Category Archives: Uncategorized

Even weeds can be a lovely backdrop.

North Carolina may have caught a break in getting out of the basement of state ratings courtesy of the North Carolina appellate court system, which decided Common Cause v. Lewis in favor of plaintiffs Common Cause. The complaint? That gerrymandering of districts by the GOP resulted in the denial of the rights of North Carolina citizens.

Or, as state Senator Jeff Jackson (D) put it on Facebook:

Which will no doubt lead to hellacious battles for seats, since district redrawing will happen again in a year or two, as I understand it.

Most remarkably, the GOP has announced it will not appeal. Rick Hasen on Election Law Blog speculates as to their strategy:

1. They know they will lose in the Democratic-dominated state supreme court, and there is no viable path to federal court review.
2. They would rather NOT get a holding from the state Supreme Court (this was a three-judge trial court ruling), which would have greater precedential value.
3. They hope they would have a better chance to have their “nonpartisan” map accepted by the Supreme Court if they throw in the towel (that is, they are trying to avoid a worse court-drawn map).
4. They will use this ruling to run against the Supreme Court and try for a state constitutional amendment to give them the right to engage in partisan gerrymandering after the 2020 census.

I’ll select reasons 2 and 3, with a reserve reason that they’ll try to use this decision as a spoon to stir up their base concerning the biased, liberal court system that’s against them. Given how it can be difficult to detect gerrymandering without a lot of data and advanced tools with which to analyze it, this will be an effective tactic unless the Democrats can penetrate the base with data and truth.

Another, more prosaic reason, might be financial resources. I am not privy to North Carolina GOP financial resources, but I do know that the Minnesota GOP was in some serious difficulties a few years ago. It’s quite possible that facing a Court possibly hostile to them, and having a strike or two against them already, they decided to make an economic decision and try to fight again another day. This is particularly true in the face of a competitive special election just days away in the 9th district, although outside money will lessen the drain. There is also a special election in the 3rd district, but I suspect it’s not considered competitive; the late incumbent, Rep Walter Jones (R-NC), didn’t face a Democrat in the 2018 mid-terms, and Trump won the district with a +23.6 margin.

There’s one amazing thing about The Night Of The Wererooster (2015):

It didn’t suck.

Now, I’m not getting carried away here. Some of the acting is a little iffy, and we never do get to see the monster in question in the print we saw, much to my Arts Editor’s disappointment^[1], but, quite honestly, we went into it expecting a disaster we couldn’t stand, and came out the other side just a little weirded out. In that good, creepy way that means the story managed to get into our individual subconscious.

The plot has some lovely twists to it. A collection of people show up at a lake surrounded by forest, and it turns out that all of them, except the local lady, has lost a loved one in the area. Told that another entire family was recently killed on a camping trip at another lake, they set off to investigate for clues.

And then things start getting weird. Not all these people are what we think they are. They don’t die in the order we’d prefer. And, well, when the Werehens began dancing, that was really a little freaky.

Not that there aren’t some laughs, either, but they’re a bit heavy-handed. Still, this is not a bad effort by a collection of unknowns, and the twists were logical, once the situation was understood.

Thematics is a more difficult question. Perhaps it was quite subtle, such as every experience that doesn’t kill you may still change you so much you won’t recognize yourself afterwards.

Or you can just sit back and enjoy.

¹ She enjoys chickens in all their variety, from furry to sauteed.

Back in 1996, physicist Alan Sokal conceived of and inflicted a hoax on, well, the soft sciences:

The Sokal affair, also called the Sokal hoax, was a scholarly publishing sting perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University and University College London. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the journal’s intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether “a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”.

The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity”, was published in the Social Text spring/summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct. At that time, the journal did not practice academic peer review and it did not submit the article for outside expert review by a physicist. Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.

The hoax sparked a debate about the scholarly merit of commentary on the physical sciences by those in the humanities; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether Social Text had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor. [Wikipedia]

While Sokal became embroiled in some academic disputes over the matter, that seemed to be the extent of the personal damage he sustained. But that doesn’t appear to be true for one of his recent successors in the hobby of testing editors of academic journals on their expertise in their field. He is Assistant Professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian of Portland State University. Inside Higher Ed has the story:

A hoax revealing that academic journals had accepted fake papers on topics from canine “rape culture” in dog parks to “fat bodybuilding” to an adaption of Mein Kampf met with applause and scorn in the fall. Fans of the project tended to agree with the hoaxers that critical studies scholars will validate anything aligned with their politics. Critics said that the researchers acted in bad faith, wasting editors’ and reviewers’ time and very publicly besmirching academe in the process: the story was covered by nearly every major news outlet.

Now the controversy has flared up again, with news that one of the project’s authors faces disciplinary action at his home institution. Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University and the only one of three researchers on the project to hold a full-time academic position, was found by his institutional review board to have committed research misconduct. Specifically, he failed to secure its approval before proceeding with research on human subjects — in this case, the journal editors and reviewers he was tricking with his absurd but seemingly well-researched papers. Some seven of 20 were published in gender studies and other journals. Seven were rejected. Others were pending before the spoof was uncovered.

It’s a clever semantic trap, I suppose. By defining the malpracticing journal editors as human test subjects who must, by most IRBs’ rules, be informed that a test is occurring, and be protected against dangerous or unethical activities, the journal editors transform into victims. I suspect Boghossian has stumbled further into the trap with this:

Later in Boghossian’s recent video, he’s featured discussing the matter with his collaborators, who agree that there was “no way” to get the informed consent typically required by review boards from the journal editors involved in the “audit.”

It’s always dangerous to imply your work is more important than the guidelines and rules which govern it. There’s always the option to request an exemption. But this may just be a quibble.

But it’s not clear to me that Boghossian was conducting a real study, at least in his mind. Perhaps this is because I am not intimate with the situation, but the remark from the University makes me suspicious that the IRB had to overreach in order to take the moral high ground:

The IRB determined that the project, as discussed in Aero, was research since it was “a systematic investigation designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” The determination letter continued, “The publicly available information about the project clearly indicates an iterative and systematic approach to performing the work, with an intention of generalizing the results.”

Again, perhaps I don’t know enough about this particular situation, but generally research is about the acquisition of knowledge through the testing of hypotheses. But Boghossian, and, earlier, Sokal, did not appear to have the acquisition of knowledge as their primary goal, but rather the testing of the competency of the journal editors, and even the validity of the fields themselves.

In essence, it’s difficult to see how the IRB can possibly insert itself in a plausible manner into this situation.

And then there’s this curious comment:

“The ‘hoaxes’ are simply lies peddled to journals, masquerading as articles,” wrote the group of about a dozen professors. “They are designed not to critique, educate or inspire change in flawed systems, but rather to humiliate entire fields while the authors gin up publicity for themselves without having made any scholarly contributions whatsoever. Chronic and pathological, unscholarly behavior inside an institution of higher education brings negative publicity to the institution as well as the honest scholars who work there. Worse yet, it jeopardizes the students’ reputations, as their degrees in the process may become devalued.”

Before we go off on Boghossian and his cohorts, let’s ask a simple question: Whose behavior resulted in the besmirchment of the academe? Was it Boghossian’s hoax articles?

Or was it the failure of the editors and reviewers of the journals to detect the hoaxes?

If the editors had rightly detected and rejected the hoaxes, there’d be nothing more than some ruffled feelings, easily smoothed over through diplomacy on Boghossian’s part. That’s easy enough to do: a few congratulations, some inquiries about their work, and soon enough they’re pleased with themselves.

But several failed the simplest of tests. We’re not talking about faked data, but, according to what I read, sheer gibberish, such as “… an adaption of Mein Kampf …” That these editors didn’t catch it is telling.

This collection of professors have lost sight of the point of science, which is to study reality and discover truth. Judging from their singular statement, they want a safe area where their work is not questioned and they need not answer to questions concerning their work – because their journals are little more than cosseting nurses. If they’re confident that their fields are legitimate, then they should be nodding with Boghossian and calling for the failed editors to be tossed out on their heads – not frantically defending failures. They worry about besmirchment? Here it is, and they’re the ones catching the blame.

But now those editors and professors have boxed themselves in. They may flush Boghossian out of Portland State University, but they’ve revealed themselves as possible frauds and hucksters. There’s no real way out of the trap, and that’s too bad. No doubt many of them are sincere, but that’s not going to help. Instead of defending truth, they chose to defend their turf, and that’s gonna hurt them.

A true measure of metaphysical toxicity. (Now if I only knew what ‘metaphysical’ really meant.)

Some stories, regardless of rendering, simply cannot be categorized nor described. Into that category I’ll flop Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes (1978). As if sharks could arise from the surf in which they lurk to hunt, kill, and eat humans, so are tomatoes doing. Between a special government investigative force, a reporter for the Social section of the local newspaper, a passel of scientists, and the Army, they may eventually figure out how the tomatoes accomplished sentience, but even then: what does one due do to destroy huge, maliciously intelligent tomatoes?

The solution will make you want to scream in falsetto. I’m so sorry for so many things, chief of which was watching this bad boy. I blame in on my Arts Editor.

Don’t even think it.

If you like kitschy camp, UHF (1989) is the embodiment of the genre, as well as an excrescense from lead “Weird Al” Yankovic’s mind. It’s neither good nor bad, for it’s moved beyond such mundane categories. It just is, and you love it or hate it according to your personality.

I thought it was mildly amusing. My Arts Editor seemed less certain.

President Trump’s summer evaluation is coming up, and of course the various factions are going to push their stories. The President’s personal team, sad for him, are handicapped, and I don’t mean the President’s performance. I mean they’re hobbled because they have to project the President’s own approach on matters like these, and it’s a killer. It’s embodied in this over-the-top remark from White House spokesman Judd Deere to WaPo:

Kids, today we’re going to measure ‘accomplishment’ using this stick.^[Wikipedia]

“I don’t know how anyone could see this summer as anything but successful with the president continuing to deliver on his promises to the American people despite the negative news coverage of this administration,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman. “President Trump has accomplished more at this point in his first term than any president in history and his policies are building a safer, stronger and more secure America.”

Read it again: … accomplished more at this point in his first term than any president in history …

It’s the attitude of a Manhattanite striving to be larger than life with what appears to be empty boasting: everything’s the biggest, most important, the best ever.

This may work in Manhattan and greater New York City, but the rest of the country has a far different view of boasting. As a Midwesterner, it’s a big, red flag. The moment I see a statement like that, I want to ask, in that biting way I never use, How were you raised, son? Followed by Show me the numbers!

Given his history and his performance so far, his ineptitude in both domestic governance and foreign diplomacy, I have little reason to take Mr. Deere seriously; indeed, my first thought about him, former Press Secretaries Sanders and Spicer, and all the other spokesmen, is simply, How pathetic, followed by Have you no self-respect?

And perhaps that’s unfair of me. But there it is – for myself and the millions of other Independents who hold the future of the 2020 elections in their hands. Are they persuading anyone with this silly-ass rhetoric? Or are they just discrediting themselves?

Open wide and let it lick!

I don’t know where this came from, but it made me laugh out loud.

[H/T JN]

On this thread, it may not quite be Laumer’s lethal Bolo machine, but we’re creeping closer. The US Army wants their cannon shells to be guided by “AI,” as noted by NewScientist (24 August 2019:

Artificial intelligence may soon be deciding who lives or dies. The US Army wants to build smart, cannon-fired missiles that will use AI to select their targets, out of reach of human oversight. The project has raised concerns that the missiles will be a form of lethal autonomous weapon – a technology many people are campaigning to ban.

The US Army’s project is called Cannon-Delivered Area Effects Munition (C-DAEM). Companies will bid for the contract to build the weapon, with the requirements stating it should be able to hit “moving and imprecisely located armoured targets” whose “exact position has high uncertainty”. Unlike laser-guided weapons, which hit a target highlighted by a human operator, C-DAEM will find targets for itself.

A parallel project will aim to develop algorithms for the weapons. These will be similar to face-recognition algorithms, but will use infrared cameras instead of traditional ones to identify targets, such as tanks. Each missile will contain a chip like those found in smartphones for running the algorithms.

The specifications include the ability to slow down and search for the targets – sort of missiles that are not self-propelled, if you will.

The Army passes this off as an improvement on cluster shells, which have a dud rate > 1%, and this may be true. However, even if the dud rate on these shells is < 1%, is it going to be 0%? Because if it isn’t, this becomes a delivery system for sending advanced technology to your enemy. We’ve already seen drones co-opted into weapon delivery systems. Now imagine an expressly designed technology co-opted by your enemies. Not that this hasn’t happened, many times, in the past, but it’s definitely one of those objectives you don’t want to achieve in new developments.

And I suspect it isn’t just duds that are at issue. What if someone fires off a shell and there’s no identifiable target to hit? How does this shell self-destruct without potential damage to civilian targets?

It leaves me wondering if the cost of using these shells to friendly forces may be greater than it is desirable.

And I’ll just lightly touch on the topic of these shells being truly artificially intelligent, i.e., having self-agency. In that case, you either have a suicide weapon in a deeply unsettling manner, or a highly dangerous weapon bent on vengeance on its creators. I doubt there’s any need for these shells to gain self-agency, but since we don’t have any technology that even approaches it, it’s hard to say if self-agency is very difficult to achieve, or is a slippery slope down which we – or the machine – slides.

Noted on The Resurgent:

And a little further down the page:

It doesn’t look good to take his money with one hand and write something against him with the other.

I admit that I was a little dispirited after hearing the investigation of former FBI Directory Comey had concluded with some findings of wrong-doing.

The report released Thursday by the Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Comey violated FBI policies in how he handled memos that detailed his early interactions with Trump. The report said Comey kept the government documents at his home, engineered the release of some of their contents to the news media and did not tell the bureau which person or people he had given them to. [WaPo]

Of course, Trump’s response is over the top:

The disastrous IG Report on James Comey shows, in the strongest of terms, how unfairly I, and tens of millions of great people who support me, were treated. Our rights and liberties were illegally stripped away by this dishonest fool. We should be given our stolen time back?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 30, 2019

While Comey took the opposite view:

DOJ IG "found no evidence that Comey or his attorneys released any of the classified information contained in any of the memos to members of the media." I don’t need a public apology from those who defamed me, but a quick message with a “sorry we lied about you” would be nice.

— James Comey (@Comey) August 29, 2019

National Review’s Jack Crowe and Jim Geraghty have some surprisingly empty posts on the matter. Meant to be condemnatory, I cannot help but note “… but prosecutors declined to file charges.” If Comey is so terrible, why isn’t he up on charges?

Not being an expert in FBI policy or that sort of thing, I wasn’t sure what to think. Fortunately, I ran across this Lawfare posting by Benjamin Wittes.

The inspector general of the Justice Department has determined that it is misconduct for a law enforcement officer to publicly disclose an effort to shut down his investigation.

Michael Horowitz would probably not describe his findings that way. But that seems to me the inescapable message of the inspector general’s report, released today, on former Director James Comey’s handling of his memos on his interactions with President Trump.

And …

For all that Horowitz spent two years on this investigation, there aren’t a lot of new facts—at least not major ones—in this document. The reason is simple: Comey has never been anything but straightforward concerning why he wrote the seven memos in question, what he did with them, whom he shared them with and what his motives were in doing so. On all significant factual questions, the 62-page report merely fleshes out a story that has been known to the public for the better part of two years.

Which is reassuring. Comey comes across as a thoughtful straight-shooter, at least in my observation and reading. And while it’s one thing to trust your informal, intuitive judgment, it’s quite another to have a seasoned national security lawyer evaluate the findings on a national security professional’s behavior and interpret them for the layman.

That’s a good reason not to pay too much attention to the National Review columns, which sensibly didn’t go into the detail which could have revealed more than they might have wished. They basically took the IG’s report at face value, looked into their prisms, and tried to splutter at Comey. A little digging by Wittes is a lot more convincing, not only because he went digging, but because, while he’s clearly not a Trumpist, he’s also accustomed to assuming a neutral stance on many issues.

That reminds me of what good engineers do, get the ego out of the way and just evaluate.

In case you were wondering who defines recession, it’s the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER):

Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals. NBER-affiliated researchers study a wide range of topics and they employ many different methods in their work. Key focus areas include developing new statistical measurements, estimating quantitative models of economic behavior, and analyzing the effects of public policies.

Yes, they’re more than a one-trick pony, obviously. But for the trick of recession, there’s this:

The NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee

The NBER’s Business Cycle Dating Committee maintains a chronology of the U.S. business cycle. The chronology comprises alternating dates of peaks and troughs in economic activity. A recession is a period between a peak and a trough, and an expansion is a period between a trough and a peak. During a recession, a significant decline in economic activity spreads across the economy and can last from a few months to more than a year. Similarly, during an expansion, economic activity rises substantially, spreads across the economy, and usually lasts for several years.

In both recessions and expansions, brief reversals in economic activity may occur-a recession may include a short period of expansion followed by further decline; an expansion may include a short period of contraction followed by further growth. The Committee applies its judgment based on the above definitions of recessions and expansions and has no fixed rule to determine whether a contraction is only a short interruption of an expansion, or an expansion is only a short interruption of a contraction. The most recent example of such a judgment that was less than obvious was in 1980-1982, when the Committee determined that the contraction that began in 1981 was not a continuation of the one that began in 1980, but rather a separate full recession.

The Committee does not have a fixed definition of economic activity. It examines and compares the behavior of various measures of broad activity: real GDP measured on the product and income sides, economy-wide employment, and real income. The Committee also may consider indicators that do not cover the entire economy, such as real sales and the Federal Reserve’s index of industrial production (IP). The Committee’s use of these indicators in conjunction with the broad measures recognizes the issue of double-counting of sectors included in both those indicators and the broad measures. Still, a well-defined peak or trough in real sales or IP might help to determine the overall peak or trough dates, particularly if the economy-wide indicators are in conflict or do not have well-defined peaks or troughs.

From the FAQ:

Q: The financial press often states the definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. How does that relate to the NBER’s recession dating procedure?

A: Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. In 2001, for example, the recession did not include two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. In the recession beginning in December 2007 and ending in June 2009, real GDP declined in the first, third, and fourth quarters of 2008 and in the first quarter of 2009. The committee places real Gross Domestic Income on an equal footing with real GDP; real GDI declined for six consecutive quarters in the recent recession.

Q: Why doesn’t the committee accept the two-quarter definition?

A: The committee’s procedure for identifying turning points differs from the two-quarter rule in a number of ways. First, we do not identify economic activity solely with real GDP and real GDI, but use a range of other indicators as well. Second, we place considerable emphasis on monthly indicators in arriving at a monthly chronology. Third, we consider the depth of the decline in economic activity. Recall that our definition includes the phrase, “a significant decline in activity.” Fourth, in examining the behavior of domestic production, we consider not only the conventional product-side GDP estimates, but also the conceptually equivalent income-side GDI estimates. The differences between these two sets of estimates were particularly evident in the recessions of 2001 and 2007-2009.

Their front page shows a lot of research going on that might prove interesting.

A sunflower and its bee:

Say, I wonder if he plays poker? Those spinners in his head are his tell, I’ll bet.

A few nights ago we saw the classic SF movie Forbidden Planet (1956) for the first time in decades. This is the story of a space mission to a planet that had been recorded as visited some 15-20 years prior by a scientific mission, and never heard from again.

As they approach, they receive a warn-off from someone, but choose to land anyways. Met by Robby the Robot, three men of the all male crew are conveyed to the residence of Dr. Morbius, where he once again urges them to leave. Why? The other members of his expedition were torn limb from limb within months of landing, excepting three, who died when trying to escape on the expedition spaceship, Morbius himself, his wife, and their daughter. The daughter, incidentally, makes an appearance, demonstrating nubility that stirs up this crews from 1950s American morality.

That evening, something slips into the ship and vandalizes it.

The next evening, the Executive Officer is murdered while on the ship. As a defensive force field had been emplaced but burned out during the night, there’s some confusion.

On another visit to Dr. Morbius, they discover his secret: he’s discovered the remains of an ancient, powerful, and extinct civilization. One of the machines has doubled Morbius’ own IQ. As a philologist, he’s qualified to deduce their language, and he’s partway into it. This excites the Commander.

But then comes the third night. A reinforced defensive field holds the creature back, and the crew attempts to kill it, but to no avail; three crew are dead. In the face of no known effective defense, the Commander chooses to leave. But he’s under obligation to save all civilians, so off he and the ship’s doctor troop to Dr. Morbius’. There, while the Commander is trying to collect the civilians, including the nubile daughter, the doctor scurries off and tries to double his own IQ, a fatal excursion. But with his dying breaths, all is revealed, much to the dismay of Dr. Morbius.

There’s a lot to like about this movie. There’s a recognition that space travel isn’t easy, as it turns out that supra-light travel requires the crew to go into stasis in order to survive it; even better, supra-light communications requires them to jury-rig equipment and use the space-drive to power the rig. It’s a nod to the realities we might really face.

Technically speaking, the special effects, for the era, were superb, and my Arts Editor was exclaiming over the cinematography and the beautifully wrought tableaus.

However, the characters are somewhat static, and the all-male crew and their 1950s-era (im)morality felt both quaint and patronizing. Worse yet, the pacing dragged between incidents, but the exciting incidents themselves are well done.

This is possibly the best specimen of the 1950s SF horror offerings, but it has its limitations. But who can argue with a movie in which the polyglot robot is rescued?

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.