Musk mocking, it’s always fun

I greatly enjoyed this skewering of his stupid cybertruck. Maybe you will too.

If you really want to annoy Musk, be a wealthy woman. Mackenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, has announced that she plans to donate $640 million to charity, which will lead to the downfall of Western Civilization, according to one really wealthy idiot.

‘Super rich ex-wives who hate their former spouse’ should filed be listed among ‘Reasons that Western Civilization died,’ Musk said in a now-deleted X post on March 6.

Musk didn’t elaborate on why he’d singled out Scott, but he’s been a harsh critic of efforts to promote corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion.

DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it, Musk said in an X post in January.

Scott does not impress me — she has a net worth of $40 billion, so giving away a small percentage of that is not much of a sacrifice. But OK, it’s a token amount, wish it was a lot more. But what will kill American civilization, at least, is the existence of billionaires of either sex who wield undue influence on the culture. Scott, Bezos, and Musk are the problem.

I should write something about DEI, because I’m at a university that doesn’t blink twice at DEI initiatives, so I’ve got lots of experience with it. It wouldn’t be an exciting post, though, because DEI is just fine, we should do more of it.

None should be too big for justice

I’ve been a fanatical Apple fanboi for over 40 years. I bought my first Apple II in 1980, and I switched to the Mac in 1984, when they first came out. I was an official Apple developer in the 1990s — I persevered throughout that long period when everyone was predicting that the company would eventually fade away, eaten up by the evil Microsoft. I stuck it out through the 6502 era, the 68000 series era, the Intel era, and now the Apple Silicon era. My lab is full of Macs. I’ve got a Mac desktop and a Mac Powerbook and an iPhone. You may not question my devotion.

And then

The Justice Department sued tech giant Apple on Thursday, kicking off a potentially historic antitrust battle. The lawsuit alleges that Apple’s ecosystem of products are designed to limit competition and put consumers at a disadvantage. “Each step in Apple’s course of conduct built and reinforced the moat around its smartphone monopoly,” the authors write. Later in the filing they add that “this case is about freeing smartphone markets from Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct and restoring competition to lower smartphone prices for consumers, reducing fees for developers, and preserving innovation for the future.”

Good! It’s about time! Apple is a big fat bloated tax-evading monster that needs to be smacked down and taught some humility. Every big company needs to be regulated, and I don’t exclude the ones that make great products that I love.

The kids are still all right

Cry harder, murderer

A crybaby made an appearance at the University of Memphis, in a talk sponsored by Turning Point USA, that despicable organization. A good-sized group of students showed up, not to cheer Kyle Rittenhouse on, but to roast him. Kyle couldn’t take it — it was all just questions and booing — and he turned tail and ran.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a darling of the right after shooting three protesters in 2020, hightailed it off a stage at the University of Memphis on Wednesday night as a crowd of demonstrators booed him.

Video from the event showed several protesters in black T-shirts in attendance. One of them stood up and questioned Rittenhouse about Charlie Kirk, the far-right conservative activist whose youth organization, Turning Point U.S.A., sponsored Rittenhouse’s appearance.

They grilled him on his good buddy, Charlie Kirk, pointing out that he was a racist, and like the dumbest straight man in the universe, Rittenhouse asked him to elaborate, and even said that he was going to “dialogue” about it.

When the protester alleged that Kirk has “said a lot of racist things,” Rittenhouse immediately grew defensive.

“Like what? What racist things has Charlie Kirk said?” he fired back from the podium. “We’re gonna have a bit of a dialogue of what racist things Charlie Kirk said.”

The protester was unfazed.

“He says that we shouldn’t celebrate Juneteenth, we shouldn’t celebrate Martin Luther King Day—we should be working those days. He called Ketanji Brown Jackson an affirmative action hire, he said all this nonsense about George Floyd, and he said he’d be scared if a Black pilot was on a plane. Does that not seem racist?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Rittenhouse said, prompting jeers from the room.

Why propose a dialogue on a subject you know nothing about? It did not go well for him — although the dialogue turned out to be very brief.

“I’m not gonna comment on that,” Rittenhouse answered, as the room once again erupted in boos. Rittenhouse waited on stage for a beat, but stormed off after he was approached by one of the event’s organizers. He did not look back or make any other comments as he left the stage.

The boos turned to cheers as he walked off.

Yes! That’s how all these scumbags should be treated at every event — make them cower behind nice safe audiences, dreading the appearance of a single naysayer.

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.

More of the same old creationist junk

A new movie has come out!

Look at that ad — for a moment, I thought someone was finally going to make Jim Pinkoski’s vision real. I’d like to see a movie about T. rex battling foolish ancient Hebrews in a cataclysmic rainstorm.

Unfortunately, then I watched the trailer. The narrator sounds bored. It seems to be a set of CGI segments spliced together, retelling bits of the book of Genesis as if they’re historical. Now I’m bored, too.

This is the work of a guy named Dan Biddle, who runs an organization called Genesis Apologetics. They basically parrot whatever the Institute for Creation Research or Answers in Genesis says. I am amused that they say they will avoid “fringe” evidence provided by other creationist organizations.

Our ministry provides practical and easy-to-understand web, video, and written products for pastors, parents, and students. The materials provided will be those that are “core” to the Creationist position, which are generally held in agreement with leading creation ministries, such as www.answersingenesis.com and www.icr.org. We generally avoid “fringe” evidences that are controversial between these and other Creationist associations.

If you’re eager to see this movie, it’s only available in theaters today and tomorrow, at venues that aren’t specified (do you think the theatrical release is only to allow it to qualify for an Academy Award? We’ll find out next year.) If you miss it, don’t panic, I’m sure it will be playing in church basements for years to come, and I think they usually dump their cheap crap to YouTube for free.

Nominally flawless

Apparently, I am in perfect health, a veritable Greek god, perfect in every way. Except…I had to point out to my doctor that I have these terrible flare-ups of joint problems. Just the week before my physical, I had been painfully crippled by inflammation of my Achilles tendon — suddenly, with no warning or precipitating injury, my ankle was swelling up in all kinds of strange lumps and bulges, and I was scarcely able to walk.

This hits me fairly often, I can count on being incapacitated at least once a semester with this nonsense (note that, as a professor, “incapacitated” means still having to hobble in and teach, no matter how much physical agony I’m experiencing.)

This was not a good thing. It’s not what I would call healthy at all.

I complain every time I visit the doctor, but it’s one of those things that will fade away with equal suddenness, so it’s hard to treat. At this last physical, I pushed a little harder, and the doctor decided that we need to do more to get a diagnosis. I went into the blood lab and yielded a quart or two so they can carry out more extensive tests.

All week now, new test results have dribbled into my mailbox. All the usual stuff, like blood pressure, cholesterol levels, a full metabolism panel, etc., etc., etc. are in the perfect range. Uric acid, serum creatine, etc., all good. Thyroid hormones, 5×5. Because I’ve been out in the wilderness more during the summers, they tested for Lyme disease, West Nile, and a whole suite of exotic tick-borne antigens…nope.

If you just go by the numbers, I am like unto Apollo, beautiful and flawless. I don’t think anyone will be sculpting my form, though, and I’m going to remember this when the field season starts up again and my knee swells up like a balloon, again.

(I’ve got it good, though, compared to my daughter Skatje who dislocated her knee on a skiing trip a few weeks ago. Her imminent fate is “Left knee MPFL reconstruction and tibial tubercle osteotomy, open reduction internal fixation of osteochondral fragment from patella dislocation,” in doctorese. It could be worse.)