Monthly Archives: October 2025

Governor Landry (R) of Louisiana is simpering towards the President, I fear. Here’s the official announcement:

Tonight, on the Sean Hannity show, Governor Jeff Landry announced that he submitted a request for federal assistance (RFA) to Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, to activate up to 1,000 Louisiana National Guard personnel. The Guard will assist in addressing ongoing public safety concerns throughout the State. Letter attached.

This request builds on the proven success of Title 32 deployments in Washington D.C. and Tennessee, providing critical support for events like the Bayou Classic, Sugar Bowl, and Mardi Gras. Past Louisiana National Guard missions—including Hurricane Ida (2021), Hurricane Francine (2024), the January 1st Terrorist Attack, Super Bowl LIX, and Mardi Gras (2025)—cut crime by 50% in early 2025.

“Since taking office, we have made real progress in driving down crime across Louisiana — but the job is far from finished. Federal partnerships in our toughest cities have worked, and now, with the support of President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, we are taking the next step by bringing in the National Guard. This mission is about saving lives and protecting families. To the criminals terrorizing our communities: your time is up. Law and order are back in Louisiana,” said Gov. Landry.

How much do they need National Guard, which Landry could call up without the permission of his Prince?

But crime in some of the state’s biggest cities has actually decreased recently, with New Orleans, seeing a particularly steep drop in 2025 that has put it on pace to have its lowest number of killings in more than five decades. [AP]

Yeah, this guy has no pride, no self-sufficiency. Just brown-nosing a President who’d accuse him of encouraging crime if he were a Democrat, despite the drop in crime statistics. Instead, peace descends upon the State – hurrah for him! – and he throws away his pride in his eagerness to please the Prince. The President. Whatever.

Quite a shame.

Sundowning:

Sundowning is increased confusion that people living with Alzheimer’s and dementia may experience from dusk through night. Also called “sundowner’s syndrome,” it is not a disease but a set of symptoms or dementia-related behaviors that may include difficulty sleeping, anxiety, agitation, hallucinations, pacing and disorientation. Although the exact cause is unknown, sundowning may occur due to disease progression and changes in the brain. [Alzheimer’s Association]

Noted in the title of this Daily Kos post, “CNN interviews Trump by text message because he(sic) says so. (or was he sundowning?)“, by annieli.

The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice (2008) is the third in the Librarian series of stories concerning a secret library, or museum collection, of insanely dangerous artifacts, and the guy in charge of it. Shouldn’t he be known as the Curator? The Director? The Too-Smart Guy?

This time around we’re visiting charming New Orleans, in search of the purpose of life. This appears to be, in the Librarian’s case, being the Librarian and not getting the girl.

And searching for the chalice of Judas Iscariot, because drinking from it restores the humanity of, ah, vampires. Wait, why does the museum need it? Anyways, the Librarian’s girl is a vampire who is desperate to be good, and after 400 years of life, she’s a bit tired, although it’s not explained why she doesn’t just take an afternoon walk and dissolve in a whirlwind of glowing particles.

So there’s plenty of adventure, but the theme, which seems to be Fulfill your destiny! is dubious. If the purpose of life is to fulfill your destiny, then why bother? It all becomes a deterministic and muddled mess, devaluing free will and making watching the movie a depressing exercise in some philosopher’s sordid assertions concerning existence. Unlike, say, the moral conundrums of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

This story is sort of fun, if you’re not thinking about it too much, but you won’t remember it the next day. It asks a question about life, but it’s not an intriguing, challenging answer.

And if the purpose of life is to devote ourselves to Bo-bo-bo-ob Newhart….

This is actually a bit late – Nov 18 of 2024 – but the nomination has a nasty observation at the end.

Oklahoma’s superintendent of public education can’t require schools to show students a video of him praying for Donald Trump and condemning teachers’ unions, the state attorney general’s office said.

The state superintendent, Ryan Walters, emailed the bizarre video to school district superintendents last week, saying his office was requiring the video be shown to students and shared with parents, as well. Talk about self-absorption. [MSNBC, Ja’han Jones]

This is along with various abrogations of the rule against endorsement of religion, and an ideological test for incoming teachers. Getting the President’s attention requires non-stop work, y’all.

How did all that work out for Mr Walters? Oklahoma was rated in education … 50th out of 51st, with New Mexico the only State/entity ranked worse. Significantly, the excuses began immediately from Mr Walters (same article from KOCO News):

“A lot of these are kind of ridiculous,” Walters said. “They love to take into account how much money we put into education. That’s never been an evaluation of mine of what makes a good education system — it’s outcomes.”

Sure, if the rating was on ideology then he’d be doing great. But teaching ideology in school only sounds good until you consider an ideology you don’t like. Then, like forbidding endorsements, implicit and explicit, of sects by government, it becomes sensible not to teach ideologies.

No matter how much it might appeal to President Trump.

So what’s happening with Mr Walters?

Oklahoma Superintendent Ryan Walters announced Wednesday that he would step down from his role overseeing the state’s schools to lead the conservative group Teacher Freedom Alliance, saying, “We’re going to destroy the teachers unions.”

The announcement from Walters, a conservative Republican who pushed to incorporate teaching about the Bible into public school classrooms, caps off a contentious tenure marked by a willingness to embrace culture war issues.

Oh, isn’t he adorable? Destroy teachers unions.

I suggest the unions not take the bait. Instead, welcome the Teacher Freedom Alliance (TFA) to the great war of, well, teaching kids. State that you look forward to working with them, will invite them to conferences, etc. It gives TFA three choices: run around screaming like lunatics while ignoring the invite; go to the conferences and run around screaming like lunatics; or be adults and discard the demonization of teachers’ unions.

My guess is that Mr Walters, being one of those folks who think culture warriors are important, will go with the first option and discover, too late, that the public wants effective education, and that the unions are acceptable so long as they facilitate … education.

Dune: Part Two (2024) continues the long slog of the Dune epic, in this one portraying the conversion of Paul Atreides, the son of the murdered leader of House Atreides, to the ways of the fremen, the inhabitants and rightful owners of Arrakis, the desert planet otherwise known as Dune.

And it’s entertaining … but not memorable. I saw it maybe a month ago, and I had to go look for reminders of the plot. And then it still didn’t come back vividly.

It just doesn’t really work for me. Then again, neither did the novel, which puts me off in a distinct minority, I know. But there it is. I can watch for the visuals, and appreciate the well-portrayed scene, but after that, it’s not so much.

Let me talk about that a little bit. As I recall, this movie has the scene where the head of House Harkonnen, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, tests his heir apparent by having him duel with prisoners who are members of Atreides. The focus is just about all Harkonnen, yet Atreides is the underdog here, and a focus on them might have made it more memorable. Instead, it almost feels pre-ordained.

That’s always boring. When the Divine says things will happen this way, there’s little to learn from the actions of the fictional mortals.

If Dune’s your thing, go for it. It’s not a shabby effort at all. It just doesn’t work for me.

This caught me by surprise:

This month, the Department of Education released its latest edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the standardized tests better known as the Nation’s Report Card. The results have left me blazing with rage. …

But scores are not slipping everywhere. In Mississippi, they have been rising year over year. The state recovered from a brief decline during COVID and has now surpassed its pre-COVID highs. Its fourth grade students outperform California’s on average, even though our state is richer, more educated, and spends about 50% more per pupil. [“Illiteracy is a policy choice,” Kelsey Piper, The Argument]

The report says … has seen [Mississippi] climb from 49th in the country on fourth grade reading to ninth nationally.

Mississippi ninth? Sounds like a miracle – in fact, some call it the Mississippi Miracle – but, like most big improvements, the lessons learned need to be distributed so all young Americans can benefit. Will they?

Our legislators who pursue this must keep in mind that a lot of professionals in the field will have an investment of some sort – generally prestige, along with NIH (Not Invented Here) and even financial – in other methods than that pursued by recently improving States. Add to that the determined demonization of the education labor unions by the right, such as the libertarians, and the political landscape may be dotted with mountain lions, which will discourage the career politician.

But this is why we hire politicians, to get the job done. I hope Americans can find such politicians.

Via Ars Technica:

New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42 percent of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82 percent of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3. …

“Cultural missteps in high-consequence settings can derail negotiations, damage relationships, and reinforce stereotypes,” the researchers write. For AI systems increasingly used in global contexts, that cultural blindness could represent a limitation that few in the West realize exists.

For us provincial types, other cultures have radically different ways of getting business done, and if you don’t know that, or arrogantly don’t care, failure will be your lot on the venture.

This emphasizes where AI may be a weak addition to the quiver of arrows.

Here’s Wikipedia’s page on taarof.

Metabolomics:

Metabolomics is the scientific study of chemical processes involving metabolites, the small molecule substrates, intermediates, and products of cell metabolism. Specifically, metabolomics is the “systematic study of the unique chemical fingerprints that specific cellular processes leave behind”, the study of their small-molecule metabolite profiles. The metabolome represents the complete set of metabolites in a biological cell, tissue, organ, or organism, which are the end products of cellular processes. Messenger RNA (mRNA), gene expression data, and proteomic analyses reveal the set of gene products being produced in the cell, data that represents one aspect of cellular function. Conversely, metabolic profiling can give an instantaneous snapshot of the physiology of that cell, and thus, metabolomics provides a direct “functional readout of the physiological state” of an organism. There are indeed quantifiable correlations between the metabolome and the other cellular ensembles (genome, transcriptome, proteome, and lipidome), which can be used to predict metabolite abundances in biological samples from, for example mRNA abundances. One of the ultimate challenges of systems biology is to integrate metabolomics with all other -omics information to provide a better understanding of cellular biology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “What researchers suspect may be fueling cancer among millennials,” Ariana Eunjung Cha, Álvaro Valiño and Dan Keating, WaPo:

[Professor Gary Patti of Washington University School of Medicine] in St. Louis team is focused on metabolomics — the vast, largely unmapped study of the small molecules coursing through the human body. Using high-resolution mass spectrometry and custom-built computational tools, Patti’s lab has developed a system capable of scanning a single blood sample for tens of thousands of chemicals at once.