Category: Politics

Maybe you’re wondering, probably not

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I haven’t said a word, at least in this space, about the current New York Times-driven media frenzy to get Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. There are a couple of reasons for that; you can probably predict most of them without me saying anything.

  • I can’t do anything about it and I have enough fucking stress in my life right now;
  • I find the entire thing hideously, insanely, diabolically stupid;
  • The people calling for Biden’s ouster fall into one of two categories: media-aligned chaos agents, by and large who should be lined up against a wall and shot, and frustrated Bernie types who still think the DNC somehow used their magical election-fixing powers and forced millions of fucking people to vote for Biden. The former are actively for Trump (the NYT never gets another dime from me) and the latter will not be satisfied with anyone the Democrats replace Biden with anyway;
  • Not one in ten of these people have actually thought through how complicated it would be to replace Biden with anyone other than Kamala Harris, and again, the people who have been calling Harris “Copala” for the last six years, again, are still gonna be mad. Fuck ’em.

There’s been some horseshit about Parkinson’s disease lately; there is no way that the legislation Biden signed this week about Parkinson’s disease could have resulted in Parkinson’s experts showing up at the White House, right? Nah.

Ultimately I will literally vote for Biden’s corpse, or Harris, or Bernie fucking Sanders, or a cold pile of bloody vomit in November, whatever is running against Trump. I give no fucks. President Cold Pile of Bloody Vomit will be an adequate replacement. I don’t have the mental energy to war-game this out; it’s the exact same bullshit as But Her Emails or Kerry’s Purple Hearts or Obama being from fucking Kenya. The news media has to have a big lie for every Democratic president. Ultimately, I’m gonna vote for the old guy with the stutter, even if he gets sick a couple more times between now and the election, and anyone who doesn’t want to do that can literally die in a fire for all I care, and that’s all the fuck I have to say about it.

A small piece of good news amidst a monstrous heap of evil shit

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching3 Comments

The Supreme Court ruled last week that it was legal to bribe them and today ruled that the President can legally order them killed, so I’m investigating just how the fuck I can get out of this miserable fucking shithole that we’re pretending is a functioning country. I’m going to do the paperwork today to get my passport renewed; my wife and son need theirs for the first time, and I’m going to have to talk my dad into getting his as well.

I think I can apply for German citizenship via descent from German nationals, and it has not escaped my notice that fleeing to Germany to avoid the Nazis is … somewhat ironic.

Anyway, the good news is that I unofficially passed my Praxis test; the score was 182/200, which is a quite comfortable margin. Higher than both of my practice tests, too; I was especially pleased to discover that several of the questions I specifically made sure to review had analogues on the official test, so I absolutely picked up some points during the studying process.

Oh, and in the process of showing off my drivers’ license to my online proctor I discovered that it was expiring in four days, and I went and got it renewed at the DMV in less than 20 minutes this afternoon.

The bad news — because of course there’s more bad news — is that despite the entire test being multiple choice, my official score report won’t be available until August 9, because ETS is the scum of the Earth. There is literally no reason this should take more than a couple of hours. It’s fucking 2024. This means that it’s unlikely that I’ll have the licensure in hand by the time school starts. Will that matter? Maybe, maybe not; the class I’m getting the licensure to teach in the first place hasn’t been confirmed yet, so all of this may have been for nothing. Right now I’m not stressing about it.

Oh, and check this fuckshit out:

Now: those two supplementary monitors are disconnected from the computer, because it won’t let you start the testing software if it detects that you have more than one monitor running. Was that good enough for my proctor? No! I had to point them away from me and cover them with towels. The disconnected monitors, which were not capable of receiving a signal from my computer. I also had to show the camera my glasses and confirm that I wasn’t wearing earrings, because … I guess I might have been wearing Google Glass and had secret spy earrings or some shit.

Don’t miss the whiteboard there; you aren’t allowed to use paper while taking the fucking test. I blatantly violated two of these assholes’ rules; one, I made no attempt whatsoever to disconnect every device in the house other than my computer from the internet, because give me a fucking break, and two, I discovered in the fine print of the rules I was agreeing to in order to take the test the requirement that if I was in a room with a door, that the door must not only be closed (fine) but that the computer I was testing on be placed in such a way that the closed door was visible to the proctor at all times.

Which would require wholesale rearranging of my office, and again, was not a requirement that anyone told me about prior to five minutes before taking the test. I was fully prepared to lie about this one if necessary, and had he given me any bullshit about it, I’d have removed the fucking door from the hinges. Christ, I fucking hate ETS. Like, the Supreme Court ruled today that the President is a king and I still think I hate ETS more than I hate them.

That said, it’s legal for Biden to order Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito executed and Trump sent to Guantanamo Bay now, and I think he should strongly consider it.

Monthly Reads is still coming later today, if (yeah, right) you’re waiting for it.

Can’t do it tonight

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I haven’t set anything or anyone on fire today and I’m just going to have to count that as a win.

In which I am unreasonably tired

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

I’m going to write a few sentences, finish my Arabic and then I think going to bed several hours early might be the move tonight. I’m not only not going to watch the debate, I want to be in a position where monitoring it online isn’t possible, so I need to either turn off every device in the house or actually be unconscious, and one of those two options requires a lot less work.

34/34

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Teaching3 Comments

I have to admit that I thought that finding out that the Previous Occupant had been convicted of 34 felonies would make me happier. Instead, I just find myself hoping he owns a gun. I want this bastard to face some fucking consequences for something, God damn it. And that pants-shitting waste of my oxygen got to walk out of the courtroom and bitch about the trial being rigged again, so this ain’t it yet.

In other news, the last day of school is tomorrow, and I am not literally too tired to live, at least insofar as I am quite clearly still alive, but I could probably convince myself otherwise. Tomorrow will go by quickly, and then year 20 (21? I may need to recount) will be in the books.

One more day. Piece of cake.

Some bits and bobs

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My head’s all over the place right now, so let’s do a bullet list.

  • Indiana voted on Tuesday. The Previous Occupant managed 79% of the Republican primary vote against an opponent who dropped out two months ago. I remind you that I Know Nothing About Politics before saying this, but it’s amazing how the polls say one thing and literally every other thing about this election says another.
  • Meanwhile, I was assuming my choice for Senate would lose because Indiana would choose the white guy, and they didn’t! Not only did Valerie McCray win, she won solidly, getting about 2/3 of the vote.
  • The sex pest won his primary too, unfortunately. I am probably just going to leave State Senate blank in November. Surprisingly, there is no Republican candidate, but there is a Libertarian running, and not only is he a Libertarian, he’s an engineer, which means he’s a jackass. It is possible to be either and not be a jackass but it is not possible to be both.
  • Today was a better day at school, not least because all of my knuckleheads from yesterday were excluded from class today. Today was the Math NWEA test, too, and for all indications it looks like it … went well? Possibly quite well? I won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning because it takes 24 hours for results to be fully available to teachers but damn near every kid I talked to showed growth.
  • Meanwhile, I’m definitely taking the high school Mathematics Praxis test this summer. My boss hinted that we might have enough 8th graders taking Geometry next year to be able to make a class section out of it, and I will fight anyone who tries to take that class away from me. That means I need to get licensed to teach it, though, so there’s a test to pass and some paperwork to get done. I can take the damn thing from my house, though, which is spectacularly good news.
  • I have chosen violence, and will be wearing a shirt that just says KENDRICK to work tomorrow. I’m expecting fireworks. It’ll be fun.
  • The final meeting of my little club of gay weirdos at school was today. We had a pizza party. I thought I had ordered far too much food. They each turned out to be a million locusts wearing skin suits, and everything I ordered was gone in seconds. I’m really going to miss these kids.
  • We had a fight in the hallway toward the end of the day, and I raised my voice to such a level clearing the hallway that I was hoarse for all of fifth and sixth hour. I’m hoping I can talk tomorrow.

Okay. That sounds good. I’m gonna go read now.

Time to bring this back

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Since my last post was in the Politics category, and I put Biden in as one of the tags, a little wandering around brought me to a lot of 2020 posts. I was not, to put it mildly, especially excited to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, and in fact voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary even though she’d dropped out by then. Biden was in the midst of sexual assault allegations that, for once, actually proved to be unfounded, and given that I wasn’t convinced by his candidacy anyway I went ahead and voted for someone I actually wanted to be President.

It occurs to me that we really haven’t heard much from Warren since 2020. Maybe I’m just listening in the wrong places.

Anyway, this is mostly an idle thought, but this is further evidence that I Know Nothing About Politics, something I’ve tried to keep in the forefront of my mind since the disaster in 2016. I couldn’t have been any more wrong about what kind of president this guy was going to be. My record of wrongness in presidential elections is pretty stunning over the last eight years, frankly.

Like I said, stray thought, but I’ve spent all day reading (James Islington’s The Will of the Many is so much better than the Licanius trilogy that it’s hard to believe the same guy wrote both) and I don’t have much of anything else to talk about, so … yeah. Grab the image and spread it around if you like; I feel like the left in general is succumbing to savior syndrome again and I’m pre-tired of the next six months.

In which I endorse: 2024 Primary Edition

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This primary kind of snuck up on me. I will grant that my particular style of media and news consumption renders me functionally immune to political ads, but other than a handful of prominent signs for local races near work I haven’t seen a Goddamned thing out there. That said, there’s a race or two worth talking about, and a couple of candidates I’m genuinely enthused about, so here we go:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. for President. This will surprise no one, of course, and Biden is running unopposed in Indiana, so it’s not like there’s even another candidate I can vote for. That said, at least in terms of his impact directly on my personal life, Biden has been the best president of my lifetime and it’s not close. I am both happy and proud to vote for him again.

Valerie McCray for US Senate. There is actually a primary race for Senate this year; both candidates passed my initial smell test, and passed my secondary test of “do you have a website that actually contains useful information about you, and makes me feel like I want you as my Senator?”. Dr. McCray’s is here and her opponent, Marc Carmichael, has his website here. While Carmichael doesn’t seem like an unacceptable choice, my rule is that when presented with two acceptable candidates I vote against the white guy. Right now I’ll be fine voting for him if he makes it through the primary, which, given that this is Indiana, I suspect he will.

Jennifer G. McCormick for Governor. Dr. McCormick was formerly Indiana’s Secretary of Education after Glenda Ritz flamed out, and I swear to God she was a Republican when she was appointed, and I spent more time than one might expect while following her on Twitter wondering how the hell a Republican appointee was getting away with saying the very liberal Democrat-ish things she kept saying. Well, if she was a Republican then, she’s a Democrat now, and I was really happy to hear that she’d decided to run for Governor. She’s running unopposed, which also surprises me, so it’s not like I had a second choice, but I can’t imagine who in this state I might have chosen over her. Sadly, she’ll likely get smoked by whatever rape-enabling troglodyte the Republican primary shits out. But we can hope!

I voted for Lori A. Camp for my House representative; I didn’t have another choice, and I’m going to stop short of calling it an endorsement. Honestly I hadn’t heard of her before going in and the sum total of my research was to make sure that I didn’t have to do any research. I glanced at her website; it’s fine, I suppose. I still want Pat Hackett.

Tim Swager for District 10 State Senator. This is inside-baseball as hell; why am I mentioning it here? Because the incumbent, David Niezgodski, is embroiled in a sexual harassment controversy, and everything I’ve seen about it makes me feel like he’s probably a slimy piece of shit. I am, I admit, a teensy bit leery of Swager as well, who has been spending a lot of money on sending mailers so that everyone knows that Niezgodski is a staffer-harassing asshole who maybe voted against abortion access once or twice– I’m not convinced of this– but said mailers are awfully thin on why Swager himself would be a better choice. His website is also rather thin but contains no obvious red flags, so, sure, you can be State Senator over the creepy married dude who broke into his staffer’s house.

I strongly suspect I’m going to go 0/5 here, if not in the primary than in the actual election, although Niezgodski might be weaker than I think; who knows. But I don’t miss elections. So here we are.