I guess I should give up on the idea of retirement

It’s an ever-retreating target. I’ve been worried about the loss of income and the sudden increase in health care costs, so I’ve been deferring it, which is no favor to my students given how ancient I am (or, alternatively, it’s a benefit because if I were to leave, the administration wouldn’t replace me for years, if at all.) I might as well give up on the fantasy, if the Republicans get their way.

Note that Trump recently threatened social security and medicare.

The Trump campaign was in full damage control last week after the former president called in to CNBC and suggested making cuts from Medicare and Social Security, which offer financial care to retired Americans or those with a disability.

But, you say, that was just Trump, who is insane, and his campaign is backpedaling fast.

Except that the Republican party is pushing for the same thing!

A new budget by a large and influential group of House Republicans calls for raising the Social Security retirement age for future retirees and restructuring Medicare.

The proposals, which are unlikely to become law this year, reflect how many Republicans will seek to govern if they win the 2024 elections. And they play into a fight President Joe Biden is seeking to have with former President Donald Trump and the Republican Party as he runs for re-election.

I’m eligible to retire right now, but maybe in a few years I won’t be old enough. It won’t be because I’m getting younger — time doesn’t work that way.

Cui bono? It sure isn’t educators or students

Every day, I walk into work conscious that all of my students are building up colossal amounts of debt for the opportunity to be here. What stings is that I was in their position over 40 years ago, and I acquired negligible amounts of debt for a similar learning experience. Am I teaching ten times or fifty times better than my professors at the University of Washington in the 1970s? No, I am not.

I might also ask, am I getting paid ten times or fifty times more than those professors? No. So where is all that money going? Mainly into the hands of bankers and politicians who have set up the system to be a honey trap for young people, who have spent the last several decades growing fat on the money siphoned out of student’s pockets, or who have been starving universities of the revenue they need to operate, transferring costs from the states to the taxpayers. Student loans are a criminal enterprise run by corrupt parasites.

This episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight was infuriating, beginning with the battery of Fox News assholes sneering at education to the Republican representative piously declaiming that everyone should be obligated to pay back their loans…when Rep. Roger Williams took out a $1.43 million PPP loan at the start of the pandemic, which he did not pay back. I am infuriated on behalf of the current generation of students who are getting thoroughly screwed over by the conservatives and capitalists who are controlling their lives.

College should be free. It is one of the primary obligations of the state to educate its citizens, and instead, they’ve turned education into a profit-making enterprise.

The Kushner Plan

There is chaos in Gaza — people are starving, they’re being bombed and shot, and the US has so far been disgustingly passive about it all. We need positive ideas and new tactics to change the situation, so let’s get advice from…Donald Trump’s son-in-law? I admit, Jared Kushner is looking at Israel through a different lens.

His remarks at Harvard gave a hint of the kind of Middle East policy that could be pursued in the event that Trump returns to the White House, including a search for a normalisation deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable … if people would focus on building up livelihoods, Kushner told his interviewer, the faculty chair of the Middle East Initiative, Prof Tarek Masoud. Kushner also lamented all the money that had gone into the territory’s tunnel network and munitions instead of education and innovation.

It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but from Israel’s perspective I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up, Kushner said. But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.

Masoud replied that there was “a lot to talk about there”.

Jesus. Exactly what you’d expect from a developer and slumlord — every piece of land is a property to be seized and exploited. Gaza is a chunk of ocean front without casinos and high rise hotels, let’s fix it!

He doesn’t seem to have put much thought into the people who live there. You know, the ones who had other things to do with their money than pay out exorbitant rents to a landlord.

Kushner also said he thinks Israel should move civilians from Gaza to the Negev desert in southern Israel.

He said that if he were in charge of Israel his number one priority would be getting civilians out of the southern city of Rafah, and that with diplomacy it could be possible to get them into Egypt.

But in addition to that, I would just bulldoze something in the Negev, I would try to move people in there, he said. I think that’s a better option, so you can go in and finish the job.

He reiterated the point a little later, saying: I do think right now opening up the Negev, creating a secure area there, moving the civilians out, and then going in and finishing the job would be the right move.

Finish the job? Finish what job? The extermination of the Palestinians? Sure, just bulldoze a patch of desert and move them there. This is insane.

I’m sitting in Miami Beach right now, Kushner said. And I’m looking at the situation and I’m thinking: what would I do if I was there?

I’m thinking: why the hell was Jared Fucking Kushner, that incompetent hack, invited to Harvard to opine on Israel?

Ignorance and hate go well together

In May of 1933, Nazis stormed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, and walked off with cartloads of books from their library, which they then burned, publicly. This is one of the most famous photographs of the pre-war period, illustrating their process for purging “Jewish” literature from Germany.

On May 6, 1933, Nazi demonstrators raided the libraries of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, a German name that roughly translates to the Institute of Sexology. The Institute was a privately operated research space for studies of human sexuality. More than 20,000 books were taken from shelves and burned days later in the streets by Nazi youth groups.

A book publisher named Rubin Mass afterwards found a few scorched pages that survived the fire, and preserved them to remember the criminality of the right-wing mob.

They were from Hirschfeld’s Sexualpathologie. Hirschfeld was Jewish, gay, and a scholar, so of course he was hated by Nazis. Most people who know anything about the rise of Hitler’s regime know this — it’s common knowledge that the Nazis regarded anything to do with deviations from a Christian heterosexual norm as degenerate. You have to be soaking in the anti-intellectual, ahistorical circle-jerk of right-wing apologetics to be totally unaware of these facts.

Cue JK Rowling.

J.K. Rowling is once again making ignorant and anti-trans comments online. On Wednesday, the Harry Potter author’s name began trending on X thanks to an ill-advised post in which she denied the claim that Nazis burned “books on trans healthcare and research.”

“I just… how?” Rowling wrote above a screenshot of a nameless user’s post. “How did you type this out and press send without thinking ‘I should maybe check my source for this, because it might’ve been a fever dream’?””

I wish the murder of six million Jews, gays, transexuals, Romany, and political opponents had been nothing but a “fever dream,” but it wasn’t. It was a horrible reality that now a famous author of children’s fantasy books would like to bring back.

I’m ashamed to say that I contributed to her coffers years ago, by buying several of her books for my kids. That was before she grew the invisible toothbrush mustache and started openly courting fascists, though. At least I never paid to see any of those Harry Potter movies, and never will.

Somehow, though, I doubt that Sydney Sweeney has any socialist sympathies

I have no idea who Sydney Sweeney is. She is apparently a hot new Hollywood star who has been working hard, appearing in a bunch of movies I haven’t seen, and good for her — but I think all celebrities get more attention and money than they actually deserve.

In an informative twist, though, I learned from this article that there are tiers of celebrity, and that Sweeney is near the bottom because she isn’t a nepo baby. Despite having a $3 million house and being pursued by paparazzi, she’s on a treadmill where she must work non-stop (at being fabulous and fashionable, which is of course much nicer than having to grind non-stop at factory) or her whole world will come crashing down.

The whole of American society, at this moment, is a layer of various anxieties and resentments without any sincerely shared values pinning it all in place. Some of those resentments are more deserved than others; the millennial generation stands to inherit a whopping $68 trillion from the Boomer generation. What is being coined The Great Wealth Transfer is already beginning. Sweeney’s peers, who are mostly the children of very rich people, are going to become even richer by doing nothing. Millions of millennials are going to become very rich by doing nothing. Among the many benefits of this will be that they can post only when they want to. They will be able to take jobs they care about instead of ones they need.

But Sweeney isn’t one of those people. She comes from a family that could not afford to financially support her at all when she finished school. She will not have the luxury of relaxing as her inheritance pours in. Everyone deserves to be able to take six months off to have a baby. Everyone. The fact that Sydney Sweeney cannot is a reminder that the reason American workers do not have paid family leave is also the reason each generation has more nepotism babies than the last. We do not tax rich people enough and they do not pay their fair share; the fact of that, over decades, has intruded upon and warped every aspect of American life. Sweeney has to work, like everyone else, and has to do so for whatever she can get, and she has to do it knowing that what reaches her was the absolute minimum figure that people who are paid much more than her had determined that she would be willing to take. She’s not alone.

I wouldn’t feel sorry for Sweeney, but she does demonstrate that wealth inequality permeates every level of American society, and that always the ones on top are the people loaded with inherited wealth that they never had to work for. Tax the rich! Tax them a lot!

Was it actually a super Tuesday?

The chaos that is American politics began to gel a little bit yesterday. It’s still not pretty and it’s never going to be — it’s more like those terrifying Jell-O recipes from the 50s, but at least we’re seeing some progress towards the final boss battle.

You know that Joe Manchin had previously announced that he wouldn’t run in 2024. Well, now Kyrsten Sinema has also bowed out. I’m going to have to recommend this obituary by Albert Burneko.

Blessed by St. Collins. Now you know she’s evil.

What a horrible nightmare of a person Kyrsten Sinema is. That she might end up having been the signal political figure of our time—a period in which the day-to-day work of elected officials has become so hopelessly divorced from the material conditions their work nominally governs that “Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns” can function as the full ideological expression and sum total contribution of an actual senator—does nothing to redeem her, personally. At a certain point you could extend her a kind of sour grudging credit, I guess, for having pioneered a new depth of undisguised cynicism in politics, a dark idiocratic abyssal layer where nothing has any value except to the extent that it demonstrably foils one’s own political party and sells out one’s own voters in service to one’s patrons. This is the kind of credit you give when you walk into an apocalyptically ruined public bathroom, freeze, and say, “Whoa, somebody took one crazy friggin’ dump in here.”

This society’s total prostration could hardly find a better—which is to say worse—avatar than Kyrsten Sinema, the mandate that nothing may ever be allowed to disrupt its consumption (or even to facilitate the hope that it could be slowed) congealed into a sneering blonde Karen theatrically performing her own imaginary cuteness while she kills even mild and popular compromise initiatives toward a better future. It’s rare for a single person to hold that kind of power, and unspeakably awful and sad that it fell into the hands of an absolute F-minus of a human being.

In any case, if holding her spiteful, obstructive, nihilistic line turns out not to have benefited any electoral ambitions—there’s no real broad base for a program best described as “the most hateful possible centrism,” to the surprise of no one else—it’s also not clear that Sinema ever authentically had any, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Which fits, since she also lacks any authentic political beliefs, convictions, or sympathy to or solidarity with humanity, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Her constituents as electoral politics defined them hated her guts; on the other hand she all but explicitly did not consider them her real constituents. Her real constituency (assuming Literally Dracula doesn’t count here) is the class of rich freaks for whose benefit she will now even more openly serve. Few could promise to protect them with as little shame, or as much sheer sadistic glee. I wish her all the very worst, forever and ever.

In other news about hypocritical women flopping at politics, Nikki Haley has dropped out of the presidential race. Didn’t she announce last week that she was in it all the way? Unfortunately, even in defeat she didn’t manage the dignity of opposing the corrupt criminal who had stomped on her.

Trumpworld’s frequent insults of Haley—who the former president slammed as “birdbrain”—would indicate that the South Carolina governor is unlikely to be a surrogate or booster of the Trump campaign this election season.

Still, despite it all, Haley has already made the case that Trump is a better choice than Biden—even if she claimed both are dangerous. In an interview with NPR from Feb. 22, Haley said, “I have a lot of concerns about Trump regaining the presidency. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden being president.”

Mediocre.

In local news, Minnesota managed to cock a snook at stooge of the Israelis and Xian fundamentalists, Joe Biden, while still giving him enough votes to carry the state.

President Biden, who faces less prominent challengers, continued to win by larger margins than Trump. But as in Michigan last week, he ceded significant votes to such options as “uncommitted.”

That option was getting nearly 20 percent of the vote in Minnesota with about 85 percent of the vote counted, after pro-Palestinian activists sought to turn it into a protest vote again. The uncommitted share there should wind up being larger than it was in Michigan (13 percent) despite a less-robust effort — and despite Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) taking another 8 percent.

Biden’s current 70 percent overall share of the vote in Minnesota means it could be his lowest share in any state, apart from the 64 percent he took as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire.

Come on, Joe. Grow a spine and stand up against the terrorist state of Israel.

I’m not complaining about some history being erased

Minnesota recently got a snazzy new flag. It’s much nicer than the cluttered (and mildly racist) mess that was the old flag.

The Republicans don’t like the change, so they organized a rally at the capitol to complain.

“I’m wearing a T-shirt today that says, ‘Erasing history never goes well.’ And that’s what we believe is happening here,” Minnesota Republican Party Deputy Chair Donna Bergstrom said. “As a Native American and tribal member, it’s exhausting to see Native Americans once again bearing the brunt of the short-sighted eradication of our shared history.”

That’s the same complaint Republicans made about tearing down Confederate statues. I think that went pretty well, actually.

The bring-back-our-hideous-old-flag rally happened today. Look upon the horde and be awed!