Shame on Temple University

The Temple University Graduate Student Association has been on strike for about a month. They’ve been protesting the fact that the university demands full-time work for $19,500 a year, and expects them to live on that in a major city on the East Coast. I lived in Philadelphia 23 years ago, and I can tell you that even then $19,500 would have been starvation wages. I don’t know how they’ve been coping in 2023.

I guess the answer is that they haven’t, and that’s why they’re striking.

Now Temple University, which has always played up their role in serving the working class and poorer communities in the region, has decided to send out a little surprise message to the striking workers.

As a result of your participation in the TUGSA strike, your tuition remission has been removed for the spring semester. You now owe the full balance listed in TUpay, which is due by Thursday, March 9.
If your balance is not paid-in-full by the due date, you we be assessed a $100 late payment fee and a financial hold will be placed on your student account. This hold will prevent future registration,

Who is running that place nowadays? Some cartoon villain?

Give the kids a radial arm saw and a nail gun, it’ll be loads of fun!

Back to the good old days.

I was 13 when I got my first job. It was hard labor for the City of Kent Parks Department. I’d go out with the crew and we’d rake and shovel to remove rocks from new parks under development.

I lasted two weeks. I was shoveling rocks from piles up into a dump truck, hoisting heavy shovel loads above my head to clear the sides of the truck bed, when my left knee buckled and my kneecap was dislocated. There went that summer! I spent the entire season in a hip-to-ankle cast, and got $170 dollars in disability pay. My knee was permanently wrecked, unfortunately — it would dislocate in a grisly fashion in 10th grade, as well, and is permanently weakened. I can feel it even now, especially when I go up and down stairs.

$170 is a lot of money when you’re 13. It got spent on clothes for school in the Fall — I was outgrowing everything — and I don’t think it was worth it.

Well looky here. Businesses are feeling a labor shortage, so they’re looking around for muscled meat to do repetitive and dangerous labor, and who do they spy? Kids. Let’s put the kids to work!

Legislators in Iowa and Minnesota introduced bills in January to loosen child labor law regulations around age and workplace safety protections in some of the country’s most dangerous workplaces. Minnesota’s bill would permit 16- and 17-year-olds to work construction jobs. The Iowa measure would allow 14- and 15-year-olds to work certain jobs in meatpacking plants.

The Iowa bill, introduced by state Sen. Jason Schultz (R), would permit children as young as 14 to work in industrial freezers and meat coolers, provided they are separate from where meat is prepared, and work in industrial laundry.

At 15, they would be able to work as lifeguards and swimming instructors, perform light assembly-line work after obtaining a waiver from state officials, and load and unload up to 50 pounds of products from vehicles and store shelves with a waiver “depending on the strength and ability of the fifteen-year-old.”

The Iowa proposal would also expand hours teenagers can work during the school year, and would shield businesses from civil liability if a youth worker is sickened, injured or killed on the job.

Even in the benighted 1970s we weren’t allowed to work construction or in meatpacking plants (although the bit about moving around 50 pound loads did trigger a twinge — repetitive heavy lifting can do a surprising amount of damage to growing bodies). Just think, I could have had my horizons broadened with hard labor pushing around dead pigs on meathooks! I was going to comment on the riches I might have received if I’d accidentally sawed off a limb, but the politicians are thinking ahead and protecting businesses from liability already.

Jesus fuck, but capitalism is evil.

The groomers are at it again

Never trust a politician who wears a big-ass cowboy hat indoors. That means I’m not a fan of the Wyoming Republican party.

More sensible Wyoming politicians are proposing a bill that disallows marriage to 15 year old and younger children. The Republicans are agin’ it. Their reasoning is that, welp, kids can get pregnant.

The key issue, the analysis states, is that children ages 15 and younger still can get pregnant but could no longer get married legally if the law passes.

This denies the right of the teen’s baby to be raised in a stable home by his or her mother and father, the document says, citing the state Constitution’s promise of equal protection as a basis.

“Parents, by virtue of their right to conceive children, have the pre-political, i.e. God-given, responsibility to raise their own children,” the document continues. “This right and responsibility includes guiding their own maturing children into the estate of Holy Matrimony.”

So “god-given” biology means that they have a right to lock children into a legal and political relationship and commit them to life as a parent. If a 13 year old gets pregnant, do they have the maturity to guide their own maturing children?

Proponents of the law have a clear response.

“You don’t want a 30-year-old who impregnates a 12-year-old to be able to marry them and get around all of our other child protection laws,” he said. “I find that argument disingenuous.”

It apparently isn’t enough for the Republicans that the law still allows them to impregnate and marry 16 year olds.

The little things that progress with a democratic state government

Every once in a while, good things happen here in Minnesota.

The Minnesota House voted 70-58 along party lines Thursday to spend around $200 million a year making school breakfasts and lunches available to all students at no cost.

That’s right, every school, even the rich suburban ones, will have all school lunches subsidized. I know what some people are thinking — the rich kids can afford it, why pay for their lunch? That’s what the Republicans are saying right now.

“Why are we feeding kids in Edina or rich areas that do not need this extra funding? We are pushing tax dollars where they are not needed,” said Rep. Pam Altendorf, R-Red Wing.

Republican lawmakers tried but failed to amend the bill Thursday by somewhat expanding eligibility for free school meals – to 250 percent of the federal poverty level, up from 185 percent – without making them free for all students.

I can be sympathetic to this argument. The problem is that it’s coming out of the mouths of Republicans who are scrabbling for ways to cause some pain to the citizenry — they don’t want to pay for any lunches at all, but if they can’t do that, they want some control. They want to exercise power, even in petty ways. They’ve always wanted to tighten education’s budget in any way possible.

We need to change our mindset on that. Education is a critical function for the state: we should be providing what students need to be prepared to learn (nutrition, books, supplies), and we should be investing in infrastructure, we should be hiring enough teachers and paying them adequately, and we should be doing that equitably for every school and every student. We already prop up inequities by basing school funding on local property taxes, and I see offering an essential service to every school without regard for the artificial partitioning of schools by class and race that are otherwise endemic everywhere in this country as a virtue.

Lunch is a start. Do books and teacher pay next. Or are you going to be upset at helping upper middle class children?

Liars lying getting hysterical about it

President Biden managed to rile up a contingent of Republicans by pointing out that they wanted to get rid of social security, and also medicare and medicaid. They were indignant. Not so, they screeched.

Sen. Mike Lee reacts with disbelief and shock that President Biden said some Republicans propose sunsetting Social Security and Medicare. Pure disbelief. Where could Biden get this obviously false crazy idea? Note that he did this while sitting next to Sen. Rick Scott, the guy who actually formally wrote the proposal as the Senate GOP platform position.

Huh. Funny how Lee used the promise of destroying social security while campaigning for the senate, and Rick Scott published a brochure explaining that he would do it. They’re on the record and are now lying about it.

After Lee was shown on TV expressing outrage over Biden saying that some Republicans wanted to cut those entitlements, critics online shared a video of an event from Lee’s Senate campaign. In the video originally posted to YouTube, Lee told a group of voters in Cache Valley, Utah, on Feb. 23, 2010, that he was about to “tell you one thing you probably have never heard from a politician.”

“It will be my objective to phase out Social Security, to pull it up from the roots and get rid of it,” Lee said at the time. “People who advise me politically always tell me it’s dangerous and I tell them, ‘In that case it’s not worth my running.’ That’s why I’m doing this, to get rid of that. Medicare and Medicaid are of the same sort. They need to be pulled up.”

Ron Desantis and Nikki Hailey have also endorsed cutting social security and raising the retirement age. I’m rather horrified at that, being 65 years old, and considering a delayed retirement already, at 67 or 68. Also, I registered for social security when I was 13 years old, and noticed then that a significant chunk of my $1.65/hour pay was snatched away by the gubmint. I figured it was OK, since it would contribute to my unimaginably distant retirement (now pretty easily imagined), but it means I’ve been paying in for 52 years. You don’t get to cut MY money, guys.

I hope the Democrats can get fired up and campaign hard on this issue.

Also, could everyone shut up about the stupid balloon? Yeah, China spies on us, we spy on them, everyone is spying on everyone.

“just a little bit fascist”

Jewish citizens of Israel are organizing watch parties, standing on hills to observe bombs and missiles exploding in Palestinian communities. This woman talks about the only solution, to wipe out their entire city.

Lady, I think you’re a lot fascist. The phrase “never again” ought to be universally applicable to all peoples, but Israel has a rather narrower interpretation.

Never mind the corpses, the pandemic is over!

Yesterday, I participated in a mundane committee meeting, one where we were making decisions on the distribution of in-house grant funds. It was fine, there were a fair number of really good proposals, we didn’t have to struggle over funding anyone’s work. However, at the end, someone made a comment about how we didn’t have to deal with COVID accountability anymore, and we weren’t going to have to provide extra money for COVID, because the pandemic was over.

My heart sank at that. People actually believe we beat the virus because a politician announced that we had. I’ve got news for those guys.

On Monday, the White House announced that it will let the Covid-related public health emergency declarations expire on May 11, 2023. Ashish Jha, Biden’s national Covid response coordinator, framed the announcement in true “accentuate-the-positive,” “we’re back to normal” fashion, tweeting that the emergency was being lifted because the country was “in a better place and “getting through the winter without a big surge or run on hospitals.” He even threw in the Biden administration’s favorite line: “We have the tools to manage this virus.”

Jha can tweet whatever he likes, but as I’ve said again and again, the numbers don’t lie. As Alyssa Bilinski and Kathryn Thompson from the Brown School of Public Health, along with Ezekiel Emanuel from the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, wrote in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association in November: “The US continued to experience significantly higher Covid-19 and excess all-cause mortality compared with peer countries during 2021 and early 2022, a difference accounting for 150,000 to 470,000 deaths.” Last week, more people died of Covid than perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Don’t be fooled. The pandemic is not over. This is all about rolling back Medicaid coverage and little things, like not having to pay for the accommodations for COVID prevention that professors are expected to make. It’s about fostering political delusions — ‘vote for me, I ended COVID!’. It’s about unleashing the greedy fucks at pharmaceutical companies.

Lastly, both Pfizer and Moderna are hiking their prices on Covid vaccines. And this isn’t a little uptick in the price tag—both Pfizer and Moderna are proposing 400 percent increases. Again, this is going to put vaccines out of the reach of many low-income uninsured Americans, dissuade others from getting the jab, and sock insured people with potential premium increases as insurance companies pass on the pain to the rest of us. The White House has issued strongly worded statements about the price hikes, but many have called for bolder action against this predatory behavior. As of now, there are crickets from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

We failed to control the pandemic because the only thing we were committed to was half-assing it. The policy of neglect and denial will continue as thousands will die. They’re mostly old people, though, so who cares, and we’re all going to close our eyes and pretend long COVID isn’t a thing. We’ll just keep on riding the roller coaster.

Wheeeee!

Why the John Birch Society is evil

One of my unfortunately vivid memories of my childhood was encountering my second cousin, Henry, who was a fanatical John Bircher. He hated the UN, communists, public schools, and non-white people. He was also cheerful, outgoing, and enthusiastic, the life of the party, and he was often at family events. He was at my father’s funeral, telling stories about Dad. I avoided him. Wanted nothing to do with him.

What I remember was Henry learning that I was into science…so he helpfully gave me all this John Birch literature about how black people were more closely related to gorillas than white people were. Even at that young age (I must have been 10 or 12), I knew this was insane nonsense, a lie driven by naked racism, and I knew right away that Henry was a bad man to be avoided. More generally, I learned early to despise the John Birch Society.

Hmm. Why have I also learned to hate Fox News? Because it is the modern form of the John Birch Society, as this video explains. The connections are undeniable.

Oh man. The comments about anti-communist paranoia just brought the bad memories flooding back. Deranged conservative relatives are just the worst — you have to hang with them and listen to their noise while hating every word. I’m just relieved he was a somewhat distant relative and only had to see him sporadically. Maybe he was like a low-dose vaccine?

Good luck with accreditation, New College of Florida!

This is how Ron Desantis wants to handle higher education: fire everyone! Kick the faculty and administration out!

He somehow seems to think that a university is just a collection of buildings, rather than people and traditions and a well-established curriculum. So he hires a couple of clueless goons, Chris Rufo and Eddie Speir, and tries to put them in charge of everything.

Somebody should explain to them that their accreditation is not a piece of paper glued to a building. It’s part of a process that involves active engagement with the faculty and administration — you know, all the people that they want to dismiss — and when they go, the institution evaporates. It’s gone. All the currently enrolled students are screwed. The university will have to start over completely from scratch, rebuilding a reputation and a curriculum that was just annihilated.

New College is a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m at the University of Minnesota Morris, a public liberal arts college that was founded in 1960. I’m going to have to take this a bit personally.

Where do Nazis come from, Mommy?

If I had to guess, I would have figured they were hatched out of the slimy runoff from a sewage treatment plant, but no! There are people who take little kids and teach to be Nazis! It’s an online school, of course, titled “Dissident Homeschool.”

“It is up to us to ensure our children know him for the deceitful, dishonest, riot-inciting negro he actually was,” the administrator of the network’s Telegram channel wrote, alongside a downloadable lesson plan for elementary school children. ”He is the face of a movement which ethnically cleansed whites out of urban areas and precipitated the anti-white regime that we are now fighting to free ourselves from.”

Since the group began in October 2021 it has openly embraced Nazi ideology and promoted white supremacy, while proudly discouraging parents from letting their white children play with or have any contact with people of any other race. Admins and members use racist, homophobic, and antisemitic slurs without shame, and quote Hitler and other Nazi leaders daily in a channel open to the public.

One problem here is that we’ve been steadily degrading the meaning of the word “school”. When I was a kid I had a relative who bought a house and set up a “school” to teach the principles of the John Birch Society — at that point, you had to have some kind of facility and had to fill out some paperwork in order to shovel your garbage into children’s heads. He was only able to poison the brains of a small number of families, but nowadays, anyone can assemble a pile of bullshit, call it an online school, and spew it out through a channel on Telegram, and amplify the signal. “Dissident Homeschool” has 2400 members! We can at least hope many of them are critics tracking the nonsense, and that some of those families are treating it as supplemental and also sending their kids to a real school.

The “Dissident Homeschool” network is run by a husband and wife team who use the aliases “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon.” This week the antifascist research group Anonymous Comrades Collective published a detailed report that unmasked the Saxons as Logan and Katja Lawrence, who live in Upper Sandusky, Ohio, with their four young children.

Oops. I doxxed the Nazis! No regrets.

Lawrence expanded on her view on why she wanted to educate her children at home. “We have our children’s best interest at heart and nobody can do a better job than we can because it’s our child. We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” she said.

There are no good Nazis.

The Right Stuff and the National Justice League were described by the Anti-Defamation League as “virulently antisemitic”, while 31 members of Patriot Front were arrested last year inside a U-haul truck on their way to an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, carrying shields and smoke grenades.

Yet Katja attempts to describe these group’s activities as entirely wholesome.

If your agenda involves treating a significant proportion of the population as degenerate and evil on the basis of irreverent criteria like the color of their skin, you aren’t “wholesome”.

We really need better enforcement of rules defining what constitutes a school, preferably one that establishes a required curriculum, but the combination of Republicans trying to carve up educational funding for their own selfish benefit, and religious groups demanding special privileges to indoctrinate their dogma means all these gaps and loopholes form that allow Nazis to burrow in and thrive.