Articles :)
Mar. 29th, 2010 09:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
There's apparently a shortage of small slaughterhouses, which I did not know.
Push to Eat Local Food Is Hampered by Shortage
By KATIE ZEZIMA
EAST MONTPELIER, Vt. — Erica Zimmerman and her husband spent months pasture-raising pigs on their farm here, but when the time came to take them to slaughter, an overbooked facility canceled their appointment.
With the herd in prime condition, and the couple lacking food and space to keep them, they frantically called slaughterhouses throughout the state. After several days they found an opening, but their experience highlights a growing problem for small farmers here and across the nation: too few slaughterhouses to meet the growing demand for locally raised meat.
In what could be a major setback for America’s local-food movement, championed by so-called locavores, independent farmers around the country say they are forced to make slaughter appointments before animals are born and to drive hundreds of miles to facilities, adding to their costs and causing stress to livestock.
As a result, they are scaling back on plans to expand their farms because local processors cannot handle any more animals.
“It’s pretty clear there needs to be attention paid to this,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an interview. “Particularly in the Northeast, where there is indeed a backlog and lengthy wait for slaughter facilities.”
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the past five years.
Fewer slaughterhouses to process local meat means less of it in butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants. Chefs throughout the Northeast are partnering with farms to add locally-raised meat to their menus, satisfying a customer demand. But it is not always easy.
“There are a lot of people out there who raise great animals for us to use, and they don’t have the opportunity to get them to us because the slaughterhouses are going away,” said Bill Telepan, chef and owner of Telepan, a high-end restaurant in New York.
Mr. Telepan’s veal supplier, Duane Merrill of Walton, N.Y., said there was no slaughterhouse in Delaware County, “and it’s the size of Rhode Island.” Mr. Merrill said he also had difficulty finding adequate transport for veal cattle down to New York City.
Brian Moyer, director of Rural Vermont, a nonprofit farm advocacy group, uses the image of an hourglass. “At the top of the hourglass we’ve got the farmers,” he said, “the bottom part is consumers and in the middle, what’s straining those grains of sand, is the infrastructure that’s lacking.”
Vermont, a locavore’s paradise, is seeing increased demand for the facilities from both small-scale meat producers and dairy farmers, who are facing some of the lowest milk prices in years and are trying to diversify with beef cattle.
“People are trying to figure out how to get a little more money out of their herds,” said Randy Quenneville, program chief for the Vermont meat inspection service. “And with the interest in stuff being local, wanting to know where their food is coming from and how it was raised, there are more people looking to do this.”
The state has seven operating slaughterhouses, down from around 25 in the mid-1980s, Mr. Quenneville said. One is a state-inspected facility, meaning that meat inspected there cannot be sold over state lines.
Two slaughterhouses recently closed, one destroyed by a fire and the other shuttered because of animal cruelty charges. The closed facility is expected to reopen soon.
Mr. Quenneville said a number of small, family-owned slaughterhouses started closing when strict federal rules regarding health control went into effect in 1999. Large corporations like Cargill also began to take over much of the nation’s meat market.
He and Mr. Vilsack are both urging farmers to band together and open local cooperatives or mobile slaughter facilities. The Agriculture Department is financing some mobile units and helping to build a regional facility near the Quad Cities in Illinois and Iowa. Helping small farmers, Mr. Vilsack said, will improve struggling rural economies.
“We recognize that the buy-local food movement is a significant economic driver in rural communities,” he said.
But building a regional facility is not always easy. As the locavore movement and self-butchering movements grow, so do cries of “Not in my backyard.”
Some residents in the quaint town of Woodstock, Vt., raised more than $1 million to buy a water buffalo farm whose owner wanted to convert it into a slaughterhouse. Some said the facility would have been too big for the town. Vince Galluccio, who helped organize opposition, was concerned that waste from the proposed plant’s feed lot and manure piles would run down a hill and into town. Now the owners plan to turn the property into a dairy farm and educational center.
Mr. Galluccio says the state needs more slaughterhouses and hopes to help build one that would be a better fit for the community. “We’re not against slaughterhouses,” Mr. Galluccio said. “But you wouldn’t open up a discotheque next to a church.”
Some would not open a “slaughterhouse” anywhere, preferring to discard the term in favor of the French “abattoir.” There are hurdles, whatever the name.
“You need skilled management and work force, a cooperative town, a good supply of water, a good way of getting rid of waste,” said Ed Maltby, a spokesman for Adams Farm, a slaughterhouse in Athol, Mass., that reopened in 2008 after a fire. “It’s not a problem that can be easily solved.”
The mobile units have been popular for poultry, and many farmers are trying to replicate the system with larger animals. Cheryl Ouellette, a farmer from Tacoma, Wash., known as “the pig lady,” helped secure a U.S.D.A.-certified mobile processing unit with $250,000 in local conservation money. It opened in August and expects to process 10 animals — mostly cows, pigs and sheep — each day.
In Washington, Ms. Ouellette said, some farmers were driving animals more than 300 miles to slaughter. “Farmers had problems, butchers couldn’t get U.S.D.A. carcasses to sell in meat cases, and chefs couldn’t get local meat,” she said. “Here there are no small processing facilities left for that food to get into commerce.”
The mobile unit goes from farm to farm with a U.S.D.A.-approved butcher and inspector aboard. It contains heaters, potable water and dumps wastewater at RV stations.
Ms. Zimmerman and her husband, Kevin McCollister, would like to see the rules relaxed on farm slaughter. Their slaughterhouse is an hour and a half away — long enough for the pigs to be stressed and not in optimal shape for processing, Ms. Zimmerman said.
“We have a product that people really wanted; we should have a system that would allow us to produce it as efficiently as possible,” Ms. Zimmerman said. “There’s not enough room for all the people like me.”
Here is a set of letters in response to an editorial, all about how to change our election system. I'm going to copy all of them.
Re “A Tea Party Without Nuts,” by Thomas L. Friedman (column, March 24):
It’s wonderful to see Mr. Friedman recommend “alternative voting,” which in this country is more commonly known as “instant runoff voting” or “ranked-choice” voting. Instant runoff voting is fairer than the “vote for one” election method, and as Mr. Friedman points out, ranked-choice ballots let voters more freely and fully express their preferences.
Instant runoff voting has already been adopted by several California cities. This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences helped publicize instant runoff voting by using it to award the best picture Oscar. The League of Women Voters of Los Angeles, of which I am president, is advocating instant runoff voting for government elections.
The league’s intent is not to push politics in any particular direction. Instant runoff voting simply gives people a clearer voice.
David A. Holtzman
Los Angeles, March 24, 2010
•
To the Editor:
Thomas L. Friedman’s column calls for breaking up “the oligopoly of our two-party system.” I couldn’t agree more, but I’d add two essential points.
In addition to instant runoff voting and nonpartisan redistricting, to give us more choice in our elections, we need a uniform, reasonable ballot access law to allow alternative candidacies (independents and third parties) to have a chance to present ideas to the American public by being on the ballot.
We also need nonpartisan administration of our elections to ensure that partisan election officials are not making discriminatory determinations of who gets on the ballot, who gets to vote, how voter rolls are purged and how votes are counted.
Theresa Amato
Oak Park, Ill., March 24, 2010
The writer, a public interest lawyer, is the author of “Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny” and was national campaign manager for Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004.
•
To the Editor:
Phil Keisling may be right that to avoid extremism we should scrap party primaries (“To Reduce Partisanship, Get Rid of Partisans,” Op-Ed, March 22), but the alternative system he recommends is even worse in that respect.
Mr. Keisling proposes that states should run open primaries in which the top two vote-getters go on to face each other in the general election. This is essentially the same method that France uses to elect presidents, only instead of a general election, the French hold a runoff between the two leading candidates from the first round.
In 2002, this system shocked the world by sending Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extreme right-wing candidate, to the runoff — a travesty because the left-center candidate, Lionel Jospin, would have easily defeated Mr. Le Pen in head-to-head competition, but was eliminated in the first round (he finished third to Mr. Le Pen and the right-center incumbent, Jacques Chirac).
Such an outcome was possible because the vote on the left was badly split among several popular candidates. Mr. Keisling’s proposal would permit similar travesties to occur in the United States.
A better approach would be to eliminate primaries altogether and open the general election to all candidates. But rather than confining citizens to vote for a single candidate, they would be given the opportunity to rank candidates in order of their preference. The winner would be the candidate who, according to the rankings, would beat all others in head-to-head contests.
Such a system would avoid the possibility of an extremist defeating a moderate when a large majority of voters prefer the moderate.
Eric S. Maskin
Princeton, N.J., March 22, 2010
The writer, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study.
•
To the Editor:
Phil Keisling, a former Oregon secretary of state, sponsored a “top-two” primary measure that was rejected by almost a 2-to-1 margin by Oregon voters in 2008. It would have allowed parties to advance their candidates to the general election by using “ringers” to split the primary votes of the other parties.
Anyone could register with any party and appear on the primary ballot with that party’s label. For example, Republicans could recruit people to register and file as Democratic candidates and thereby split up the Democratic vote and stop any of them from finishing in the top two. Democrats could follow the same strategy.
Since 1979, in Louisiana, the only state where this system has operated for more than one election cycle, there have been 9, 9, 8, 12, 16, 11, 17 and 12 candidates on the primary ballot for governor alone. Fragmenting the vote has allowed extremist candidates (remember the white supremacist David Duke) to win the primary — the opposite of what Mr. Keisling desires.
Linda Williams
Portland, Ore., March 24, 2010
The writer is chairwoman of the Independent Party of Oregon.
•
To the Editor:
Phil Keisling is right that our primary system is broken, with plunging and unrepresentative turnout, but his prescription for a general election between the top two primary candidates would too often replicate the worst of modern politics. After eliminating most candidates in low-turnout primaries, we’d typically be left with two candidates representing only the major parties.
It would be better to allow all candidates on the November ballot and use instant runoff voting. Voters would have one vote but indicate backup choices. If their first choice runs weakly and is eliminated, their ballots are awarded to their next choice, requiring winners to reach out to backers of other candidates.
“Hurt Locker” won the best picture Oscar with this system, and voters handle it well in major elections in Minneapolis and San Francisco and in nations like Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Instant runoff voting can be particularly valuable in those state legislative districts where voters elect several representatives rather than just one. It could result in fairer representation of the left, center and right, providing more balance to policymaking.
Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote
Takoma Park, Md., March 23, 2010
And here's a short article about a charter school which used their cafeteria as a nightclub on weekends. There's a lot of anger about this, which I can see and largely agree with, but on the other hand it strikes me as an efficient use of space - I mean, if school isn't in session, it's not like it's corrupting children, is it?
Uproar Over School Cafeteria That Doubled as a Nightclub
By IAN URBINA
Books by day, beers by night — at least that is what school district officials in Philadelphia say was offered at a charter school there, where they say the school’s cafeteria was used weekends as a nightclub.
Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for the school district, said his office was investigating whether the school, the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School itself rented the cafeteria to the bar, known as Club Damani, or if the landlord did so. In the meantime, Mr. Gallard said, the city has asked the bar to cease operating or the school to move.
The school is home to roughly 500 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. When it opened in 1997, it was one of the first charter schools in the city. Now, there are 67 charter schools educating about 34,000 students, Mr. Gallard said.
Harambee officials did not respond to requests for comment. But they posted an open letter on the school’s Web site, saying reports about the school’s operating a bar, which first appeared over the weekend on a local television station, WPVI-TV, were “a biased depiction of the true success story that Harambee truly is.”
In the letter, school officials said Harambee excelled in building students’ self-worth, engaging parents and consistently producing students who exceed state standards in math and reading.
But the presence of the nightclub in the school building drew strong criticism.
“It is an outrage,” said State Senator Jeffrey E. Piccola, a Republican who heads the Education Committee and who has called for the school to close immediately and relocate its students.
Mr. Piccola said he planned to amend a charter school bill that he had already introduced to ban the consumption, purchase and sale of alcoholic beverages in a charter school.
“A bar should not be located anywhere near a school,” he said. “To think that a full bar is actually operating in a school is an outrageous affront to charter schools, young children, educators and taxpayers everywhere.”
City officials said Club Damani appeared to have a liquor license that expired in April 2008. The city controller, Alan Butkovitz, said the school was also being investigated for questionable spending.
And finally, an article about ballet and twitter
Ballet Stars Now Tweet as Well as Flutter
By GIA KOURLAS
In the rarefied world of ballet, where dancers are expected to speak with their bodies, sometimes it seems that aloofness is something to aspire to. Lately, though, the ribbons are loosening. Courtesy of Twitter, dancers are starting to make themselves heard. It isn’t always dainty.
“Hi, I’m Devin and I’m an MRI-aholic.”
“Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.”
“What you didn’t know- fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! Thurs was the first time I did the whole ballet!”
“Don’t let me be fat.”
Tweets — like these by the New York City Ballet dancers Devin Alberda, Ashley Bouder, Kathryn Morgan and Mr. Alberda again — are starting to change the public face of ballet. They may never amass the number of followers of, say, the prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher, but Twitter is making ballet dancers human. (A simple Google search of a name plus Twitter is generally all that is needed to find them.)
Kristin Sloan, a former City Ballet dancer who now runs her own video-production company, was a pioneer in this trend with her Web site, thewinger.com, which posts photos taken by dancers backstage, in rehearsal studios and on tour.
That in itself was quite a step for ballet, which has long been seen as elite, ethereal and something to keep under glass. Casting, until it is made official by companies, is a closely guarded process, and when a dancer — a star or otherwise — is off the stage, the reason rarely becomes public.
But when dancers are the ones documenting their own injuries — as Ms. Morgan did before her debut as Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty” last season — they hold the power. Ms. Morgan wasn’t sure she would be able to dance the role until two weeks before her first performance. She tweeted the cancellation of her appearance in another ballet and assured her followers that she was saving her injured foot — “super frustrated but it is for the best” — documenting the ailment with digital pictures.
Ms. Morgan said she saw no need to veil even the difficult parts of her career. “When I was younger, I would always want to know what dancers were doing,” she said in an interview. “I would have loved to have Twitter to read about what they were doing on a day-to-day basis rather than just in a performance. I thought this might be a really good way to put ballet out there.”
Ms. Bouder, a principal dancer at City Ballet, has a growing international presence that she credits in part to the connections she’s made through Twitter and Facebook. For her, social media are a vital way to reach past the orchestra pit. “We don’t have celebrity status like actors in magazines,” she said. “That’s the main reason people get interested in something — you get all the dirt, you get to know someone and you become attached, and in the dance world, we’re like a face, not a personality.”
With increasing frequency over the past few months, Ms. Bouder has shared aspects of her personal life — she recently moved to Chelsea, she has a dog named Scout, she is a friend of Rufus Wainwright — but her specialty is live tweets during intermission. “I thought it would be super interesting to see how someone would feel in the middle of a show,” she said.
And indeed, mid-ballet, she has tweeted assessments from her dressing room. “Odette act II was ok today, mild foot cramps though. Yuck yuck. Onto odile. Going for evil sexy tonight;).”
In between acts of “Sleeping Beauty” she tweeted: “Intermission=feet up. Rose adag good, solo eh, vision good. Awakening and act III next.” (Translation of bunhead slang: In “Swan Lake,” the ballerina performs the dual role of Odette and Odile; the Rose Adagio features challenging balances on point. “Vision” and “Awakening” are both scenes.)
Ms. Bouder’s technique is so strong that unless she fell on her behind — she is a daredevil and that has been known to happen — an audience member might have trouble grasping why she thought her solo was “eh.” Her tactic is not to make followers feel bad about what they can’t see, but to show them how to look more closely.
She also follows other dancers. “You know when you’re watching,” she said, “and you’re like, ‘Oh, that was so great,’ and then you read that they thought it was just O.K.? You think, I wonder what they didn’t like about it? Or if they didn’t think that was good, what do they look like when they really feel good?”
At City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, there are no policies on dancers’ participation on Twitter, though some choose to keep their Twitter accounts private. (At the moment the relationship between tech-savvy dancers and company administrators seems to be akin to a child showing a parent how to use e-mail.)
Katherine E. Brown, City Ballet’s executive director, said: “There’s something special about them talking about the company and the work they’re doing in their own words and giving that behind-the-scenes sort of feel to it. In a way, demystifying it a bit.”
But how far can the cloak slip? “We rely on them to use their good judgment and discretion,” Ms. Brown said. “We really don’t put parameters around it for them. This is really their personal thing.”
Daniil Simkin, a soloist at Ballet Theater who along with Maria Kochetkova of the San Francisco Ballet, was one of the first professional ballet dancers to use Twitter, said: “You cannot just go out there and say everything that comes into your mind. You have to filter it. I would say it’s a delicate balance. The more you give, the more people want.”
Mr. Simkin, who is as passionate about technology as he is about ballet, said he had been criticized by dancers and others who see his tweeting as an egocentric exercise. (He is, like the others, building an independent fan base.) “I understand that it can seem that way, but I am not doing it for myself,” he said. “Of course I benefit from it. But for me, it’s all about information and transparency. You see the things most clearly if there is no barrier and no filter, and that is the epitome of Twitter. It breaks it down: the ballet dancer is not that mystic creature anymore.”
Mr. Alberda’s tweets sum up that sentiment. His postings range from personal musings (“Sometimes Kate Bush is the only person who knows how I am feeling,” a reference to the English singer and songwriter) to the stress surrounding an injury. When a protrusion in his upper arm kept him off the stage last season, he tweeted: “I have ultrasound jelly all over my armpit. The ultrasound technician didn’t even hold me afterwards. I feel dirty.”
Clearly, Mr. Alberda is a different sort of ballet tweeter — less self-promotional, more philosophical and always snappy: “I’ve heard the voice of God and he is an angry God with a Danish accent who doesn’t like my acting.”
The god in question was his boss, Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief. As Mr. Alberda explained, he wasn’t trying to be offensive. “It’s taking a difficult part of my day and making it slightly humorous,” he said.
For now at least, the gods haven’t tweeted.
Push to Eat Local Food Is Hampered by Shortage
By KATIE ZEZIMA
EAST MONTPELIER, Vt. — Erica Zimmerman and her husband spent months pasture-raising pigs on their farm here, but when the time came to take them to slaughter, an overbooked facility canceled their appointment.
With the herd in prime condition, and the couple lacking food and space to keep them, they frantically called slaughterhouses throughout the state. After several days they found an opening, but their experience highlights a growing problem for small farmers here and across the nation: too few slaughterhouses to meet the growing demand for locally raised meat.
In what could be a major setback for America’s local-food movement, championed by so-called locavores, independent farmers around the country say they are forced to make slaughter appointments before animals are born and to drive hundreds of miles to facilities, adding to their costs and causing stress to livestock.
As a result, they are scaling back on plans to expand their farms because local processors cannot handle any more animals.
“It’s pretty clear there needs to be attention paid to this,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in an interview. “Particularly in the Northeast, where there is indeed a backlog and lengthy wait for slaughter facilities.”
According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the number of slaughterhouses nationwide declined to 809 in 2008 from 1,211 in 1992, while the number of small farmers has increased by 108,000 in the past five years.
Fewer slaughterhouses to process local meat means less of it in butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants. Chefs throughout the Northeast are partnering with farms to add locally-raised meat to their menus, satisfying a customer demand. But it is not always easy.
“There are a lot of people out there who raise great animals for us to use, and they don’t have the opportunity to get them to us because the slaughterhouses are going away,” said Bill Telepan, chef and owner of Telepan, a high-end restaurant in New York.
Mr. Telepan’s veal supplier, Duane Merrill of Walton, N.Y., said there was no slaughterhouse in Delaware County, “and it’s the size of Rhode Island.” Mr. Merrill said he also had difficulty finding adequate transport for veal cattle down to New York City.
Brian Moyer, director of Rural Vermont, a nonprofit farm advocacy group, uses the image of an hourglass. “At the top of the hourglass we’ve got the farmers,” he said, “the bottom part is consumers and in the middle, what’s straining those grains of sand, is the infrastructure that’s lacking.”
Vermont, a locavore’s paradise, is seeing increased demand for the facilities from both small-scale meat producers and dairy farmers, who are facing some of the lowest milk prices in years and are trying to diversify with beef cattle.
“People are trying to figure out how to get a little more money out of their herds,” said Randy Quenneville, program chief for the Vermont meat inspection service. “And with the interest in stuff being local, wanting to know where their food is coming from and how it was raised, there are more people looking to do this.”
The state has seven operating slaughterhouses, down from around 25 in the mid-1980s, Mr. Quenneville said. One is a state-inspected facility, meaning that meat inspected there cannot be sold over state lines.
Two slaughterhouses recently closed, one destroyed by a fire and the other shuttered because of animal cruelty charges. The closed facility is expected to reopen soon.
Mr. Quenneville said a number of small, family-owned slaughterhouses started closing when strict federal rules regarding health control went into effect in 1999. Large corporations like Cargill also began to take over much of the nation’s meat market.
He and Mr. Vilsack are both urging farmers to band together and open local cooperatives or mobile slaughter facilities. The Agriculture Department is financing some mobile units and helping to build a regional facility near the Quad Cities in Illinois and Iowa. Helping small farmers, Mr. Vilsack said, will improve struggling rural economies.
“We recognize that the buy-local food movement is a significant economic driver in rural communities,” he said.
But building a regional facility is not always easy. As the locavore movement and self-butchering movements grow, so do cries of “Not in my backyard.”
Some residents in the quaint town of Woodstock, Vt., raised more than $1 million to buy a water buffalo farm whose owner wanted to convert it into a slaughterhouse. Some said the facility would have been too big for the town. Vince Galluccio, who helped organize opposition, was concerned that waste from the proposed plant’s feed lot and manure piles would run down a hill and into town. Now the owners plan to turn the property into a dairy farm and educational center.
Mr. Galluccio says the state needs more slaughterhouses and hopes to help build one that would be a better fit for the community. “We’re not against slaughterhouses,” Mr. Galluccio said. “But you wouldn’t open up a discotheque next to a church.”
Some would not open a “slaughterhouse” anywhere, preferring to discard the term in favor of the French “abattoir.” There are hurdles, whatever the name.
“You need skilled management and work force, a cooperative town, a good supply of water, a good way of getting rid of waste,” said Ed Maltby, a spokesman for Adams Farm, a slaughterhouse in Athol, Mass., that reopened in 2008 after a fire. “It’s not a problem that can be easily solved.”
The mobile units have been popular for poultry, and many farmers are trying to replicate the system with larger animals. Cheryl Ouellette, a farmer from Tacoma, Wash., known as “the pig lady,” helped secure a U.S.D.A.-certified mobile processing unit with $250,000 in local conservation money. It opened in August and expects to process 10 animals — mostly cows, pigs and sheep — each day.
In Washington, Ms. Ouellette said, some farmers were driving animals more than 300 miles to slaughter. “Farmers had problems, butchers couldn’t get U.S.D.A. carcasses to sell in meat cases, and chefs couldn’t get local meat,” she said. “Here there are no small processing facilities left for that food to get into commerce.”
The mobile unit goes from farm to farm with a U.S.D.A.-approved butcher and inspector aboard. It contains heaters, potable water and dumps wastewater at RV stations.
Ms. Zimmerman and her husband, Kevin McCollister, would like to see the rules relaxed on farm slaughter. Their slaughterhouse is an hour and a half away — long enough for the pigs to be stressed and not in optimal shape for processing, Ms. Zimmerman said.
“We have a product that people really wanted; we should have a system that would allow us to produce it as efficiently as possible,” Ms. Zimmerman said. “There’s not enough room for all the people like me.”
Here is a set of letters in response to an editorial, all about how to change our election system. I'm going to copy all of them.
Re “A Tea Party Without Nuts,” by Thomas L. Friedman (column, March 24):
It’s wonderful to see Mr. Friedman recommend “alternative voting,” which in this country is more commonly known as “instant runoff voting” or “ranked-choice” voting. Instant runoff voting is fairer than the “vote for one” election method, and as Mr. Friedman points out, ranked-choice ballots let voters more freely and fully express their preferences.
Instant runoff voting has already been adopted by several California cities. This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences helped publicize instant runoff voting by using it to award the best picture Oscar. The League of Women Voters of Los Angeles, of which I am president, is advocating instant runoff voting for government elections.
The league’s intent is not to push politics in any particular direction. Instant runoff voting simply gives people a clearer voice.
David A. Holtzman
Los Angeles, March 24, 2010
•
To the Editor:
Thomas L. Friedman’s column calls for breaking up “the oligopoly of our two-party system.” I couldn’t agree more, but I’d add two essential points.
In addition to instant runoff voting and nonpartisan redistricting, to give us more choice in our elections, we need a uniform, reasonable ballot access law to allow alternative candidacies (independents and third parties) to have a chance to present ideas to the American public by being on the ballot.
We also need nonpartisan administration of our elections to ensure that partisan election officials are not making discriminatory determinations of who gets on the ballot, who gets to vote, how voter rolls are purged and how votes are counted.
Theresa Amato
Oak Park, Ill., March 24, 2010
The writer, a public interest lawyer, is the author of “Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny” and was national campaign manager for Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004.
•
To the Editor:
Phil Keisling may be right that to avoid extremism we should scrap party primaries (“To Reduce Partisanship, Get Rid of Partisans,” Op-Ed, March 22), but the alternative system he recommends is even worse in that respect.
Mr. Keisling proposes that states should run open primaries in which the top two vote-getters go on to face each other in the general election. This is essentially the same method that France uses to elect presidents, only instead of a general election, the French hold a runoff between the two leading candidates from the first round.
In 2002, this system shocked the world by sending Jean-Marie Le Pen, an extreme right-wing candidate, to the runoff — a travesty because the left-center candidate, Lionel Jospin, would have easily defeated Mr. Le Pen in head-to-head competition, but was eliminated in the first round (he finished third to Mr. Le Pen and the right-center incumbent, Jacques Chirac).
Such an outcome was possible because the vote on the left was badly split among several popular candidates. Mr. Keisling’s proposal would permit similar travesties to occur in the United States.
A better approach would be to eliminate primaries altogether and open the general election to all candidates. But rather than confining citizens to vote for a single candidate, they would be given the opportunity to rank candidates in order of their preference. The winner would be the candidate who, according to the rankings, would beat all others in head-to-head contests.
Such a system would avoid the possibility of an extremist defeating a moderate when a large majority of voters prefer the moderate.
Eric S. Maskin
Princeton, N.J., March 22, 2010
The writer, a Nobel laureate in economics, is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study.
•
To the Editor:
Phil Keisling, a former Oregon secretary of state, sponsored a “top-two” primary measure that was rejected by almost a 2-to-1 margin by Oregon voters in 2008. It would have allowed parties to advance their candidates to the general election by using “ringers” to split the primary votes of the other parties.
Anyone could register with any party and appear on the primary ballot with that party’s label. For example, Republicans could recruit people to register and file as Democratic candidates and thereby split up the Democratic vote and stop any of them from finishing in the top two. Democrats could follow the same strategy.
Since 1979, in Louisiana, the only state where this system has operated for more than one election cycle, there have been 9, 9, 8, 12, 16, 11, 17 and 12 candidates on the primary ballot for governor alone. Fragmenting the vote has allowed extremist candidates (remember the white supremacist David Duke) to win the primary — the opposite of what Mr. Keisling desires.
Linda Williams
Portland, Ore., March 24, 2010
The writer is chairwoman of the Independent Party of Oregon.
•
To the Editor:
Phil Keisling is right that our primary system is broken, with plunging and unrepresentative turnout, but his prescription for a general election between the top two primary candidates would too often replicate the worst of modern politics. After eliminating most candidates in low-turnout primaries, we’d typically be left with two candidates representing only the major parties.
It would be better to allow all candidates on the November ballot and use instant runoff voting. Voters would have one vote but indicate backup choices. If their first choice runs weakly and is eliminated, their ballots are awarded to their next choice, requiring winners to reach out to backers of other candidates.
“Hurt Locker” won the best picture Oscar with this system, and voters handle it well in major elections in Minneapolis and San Francisco and in nations like Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Instant runoff voting can be particularly valuable in those state legislative districts where voters elect several representatives rather than just one. It could result in fairer representation of the left, center and right, providing more balance to policymaking.
Rob Richie
Executive Director, FairVote
Takoma Park, Md., March 23, 2010
And here's a short article about a charter school which used their cafeteria as a nightclub on weekends. There's a lot of anger about this, which I can see and largely agree with, but on the other hand it strikes me as an efficient use of space - I mean, if school isn't in session, it's not like it's corrupting children, is it?
Uproar Over School Cafeteria That Doubled as a Nightclub
By IAN URBINA
Books by day, beers by night — at least that is what school district officials in Philadelphia say was offered at a charter school there, where they say the school’s cafeteria was used weekends as a nightclub.
Fernando Gallard, a spokesman for the school district, said his office was investigating whether the school, the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School itself rented the cafeteria to the bar, known as Club Damani, or if the landlord did so. In the meantime, Mr. Gallard said, the city has asked the bar to cease operating or the school to move.
The school is home to roughly 500 students in kindergarten through eighth grade. When it opened in 1997, it was one of the first charter schools in the city. Now, there are 67 charter schools educating about 34,000 students, Mr. Gallard said.
Harambee officials did not respond to requests for comment. But they posted an open letter on the school’s Web site, saying reports about the school’s operating a bar, which first appeared over the weekend on a local television station, WPVI-TV, were “a biased depiction of the true success story that Harambee truly is.”
In the letter, school officials said Harambee excelled in building students’ self-worth, engaging parents and consistently producing students who exceed state standards in math and reading.
But the presence of the nightclub in the school building drew strong criticism.
“It is an outrage,” said State Senator Jeffrey E. Piccola, a Republican who heads the Education Committee and who has called for the school to close immediately and relocate its students.
Mr. Piccola said he planned to amend a charter school bill that he had already introduced to ban the consumption, purchase and sale of alcoholic beverages in a charter school.
“A bar should not be located anywhere near a school,” he said. “To think that a full bar is actually operating in a school is an outrageous affront to charter schools, young children, educators and taxpayers everywhere.”
City officials said Club Damani appeared to have a liquor license that expired in April 2008. The city controller, Alan Butkovitz, said the school was also being investigated for questionable spending.
And finally, an article about ballet and twitter
Ballet Stars Now Tweet as Well as Flutter
By GIA KOURLAS
In the rarefied world of ballet, where dancers are expected to speak with their bodies, sometimes it seems that aloofness is something to aspire to. Lately, though, the ribbons are loosening. Courtesy of Twitter, dancers are starting to make themselves heard. It isn’t always dainty.
“Hi, I’m Devin and I’m an MRI-aholic.”
“Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.”
“What you didn’t know- fell in my dress reh. Fri, tweaked my foot, and couldn’t finish! Thurs was the first time I did the whole ballet!”
“Don’t let me be fat.”
Tweets — like these by the New York City Ballet dancers Devin Alberda, Ashley Bouder, Kathryn Morgan and Mr. Alberda again — are starting to change the public face of ballet. They may never amass the number of followers of, say, the prolific tweeter Ashton Kutcher, but Twitter is making ballet dancers human. (A simple Google search of a name plus Twitter is generally all that is needed to find them.)
Kristin Sloan, a former City Ballet dancer who now runs her own video-production company, was a pioneer in this trend with her Web site, thewinger.com, which posts photos taken by dancers backstage, in rehearsal studios and on tour.
That in itself was quite a step for ballet, which has long been seen as elite, ethereal and something to keep under glass. Casting, until it is made official by companies, is a closely guarded process, and when a dancer — a star or otherwise — is off the stage, the reason rarely becomes public.
But when dancers are the ones documenting their own injuries — as Ms. Morgan did before her debut as Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty” last season — they hold the power. Ms. Morgan wasn’t sure she would be able to dance the role until two weeks before her first performance. She tweeted the cancellation of her appearance in another ballet and assured her followers that she was saving her injured foot — “super frustrated but it is for the best” — documenting the ailment with digital pictures.
Ms. Morgan said she saw no need to veil even the difficult parts of her career. “When I was younger, I would always want to know what dancers were doing,” she said in an interview. “I would have loved to have Twitter to read about what they were doing on a day-to-day basis rather than just in a performance. I thought this might be a really good way to put ballet out there.”
Ms. Bouder, a principal dancer at City Ballet, has a growing international presence that she credits in part to the connections she’s made through Twitter and Facebook. For her, social media are a vital way to reach past the orchestra pit. “We don’t have celebrity status like actors in magazines,” she said. “That’s the main reason people get interested in something — you get all the dirt, you get to know someone and you become attached, and in the dance world, we’re like a face, not a personality.”
With increasing frequency over the past few months, Ms. Bouder has shared aspects of her personal life — she recently moved to Chelsea, she has a dog named Scout, she is a friend of Rufus Wainwright — but her specialty is live tweets during intermission. “I thought it would be super interesting to see how someone would feel in the middle of a show,” she said.
And indeed, mid-ballet, she has tweeted assessments from her dressing room. “Odette act II was ok today, mild foot cramps though. Yuck yuck. Onto odile. Going for evil sexy tonight;).”
In between acts of “Sleeping Beauty” she tweeted: “Intermission=feet up. Rose adag good, solo eh, vision good. Awakening and act III next.” (Translation of bunhead slang: In “Swan Lake,” the ballerina performs the dual role of Odette and Odile; the Rose Adagio features challenging balances on point. “Vision” and “Awakening” are both scenes.)
Ms. Bouder’s technique is so strong that unless she fell on her behind — she is a daredevil and that has been known to happen — an audience member might have trouble grasping why she thought her solo was “eh.” Her tactic is not to make followers feel bad about what they can’t see, but to show them how to look more closely.
She also follows other dancers. “You know when you’re watching,” she said, “and you’re like, ‘Oh, that was so great,’ and then you read that they thought it was just O.K.? You think, I wonder what they didn’t like about it? Or if they didn’t think that was good, what do they look like when they really feel good?”
At City Ballet and American Ballet Theater, there are no policies on dancers’ participation on Twitter, though some choose to keep their Twitter accounts private. (At the moment the relationship between tech-savvy dancers and company administrators seems to be akin to a child showing a parent how to use e-mail.)
Katherine E. Brown, City Ballet’s executive director, said: “There’s something special about them talking about the company and the work they’re doing in their own words and giving that behind-the-scenes sort of feel to it. In a way, demystifying it a bit.”
But how far can the cloak slip? “We rely on them to use their good judgment and discretion,” Ms. Brown said. “We really don’t put parameters around it for them. This is really their personal thing.”
Daniil Simkin, a soloist at Ballet Theater who along with Maria Kochetkova of the San Francisco Ballet, was one of the first professional ballet dancers to use Twitter, said: “You cannot just go out there and say everything that comes into your mind. You have to filter it. I would say it’s a delicate balance. The more you give, the more people want.”
Mr. Simkin, who is as passionate about technology as he is about ballet, said he had been criticized by dancers and others who see his tweeting as an egocentric exercise. (He is, like the others, building an independent fan base.) “I understand that it can seem that way, but I am not doing it for myself,” he said. “Of course I benefit from it. But for me, it’s all about information and transparency. You see the things most clearly if there is no barrier and no filter, and that is the epitome of Twitter. It breaks it down: the ballet dancer is not that mystic creature anymore.”
Mr. Alberda’s tweets sum up that sentiment. His postings range from personal musings (“Sometimes Kate Bush is the only person who knows how I am feeling,” a reference to the English singer and songwriter) to the stress surrounding an injury. When a protrusion in his upper arm kept him off the stage last season, he tweeted: “I have ultrasound jelly all over my armpit. The ultrasound technician didn’t even hold me afterwards. I feel dirty.”
Clearly, Mr. Alberda is a different sort of ballet tweeter — less self-promotional, more philosophical and always snappy: “I’ve heard the voice of God and he is an angry God with a Danish accent who doesn’t like my acting.”
The god in question was his boss, Peter Martins, the company’s ballet master in chief. As Mr. Alberda explained, he wasn’t trying to be offensive. “It’s taking a difficult part of my day and making it slightly humorous,” he said.
For now at least, the gods haven’t tweeted.
