At tomorrow's debate, Candy Crowley is "going to react organically to what’s happening."

She "understand[s] that [she's] there." She's "not a fly on the wall." 

You got a problem with that? Apparently, both campaigns do. They were expecting a fly on the wall! They contracted for a fly on the wall.

Why did Althouse post this item?
	The blog has a theme today: candy!
	She loves to use the blog tag "insect politics."
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ADDED: What does it mean to react organically? That's old hippie talk. There was a time when everything was "organic" or "so organic." Wow. No exclamation point after "wow." It was just... wow. It was so hard to think back then. When everything was... like... organic?.

But how does an organ react? The stomach aches, the heart attacks, the lung wheezes, the bladder loses control.

Repeating the old marshmallow test — the one about kids' capacity for delaying gratification.

And changing the results by exposing the kids — pre-temptation — to untrustworthy/trustworthy adults.

“Being able to delay gratification — in this case to wait 15 difficult minutes to earn a second marshmallow — not only reflects a child’s capacity for self-control, it also reflects their belief about the practicality of waiting,” says Celeste Kidd, a doctoral candidate in brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester and lead author on the study.” Delaying gratification is only the rational choice if the child believes a second marshmallow is likely to be delivered after a reasonably short delay.”

You can imagine the social policy the researchers would like to support. The ability to delay gratification is tied to future economic success (according to the old study), and if the capacity for delaying gratification is purely a matter of character, it seems to justify different economic results. One can feel good about being a big old conservative, who favors equal opportunity and scoffs at equalizing the results. You want differential outcomes, because they are deserved and they are incentives.

But if we find out that a child raised around unreliable adults will adapt by taking the rewards that are available in the present and that this child has shown good aptitude in refraining from delaying gratification, our conservatism won't feel so comfortable anymore and we're amenable to arguments about equalizing outcomes.

Black licorice! Potty training! Emily Dickinson!

Now that I've wandered over to the San Francisco Chronicle web page — I was looking for info on that "Star Trek" doodle, I find some intriguing headlines:

1. "State expands warning on eating black licorice." (A particular brand has lead in it. It's not the old story that glycyrrhizin is dangerous.)

2. "Photo of mom potty-training kids at restaurant table sparks outrage."

Kimberly Decker [who took a photo and posted it on Facebook] says the mother in question lugged portable potties into the restaurant, placed them on chairs and sat her children down on them. At first Decker thought the potties were booster seats but when the mother stripped off her children’s clothes, she realized the twins were going to the bathroom—in the middle of the restaurant in front of other diners.

“She had to undo the jumpsuits, and take them all the way down so they were completely nude, with the jumpsuits down to their ankles just eating their chicken nuggets, sitting on little toddler potties”...

You have to question whether Decker made the right choice in posting the photo online.

3. "Scholars may have 2nd photo of poet Dickinson."

Kelly said perhaps the best evidence [that it's really Emily Dickinson] is an ophthalmological report that compared similarities in the eyes and facial features of the women in the photos....

That could shift some perceptions about the Amherst native...  For instance, a book in the 1950s was the first to propose Dickinson had a lesbian relationship with [the other woman in the photograph, Kate Scott] Turner....

"So if you were to pick one up, you'd be like, 'Oh! This is a homemade Mounds bar.' "

"Basically it's coconut and sugar dipped in chocolate"... but it's not, because it's got potatoes, and it's a needham, the food from Maine that you haven't heard of... or have you?

The origin of needhams is hazy, but lore centers around the late 1800s and a Rev. Needham....

I don't taste the potato, but [some guy in Maine] says that's the idea.

"It's less about tasting potato," he says, "and more about that it's just not really gummy and cloyingly sweet."

This is one article in a series over at NPR — "Americandy: Sweet Land Of Liberty'We're taking a cross-country tour of candies from around the U.S., sampling hometown sweets that deliver a nostalgic sugar rush." I was just looking at the NPR home page and said out loud: "Whatever happened to NPR? It's pretty much irrelevant politically, and all the news seems to be soft news about nice things that feel good to people who don't want to hear about politics. Maybe it's something about what works on the radio." And the next thing you know, I was swept into an article about using Maine potatoes to concoct some Mounds-like candy that not so gummy and sweet, and then on to a whole series of articles about local candy: Buffalo Sponge, Chukar Cherries, Valomilks, etc. etc.

"We should give marshmallows to every kindergartner."

"We should say, 'You see this marshmallow? You don’t have to eat it. You can wait. Here’s how."

When [Professor Walter Mischel] and his colleagues taught children a simple set of mental tricks—such as pretending that the candy is only a picture, surrounded by an imaginary frame—he dramatically improved their self-control. The kids who hadn’t been able to wait sixty seconds could now wait fifteen minutes. “All I’ve done is given them some tips from their mental user manual,” Mischel says. “Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.”

Self-control. Learn it. Teach it.

"Trayvon Martin was not innocent. He was guilty of being black in presumably restricted public space."

Writes Melissa Harris-Perry in The Nation:

For decades, Jim Crow laws made this crime statutory. They codified the spaces into which black bodies could not pass without encountering legal punishment. They made public blackness a punishable offense. The 1964 Civil Rights Act removed the legal barriers but not the social sanctions and potentially violent consequences of this “crime.” George Zimmerman’s slaying of Trayvon Martin — and the subsequent campaign to smear Martin — is the latest and most jarring reminder that it is often impossible for a black body to be innocent.

This is the left-wing presentation of the case. All I want to talk about here is the photograph The Nation has used to illustrate this item. We see a 3-year-old child, a boy who happens to be black. He's been dressed in a black hoodie — the item of clothing Martin was wearing when he died — and given a sign to hold. The sign has a picture of a bag of Skittles — the candy the 17-year-old Martin had in his possession when he was shot — and the words Justice 4 Trayvon Martin. The child's eyes are downcast. He looks terribly sad.

But he can't possibly be sad about racism in American, injustice, or the death of Trayvon Martin. He's 3 years old!

He's probably sad because he's been dragged to a protest and made to stand around, holding a sign, at knee level to a lot of adults who are angry about something he can't understand. Who knows the ways in which a 3-year-old absorbs the emotions of the adults who surround him? Does he even know he's black, and if he does, does that have meaning for him? What meaning is he learning — that he's guilty of being black?

"I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.'"

"It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something."

The reference, whether or not intermediately from the magazine, was one of many 1960s riffs on Charles M. Schulz's culturally popular saying, Happiness is a Warm Puppy, which began in the Peanuts comic strip and became a widely sold book.

We've all heard the Beatles song. (It's my longtime personal favorite.) But have you read "Happiness is a Warm Puppy"?

It's a slight book, writes Alan David Doane:

There are perhaps 40 or so concepts visited by Schulz over the course of its orange, pink, red and brown pages, and of course the reader will agree with some and wonder at others. "Happiness is sleeping in your own bed," is one that rings solidly true for me...

"Happiness is some black, orange, yellow, white and pink jelly beans, but no green ones," seems bizarre to me....

"Happiness is one thing to one person and another thing to another person," Schulz finishes up with, showing Linus and Lucy each enjoying their own, separate, things.

"Cause of death was not..."

"... a lethal mixture of pop rocks and coke."

The internet is having a big laugh over cruelty to children.

Hey, lie to your children and make them cry, and do it all on video so we can get a laugh. Go ahead, appropriate your child's innocence and trust, make him suffer, and give it to millions of strangers to howl over.

BUT: There is justice in the world. And the day will come when the child will have a video camera of his own, and he or she will film the parent getting emotional.

A YouTube video featuring a Texas judge repeatedly striking his 16-year-old daughter with a leather belt has gone viral on the Internet this week — racking up 2.4 million views since it was posted Oct. 27, and eliciting angry reactions from people around the world.

Teach your children well...

Madison radio personality Sly incites listeners to go to Paul Ryan's home and dump candy at his door.

Audio at the link.

We fired up our V-8 caravan and headed south to Janesville, home of an empty GM plant, worker plight, and Paul Ryan. He offered candy to a constituent who really just wanted a job and his legislative help in getting one for himself and the rest of Rock County's unemployed. So, we brought him enough sugar to last he [sic] and his yippy-skippy wife and neighbor the rest of their lives.

You can listen to the audio of the radio broadcast yesterday morning on WTDY. Sly gives out Ryan's home address, giggles about going over to the house to put candy there as a prank, and urges readers to head over there, with candy. He goes into detail about the directions to the house, the number of children who live there, and the physical attractiveness of the Congressman's wife.

"How many ways can one say 'one of the worst ideas of all time?'"

Medical marijuana for kids... with attention deficit disorder.

UPDATE: Candy!

The ad yanked from Pepsi's Super Bowl contest.

There are over 5,000 entries in the contest, but this was so "irredeemably offensive" it couldn't even be permitted to contend:



So... if Christians are really that touchy, maybe you shouldn't even be using the expression "irredeemably offensive." Don't be having any fun with The Redeemer.

***

Did you used to play "Communion" with with Necco wafers? Was that okay in a way that Doritos would not be?

"With Physical Books Obsolete..."

"... The Strand Resorts to Luring Customers With Candy."

Was this photo taken automatically by a school-supplied laptop without the knowledge of the sleeping teenager?

The caption:

"This photo, allegedly taken surreptitiously by the Lower Merion School District through a laptop web camera, shows Blake Robbins sleeping at home at 5 p.m. on Oct 26. (Photo provided by the Robbins family)"

There is a lawsuit based on what may very well have been a terrible invasion of privacy, but I've got to marvel at how the laptop caught such a well-framed and well-lit shot of the glossy-haired boy.

According to the latest filing by the Robbinses, officials first activated the tracking software on a school-issued Apple MacBook that Robbins took home on Oct. 20.

Hundreds of times in the next two weeks, the filing says, the program did its job each time it was turned on: A tiny camera atop the laptop snapped a photo, software inside copied the laptop screen image, and a locating device recorded the Internet address - something that could help district technicians pinpoint where the machine was.

The system was designed to take a new picture every 15 minutes until it was turned off....

Robbins and his parents say they first learned of the technology on Nov. 11, when an assistant Harriton principal confronted the teen with an image collected by the tracking software.

Robbins has said one image showed him with a handful of Mike and Ike candies - which the administrator thought were illegal pills.

Those overreaching school officials... exposed by their own over-aggressive control-freakishness... and the devious mind-tricks of Mike and Ike!

At the Sweetness Café...

... don't you love it?

At the Sweet and Salty Snackhouse...

... you can get your fill. And you know damned well that none of this is any good for you. Yet you cannot stop!

Candy-loving kid = future drunk.

Scientist = killjoy.

For Halloween, the First Lady is a leopard and the President is "a middle-aged dad."

"The first lady was dressed as a leopard, with a smear of eyeliner, fuzzy ears and a spotted orange-and-black top. The president was dressed as a middle-aged dad, with a black cardigan, checkered shirt and sensible brown slacks. Together they handed out treats on the steps of the north portico of the White House last night, sending some trick-or-treaters into fits of shock and joy."

But the President is a middle-aged dad. And how does leopard go with middle-aged dad anyway?

The First Family got way more kids coming to the door than Meade and I did. They got 2,600! Did we even get 26? We did this routine in which Meade, wearing a mask and werewolf gloves would attack me while  I was giving out the candy — traditional Milky Way bars. The Obamas gave "a plastic baggy containing White House M&Ms, an orange sugar cookie in the shape of the residence, and clumps of desiccated apricots, apples and papayas." No word on whether they did a leopard-attacks-middle-aged-dad routine.

Have some.

(Thanks to Irene and Ray.)

(Candinas Chocolatier.)

Don't be afraid.

It's Ted's Toys.

Althouse is inside. With chattering teeth:



And Ted...


(Enlarge.)

... the Evil Toymaster:



Now, get out of here:


(Enlarge.)