Month: August 2020

I came of age in the 1990s, in the era of the bandit wars and Wild West capitalism in the former USSR. We saw 1,500% inflation. We experienced everybody we know losing their jobs. We saw everybody’s – EVERYBODY’S – life savings getting wiped out overnight. Literally. We went through several currency changes. One country disappeared. Another country began. Everything changed. Even the way we wrote addresses on envelopes changed. What we ate, how we ate it, what we believed, what we knew about the world. It all changed.

And throughout all that, I never saw such lawlessness as is happening now in New York, Chicago, Portland and Seattle.

I’m so completely enraged by these “protests” because these are people who have been handed everything, every opportunity on a silver platter. They haven’t been through any of the shit I listed above. And the only reason they are shitting on everything is because they know there will be crowds of people who’ll clean up after them and make it all pretty again.

I’m like a poor kid watching a spoiled rich brat trash a roomful of expensive toys with the certainty that mommy and daddy will buy even better ones tomorrow. That the brat is convinced his tantrum is justified makes no difference.

So why is the digital oligarchy sponsoring BLM, censoring any opposition to it and shutting down any realistic discussion of COVID? BLM and COVID are both completely real, of course. I’m not suggesting that the DO (digital oligarchy) created them. DO uses them to accelerate the creation of the new economic system and a new system of governance.

That new system is not going to have what we know as “the middle class.” It will have very little between the oligarchy and the underclass.

The best way to get rid of the middle class fast is to destroy welfare. There is no middle class without welfare. By welfare I don’t mean the payments that a government makes to the permanently unemployed underclass. Those payments are not going away. To the contrary, the DO wants to move as many of us as possible into that underclass and give out a lot more of those payments.

The welfare that creates a middle class is this: safe streets, clean, quiet neighborhoods, weekends, vacations, near 100% literacy, the capacity of husband-wife-children families to live by themselves, the capacity to form families, a reasonable sense of autonomy and dignity, a measure of predictability and control over your life. The underclass that receives government payouts doesn’t have any of this welfare. The DO wants to give us those payouts but take away everything else.

Now look at everything I listed. COVID panic and BLM are making everything on this list impossible. They are also pushing more people into the underclass and making more payouts necessary. This is why the digital oligarchy is so aggressively promoting them.

I’m going to put this in a separate post because people clearly aren’t getting it.

The endless “protests” we are witnessing are a tactic of terrorizing the population in order to push through the neoliberal destruction of welfare. These “protesters” are the wrecking crew of neoliberal economic reforms.

The only reason why it’s not extremely obvious to everybody is that the wrecking crew and its Bezos and Co backers have switched off our intellectual faculties by screaming something vaguely race-related. We hear “race” and we stop thinking. We let ourselves be robbed blind. Any capacity to resist dies.

80% of African Americans don’t want any reduction in policing. They want an increase. These “protesters” aren’t helping black people. They are helping the Bezoses of this world to rob me and you while we beg them to rob us some more.

Isn’t it bizarre that the same political party that insists that the concepts of “female” and “black” have no meaning and that all you need to do to be one is say you are is the party that made such a big deal out of nominating a “black female” VP candidate?

There’s got to be some semblance of logic to all this. If anybody can be a woman whenever they feel like it, then what’s the value of nominating a woman?

It’s also starting to seem like Democrats have a problem with non-immigrant blackness. It’s almost as if they thought that blacks who have been in this country for a couple of generations aren’t good enough. When are they going to run somebody black who’s not from one of the highest achieving immigrant groups?

Have heard about Cannon Hinnant?

I’m trying to see whether one’s political leanings have an impact on whether one is likely to know about what happened to him.

“What do we know about 18 to 24 year olds? They are really stupid… they make really bad decisions,” said Kamala Harris.

I have no idea what the context was but now I like her. It’s a really sincere thing she said.

Still would rather eat toenails than vote for her, obviously.

Study one million something something:

Transmission of infection occurred from an adult to a child in 19 clusters and/or from an adult to another adult in 12 clusters. There was no evidence of child‐to‐adult or child‐to‐child transmission. . . While children become infected by SARS‐CoV‐2, they do not appear to transmit infection to others. Furthermore, children more frequently have an asymptomatic or mild course compared to adults.

I wasn’t going to be department Chair. I used to say in a very loud and decisive way (like I say everything), “I’m NEVER going to be Chair. NEVVAH!”

When people started asking me to run, I was incensed. How could they? Haven’t I said a million times that I NEVVAH?

So I called my sister and ranted for 15 minutes about the evil people who were trying to convince me to do something I absolutely, totally, 100% was NEVVAH going to do.

“Stop being an idiot and run for Chair already,” she said.

My sister is a professional job recruiter with 15 years of experience. She has a talent for pairing people with jobs they never expected to do, and she never misses. She really understands people and how to get them into jobs they’ll love. I don’t but I do know to trust an expert when she feels like giving advice.

So I became Chair.

I had enormous misgivings but after doing it for 1,5 months, I’m in love with this job. I’ve never been this energized or felt so alive at work. And it’s not that I was unhappy before. I love academia and always enjoyed being a professor. But the experience I’m having now is on a completely different level.

Who knows, maybe I’ll have a burnout or get bored with it soon. But the I’ve had such great 1,5 months that it’s all worth it just to experience something this intense.

For the people we hire, we fill out a diversity form that explains how hiring this person helps fulfill our university’s goal.

One administrator reasonably asked what the goal is. More women? More African Americans? More Hispanics?

“I have absolutely no idea. We never figured that out,” was the cheerful reply.

Here are some fascinating documents on reeducation camps for white men conducted by the US government.

In a subsequent session, the white males must publicly recite a series of “white privilege statements” and “male privilege statements.” They must accept their complicity in the white male system and their role in creating oppressions.

Finally, as the reeducation camp concludes, the white males must write letters “directed to white women, people of color, and other groups regarding the meaning of this Caucus experience.” They apologize for their “privilege” and pledge to become “better [allies].”

This is not pathetic at all. Nope, not in the least.