In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Some mornings, I ramble.  This morning, I shall ramble.  Fair warning.  The current educational hullaballoo centers on Toni Morrison's Beloved .  Should it be taught in schools?  What's your  opinion?  An informed opinion would require that you read the book.  Have you... read it?  Some proportion of you have.  Some proportion of you have not.  Statistically, less than 50% of you have read it.  Then again, how would that be true?  Nobody reads this damned blog, and 50% of 0 is 0, so less  than 50% would be less than zero.  We're talking about Toni Morrison, not Bret Easton Ellis.  I just posed a mathematical impossibility.  Of course, for reasons that I do not fully understand, people actually click on my incoherent ramblings about obscure science fiction books and their supposed applications to modern politics, economics and society, and the obscurity of these books would suggest that clicks...

  You'll take my Soylent Green from my cold, dead hand!  Wait... no.  OK, you'll pry my social media feed from my cold, dead hand!  There we go.  That's where I was going.  I think.  Anyway, there once was a movie called Soylent Green .  It existed entirely for the Twilight Zone , pre-M. Night Shama... fuckitwhatever twist ending.  The world is overpopulated, and people are kept fed, in part, by the consumption of processed human corpses, repackaged as "Soylent Green."  Hence the revelation at the end, with glorious overacting by Chuck-Moses.  Nobody ever watches the movie, because the movie sucked.  It's just a meme now.  Memes.  And that brings us to... Facebook.  Which, like the movie, sucks.  So hey, change the name!  Whatever. So Facebook sucks.  Over the last few weeks, we have had a sequence of news stories about not just the effects of Facebook and Instagram (owned by Zucky and bride of Zuc...

 Rep. Adam Kinzinger will not seek reelection because he has decided to spend more time with his nope, can't type it.  I felt some obligation to make some comment, not that anyone reads this damned blog, and yet my only comment is how completely unnecessary it is for any analyst to comment because this was such an obvious and inevitable thing.  Liz Cheney may  survive, but she has the Cheney name and far more ferocity than Kinzinger.  Is that enough?  If I had to bet... no.  Trump will be there, personally.  Liz won't make it.  Which is a shame.  However, this is the Republican Party.  Kinzinger took the path that Gary Jacobson & Samuel Kernell called "strategic retirement" in their book, Strategy & Choice in Congressional Elections .  Liz?  Not for her.  She'll go down swingin', but she will go down.  Us?  We'll go down in flames when these lunatics decide that January 6 wasn't sufficiently ambitiou...

 Lage Lund, "Are We There Yet?" from Terrible Animals .

 Boyle's law.  The laws of thermodynamics.  The physical sciences are replete with principles elevated to the status of "law" by a group of people who are both precise and cautious to a fault, if such a thing can ever be said.  In all intended circular irony.  In political science, we refrain from bestowing the title of "law" upon anything that is neither statutory nor constitutional nor "common" in its non-colloquial sense.  Mostly.*  Occasionally, one of us stumbles, half-blind upon an empirical observation that the discipline gleefully rushes to call a "law" in the mad hope that we, too, can look like we have something more deterministic than a p -value for a regression coefficient in a multinomial logit with clustered standard errors because we were too fucking lazy to do hierarchical models, so fuck you very much Dr. Reviewer Sir, and trust me, that was very  funny to like, three people, but it's Sunday morning, and I'm not talki...

 As I understand it, the younger generation was raised with the social model in which "everybody gets a trophy," thereby devaluing awards in pursuit of that all-important lifetime goal, self-esteem.  Self-esteem plus a nickel being worth either a nickel, or perhaps slightly less, if self-esteem causes one to mis-allocate a nickel.  The phenomenon is likely overstated, even if it contains a kernel of truth, and the same can likely be said of any potential consequences.  I have never bothered to read any rigorous empirical work on the subject because frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.  However, amid the surfeit of awards bestowed upon so many as to inflate the value of the concept, perhaps I can either contribute my share to award inflation, or better yet, introduce an award with some real meaning.  It's the First Annual Donald Trump Award For Incompetence In The Field Of Negotiation ! While the title of this post has already given away the winner of the a...

 Robert Walter, "Criminals Have A Name For It," from Super Heavy Organ .

 Obviously, read this one.  Artemis  was fun, if a bit of a letdown after Weir's more famous debut novel, but Project Hail Mary  is something of a return to form, if also something of a return to familiar ground.  Regardless, the man can write, and I'll forgive a lot when there's good writing.  I'm a bit late getting to Weir's new one, but whatever.  If you are familiar with Weir's oeuvre, you mostly associate him with "hard science fiction," and the trials and tribulations of some dude trying to get the laws of the universe to play nice in a survival situation.  Yeah, that's basically what Project Hail Mary  is, but I wanna ramble about politics.  It's what I do. So here's the spiel.  Aliens arrive from the Tau Ceti system!  Only, they're just microbes (eventually called "astrophage"), and they're very bad.  They have a reproductive life cycle that involves going back and forth between the sun and Venus, feeding on the en...

 We are just about a year away from the 2022 midterm elections, putting us three years from something that scares the absolute shit out of me.  Donald Trump failed in his attempt to steal the 2020 election.  I thought he would succeed.  Go back, and read what I was writing in the lead-up.  I am far less sanguine about democracy's prospects in 2024, and as we watch democracy crumble, what is the January 6 Committee doing?  They issued a subpoena to Steve Bannon.  Predictably, Bannon told them to suck it, so Congress will refer contempt charges to the DoJ, where Supreme Court Justice  Attorney General Merrick Garland is legally obligated to file criminal charges against Bannon.  Garland is not exactly Elliot Ness, but dollars-to-donuts, Bannon has donuts ready when the cops show up to arrest his ass. What then?  Bannon will claim executive privilege, we get a drawn-out court battle, and by the time the whole thing plays out, Trump steals b...

Read Ring Shout , by P. Djeli Clark.  It is good.  Flawed, yes, but quite good, and in some ways, it is a sort of antidote to some irritating tropes in modern genre writing, even if it also indulges in a few of the more obvious, if fan- and editor-mandated tropes.  Let’s get into this. The premise is as follows.  Go with me if it sounds simplistic and a little obvious.  1920s, Macon, Georgia.  The kkk?  Actual, literal demons from another dimension.  Hunt ‘n kill ‘em.  Throw in some musical lore from the Gullah tradition (African-Americans from the Carolina islands), some history from the slave trade through Birth Of A Nation , and Bob’s your uncle, novella worth reading.  It sounds like an obvious thing to write, but nobody else had, so Clark did.  Actually, the uncle in the novella was William, not Bob, but whatever. The plot is a little more complex.  And cool.  The trick is as follows.  Birth Of A Nation was act...