NCGA Republican leadership to everyone else: 'Drop dead'

Thursday, 24 May, 2018 — civics

Paul A. Specht and Will Doran writing for the News & Observer, covering the latest in a long series of the North Carolina GOP freezing out Democrats from involvement in the legislative process:

Democrats are upset that Republican legislators are mostly excluding them from state budget talks, as it’s unlikely any proposed changes will be adopted once the budget is revealed.

Republican leaders plan to gut an old bill and amend it as a “conference report” to include their budget plans, meaning state lawmakers will have no method for amending the legislation.

The NCGA leadership isn’t denying the accusation.

Shelly Carver, a spokeswoman for Senate leader Phil Berger, said the purpose of the short session is to adjust the two-year state budget that was passed over a six-month period last year — “not to write an entirely new plan.” Republicans hold a supermajority in the House and Senate, so it’s unclear whether Democratic proposals would be adopted even if under a more open process.

“It’s clear Gov. Cooper and legislative Democrats are upset they won’t be able to abuse that process to try to score political points in an election year, but lawmakers of both parties will have the opportunity to vote on the bill and make their voices heard,” Carver wrote in an email.

The thing is, this supermajority is the result of an unconstitutional racially-based gerrymander. Delaying motions have allowed the state GOP to delay a reckoning with redrawing both the state legislative districts and the state’s congressional districts. So, the reason why Democrats won’t be heard during the budget process is because the NC GOP explicitly set up the process to allow exactly this.

“(A)n entirely new plan” talks past recent events in Raleigh, specifically the May 18, 2018 rally of state public school teachers in Raleigh for better pay and better school funding.

Jeff Jackson, a state senator representing Charlotte put it this way, as part of a thread put it thusly:

Ultimately, this is about teachers. Republicans know that Democrats are going to offer amendments to raise teacher pay and Republicans don’t want to be on record voting against that. So they’re going to torpedo the whole process to avoid publicly saying “No” to teachers.

Both my NC Senate and NC House representatives and neither is involved in this process. I effectively have no representation at the state level.

🔗 2017 Police Violence Report

Monday, 1 January, 2018 — links civics

The team at Mapping Police Violence has released their 2017 report. The report covers general statistics behind the 1,129 people killed by police across the United States in 2017 with some effective visualizations.

Of note, the discrepancy in the number of killings against the number of incidents where an officer was charged with a crime. Related are the number of killings where a video record exists.

🔗 Photographing Art

Sunday, 31 December, 2017 — links photography

Zed A. Shaw writes:

Photographing art turns out to be very difficult. You would think that you could just point a camera on your phone at a piece of art and it would come out correct. In fact if you’re at a museum it might actually work because the museum controls the light that is on every painting. In my house though I do not have high quality museum lights. What I have are crappy, yellow, florescent, warm, and plain terrible lighting. So when I take a photo of my paintings it usually comes out looking kind of like I took the photo under a streetlamp.

I like this post as an example of explaining a problem by writing through the thinking process to solve a problem. It’s not written as a professional photographer, it’s written as a painter who needs to solve a photography problem.

🔗 2018 Student Camera Project, Part I

Saturday, 30 December, 2017 — links photography

My friend Magnus Hedemark is starting to assemble a $300 learning camera kit. Besides budget, the key is that it’s a student camera, which he explains thusly:

A student camera is a camera that someone learning serious photography can use to effectively develop their knowledge and skills while creating images that are pleasing enough to make the whole experience worthwhile. They don’t require a lot of features.

Here are some of the things I would require out of a student camera:

1. Easy manual aperture control.
2. Easy manual shutter speed control.
3. Easy manual ISO control.
4. Interchangeable lens system with a common mount.
5. A prime lens in a “normal” focal length (effective focal length between 40-58mm).

I’m very interested with where this goes.

Unlazy writing and thinking

Friday, 29 December, 2017 — writing creativity

I spent a lot of time reading and writing on Twitter in 2017. I haven’t pulled together a 2017 corpus of tweets, but there’s some thinking I was happy to share in thread form. There’s also a fair amount of time I spent that I’d struggle to consider as well-spent on Twitter.

Mentally, I’m ready for something different than what I’ve been doing. Twitter’s format, even at an expanded 280 characters, doesn’t encourage me to develop my thinking and writing the way I would like.

I want my writing to embody and encourage proactive thinking. Both in myself as a writer, and hopefully within whatever audience I’m fortunate to have read this. I want write less from a reactionary perspective. Some of that this past year has been snark. Some has been shouting into the void at various horrors politic. I think my motives are fine, but I can better channel the writing I do than I have been.

My hypothesis is I’m better writing thoughts on a particular topic out in long form. I’ll set it down for at least a bit, then return to edit and refine. I’ll post it on this site and then share a link on Twitter. I think I’ll have better work than the work I produce hashing out my thinking in an unwieldy and uneditable Twitter thread.

I’m interested in quoting and linking with citations to source material. I’m interested in updating a piece, fixing misspellings or poor phrasing when I find it.

Twitter as Endless River has been easy for me to indulge in as a lazy writer and lazy reader, particularly given a pretty busy year at work. Flick, scroll, open some tabs, maybe read them, refresh, repeat. My fear of giving in to laziness as both a writer and a reader is that said laziness encourages lazy thinking.

My desire to shift direction on writing has another element, ownership. Andy Baio wrote about this in 2016:

Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.

I like that approach, too. It’s the approach I’m using for this site. Similarly, there are services like micro.blog to provide longer, non-siloed places to write. I’m interested in RSS and JSON feed as content sharing mechanisms. I’m keenly interested in writing on and for the Open Web.

Here, I can post as much or as little as I (and I’m guessing with this), my audience can stand on a given topic. If a post needs 3,000 words, that’ll happen. That’s going to be far easier to read here than a 60 tweet thread, whether or not I used Twitter’s new threading tool. If I want to post a lot fewer words, perhaps just to say I liked a link, this site should fit that need, too.

I’m interested in approaching where I read and what I read in 2018 differently. Specifically, putting more emphasis on reading clear, articulate writing from others outside of Twitter.

My hypothesis is that active, considered reading will lead to more considered thinking. That will lead to active, considered writing. I plan to be doing more of that here this next year.