MAYBE THE FIX ISN’T IN: Appeals Court Judge Says Not So Fast on Pathetic 30-Day Sentence for Rand Paul’s Politically Motivated Attacker.

CHANGE: Most Americans Now Have an Unfavorable View of the Democratic Party, A Flip From 2018.

BREAKING: Testimony reveals Obama AG urged prosecution of pro-life investigators Daleiden and Merritt.

HUH: No Bones about It, People Recognize Objects by Visualizing Their ‘Skeletons.‘ “This basic ability gives humans a leg up on computers.”

Humans effortlessly know that a tree is a tree and a dog is a dog no matter the size, color or angle at which they’re viewed. In fact, identifying such visual elements is one of the earliest tasks children learn. But researchers have struggled to determine how the brain does this simple evaluation. As deep-learning systems have come to master this ability, scientists have started to ask whether computers analyze data—and particularly images—similarly to the human brain. “The way that the human mind, the human visual system, understands shape is a mystery that has baffled people for many generations, partly because it is so intuitive and yet it’s very difficult to program” says Jacob Feldman, a psychology professor at Rutgers University.

A paper published in Scientific Reports in June comparing various object recognition models came to the conclusion that people do not evaluate an object like a computer processing pixels, but based on an imagined internal skeleton. In the study, researchers from Emory University, led by associate professor of psychology Stella Lourenco, wanted to know if people judged object similarity based on the objects’ skeletons—an invisible axis below the surface that runs through the middle of the object’s shape. The scientists generated 150 unique three-dimensional shapes built around 30 different skeletons and asked participants to determine whether or not two of the objects were the same. Sure enough, the more similar the skeletons were, the more likely participants were to label the objects as the same. The researchers also compared how well other models, such as neural networks (artificial intelligence–based systems) and pixel-based evaluations of the objects, predicted people’s decisions. While the other models matched performance on the task relatively well, the skeletal model always won.

On the Rumsfeld Epistemological Scale, AI programers trying to duplicate the functions of the human mind are still dealing with some high-level known-unknowns, and maybe even a few unknown-unknowns.

FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION, HOW DOES IT WORK? Nearly a Third of Democrats Say It Should Be Illegal to Join the NRA.

IN MY LITTLE TOWN: Police chief admits to calling own officers to respond to domestic violence call at his house.

The Monument officers had to respond outside of their jurisdiction to get there. It was eventually decided that no charges would be filed in connection to the incident.

Over the last several weeks, 11 News has reached out multiple times to Chief Owens and Monument Town Manager Mike Foreman but both have said they have no comment.

Body camera footage from a responding El Paso County Deputy starts with the moments the first deputy arrived and the last Monument police officer was about to leave.
…
Mark Owens was appointed as the interim police chief after the previous chief’s abrupt retirement earlier this year. After deputies investigated the alleged domestic violence call, no arrests or charges were made.

Monument Police body camera footage obtained by 11 News shows Owens sitting outside after a domestic violence call was phoned into 911.

“Another crazy Monument chief,” Owens jokes with one of his officers wearing the camera.

Good grief.

MICHAEL GOODWIN: US feels divisive in 9/11 aftermath as memories of unity fade.

Yet few anniversaries of 9/11 have been as fraught with troubling emotions as today’s. From the vantage point of the 18th anniversary, it is unfortunately true that the worst day in American history forged the last great moment of national unity.

The mourning and sense of common purpose that were so distinct then seem as if they happened in a different country in another century. Now our nation is not just polarized. It is fractured.

“I’ve never seen it like this,” an elderly friend told me recently. “I’m afraid of what’s happening to our country.”

She is not alone. And while the 9/11 attack certainly didn’t cause our bitter divisions, its ramifications are among the powerful forces still shaping our dangerous world.

I don’t remember any “unity” lasting more than a few weeks, or months at best.

THEY DIDN’T BUTCHER IT; THEY’RE HACKS WHO HACKED IT: PolitiFact Butchers Fact Check On Trump And Ralph Northam.

Previously: Michael Brown PolitiFact Check: Murder Is What Democrats Say It Is, or Something.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Americans Who Can’t Agree on Anything Agree Our Media Sucks.

Next time you’re at the grocery store, try counting the number of deodorants there are to choose from (sorry, Bernie!), and see which happens first: You add up the total, or you grow a ZZ Top beard. Now go down the aisle a little ways and try totaling up your shaving options. Hurry it up, please — I haven’t got all day.

Let’s not even get started on the number of faiths and denominations Americans have to choose from, because I’m trying to keep this column light and friendly.

All this choice, all these options — they’re a good thing, especially for 320 million people who can’t agree on much of anything.

And yet according to new research, there is one issue upon which virtually every American can and does agree: Our news media sucks.

Read the whole thing, if you don’t mind me saying so myself.

HMM: Jerry Falwell Jr. Asks FBI to Investigate “Attempted Coup” Against Him.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Apple Reveals 2019 iPhone Lineup: Which Should You Buy?

HMM: Democrats ‘Coaching’ Migrants During Secret Mexico Trips, Leaked Letter Alleges.

Democrats are seeking “to delegitimize the administration’s border security efforts and vilify the men and women who protect our border,” Jordan accused, noting that the trips “could continue to result in misleading information about the administration’s border security efforts.”

The letter specifically asks about Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX) and alleged “coaching” of migrants. According to a report from The Washington Examiner in July, Escobar was “sending staff to Mexico’s northern border town of Ciudad Juárez to find migrants returned from El Paso, Texas, under the ‘remain in Mexico’ policy, then coaching them to pretend they cannot speak Spanish to exploit a loophole letting them to return to the U.S.”

“What we believe is happening is Veronica Escobar’s office is going … to basically second-guess and obstruct work already done by the Border Patrol,” one senior union official source told the Examiner.

Nah. For elected Dems, this is just constituent outreach.

COMMUNIST FRONT CORPORATION: Chinese professor stole hard drive secrets for Huawei, US government charges.

RICK MORAN: Kamala Harris’s Criminal Justice ‘Reform’ Program a Dream Come True for Criminals.

OH. I GUESS THAT SETTLES IT THEN. Facebook exec: ‘We do not’ have an anti-conservative bias.

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT: PinkNews does massive disservice to LGBT community by supporting Jessica Yaniv.

When Canadian “trans activist” Jessica Yaniv forced into existence an international controversy by trying to weaponize Canadian law to force female estheticians to wax Yaniv’s male genitalia, multiple allegations of Yaniv’s past inappropriate sexual behaviour with young girls began to surface. The Post Millennial published multiple exclusive interviews with Yaniv’s various accusers including an account from a young woman who claimed that Yaniv tried to share child porn with her when she was only 14, and an interview with a young woman who provided screenshots of several disturbing Facebook messenger conversations with Yaniv, including one in which Yaniv asked the 15-year-old for a picture of her used tampon.

When these allegations came to light, YouTuber Blaire White was among the first to bring attention to the situation. Being a trans woman herself, White expressed both concern for Yaniv’s alleged victims and potential future victims, but also for the transgender community. White feared that Yaniv’s attempt to characterize her predatory behaviour as part of her transgender identity would be detrimental to the transgender community.

White’s concerns were not at all off-base. From the beginning of the Yaniv saga, PinkNews was there to tell the story of Jessica Yaniv: misunderstood trans activist.

“Internet bully and sexual predator” is more like it.

CALIFORNICATION: Colorado Gov’s ‘Green Little Deal’ is as troubling as the real deal.

Polis and his cohorts in the legislature passed an extreme version of the red flag gun law, approved Proposition CC for the 2019 ballot, and eroded parents’ rights and local school districts’ authority with a troubling sex-ed bill. They also signed Colorado onto the NPV Compact, a way to circumvent Colorado’s voice in the electoral college that has prompted a citizen ballot initiative to repeal it. And that’s not even the tip of the iceberg.

The most pernicious project Polis has undertaken so far is his Green Little Deal on the Platte (GLD). Rooted in the same command-and-control mentality of its national, Green New Deal counterpart, the GLD involves several troubling actions.

First, the legislature passed SB19-181, which Polis signed into law in April. Spearheaded by fellow Boulder liberals, Speaker K.C. Becker and Sen. Stephen Fenberg, the law poses tremendous risks to Colorado’s oil and gas industry. The sector contributes roughly $30 billion a year to the state’s economy, tens of thousands of jobs and $1.2 billion annually in revenue to state and local governments.

The industry is critical, and local communities rely heavily on its benefits. During marathon testimony before the Senate Transportation and Energy Committee on March 5 — only four calendar days after SB 181 was introduced — a public school teacher from Grand Junction aptly noted that oil and gas — not marijuana — is funding their schools. “What’s your Plan B?” the teacher asked.

They’ll kill the golden goose, not out of any expectation of extra gold, but just because they can.

“AIRPLANES TOOK AIM”:

Was no one flying the planes? Were they motivated by anything in particular?

For a newspaper of record, the NYT sure seems to miss an awful lot of historical context.

UPDATE: The tweet has since been deleted, but screencaps are forever.

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Weekly Progressive Dementia Update. “I keep hoping that the permanently aggrieved Left will eventually run out of innocuous things to be triggered by. Not that I don’t enjoy their misery — I most certainly do — but I fear that one day these loons will have too much power and attempt to enforce their speech police fetishes.”

BREAKING: FBI Arrests Top FEMA Administrator, Two Others For Hurricane Maria Relief Fraud.

GOOD LORD: Nurse: I Witnessed the Infanticide Ralph Northam Defended.

THE CERTIFICATES OF DEPOSIT ARE FABULOUS: Michigan Approves America’s First Gay Credit Union Because… Discrimination?

CHANGE (IT BACK): Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986.

PRIVACY: Popular period-tracking apps were found sharing extremely sensitive data to Facebook, including when users last had sex.

Privacy International’s report identified five apps which shared data with Facebook. It focused on two apps in particular — Maya and MIA Fem — which the report said were sharing alarming amounts of detail.

Maya has over five million downloads on the Google Play Store, while MIA Fem has one million.

Both apps had Facebook’s Software Development Kit (SDK). SDK lets apps use certain features, for example allowing users to log in via Facebook, and helps the apps manage their data. In return, the apps feed data back to Facebook.

Even if you use and enjoy Facebook, using them as your login for third-party apps is an invitation for this kind of thing.

YES: When We Argue About Dave Chappelle, We Should Recognize That Super-Wokeness Is Mostly An Elite Phenomenon.

Two moments in “Sticks & Stones” capture Chappelle’s qualms with cancel culture, which are a bit more nuanced than the cartoon being drawn by some critics. In the first, Chappelle relates, with frustration, an incident in which a standards and practices employee at Comedy Central told him that while it was okay to use the N-word, the word ‘faggot’ was off-limits. In the second, he talks about getting a drink with a trans fan of his after a set in San Francisco. She points out that it doesn’t really make sense to claim, as some have, that his infamous (and hilarious) R-Kelly bit normalized the singer’s behavior or somehow insulated him from criticism, and to then turn around and claim that jokes about trans people harm rather than ‘normalize’ them.

Whatever you think of these particular arguments, or the amount of time Chappelle spends complaining about being criticized (not how I would use such a perch!), he is simply pointing out that these rules about what he can get away with saying can sometimes seem arbitrary and inconsistent. And this is an argument that appears to have a great deal of resonance among Americans, blue and red alike. Chappelle’s would-be cancellers ignore it at their own peril.

Those who view any critique of cancel culture or political correctness as inherently bankrupt often derail conversations about it by claiming that PC is simply a synonym for “Being a decent person” — if you’re a decent person, in other words, you won’t get in trouble, and you’ll have nothing to worry about. But this isn’t how most of the country sees things, and it doesn’t accurately capture how the rules over who can get away with saying what are made, revised, and enforced.

Arbitrary rules are never instituted for the benefit of those who must follow them.