Should Democrats confirm Gorsuch? I agree with every word of this brilliant piece.
Simone de Beauvoir was right, there are men who are consumed with a jealous rage that women can get pregnant while they can’t.
How to survive in intersectional feminist spaces? You’d think from this idiotic article that crowds of people are lining up to access intersectional spaces. It’s cute how some folks try to protect entrance to a group nobody wants to join anyway.
Big tennis is not that different from academia. You can’t get people to retire until they are wheeled away on a hearse.
Students make Freudian mistakes. Short and funny.
I don’t know if this person is deranged or brilliant. Decide for yourselves if this is somebody to emulate. All I can say is that this is what the liquid economy wants.
Students fall prey to an employment scam. Please share with your students.
How much does a president cost? Not that much, actually.
A blogger entreats Trump to be a man: “Be a man. A real man. One who doesn’t require to be told endlessly that he’s the best, the greatest, the biggest. One who isn’t compelled to ask for affirmation from people who couldn’t give less of a shit about things like the size of your inauguration crowd.” I wonder if this blogger ever met men because this is kind of the definition.
California’s pensions are eating kids’ schooling. We have a similar problem with pensions in Illinois and it’s unsolvable because people who were promised they can retire at 55 with a pension of $2,500 a month will never relinquish this fantasy. They’ll happily devour kids’ lives instead.
Another example of why highly popularized studies should not be trusted.
Clarissa's Blog 
Re: pensions, the article you link to is not an anti-pensions article. It’s an anti-teachers unions article. I like how it’s only the teachers pensions that rile him so much. He neglects to mention that the biggest pension hogs in california are either administrators/city managers or law enforcement. Untouchable constituencies. Teachers don’t even come close.
I’m sure it was an innocent oversight on his part.
“The ‘Big Dog’ units of government conferring the most $100,000 retirement pensions include the California Highway Patrol (1,066); Santa Clara County (836); City of Oakland (509); CA Forestry and Fire Protection (476); Riverside County (461); City of Long Beach (351); CA Dept. of Justice (280); CA Corrections, Paroles and Com (275); CA Corrections (268); and the City of Anaheim (253).”
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The most egregious example in recent memory is of course, the famous case of Bell, California. A tiny city with a 25k median income, whose city council, police department, and city manager conspired to give themselves huge salaries.
The city manager was making $750k/yr (more than the US president lol), with a retirement package of more than $1M/yr.
Sleazy, sleazy people.
“Prosecutors filed suit regarding an agreement with Rizzo, Adams had himself declared disabled the day of his being hired in Bell. The disability status stands to net Adams millions of tax-free pension dollars at taxpayers’ expense. Under the agreement, the 59-year-old Adams would receive a lifetime disability benefit whenever he was ready to retire, meaning he would not have to pay taxes on half of his $400,000-plus annual pension. His Bell retirement would be the third-richest in the state’s huge pension system.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Bell_scandal
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Haha.
“The injuries that Adams cited in order to collect millions of tax-free dollars from a law-enforcement disability pension did not stop him from taking rigorous spinning classes and running in a 5K race, the Glendale Downtown Dash, in 2009.[79][80] Nor did it stop him from stating on an 2008 application for Orange County sheriff, that he likes to ski and had been in the 120-mile Baker to Las Vegas Relay run.”
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My interest in the issue doesn’t lie with the unions but with the extreme selfishness of the generation of 50-year-olds. We have the same problem here in Illinois and it’s unsolvable. They don’t want to pay 1,5% more in state tax but neither do they relinquish the right to retire at 50 with a huge pension.
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On that point, I agree. I was commenting on the dishonest anti-teacher slant of the article.
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Everyone is selfish and terrible.
Pensions and the “benefits” are given in exchange for people agreeing to forgo money in the present, for it is axiomatic that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar in the future.
Like you said, public schooling and the nation state are out the door.
Self interestedly, I should be just like these 50 year olds. I have zero reason to vote higher taxes on myself for any reason whatsoever.
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These are not all completely single 100% healthy people, though. They will end up paying for this in the form of skyrocketing college tuitions for kids, supporting their unemployed adult children, losing their health coverage.
Nothing is really free. If a state is broke, everybody should pitch in and try to do something to make things work.
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Of course. But notice how everything you listed, save their health coverage, affects other people, not them.
Look, if they can’t be prevailed to give a shit about their own children why do I need to subsidize them? They can use all the money they saved by not paying taxes and their fat retirement funds to pay for their own health care, unemployed children, and asswipers.
This line of thinking gets more appealing by the day.
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“This line of thinking gets more appealing by the day.”
Oh yes. I’m getting very fed up with these folks, too. Their self-absorption is unlimited. I talked to one such guy. He voted for Rauner because Rauner’s opponent was for raising the state tax. And now he is pouting about the lack of budget.
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The big problem is that the state stole all this pension money because these politicians saw this big pile of money just setting there. The newspapers refuse to report this angle. Where did this money go? They also fail to report that state workers in Illinois do not pay federal social security because of a deal brokered by politicians. These old folks have zero social security funds coming to them.
. Without the pension that they paid out of their checks — that the state stole — they have nothing.
As usual, workers fight other workers rather than hold the state accountable.
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I’m all for holding “the state” accountable but doing that will not close the several billion budget gap in Illinois. The problem is real and it exists now. Something has to be done at this point, and recriminations- fun as they are- won’t do that.
By the way, fifty years old is hardly “old folks.” We are talking about young, vigorous people whose “right ” to stop working is in question.
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Nightmare Fuel
The Demon Voice That Can Control Your Smartphone
Researchers have created creepy sounds that are unintelligible to humans but still capable of talking to phones’ digital assistants.
Hidden Voice Commands
Voice interfaces are becoming more ubiquitous and are now the primary input method for many devices. We explore in this paper how they can be attacked with hidden voice commands that are unintelligible to human listeners but which are interpreted as commands by devices. We evaluate these attacks under two different threat models. In the black-box model, an attacker uses the speech recognition system as an opaque oracle. We show that the adversary can produce difficult to understand commands that are effective against existing systems in the black-box model. Under the white-box model, the attacker has full knowledge of the internals of the speech recognition system and uses it to create attack commands that we demonstrate through user testing are not understandable by humans. We then evaluate several defenses, including notifying the user when a voice command is accepted; a verbal challenge-response protocol; and a machine learning approach that can detect our attacks with 99.8% accuracy.
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I’m just gonna keep going.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2016/11/26/mapping-the-100000-california-public-employee-pensions-at-calpers-costing-taxpayers-3-0b/#7c21e8477153
“No one has hit the pension jackpot quite like the sworn officers of the California Highway Patrol (CHP). Of the 1,066 six-figure retirees, their average pension is $10,192 per month or $122,304 annually. On top of that, there are the 6,350 active employees at CHP averaging $115,000 in pay with taxpayers chipping in another $48,300 in pension contributions. Therefore, each officer costs $163,000 in pay and pension costs alone.
Meanwhile, Riverside County has 461 six-figure retirees and the top 12 retirements each exceed $200,000 per year. Last year, the assistant sheriff made $653,025 by cashing in banks of unused benefits, i.e. leave.”
120k for a high school educated CHP patrol cop. No problem.
Teachers making 45K? They’re stealing from our children!!
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It doesn’t matter what their profession was before retirement. What matters is that they are a huge untouchable burden.
Potentially, I also have the right to retire at 55 with an enormous state pension. But I believe this practice should be canceled because it’s immoral.
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“Should Democrats confirm Gorsuch? I agree with every word of this brilliant piece.”
Among these 14 spineless creatures, Tim fucking Kaine. What a useless human being.
https://twitter.com/ShaunKing/status/826779768423063552
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I don’t even know what it is they think they are trying to achieve. Losers.
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Nancy Pelosi says “democrats have a responsibility to find common ground with Trump”.
Good luck in the 2018 primary, Nancy!
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That’s why I’m saying that this generation of Democrats should retire en masse. Today.
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Feinstein and Pelosi in bluest-of-blue california. Utterly safe seats. They’re not doing this because of re-election pressure like Joe Manchin ( senator from West Virginia, which went for Trump big time). It must be fucking ideology then.
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This is no longer an accurate graphic (largely because almost all Dems voted against Tillerson.) Here’s the updated list: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/31/us/politics/trump-cabinet-confirmation-votes.html
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And this is the party that is managing to bring people to the polls. Hmm…
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The tweet above in response to this:
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The next step is the non-compliant media will be hounded for non-patriotic statements.
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Haha.
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Trump could make Canada great again.
Yesterday, White House press secretary Sean Spicer confirmed that administration officials have drafted a new executive order aimed at overhauling, among other things, the H-1B work-visa program that U.S.-based tech companies have long relied on to bring top foreign engineering talent into their ranks.
…
Whether and when that executive order gets signed is an open question, but at least one small group of cofounders has banded together to make it easier for U.S. companies to create subsidiaries in Canada and to move their U.S.-based employees to a new, Vancouver-based office, and all within what they describe as weeks, not months.
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Agreed on Gorsuch! If Democrats in Congress aren’t gonna fight on that, when the hell they ever going to? My Democratic senator has pledged to block him, hopefully everyone else follows suit. I’m even going to call my Republican senator and tell him to block. It’s unlikely he will, but he does support gay rights, so who knows.
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Why did Sanders or Warren vote yes on any single nominee? Really, I would love to know.
They’re all just confirming why I’ve been a registered Independent for my voting life. What are they getting for their yes votes?
.
My Democratic senator doesn’t show up in that list. Interesting, since the state swung Republican.
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I hear you. 😝😝😝
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Whee! Wankery!
Sanders, Cruz to face off in debate over future of ObamaCare
Seriously, who would watch this?
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That is disgusting. I know some people who comment on this blog are sick of Hilary Clinton, Donna Brazile, and other Dem leaders. Me? I’m thoroughly disgusted by Sanders. I don’t want to look at his face ever again. He Naderized this election and by the time he decided to play nice, it was too late to put the rabbit back in the hat.
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I saw the article in Inside Higher Ed about “pregnancy without women” and wondered what you might think about it. It’s just crazy that criticisms of this are considered “transphobia” and bigoted. I’m curious what you think about Sheila Jeffreys, who is mentioned in the article and is a feminist who is generally considered transphobic for her feminist criticism of transgenderism. She got a book on the topic published with Routledge–the title is “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism.” Personally I’m not anti-trans, but I do think that there is a strong strand of essentialism among some trans activists that could be considered anti-feminist. In terms of gender identity, I think that the most radical and feminist are those individuals who identify as “agender” or “genderqueer” and reject gender altogether. Although I would never intentionally misgender anyone, I do question, from a political or philosophical perspective, how feminist it is to insist on your gender identity (“I’m a man, NOT a woman” and vice versa) if you’re transgender or any one else, for that matter.
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I find it very sad that instead of discussing what we can do to help provide healthcare and combat job and housing discrimination for trans people academics think they are being super progressive by speechifying on how “men can get pregnant.” Let’s work to provide prenatal care to those who are pregnant, you know? But it’s all empty posturing.
Yes, I agree with you, there is a lot of gender essentialism here and it’s very sad. But it’s even sadder that real issues of transgender people are being pushed out of sight while academics are orgasmically debating the nature of womanhood.
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Regulation Bill passes 2nd and 3rd Knesset readings
MKs approve bill formulated to retroactively legalize outposts built on privately-owned Palestinian land, offering Palestinian land owners compensation: vote, which passed by majority of 60-52, comes despite Netanyahu’s requests for its postponement, and despite Attorney General’s assurances that he will not defend it in the High Court.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4918700,00.html
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