Moving Day

We have survived, mostly.

More later -- MUCH later. (1) I might have lost my phone and (b) we don't get internet at the house until Saturday.

Read This

...and tell me you think this man is sane:

Another totally Fake story in the Amazon Washington Post (lobbyist) which states that if my Aides broke the law to build the Wall (which is going up rapidly), I would give them a Pardon. This was made up by the Washington Post only in order to demean and disparage - FAKE NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2019

Moving Advice

Here is a good reason to have all your books on Kindle.

When you move, you don't have to spend six days loading them all into boxes.

And then hauling all those boxes into a truck and out of a truck.

Every bone in my body is one big bruise.

Two Days Until the Big Move

We move on Thursday.

The house is filled with boxes.

We have too many books.

A Young Artist Makes A Comic

We've started packing, and while we were clearing out a closet, we found this comic, drawn when the kid was about seven:

The text:

First panel: Hello, children!

2nd: I'm Mr. Happy Face!

3rd: Do you know what happens when you get old?

4th: You die! (response from children out of panel: WHOAH!)

Baby's first comic!

We Signed The Lease

Oh, my God, you wouldn't believe how great this landlord is, and how wonderful the house is.

Listen to this. He's letting us move in a week early. We don't have to start paying rent until September 1, but we can start moving in right now.

On his part, he's so thrilled to be having academics as his tenants he couldn't stop talking about it. Also! He plans to put in central air!

Also, the house is just beautiful. Built in the late 1940s, on an acre of wooded land, wooden floors, original molding, original kitchen fixtures, original windows... and within walking distance of the university.

There's this little wrought iron, glass-topped table and chairs outside, under the trees. Also original.

And a working fire-place. And built-in bookcases. And so many windows.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who made this possible. Oh my God.

Links

"Pro-life" crusaders claim to want to stop abortion, yet eliminate access to birth control -- which, as we know, increases the number of abortions

More on this

And more

TYWKIWDBI shares a nice 5-minute informational video on what the USA is doing wrong with the minimum wage

I was posting awhile back about how atrocity stories are used to inflame populations -- buried in this story is such an atrocity story, used to justify stealing infants from the Chinese. I remember many such stories from that era.

What's wrong with sharing these stories?

About those rallies

Long, but worth watching (true of most of Philosophy Guy's work)

Written by my colleagues (in one case, now a former colleague)

Here's a pretty good reading list

Despite the lies Trump keeps screeching at us

The kids are okay; old white Americans? Not so much. (Frankly, this video is just really sad.)

Does everything look alright you dumb fucker? I want that Truck off my lawn. Thor's retirement is not going well. 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/RDBNJ9drs7

— Eugene W (@NOW1SOLAR) August 19, 2019

are you telling me that the guy who ran a scam university and a scam charity and a scam magazine and a scam airline and sold scam mortgages and scam steaks and scam vodka and scam fucking water for fuck's sake, has been running a scam economy? fuck me, I did not see that coming

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) August 18, 2019

My father is a die hard Fox News watching Trump voter. Let me tell you: it is not a good use of time to try to flip Trump voters. No amount of logic or humanizing or anything else works. Just move on and mobilize and stop voter suppression.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) August 18, 2019

Heh:

quillette, the other white nationalism

— ᴀsᴄʜ 'demonic ink' ᴄᴏɴꜰᴏʀᴍɪᴛʏ 🍈🍮🥀⚗️🦠 (@AschConformity_) February 27, 2019

Eventually, you know, you gotta ask yourself if we're the baddies:

Update on the Update

The landlord seemed positively cheery about us having so many animals. Also, he says of course he will deal with the fallen trees. He seemed surprised at the question. He says we'll just need to mow and keep the bushes cut back. (Which is what I have always understood "lawn and yard care" to mean.)

We're meeting to sign the lease and walk through the house tomorrow. Thanks to every one of you who donated, we can (just barely) pay the deposit. By the time we have to actually move, I'll have been paid, so we can pay the first month's rent and deal with renting the U-Haul.

I'm hoping, since we've been living in Fort Smith for 16 years and never missed a utility payment once (or a rent check either, I'll just mention -- never even been late with one) that we won't have to pay deposits again. So that should be okay.

Here's the living room of the house:




Here is the kitchen:



It's a little smaller than our current place, but it's also cheaper. Plus it's so close to the university that I can walk to work or ride my bike. Which is excellent.

Again, thank you to everyone who made this possible. I'm sending you love and hugs and every good wish in the world.

Donate to Help Me Move: Update

I've written a letter to the landlord saying we received his (very odd) notice, that his "terms" are not acceptable, and that we will be moving out.

We've begun looking for a place. There are a lot of places available in our price range (I'm hoping for at least a hundred less than we are paying here) though not as many in the location I am hoping for (near the university).

We did look at this one yesterday, which is lovely:



I am waiting to hear if the landlord will accept our tiny zoo of two cats and a dog, and what his philosophy is about who takes care of fallen trees. The rent is perfect -- a hundred and twenty less than we're paying here -- and it has hardwood floors throughout. Though not central air, just window units.

Dr. Skull grumbles when I suggest a duplex or a townhouse, though these seem a practical solution to me. We'll see if I can't twist his arm.

Thanks to everyone who has donated so far! Not only are you making this move possible, you have reinforced my faith in humankind. Go us!

Donate to Help Me Move!

My landlord is having some issues. Originally he was an excellent landlord, if a bit reluctant to fix non-essential items (like our gate, which was broken when we moved in and has never been fixed). But over the past few years he's been growing increasingly strange.

He'll be perfectly pleasant sometimes when we call him for a repair -- when our 15 year old dishwasher finally quit, for instance -- and then lose his rag the next time (a clogged drain).

It's not like we call him often, either. I usually manage most repairs myself.

Anyway, yesterday he sent us this bizarre little letter saying that we were "responsible" for the breakages and damages to the house, and that he wasn't going to "unilaterally" pay for them anymore. Also that he was "revoking" our deposit and applying it to the costs we had already incurred.

If we didn't like this, he said, we could move.

He's well into his 80s, so this could be age-related dementia. But he's also a rich white Republican, so it could be just entitled rich guy hatefulness.

In any case, we really need to move to a less expensive place anyway.

Except, as all y'all know, we're stony broke. (A combination of no work all summer and heaps of medical bills last winter.)

If anyone feels moved to donate to the delagar moving fund, this would be the time.

What we REALLY do in College

The First Week

ONE YEAR LATER

Hey! Who's telling all our deep dark secrets!!

(Original source)

First Day of Fall Semester

First Day of Fall 2019. Things I have Learned so Far:

• Almost all of my students are working full-time
• Almost none of my students are on Twitter
• Almost all of my classes are well under cap (this is very unusual -- up until a few years ago, every class was at or over capacity every semester)
• None of them drink soda anymore -- they drink water, and almost all of them have their own refillable water bottles
• Lots of tattoos
• Not so much dyed hair
• They get very nervous if you ask them to draw pictures*
• They're very, very strict about grammar and spelling
• Their biggest worry is failing
• They've done a lot of cool things**

*I do this thing where I have the students fill out 3X5 index cards with their names, their preferred emails, and their majors, so that I'll have that information. I also have them add other details -- like what their biggest worry is, or something cool they've done. This year I had them draw a little picture in one corner, which was a source of great anxiety. "A picture of what?" "What do you want us to draw?" When I told them to just have fun with it, though, they calmed down.

** One of them swam with sharks. Another works with circuit boards for fun. Another studies cryptids. And one traveled to Germany this summer to work in a winery. 

Hugo Winners

Mike Glyer has posted the Hugo Winners here.

I'm especially pleased about Zen Cho's win, and also Alex Harrow's.

Also The Good Place winning for Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form, and Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form. The Good Place is excellent television, and Spiderman was amazing.

And I was glad to see Gardner Dozois win one last time. He'll be missed.

Wascally Wabbits

So I was having this discussion with a buddy of mine about this commercial which has populated the childhood of American children for the past 60 years:

The catch-line is always "Trix are for kids!"

So my friend and I were talking about the weirdness of this commercial, which relies on children frustrating the desires of another, and mocking and tormenting another, into order to fulfill their own desire -- and their own desires for something both unnecessary and unhealthy, let's not forget. An early commercial makes this even more explicit:

The discussion sparked a memory of how, when I was a young media-saturated toddler delagar, shopping with my parents on Sunday morning at Schwegmann's

I'd always pester my father for Trix, just as the TV had told me I should. "I want Trix!" I would say. "Can we get Trix?"

"Trix are for kids," he would say cheerily, walking on past.

Far from annoying me, this would puzzle me. "But I am a kid," I would say, as if this were some information he was lacking.

"Trix are for kids," he would repeat, continuing on down the aisle.

"But Daddy," I would say, running after him, "But Daddy, I am a kid! So can I have some?"

"Trix are for kids!"

I was just convinced, when I was five years old, he was simply missing the facts. Like if I could get him to understand the data -- that I was a kid -- he would smack himself in the head and say, Oh, right! do a 180 in the aisle and buy me the cereal.

It occurs to me now that this is the fundamental error we are making when we try to hold a reasoned debate with MAGA Americans. We think they are just missing the facts. We think if we just supply them with the data, they will say, oh, right! Now I see, do a 180, and begin acting like decent human beings.

But they aren't missing the data. Like my father, they are perfectly aware of the facts. They know that climate change is real. They know that the USA has kids in cages. They know that Trump is looting the country, and that he changed the tax laws to put more money in the pockets of the 1%. They know that Trump is gutting the EPA to allow corporations to make more money, while destroying our water, air, wetlands, and our national parks. They know socialized medicine is the only system that works. They know antifa is not a terrorist organization, and that Proud Boys is. They know that police violence is a problem.

They know all this. We can repeat this information all we like, we can present all the evidence we want, under the delusion they're just missing the facts, and that if we give it to them, they'll say, oh right, and do a 180.

But that's not going to happen, because they don't care about evidence. They care about power and about wealth. They care about hegemony.  They care about their privilege, and keeping that privilege. If they have to mock and torment people to keep it, well, they'll do that. If they have to exploit people to keep it, they'll do that too. If they have to destroy the planet, well, they're Good Christians, aren't they? They know this is not the only world.

In conclusion: Vote every single member of the GOP out in 2020.

NOW it hits me

Gotdamn it, I have an 8:00 class this semester.

Worldcon

My people are in Dublin this week.  More here.  And here.

I'm usually too broke to go to SF workshops or conventions, but I love watching them from afar.

Links

This is wonderful (stolen from N&M)

Huh

MAGA Americans love to complain about the hellscape of SF, but

This makes a good point about why the Right is so susceptible to scams

Who said it?

The actual hellscape

The Party of Personal Responsibility, where it's always someone else's fault

The sixth leading cause of death for US men ages 20 to 26

In light of which, this is interesting -- we lose more people to guns than to cars, and more to drug addiction than to guns

Guess who paid for the huuuge tax break. Yeah, that would be people like me. Meanwhile, ‘Those in the top 1%... got an average tax cut of about $33,000’

I remember the glee that surrounded these liars when they broke their scam

Back to School

Thursday and Friday are our pre-school conferences, and Monday my first day of classes. I had the entire summer to write, since none of my classes made, and I still didn't get as much done as I wanted to.

Here's for getting more done this winter.

My Hometown

This is the sort of crime that happens in my hometown:

Man Run over by Cow On Garrison Avenue Bridge

A man was run over by a cow according to the FSFD Battalion Chief Terry Graves and the incident happened before 11 a.m.



Now with video!

https://www.facebook.com/tori.keith.9/posts/2482631451816688

What I'm Reading Now: UPDATED

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Non-fiction, but very readable. Harari starts from the big bang and moves forward. His overarching theme is that fiction -- myths, religion, laws, corporations, nations -- made it possible for humankind to become the dominant animal on the planet, by allowing us to move past the small band stage of organization. An example is religion. When we can all identify as Catholics, then we all know what rules we order our world by, and we can thus cooperate with total strangers, in a way we can't without those rules. Same for, say, governments. When we identify as US Citizens, we have a set of rules we all agree on, and then we can cooperate with total strangers.

This ability to make up rules about the world, and then believe that those rules are real (instead of just made up by us), Harari argues, is our great power. His argument is compelling.

Of course you see the problem. We identify as US Citizens, but do we agree on the set of rules? Right now we are vehemently disagreeing, because the set of rules is changing. Harari notes this is also something humans can do -- change their rules radically and abruptly. (Cf the French Revolution, when we went from the Divine Right of Kings to the Sovereign Rule of the People.)

Very much a must-read, just for this insight alone.

ETA: Boy, did this book go downhill fast after that chapter.

I'd read about 60% of it at that point. After that, I hit the chapters on religion and science, in which Harari argues that science functions as religion, or at least serves the same purpose as religion. I might have gone along with him, since his basic point is that science, like religion, allows people to cooperate and work together. But his argument in these chapters shows that he fundamentally misunderstands how science works, and what science is. For instance, he argues that evolution -- and evolutionary science -- is about evolving into superior creatures; or devolving into inferior beings.

Now it is true that Social Darwinists act as though this is what evolution means -- that evolution has a teleology, and that this is that teleology, the creation of some Better Human (that's why many people in the USA today want a "certain" sort of person to reproduce, and other sorts not to do so).

But that is not what actual evolutionary science is about. Evolution has no aim. There is no "superior" or "better" creature in evolution. There's a creature that is fit for the environment that exists right now, which is the one that survives. No moral element to that fitness. And there is certainly no "devolving" in evolution. The very notion is an oxymoron.

So at that point, I'm afraid, I lost all confidence in Harari as a scholar, and when I looked around to see what other reviewers said, it seems he has made similar errors in basic facts in other places.

Although I still like what he said in the first half of the book, I can no longer trust him, and no longer recommend this book.

Whaaat!

Quillette isn't a reliable source? No!

Quillette: the truth is whatever confirms my views pic.twitter.com/NLU7uINw4N

— Ted McCormick (@mccormick_ted) August 9, 2019

Links

This thread is great

This went hog wild last week

Americans think their country is #1, but

For this one, you have to read the comments -- there really is no bottom here

cop: do you know why i pulled you over

me: because the police force is a fascist institution designed to protect the wealthy

cop: there's a man in your trunk

me: yea a 𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙝 man

— rocket (@tweetsbyrocket) August 6, 2019

Whining

It's going to be 101 degrees here today, with a heat index of 113.

Also, through no fault of my own -- a clerical error on the other end -- I did not get my sabbatical. Aargh.

I've been invited to reapply, at least.

What I'm Reading Now

Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Non-fiction, but very readable. Harari starts from the big bang and moves forward. His overarching theme is that fiction -- myths, religion, laws, corporations, nations -- made it possible for humankind to become the dominant animal on the planet, by allowing us to move past the small band stage of organization. An example is religion. When we can all identify as Catholics, then we all know what rules we order our world by, and we can thus cooperate with total strangers, in a way we can't without those rules. Same for, say, governments. When we identify as US Citizens, we have a set of rules we all agree on, and then we can cooperate with total strangers.

This ability to make up rules about the world, and then believe that those rules are real (instead of just made up by us), Harari argues, is our great power. His argument is compelling.

Of course you see the problem. We identify as US Citizens, but do we agree on the set of rules? Right now we are vehemently disagreeing, because the set of rules is changing. Harari notes this is also something humans can do -- change their rules radically and abruptly. (Cf the French Revolution, when we went from the Divine Right of Kings to the Sovereign Rule of the People.)

Very much a must-read, just for this insight alone.

ETA: Boy, did this book go downhill fast after that chapter.

I'd read about 60% of it at that point. After that, I hit the chapters on religion and science, in which Harari argues that science functions as religion, or at least serves the same purpose as religion. I might have gone along with him, since his basic point is that science, like religion, allows people to cooperate and work together. But his argument in these chapters shows that he fundamentally misunderstands how science works, and what science is. For instance, he argues that evolution -- and evolutionary science -- is about evolving into superior creatures; or devolving into inferior beings.

Now it is true that Social Darwinists act as though this is what evolution means -- that evolution has a teleology, and that this is that teleology, the creation of some Better Human (that's why many people in the USA today want a "certain" sort of person to reproduce, and other sorts not to do so).

But that is not what actual evolutionary science is about. Evolution has no aim. There is no "superior" or "better" creature in evolution. There's a creature that is fit for the environment that exists right now, which is the one that survives. No moral element to that fitness. And there is certainly no "devolving" in evolution. The very notion is an oxymoron.

So at that point, I'm afraid, I lost all confidence in Harari as a scholar, and when I looked around to see what other reviewers said, it seems he has made similar errors in basic facts in other places.

Although I still like what he said in the first half of the book, I can no longer trust him, and no longer recommend this book.


Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars


I'm not sure I like this one, but I did read it straight through. The first half is better than the second half.

It's about a young girl, Nedda Pappas, who becomes an astronaut, and also about a town caught in a time-loop-sort-of-thing. The book moves back and forth from a few days in Nedda's childhood in her Florida town to a few days in Nedda's adulthood.

In her childhood, she witnesses the Challenger explosion and then deals with the outfall of her father's scientific breakthrough, one which does very odd things to time as the town experiences it. In her adult life, she's on a space ship, traveling away from Earth toward a possible colony planet.

The first half of the book is very readable and compelling. The second half is less so, but I still read it. I'd say a B+.


Sarah Blake, The Guest Book, The Postmistress

These are historical fiction / Romance / mystery novels. Both are set in WWII, and both are compulsively readable. The Guest Book is a better book than the Postmistress, but both are pretty good.

They're both the sort of big sprawling book I like a lot -- like Middlemarch and Nobody's Fool -- where the author writes about a community, rather than an individual, using the community to show how the individuals happen, and how and why the individuals make mistakes. Blake does a really good job with this in The Guest Book especially.

The Guest Book is the story of a wealthy East Coast family, a very nice family, one that ends up doing some appalling things. The Postmistress is the story of a small coastal town in Massachusetts during WWII, and the intertwined lives of several families there, including one woman whose husband goes off to serve as a doctor during the Blitz, and the postmistress of the town, and a reporter who works with Edward Murrow.

Highly recommended. Blake has written one other book, but I do not recommend that one.



Richard Russo, Chances Are

You know I'll read anything Russo writes. This is not as good as Nobody's Fool, which is my favorite Russo novel, but it's better than his last few books have been.

Three men in their mid-sixties meet for a weekend at a summer house in Martha's Vineyard which one of them has inherited. They've been friends since their college days, when they spent a similar weekend here. That's the weekend that the young woman they all loved disappeared.

So we have another mystery/romance/historical novel, sort of, and also a novel of an intertwined community. This one is set (the part about the sixty-ish men) in the summer of 2016, just before Trump's election, so we get some commentary on that. The other part (the college days) is set in 1970, in the last years of the Vietnam war, so we get some details on that.

It's readable, because everything Russo writes is readable, but I don't know that it ever takes fire the way Nobody's Fool does.

On the other hand, Nobody's Fool is a perfect book. It's probably unfair to complain that Russo hasn't written yet another perfect book, that loser.

What Does the Right Say?

The Right says young white men murdering people in mass quantities is the fault of the Left -- because we're pro-choice, which teaches young men that killing is okay.

The Right says it's because young white men are "bullied" in school.

The Right says it's because of video games.

The Right says it's because young men are "devalued" in society.

The Right says it's because young women won't date these specific young men.

The Right says it's because "family" has been "corrupted" (I bet you can guess by who).

The Right says it's because women have jobs.

The Right says it's because immigrants have robbed young white men of the belief that their culture (the culture where all Americans are white men) is the culture of America.

The Right says it's because of cell phones.

The Right says it's because of feminists.

The Right says it's because of public schools.

The Right says it's because of Satan.

The Right says it's because of the Left.

The Right says it's because of porn.

I mean, guns don't shoot people. Porn shoots people.

It’s not Trump’s fault. It’s not the NRA’s fault. When will our nation wake up and realize we have a youth mental health crisis likely caused by over-medication, absentee parents, and a culture that glorifies infamy and notoriety above God, family and community?

— Tomi Lahren (@TomiLahren) August 4, 2019

Studies show millennial/young men are the loneliest generation (high rate of having zero friends or no close friends), skyrocketing rates of suicide, by far most violent demographic in America. Not a group that garners a ton of sympathy in the media but problem demands inquiry.

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) August 5, 2019

Trump Blames Video Games

 

Mass Shooters

Who radicalized him?



Original link here:

Using the El Paso terrorist's manifesto, I connected the dots for folks still having trouble doing that.

This is just the first page. pic.twitter.com/mQcW3doGNF

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) August 4, 2019

Thread

Two mass shootings in two days, both by white males who have been radicalized by Trump and by white supremacists.

Thread:

https://twitter.com/LOLGOP/status/1158027069269450752

Links

New books

Via Heebie at Unfogged, this unsurprising story (I still remember all the guys who would get so angry when I outscored them on exams as an undergrad -- including, btw, my own brother)

Good thing we put this dishonest hack on the Supreme Court. (In case you're stopped by the paywall, it's yet another series in the fantasy genre, where conservatives who haven't been on a university campus in 30 years tell us about those colleges, based on what they've seen on Fox News.)


Not sure what's more disturbing here -- the actual commercial or the comments from YouTube viewers:

I just..what?

Also it made me think of this, though I don't know why

July Temperatures

Image stolen from Camestros, over here



Anyone running for office who isn't talking about this doesn't get my vote.