I don’t imagine that any sentient human of the center-conservative bent has escaped hearing about how a reporter for the centrist-academic website Quilette had the snot beaten out of him in downtown Portland by the black-clad streetfighters who represent themselves to be anti-fascist. Apparently, this was punishment for Andy Ngo daring to report on their unsavory antics and not being in slavish accordance with whatever political delusion the Antifa-ites hold close to what passes for their hearts. For myself, I prefer to call them the Klantifa, as the natural successor to the KKK as the thuggish arm of local Democrat Party government. (They do the dirty work, while the official Party maintains semi-plausible deniability.)
The Klantifa appear mostly to be a bunch of pasty-faced, dread-locked inhabitants of their parents’ basements with a taste for public live-action role-playing, combined with delusions of street-fighting adequacy whenever they outnumber their targeted opponent at least five to one.
Crime and Punishment
Credibility Falls
How the mighty are fallen from earlier glory: in the 1990ies, CNN was the scrappy, creative underdog in the TV news business. No name anchors and reporters, bare-bones no-frills sets, go anywhere, cover anything reporters and camera crews. In the first Gulf War, they were Johnny-on-the spot and the news source to watch for war developments, if my memory serves. And now, some knowledgeable commenters and bloggers wonder openly if the only reason that CNN’s viewership isn’t crashing more steeply than has been reported is because of the channels’ ubiquity at airports and other public venues. Once upon a golden time, it seemed only logical for the owners/managers of airports and the like to have contracts with CNN, and no one objected much because it was CNN, a responsible and political neutral source of news.
Saving (Restoring) Free-Range Childhood
Kerry McDonald: The Value of a Self-Directed Summer for Kids.
Autonomy and choice are central to a self-directed summer, in contrast to the control and regimentation that define so many children’s days all year round. Parents from all socio-economic backgrounds face mounting pressure to have their children’s summer days filled with structured, and often expensive, enrichment activities; but poorer parents may confront the most coercion.
RTWT. See also my related post Six Hundred Million Years in K-12.
The term “free-range kids” was originated, AFAIK, by Lenore Skenazy, who has a blog with that name.
Movie Considerations & The Highwaymen
After reading a couple of favorable reviews of The Highwaymen at blogs that I am usually given to trust, I took a flyer on watching the movie streaming video, of course, on my home computer. I can count the number of movies that I have made a deliberate effort to see in a theater over the last couple of years on the fingers of one hand and … well, wow. Just wow. Kevin Costner isn’t any Kenneth Branagh, or even a John Wayne but he can act, especially given an intelligent and nuanced script, spare and understated direction, and production values not dependent on flashy special effects. Woody Harrelson may personally be nuttier than squirrel poop but he also can act. Like Jimmy Stewart did before them they are better and more interesting playing older, more grizzled characters then they were as smooth-faced young studs. So The Highwaymen is a retelling of the hunt for and final ambush of gangsters Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, glamorized beyond practically all recognition in the 1968 movie.
The 737 MAX and the Death of MIL-STD-499A SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT
One of the life experiences that comes with being a three decade veteran of military procurement is you have been around long enough to know where all the important bodies are buried — case in point, the Boeing 737 MAX. What we are seeing in the two recent 737 MAX crashes is the the 20 year accumulation of professional toxic waste and decay in Boeing management that came with the first Clinton Administration’s cancellation of MIL-STD-499A SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT.
I was e-mailed a link today to this Daily Kos post on the 737 MAX :
Did Boeing ignore basic SW engineering principles?
Thursday March 21, 2019 · 8:34 AM CDT
and this passage just jumped out:
A few software engineering principles:
- Software engineering 101: validate your inputs.
- Software engineering 201: when something goes wrong, provide useful data to the human.
- Software engineering 301: for life-critical decisions, avoid single point of failure.
Until today, I had thought that aviation was *good* at software engineering. But my faith is shaken by the New York Times description today of what went wrong with the Boeing 737 MAX.
The above passes my professional “Bozo Test” of whether the poster knows what he is taking about regards software development. He does.
This is where that “military procurement life experience” I mentioned comes in. The timing of the development of the 737 MAX MCAS software was roughly 20 years after the Clinton Administration cancelled the majority of Mil-Specs in the mid-1990’s and in particular the one for system engineering management.
See:
MIL-STD-499A (NOTICE 1), MILITARY STANDARD: SYSTEM ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT (27 FEB 1995) [NO S/S DOCUMENT]., MIL-STD-499A (USAF), dated 1 May 1974, is hereby canceled without replacement.