Monthly Archives: August 2019

This guy was going somewhere in a hurry.

As a fencer and occasional referee, I’d be remiss to not note Corlis Hicks, fencing coach at Rochester STEM Academy, winning an award as 2018-19 USA Fencing High School Coach of the Year. From USA Fencing:

Rochester STEM Academy isn’t where one might traditionally expect to find high school fencing.

The Minnesota high school is more than 1,000 miles away from the East Coast hotbeds of varsity fencing, but Coach Corlis Hicks (Dover, Minn.) has built a state championship team of her first-time fencers at the tuition-free public charter school that serves primarily immigrant, minority and underprivileged students.

In just five years’ time, her students have gone from knowing nothing about the sport of fencing and not knowing how to stand in en garde to the women’s épée team winning the state championship in the 2018-19 season – the school’s first state title in any athletic activity.

“They’re reading who had fourth place and who had third place and I’m staring at my girls and they’re standing there, they’re relaxed, they’re getting their pictures taken, and it dawned on me, ‘oh my gosh, we’ve won first place,’” Hicks said. “The shock on all their faces followed by glee and the pride in what we’ve done … the huge smiles of we’ve arrived, we’ve proved something. And they’ve proved it to themselves, to the community that supports us … so for them, this was a validation that all their work, all their practice time, that they can be successful. Our school for the longest time, and continues to, battle the perception that we are the last-chance place for Somali kids and that’s not true. There’s a lot more going on here.”

Congratulations to Hicks!

From NCLEG.gov:

“A BILL TO BE ENTITLED AN ACT CONSISTENT WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THE CONFERENCE COMMITTEE SUBSTITUTE AND COMMITTEE REPORT FOR HOUSE BILL 966 OF THE 2019 REGULAR SESSION (1) APPROPRIATING FUNDS TO AWARD LEGISLATIVELY MANDATED SALARY INCREASES IN EACH YEAR OF THE 2019-2021 FISCAL BIENNIUM TO EMPLOYEES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT A FUNDING LEVEL SUPPORTING A ONE-HALF OF ONE PERCENT INCREASE AND TO EMPLOYEES OF THE COMMUNITY COLLEGE SYSTEM AT A FUNDING LEVEL SUPPORTING A ONE PERCENT INCREASE PURSUANT TO POLICIES ADOPTED BY THE BOARD OF GOVERNORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AND THE STATE BOARD OF COMMUNITY COLLEGES, RESPECTIVELY, AND ALSO APPROPRIATING FUNDS FOR FACULTY RETENTION AT THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA IN THE AMOUNT OF SIX MILLION DOLLARS FOR THE 2019-2020 FISCAL YEAR AND ELEVEN MILLION FOUR HUNDRED THIRTY-THREE THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED THIRTEEN DOLLARS FOR THE 2020-2021 FISCAL YEAR, (2) APPROPRIATING FUNDS FOR THE 2019-2020 FISCAL YEAR TO PROVIDE A ONE PERCENT SALARY INCREASE FOR NONCERTIFIED PUBLIC SCHOOL EMPLOYEES OR A PRORATED AMOUNT AS APPROPRIATE AND EXPRESSING THE INTENTION OF THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY TO APPROPRIATE FUNDS FOR THE 2020-2021 FISCAL YEAR TO PROVIDE A ONE PERCENT SALARY INCREASE FOR NONCERTIFIED PUBLIC SCHOOL EMPLOYEES OR A PRORATED AMOUNT AS APPROPRIATE, (3) REQUIRING THE DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION TO STUDY AND REPORT TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY ON SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGIST AND SCHOOL COUNSELOR POSITIONS, (4) SETTING THE EMPLOYER CONTRIBUTION RATES FOR RETIREMENT AND RELATED BENEFITS, (5) PROVIDING TWO ONE-TIME COST-OF-LIVING SUPPLEMENTS THAT ARE BOTH IN THE AMOUNT OF ONE-HALF OF ONE PERCENT OF A BENEFICIARY’S ANNUAL RETIREMENT ALLOWANCE, (6) APPROPRIATING FUNDS TO IMPLEMENT CONNER’S LAW, AND (7) AMENDING SPECIAL INSURANCE BENEFITS OFFERINGS. “

Why? The Edugram (via Notes From The Chalk Board) explains:

A little known rule in the NCGA is the amendment process to bills on the floor. See, most people assume that any relevant matter to a bill can be put forward as an amendment. And in most cases that’s true. So if we’re debating a bill about the speed limit and the bill says NC is going to lower the speed limit to 65mph statewide, I could make an amendment on floor to change it to 100mph statewide instead. But, I cannot run that amendment if it changes the title of the bill. So my amendment to change the statewide speed limit to 100mph is perfectly fine if the bill title is An Act to Set the Maximum Speed Limit in North Carolina. But that exact same amendment is out of order and cannot be considered if the title of the bill is An Act to Set the Maximum Speed Limit in North Carolina to 65mph.

And if you don’t want to defend your foolish attempts to exclude teachers from raises, then this is how you avoid having those debates.

North Carolina GOP legislators continue to disrespect the educational community. The GOP has been trying to override Democratic Governor Cooper’s veto of their budget, but apparently to no avail. Notes From The Chalkboard reports on the GOP’s alternative approach:

A new piecemeal strategy is emerging with state legislators introducing a series of “mini budget” bills which are essentially just individual pieces of the state budget Cooper vetoed two months ago.  On Friday the governor signed into law pay raises for state employees such as State Bureau of Investigations, Alcohol [sic] Law Enforcement and Highway Patrol.  The bill did not include pay raises for educators. Cooper said, “We appreciate our hardworking state employees across North Carolina. However, Republicans are insisting that teachers get a smaller pay raise than other state employees. This hurts our efforts to attract and keep highly qualified teachers in every classroom. I urge Republican legislators to pass a pay raise that doesn’t shortchange teachers.”

Attempts to amend these bills by Democrats in order to add pay raises for teachers didn’t even get a hearing.

Teachers unions do tend to vote for Democrats, so I wonder if this is all about the GOP punishing the unions for their political inclinations. It certainly doesn’t make sense for the GOP, or anyone who values education, to put in place a system which ensures superior teachers will move elsewhere, leaving only inexperienced and inferior teachers to teach in their schools.

And alienate the teachers and potentially everyone who knows a teacher.

An alternative theory would have to do with discrediting the public school system, since the GOP could deny that the teachers were inferior based on pay – it’s not like pointing at a tornado and saying it destroyed your home, there’s wiggle room when it comes to connecting teacher pay and educational outcomes.

But, in the end, the failure of for-profit schools makes this sort of motivation a mug’s game. Oddly enough, though, it is potentially becoming another holy tenet of the GOP, in its headlong rush to make government smaller in the belief that the free market can provide everything you need. As long-time readers of this blog know, I do not believe schooling fits the free market profile for legit markets.

The North Carolina GOP, in my view, is putting its long term survival at risk because they’re putting their children’s future at risk. If & when North Carolina parents come to understand that, the GOP may suddenly lose a helluva lot seats in Charlotte.

[H/T RWK]

“Oh, God, not another one!”

It’s a title that screams CHEEESE!, and that’s … misleading. Galaxy of Horrors (2017) is a member of an uncommon breed, the movie anthology. Its operational conceit is that a man on a spaceship being transported in a cryogenic pod is awakened early when the ship’s computer system detects damage. Amidst warnings of falling oxygen levels, our nameless victim lacks the proper password to be released from the pod, or even control anything at all.

Including the in-pod entertainment system. Because, perhaps, of damage to the computing system, he’s now subjected to eight short movies of science fiction horror, all while the computer continues to count-down the falling oxygen levels. His anxiety about his own situation amplifies the black humor of supplying a dying man with horror stories that are, themselves, rife with death.

WARNING: Spoiler alert. If you prefer to be surprised, let me just say that Galaxy of Horrors delivers some well-done stories in the SF Horror genre, and I say that as an audience member who doesn’t much care for horror, although I make exceptions for Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). If quick hit-and-run stories are to your taste, this may be for you.

Now, on to the spoilers.

The lead-off story, Eden, was the best. It’s the time of the apocalypse, and it’s brought on by the disastrous failure of the biosphere. Whether the latest American Civil War or climate change is causing it, now nearly everyone must use gas masks to breathe in this near-future scenario. We follow along with a father-son duo who are part of a cult bent on suicide, but not just personal suicide.

Suicide of the entire human race.

It’s tightly wound, as police and cult members die in gouts of gore, interspersed with the American President rehearsing a speech he will soon give announcing the failure of the cult. But he doesn’t really understand, as at one point he tells a captured cult member that the cult’s leader has been captured and killed, to which the cult member replies that was the intention.

A grim view of the future, it’s fast paced enough that the audience hasn’t the time to analyze for inconsistencies. You’re along for a bumpy, nasty ride that you can believe in.

Iris comes up next, and proves to be an insightful look into the dangers of having true Artificial Intelligence (AI) in your phone.

Especially if you’re a murderer.

Dave does murder-for-hire, and in order to get paid for his latest job, he must provide photographic evidence. Having hauled the body into the wilderness, he takes the picture and buries the body. It’s only at this point that Iris, the commercial AI in his phone, tells him the picture is corrupted.

Dave is understandably upset, and not in the mood to discuss his morality with his phone. Eventually, though, Dave ends up clinging to a rock face as Iris guides him down it to pick her up. You see, in a fit of pique, he flung her phone towards the cliff. It’s just too bad she directs one of his feet to an unstable rock formation.

This is an unassuming, well-thought out and executed tale of the implications of the future. While Iris, in this case, is an AI with a social conscience, it’s not hard to imagine an AI without one. A horrific thought indeed.

Flesh Computer investigates the issues of integrating computers and people, and how to treat the results. While technically well done, the plot lacked impact, as a couple of criminals invade the apartment of a man whose hobby is cybernetics. What will happen when he breaks into his own apartment and discovers what the men are doing? It wasn’t so much horrifying as just violent.

If you squeeze it just right, he gets a migraine.

Pathos is an exploration of the frenzied attempts to escape ennui. Our unnamed protagonist is fed through a tube in his head, which also provides management with control of their worker. The work he does is used to pay for that food, control, and for sensory services that substitute for real life. As we come for our visit, he’s attempting to select and pay for a sensory experience, tastes of which appear on the walls of his chamber amidst commercials for same. Meanwhile, management is noting that he’s not paid for nutrition, and they’re threatening to cut off his senses if he doesn’t pay up.

And he can’t remember his credit card number.

Its incoherency masked by its frenetic pacing, ultimately it’s not quite clear enough to clearly connect with the black hole at the center of every thinking person’s soul, that being the question of meaning. But it was quite entertaining as we tried to figure out what was going on.

Eveless concerns a world which has, without explanation, lost all of its women. What to do? Well, two men have found a way to make one of them pregnant, a discovery ambivalent at best since the birth doesn’t really go all that well. And the baby?

A male.

Oh, try, try again, in all of its horrific implications. It’s a slight tale, but not without its charms.

They Will All Die in Space deals with the awkward problem of a damaged colony ship, a lack of supplies, and a food larder. The food larder is, unfortunately, your frozen shipmates. Neatly plotted, information withheld until the proper time, it was a nice story that lets the horror creep up on you.

In Kingz, we discover the drug world isn’t run by bad people, but by something infinitely worse. As we watch the parasite that controls the drug lords move from host to host, it occurred to me that a medieval battle helm might be in order, but it turns out what you really need is a full suit of armor. As two drug runners battle to sell their white powder to a drug lord, one discovers his sister where she shouldn’t be, and then the antagonism of the drug lord gets out of hand. Soon, they meet up with the mother parasite, and that’s when things really go downhill, leaving a single survivor, and a question about parasites. Graphic and bloody, it goes for frenetic but doesn’t quite get there, but the plot is tight enough to carry the day.

Finally, Entity finishes up the anthology, a gossamer web of a story of a cosmonaut who sees her space station explode as she escapes. She floats through space until she encounters an Earth that proceeds to melt into something else. Puzzling and somewhat punchless, due to the lack of connection with the protagonist, trying to understand what is going on turned out to be a fruitless exercise. The sense of horror, beyond that of dying of a lack of air while drifting out of control in space, never quite materializes.

Technically speaking these are well made films; in the end, they succeed or fail dependent on their stories, which is how it should be. I thought some horrific and some not, but I do have to stress that I’m not a horror fan.

But if you are, you might want to check this anthology out.

President Trump’s inconsistency, also known as his tendency to speak out of both sides of his mouth, sometimes at the same time, can make his supporters look bad. Some of them don’t really care, because, being the President, he can, unethically and even illegally, direct to them certain benefits, be it money, position, promotion of ideologies, or even just prestige.

But then there’s Fox News. Their close association with the current President through news coverage, interviews, and even hiring of former Fox News personnel, has linked their fortunes – quite literally – to that of the President’s. Therefore, when one day he says one thing, the next the opposite, and the third day he descends into gibberish, this may reflect poorly on Fox News. They cannot filter everything Trump says, because many viewers will catch on and Trump won’t put up with it, so they have to ride the bucking horse.

Or … they can start easing down from animal. Here’s Fox News commentator and anchor Neil Cavuto reprimanding the President:

Check out Neil's latest Common Sense pic.twitter.com/Iwg9ZrxDeH

— Neil Cavuto (@TeamCavuto) August 29, 2019

If you don’t want to watch it, WaPo provides a transcript. Cavuto is suitably nasty here:

CAVUTO: You’re only human. I get that. Who likes to be corrected? But you are the president. It comes with the job, just like checking what you say and do comes with my job.

After all, I’m not the one who said tariffs are a wonderful thing; you are.

Just like I’m not the one who said Mexico would pay for the wall; you did.

Just like I’m not the one who claimed that Russia didn’t meddle in the 2016 election; you did.

Now, I’m sorry you don’t like these facts being brought up, but they are not fake because I did. What would be fake is if I never did, if I ignored all the times you said you loved your old Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, until you didn’t, had no plans to dump your homeland security secretary, until you did, called Chinese President Xi Jinping an “enemy” just last week and a great leader this week.

Sometimes, you don’t even wait that long. Last week, you expressed an appetite for background checks, before arguing just hours later our background checks are already strong.

These aren’t fake items. They’re real items, and you really said them, just like you never paid to silence a porn star, until it turns out you did, never ordered your former White House counsel Don McGahn to fire Bob Mueller, until we learn you tried.

Fake is when it’s wrong, Mr. President, not when it’s unpleasant, just like it isn’t and wasn’t fake when you said the “Access Hollywood” tape wasn’t real, when it was, or that you inherited a depression from Barack Obama, when you didn’t, or that you ripped quantitative easing when he was president, but are furious the Federal Reserve isn’t doing the same for you now that you’re president.

Perhaps Cavuto is simply unable to put up with the head conservative any longer. Cognitive dissonance must be exhausting for people who are not used to the constant mendacity, particularly when you’re accustomed to logic and rationality.

But it’s also possible that this is Fox News beginning to step away from that hand grenade with which they’ve been playing. They have their conservative judges from Trump, but they also saw the GOP shredded in the mid-terms, and so far the 2020 elections are not boding well. A number of Republicans have announced they will not be seeking re-election, including today’s announcement to that effect from Rep John Shimkus (R-IL). Add in the health-induced retirement of Senator Isakson (R-GA) and a plethora of Texas Republican Congressional Representatives who have announced their retirements, and Fox News executives may be reading the writing on the wall. They may feel, justifiably, that paying the cost in Trump cultists’ hatred now may be better than being associated with a President who fails in his re-election bid while losing control of the Senate, and falling deeper in the hole in the House.

Fox News knows they’re big, bad, and have an operation in place. No one on the conservative side of the spectrum is likely to challenge their primacy. However, if they lose their reputation, ill-earned as it is, of being “balanced and fair,” they will still retain their hold on their conservative audience, but many will leak away as they perceive the fallacy of that slogan in application to Fox News. For them, a bigger audience is a bigger profit, and sometimes you just have to step away from the buffet line so you can return to it later.

The next few weeks should prove interesting. Will Trump take the big, broad hint and at least seek consistency? If not, will Fox News continue to inch away?

If Sean Hannity is fired or otherwise demoted, we can assume the latter. If Cavuto is fired, maybe not.

Malediction:

Noted in this xkcd comic’s tool tip.

Just for completeness concerning Senator Isakson’s retirement, it appears that Governor Kemp will appoint a replacement until a special election in 2020.

And, in the category of Really Trying Hard To Be Appointed, Rep Doug Collins (R-GA), auditioning – or perhaps leaping onto the metaphorical casting couch – for the role of temporary Senator, had this to say:

Collins on Thursday called Isakson “a mentor” whom he has “followed … for years” and said “Georgia has suffered an amazing loss.

“Johnny Isakson is a man of stature. He is one of the politicians that have come forward and shown what leadership and statesmanship is like,” Collins said, adding: “We in Georgia stand on his shoulders because he has provided Republican leadership for so long.”

I can’t even say I’ve heard of Senator Isakson until he announced his sudden retirement. I do hope Collins didn’t hurt himself with that little trifling of praise.

Apparently I was just plain silly at the tractor display at the Fair.

These last ones look like bumpy rides.

While reading this editorial by John Blake of CNN I had a thought.

The National Rifle Association has actually grown weaker in part because of a “Trump slump.” Gun sales have slowed dramatically because no one is worried about Obama taking their guns anymore, and Trump is seen as gun-friendly. And the religious right has lost credibility because of white evangelical Christians’ steadfast support for Trump.

It occurred to me that, if the Democrats win the Presidency, we can expect right-wing media to swing into full fear mode, and then the left-wing will notice and spew out their views, and it’ll be cacophony all over again. Meanwhile, the gun companies will reap profits on the back of the fears of gun enthusiasts.

Just like the Obama years. He was unable to do anything because of a recalcitrant Congress, and yet the gun enthusiasts were goaded into spending to the point that ammunition became scarce.

If you think you want to make money off the gun enthusiasts, investing in gun stocks might not be a bad idea. Not that I’d do it myself, though. That’d be a bit of a moral lump to swallow.

It’s a fierce battle. Vehicles overturned and lost, tents disappearing in the middle of the night, fire threatening their very existence, warriors cursing as they struggle against the odds, and those damn fucking backers. I’ll tell you what, they need to be more free with the króna, eh?

Wrath of Gods (2006) is all about conflict, the conflict between man and man, man and Nature, man and his art, perhaps even man and Odin. This is a documentary about the making of the aforereviewed Beowulf and Grendel (2005), wherein they filmed in Iceland, a land by turns sunny, windy, snowy, and dangerous. Between the landscape, the water, and the people, the actual shooting of the movie makes for a hairy adventure, and the audience gets an interesting look behind the scenes of an indy pic, the stresses over finances, threatened walkouts, scheduling slowdowns, injuries, and general mayhem that might be unusual for most films.

It’s more gripping than the actual movie, because we know it’s real. Between weather that starts out all polite and descends into the depths, claiming vehicles, amity, and nearly the movie itself, and the people reacting to that stress, it hovered between interesting and fascinating.

If you have an interest in the making of movies, Wrath of Gods might be just your cup of tea. Very cold tea.

Senator Cory Book (D-NJ) is one of the Democrats who has thrown his hat into the Presidential ring. Politico is reporting that during his tenure of Newark, NJ, this happened:

A longtime friend and adviser to former Mayor Cory Booker allegedly directed the head of Newark’s troubled watershed to solicit political contributions from agency contractors in the late 2000s, according to documents reviewed by POLITICO.

The previously unreported allegations of unethical behavior, included in a 2015 FBI memo, represent the newest twist in a decade of political turmoil surrounding the city’s water system, and come as New Jersey’s largest city grapples with a massive lead contamination crisis that has forced tens of thousands of residents to rely on bottled water for drinking and cooking. The allegations were presented in April as evidence in a separate criminal case.

While Newark’s lead contamination crisis began in earnest under the city’s current mayor, Ras Baraka, Booker — New Jersey’s junior senator who is seeking the Democratic nomination for president — presided over major administrative problems within the city’s water system that were further exacerbated by his appointees, according to interviews and the documents reviewed by POLITICO.

There are, of course, denials by those involved, disputes about the accuser being someone with a gambling addiction, etc. Politico emphasizes Booker does not appear to be involved.

However, if he appointed those in trouble, it at least points to a weakness in selecting leaders. If he hands out technical leadership positions to political allies as rewards, well, that strikes me as incompetent. Consider this from the local Sierra Club:

“When you turn your water company and your water corporation into a dumping ground for political hacks, this is what happens,” said Jeff Tittel, senior chapter director of New Jersey’s Sierra Club. “This is the kind of stuff that’s gone on there for far too long. And the outcome is we’re poisoning our children.”

Under Booker, the watershed corporation’s executive director was Linda Watkins-Brashear, a one-time campaign volunteerwho pleaded guilty in late 2015 to accepting nearly $1 million in bribes and kickbacks from contractors as well as an employee of the corporation. She was sentenced in 2017 to eight years in federal prison. Eight other officials were charged in the scandal.

The watershed’s corporate counsel at the time was Elnardo Webster, a friend and former law firm colleague of Booker’s as well as the treasurer and finance chairman to his mayoral campaigns.

Neither Booker nor Webster was charged with wrongdoing, but the unseemly tangle of patronage hires and kickbacks at an agency responsible for maintaining safe drinking water for Newark was a stain on Booker’s tenure as mayor, which ran from 2006 to 2013.

So far, Booker has not begun climbing the polls, so it seems more likely he’ll be following Gillibrand off the nomination stage. But it’s a real lesson that who you pick for important agencies had better be qualified, and not just be someone you owe a favor. Does Booker understand that?

Evidently my camera was out of control at the fair:

A trifle cladistic, wouldn’t you say? Maybe it’s an incomplete clade, but there’s definitely an ancestor / descendant thing going on here.

Please don’t make love to it.

I read Beowulf once, but I don’t really recall it, so the fidelity of Beowulf and Grendel (2005) to the original is quite beyond me, and perhaps that is just as well, as I thought Beowulf fairly boring.

This version, too, felt more like a wave and a tap on the head to a story, as segues are nearly non-existent, as is explanation or much character development. We might say that Beowulf and his men have been called in as an exterminator of the troll known as Grendel. The troll, motivated by the murder of his father years before, is focused on vengeance upon those who ran his father off a cliff. In fact, he’s so motivated that he won’t battle with Beowulf and his men until they engage in their own bit of mischief, desecrating the remains of the troll’s father.

Along the way we have an outcast witch, a great deal of rough swearing, something swimming around in the harbor, long soulful looks from Beowulf, and some beautiful shots of the wild lands of the Danes. But a sense of urgency never descends on the audience, even in the midst of a veritable slaughter of villagers. At best, it never quite reaches the point where we turned it off, but rather we watched just to see where it might go next.

That didn’t turn out to be all that interesting.

Senator Johnny Isakson (R-GA) is resigning at the end of the year due to health concerns, and I wish him all the best.

That said, it’s worth analyzing how this affects the national political scene. Immediately following his resignation will come, I’ll guess, an appointment, which will no doubt be of a Republican, but that will be followed by a special election, the timing of which I’m unsure.

Isakson is, I’d say, mediocre in terms of loyalty to President Trump, having a current TrumpScore of 91.7%. It’s safe to assume his appointed successor will be no different.

But his elected successor? Isakson won his last election in 2016, Fellow Georgia Senator Perdue (R) ran in 2014, so the temper of Georgia voters statewide isn’t all that well known. For what it’s worth, Isakson won his last race by 12+% points, but at the time the Republicans were riding relatively high. The anger at Trump has been building ever since, and if Isakson’s seat comes up for election when the economy is in recession, the Democrats may find themselves handed a silver platter with a Senate seat on it. After all, Democrat Doug Jones won a Senate seat in 2017 in a special election in neighboring Alabama.

The Democrats would be well-served to recruit a strong candidate. For example, Georgia is the home of Stacey Abrams (D), who lost the race for Governor by a little over 2 points to the sitting Secretary of State, a situation many called a conflict of interest. She is intelligent, widely read, and articulate, If she chooses to run for the Senate, she might just win.

This may be the first big opportunity for the Democrats. Or at least a hurdle.

Megan McArdle isn’t entirely sure she likes the Business Roundtable vow to put investors not-first: In fact, she’s going to try to defend the investor-first approach:

Or, rather, let me highlight the answer that Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, offered in the New York Times in 1970, when corporate social responsibility was much in vogue.

“In a free-enterprise, private-property system,” Friedman argued, “a corporate executive is an employe [sic] of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to the basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom.”

This entire question has been bothering me, off and on, since I wrote that last post, because it seemed to be an unresolved question. But I think I’ve resolved the conundrum, at least to my satisfaction.

Friedman’s point implicitly places on the investors the kudos for providing the means for starting a business, and from that he concludes, implicitly, that without the investors, the corporate concern would not exist. He’s right, this is true. And, at least judging from what McArdle quotes, that’s where he stops.

If we’re going to make this a question of enablement, then we, and Friedman, must go the entire way and assign credit where credit is due. That is to say, are the investors the only entity responsible for the existence of the corporation?

No.

A free market corporation, in an ideal world, must have at least two more credible entities, two entities which will be familiar to those who read the Business Roundtable declaration: Customers and employees. If you don’t have someone to purchase your widgets, services, or whatever you’re selling, then, as the buggy whip makers will tell you, your company has no future. If you don’t have employees, those folks who make the widgets or provide the services which are desired by the customers, once again, you have no business.

None of this is new, of course. Now we call them stakeholders. But the simple fact of the matter is that these two other entities are just as important as investors in keeping the corporation alive and productive. It is, metaphorically speaking, a three-legged stool; mistreat one and you imperil the corporation. So when the Council of Institutional Investors becomes alarmed that investors may lose their current primacy, perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt.

McArdle also suggests that there’s a difference between social responsibility and the Business Roundtable declaration:

I’m not talking about the kind of “corporate social responsibility” that ultimately benefits shareholders. Treating employees decently often means lower turnover and higher profits; investing in community schools might lead to a better-trained workforce; and strategically supporting social causes might be good public relations. But if those steps benefit shareholders, moralistic appeals aren’t necessary to justify them, nor are pledges to ensure that the CEOs follow through.

First, I’m having trouble seeing any difference. Improving the world around oneself, whether or not you’re a corporate entity, will redound to your benefit. But let’s assume I lack imagination and McArdle is correct that there is a difference. She still has a problem in that she’s assuming the recognition of corporate social responsibility is a simple matter. It’s not. The history of the private sector is replete with examples of poor recognition of corporate social responsibility, from strike-breaking to pollution.

I think she commits a sin that I would ordinarily approve: she tries to partition these responsibilities into those for the private sector and those for the public sector:

Unlike corporate social responsibility efforts, the tax code actually targets the affluent, rather than anyone who happens to own shares in a company — which, if you have a pension, or a 401(k), or a life insurance policy, includes you. Also, unlike corporate social responsibility initiatives, redistribution through the tax code is democratically accountable.

This results in sins being committed by those in charge, investors and their representatives, senior management, and having to be cleaned up, rather than being prevented. No, as much as I like to divide responsibilities and assign them to different entities, there is an overwhelming benefit to corporate C-suiters thinking and acting on the realization that investors are not the only group critical to a company’s survival. Think of the Lehmann Bros disaster. I’ll quote myself to save the reader the trouble of digging through that rather large post:

A few years after the Great Recession that started in 2008, I read an article on the demise of Lehman Brothers. For younger readers and those who don’t recall, Lehman Brothers was more than just an obscure name appearing in Despicable Me (2010), it was one of the monster investment banks of Wall Street. One might write, Lehman Brothers (1850-2008), because it was the distressed institution that was not rescued by either the Bush or Obama Administrations during the Great Recession. The article, which might have been written by Morgan Housel of The Motley Fool, but I cannot recall with certainty, purported to recount one of the last meetings Lehman Brothers exec had with investors, and the theme of the meeting was how Lehman Brothers was dedicated to making profits for those investors.

Sounds harmless, even typical, doesn’t it? Yet, a few days later Lehman Brothers was dead, the victim of its own mad financial machinations, ripped to pieces when those knotted messes were ripped apart by the inertia of a falling market and a world wide recession.

I would contend, as did the author of that article, that it was a primary symptom of a foundational illness that ultimately doomed Lehman Brothers. Look, from a societal point of view, companies do not exist to make money. I know the general wisdom of the private sector would differ with me, but if you think it through, it becomes obviously right. The proper formulation is, Companies provide specific services thought to be useful to their consumers, and the best ones are profitable because they have the right combination of efficiency and service content.

They forgot about their customers and their stool fell over. No more Lehman Brothers. It’s a lesson writ large, and one worth learning. No doubt top execs will continue to ignore it and still make their companies work, but I have to wonder how much better their companies would have done if they had been trying to properly balance all three groups, rather than just satisfying their investors.

One or two more tractors from the Minnesota State Fair:

Dr. Austin Frakt and Gilbert Benevidez, MPH, present their research on the intersection of economics and medicine, namely prices, in an article at news@JAMA:

Price transparency has been touted as a way to reduce health care spending, but there’s one big problem: it has rarely worked. That may have more to do with how it has been implemented in the past rather than a fundamental problem with the concept itself.

The idea behind price transparency is that informed consumers can price shop for medical services that have widely varying prices, like elective surgeries or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The concept is very popular, both in the United States and abroad.

But do they work?

A study published in the American Journal of Managed Care surveyed more than 140 million health plan members across 31 different commercial plans who had access to price transparency tools. Only 2% used them. Many members did not know the tools existed at all.

Sunita Desai, PhD, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School in Boston set out to measure the association between employer-provided price information and outpatient spending. In a 2016 article in JAMA, they reported that they found that employees rarely used the information, nor was it associated with lower spending. Aetna offers a website with real-time, personalized price estimates that is used by only 3.5% of its members. Perhaps these tools can be effective in reducing health care spending, but evidence shows that low overall use is a significant bottleneck to achieving that goal.

One can argue, however, that the tools are not good enough, or that augmentation is required. That gets us to the meat:

… a recent article in the American Journal of Health Economics by Christopher Whaley, PhD, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, examined pairing price transparency with reference pricing for Safeway employees. Here’s how it works: payers set a maximum reimbursement threshold for shoppable health care services, which is the reference price. Patients who use providers with prices above the reference price pay the difference out of pocket. Under properly designed programs, members are given price transparency tools that help them find lower-priced care.

The study watched for employee health care behavior changes over 2 years, looking at laboratory and imaging test prices. After the first year, during which only price transparency tools were offered, the authors confirmed the findings of previous studies: health plan members rarely shopped.

But when the reference pricing information was added in the second year things changed. Shopping picked up and prices decreased. Specifically, laboratory test prices dropped 27% and imaging test prices decreased 13%. The authors concluded that price tools will capture the attention of consumers only if the consumers have strong financial incentives to shop in the first place.

But disappointingly they mention, but do not expand, on one of the most important, but difficult to measure, obstacles to lowering health costs in a free market setting:

… quality is crucial in health care—where bad quality could cause serious harm. Although quality is important for other products, bad quality is typically just an inconvenience. But judging the quality of care is much harder than sizing up other products or services. Because of this, patients may use price as a proxy, assuming higher prices mean better quality. Consequently, even if patients have price information, they may not choose the lowest price available.

And it’s difficult to get quality information on doctors and facilities. Who wants to go to a second-rate facility when a mistake can worsen your condition, or even kill you^[1]? But finding that information out can be difficult, and when it’s a medical emergency, between the time requirements of the situation and the aggregation of disparate medical groups, the entire concept of price shopping recedes into irrelevancy.

The quality issue implicitly brings another issue to the fore: medicine is not a commodity. Price shopping is at its best in commodity situations, which can exist either for an entire market, or within a price point of a market.

But that doesn’t apply when your life is on the line.

I’m not saying there are bad doctors and good doctors, or bad hospitals and good hospitals. Although there are. I’m just saying that experienced doctors may bring more tools to a problem than inexperienced doctors, while fresh out of school doctors may be more informed on the tools and medicines becoming generally available than the experienced doctors, and they’re all working in one of the most complex subjects humanity has ever studied: biology.

My gut feeling is that studies such as this one are somewhat beside the point, as interesting as reference prices and that sort of thing may be.

¹ Known as iatrogenic medicine.

Kevin Drum expresses frustration that people just don’t get how hard it will be to even start fighting climate change – and our own natures:

Human beings aren’t wired to [make the changes necessary to reduce climate change]. You aren’t doing it. I’m not doing it. Europeans aren’t doing it. No one is doing it. We’re willing to make modest changes here and there, but dramatic changes? The kind that seriously bite into our incomes and our way of life? Nope.

When I mention this to people, a common reaction is disbelief. You really think people will let the planet burn before they’ll give up their cars? That’s exactly what I think, because it’s happened many times before. Over and over, human civilizations have destroyed their environments because no one was willing to give up their piece of it. They knew exactly what they were doing but still couldn’t stop. They have overfished, overgrazed, overhunted, overmined, and overpolluted. They have literally destroyed their own lifeblood rather than make even modest changes to their lifestyles.

Anybody who’s interested in constructing a realistic plan to fight climate change has to accept this. It’s the the single biggest obstacle in our way, and it can’t be wished away or talked away. As frustrating as it is, it has to be addressed on its own terms. Anyone not willing to do this simply because they don’t like it needs a very deep gut check about what they really think is important.

To amplify, this is the evolutionary drive humans, as well as most live entities, are burdened with: the drive to increase our numbers. Historically, one group could overwhelm another through sheer numbers; nowadays, technology enables weapons that lessens that advantage, but evolution drives us on.

In addition, we’re seeing what economists call the tragedy of the commons, and it’s the greatest commons of all – the biosphere. We’re savagely using it for our individual and group purposes, unable to conceptualize the idea that the world as a whole is so overpopulated that the biosphere itself is affected on a global scale.

But we cannot directly perceive it, so it lacks urgency; and, meanwhile, the evolutionary drumbeat goes on: the other groups are growing bigger, we must too!

Population biologists often talk about how different species populations change through time in response to predator or prey populations, and I’m sure they also study how subgroups within certain species also see their populations vary through time in relation to each others’ aggressions and misfortunes.

If we cannot find our way out of this conundrum, humanity’s going to see a drop in population that will be very unpleasant.

The Color Out Of Space (2010) is a truly puzzling creature. On the one hand, it’s quite well made, featuring excellent and cinematography, and while the pacing could have been improved, it wasn’t awful.

On the other hand, the story falls into the What The Hell? category. My Arts Editor may have summed it up best: aliens fly down from outer space, dine on some human, regenerate, and leave.

Yeah, that’s about as good as it gets. Really.

Based on the story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft, it didn’t try to help the audience much, and in a way that sort of aesthetic decision, similar to that of Arrival (2016), is admirable. It forces the mind open in order to try to understand just what’s going on, rather than providing a framework from which to watch the story, an inevitable part of most stories, and yet an element that must be handled with delicacy.

But this movie fails to hook the audience early, and rather than flopping around in the storytellers boat, we speed away from the story, little understand, and less caring.

And a few more tractors from the Minnesota State Fair:

Nope, not that Joe Walsh.

I’ve always enjoyed that song, though.

Former Rep Joe Walsh (R-IL) has declared for the GOP Presidential nomination:

Conservative radio host and former Illinois US Rep. Joe Walsh will challenge President Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020, he announced Sunday.

“I’m going to run for president,” Walsh said on ABC’s “This Week,” also telling host George Stephanopoulos, “I’m going to do whatever I can. I don’t want him (Trump) to win.”

Walsh had said Thursday that he was “strongly, strongly considering” entering the race.

“I’m not trying to be cute or coy. I’ve told you before — if somebody’s going to get in there and go after him … it’s got to be done soon,” Walsh told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day.” “You’re running out of time. But more importantly, these are not conventional times. Look at the guy in the White House. These are urgent times.”

Walsh had previously called for a Republican to challenge the President, calling him an “unfit con man” who is “bad for the country” earlier this month. [CNN]

It’s difficult imagining anyone mounting a serious challenge in the Republican primary to President Trump, but it’s still interesting to look at Walsh and try to understand the chemistry he’s hoping to build. WaPo’s Jennifer Rubin provides an very short overview:

Joe Walsh, the former Illinois congressman turned radio talk show host, said some pretty outrageous things in his day. But unlike those who have admitted no wrong and have drunk the Trump Kool-Aid, Walsh has apologized. “On more than one occasion, I questioned [President Barack] Obama’s truthfulness about his religion,” he wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “At times, I expressed hate for my political opponents. We now see where this can lead. There’s no place in our politics for personal attacks like that, and I regret making them.”

On The Issues has this graphical representation of Walsh’s ideological position:

To the right, for your reference, is the On The Issues graphical summation of President Trump. Based solely on these measurements, it appears there’s little to differentiate the two. Of course, there’s far more to winning a nomination than ideological position, and while I favor such mundane observations as competency and sobriety, many folks on both right and left are susceptible to charisma. While I don’t personally see it, the energy and size of President Trump’s base indicates that he has a charisma that appeals to, and, in my view, overwhelms the rational faculties of a sizable percentage of the American electorate.

Can Walsh crack that charisma? I’m dubious. Certainly, he’ll attract a few Never Trumpers, but that won’t be enough. He needs to evaporate much of the 80+% of Republicans who approve of Trump. Simply shouting every day of the campaign that Trump is a “con man,” to use his own words, an incompetent, a fool who is endangering the country, is in itself a foolish approach. Trumpists will simply cover their ears and proclaim to each other that Walsh was never, as he admits, a fellow Trumpist, merely an anti-Clinton voter. Such will Walsh be dismissed, even if he manages to enlist Fox News on his side.

Walsh would need to adopt a subtle approach designed to show how Trump is basically someone whose loyalties are fickle, not least to the principles on which this country was founded and nominally operates, that he is inconstant, exclusively self-interested, and incapable of wise, deliberate governance. There are numerous examples of these points from which Walsh can select. By asking his base why they adhere to someone who betrays their own principles constantly, he may be able to engender some cracks in that foundation.

But will he? I guess we’ll find out. Walsh is not the first challenger to Trump; former Governor William Weld of Massachusetts, an old-line Republican and former candidate for Vice President from the Libertarian Party, has also entered the field. I have not discussed him. But it shows there’s a little life in the Republican Party that worries about the traditional values of a President, and how Trump is a miserable failure when it comes to those values.

Remember that WaPo piece in which a couple of high ranking Log Cabin members endorsed President Trump? It appears that other Log Cabin members simply couldn’t abide such a terribly reasoned endorsement:

Robert Turner, the former president of the D.C. chapter of the national LGBT group Log Cabin Republicans, announced in a Facebook message on Aug. 15 that he has withdrawn his membership in the organization after it announced in an op-ed column in the Washington Post that it endorsed President Donald Trump for re-election in 2020.

“It saddens me greatly to say that today, I am ending my association with Log Cabin Republicans, an organization I’ve been heavily involved with for the last decade – including serving as president of the D.C. chapter for three years,” Turner said in his Facebook post. …

“But for me,” Turner continued, “there’s no more fight left. The national board’s endorsement of Trump, and their subsequent and hollow WaPo op-ed, is a step too far. And this leaves me sad.” [Washington Blade]

It makes me wonder just how much of clinging to power syndrome motivated that ill-considered endorsement. Granted, being a conservative LGBTQ+ person is a bit of a solitary path to walk, although Andrew Sullivan has done an admirable job of it for 20+ (or is it 30+ years, Andrew?), but allowing one’s emotions to dictate one’s moral choices is a dangerous move to make. People lose respect for you.

Like Mr. Turner basically just said.

Amidst the wailing of economists, Democrats, and farmers concerning the incompetent, amateur maneuverings of President “Trade wars are easy to win!” Trump, it’s worth taking a step back and considering that, despite the indisputable evidence that Trump is flailing and possibly in the grip of dementia, he may be on the right side of history. Here’s David Von Drehle in WaPo:

I’m talking about soft power — the use of international organizations, moral suasion, foreign aid, trade, compromise, alliances and salesmanship to achieve a nation’s aims. Brutally adept with hard power — from tanks and machine guns to concentration camps and starvation — the Chinese Communist Party has little experience with soft power. Xi is getting a crash course, with one test after another.

Hong Kong is the most immediate. More than 20 years after the former British colony was returned to Chinese sovereignty, the proud and wealthy city refuses to submit to Communist control. A law that would allow Beijing authorities to extradite dissidents from Hong Kong provoked a backlash of protest that grows larger with each effort to quell it. Close to 2 million people, according to organizers, participated in a peaceful demonstration on Sunday — arguably the biggest challenge to party authority since the 1989 student protest in Beijing, which ended in a massacre.

China is by no stretch of the imagination a democracy. The Communist Party has power and, constitutionally, will not peacefully relinquish it. The Army has been and could easily once again be used to coerce citizens into doing Communist Party bidding, and minorities such as the Uighurs face cultural and ethnic extinction.

So limiting trade with China is not necessarily a bad thing, no matter what free trade advocates and libertarians may think. Of course, there are arguments on the other side, that making China dependent on trade may limit their aggression. It’s a fine and valid argument to have.

I have little use for Trump’s methods, his claims of authority to order companies out of China, for his entire China debacle dating right back to before he was inaugurated. But with concerns about Chinese power combined with Chinese lack of scruples, and credible reports of illicit technology transfers from the West to China, it’s worth contemplating that Trump has the right idea.

He’s just a flaming idiot about how he implements it. He may end up getting pitchforked by American farmers. Which would not be a bad thing.