Cowboy Who?

This post, my office isn’t acknowledging my adopted baby , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

After a long wait, my spouse and I were finally paired with a birth family for an infant adoption and got to bring our son home! This is a complicated situation with work because I work in a position that requires coverage and the nature of the adoption process is unpredictable. Most domestic infant adoption agencies have the birth mother choose an adoptive family so it could be a very brief wait or an extremely long one (ours was on the longer end of normal). I handled it as best I could (I think): I informed my direct supervisors that we were undergoing this process shortly before we were approved and told them ASAP when we had a “lead” that would require some quick movement. I also informed HR that we were waiting, and my team since I am a “team lead” (which means mostly that I am an individual contributor but also mediate communications between my small team and leadership).

We found out that we were chosen to parent our son on a Friday evening—after working hours—but I immediately called my (current) direct supervisor, before even anyone in my family. (My usual direct supervisor is on maternity leave herself, which will be relevant later.) I worked long hours Saturday, Sunday, and Monday because I knew I was going to need to travel on Tuesday to pick him up. I left my work in an honestly stellar place—it was as easy as could be hoped, and much easier than could be reasonably expected, for someone else to jump in and take over my projects. All went well with the adoptive placement and I officially put in for leave.

The thing is, I feel weird about how it’s all been handled at my workplace. First of all, as I was getting the news of the baby’s birth and preparing to drive eight hours to pick him up, my boss texted me to ask the members of my team about something while they were all in the building and I was not. I reminded him I was out and the reason and he told me to text them anyway. (Couldn’t he go talk to them or text them himself?) The work that I did to prep for being out is being redone despite my having shared it with all the relevant people, and there are emails being sent that I am cc’d on basically implying that I left them in the lurch and/or asking me to do things while on leave. Not a single person has sent me a congratulatory or well-wishing message unless it was also accompanied by a request for me to complete a task. It’s definitely not that people don’t know—it was mentioned in our weekly newsletter.

To add insult to injury, when my supervisor was preparing to go on maternity leave, there was a baby shower held for her and everyone who works under her was asked to pitch in and contribute to a group gift. We were also asked to record something for a congratulatory video that someone put together. People also brought in their own gifts for the baby. I don’t need gifts, but it feels weird that just a few months later, I didn’t even get a card stuck in the mail or even a congratulatory email thread in the weeks after my son’s birth and adoption. Two other folks (at lower levels than me) have had babies since I’ve been there and there was no fanfare for them either, but I had hoped the difference in how they were treated was just due to timing (one was RIGHT at the beginning of the pandemic and the other was during a change in leadership). Again, I don’t need the gifts or the party, but I would have appreciated some sort of acknowledgement of being a new mom!

This has sure driven home your opinions about “we’re a family” workplaces and not gifting up, but also it’s weird, right? My spouse’s workplace has done a lot for us and been very kind, so maybe my calibration is off? Am I expecting too much? Should I be reading anything into this? Once I’m back, is there a way to say something without sounding like I’m begging for gifts? I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.

You are not expecting too much! Your calibration is not off.

But I don’t think you should read anything into it other than “people are weird and clueless about adoption.” I don’t know why that is; after all, most people understand that maternity leave isn’t just about recovering from the birth but is also about bonding with and adjusting to a new baby, and that a new baby is still a momentous thing even when you didn’t deliver one from your own body (see: fathers). But still, people are sometimes weird and clueless about adoption.

Cluelessness aside, though, I am not happy with your coworkers, and particularly your boss. Sending you work to do while your baby was being born = not okay. Asking you to do more work while you’re on leave = not okay. (And if you’re on FMLA, legally that’s considered FMLA interference, which is against the law. If they’re still contacting you, feel free to point that out — or just simply be unavailable and don’t respond to messages.)

It is interesting that while your office did a shower, gift, and video for your manager, two other lower-level people in addition to you got nothing. You could be right that it was just bad timing for the other two, but it might indicate that this is less about adoption and more about your office being troublingly hierarchical about whose milestones get recognized. (Your manager should have recognized that and either said no to the plans for her or ensured that others got similar recognition.)

As for whether there’s a way to address it when you’re back: probably! Since you’re not the only one who has been ignored, you could frame it as, “I noticed that the way we handle babies has been really uneven. We did a shower, gifts, and video for Jane, but nothing for Lucinda, Cecil, or me. What do you think about standardizing what we do going forward so people don’t feel overlooked or left out?”

You could also try saying to your boss, “Did I need to handle the planning for my maternity leave differently? I let everyone affected know the likely timeline, worked long hours in advance to make sure everything was in place, and thought I had left things in really good shape for someone else to step in on my projects. But people kept trying to send me work despite knowing our baby had arrived, and I got the sense people felt left in the lurch. Was there something I should have done differently, or was there some other communication issue that we should handle differently in the future?” It doesn’t sound like you did mishandle anything on your side, but this would let you bring the problem to your boss’s attention constructively.

Alternately, you could wait until your regular manager is back from her own maternity leave and debrief what happened with her. She might be better positioned to understand and act on your feedback than the “do this task while you’re on your way to pick up your baby” interim guy is.

Congratulations on the baby!

This post, update: my new office has a no-humor policy , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Remember the letter-writer who discovered her new office had a no-humor policy? Here’s the update.

I wrote in early last summer about working at a job with a no-joke policy. It’s been about 9 months, and I’m still working there. The no-humor rule is definitely still a thing, but I’ve learned to live with it.

I didn’t engage in the comments because I didn’t have time to read them all until a bit after my letter was published. I so appreciated you and the commenters for assuring me that I was not the crazy one! I thought on it, and ended up deciding that such a serious working environment was not a justifiable reason for me to leave this job; the perks were just too good! Maybe it would have been a dealbreaker for other people, which I totally respect, it just wasn’t enough to make me job search all over again. I forced myself to realize that being serious all day, despite being ridiculous, is a condition of my job and that I should either find the nearest exit or that I should do my best to fulfill this part of my job while I’m here. It worked! It doesn’t make me miserable anymore, mostly because I’m able to really focus on work while I’m here and I get to have friendly conversation again at 5:01pm every day.

I want to answer a few things that were raised in the comments. First is the other coworker who went to HR after hearing my one and only joke. Yeah, it felt really shitty to hear I’d been reported for something so minor, and I appreciated the commenters who brought that up too. I never figured out who it was (though I have a few ideas), and it honestly instilled in me a lesser sense of trust with everyone I work with so early in my tenure here, which sucks.

Second is where this policy originated. A few commenters said it sounds like something that originated from either a very serious prior harassment claim against an employee or a weirdly serious president who mandates this kind of behavior. I don’t think either of those are the case: there’s been nothing to indicate that the former ever occured, and our top bosses have shuffled around a bit since I’ve been here yet the no-joke thing has remained. Based on how I’ve seen this framed in my time here, I think Alison’s original guess was mostly correct. The “no joking at all” seems to be based on the idea that we won’t be taken seriously if we’re goofing off all the time, and that seems really entrenched in the culture here at this point. (Yes, of course, that ignores the tons of offices that have stellar performances while also also allowing their staff to make jokes!) It also seems to have snowballed over the years: while the rule was framed to me as “never makes jokes”, it manifests as more of a “be serious and lack personability all the time.” I really don’t know. I guess everyone who works here gravitates toward a serious working environment, or like me, ended up here on accident and is just putting on a decent poker face.

I am happy to report that there are some benefits though! Since we’re not expected to discuss/focus on anything but work, I don’t have to deal with any interpersonal issues or clingy oversharing colleagues. I don’t necessarily think I’m any more productive, but it’s nice that there are almost no office politics or clashing personalities- we don’t know enough about each other to play favorites! I think when I’m at my next job and inevitably have an overbearing or personally grating colleague, I’ll be aghast just because that element of coworking has been out of my day-to-day for a while at this point.

That being said, that obvious lack of rapport stings some days, and I don’t feel a sense of camaraderie with really anyone I work with. There are a few who seem like they might be fun in a social setting, but I’ll never know because we don’t socialize or even have casual conversations. I never realized how much the occasional office happy-hour or group lunch can bond people, and I’ll never take those for granted when I’m at a different workplace.

Overall, I don’t plan to stay here more than another year. It’s grown my technical and deliverable skills a ton, but the emotional labor involved in NOT ever being emotional is so draining. I find myself always volunteering for external meetings, professional development, and networking opportunities just to engage with other people in a professional setting and ensure my mindset around work stuff isn’t getting too warped. At these, I’ve gotten to chat with a few folks our firm has a working relationship with, and all have seemed surprised at how warm I am one-on-one! I’ve asked a bit about their impression of meeting with our staff, and all have said since our reputation in the industry and our caliber of work products are very good, they’ve assumed our office is kind of a business-first, work hard/play later space. I didn’t have the heart to tell them that we’re actually work hard/play never :).

Last, a few of my friends have been dying to see how my office handles personal occasions like birthdays and holidays, especially now that my first holiday season here is now past us. I can now report that for my birthday, I received a virtual gift card to a restaurant of my choice and an automated congratulatory email with no verbal acknowledgement from anyone. For the holidays, I was understandably very interested to see if this laughless desert has a holiday party- and they don’t! Everyone was allowed to select from a choice of four company-branded gifts to be mailed to their home along with another restaurant gift card, and there was again no acknowledgement in-person that it was the holiday season whatsoever (I didn’t expect to see decorations anyway).

In closing, I want to make it clear: yes it’s super weird that my office doesn’t permit its employees to make jokes! I think it’s weird, and just because I choose to still work here doesn’t mean I’m not constantly baffled at the lack of interpersonal relationships around me. That said, it’s shown me what I do/don’t value in a working environment while I’m still pretty early in my career, which is great! Plus, plenty of content for dinner parties for years to come. Thank you again Alison and all the commenters for reassuring me and helping me through such a confusing time.

Tech company ID.me has made amazing inroads with government customers over the past several months. Some of this is due to unvetted claims by the company's CEO, Blake Hall, who has asserted (without evidence) that the federal government lost $400 billion to fraudulent COVID-related claims in 2020. He also claimed (without providing evidence) that ID.me's facial recognition tech was sturdy, sound, accurate, and backstopped by human review.

These claims were made after it became apparent the AI was somewhat faulty, resulting in people being locked out of their unemployment benefits in several states. This was a problem, considering ID.me was now being used by 27 states to handle dispersal of various benefits. And it was bound to get worse, if for no other reason than ID.me would be expected to handle an entire nation of beneficiaries, thanks to its contract with the IRS.

The other problem is the CEO's attitude towards reported failures. He has yet to produce anything that backs up his $400 billion in fraud claim and when confronted with mass failures at state level has chosen to blame these on the actions of fraudsters, rather than people simply being denied access to benefits due to imperfect selfies.

Another claim made by Hall has resulted in a walk-back by ID.me's CEO, prompted by increased scrutiny of his company's activities. First, the company's AI has never been tested by an outside party, which means any accuracy claims should be given some serious side-eye until it's been independently verified.

But Hall also claimed the company wasn't using any existing databases to match faces, insinuating the company relied on 1:1 matching to verify someone's identity. But this couldn't possibly be true for all benefit seekers, who had never previously uploaded a photo to the company's servers, only to be rejected when ID.me claimed to not find a match.

It's obvious the company was using 1:many matching, which carries with it a bigger potential for failure, as well as the inherent flaws of almost all facial recognition tech: the tendency to be less reliable when dealing with women and minorities.

This increased outside scrutiny of ID.me has forced CEO Blake Hall to come clean. And it started with his own employees pointing out how continuing to maintain this line of "1-to-1" bullshit would come back to haunt the company. Internal chats obtained by CyberScoop show employees imploring Hall to be honest about the company's practices before his dishonesty caused it any more damage.

“We could disable the 1:many face search, but then lose a valuable fraud-fighting tool. Or we could change our public stance on using 1:many face search,” an engineer wrote in a message posted to a company Slack channel on Tuesday. “But it seems we can’t keep doing one thing and saying another as that’s bound to land us in hot water.”

The internal messages, obtained by CyberScoop, also imply that the company discussed the use of 1:many with the IRS in a meeting.

Those messages had a direct effect: Blake Hall issued a LinkedIn post that admitted the company used 1:many verification, which indicates the company also relies on outside databases to verify identity.

In the Wednesday LinkedIn post Hall said that 1:many verification is used “once during enrollment” and “is not tied to identity verification.”

“It does not block legitimate users from verifying their identity, nor is it used for any other purpose other than to prevent identity theft,” he writes.

Hall's post hedges things quite a bit by insinuating any failures to access benefits is the result of malicious fraudsters, rather than any flaws in ID.me's tech. But this belated honesty -- along with the company's multiple failures at the state level -- has caused the IRS to reconsider its reliance on ID.me's AI. (Archived link here.)

The Treasury Department is reconsidering the Internal Revenue Service’s reliance on facial recognition software ID.me for access to its website, an official said Friday amid scrutiny of the company’s collection of images of tens of millions of Americans’ faces.

Treasury and the IRS are looking into alternatives to ID.me, the department official said, and the agencies are in the meantime attentive to concerns around the software.

This doesn't mean the IRS has divested itself of ID.me completely. At the moment, it's only doing some shopping around. Filing your taxes online still means subjecting yourself to ID.me's verification software for the time being.

A recent blog post on ID.me's site explains how the company verifies identity as well as names the algorithms it relies on to match faces, which include Paravision (which has been tested by the NIST) and Amazon's Rekognition, a product Amazon took off the law enforcement market in 2020, perhaps sensing the public's reluctance to embrace even more domestic surveillance tech.

This may be too little too late for ID.me. Its refusal to engage honestly and transparently with the public while gobbling up state and federal government contracts has expanded its scrutiny past that of the Extremely Online. Senator Ron Wyden wants to know why the IRS has made ID.me the only option for online filing.

I’m very disturbed that Americans may have to submit to a facial recognition system, wait on hold for hours, or both, to access personal data on the IRS website. While e-filing returns remain unaffected, I’m pushing the IRS for greater transparency on this plan.

But e-filing is affected. As the IRS's spokesperson noted in a statement to Bloomberg, ID.me is still standing between e-filers and e-filing.

[IRS spokesperson Barbara] LaManna noted that any taxpayer who does not want to use ID.me can opt against filing his or her taxes online.

It may be true that people with existing accounts might be able to route around this tech impediment, but new filers are still forced to interact with ID.me to set up accounts for e-filing. If spotty state interactions created national headlines, just wait until a nation of millions starts putting ID.me's tech through its paces.

Houston artist Bill Davenport announced this weekend that he has officially closed his storefront, Bill’s Junk. Opened in 2008 by the artist, the store was part art project and part genuine secondhand shop. Mr. Davenport sold various types of art and objects in the space: his own paintings and sculptures; artwork sourced from eBay, Goodwill, and yard sales; books; miscellaneous objects given to him by friends, neighbors and strangers; and anything and everything else. Bolstered by the motto “Art can be disappointing, but junk always exceeds your expectations,” Mr. Davenport took a wide-ranging approach to his junk shop. On Facebook, he described Bill’s Junk as “a store where high art, low craft, nature and salvage are reconciled under the umbrella of commerce.”

Mr. Davenport came to Houston in 1990 for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Core Residency Program. After three years as a Core resident, he decided to remain in the city because of the opportunity it provided. “Houston was great, because you could do anything you wanted and nobody cared,” Mr. Davenport told Glasstire. “It seemed like the possibilities were endless, and they were.”

During and after his time at the Core, Mr. Davenport began to exhibit his work across Texas, including at Inman Gallery and Wiersbowski Gallery in Houston, and at Angstrom Gallery in Dallas. In the late 1990s and early aughts, Mr. Davenport taught art at schools across the city of Houston. From 1995 to 1997, he published Artletter, “Houston’s Timely Magazine of Art,” in which he and other contributors reviewed exhibitions and events.

In 2001, Mr. Davenport became Glasstire’s first-ever contributor. He continued to write regularly for the publication, and served as its Editor-in-Chief from 2013-2015.

In 2006, Mr. Davenport and Francesca Fuchs purchased the two-story building that would eventually house Bill’s Junk, located in Houston’s Heights neighborhood at 1125 E 11th Street. The building was not in a good state — it had been condemned by the city and its ceiling was falling in. The entire space, which is 4,000 square feet, had previously been in the 1930s, according to writer Pete Gershon, “a fleabag flophouse.” Subsequent tenants of the building included various barbers, lunch counters, and, before Mr. Davenport and Ms. Fuchs bought the building, “a ramshackle party supply store.” Mr. Davenport and Ms. Fuchs worked to renovate the building. Upstairs they constructed a family apartment, and downstairs they constructed two studio spaces.

In 2008, once the pair had finished updating the building, Mr. Davenport decided to dispose of their excess building materials by putting them outside, like a yard sale. He additionally set out thrift store artwork (he had been collecting works by no-name artists for 25 years), as well as his own work that he wanted to get rid of. This yard sale spilled into the building’s storefront.

Then, an increasing number of people began coming by to see his yard sale. Weeks after Mr. Davenport began trying to get rid of his excess objects, Toby Kamps, who was then a curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), came by to ask if Mr. Davenport would consider including his yard sale in the museum’s upcoming (and now legendary) exhibition, No Zoning: Artists Engage Houston. According to Mr. Davenport, this ask was “a difficult decision” and “sort of a slap in the face” — he had been an artist actively working the city for years, and suddenly the museum didn’t want his actual art for exhibition, but instead wanted his yard sale. Ultimately, he agreed to the show on the condition that everything he trucked to the museum really would be for sale — his project would be an operating store inside the exhibition.

The inclusion of his project in No Zoning was a turning point for Mr. Davenport. As a concept, Bill’s Junk was exceedingly popular — when he was tending the shop, attendees to the exhibition would come in and suddenly realize they were in a store. “Their faces would light up,” Mr. Davenport says, “shopping is way more interesting than looking at art. I mean, literally. The difference between the way someone looks at a piece of art in a museum and the way they look at something when they’re shopping is night and day. Shopping beats looking at art any day, pretty much.”

Throughout the four-month-run of the exhibition, he sold-out the store multiple times. Ultimately, this proved the project’s concept to Mr. Davenport, and he decided to keep it going after the exhibition was over. He wanted Bill’s Junk to have a larger life beyond the CAMH’s exhibition, outside of an art world context. Also, as he tells Glasstire, people in Houston expected him to continue running it into perpetuity.

The basic idea behind Bill’s Junk is the concept behind many artistic ventures: “to show people a larger world.” Mr. Davenport continued: “what I really like is when people come in and see something that they hadn’t considered before, and they consider it and then they’re like ‘okay that could be like that’ and then they smile and it’s great.”

Much of the mystique around objects at Bill’s Junk came from the way they were presented — they crowded the floor, peg boards, shelves, and myriad other display units. Many of the objects also had small, handwritten tags, attached via string. These tags sometimes gave a brief history or context for the object, along with its price. The stories of the objects that passed through Bill’s Junk included those of aging and deceased artists, of faraway self-taught makers, and of Houston history, among many others.

Mr. Davenport’s own art also played a big part in Bill’s Junk. Although he was represented by Inman Gallery for a number of years, he began showing and selling smaller-scale artworks out of his store. Many of these pieces were affordable — under $100 — so that they could both be relatable to and blend in with the other objects on view.

Concurrently with Bill’s Junk, Mr. Davenport also ran an exhibition space next door in the building’s connected storefront. Initially his idea was to open a commercial gallery space, called Optical Project. Starting in October of 2008, about five exhibitions ran in this first iteration of the gallery, including solo shows by artists such as Maggie Hills, Giles Lyon, and Ludwig Schwarz. The space also hosted a show by Sterling Allen, which, as Mr. Davenport tells it, was Arturo Palacios’ first venture into the Houston scene. (Mr. Palacios went on to move his gallery, Art Palace, from Austin to Houston. He later cofounded Deasil.)

Eventually, Mr. Davenport realized that he “didn’t like being an art dealer and had no talent for it.” The gallery then became a flex space where artists could propose shows. It operated this way, intermittently hosting pop-ups and exhibitions by Charlie Kitchen, Kathleen McShane, Paul Horn, Seth Alverson, and others, until 2020. Mr. Davenport tells Glasstire that there are two more shows scheduled to happen in the space before summer 2022. After that, this space will shutter, too.

Mr. Davenport has told Glasstire that he intends to rent out the Bill’s Junk storefront. While he says that it would be “nice to have something cool” in the space, he does not have a particular tenant in mind. The rental property, which is about 720 square feet, will include Bill’s Junk and the back portion of the space, which served as Mr. Davenport’s painting studio.

As for why Mr. Davenport decided to call it quits now, he told Glasstire that the whole junk setup that his shop is based on — the world of thrift store art — doesn’t exist anymore. “At the beginning there was a possibility of going to Value Village and finding something unrecognized, but the world seems to have caught up. Those things have value now — they’re on eBay and much more expensive.” He continued, “it has been one long downhill slide. I started with the best stuff and now I just have mediocre stuff left. And that makes it not fun anymore. I really should have closed four years ago for that reason.” He summed it up: “I ran out of good junk, really.”

While Mr. Davenport may have been thinking about closing for a while, the decision came on a whim. He painted a sign that read “EVERY-THING MUST GO!” on the morning of January 29, without deciding to close the store. He had merely intended to get rid of much of his inventory. Then, as people began to ask him if he was closing shop, he began saying that he was. And just like that, as quickly as Bill’s Junk had materialized, it was closed.

When looking back on what he’s taking away from his time running Bill’s Junk (storefront artist-run spaces aren’t new — Claes Oldenburg ran The Store in 1961, and Texas artist Franco Mondini-Ruiz ran his Infinito Botanica in the 1990s. Both influenced Bill’s Junk), Mr. Davenport told Glasstire that the project “certainly gave me a lot of insight into how people think about art and its marketing. It allowed me to step outside of the business part of the art world, which I was feeling a bit constrained by in 2008.” He went on to say that the project also gave him a way to do something different — it enabled him to abandon the New York-centric model of how you’re “supposed to” be an artist in society. “What can you do that will matter to people in Houston? Being a gallery artist was okay, but it wasn’t vital in the way a store was vital.”

Mr. Davenport will continue to post items for sale on his Instagram, and he will continue to participate in pop-ups and events, like the multi-day shop he ran at Talley Dunn Gallery in 2019. These types of events will allow him to still have the shopkeep-customer relationships, which have been such a large part of Mr. Davenport’s life over the past fourteen years.

“The best thing about the store always was the customers,” Mr. Davenport told Glasstire. “I’ve had so many great customers and so many great interactions with people. I want to put in a thank you to them, because without them it is just me sitting in a room. And that’s what it was in the end, and that’s why I quit.”

 

Correction: February 2, 2022: This article has been updated to reflect that Bill Davenport and Francesca Fuchs, together, purchased and renovated the building that housed Bill’s Junk. 

The post Bill Davenport Closes His Houston Storefront, Bill’s Junk appeared first on Glasstire.

We’re going on tour with our new movie and live show, Kidz Klub! 

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 Now that society is collapsing, Everything Is Terrible! is reborn with their new and fantastical expedition into found footage... but this time the adults can stay home! EIT! has unearthed thousands of forgotten DVD & VHS tapes aimed at yesterday’s youth to bring you their most mind-melting movie to date. Watch in awe as all colors of the rainbow join forces to destroy the tyranny of adult civilization once and for all! All of your oldest friends will be there; skateboarding web-surfers, rapping math equations, gigantic baby ducks, and maybe even a wizard or two! And what EIT! show would be complete without a live experience that makes the Ice Capades look like a stupid piece of trash! Finally, an all-encompassing extravaganza created for kidz... by kidz!

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "NEW BOOK! Out of Your Mind!" - originally published 1/15/2021 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

Good morning! There is a lot of weather to talk about for this week, but first I want to say a word regarding our app, which is available for Apple and Android devices. Several readers have written to note a bug in the 7-day forecasts on the home screen, and we’re aware of it. Fixing this will be part of our next update, which will also include some of your most requested features. We’ll have more to say on this soon, but I did want to take a moment to apologize for the bug.

With that said, let’s talk about today’s rains and an Arctic front coming into Houston later this week.

Monday

The high pressure system that brought our beautiful weather this weekend has now exited eastward, and in its place a low pressure system will move into the region today. Light showers will develop to the southwest of Houston this morning, and move into the city later this morning. The potential for heavy rainfall is greatest this afternoon and evening, before activity winds down around midnight. Generally I think the region will see 2 to 4 inches for areas west of Interstate 45, and 1 to 3 inches east.

The greatest threat for heavy rainfall is likely near Matagorda Bay, and areas southwest of Houston, where higher isolated totals of 6 inches or more are possible. Due to the threat of some street flooding, we have instituted a Stage 1 flood alert for today and this evening. Note that these impacts are most likely during the evening commute. Highs, otherwise, will reach the mid- to upper-60s today, with lows in the upper 50s Monday night.

Tuesday

Congratulations. This is the one day with zero weather concerns this week. Expect highs in the low 70s with mostly cloudy skies. We may briefly see a little sunshine during the afternoon hours. Winds will be light. Overnight lows will again drop into the upper 50s.

Wednesday

This will be another warm-ish day, with highs likely reaching the mid-70s beneath cloudy skies. Some light showers will be possible during the afternoon hours, ahead of a front that will sweep through on Wednesday night, reaching Houston between midnight and sunrise on Thursday, and pushing off the coast by sunrise. Temperatures will drop sharply with this front, but most likely any rainfall accompanying it will end before temperatures get cold enough for wintry precipitation.

Thursday

Welcome to winter. Skies will be mostly cloudy on Thursday, with rains likely ending by or before noon. Your afternoon temperatures should top out at about 40 degrees, made to feel colder still by a stiff northerly breeze. The question becomes how cold it will get on Thursday night, and that is going to depend on whether skies clear somewhat (which would make things colder), and how quickly winds die down (more winds means more mixing, which would trend warmer). For now I think we’ll see mid-20s for inland areas such as Katy and The Woodlands, upper-20s for central Houston, and a light freeze right along the coast. This should be just warm enough to preclude concerns about widespread pipe damage, but the forecast at this point could still go a bit warmer or a bit colder.

Friday

Friday will be cold, with partly sunny skies, and highs in the low 40s. Expect another cold night with temperatures perhaps a degree or two warmer than Thursday night.

Saturday and Sunday

The weekend looks partly sunny and chilly. Expect highs of around 50 degrees on Saturday, with a light freeze possible Saturday night, and in the mid-50s on Sunday. We can’t rule out some light rain each day, but for now I’d bet on dry conditions. A slow warming trend should continue into next week.

This post, the new hire who showed up is not the same person we interviewed , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

This is a situation currently unfolding at my husband’s office so I’m a very amused bystander and thought I’d get your opinion on this craziness.

My husband works in IT and is on the leadership team at a midsized private company. He was part of a panel that recently interviewed a number of folks for an open position on his team. They are entirely remote. They had a few candidates for a first and second round, and had one make it to a third final round before an offer. “John” accepted the offer and started last week!

Except … it’s not the John my husband remembers. My husband was confused and said the following things were odd:

– John has different hair and now wears glasses.

– John is talking extensively about working in a garage because his three children and wife are home. In the interview, he made references to being single and was visibly in an indoor desk area.

– John can’t answer a number of questions that they previously discussed in the interview, things pretty pivotal to the position.

– Husband describes John as being aloof and pretty timid whereas John was confident and articulate when they interviewed him.

He is convinced this is not the person they hired. I agreed that all those things taken together make this very odd but each one could have a valid explanation. I told him the most likely explanation is the hiring committee simply mixed up the candidates (or HR did) and the wrong John was offered and accepted. He agreed but said since only one candidate made it to the third round, that is really unlikely (other candidates had already been sent rejections before the third round even occurred). He’s confident they couldn’t have been mixed up.

All of this is a bit moot as my husband is in his notice period and will be moving to a new company in a few weeks … but he feels like he is going crazy. So my question is … is this a thing?! In a now mostly virtual world, are people perhaps paying people to conduct interviews for them?!?

The situation is actively unfolding so I’m sure I’ll have updates. The less mature side of me wants him to start planting fake references to the interview conversations they had to see if John bites, but I digress.

After receiving this letter, I got updates. Many updates (probably because I greeted each one enthusiastically and requested more)! So let’s do those first and then get to the question.

Update 1

11:57 am

A very quick update!

My husband just came out of his office and said he has a text from his boss “Holly” on his personal cell because she didn’t want it on the company network. She wants to know if he thinks John is acting a lot different than the John they hired. He responded and told her all of his suspicions with the caveat that he didn’t want to accuse him of anything but something is very off. She too thinks it’s unlikely candidates were mixed up because she has his resume and John claims all the same work history/credentials as the John they interviewed.

They are on a call with HR as I type this. Unclear if they are working out an error by the hiring committee /HR or unraveling fraud. More to come.

Alas, my planting fake call-backs idea had no time to come to fruition.

Update 2

12:25 pm

Husband just got off a call with Holly, their HR business partner, and the internal recruiter who sent the offer. They confirmed the right candidate was offered a job and agreed many things were odd. (Another oddity revealed on that phone call … John didn’t know who Holly was; she had to reintroduce herself and he asked about her role … Holly was on two of three rounds of interviews and they extensively reviewed their org chart and her role.)

They are currently speaking with their legal team to discuss options and when to bring John into the mix to try to explain.

Update 3

1:43 pm

It’s definitely been a crazy morning! They are waiting to hear back from legal — I think they are weighing whether they confront John and let him try to explain or let him go anyway. He either lied about his identity or lied about his experience since he’s unable to speak about the basics of the job now so regardless it seems like he will be gone. I will keep you updated on what he learns next!

Husband in a rabbit hole of research now and apparently this fake interviewing is a thing (the job in question is a mulesoft architect). Bizarre!

Update 4

3:13 pm

They heard back from legal … who are less than thrilled about the situation! They approved HR to have a conversation with John regarding what has been reported (more in the vein of “there’s been some concerns about performance and you overselling abilities” and less of the We Think You Are a Liar route).

In the meantime, legal approved security to put a trace on John’s computer to review if there have been outside messages or if his work is being completed with outside help or on a different computer altogether. My husband said the general consensus among the group on the call is that the talk with HR is going to send up a quick red flag and John is likely to resign claiming a poor fit rather than get caught committing or admitting fraud.

Hopefully another fun update soon! My husband is getting sick of me sitting against his office door eavesdropping :)

Update 5

5:07 pm

I think my last update for a while: as soon as HR got on the call with him, before they could get through their first question, John said the words “I quit” and hung up the calls. He has since been unreachable!!

So good riddance John. Their security teams are trying to discover what all he downloaded, if they’ll be able to get their equipment back, is John really his real name, etc. !!

Incredibly bizarre situation. Hoping it was a failed case of trying to get a job and not trying to steal company info but who knows — they may never!

First, thank you for this saga, which I found highly diverting.

So yeah, in response to whether this is a thing … as your husband found, the internet claims it’s a thing, particularly in IT jobs and largely because of the increase in virtual interviewing. The idea is that one person interviews and another takes the job, or one person interviews while another person feeds them answers. You could short-circuit the first category by having people show I.D. at the start of virtual interviews, but the second category is harder and you’d need to address it by being forthright and direct if the person you hire doesn’t seem to have the skills they appeared to have in the interview … which is something good managers should do regardless, but it’s easy to fall into thinking maybe the person is just still adjusting to the role and then suddenly you’re two months in with someone who was never going to be able to do the job because they Cyrano de Bergerac’d their interview.

This post, what’s the point of making me work from the office to “collaborate” if no one else is here? , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I work at a large nonprofit that went totally remote at the beginning of the pandemic (previously very few people had been allowed to work remotely on any kind of regular basis). While remote work proved both effective and popular, as time has gone on, leadership has mandated first one day, then two days, and now three days in person at the office. The stated logic is that going to the office allows valuable (and in some cases spontaneous) face-to-face interactions and collaborations to occur that just don’t happen over Zoom.

If that were true, I wouldn’t love it but maybe I could get on board. However … it’s not, at least not for me. At LEAST 50% of the time that I come in, I am literally the only member of my team (or of the group of employees with whom I typically interact outside of my team) on the premises. I spend two hours commuting — two extra hours away from my family — to come sit in an office and literally speak to no one the entire day (except by email or maybe Zoom … like I would have done at home). I am growing more and more resentful each time that I arrive at my desk and see the offices of my other team members empty and dark. I feel like several hours a week of my time are being stolen from me (and my family) for no reason at all, and my motivation for work is tanking. Some departments have instituted policies for all staff to come in on the same days to avoid this issue, but mine has not done so, and in any case my work is highly cross-departmental and so the people I need to work with would often fall outside of such a policy anyway (heck, some aren’t even located in the same city!).

My direct supervisor had been fantastic ever since the pandemic started about allowing me to work flexible hours, etc. as long as I get my work done well and on time (I had no childcare until a few months ago due to Covid safety concerns). However, this in-person work mandate comes from above her. Do you think there is any effective way to attempt to address this ridiculous blanket policy with the higher-ups or otherwise?

Yeah, there’s no point in coming in if you’re just going to sit in a closed office and only talk to people on Zoom anyway. Either management above you doesn’t realize that’s happening or they’re okay with it because at some level they believe being physically in the office is “real” working whereas working from home is not.

But I’m curious what the rest of your team is doing. If you’re all supposed to be in the office three days a week and more than half the time you’re the only one there when you come in … is it possible that other people aren’t really adhering to that mandate and you don’t need to follow it as rigidly yourself?

Also, would it be helpful to have face-to-face interactions with other people who work from your same city (including those in other departments)? If so, one option is to coordinate your in-office days with them (if they’re up for face-to-face meetings; not everyone is) and see if that makes those days feel more worthwhile.

But if not, talk to your manager! Explain that you’re commuting two hours round-trip three days a week to sit in an office and see no one, and you’re still talking to people over Zoom or email just like you would have done at home. Tell her you’re happy to come in when there’s a need for it but right now it feels like you’re spending six hours a week driving without any work payoff.

And yes, the policy comes from above her, but she still might be able to okay you doing things differently, and she’s better positioned than you are to push back with managers above her.

It’s also worth talking to your colleagues and seeing if any of them are feeling the same. If so, a group of you all pushing in the same direction about this can be more effective than one voice alone.

Video Games
How It’s Made
Erlbach
1996

I am sure this book from 1996 is super informative to those kids dreaming of a career in gaming. There really aren’t very many specifics and I am sure the industry itself is nothing like it was in 1996. I would also imagine the jargon has also changed over the years. Bottom line, this needs to be weeded.

I think my husband has some instructions on Pong somewhere in our house, in case this holding library is looking to start a retro gaming collection.

Mary

The post How about a career in video games? appeared first on Awful Library Books.

“School boards are pulling books from classrooms. Parents are being asked to inform on teachers who teach ‘objectionable’ material. Streaming services are pulling down music rather than misinformation. This might be the information age, but there have never been more questions about who can get what information, and from where.” — CNN, 1/29/22

I believe that choosing not to do business with Spotify is censorship. Now, here’s a bunch of books we need to ban.

What’s that? You want more of an explanation about the censorship thing before I get into the books? Alright, look:

It’s a free market. That’s what I love about this country. But when you decide to stop doing business with someone because you don’t like their business practices, you are literally promoting censorship. And I am totally, fully against censorship. Now, I’d like to read a list of books we need to ban from our classrooms forever.

Sorry, you have another question? No? It’s just the same question, again? Sure, I’ll give it another shot:

We live in a capitalist society where the economy is self-regulating, so people have economic freedom. But I believe that if you actually use your economic freedom, that is censorship, and I hate censorship. Now, I want to start by banning Maus—we shouldn’t be allowed to talk about the Holocaust, or mice, for any reason.

Huh? “That wasn’t a full explanation?” Well, maybe this will help:

Some musicians who sell their music to Spotify have decided to stop selling their music to Spotify because they think Spotify gives a platform to dangerous medical misinformation. And because I don’t agree with them, and even though nobody has been kicked off Spotify yet, what they’re doing is censorship. And if there’s one thing I won’t stand for, it’s censorship. Now, here are all the books we need to permanently get rid of and, ideally, un-write. Is that possible?

What is it now? Again?! You don’t think I “actually explained why it’s censorship?” Ugh, fine:

When you decide to do or say anything I disagree with, that’s censorship. Now, get these books out of my kid’s school before I call the cops.

You disagree?! You think that just because I disagree with someone, that doesn’t mean what they’re doing is censorship? And you think banning books is actual censorship? Well, I disagree with you. This means you’re censoring me! Now stop censoring me, and burn these books.

About thirty minutes into Donald Trump’s speech Saturday night at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds in Conroe, north of Houston, the former president stopped playing the familiar rhetorical hits and a curious thing happened: many in the crowd began to leave. For the first half of his speech, Trump had kept the tens of thousands in his audience enraptured. He had been railing against Biden administration border policy and vaccine mandates (while extolling his administration’s program to expedite vaccine development), when he suddenly turned to the ostensible purpose of his visit: endorsing a dozen or so Texas GOP candidates ahead of their March 1 primaries. But as he began to talk about the first recipient of his blessing, Governor Greg Abbott, the energy of the audience…

The post Texas Republican Candidates Need Donald Trump More Than He Needs Them appeared first on Texas Monthly.

This is the first study to investigate the investment properties of LEGO as an alternative asset class from micro- and macro-financial perspectives that overcomes many survivorship bias limitations prevalent in earlier research.

Explains author Savva Shanaev of Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK, in a 2020 paper for the Journal of Risk Finance, Volume 21 Issue 5.

The research found that between 1966 and 2018, those investing in LEGO sets would have gained a modest 1.20% inflation-adjusted return per annum.

However, the defensive properties of LEGO are considerable, as including 5%–25% of LEGO in a diversified portfolio is beneficial for investors with varying levels of risk aversion.

See :  Children’s toy or grown-ups’ gamble? LEGO sets as an alternative investment

If you had to give up coffee or chocolate, which would you choose?

The new Powerpc chip is here! I review what came in the box, the various models, System 7.1.2 and System 7.5, speech recognition past, present and future, Bungie's Marathon, monitors, ethernet, keyboards and finally restoration.

The original 6100 video from 2016 can be found here: https://youtu.be/Ynro9kW8TvY

Andrea Grell eWorld emulation (for Wayback Machine): http://my-old-Macintosh.de

Luke LaRock (feat. the Noofle): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIhU9szohrNO3JR6ZvjjUgA/about


... For Noreen 'the Mom'

The singer-songwriter is the first high-profile musician to join Young's protest against the streaming service over its hosting of Joe Rogan's podcast.

(Image credit: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

Hesseman died because of complications from colon surgery, his manager said. He earned two Emmy nominations for his role on the CBS show, which ran from 1978 to 1982.

(Image credit: Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP)

The NBA is currently celebrating its 75th season and throughout 2021-22, there have been a variety of ways they are marking the occasion. From a jewel-encrusted basketball to specially designed uniforms that draw on the unique history of each team, the league, fans, and teams are finding their own ways to celebrate. 

The Houston Rockets and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) have teamed up with local artists to create limited-edition posters. Each poster will be available for purchase at each of the eleven Remix Night games. Designs of the posters correspond with the influential Rockets alumni who will be honored at the games. The Rockets will also don their Remix uniforms on these nights.  

In a press release announcing the collaboration, creator of the poster project, Houston-based artist Phillip Pyle II remarked, “Basketball and contemporary art are neighbors that just need a reason to visit.” It’s no surprise that Pyle, whose artistic background includes graphic design and whose stated interests include sports and popular culture, is behind this project. 

Here is a list of past games, along with the Rockets alumni honored and the poster’s designer:

Game: Friday, November 12, 2021 vs. Portland
Honoree: Mario Elie
Poster designed by: Alexis Pye

Game: Friday, December 3, 2021 vs. Orlando
Honoree: Steven Francis
Poster designed by: Ann Johnson

Game: Friday, December 10, 2021 vs. Milwaukee
Honoree: Vernon Maxwell
Poster designed by: Gregory Michael Carter

Game: Friday, December 16, 2021 vs. New York
Honoree: Rudy Tomjanovich
Poster designed by: Phillip Pyle, II

Game: Friday, December 31, 2021 vs. Miami
Honoree: Moochie Norris
Poster designed by: Rabea Ballin

Game: Friday, January 7, 2022 vs. Dallas
Honoree: Bill Worrell
Poster designed by: Sarah Welch

Ready to get your hands on a commemorative poster? Mark your calendars for the remaining Remix Nights:

Friday, January 28, 2022
Thursday, February 10, 2022
Friday, March 11, 2022
Friday, March 18, 2022
Friday, April 1, 2022

The posters available on the above nights will be designed by Tay Butler, Jack Massing, Matt Manalo, Stephen Wilson, and Robert Pruitt. The honorees have not yet been announced.

The post The Houston Rockets and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Team Up with Local Artists to Create Commemorative Posters appeared first on Glasstire.

It is such a lovely day across the Houston region today it’s difficult to imagine unpleasant weather. But we’ve got plenty of that on tap for the week ahead, so we’re jumping in with a Sunday post to keep you in the loop.

Monday’s rains

We continue to expect that a low-pressure system will produce widespread rainfall across the Houston region on Monday, generally from the late-morning hours through around midnight. Rainfall amounts are going to vary widely with this system, as some areas pick up less than one-half inch of rain, and other locations 2 to 4 inches, if not a bit more. Because these rains have the potential to produce some nuisance street flooding, we think it’s worth instituting a Stage 1 Flood Alert. This will primarily affect areas south of Interstate 10, and west of Interstate 45.

Generally, the closer to the coast you live, and the further west of Houston, the more likely you are to see heavy rainfall. The good news is that we don’t anticipate any severe weather beyond heavy rainfall on Monday, so tornadoes or strong winds are unlikely. These rains should end over night with partly sunny skies on Tuesday.

Mid-week freeze

The next event on our radar—if you thought I was going to spare you weather puns because of the Sabbath, you thought wrong—is a cold front that will arrive on Wednesday night. Some additional rain showers may well accompany this front, but I think our atmosphere will dry out before the coldest air arrives. This should preclude any wintry precipitation for the Houston metro area, but I’m not ready to entirely rule that out yet.

The bigger story will be colder air, with low temperatures likely dropping into the 20s for Houston on Thursday and Friday nights. Even Galveston Island may see a light freeze on Thursday night. These temperatures should be about 10 degrees warmer than the region experienced during the freeze last February, but it will nonetheless be quite cold. As we get closer, we’ll be able to fine tune the temperature forecast.

Still more significant impacts are likely for inland parts of the state this week, particularly the Dallas area. Beginning late Wednesday afternoon through Thursday, snow and ice are likely for the Metroplex. Low temperatures on Thursday night probably will get into the teens. So if your plans take you north of Houston this week, roads and more could be mess.

If you’re wondering what this means for the Texas power grid, the answer is I don’t know. We’re not going to see the cold extremes we saw in 2021, but it will still be plenty cold across the entire state.

More tomorrow.

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Hell, I can't even make myself say it on purpose.

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Last week America's Internal Revenue Service announced a live-video-feed verification of taxpayer's faces would be required by this summer access online tax service. But now the Washington Post reports that "complaints of confusing instructions and long wait times to complete the sign-up have caused an unknown number to abandon the process in frustration." "The $86 million ID.me contract with the IRS also has alarmed researchers and privacy advocates who say they worry about how Americans' facial images and personal data will be safeguarded in the years to come." There is no federal law regulating how the data can be used or shared. While the IRS couldn't say what percentage of taxpayers use the agency's website, internal data show it is one of the federal government's most-viewed websites, with more than 1.9 billion visits last year. The partnership with ID.me has drawn anger from some members of Congress, including Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who tweeted that he was "very disturbed" by the plan and would push the IRS for "greater transparency." Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) called it "a very, very bad idea by the IRS" that would "further weaken Americans' privacy." The Senate Finance Committee is working to schedule briefings with the IRS and ID.me on the issue, a committee aide said.... "No one should be forced to submit to facial recognition as a condition of accessing essential government services," Wyden said in a separate statement. "I'm continuing to seek more information about ID.me and other identity verification systems being used by federal agencies." A Treasury official said Friday that the department was "looking into" alternatives to ID.me, saying Treasury and the IRS always are interested in improving "taxpayers experience...." About 70 million Americans who have filed for unemployment insurance, pandemic assistance grants, child tax credit payments or other services already have been scanned by the McLean, Va.-based company, which says its client list includes 540 companies; 30 states, including California, Florida, New York and Texas; and 10 federal agencies, including Social Security, Labor and Veterans Affairs.... Equifax, the credit-reporting company that previously confirmed taxpayers' data for the IRS, had its $7 million contract suspended in 2017 after hackers exposed the personal information of 148 million people... [ID.me] says 9 of 10 applicants can verify their identity through a self-service face scan in five minutes or less. Anyone who hits a snag is funneled into the backup video-chat verification process...But some who have tried to verify their identities through ID.me for other purposes have reported agonizing delays: cryptic glitches in Colorado, website errors in Arizona, five-hour waits in North Carolina, days-long waits in California and weeks-long benefit delays in New York. The security blogger Brian Krebs wrote last week that he faced a three-hour wait trying to confirm his IRS account, three months before the tax-filing deadline.... The company said it intends to expand its workforce beyond the 966 agents who now handle video-chat verification for the entire country. It has also opened hundreds of in-person identity-verification centers — replicating, in essence, what government offices have done for decades. The article also points out that advertising is also a key part of ID.me's operation, with people signing up through their web site asked if they want to subscribe to "offers and discounts" — though the company stresses people do have to opt in. And in addition, the article adds, "If a person is using ID.me to confirm their identity with a government agency, the company will not use that verification information for 'marketing or promotional purposes,' the company's privacy policy says." But a senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center complained to the Post that "We haven't even gone the step of putting regulations in place and deciding if facial recognition should even be used like this. We're just skipping right to the use of a technology that has clearly been shown to be dangerous and has issues with accuracy, disproportionate impact, privacy and civil liberties." A spokesperson for the U.S. Treasury Department also told Bloomberg News "that any taxpayer who does not want to use ID.me can opt against filing his or her taxes online." "We believe in the importance of protecting the privacy of taxpayers, while also ensuring criminals are not able to gain access to taxpayer accounts," LaManna added, arguing that it's been "impossible" for the IRS to develop its own cutting-edge identification program because of "the lack of funding for IRS modernization."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. That’s been a cornerstone of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s legal strategy in court when combating foes of all stripes—socialists in Washington, tyrants on local school boards, and now, a state court filled entirely with Republican judges. 

After the state’s Criminal Court of Appeals—the highest court for criminal cases—axed Paxton’s power to unilaterally prosecute alleged election crimes in December, the embattled lawman responded by stoking the fury of the GOP ranks. 

Typically a sleepy outpost in the world of Texas politics, the high criminal court now finds itself a target of the party’s increasingly rabid crusade for “election integrity.” Eight of the nine judges—all of whom are Republicans—signed onto the decision. The ruling overturned a provision of state law granting the attorney general unilateral power to prosecute alleged voter fraud because, the judges said, it violated the state constitution’s separation of powers. The attorney general can still prosecute such cases with permission from local prosecutors. 

This struck a major blow to Republicans’ efforts to find and prosecute voter fraud, which they say hinges in large part on empowering the state attorney general to supersede uncooperative local district attorneys. While election fraud is exceedingly rare, Texas Republicans have long used claims of widespread illegal voting to further restrict access to the ballot. In 2021, Paxton’s voter fraud unit spent $2.2 million and only closed three cases. 

Paxton immediately lashed out against the court, claiming their decision meant “Soros-funded district attorneys will have sole power to decide whether election fraud has occurred in Texas” and has since questioned the partisan loyalties of the eight GOP judges. He has filed a motion calling for the court to rehear the case, which is now backed by an army of right-wing activists and at least two dozen Republican lawmakers. 

As the Austin American-Statesman reported this week, Paxton has also rallied the troops with the help of prominent conservative hucksters involved in spreading former President Donald Trump’s lies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. On Lindell TV, a website run by infamous MyPillow CEO and “Stop the Steal” booster Mike Lindell, Paxton urged viewers to contact the court judges. “Call them out by name,” Paxton said. “I mean, you can look them up. There’s eight of them that voted the wrong way. Call them, send mail, send email.”

The state attorney general followed up with an appearance on the “War Room” podcast with Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime political consigliere, who was eager to amplify Paxton’s pleas.

“We’re going to make them all famous, and they have to understand they’re going to be made famous. Very famous. On a global scale,” Bannon said, according to the Statesman report.

“That’s awesome,” Paxton responded. “That’s exactly what they need. They need to know because nobody knows who they are.”

Paxton hasn’t been alone. Steve Hotze, the notorious right-wing zealot from Houston, is working to stir up the party base. A PAC run by the pastor reportedly sent out robocalls to tens of thousands of Republicans around the state with a message from Hotze urging them to call the Criminal Court of Appeals. “Leave a message that you want the court to restore Paxton’s right to prosecute voter fraud in Texas,” Hotze said, according to the Houston Chronicle. “If this decision isn’t reversed, then the Democrats will steal the elections in November and turn Texas blue.”

Hotze has a long history of ginning up voter fraud conspiracies. In 2020, Hotze hired a team of investigators—including a former Houston police captain—to expose an alleged mail-ballot harvesting plot orchestrated by Houston Democrats. The allegations were dismissed as bogus by local prosecutors. Hotze also unsuccessfully filed numerous lawsuits in an effort to block efforts to expand voting access during the pandemic, and to toss out 127,000 ballots cast at drive-thru voting locations in Harris County. 

The efforts by Paxton to encourage public pressure against the court—which some experts say violates legal ethics—have been successful. The Criminal Court of Appeals has been overwhelmed by a flood of calls and emails by activists demanding they rehear the case and reverse their ruling. Several emails, obtained by the Statesman, threatened the judges with political repercussions if they failed to reverse course. 

One menacing email—sent by a self-described “US Navy Veteran FreeMason Armed Patriot”—was forwarded along to law enforcement. One part of the message said: “Your court now is on my list to go after in The Patriot hunt for Communists. We are armed at all times so do not cross the line.”

Legal experts say that it would be extraordinarily unusual for the Court of Appeals to reverse its ruling, especially one that was so overwhelmingly decided. 

In 2018, the Criminal Court of Appeals ruled that the pay agreement for the special prosecutors in Paxton’s securities fraud cases violated state law—which was a significant victory for Paxton and his defense team’s efforts to drag out the case for years. But the decision was a controversial one within the court, with three of the judges writing dissenting opinions and another writing both a dissenting and concurring opinion. Even so, the court dismissed the prosecutors’ motion for a rehearing. 

Amid the growing political pressure, Governor Greg Abbott broke his silence over the case this week by joining with Paxton. “Texas’ highest law enforcement officer has constitutional authority to enforce that election-integrity law. The Court of Criminal Appeals needs to uphold Texas law and the Attorney General’s responsibility to defend it,” Abbott’s spokesperson said. 

Texas is one of the few states where judges must run in partisan elections, which critics say opens the judiciary up to outsize political influence. 

As a former district judge and state Supreme Court justice, Abbott has been one of those critics. In 2019, he tweeted, “We need judges devoted to the constitution and strict application of the law, not to the political winds of the day.” 

Republicans are already plotting alternatives if the court doesn’t change its mind. State Representative Briscoe Cain pledged to push a bill in the next legislative session that would allow the attorney general to take an election fraud case to a neighboring (and more politically amenable) county if the local prosecutors refuse to play ball. 

For his part, Paxton has said that if the court doesn’t reopen the case, he’ll demand that Abbott call a special session before the upcoming 2022 elections to pass legislation that would allow his office—as well as private individuals—to sue with the threat of “large penalties” over anything related to voter fraud. 

As he told Bannon, he also wants the Legislature to pass another law that grants him unilateral prosecutorial power of election laws. That, he said, would require the court “strike it down again, because it would take several years to go through that process, and at least we can keep that (law) in place through the next election.”

The post Paxton Targets GOP Judges After They Strike Down His Powers on Election Fraud appeared first on The Texas Observer.

New Hampshire Gov. Christopher Sununu says he expects the at-home tests to be available at statewide liquor stores within the next two weeks.

(Image credit: JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images)