Spinning easily while watching Canadian public radio on television.
Sure, you’re a lot fancier racing people all over the world on Zwift. I just hope your not knowing that Andrew Wilkinson has resigned as B.C.’s National Liberal Party leader or anything at all about Vancouver traffic doesn’t come back to bite you today.
Was it wrong to request an absentee ballot in the name of my deceased mother from the state of Florida? And father?
Given my recent references to ballot box explosives and voting forgery, how long until Trump’s Federal Marshalls surround my Prius with guns a blazing?
If the humble blog goes dark, you’ll know why.
This election is the largest, most consequential mass communication experiment ever conducted. The question before us is whether someone can bend objective scientific data into an alternative reality on a national scale.
Whenever you hear an old white guy brag, “I’m the least racist person in this room!” translate it thusly, “I’m the least self aware person in this room.” We all know introspection and humility are for losers.
“Multicultural Perspectives in Classrooms”. Today’s topic, conflict resolution. More specifically, active listening. I ended class with a surprise homework assignment.
“Watch the second and final Presidential Debate tonight and then grade each candidates’ active listening skills.”
My Netflix comedy special is gonna kill.
This morning, on the way home from the pool, I dropped my ballot in the box at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on the corner of Henderson and North Street.
I voted for Biden-Harris.
Then, over breakfast, I read these tweets.
I don’t want my 403b to crash or all that I’ve built to be destroyed. And I don’t want to lose my health care or pay more taxes. Nor do I want to be complicit in destroying our economy.
What are my options here? How do I retrieve my envelope from the box? The only thing I can think of is dynamite.
Sane people now know the vast majority of cases are the result of people congregating indoors without masks. I’ll continue to be outdoors or inside with a mask on, but if you want to get the ‘rona, some of our Canadian brothers and sisters are here to help.
At least 61 COVID-19 cases tied to ‘very large’ outbreak at Hamilton spin studio, Spinco.
A tutorial.
Step 1. Go to an indoor spin class with LOTS of other people.
Step 2. Conform to what everyone else does—after clipping into your bike, take your mask off.
Step 3. Lean on the pedals hard for an hour.
Step 4. Wait.
Sentence to ponder from the article.
“Hamilton Public Health Services isn’t calling it a ‘super spreader’ event, but Richardson described it as a large outbreak with lots of transmission.”
That’s the funniest thing I’ll read all day.
I hear someone super smart on a podcast. I read about an unsuspecting athlete inspiring lots of other people to vote. I watch Savannah Guthrie give Fox News hosts a tutorial on how to interview the President. I read an absolutely beautiful essay about the arrival of fall in Twisp, WA.
And I want to know more about these people. So I google them and in a few seconds I’m skimming their wikipedia pages (or in the case of the essay writer, their personal website).
And when I skim someone’s wikipedia page, I always start with “Personal Life”. Is that because I’m a nosy bastard or because it’s human nature? What, dig this, they live in Ojai, CA; they’ve been married a few times; they have three children; and they raise llamas.
I wonder whether this phenomenon, which I think is human nature, partially explains higher education’s irrelevance in most people’s day-to-day lives. Higher education is always looking itself in the mirror and saying “This is the year I’ll become a public intellectual. This is the year I’ll make my work accessible. This is the year I’ll engage with the Deplorables.”
But why don’t the changes ever take? I propose it’s because academics, intellectuals, scholars, pick your preferred term, never ever talk about their Personal Lives. The unspoken agreement is that it detracts from the seriousness of your scholarship. The thinking being that one’s ideas, if they’re persuasive and original enough, should be sufficient to garner attention.
And how’s that working out?
Maybe higher education needs to look in the mirror and say “This is the year I become human. This year I’ll reveal something, hell anything, about my life off campus. This is the year I’ll crack the curtains on my Personal Life.”
Eighteen more days.
Congress has been asleep at the anti-trust wheel for a long time. Meaning you and I are largely responsible for the fact that every sector of our economy is dominated by fewer, ever larger entities. Small promising companies are inevitably gobbled up by larger ones. Economic theory suggests a lack of competitiveness is bad for consumers.
Similarly, if an ever shrinking number of newsrooms translates into less competition for readership, ever larger newspapers should be bad for citizens and our democracy. Right now, The New York Times is serving as a powerful counterfactual to this phenomenon. I’m not sure what to make of the fact that the largest newspaper is doing a lot of the best work.
Two examples.
‘Straight to Gunshots’: How a U.S. Task Force Killed an Antifa Activist. From the article,
“President Trump praised the killing of Michael Reinoehl, suspected of fatally shooting a far-right protester, as ‘retribution.’ Our investigation found that officers may have shot without warning or seeing a gun.”
More and more it’s looking like Reinoehl was murdered by the U.S. government inside the U.S. Four officers fired their weapons around 30 times. Eight bullets hit civilian properties. Some bullets flew right by an eight year old on his bike. Others blew out windows of neighboring cars. Our incredible passivity about this murder will embolden our President.
As the virus spread, private briefings from the Trump administration fueled a stock sell-off. While we’re making jokes about a fly, the owners of production fuck the proletariat. By calling it “draining the swamp”, their thoughts about us are obvious, they think we’re stupid. Remember what the President said in the run-up to the last election, “I love the uneducated.”
“The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.
Interviews with eight people who either received copies of the memo or were briefed on aspects of it as it spread among investors in New York and elsewhere provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.”
Imagine if the President’s base got half as upset about white collar criminality as they do about the occasional criminality that accompanies urban protests.
Pressing Pause 