I Have Questions

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Recall that Maricopa County, AZ, has developed a hoary history of election ballot and counting irregularities, most recently in the 2022 election in which the county was unable to deliver sufficient ballots in sufficient numbers to accommodate the voters, many of whom were denied their right to vote by those ballot failures. Maricopa County investigators, led by Former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Ruth McGregor, have released their report on causes of those…snafus.

Between the August primaries and the November general contest, the county expanded the length of the ballots from 19 inches to 20 inches in order to include all of the required information. The increased ballot size in combination with the use of 100-pound ballot paper, the report concludes, was too great a strain on the printers.
“Based on our tests, and for the reasons described in this report, we concluded that the combined effect of using 100-pound ballot paper and a 20-inch ballot during the 2022 general election was to require that the Oki B432 printers perform at the extreme edge of their capability, a level that could not be reliably sustained by a substantial number of printers,” the report states.

That raises questions in my poor, dumb, flyover country northern Texan mind.

Who reviewed the performance specifications for the Oki B432 printers?

Who tested those printers on the larger paper?

Who tested those printers on the heavier-weight paper?

Who tested those printers on the combination of larger size and heavier weight?

Finally, an encompassing question: of the County’s election officials and staff, for how long have the staff members—the bureaucrats and volunteers, not the elected officials—been in place?

Rogue Judge

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A couple of teachers had the impudence to demur from compulsory “antiracism training” imposed by their Springfield Public Schools district managers.

In response, US District Judge Douglas Harpool, of the Western District of Missouri, not only ruled against the teachers, he ordered them to pay $313,000 in legal costs for bothering the district, and he did this cavalierly disregarding their arguments and issuing his ruling via summary judgment—which means the court—Harpool—never really took the case up, or took it seriously. He wrote in pertinent part, as summarized by Just the News:

They have not provided evidence they were compelled to “speak favorably” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.” about the district’s message or “somehow affiliate or associate” with that message, as evidenced by Lumley’s allegation that “her own coworkers berated her during training” for disagreeing, Harpool wrote.

Never mind that the very parts that Harpool cited demonstrates the compulsory nature of the requirement not to speak unfavorably about the district’s “message” and not to remain unaffiliated or unassociated with the district’s “message.” That pressure to not be unaligned or to not speak unfavorably is exactly the compulsion to speak favorably and to align. The fact that the beratement went unchallenged by the program’s instructors or the district’s managers further emphasizes the compulsory nature of the district’s “message.”

This is a Federal judge who needs to be removed from the bench forthwith. He has shown himself not just incapable of, but openly refusing to, adjudicating a case objectively and on the basis of the facts and statute(s) presented. Instead, Harpool reigns over his court on the basis of his personal agenda.

Harpool’s ruling can be read here.

“Auditors Didn’t Flag”

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Silicon Valley Bank’s third-party auditors did not mention the underlying risk to SVB’s viability in its report, which the group issued two weeks before the bank’s collapse.

When KPMG LLP gave Silicon Valley Bank a clean bill of health just 14 days before the lender collapsed, the Big Four audit firm flagged potential losses on loans as a so-called critical audit matter. But the audit opinion was silent on what actually brought down the bank—its unrealized bond losses and ability to hold them given a reliance on potentially flighty deposits.
“The auditors failed to mention the fire in the basement or the box of dynamite on the first floor, but they did point out the peeling paint on the flower box,” said Erik Gordon, a University of Michigan business professor. “How could they miss the interest-rate risk?”

And this from Martin Baumann, ex-Chief Auditor at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board and who had a leading role in designing the new measure:

Silicon Valley Bank’s unrealized losses in its bond portfolio appear to “meet every definition of a possible critical audit matter[.]”

A critical audit matter is a tool intended to help investors decode risks and uncertainties buried in financial statements, to make audit opinions actually useful.

Thus, how could the auditors have missed the larger risk? Why did they?

Or did they? Maybe this is a demonstration of the weakness of auditors being paid by the auditees for the audits.

One apparent weakness in the PCAOB’s existing requirements, though, is that banks can hide the risks in their portfolios by (re)characterizing some or all of their bond holdings as “hold to maturity” rather than as marketable and so required to report their (fluctuating) market value. But when the bonds are being held in even partial satisfaction of reserve requirements, maybe those “hold to maturity” bonds still should have their current market value reported to the public. After all, SVB had no intention of selling even its “marketable” long-term bonds. That is, until it began to experience deposit withdrawals at rates it could not fill without selling those long bonds immediately, and so at losses driven by the environment’s rising interest rates.

So—again I ask: why did SVB’s auditors not report that interest rate risk? KPMG may well have a valid reason for its silence on that risk, but it should say what that risk is.

In any event, it would be useful to see the timesheets of those auditors—when I worked as a defense contractor, my timesheets were required to be submitted with 10-minute intervals—so we in the public can know what those auditors were doing instead of their jobs.

Bound by the Prior Administration

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In Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal‘s Letters section, Mr Serpico had some thoughts regarding Navy Public Affairs Officer Admiral (ret) John Kirby’s, occupying a seat at Biden’s table as National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, words on the Biden Afghanistan so-called withdrawal.

John Kirby, the National Security Council spokesman, said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration. In essence, it was former President Trump’s fault (“Joe Biden Isn’t Sorry About Afghanistan,” Review & Outlook, April 7).
You rarely see such an act of unashamed temerity. The Biden administration had seven months to make any changes it wanted to avoid the debacle that followed.
Are we supposed to believe that Mr Trump recommended giving up Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night? Did Mr Trump recommend that backward sequence for the removal of our Afghan partners, equipment, and personnel? Did Mr Trump recommend not telling our NATO partners that we were leaving?
Remember, it was President Biden who disregarded his internal military advice about leaving behind a residual force in Afghanistan. All of this hearkens to former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s warning that Mr Biden “has been wrong on every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

What Mr Serpico said.

To which I make a minor correction: “You rarely see such an act of unashamed lying.”

And to which I add:

John Kirby…said with a straight face that the Afghanistan withdrawal was executed with constraints previously set by the previous administration.

What constraints, exactly? What Trump had set up was a series of milestones that as the Taliban met each one, the next step of our drawdown would follow, but if a milestone was missed by the Taliban, the deal was off. And that set of milestones had a residual force, large enough to be effective, remaining.

Further, that deal was no treaty; it was a President’s Executive Agreement. Executive Agreements routinely are withdrawn—entirely legitimately in process and usually for good cause, as well—by subsequent Presidents. Biden was not bound by Trump’s EA; Biden easily could have altered or rescinded it, just as he did with all of the other Trumpian EAs and Executive Orders he rescinded in the last 10 days of January 2021. He chose to ignore this one.

Biden wasn’t bound by anything other than his panic-ridden wish to get out of Afghanistan, no matter the cost, in lives, in national honor, in messaging to enemies like Russia and the People’s Republic of China.

Plebe’s Humor

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Because it’s time, again.

Just to start things off, keep in mind that there’s a fine line between a numerator and a denominator.

OK, that’s enough of that.

Why don’t blind people skydive?
Because it scares their dogs.

What concert only costs 45 cents?
50 Cent featuring Nickleback.

A man walks into a library and asks the librarian for books about paranoia. She whispers, “They’re right behind you….”

I went into a store to buy some books about turtles.
“Hardbacks?” asked the shopkeeper.
“Yes,” I replied. “And they have little heads, too.”

What goes down but never goes up?
An elephant in an elevator.

Why do elephants need trunks?
Because they don’t have handbags.

How can you tell if an elephant is under your bed?
Your nose is touching the ceiling.

What’s big and gray and has horns?
An elephant marching band.

“If there are any idiots in the room, will they please stand up,” said the sarcastic teacher.
After a long silence, one freshman rose to his feet.
“Now then, Mister, why do you consider yourself an idiot?” inquired the teacher with a sneer.
“Well, actually I don’t,” said the student, “but I hate to see you standing up there all by yourself.”

A man is walking through the woods when he sees a bear charging at him.
He books it, but he knows he can’t outrun a bear for long, so he starts praying, “Dear Lord, I beseech thee. Please, o Lord, please let this bear be a Christian!”
The bear catches up to him, knocks him down on the ground, then gets on its knees and says, “Dear Lord, thank you for this food I am about to receive….”

Knock, knock.
Who’s There?
To.
To who?
It’s actually “to whom.”

And for the rest of you grammar nazis, understand that it’s

i before e … except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor.