How Many of The Owners and Employees Voted For California's Democrats?

People deserve the government they vote for, and they often get it, good and hard:

A running list of notable Bay Area restaurants and bars that have announced permanent closure...

It's an awfully long list.

Dumb As A Rock

I have a friend who often remarks that only educated people could be so stupid as to <insert stupidity here>.  He would be 100% correct in this instance:

The University of Wisconsin-Madison plans to remove a large rock from campus after students complained that it is a symbol of racism because it was referred to in a local newspaper in 1925 using a word regarded as a racial slur...

According to the State Journal, the 1925 news article is the only known instance of the offensive term being used.

That's right, folks--a boulder is racist.  A boulder's existence causes pain to black students.  Taypayer money will be spent because people used to refer to a boulder in racist terms.

Better make sure none of the stores on campus sells mixed nuts.  Besides the name being kind of toxic masculinity rape-y, wait till some Gen Z'er finds out what people used to call Brazil nuts.

More Science! In the Fight Against The 'Rona

I never in my most dystopian nightmares dreamed I'd live in a society where this could happen:

Nearly all Californians will be subject to a 10 p.m. curfew starting Saturday in an effort to curb spiking coronavirus infections, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office announced Thursday afternoon.

The curfew, which administration officials are calling a limited stay-at-home order but affects 94% of state residents, will cover only nonessential activities and will be in place nightly from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

People will still be allowed to perform essential tasks like walking their dog, picking up prescriptions at the pharmacy or getting takeout at restaurants, Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly said. But nonessential businesses and activities will be prohibited. For example, restaurants will have to close their outdoor dining by 10 p.m. ...

The state plans to leave enforcement to local governments at first, Ghaly said. Some local elected officials are already balking at the order. Sacramento and El Dorado sheriff’s offices said they won’t enforce it.

FYI, Sacramento County is where Gruesome Newsom works. El Dorado County is the county in which he lives.

“Activities you normally do are higher risk today than they were a month ago,” because more people are infected across the state, Ghaly said during a press conference announcing the curfew. “This is going to help us stop the surge faster and avoid more severe restrictions.”

The goal is to curb spread of the coronavirus by reducing gatherings at night when most activities that take place are nonessential. By issuing the curfew now, Ghaly said the state hopes to keep case rates from escalating out of control and overwhelming hospitals.

For those of you for whom science! is so important, I have to ask:  where is the science! showing that at 10pm-5am curfew will have any effect?  What data is telling us that any measurable number of transmissions is occurring at night?  Is there any data showing differences in the numbers of cases before and after curfews were imposed in other jurisdictions?

It's good that county sheriffs are elected in California and don't report to the governor.  In many cases they may be our last line of defense against the tyranny of those who live to impose their will on the rest of us.  After that?  Gawd, I hope it's not civil war.

Masks and Lockdowns Are For the Politicians, Not For Your Health

It's been clear to anyone who believes data as opposed to their emotions that worldwide lockdowns haven't stopped the 'rona and masks haven't stopped the 'rona:

A recently completed research study by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in cooperation with the Naval Medical Research Center and published in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that strict quarantine, tightly controlled social distancing, and continuous use of masks did absolutely nothing to contain the spread of COVID-19, and might even have increased its spread...

None of these strict lock down mandates, including continuous mask use, did anything to prevent transmission.

The control and test groups were Marines, and whose compliance was thus highly supervised:

More significantly, the control group of Marines who did not participate in this study, and thus were not under the same strict lock down rules, actually saw fewer infections, as shown on the table from the study to the right. While the difference wasn’t very large, it existed nonetheless. One could argue that the overuse of masks probably contributed to the higher numbers in the study group, since even in this tightly controlled setting it is still impossible to expect people to wear masks properly. Even if they replaced them regularly, it is unrealistic to expect people to never touch them while they wear them. Over long periods the masks will become havens for the virus, where the person breathes.

The study also demonstrated once again the relative harmlessness of the disease. Almost all of these young healthy Marine recruits who tested positive were asymptomatic, meaning that they wouldn’t have even known they were infected if they had not been participating. Furthermore, it appears no one even got very sick.

Once again, this data continues to reinforce the very very early data from March. COVID-19 is not dangerous to the young or healthy, and it will spread no matter what you do. The best way to beat it and thus protect the vulnerable older and sick population is to have it spread as fast as possible through the young and healthy population, so that it will die out quickly and thus no longer be a threat.

The people imposing these restrictions on us aren't abiding by them, either:

I’ve seen this phenomenon called “the chump effect”: The rules only apply to the people who are willing to follow them, and you’re expected to shut your trap about anybody who doesn’t. You have to do what you’re told, even as you watch others flout the rules with no consequences. So you feel like a chump, and you resent it. If the rules don’t apply to everybody, why should they apply to anybody?

This is a really good way to break down a society.

So who benefits from these useless restrictions?  The people in power who get to impose them on the rest of us.

Payoff!

Because we have been doing distance teaching in my district all semester, and because our class time is about 40% less than in a regular school year, I had to cut how much material I teach in each of my classes.  In statistics, I used to teach 5 chapters in the first semester, but this year I won't test Chapter 4 until early December.  There won't be near enough time remaining to teach Chapter 5.

However, I can teach Chapter 9.  Chapter 9 is about correlation, and I can teach the rudiments of that material in the short time I'll have remaining in the semester after the Chapter 4 test.  Again, I won't be covering the material in depth, but I have to cut something, and this material seems as good as any other to skimp on.

I was preparing to make a Chapter 9 Section 1 instructional video today when I thought, "I taught this 2nd semester last year."  Late in the 2nd semester, like after the corona-shutdown.  When I was making videos from home.

So I checked on my YouTube channel and there they were, videos for Chapter 9 made from my kitchen table last spring.  I knew that making these videos would eventually pay off, and it just did--I now have all the stats videos I need for the remainder of the semester!

Clearly, Education Is Needed

To Kill A Mockingbird.  It's a story so powerful that years ago I bought the DVD so my son and I could watch it together.

Wasn't the whole point of the story the truth's triumph over racism, that even in injustice we can know the truth, and that it will eventually win out?  Not to clueless people.  No, the point is that racism is bad and children shouldn't read about it:

Schools in Burbank will no longer be able to teach a handful of classic novels, including Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, following concerns raised by parents over racism.

Middle and high school English teachers in the Burbank Unified School District received the news during a virtual meeting on September 9.

Until further notice, teachers in the area will not be able to include on their curriculum Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Theodore Taylor's The Cay and Mildred D. Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Four parents, three of whom are Black, challenged the classic novels for alleged potential harm to the district's roughly 400 Black students.

Next up:  Jews complain that children read Anne Frank's Diary and Elie Wiesel's Night in school.

What's at least as discouraging as the clueless parents is that the school district caved in to them.

The Mask Stasi

It's true, and only lefties can support this: 

There are vague promises that things might begin to open again next year, but don’t hold your breath. “Two weeks to slow the spread” and “fifteen days to flatten the curve” have long since morphed into a semi-permanent nanny state in which the very act of slowing and flattening ensures that the virus will go on indefinitely by guaranteeing a continuous stream of new “cases” with which to frighten the public and increase government power. 

In defiance of all previous medical experience, the Covid “pandemic” has muzzled the population with bank-robber masks, driven families asunder, forced elderly couples to die apart, punished schoolchildren with the false promise of “remote learning,” made Americans eye each other with suspicion and sidle away, and created a near-Stasi level of rats and snitches only too happy to inform on their fellow citizens.

Prior to this I never would have believed Americans would surrender their freedoms so easily.  Remember the Ronald Reagan quote?

“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Will We or Won't We?

 Our district is making plans to come back to school in January using a hybrid model (it's a hybrid of the worst of online schooling and the worst of in-person schooling).

But Sacramento County has slipped back into "purple", which according to the color code means we're one step from a zombie apocalypse of 'rona cases.

Somehow our district will be able to make its decision by December 15th.

So, will we half-heartedly come back in January, or won't we?  Your guess is as good as mine!

 

PS:  California's governor, Gruesome Newsom, has moved to nearby El Dorado County, where his children can attend in-person school.  Yes, same hypocrite:

The San Francisco Chronicle reported on Friday that Newsom attended an outdoor birthday celebration for political adviser Jason Kinney with at least a dozen attendees at the French Laundry, an upscale restaurant in Napa Valley.

The report came the same day Newsom -- as well as Oregon Gov. Kate Brown and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee -- announced a travel advisory for visitors leaving and entering their respective states ahead of Thanksgiving as the state experiences a spike in COVID-19 cases.

The (Sacramento) Bee stung the Democratic governor with a scathing editorial slamming the tone-deaf soiree.

Rules are for the little people.

Update, 11/23/20:  The CDC won't back off on masks, but they're pretty strident that schools should open.  Why do they use data for one point of view but not the other?

Random Pic

 Went to Apple Hill with a friend on Friday since we had a day off school:

 

Who *Should* Be In Charge In Classrooms, Teachers or Students?

 The Southern Poverty Law Center has been on a moral decline for many years, but in recent years they've fallen off the cliff.  Case in point:

The Southern Poverty Law Center published an article documenting the ways in which white teachers "weaponize their whiteness" to harm black students.

The article, published by SPLC's "Teaching Tolerance" division, outlines how white people weaponize their "entitlement, anger, … need for retaliation, feigned fear and, finally, white fragility."

It suggests that teachers—particularly white, female teachers—can stop the weaponization of whiteness by relinquishing control of their classrooms when a student questions their authority. One teacher quoted in the piece says he has to "resist the urge to maintain power or control in [his] class, and especially to resist the anger that can bubble up in [him] when that control is called into question."

Ignoring the plethora of buzzwords and kooky ideas in the second paragraph/sentence, I want to focus on the third.  Relinquish control of their classrooms--what does that look like?  Does it look like Seattle's so-called "autonomous zone" of 2020, or perhaps Minneapolis or any of a dozen other cities during this past spring's riots?  If a teacher "relinquishes control", who is harmed by it?  I assert it's the other students, who obviously don't matter to the SPLC--and often, those other students are of the same race and are from the same neighborhood as those who act out in class.

I'm hard-pressed to think of a time in history where giving in to mob rule ended up being a net positive for a society, but that is exactly what the SPLC is suggesting.  The United Negro College Fund used to tell us that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, now the SPLC tells us to sacrifice that mind on the altar of so-called social justice.

I see no justice in doing so.

Idiot Administrator? You Decide.

 How does a principal get to make this decision, anyway?  They're not his kids.

Jessie Thompson's kids, ages 9, 10 and 11, would like to walk home together, but James H. Spann Elementary School in Summerville, South Carolina, won't let them leave without an adult.

When Thompson asked if she could sign some sort of waiver, the assistant principal told her: "Students will not be allowed to walk home by themselves." If an adult does not pick them up, the kids must take the bus. The bus ride actually takes longer than the 20 minute walk. Moreover, in the era of COVID-19, walking is arguably safer—and certainly more comfortable.

While other elementary schools in the area allow kids to walk home, Principal Shane Sanford put his foot down and the school district backed him up. In response, Thompson hired an attorney, Ashley Ameika, who wrote the district on October 14, imploring them to reverse course. The school has refused to change its policy.

When I called Sanford last week, I was forwarded to the district's public information officer, Pat Raynor, who said, "I cannot go into specifics because of family privacy." Well, what about a generic family wanting their kids to walk home, I asked.

"I will say just that in general the policies and guidelines in place for our schools regarding the safety of our children and staff depend on things such as the location of the school," Raynor replied. Sanford apparently believes the streets around his school are too dangerous for children to navigate.

Strange Calendar Settings

 There's a tech company out there, perhaps you've heard of them, whose software runs a lot of phones--including mine.

So when I look at the calendar on my phone, I see "reminders" on certain days.  For example, in this month Election Day and Indigenous Peoples Day are identified.  If there's a way to turn these off, I haven't found it yet.

You know what holidays are not on that calendar?  Veterans Day and Thanksgiving.

I looked in December and Christmas isn't shown, either.  Who determines what events are shown on this calendar, and why?

Thank You

 My mother, her friend, and I, veterans all, went to the local Texas Roadhouse for their free Veterans Day lunch.  It was a drive-thru pick-up for veterans, and the line of cars snaking through the parking lot went quickly.  The two entrees to choose from were chicken breast or pulled pork, along with corn, baked beans, and a dinner roll.  It's always easy to be a big tipper when the meal is free!

Thank you, Texas Roadhouse.

The Holiday Season Is Upon Us

The school year is a little longer now than it was when I was in school, but in my district we start the school year super early, in mid-August.  Why, you ask?  To accommodate all the days off!

Days off start coming at us fast and furious now:

Veterans Day (tomorrow)

Used to be an optional Professional Development day, now just a random day off (Friday)

Thanksgiving week

Christmas/New Year

Dr. King's birthday

Ski Week in February

And all of that occurs between now and the end of February!  

Spring Break occurs in March or April each year, but that's too late to include in the rush of holidays above.

Evaluating Teachers In the Time of the 'Rona

 From the National Council on Teacher Quality:

While states and school districts are focused on trying to bring students back into the classroom, it's safe to say that the COVID-19 pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of our education system, including how to properly evaluate teachers in the classroom—or in a Zoom setting.

As part of NCTQ's ongoing research on COVID-19 related education policies, our latest installment tracks how states will proceed with evaluating teachers for the 2020-2021 school year. This analysis examines topics such as whether summative evaluations will be required, whether states that required objective measures of student growth prior to the pandemic will continue to require them this year, and whether any modifications have been made to the measure of professional practice.

As of mid-October, nearly half of all states have released plans regarding teacher evaluation for the 2020-2021 school year. Although state guidance varies to a certain degree, there are some overall trends worth noting.

See the data and analysis on:

• State guidance for teacher evaluation in SY20-21: Of the 24 states that have released guidance thus far, 21 are still requiring summative evaluations for all teachers.
• Requirements for measures of student growth during the pandemic: Nine states have suspended the use of student growth measures for this school year, while others have modified requirements around what constitutes measures of student growth.
• Examples of how states are addressing teacher observations this year: Several states have announced changes in the number of required observations or even what qualifies as an observation.

Read more here.

Hoping It's A Smooth Week At Work

With Veterans Day occurring on Wednesday, we get Wednesday off instead of a long weekend.  In previous years, the week of Veterans Day has included an "optional professional development day", where anyone who wanted a couple hundred extra dollars could get it by attending some (usually worthless) training put on or paid for by our district.  No optional PD day this Friday, but no work for secondary teachers, either.  Yay us!  (Elementary teachers will get the first Monday after New Years off, but it will be a "grading final exams and submitting grades" day for secondary teachers--so it all evens out.)

So I only work Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday this week.  It's finally feeling like autumn around here, with a small probability of rain this Friday.  I think I'll go back up to Apple Hill on Friday.

This Post From 4 Years Ago Has Aged Extremely Well

To Our Friends On The Left: What, Exactly, Are You Afraid Of?

They were afraid of things they thought President Trump would do, but that he never actually contemplated.

I'm concerned about things Joe Hindenburg has actually said he would do. 

Yes, I Believe The Democrats Cheated

Opposition to President Trump brought the Democratic Party to banana republic levels of vote fraud.  Yes, Democrats, the rest of the world is laughing at us, but not just for the reasons you think:

"Regardless of the outcome, one thing is absolutely clear," Khamenei wrote. "The definite political, civil, & moral decline of the US regime." 

It's not often I agree with the Iranian government, but in this case they're right.

The BBC told us 4 years ago what election fraud looks like:

Watch the turnout figures ‒ they can be a big giveaway.

You never get a 98% or 99% turnout in an honest election. You just don't...

 

Even where the turnout is within the bounds of possibility, if the figure is wildly different from the turnout elsewhere, it serves as a warning...

 

And if there are more papers in the boxes than were issued by the polling staff, it is highly likely that someone has been doing some "stuffing"...

It is now standard practice to allow party agents, observers and sometimes even voters to watch the counting process and take photographs of the results sheet with their phones.

They then have proof of the genuine results from their area ‒ just in case the ones announced later by the electoral commission don't match...

 

Delay is certainly dangerous, fuelling rumours of results being "massaged" before release and increasing tensions, but this is not incontrovertible proof of rigging.  

Does any of this sound familiar?

And lastly, I've said in a previous post that there are certainly some statistical "anomalies".  I've heard of Benford's Law before, and here it is applied to the election results:

As the vote counting for the 2020 Presidential Election continues, various facts suggest rampant frauds in Joe Biden’s votes. So does mathematics in terms of the votes from precincts.

Benford’s law or the first-digit law, is used to check if a set of numbers are naturally occurring or manually fabricated. It has been applied to detect the voting frauds in Iranian 2009 election and various other applications including forensic investigations.

As I recall, Barack Obama's team fired a polling firm when statistics showed they were making up data.  While statistics aren't flawless, I give them a lot of weight.  And when Milwaukee County, Chicago, and Pittsburgh all look shady, well, I believe there was shade.

So I will state here, for the record, that I believe the Democrats cheated.  A Biden presidency would be illegitimate.  That doesn't mean I'm going to go burn down cities in a temper tantrum--no, Republicans don't do that.  But unity?  Coming together?  Does anyone remember "the Resistance" of the last 4 years?

If President Trump loses his legal challenges, our neo-Hindenburg president will be a disaster--not just that I'll disagree with his policies, but he will be bad for America.  Jobs, gas prices, general inflation, foreign policy, all a disaster.  Economically we had 4 years of the good life, I don't see how it can continue.

I know the lefties will enjoy their win.  They'll trash-talk--I get that, I trash-talked 4 years ago, too.  But remember the old saying:  winners never cheat.  And that's because they don't have to.  The Democrats had to.

Update:  It wasn't the Obama team that fired the polling firm Research 2000 back in 2010, it was Daily Kos who fired them.

"Diversity Training" Is Terrible

I have nothing to add to this article.  It's well-written, well-sourced, and just plain right:

In wake of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that followed, many colleges and universities have been rolling out new training requirements – often oriented towards reducing biases and encouraging people from high-status groups to ‘check their privilege.’  The explicit goal of these training programs is generally to help create a more positive and welcoming institutional environment for people from historically marginalized and underrepresented groups.

As I have explained elsewhere, there is a long literature on the benefits of diversity on knowledge production.* However, many of the approaches to training people how to navigate and utilize diversity were implemented by corporations, non-profits and universities before their effectiveness had been tested rigorously (if at all).**

Beginning in the mid-90s, it became increasingly clear that, due to this lack of validation, many widely-used interventions could be ineffective or harmful. An empirical literature was built up measuring the effectiveness of diversity-related training programs. The picture that has emerged is not very flattering.

The article addresses unconscious bias/implicit bias  and microaggressions training, points out the flaws in such training, and identifies the negative consequences of such training.  

Even if your heart is pure, and you genuinely believe that such training is important to organizations and should help people work better together, the conclusions of studies about the actual effectiveness of such training are inescapable:

However, when scientists set about to investigate whether the programs actually changed behaviors, i.e. do they reduce expressions of bias, do they reduce discrimination, do they foster greater collaboration across groups, do they help with retaining employees from historically marginalized or underrepresented groups, do they increase productivity or reduce conflicts in the workplace — for all of these behavioral metrics, the metrics that actually matter, not only is the training ineffective, it is often counterproductive.

Science would indicate that you should believe the data, not your intuition. 

(And for those of you for whom this kinda stuff is important, look at the author's name.)

Sleep

 When I got home from work on Thursday, nothing seemed unusual.  I'd relax, which a documentary or two, then go to bed.  Everything normal.

Then I checked my email. I'd gotten one of those "you have a new relative" emails from 23&Me.  A woman from San Luis Obispo, who genetically appears to be a 2nd cousin of mine (we share the same great-grandparents), had messaged me to find out what I knew about our shared relatives because her dad's birth certificate says "father unknown".  Family talk had a name for this biological grandfather of hers.

That name, and the genetic map from 23&Me, point to my grandmother's younger brother.  

So I started texting my mother, as this "unknown" man would be her uncle.  Then we switched to the phone.  The call ended close to midnight.

I was tired yesterday, as you might imagine, since I wake up at 5am!  I didn't stay very late at 7th Period (our term for happy hour), coming home early.  When I started dozing off while watching tv, I decided just to turn the thing off and go to bed.  That was shortly after 8 pm!

Woke up around 6 this morning.  Sleep is wonderful!