In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 Our long national nightmare is, um, is this thing still happening?  As I awaken this morning, to the glorious scent of my morning coffee, I am similarly comforted by the news that yes, my friends, we have a deal!  The debt ceiling crisis has been resol... Wait, what?  It's over?  No.  It's not over.  Or is it?  Well, shit.  Yellen pushed back the doom date, McCarthy accepted the terms of Biden's surrender in general form, and now the question will be the process of getting the actual votes in Congress.  Yesterday, I warned that this would actually be quite difficult, and I stand by that.  Will this pass?  I do not know. Biden gave away a lot.  In policy terms, the left will throw shit-fits about Biden's surrender.  My initial reaction is as follows.  I mostly see the policies themselves as defensible.  Work requirements?  Philosophically, it is hard to oppose work requirements, but anyone should be ope...

 This morning, I look down at my hot, steaming, glorious mug of coffee and ask, should I be drinking Manischewitz?  No.  No one  should drink Manischewitz.  Ever.  Aside from the whole "morning drinking" thing, that shit is nasty.  However, any time one of us asks this kind of question, the foul taste of that vile concoction intrudes into our memories.  Let us let such things pass.  Instead, let us consider yet another debt ceiling crisis.  Will there be "a deal?"  I do not know.  That is not good. Remember, of course, that "a deal" on the debt ceiling means that Joe Biden pays some  but not all  of the ransom demanded by the House Republican Party for not blowing up the nation's economy.  "Deal" is the wrong word.  "Deal" connotes (if not denotes) a mutual agreement.  This is entirely one-sided, because as I have observed repeatedly, Joe Biden already caved.  He is paying a ransom.  The quest...

 Art Blakey, "Crisis," from Mosaic .

 I have a small observation for this morning, a sort of "did you ever notice" thing.  Imagine me with a microphone, in front of a brick wall doing 1990s ultra-safe stand-up.  Did you ever notice that it is only ever the other  side fighting "the culture war?"  This morning's motivation is the silliness of the Gorman poem.  Poetry is not my preferred art, as my very few readers will know.  I prefer long-form prose (often excessively long-form prose), and absurdly pretentious music, but the beauty of the marketplace of ideas and art (such as a marketplace exists for art) is that you may enjoy the form of your choice.  That said, I vaguely remembered there being some sort of rah-rah about Amanda Gorman, yet I did not remember the poem itself.  Because we now live in stupid-ville, and someone complained about it, I went back and read it.  Note: read , rather than watched her performance of it.  There are real debates to be had about the...

 To the House Republican Caucus, You won.  Let me lay this out for you, Kev'.  The debt ceiling is the most idiotic and self-destructive law on the US federal books.  Pass a law, and raise the debt ceiling.  It is that simple.  Do it, and everything continues to chug along normally under the greatest system ever devised, to the degree that the word, "devised," makes sense when, in fact, the whole point of capitalism is that it is the absence of design.  There is no central planner sitting at a desk in Washington, D.C., pushing buttons and flipping switches to make the whole thing work because when you try that, it doesn't work.  What must we do to keep it working?  As little as this: refrain from the stupid.  Refrain from destroying your own economy by, for example, refusing to raise the debt ceiling.  In other words, all you have to do is raise the damned debt ceiling, and let capitalism work its math. You took another path, becaus...

 I admit it, my go-to author, my break-glass-in-case-of-emergency source of wisdom and insight is Stanislaw Lem, which is strange given my rejection of postmodern philosophy and Lem's embrace of it, but Lem had so much right.  Anyway, we have been inundated with news about development in artificial intelligence, and there are so many freak-out novels about "the singularity" that one hardly knows where to begin.  So I'll begin with the weirdest one possible, Peace On Earth . Have you played around with ChatGPT, Google's new "Bard" program, or any of the others?  They're fun.  I started prompting them to write papers for my classes.  I'll write something more narrowly focused on that soon, but the executive summary is that paper assignments are not as dead as the parrot, but they are as dead as they guy in the wheelbarrow.  Grade inflation made the whole thing a farce before some asshole invented ChatGPT, and now?  Now, any professor or K-12 teache...

 Consider the Durham Report and the Mueller Report.  I propose that they are inverses of each other, in the following sense.  One can examine the findings themselves, and the lead investigators' presentations of those findings.  Robert Mueller presented damning findings in such an understated way as to create a disjoint, in which the news-consuming audience-- even those who are not entirely in the Republican informational bubble-- believed that Trump had been largely exonerated on matters related to Russia.  While it is true that Mueller's most damning findings related to the obstruction charges, that is more a function of the bar for conviction under obstruction compared to the bar for conviction under conspiracy law.  In contrast, John Durham found a set of mistakes-- and anyone committed to truth must acknowledge what Durham found-- yet instead of interpreting what he found through the cautious, legalistic and dry framework used by Mueller, Durham turned...

 Tigran Hamasyan, "The Cave of Rebirth," from An Ancient Observer .

 I will make two brief observations for the morning.  First, I wrote an earlier post that suggested that Biden appeared to be blinking/swerving/otherwise metaphorically crying "uncle" in the debt ceiling crisis that we must all endure.  For all the posturing of recent events, I do not think there can be any other reasonable interpretation.  Biden's original position was that he wouldn't pay a ransom for a debt ceiling increase.  McCarthy's position was that Biden must pay a ransom.  They are now negotiating the size and structure of the ransom.  Biden can yell up and down the boulevard that the ransom he is paying is a separate thing from the debt ceiling, but if you buy that, let me introduce you to my pitch-man, George Santos.  He has some great products to sell you.  Biden is paying a ransom. I intend to write a longer form post on the Durham report this weekend, but this is a strange document.  It is difficult to reconcile the headli...

 I am a few years late to the Daevabad trilogy, but every once in a while, the buzz is earned.  You should read S.A. Chakraborty's The City of Brass .  I have yet to read the next books in the series, but the first is outstanding.  Let us consider some very big questions of political leadership and the tradeoffs that one must make for the sake of peace and stability.  It is not often that I read a book and do not know where I stand.  I do not know where I stand.  It is extraordinarily difficult to nominate Ghassan al Qahtani, the reigning king in Daevabad, for the Nobel Peace Prize, but it is also difficult to say that he does not have a point, or even that he is acting out of selfishness.  He is not.  This is good. The novel is about djinns, and I have never studied the mythology of djinns, but Chakraborty has.  I shall not bother to research what she invented, and what was based on historical lore because I do not care.  I have en...

 I am running for president.  As of this morning, I am founding a new political party, and running for president.  My party shall be called, "The Econ 101 Party."  After a long discussion with my closest advisor and best strategist-- my cat, Drusilla*-- it has become clear that political dysfunction has driven me to this.  I really had no other option.  As of this moment, I am a candidate for the highest office in the land.  My new political party will have a clear, coherent platform, as stated in this cockamamie blog which nobody reads, which is perfectly appropriate in oh , so many ways. The Econ 101 Party stands, first and foremost, for the principles of Econ 101.  Thou shalt take Econ 101.  Thou shalt study Econ 101.  Thou shalt follow the lessons of Econ 101, and thou shalt not do anything ruled grotesquely, inanely or insanely stupid by the observations, equations, graphs and principles of Econ 101. To whit, when the economy is shr...

 Daniel Penny has been charged with manslaughter for putting Jordan Neely in a choke hold on the New York subway after Neely threatened the passengers.  My advice in all criminal or even potentially criminal matters is that you wait for the investigation, and evaluate the facts in as dispassionate a mindset as possible.  With that in mind, what is my conclusion on the Neely/Penny case?  What did I just tell you?  Wait.  Let the investigation proceed.  You have no obligation to draw a conclusion before the full presentation of facts, and even then, unless you are a juror, you still have no obligation to draw a conclusion.  I shall wait.  Instead of telling you what you must think before the full investigation, we shall play a game called, "what if?" What if Jordan Neely had no arrest record?  What if, instead, he had been on the train several times with a group of people, and one of them had been repeatedly harassing some women?  So ...

 We are all learning more than anyone ever wanted to know about sexual assault.  Why?  Because Donald Trump was president.  As we read through the verdict and New York's laws, the jury found that Donald Trump sexually "abused" E. Jean Carroll, but the jury did not find that he "raped" her.  As we parse the distinction, it seems to be this.  Carroll did not see  precisely what Donald Trump was doing, so there was some uncertainty in her mind about whether he was using his fingers, or his phallus.  OK, gentlemen.  Look at your fingers.  You don't actually need to look at any other appendage.  You are intimately familiar with other appendages.  Is one, perhaps, larger? I recognize that this is not the most important point right now, nor really ever, but if E. Jean Carroll couldn't tell whether or not that was Don Jr.-- a little prick-- then the prick is, indeed, very small.  We know that Don Sr. is very insecure about size....

 I have repeatedly stated that I do not think Trump will be criminally convicted.  Technically, that was not a criminal conviction, but I must re-evaluate.  Holy shit.  Every once in a while, there is a good day.  Today is a good day to... render a verdict for the plaintiff.  Qapla'!

 It is always important to consider heterodox analysis, and one of the most important sources of heterodox thought on economics, politics, race and culture is Glenn Loury.  Today, I am prompted by some thoughts after listening to his latest discussion with Heather MacDonald.  Loury, despite being African-American, has not shied away from interviewing one of the most controversial writers around, whose mere name is enough to send shivers down the spines of so many.  Charles Murray.  Even Coleman Spock Hughes nearly lost his shit talking to Murray.  Why?  Murray is famous for being the guy who "went there" on race and IQ, claiming that white people are genetically, racially smarter than black people.  If you were not aware of the writings of one, Dr. Charles Murray, then let this moment sink in as your introduction to one, Dr. Charles Murray.  Is there more to what he says than that?  Yes, but in the same way, James Earl Ray did more in hi...