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For the first time in history, an openly gay ambassador was not confirmed “in spite of” Republicans, or simply “with Republican support.” Grenell is now our ambassador to Germany because of Republican support.And now the Trump administration (and its supporters) will use the existence of an openly gay ambassador to a high profile country as an example that Republicans are no longer anti-gay, all the while the Trump administration continues to be virulently anti-LGBT in multiple ways.
Jerry McNerney (CA-9), the only member of congress with a PhD in mathematics, has agreed to be the co-chair of the Freethought Caucus. I am not sure who the other member of the Caucus is, but presumably that in addition to Jared Huffman (CA-2) they will be from another state other than California!
| Into The Fire is the second book in the series called “Vatta’s Peace” by Elizabeth Moon. Moon is known for her military sci-fi and space opera series called Vatta’s War. I had assumed this new series would be in a similar vein but the space opera components appear to be increasingly minimal as the series proceeds. I have not read the previous series, just the new one. In the first book, Cold Welcome, Kylara Vatta (Ky to her friends) returns to her home planet of Slotter Key after acquitting herself admirably in various military operations in space. However her space shuttle is sabotaged and she manages to survive a crash landing in the sea and make it to a wintry, barren continent with a couple dozen troops. That book was centered around Ky’s fight for survival for herself and the troops she commands. I thought the setting was odd for a military sci-fi space opera but the suspense of will-they it won’t they survive was compelling. And before they leave the remote continent Ky and company discover an abandoned secret military base which holds important secrets (alien artifacts). In Into The Fire, Ky has returned to her family (her cousin Stella Vatta is the CEO of the huge Vatta corporation which focuses on planetary and interplanetary shipping of goods and services and her aunt Grace is the Rector, basically the equivalent of planetary Secretary of Defense) to discover that there’s a vast conspiracy formed to do the Vattas (and her specifically) extreme harm. So she’s “home” (well really it’s Stella’s home) but she is definitely not safe and sound. Ky has to deal with some bizarre fallout fir being missing for more than half a year due to the events in the first book. She was presumed dead and the Commandant of the Military Academy was killed (murdered) in the original crash. But what is Ky’s biggest problem? IMMIGRATION! Because she had been returning to Slotter Key after more than a decade away (as something of a military hero) she was unaware citizenship laws had changed and the administration considers her an illegal undocumented immigrant warranting arrest and confinement. This provides a deep insight into the administrative fussiness of Slotter Key society. Another one of the cultural norms of the world Moon is building in the Vatta books is that assassination and violent death are considered common place (among wealthy families like the Vatta’s). Ky (and Stella and Grace) are subject to attacks of various kinds multiple times (poison attack, home invasion, direct military assault and mercenary double agents). This element of the book does add some suspense even though it’s really hard to believe any of the main characters will come to substantive harm (even though we do know that another assassination attempt successfully killed Ky’s parents and other members of her family in events that happened before this series began). Moon is at her best when she is describing the action scenes involved in these attacks and other military episodes. She also provides some intrigue by depicting the complicated nature of the relationship between Ky and Stella, who could be described as “frenemies.” This dynamic is interesting but it’s not entirely motivated in the text. One of the key weaknesses in the book, IMHO, is Moon’s curious penchant for including the most mundane details of her character’s lives and activities. There are LOTs of examples of information being provided of things I don’t believe the reader needs to know (like the fact Ky eats ham sandwiches when she needed a quick snack after working too hard or the specifics of how meals are going to be prepared at Stella’s house when Ky and her fiancé Rafe are staying there). Maybe this is intended to communicate verisimilitude but I found it mostly tedious and distracting. Overall, I am still interested in Ky’s character and I want to see what happens to her in the future so I will continue to read the Vatta’s Peace series but Into The Fire convinced me I don’t need to seek out Moon’s other books I presume they will suffer from this and other flaws in the writing. That’s probably too bad because I suspect that having read the multiple books in the Vatta’s War series that preceded this one would provide more context of the reasons for why another prominent Slotter Key family is going through such machinations to exterminate the Vattas. As I reflect on my reactions to the book another flaw in Moon’s writing which I didn’t think consciously about as I read the book but becomes more evident as I prepare and write this review is that Moon doesn’t spend much time on depicting or discussing the diversity in her world-building, so my assumption is that most people are alike. She does mention a few times that Ky’s skin is light-brown in color but I don’t have a good sense of what Stella looks like (although her beauty and poise are remarked on several times). Ky’s boyfriend Rafe is described as “a shortish man, black haired, dark-eyed, well-dressed.” What image is that supposed to provide the reader of his “race” or “ethnicity”? I suppose that’s fine in a typical fiction book but there are a lot more SFF writers these days who are trying to be more explicit and direct in addressing issues of representation but Moon doesn’t appear to be one of them. |
Every person shall be at liberty to worship God according to the dictates of his or her own conscience. No person shall be compelled to attend, or, against his or her consent, to contribute to the erection or support of any place of religious worship, or to pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for the support of any minister of the gospel. Property belonging to the state may be used to display the Ten Commandments, and the right of a public school and public body to display the Ten Commandments on property owned or administrated by a public school or public body in this state is not restrained or abridged [emphasis added]. The civil and political rights, privileges, and capacities of no person shall be diminished or enlarged on account of his or her religious belief. No public funds may be expended in defense of the constitutionality of this amendment.
The Ten Commandments shall be displayed in a manner that complies with constitutional requirements, including, but not limited to, being intermingled with historical or educational items, or both, in a larger display within or on property owned or administrated by a public school or public body.The bill (SB 181) passed the state house 66-19 and the state senate (22-3). The amendment has now become an issue in the Alabama gubernatorial race with candidates trying to position themselves as the most in support of enhancing the place of religion in the public square.
Last month, Johnson appeared before the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole, where his friend, Meredith Rowan, attended as his delegate in the hearing. The board did not immediately respond to an email or phone call for comment, but Rowan said Johnson called her from prison today to tell her that his parole had been granted — with a delay.
“Michael was excited that it got approved,” Rowan told BuzzFeed News. “I have to look at it that I have a date, and it’s only 18 months away, and it’s still a lot sooner than a 30-year sentence,” Rowan said Johnson told her. If released as planned, Johnson will have served 60% of his 10-year sentence. The date is contingent upon Johnson not accruing any violations.
Johnson’s lawyers, Eric Selig and Jessica Hathaway, confirmed the terms of Johnson’s parole. ”We had some hopes, because of all the support Michael had received and a couple of other factors, that he would get out at an earlier date,” Selig said.
Johnson will live with Rowan and her family in Indiana when he is released, Rowan said. He will be supervised by parole officers for the duration of his 10-year sentence, until 2023.
Laws that single out HIV are widespread in the US. At least “67 laws explicitly focused on persons living with HIV had been enacted in 33 states” by 2011, according to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and researchers from the US Department of Justice. In Missouri, where Johnson was convicted, people living with HIV can face life in prison for exposing others to HIV if they have sex without first disclosing that they have the virus.We at this blog have been following this case from the beginning because it seemed like such an egregious example of abuse in the criminal justice system intersecting with homophobia, race and HIV stigma.
University of California at Berkeley math professors Lauren K. Williams ’00 and Denis Auroux will join Harvard’s math department as senior faculty at the start of the next academic year, Department Chair Curtis T. McMullen said in an interview last week.
Auroux has served as a math professor at UC Berkeley since 2009 and has published articles on subjects ranging from “symplectic submanifolds” to “Lefschetz pencils.” Williams, a former math concentrator, won a tenured associate professorship at UC Berkeley in 2013—and a full tenured professor position there in 2016—and has written extensively about cluster algebras and tropical geometry.
Moon Duchin is a mathematician at Tufts University, where she is also a Senior Fellow in the Tisch College of Civic Life and serves as the founding director of the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Society. She majored in Mathematics and Women's Studies at Harvard and received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago.
Duchin's research in pure math lies in geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, and dynamics. An area of particular interest is nilpotent geometry, or the shape of groups that fail to be commutative in a controlled way. She has studied random walks, random groups, and rigidity theorems for surfaces and billiards. She is also interested in the social studies of science, particularly the role of expertise, authority, intuition, and proof.
Duchin is currently engaged in a long-term project on the geometry of gerrymandering, an application of mathematics to civil rights. She has worked to build a national network of collaborators doing wide-ranging work on mathematical and computational interventions in electoral redistricting. They aim to engage the legal, political, and philosophical dimensions of the gerrymandering problem, working closely with civil rights organizations. Duchin recently served as a consultant for the governor of Pennsylvania in the court-mandated push to redraw the congressional map.I know Moon relatively well, having spent a 3 days attending the latest Geometry of Redistricting Workshop at the University of San Francisco last month. I'm not surprised she has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, I think that she should also be considered for an even more prestigious award, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, in the near future.
Best Novel
- The Collapsing Empire, by John Scalzi (Tor)
- New York 2140, by Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit)
- Provenance, by Ann Leckie (Orbit)
- Raven Stratagem, by Yoon Ha Lee (Solaris)
- Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty (Orbit)
- The Stone Sky, by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit)