companies by eliminating or reducing sales taxes (provided we still replace that income somewhere else) we could actually benefit from it, not by just eliminating sales tax and magically increasing revenue, but by replacing regressive taxation with progressive taxation and stimulating the economy in the process.
According to KWTV News, 18-year-old Melissa McKenzie said she was kicked out of Del City High School in Del City, Okla., at the beginning of the semester when the principal found out she was living with her girlfriend instead of her family. The principal then told her if she returned to her family’s home, she would be welcomed back to school.
The upshot of this story is that students are being discouraged from graduating because they are lesbian. I normally focus here on Vermont, and this is in Oklahoma, but it’s important to understand that this sort of backwater, ignorant, hateful nonsense can happen anywhere and needs to be called out, not just in our own backyard.
I have no wisdom to impart here. I have nothing to say which makes this better. I am disgusted, appalled and seriously would like to see the principal who’s involved in this story (which is not the first time he has done this) get fired.
No. Not just fired.
Kicked.
Kicked in the shins.
Kicked in the shins over and over again by a team of angry lesbian soccer players.
I wish I had something better to say about this, other than “I’m glad I live in Vermont.”
The pledge, written in 1892 by socialist writer and Baptist minister Francis Bellamy, partly to help heal sectional hatred still lingering from the Civil War decades earlier, is: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
Except that’s not true. It’s an accurate rendering of the pledge as it currently exists, but that’s not the pledge that Bellamy wrote. Bellamy wrote:
I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
This is subtle, but that does not make it unimportant. To imply that the pledge has existed with the phrase “under God” since 1892 frames it in terms of having more than a century’s worth of history as a religious document. The phrase “under God” was added in 1954 after being actively promoted and lobbied for by religious organizations.
It’s easy to make this sort of error in fact, which is why it’s so important that our media not make it– it creates a false reality which damages the fabric of our discourse and needs to be challenged when presented.
The Associated Press reported that Aldrich’s refusal to barber the patron – Dr. Darryl Fisher, of Taos, N.M. – sparked a demonstration by people who claimed his denial of service was racially motivated.
Except that… it didn’t. The piece she links doesn’t say anything at all about those of us who were at the demonstration making any claims, and there was actually a lot of fairly careful discussion about that at the demonstration itself. Most of us were very clear that we weren’t accusing the barber of racism, but were concerned about someone having developed the sense that the town was racist and trying to figure out how best to address that. But hey, why stick to the facts when you can just make stuff up as you go along, such as:
It is entirely possible that Aldrich is, in fact, a racist who didn’t want to cut Fisher’s hair because he doesn’t like people of color. If that’s the case, I best not be defending the guy. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Aldrich is a stand-up guy who loves all people regardless of color, creed, political persuasion or sexual proclivity. Then this story makes a lot more sense.
The piece I just quoted was posted yesterday (Wednesday, November 10th) at 8:30 am. Let’s take a moment and enter the Wayback machine to go back two days to the Brattleboro Reformer, reporting on Aldrich’s own comments (since Reformer writer Jaime Cone actually talked to people involved and did some actual work here):
He also seems angry that Fisher spoke out about what happened.
“What does he have to go stirring this up for?” he said, adding that he believes black people are more racist than white people.
But yes, even though Aldrich is on record making a bigoted comment about blacks, the story “makes a lot more sense” if we just “assume for the sake of argument” otherwise.
If you think I’m done with this, you’re sadly mistaken.
Ober, not satisfied with making mocking comments about those of us attending the demonstration (“Oh, you gotta love Vermont and its knee-jerk PCness. Well done, white people, for making a fuss about something you know nothing about – black hair.”), also decides that in order to support her position, she’ll just make some stuff up:
Aldrich, like 99.9 percent of white hair stylists, doesn’t know how to cut black hair.
99.9%? So if we randomly pulled out 1,000 white hair stylists, only one of them would know how to cut black hair? Why not 99.93%? Why not 97.24%? Why 99.9% Because that’s the number you use when you are making things up out of whole cloth to express a vast majority.
Oh, and:
That’s understandable, since he lives in Bellows Falls, a town of 3000 white people and 11 black people.
Let’s back that statistic up for a moment. The source she uses for it is here.
It’s accurate that Bellows Falls is estimated to have had around 3,000 residents in 2009. But the number of blacks listed is from ten years ago. If you’re reporting on demographics that small, you should probably, for accuracy’s sake, indicate the age of your numbers. But I will give her credit for not just making the number up. It’s true that in y2k, the census did report 11 black people in Bellows Falls. I just don’t know that that number is quite so accurate in 2010 and would think it would be useful to include the fact.
If at this point, you think I’m being picky, you’re right. I’m annoyed at this piece which attempts to simplify and dismiss something serious and I’m particularly not fond of white people trying to pretend that racism is irrelevant, meaningless or that responses to it are just PC.
So yes, I’m being picky. I’m also doing something that Ms. Ober clearly chose not to do in this case: I’m being thorough.
It’s clear from the accumulated evidence that Aldrich doesn’t know how to cut the hair of black people and, it seems clear, that he doesn’t care to know. But that doesn’t mean that others are equally ignorant. If Ms. Ober had bothered to do some research before writing this piece she might have learned from the Brattleboro Commons (in which Allison Teague actually learned some facts about the situation before choosing to write about it):
Lori Brown, owner of Boccaccio’s hair salon in Bellows Falls, said, “We are all trained to cut any kind of hair whether you’re African American, Caucasian or Indian,” she said.
I guess that, given Lauren Ober’s statistics, that’s probably it for the state of Vermont for white stylists who know anything about black hair. But hey, she knows more about this than we do, because even though she didn’t attend the demonstration, didn’t talk to anyone involved with it, doesn’t know what actually happened, and feels comfortable just making things up out of whole cloth, she did have a black roommate in college.
So forget everything I said. I’ll just defer to her on this.
