In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 I tend to write posts about a year in retrospect.  The ritual is as silly as many such rituals.  A year is marked arbitrarily.  We select revolutions around the sun as a vital timekeeper when we could ignore that in favor of others.  The specific day we choose to start the new year is completely arbitrary.  Shift that by a few months, and one could write very different stories about many "years" as the events within a "year" change by accounting gimmickry.  I don't celebrate my birthday, and have not done so in decades.  Holidays, I do for others, but there is something worth while in noting past events and thinking about what has happened, and hence what may happen.  What does happen.  What will happen.  I cannot say that the events of 2023, those that occurred on a national or global scale between January 1, 2023 and today, December 31, 2023 were, when taken together, net good.  I mean, there are still some hours left as I type away, and the stock market did

 A schedule switch, 'cuz holidays.  This morning, I shall do a thing I do on occasion, which is to revisit those old Philip K. Dick classics and examine how they are part-prescient, and part-back-asswards.  Stepping back from the day-to-day chaos of American politics and the two wars that have our attention (as opposed to the wars about which nobody cares), one of the rising tides in global politics has been neo-Malthusianism and with it, various fracas... fracases?  My spell-checker says that yes, the plural of 'fracas' is, indeed, 'fracases.'  That sounds like fricassee.  Anyway, there are fracases  about population growth, resources, global versus national governance, the issues even intersect with wokeness because of how ESG scores are computed, and basically, it's a whole, big thing of finger-pointing and mutually-assured paranoia.  So, I shall blather about a Philip K. Dick novel because as I must remind any who read or listen, novelists often contribute m

 Nikki Haley was always a fraud.  The media have been trying to create a story about the 2024 Republican nomination contest, but there is no such thing.  Donald Trump is the nominee, already.  There are no debates.  There are ridiculous, circus sideshows, but no debates.  The nominee, already crowned, does not need to attend, because why bother?  Yet, the press cannot abide this simple truth, because they have a 24-hour news cycle, and they need to pretend that something is happening.  That means there needs to be a contender.  Lately, they have anointed Nikki Haley as Trump's competition, as though she ever had a chance.  She never did.  Under the spotlight, while trying to sail between the Scylla and Charybdis of competing electoral pressures, Haley was asked a simple question.  Simple, that is, for anyone who isn't running in a Republican primary.  What was the cause of the Civil War?  She fumbled the answer, because she wants the GOP nomination, and the Republican Party is

 It is Christmas Eve, for those who celebrate it, and so I have some observations on hatred, because Christmas and irony go together like two things that I cannot think to write because I just started and the coffee has not yet kicked in.  Gimme a break, it's early.  In a better world, one would contemplate nothing but virtue and beauty, yet without vice and ugliness for contrast, what would there be to contemplate?  Virtue only exists in challenge, and challenge only exists amid vice and ugliness.  So, as we look around a nation and a world with so much vice, and so much ugliness rooted in hatred, rooted so often in deeper motivations, more insidious motivations like resentment, we contemplate hatred.  A one-liner that I can no longer attribute from a bad stand-up routine went as follows.  "Prejudice is such a stupid thing because there are so many perfectly good reasons to hate people on an individual basis."  Har-har, and being something other than a social butterfly,

Yesterday, the Supreme Court refused Jack Smith's request for an immediate ruling on Trump's claim of immunity for everything he ever has done or will do because he is Leto II, God Emperor, and while he may truly be a giant worm creature with a creepy thing about younger women, that is not actually what the Constitution says.  Regardless of how the immunity claim is handled by the appeals courts, the matter will go to the Supreme Court, so why not just rule now?  It does not matter.  Game this out. Suppose that SCOTUS granted Smith's motion.  Might they rule that Trump has immunity?  Perhaps, but probably not.  It is an absurd claim, and the only way that the conservatives would do it is if they could figure out another Bush v. Gore  gimmick to say that Donald Trump is the only ex-president with immunity, so their ruling cannot be used as precedent in any potential future case.  So, like, Biden cannot have Trump hauled off to a CIA black site and have his skin pealed off, t

 The Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump is ineligible for the presidential ballot under the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause.  The probability that these challenges withstand a Supreme Court appeal is roughly as high as Donald Trump sitting down to read Lucius Seneca's Letters, deciding that his entire life has been a lie, a fraud, a path to self immiseration in the truest sense, devoting himself to stoic virtue and following the path of Musonius Rufus and Epictetus.  He then joins a monastery, and upon his confirmation, or whatever, he performs the marriage ceremony of Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.  Who needs a bloated military budget when we have so many monkeys flying out of our asses?  Fly, my stinkies, fly !  Yeah, this will not work. Which argument will the Court use?  My expectation has been the simple observation that Trump has not actually been convicted of any crime, nor even indicted on insurrection-related charges, if you read the federal charges

 One should avoid the internet.  What are you doing here, kids?  Go play outside, or read a physical book, or something.  Do I provide insufficient recommendations for books?  The internet, aside from being a series of tubes, is home to adorable cat videos and noxious political discussions best summarized by the famous aphorism that as any comment thread increases in length, the probability of a Hitler reference asymptotically approaches 1.  I'm  not Hitler, you're  Hitler!  The caged system is totally  fascistic!  Can't you even see the implications of the name?!* Let us systematize the Hitler analogy, because everything is systemic, right?  At the very least, I hector and harangue my students with the minutiae of measurement theory because, silly ole' me, I still strive for that which has been fundamentally debunked anyway, "social science."  Social science relies on measurement, so let us conceptualize and measure our variables. Hitleriness:  the variable o

 This may or may not be Part I in a two-parter on The Empire of Gold , by S.A. Chakraborty.  The novel is the conclusion of The Daevabad Trilogy, to which I am returning after a longer gap than I normally leave when reading a series, but Chakraborty decided to blow up her own world at the end of The Kingdom of Copper .  The first two books were outstanding, but I was trepidatious given how thoroughly the author FUBARed everything, leaving herself I-had-no-idea what with which to work for a third book.  So, here we go.  There may or may not be a Part II.  (And I have just a tad left in the book, which I do not expect to change my reading of these observations.)  I have some other thoughts that do not fit here. First, a very quick explanation and recap, leading up to The Empire of Gold .  (My posts on The City of Brass  and The Kingdom of Copper  are linked.)  The novels take place at the start of the 19th Century, beginning in Cairo, moving over to the fictional djinn city of Daevabad,

 This morning, I have a simple observation.  Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to pay $148 million in damages for defamation, based on all of the batshit lies he told about a pair of election workers in Georgia.  Since he is broke, there is a great deal of speculation about how much money they will actually be able to collect, but call it some measure of justice.  My observation, though, is not about "America's mayor."  Rather, consider Donald Trump, on whose behalf Rudy told those lies.  Rudy was likened to a flat-earther by his own attorney in an attempt to reduce the damages, courting sympathy for being bonkers (which... he is), but the question raised by the verdict is, what about Trump?  His attorneys are all being disbarred and hit with defamation suits, and otherwise everyone around him goes down, but consider.  Donald Trump told fuckloads  of lies about the 2020 election.  Giuliani gets hit with a defamation suit and $148 million in penalties.  What about Trump?  To

 The House of Representatives has voted to impeach, I mean, on an "impeachment inquiry" of Joe Biden, for, um... they'll figure it out.  Or not.  This will be a "repeal-and-replace" situation.  The Republican Party promised a replacement for Obamacare, year after year, and when they finally got unified control, they had to put up or shut up, but as it turned out, they found a third option.  "Fuck up."  They reduced the bill to "skinny repeal," which was a repeal of the individual mandate with no replacement, because they could not figure out a replacement.  Then, John "Keating 5" McCain sank the bill, along with Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, but then the GOP added the individual mandate repeal back into their 2017-8 tax bill, for which all three voted anyway, and everyone forgot about that except me because they needed to pretend that John McCain was Mr. Honor.  Regardless, there was never a "replace," and there never

 If you know the name, Claudine Gay, you probably learned of her existence from her testimony before Congress, when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), shitweasel, managed to look like Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington  simply by lobbing the softest of ethical softballs to three horrible people who demonstrated on national television just how far "elite" universities have sunk under the weight of the vileness of DEI.  The President of Penn has resigned, but Claudine Gay has magic superpowers, and she is forever protected, unlike the Jews from Auschitz to Dachau to October 7, from the Inquisition to pogroms, from every group committed to extermination of us "vermin."  Gee, can I hide behind this  rock?  This  tree?  (Hint:  that's a reference.)  Claudine Gay's testimony should not have surprised anyone, nor should news that is not as prominent, but should be.  She is a plagiarist.  Yup.  Here is a link, with some side-by-side text .  Claudine Gay is guilt