Rightwing extremists fare poorly in school board elections

Rightwingers in the US have made schools and libraries the focus of their culture wars, seeing those venerable institutions as somehow indoctrinating children with liberal values, when in reality they are largely providing fairly ideologically neutral services. What has happened is that rightwingers have lost the culture wars as the zeitgeist has shifted under their feet, resulting in the public at large more accepting of those groups that were formerly invisible or marginalized because of their gender identity or sexual orientation or ethnicity. As a result, the rightwingers have become the fringe but still see themselves as upholding mainstream values, and have launched an assault on schools and libraries in their effort to take control of what they think they have lost.

But it looks like becoming ever more extreme, as often happens with groups fighting culture wars, may be a losing political strategy because it makes their toxic views more public and alarms those do not agree with them. Those who may formerly have been somewhat passive politically have now become more active in trying to stop the extremists and we are seeing some evidence of that as rightwingers have recently lost in many school board elections.
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Making surface parking lots into solar farms

On hot days, if one parks one’s car in the sun for any length of time, the temperature inside can rise to values much higher than the ambient temperature, making the interior extremely hot to the touch. This is another example of the greenhouse effect, similar to what is heating up the Earth.

It’s only early April, but we’ve already had our first report of an infant found in a hot car in Tucson.  We talk about this every Spring and Summer in Arizona: the dangers of cars heating up in the sun.

Afternoon temperatures are about 20 to 25 degrees lower now than they will be in June, but it’s still hot enough to raise the temperature up to 120 degrees in about 45 minutes.

The air inside the car heats up so fast because of the “greenhouse effect”.  Here’s what it means:
Incoming solar radiation, known as “shortwave radiation”, shines through the windows and is absorbed in the car’s interior.

The heat released from the interior is known as “longwave radiation”, and is much weaker than the shortwave radiation.  The heat becomes trapped inside the car.  Heat continues to enter the car, but struggles to exit.

It only takes 10 to 15 minutes for a car in direct sun light to heat up above 100 degrees when it’s 80 degrees outside, even if the window is cracked.  When the air temperature climbs above 100 degrees here in June, the temperature inside a car can soar above 150 degrees to 170 degrees in less than an hour.

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Lindell has to pay $5 million over false election claims

There are so many lawsuits going around over the lies told about the 2020 election that this one went under my radar. It was not a lawsuit exactly, but something that was referred to an arbitration panel that ruled that Mike Lindell, the founder of the My Pillow company and ardent advocate of Trump and the Big Lie, has to pay $5 million to someone who took up his challenge to prove that Lindell’s data claiming to support the Big Lie was wrong.

He announced his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota in 2021, saying he would give $5m to anyone who could disprove what he claimed was genuine election data he had obtained.

The arbitration panel said that the challenge had been successfully met.

Mike Lindell must make good on a promise and pay $5m to a software expert who debunked data the conspiracy theorist touted in advancing Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 presidential election defeat was the result of voting fraud, an arbitration panel decided.

In its decision, the panel said: “The data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.”
…

On Wednesday, a panel of the American Arbitration Association ruled in a dispute between Lindell and Robert Zeidman, an expert who took up the challenge.

Based on its analysis, the panel said, “Mr Zeidman performed under the contract … Failure to pay Mr Zeidman the $5m prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”

Lindell has vowed to take this matter to court. Of course he will. That is what he does.

There was a parenthetical comment in this news report that said that Lindell “is recovering from substance use disorder”. I wondered why he always seemed to be hyper-energetic in his public appearances, talking non-stop and at a high volume. This may be the explanation.

How Harry and Meghan’s child became part of the Disney-DeSantis feud.

The governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is a prime example, if you needed one, that having elite educational credentials (he attended Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Law School) does not mean that you are smart. I wrote before that I thought his decision to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 (while he has not yet made a formal announcement, he has done pretty much everything that a prospective candidate does) was not a good idea, that he would suffer because of it, and that he would have been in a far better position in 2028.

Further evidence that his political skills are sub-par comes from the fight he picked with the Disney corporation, escalating it to such ridiculous levels that it risks backfiring on him. DeSantis seems to think that running on an ‘anti-woke’ platform will be his key to success in outflanking Trump on the culture war grievance issues. He has bragged that ‘Florida is where woke goes to die’. The word ‘woke’ is conveniently undefined, meaning that one can claim to be anti-woke by seizing on any aspect of the culture wars and opposing any moves that seek to make society more egalitarian by promoting acceptance of marginalized groups. In particular, ‘anti-woke’ rhetoric has been used to attack equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community.
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P. G. Wodehouse books changed to remove offensive language

When the publishers of Roald Dahl’s books announced their decision to change some of the language that was seen as offensive, my thoughts immediately went to my favorite author and his very funny book Thank You, Jeeves. In that book, the hapless Bertie Wooster, in an attempt to escape from the yacht where he was being held captive by an angry prospective father-in-law, uses shoe polish to darken his skin in order to blend in with a troupe of blackface minstrels who had been invited to perform on the yacht, hoping to slip off with them after the show.

Nowadays, white people performing in blackface is severely frowned upon but in those times it was not uncommon, with people like Al Jolson, Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple being among those who did so. In this book, however, it is even worse because the narrator Bertie casually calls the performers ‘n-word minstrels’, again something that was apparently a fairly common description at that time. But reading that was really jarring, however much one might believe that there was no bad intent on the part of the author and that he was merely using the accepted language of his time.

So I welcomed the decision by the publishers to revise Wodehouse’s books to eliminate this and any other language that are no longer appropriate. In my view, doing so does not detract from the books. There are some books, such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, where retaining the original language is defensible because Twain was making social commentary and the language played an important part of his message. But while one might argue that Wodehouse’s use of those words tells us something about attitudes in those days and thus should be retained, his books were meant as light entertainment and those words were incidental to the book, so eliminating them should be uncontroversial.

But is anything involving race and gender uncontroversial these days?

The aftermath of the Fox-Dominion settlement

As far as a I can tell of the settlement of the case, Fox News personalities who told all those lies about Dominion and the elections will not have to make on-air apologies.

It looks like Dominion wanted a large financial settlement more than they wanted on-air apologies from Fox, and Fox wanted to avoid giving on-air apologies and was willing to pay almost $800 million to avoid doing that. Dominion likely used the demand for apologies as leverage to get Fox to pay up. While this is a large amount, Murdoch media is used to seeing fines for wrongdoing as just the cost of doing business. While many of us would have liked to see all the Fox people squirm on the witness stand and show public contrition for their irresponsible and dangerous rhetoric, ultimately Dominion is a business, not a pro-democracy or media watchdog organization, and it made a business decision.

But there are other cases that in the works and it will be interesting to see what impact this result will have on those cases.
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Last minute delay in Fox-Dominion defamation trial

[UPDATE: The two parties have reached a settlement in which Fox will pay Dominion $785.5 million.

This settlement is not the end of the legal woes for Fox.

Fox still faces several legal battles related to its decision to broadcast false claims. Smartmatic, another voting equipment company, is suing the company for $2.7bn. Abby Grossberg, a former Fox employee who worked for Bartiromo and Carlson, is also suing the company, alleging she was coerced into giving misleading testimony.

The network also faces a separate lawsuit from a shareholder who is seeking damages and argues that executives breached their fiduciary duty to the company by causing false claims about the election to be broadcast.

Fox has also admitted that it told lies about the election. It is not yet clear what public apologies Fox will give on the air, if any. The details of the settlement once released may clarify that point.]

The defamation trial of Dominion against Fox News was supposed to get underway yesterday but on Sunday the judge in the case postponed it until today. No reasons were given for the delay, leading to speculation that lawyers for both sides were trying to negotiate a deal. It is not unusual for deals to be struck on the eve of a trial as both sides play a game of chicken to see whether the other will make the first move, signaling weakness. Although the judge on Monday said that the trial would start today, it may be that a deal has been reached by the time people read this post.

It seems likely that if the idea of a deal was broached, it was by Fox since the amount of pre-trial information released has been pretty damning to them. But what might have pushed them over the edge is the fact that the judge ruled that Rupert Murdoch could be forced by Dominion to testify. This came in the wake of Fox admitting that it had misled the judge by downplaying Murdoch’s role in the company , by claiming that he was not an officer but had mostly an honorary role, which seemed to tick off the judge.
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The ethical dilemma posed by AI generated art

Take a look at this photograph that won a prize at the prestigious Sony world photography awards last week.

After being awarded the prize, the winner Boris Eldagsen declined it saying that the photo was AI generated and that he had submitted it to start a conversation about how to deal with AI in the art world.

“We, the photo world, need an open discussion,” said Eldagsen. “A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter – or would this be a mistake?

“With my refusal of the award I hope to speed up this debate.”

He said this was a “historic moment” as it was the first time an AI image had won a prestigious international photography competition, adding: “How many of you knew or suspected that it was AI generated? Something about this doesn’t feel right, does it?

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Attack ad against DeSantis

It looks like the gloves are off as this ad by a seemingly pro-Trump group demonstrates. However, in these days of front groups and hoaxes, it is hard to know who is behind any internet ads. It may be by a group that is trying to stir up a fight between the two.

The ad uses as its framework the story that DeSantis had been seen using his fingers to eat pudding but the message is something that Democrats might have put out since it uses his support for cutting social security, Medicare, and raising the retirement age against him.