Right Wing Nation

There’s so much competition, the only way to do this fairly (and without hurting somebody’s feelings) is to give the big, red, rubber nose to several awardees.

This Clown Award is very special, because for the first time, we are awarding that ever so prized red, rubber nose to Brits! Give the UK a big hand, everybody!

The first goes to UK Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. The Iranians kidnap British soldiers then parade them on television, and she’s concerned, yes, very concerned, but not about them!

It was deplorable that the woman hostage should be shown smoking. This sends completely the wrong message to our young people.

That’s right. She presumably doesn’t care that they were kidnapped, or that they’re being paraded around on television. Oh no, she’s a drooling moonbat. She cares about important things–that the kidnapped soldier was seen smoking on television! You go, Patricia! Speak truth to power, girl!

The next red nose also goes to the UK, and requires a bit of explanation. Great Britain is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, and the tofu-brained Archbishop of York, well, I’ll let you read it:

The Archbishop of York has called on Prime Minister Tony Blair to formally apologise for Britain’s role in the slave trade as churches across the UK mark the 200th anniversary of its abolition today.

You have to step back and think about it for a minute before the breathtaking stupidity hits you. The UK is celebrating the abolition of the slave trade, and this moron (along with all the UK moonbats) want to use the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade to assuage their guilt. And that’s not all–the race pimps are demanding reparations!

And speaking of anniversaries, the 400th anniversary of the settling of Jamestown is coming up–but the multiculturalist, bed-wetting leftists are apparently controlling the events:

The disease known as moonbattery has so twisted us against ourselves that we can no longer look back on our own proud history without neurotic shame. Alternative festivities have had to be planned to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement this year, because official events will portray the spread of Western Civilization to North America as a tragedy.

The word “celebration” has been banned from use in taxpayer-funded Jamestown 2007 events in favor of the term “commemoration.” After all, as anti-Caucasian activist Mary Wade screeches, “You can’t celebrate an invasion.”

Exhibition galleries will glorify the Stone Age barbarians who preceded the colonists to Virginia, characterizing them as avatars of political correctness whose “advanced complex society” was “in harmony with the life that surrounds them.” Actually, these saintly savages murdered 400 colonists — men, women, and children — during the Jamestown Massacre on Good Friday in 1622.

There are, however, still sane human beings in Virginia:

Fortunately an alternative event called The Jamestown Quadricentennial: A Celebration of America’s Providential History will be taking place in the Jamestown/Williamsburg/Yorktown triangle on June 11–16. If we let moonbats take our history, it will be all the easier for them to take our future.

Congratulations to you all–with special congratulations to our first British winners of the Clown Award, coveted among moonbats and wackjobs everywhere! Wear your red, rubber noses with pride!

Previous Clown Award winners:

Frederica Wilson
Janet LaRue
Sheila Jackson-Lee
Madison, Wisconsin motorists

Don Surber:

Her protest is a symptom of something weird. Becoming as Michelle Malkin would say, “Unhinged” over being called a Democrat when you are, indeed, a Democrat is a sign that someone needs to step away from the computer and take the dog for a walk. A long one.

Or maybe dunk her head. Quite a few times.

Statistics are an invaluable tool for improving your teaching and making your class fairer for your students. With statistics, you can identify bad test questions and throw them out. You can identify questions many students should have gotten right but did not, and determine what went wrong. You can determine how well the assignments you give your students work, and you can determine how well you are preparing students for those state exams.

Let’s start with that 100-point test you just gave. Here are your descriptive stats:

Your mean is just a little low (ideally, it should be in the mid 70s), but not low enough for concern. Your mode (most frequently occurring score) is 100, and that’s always good, but your standard deviation is large: Each score on average varied 24.94 points from the mean, and that’s a lot of spread. Your kurtosis is a bit low, too, and along with the large standard deviation, it looks like you have a lot of scores in the tails. It’s not a bad exam from just looking at the descriptive stats, though you would have liked to have had more students clustering around the mean.

Next, look at the correlations between the individual questions and the total score (yes, I know all about collinearity, but this is justified). Let’s pick two questions to look at, Question 11 and Question 35, and run Spearman correlations between the questions and the Exam Score:

When we don’t see the effects of collinearity, there’s a problem. Note that the correlation coefficient between Question 11 and the Exam Score is 0.02! There is something bad wrong with that question. First, pull the exam and read the question; usually, when this happens, it’s pretty obvious what went wrong, often a typo or a badly worded question, but sometimes a question that goes beyond the scope of what you covered. Once in a great while there will be nothing wrong with the question. If that is the case, leave it in, but otherwise, delete it from the exam and the exam results. Note that Question 35 highly correlates with the Exam Score. Leave it in. Do this for all the questions, deleting any that have suspiciously low correlations after you read the question and determine if there is anything wrong with it.

As you’re doing this, you will usually notice that there are questions on topics you covered in class that students should have gotten right, but did not. This is a pedagogical red flag (when this happens with questions only from reading assignments, it indicates that students didn’t do the reading, and I find that these are the questions most students miss). How did you cover those topics? How can you change your presentation to make it clearer to your students? Go through all the questions fewer than half the students got correct, and run them through the same process. Compare the questions on similar topics. If students missed many of the questions on the same topic, that’s a sign that there’s a problem with the way you present the topic.

Use statistics to tell you how well you’re presenting the material.

You can also use statistics to determine how effective those assignments you give your students are. Let’s say you’ve just given your first 200-point exam, and before that, you had given several assignments (we’ll look at three). Your data look like this (the table represents part, not all, of your data):

Run Pearson correlations on the assignments and exam:

If your assignments are effective (and if they cover the same skills covered on the exam), you should get at least a 0.5 Pearson correlation coefficient between the assignments and the exam score. Assignments 1 and 2 correlate pretty highly, but note the third assignment. There is nearly no correlation between it and the exam score. This is a great big red flag, so compare the three assignments. It’s not enough just to ditch the third assignment and replace it with something else; you need to figure out what is wrong with the third assignment. What is different about the third one? How are the first two similar–and how is the third different from the first two? Whatever it is, it’s not working.

Note that you can use exactly the same method to determine how well your assignments and exams are teaching students what they need to know by running correlations on your students class scores and their standardized exam scores. You can also determine which teachers are better preparing their students. Here are two teachers’ 100-point final exam scores and the standardized exam scores (only part of the data are represented):

First, let’s look at the descriptive stats:

Both teachers’ scores are lower than the standardized exam scores, and this can be a good thing, provided that the class exams are covering the right material and preparing students for the standardized exam. Both have fairly high standard deviations, though the second teacher’s is higher than the first, both have a low kurtosis, usually indicating more data in the tails, and both are slightly left skewed, indicating more data in the left (low) tail than the right. Note that the second teacher’s minimum score is 3/100! From only looking at the descriptive stats, it looks like the second teacher probably has a more difficult class than the first. But difficulty isn’t the issue; how well the teacher’s class matches the state curriculum is the issue. To check that, we run correlations:

We see a vast difference between the two teachers. The first teacher’s scores correlate highly with the standardized exam score, at 0.75. This means his curriculum fairly closely matches what the state prescribes. But the second teacher’s curriculum doesn’t correlate highly with the state curriculum at all, at only 0.17. The second teacher should sit down with the first and compare what they do, to see where he is going astray from the curriculum.

Universities often give departmental exams to large undergraduate classes. The same method can be used if you teach one of those classes to see how well you are teaching what you’re supposed to be teaching.

The point I’m trying to make is that statistics are more than just a tool for research. Statistics are an important tool that tell you how well you’re teaching, how well your curriculum matches the states’, and how fair your tests are, and all by doing nothing more complicated than running descriptive stats and correlations. Statistics are the laser grips that allow you to shoot in the dark.

I’m going to barbecue today–pulled pork, of course (and nobody is going to be slinging her boobies around in anybody’s face). Here’s the menu:

Before you start, please read my article on smoking meat on your grill. There’s no point in doing this if you’re not going to smoke it.

Carolina Barbecue

We’ve been over this before. Keep the cloyingly sweet tomato sauce, thanks very much. Barbecue is all about hickory (or whatever wood you prefer; mesquite would be more traditional for Texas barbecue, though I used to get apple wood back in Indiana, and that was really good). And Kansas City barbecue? It’s an abomination. In my not so humble and extremely partisan opinion, the best barbecue is to be found in the Carolinas and Georgia, where they don’t sop it in heavy sauce.

As I said before, you can, of course, use this recipe to barbecue ribs or chicken. To barbecue chicken, either buy chickens split in halves (I haven’t seen any here). Or split chickens in half through the breastbone and backbone yourself. Or just split chickens through the breastbone, flip them over, and flatten them by pressing down on the breastbone and breaking it, Chinese style.

Rub:
2 T. paprika
2 T. salt
1 T. black pepper, ground
2 t. cayenne, ground

Sauce:
1 1/2 c. cider vinegar
1/2 c. bourbon, apple cider, or orange juice
1 c. water
2 T. molasses
2 T. salt
1 7-oz. can chipotles in adobo, finely chopped
1 T. red pepper flakes
1 T. black pepper
1 t. cayenne, ground
1 t. liquid smoke

1 5-6 lb. pork shoulder (or boston butt) roast, or spare ribs (you’re a fool if you buy baby back ribs) or 2 chickens, halved

If you’re doing pulled pork and the roast comes in one of those net things like they do here, cut it off. Those are there only so when it’s done, you can cut it into nice slices. Also, since it holds the roast together, cutting it off will help the smoke and flavor get into the roast better. Cut the damned thing off. Also, yes, you can use pork loin, but it’s not as good. Fresh ham is great, if you can find it, but a shoulder (boston butt) is the best for pulled pork. And baby back ribs? Why? They have comparatively no meat on them; they’re just fashionable because they’re small, and because they’re fashionable, they’re ridiculously expensive. Get spare ribs.

Mix all rub ingredients. Coat the meat with the rub — and I don’t mean sprinkle it on. I mean press it into the meat, one side at a time, leaving not the tiniest bit unexposed (it tends to be a messy process, but it’s easy to clean up), and keep pressing the dry rub into the meat until there is none left. Cover the meat with plastic wrap, place on a plate, and refrigerate 8 to 24 hours. (For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to proceed as if you’re barbecuing a pork roast for pulled pork. Substitute as appropriate in the directions.)

You’re going to cold smoke the pork. You’ll start the fire on one side of your grill, and cook the meat on the other side, not above the flame. You’ll need your favorite charcoal to start the fire, and enough wood chunks (hickory is traditional, but use your favorite — and chunks, not chips) to burn five or six hours — figure about an hour or a little over per pound. Buy one of the big bags.

Start the fire and let the coals burn down to white ash. Soak a bunch of wood chunks in water. When the coals are almost ready, drain the chunks thoroughly (be careful to drain them really thoroughly, or you’ll put out the fire).

On the other side of the grill, put an aluminum pie pan below the grill to catch juices, and add a cup of water, beer, or apple cider (the primary purpose is to keep the roast moist, but it also can add a subtle flavor). Unwrap the pork (do I really need to say that?) and place it on the grill above the pie pan. Place the soaked chunks on top of the coals and immediately close the cover of the grill.

Adjust the vents or the height of the grills (or however your grill works) to keep the inside temperature between 200 and 250. Check the temperature and the fire every 30 minutes. Keep chunks soaking, and when you add more chunks, add half soaked and half unsoaked chunks (so the moisture doesn’t kill the fire before the roast is done). Add more chunks as needed to keep the fire hot and smoking, and turn the roast every hour.

Two hours before the meat will be done (approximate this — an hour or so per pound), mix the sauce ingredients–adding the adobo from the chipotles (it’s got a great smoky flavor). Baste the roast with the sauce, turn it, and baste it again. Repeat every 30 minutes until the roast registers 185 on a meat thermometer. Remove the roast, and let it sit for at least 30 minutes (an hour is better).

Bring the remaining sauce to a boil (there won’t be much left), then reduce it by about half. With forks, pull the meat apart and put it in a bowl. Mix in just enough of the sauce to moisten it (serve the rest on the side so people can add more if they want), and serve with cole slaw, fried corn, and fried cinnamon apples.

Cole Slaw

I grew up with slaw made with cooked dressing. Then, I had this slaw at somebody’s house that was so good I couldn’t stop eating it, so I asked for the recipe. One package slaw mix (cabbage and carrots), one shredded onion, 1/2 cup (each_ mayonnaise and Marzetti’s slaw dressing, salt, pepper, and celery seed. I don’t know where the cooked slaw dressing recipe is. I haven’t seen it (or pined for it) since I discovered this. Quick. Easy. And really good.

Fried Cinnamon Apples

4 T. butter
4 Granny Smiths, Jonathans, or Winesaps
1/2 c. dark brown sugar
1 t. cinnamon
2 T. water, apple cider, orange juice, or bourbon

Core, peel, and slice apples. Heat a large skillet over medium heat and add the butter. When melted, add the apple slices, and stir thoroughly. Cook about five minutes, then turn the apples. Add the sugar, cinnamon, and water, and cook uncovered until apples are soft. Serve hot.

Fried Corn

I don’t know if this is an Ohio River Valley thing or not, but it’s something I grew up eating several times a week (except when corn was in season, then we ate corn on the cob), and never see anywhere. Go figure.

1 large package frozen corn
1 stick butter
salt and sugar (see below)

Melt the butter over medium heat in a skillet. Add the corn, turn the heat up to medium high, and cook it, stirring frequently, for about fifteen minutes. Salt to taste. Depending on the sweetness of the corn, you may want to add a pinch or two of sugar–contrary to popular belief, the sweetness of corn depends as much on how quickly it was picked, cut and frozen as it does the type of corn.

Coconut Cream Pie

Sure, I love chocolate. But my very favorite sweet flavor is coconut. I love coconut. I love coconut anything, even savory coconut. This, by the way, is my grandmother’s recipe.

1 pie shell, baked (see below)

Filling:

3/4 c. sugar
1/2 t. salt
3 T. cornstarch
2 T. flour
3 c. milk (or half-and-half, or 2:1 milk and cream, if you want it richer)
5 egg yolks, beaten
1 1/2 c. sweetened coconut

Meringue:
5 egg whites, room temperature
1/2 c. sugar
1/4 t. cream of tartar
1/2 c. sweetened coconut

Preheat the oven to 450.

First, the pie shell. If you use one of those supermarket pie shells you unroll, you’ll have to roll it out some more, because they contain too much fat and they shrink. Roll it out enough that you can lay it in the pan and crimp a substantial rim around the outside.

Mix the sugar, salt, cornstarch, and flour together in a heavy pan. Over medium heat, gradually blend in the milk. Cook, stirring constantly, until it thickens. Quickly beat a couple of spoonfuls of the hot filling into the egg yolks to temper them, then mix them into the filling, and cook, stirring constantly, for three minutes. Turn off the heat, add the coconut, and pour into the pie shell.

Make the meringue. Start beating the whites in a clean bowl. Add the cream of tartar, and beat until foamy. Start beating in the sugar, a couple of tablespoons at a time, and beat until the whites are stiff and glossy, but not dry. Plop the meringue all over the edges first, then the middle. Seal the meringue to the edges of the crust (or the meringue will weep), then smoosh it around with a spoon so it covers the whole pie. Use the spoon to swirl it all over, then sprinkle the coconut on top. Bake until the meringue is golden (watch it closely). Let the pie cool at least an hour before you eat it (or try, anyway).