Category Archives: Uncategorized

It’s almost drearily obvious to the paranoid that Boris Johnson, one of the obstinate leaders of Brexit, must be a Russian asset. Not only is the disruption of European trade and military alliances which Brexit will bring on be to Russia’s advantage, but there are two other factors. First, as has been noted numerous times, Trump, himself a suspected Russian asset, is a big booster of Johnson:

Trump has been a Johnson champion for a long time. The president undercut May at every opportunity and boosted Johnson whenever he could. Johnson has seemed his kind of politician — reckless, irreverent, disruptive, not a detail person.

Through Vice President Pence, who met with Johnson on Thursday in London, Trump sent a message of support, for Britain leaving the European Union and for the prospect of a new trading agreement between the two nations that supposedly share a special relationship. “Fantastic,” Johnson said to Pence, while noting that negotiations could be difficult, which was hardly an understatement. [Dan Balz, WaPo]

For the paranoid, dabbling in disruptive politics of our closest ally is a telling sign for Trump’s potential allegiance. The other red flag^[1]? Johnson is not the best of the best, as classmate Andrew Sullivan observed a few weeks ago:

Boris was so posh it was funny. At least that’s how I saw it. And what marked him as different from the other Etonians was his decision to embrace this, and make fun of himself in the process. Others came rather insecure about their privilege and played it down — think of fellow Etonian David Cameron who decided to call himself “Dave.” Not Boris. Alongside party-boy Darius Guppy and Charles Spencer, Diana’s brother, he reveled in it. As sitting president, I did my small part to help him gain his footing, despite a certain amount of class resentment I’m not really proud of. …

This reputation hurt Boris in hunting for votes to be president of the Oxford Union, and he lost the first time around to someone called Neil Sherlock who was a nerdy state school kid. Legend has it Johnson kept reinventing himself politically and playing down his Toryism and poshness — with the help of then-student Frank Luntz, believe it or not — and eventually it worked and he won. I have to say I found him hugely entertaining, and great company, but could never really take him seriously. He has a first-class wit but a second-class mind and got a second-class degree. If you want to measure the quality of his scholarship, check out his deeply awful biography of Churchill, a thinly veiled attempt to redescribe his own career as a Second Coming of Winston.

Johnson and Trump are alike in that they have always been deeply ambitious, but, to use Sullivan’s spot-on adjective, second-raters – their eyes bigger than their stomachs, as it were. Such people are meat and potatoes for master manipulators, and whether it’s Putin himself, or some back-room Russian guru, I think we’re seeing a public display of the lengths to which people such as Trump and Johnson will go to be thought of as in the first rank.

Even when they don’t deserve it, and will wreck everything around them doing it.

¹ Forgive the pun. If you’re too young to understand, in a previous national incarnation, the Russians were known as “the Reds,” due to the color of the flag of the Soviet Union.

My Arts Editor happened across this news:

The E-type appears to have a lot of body types to pick from, so it’ll be interesting to see if it’ll be the one in the ad, above, or another. Long time readers will recall our own advocacy for Chevrolet to put out 1950s Corvettes replicas with electric innards.

Wouldn’t that be delicious in the garage if Chevy could give it a 200 mile range?

My Arts Editor’s comments upon review of these night-time pictures:

There’s something a little sinister and disturbing about these. Interesting.

I’m not seeing it myself. Here’s the movie review, since I mentioned it.

It comes right here in my own backyard:

Public high school coaches aren’t public officials under the law, according to the court, because their decisions about playing time and benching tardy players aren’t core government functions. …

“Simply, basketball is not fundamental to democracy,” the ruling said. [StarTribune]

What it means is that if you’re attending a high school sporting event and start screaming filthy falsehoods about the coach, she doesn’t have to take it. She can dump your ass in court and sue for damages.

Back when I was refereeing regularly at high school fencing tournaments, I didn’t hear more than a couple of groans, which is completely acceptable. I haven’t heard of it getting worse since I more or less stopped refereeing, and hopefully it’ll stay that way.

Steve Benen puzzles over the Trump Administration’s move to erase light bulb regulations that were designed to lessen overall power consumption:

There was no good reason for the Trump administration to roll back lightbulb energy-efficiency standards, but that’s exactly what happened this week.

Under one action, the Energy Department will repeal a regulation enacted under President Barack Obama, set to take effect on Jan. 1, 2020, requiring an expanded number of lightbulbs in the U.S. to be in compliance with stricter energy efficiency standards. That regulation change was spun off of a 2007 law signed by President George W. Bush that aimed to gradually phase out energy inefficient bulbs like incandescent and halogen bulbs.

The regulation that’s being eliminated would have redefined four categories of incandescent and halogen bulbs so that they would be subject to existing energy efficiency rules from which they were previously exempt. It would have applied to about half of the 6 billion lightbulbs used in the U.S., experts have said. […]

Trump’s Energy Department also nixed new energy efficiency standards for all pear-shaped lightbulbs that were also scheduled to go into effect Jan. 1, 2020.

I can appreciate why no one uses the phrase “lightbulb energy-efficiency standards” as click-bait, but this isn’t trivial. As The Hill’s report added, the Trump administration’s new rule “will increase U.S. electricity use by 80 billion kilowatt hours over the course of a year, roughly the amount of electricity needed to power all households in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to an analysis by the Appliance Standards Awareness Project.”

Benen forgets that the only metric of success for Trump is profits, in this case the corporate profits of the energy companies. The more they sell, the higher their profits. And since climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” the consequences of higher energy consumption are immaterial.

Trump does not share in the general public project to reduce energy consumption. It’s not even on his radar unless someone yells a question at him in the roar of Marine One.

So this measure, initiated by the Republicans themselves, should come as no surprise. Gotta prop the economy at the expense of the biosphere. And the hell with all the babies it kills. Measuring that is difficult and Trump and his successors can merely scoff at any such measurement.

Hopefully, these useful bipartisan measures can be reversed when Trump is out of office, and his movement discredited.

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]