Toll Road Follies

Curmie got two bills (of sorts) for toll road fees today. 

One appeared on his phone; it was an obvious scam.  Curmie’s cell has a New Hampshire number, but he hasn’t been in that state in about three and a half years, and to the best of his recollection has never driven on a toll road there, even if there are any.  This is perhaps the third time he’s had one of these threatening messages.  The last one was from a phone number from the nation of Tuvalu; this time he didn’t bother to check before tapping the “delete and report” tab.

The other one came by mail, and was actually legit.  Well, sort of.  Curmie and Beloved Spouse were able to get away for a brief vacation in San Antonio between Christmas and New Year’s.  Our GPS took us onto a toll road near Austin on the way there; we took another route on the way home.  Anyway, we owed the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority (what a title!) a grand total of $2.71, $1 of which was a processing fee.

Anyway, the outside of the envelope reads, in big letters, “Past Due Payment Required.”  Whoever was sorting the mail at the post office couldn’t have missed it, nor could our mailman.  Needless to say, there was nothing past due about our account, and those assholes knew it.  The invoice wasn’t even processed until the 11th, and just arrived today.  So we begin with a defamatory lie.  Way to start off on the right foot, CTRMA!

But there’s a $15 fine if you don’t pay the bill by the actual due date (February 10), and this is this kind of thing that sometimes gets buried, so Curmie decided to pay it immediately.  There are manifold ways of paying: by mail, online, by scanning a QR code, in person (in Austin, about a four-hour drive) or by phone.  Curmie didn’t have any stamps handy, and he didn’t really want to have to pay for one, let alone drive to the post office.  And he really didn’t trust those bozos to process a check as soon as they got it, especially since they’d get more money if they delayed.  Having a credit card receipt seemed the way to go, so he tried online first. 

You’ve got to fill out a form that wants far more information than is necessary, but Curmie shrugged and entered it all in.  But, of course, there were problems.  The form insists on a cell number.  Curmie dutifully plugged his in.  Nope.  It was the “wrong format.”  Of course, there wasn’t a specified format, but whatever.  After you get told you did it wrong, there’s (sometimes) a pop-up that says to use only numbers with no spaces.  That’s what Curmie had done, of course.  After a couple of tries, it became clear that “only numbers with no spaces” means “parentheses around the area code and then a space, and a hyphen after the exchange.”

Then you’ve got to enter a user name and password, then to identify the letters or decide what part of the photo includes a motorcycle or whatever.  Curmie got that far, hit the “next” button and watched the spinning wheel of death for a good four minutes before finally getting the message that there was an error, and to “please try again later.”  Curmie waited a few minutes, then tried again.  But this time he got a message that the secondary email couldn’t match the primary email.  Of course, Curmie hadn’t entered a secondary email.  So he added one.  Remember, all that’s happened so far is the system rejecting Curmie’s attempt to establish an account. 

One more try to establish the account… now the message reads that the primary email is already in use, presumably meaning that although the previous message had said that there was an error, apparently the account really was established… except that it wasn’t, or at least the password Curmie had just created didn’t work.

Anyway, after some more fiddling, we finally get to the point where you can enter your credit card information.  Another interminable wait while it processes, and another message that there’s been an error; try again later.  Arrgghhh.  Went through the whole process again, with the same result: there was an error, try later.  Okay, that’s it.  The online system is obviously FUBAR.  Fine.  Let’s try scanning that QR code.  Well, it doesn’t work, either.  At least it tells you that pretty quickly. 

Ah, but there’s still the possibility of paying by phone.  The robot voice, sounding rather like a junior high girl trying to be elegant, asks for the account number.  Curmie provides it.  He is then informed that he has a credit balance of $2.71.  Not only had they charged his card while claiming the inability to do so, they’d done it twice!

So Curmie called the credit card company.  Apparently they can’t do anything while the charge is still officially “pending” (Curmie would have thought it would be easier under those conditions), but once the charges are fully posted, Curmie can call them back and they’ll claw back the money.  It’s only $2.71, which Curmie can afford, but dammit, CTRMA is not getting paid extra because they’re inept.

Curmie already knew that avoiding that toll road in the future is of paramount importance, and that customer service at Discover is really good.  He’s learned one more thing: No one who works for CTRMA should be allowed within ten paces of any device that wasn’t manufactured by Fisher-Price.

The Censorial Asshats at Texas A&M Are At It Again

Dr. Leonard Bright

Yes, there are probably more important stories to write about, but Curmie was a college professor for a very long time, and taught multiple courses in which topics related to race and gender figured reasonably prominently.  Curmie has already expressed his relief that he’s now retired, because now the university doesn’t have to fire him for thinking he knows more about what’s appropriate reading and/or discussion material for his course than some administrator too busy kissing the ass of grandstanding politicians to actually care about education does.

So, here we are again, because, as the title of this essay suggests, the censorial asshats at Texas A&M University are at it again.  And in some ways it’s worse than ever.  Yes, demanding the removal of a selection from Plato’s Symposium from a Philosophy course is probably stupider, but this one may show even less regard for the way universities are supposed to operate.  It’s bad enough, in other words, that Professor Leonard Bright’s graduate level Ethics and Public Policy (PSAA 642) course was cancelled, but these idiots did so after the class had already met!

Dean John Sherman claims that Bright had declined repeated requests for more specifics about his course.  Bright says, quite reasonably, that issues of race, gender, and sexuality were likely to arise every day: “During discussions, book reviews, case studies, throughout the course. There is no one day. That’s how this class works.”  Well, duh.  Sherman, of course, had no relevant experience in an academic environment prior to being hired as dean, so, not to put too fine a point on it, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing.  Curmie’s a reasonably smart lad, too, but you don’t want to put him in charge of a national security agency. 

Sherman is clearly far from stupid, but he is ignorant, and that may be even worse under these circumstances.  Let’s start with some basic facts.  First off, the more advanced a course is, at least outside the so-called “hard sciences,” the more it tends to be run as a seminar.  Students are actively engaged in discussing, debating, and interrogating course materials.  People who don’t understand how seminars work—and, unfortunately, this includes a good many university administrators—think this makes for a lesser load on the professor, even trying to claim that teaching a three-credit-hour seminar should count as less than three hours of courseload in lecture courses.  

In fact, of course, the opposite is true.  True, you do less of the talking, but you don’t know what direction a student wants to take the discussion, so you’d better be ready for anything.  That means more prep time and a greater need to clarify one’s own perspectives.  An analogy might be the difference between a speech (lecture) and a press conference (seminar).

Importantly, these are graduate students, who are curious by nature and both intelligent enough and scholarly enough to have been admitted to grad school at Texas A&M back when it was a reputable university (i.e., last year or earlier).  They’re going to ask questions.  They’re going to have, and state, their own opinions.  Even in the wet dreams of the Christian dominionists, there is no means to completely control what students say in a classroom.  The censors can claim that a faculty member’s mentioning the fact that gay people exist is somehow “advocating” for homosexuality, but they don’t have a rejoinder for a student who says, “I’m LGBTQ+, and this policy affects me in the following manner…” 

What is the professor to do in that scenario?  Sure, there’s an opportunity to open the floor for other student input, but what if there is none, other than perhaps a handful of nods in agreement?  Students deserve a response to their commentary, and they deserve to hear the professional perspective of a recognized authority (the professor), not some equivocation inspired by trying to obey an unconstitutional imperative.

In other words, Dr. Bright’s assertion that the verboten topics might arise in literally any class period is 100% accurate, and he would be compelled to respond.  Expecting him to be able to predict when and how often such conversations would happen is not merely unreasonable; it betrays a profound misunderstanding of how university coursework works, especially in advanced courses.  Yes, we can put much of the blame on the idiot state legislators (the usual apologies for redundancy) who passed SB37, but Sherman deserves plenty of criticism, too.

But that’s not all!  As Curmie wrote last October about the suppression of a high school play, “If you’re going to be a censorial asshat, at least be timely about it.”  As noted above, the course was cancelled after classes has already started!  Yeah, yeah, the university promises to help students find new classes, where, of course, they’ll already be behind.  If they as much as wrote their names on the inside cover of a textbook, they can’t sell it back to the bookstore for full price.  Most importantly, this was the course that best fit those students’ needs, which they chose, presumably in consultation with their advisors, for that reason.  It was the only ethics course to be offered in the department this spring.  Curmie won’t bother you with the obvious joke in that regard, Gentle Reader; he knows you can get there on your own.

There is precisely one legitimate reason to cancel a course after the semester has started: that the professor is unable to continue teaching it for reasons beyond the university’s control: serious illness, for example.  Clearly, that’s not the case here.  QED.

Oh, by the way, you know how Curmie mentioned in his blog post of January 8 that Dr. Martin Peterson, whose choice of a selection from Plato led to censorship, was the Chair of the Academic Freedom Council at A&M, “which makes him an especial target for the censorial asshat brigade”?  Well, the Texas Tribune article linked above reports that Dr. Bright, who is, by the way, a tenured Full Professor, also happens to be president of the Texas A&M Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, “a faculty group that opposes the system’s new race and gender ideology policy.”  What a coincidence, huh?  Dr. Bright argues that his “decision to speak out in defense of academic freedom and the integrity of higher education has clearly placed a target on [his] back.”  It is difficult to argue with that analysis.

Back when Curmie was teaching, he not infrequently expressed views that he freely admitted were not shared by the majority of theatre historians—about the motivations behind creating the Dionysian festival or about the demographics of Shakespeare’s audience, for example.  He made a point of explaining why most scholars thought the way they did, and why he disagreed.  He didn’t care which argument students regarded as more persuasive; he wanted them to think, to reach a conclusion based on all the available arguments.  In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must believe Dr. Bright when he says that students are not expected to agree with him.  It’s the administration that has clearly taken a side, and it’s not in favor of free inquiry.

Texas A&M has quickly turned into the Augean stables, and is desperately in need of a Herakles.

There's No 3-D Chess Here

Nope.

It had probably been months since Curmie had heard the term “3-D Chess” to describe someone so strategically brilliant as to leave the rest of us in the dust.  Then he encountered the metaphor twice on Wednesday of this week.  In both cases, Curmie’s response was, shall we say, skeptical.

The first occurrence was during the FIRE members-only webcast.  One of the viewers asked if it was possible that the administration at Texas A&M was in fact sympathetic with faculty who just want to teach their courses based on their professional expertise.  The argument, you see, was that censoring Plato in a Philosophy course was so remarkably stupid that it invites a lawsuit, which would, hypothetically, free the university from the grotesquerie that is SB37.  In other words, university policy-makers—the Regents and the administration—were hoping for a 1st Amendment challenge to an obviously unconstitutional law.  It would succeed, and control of the curriculum would thereby be wrested from idiot pols and returned to its rightful place, the university itself.

It was not an outrageous question, but FIRE’s General Counsel Ronnie London doubted that university officials were indeed “playing 3-D chess.”  He granted the possibility, but made it clear that such a scenario was unlikely.  Curmie agrees, not merely because he doubts that anyone would employ such a strategy, but because the Regents are appointed by ultra-right wing Governor Greg Abbott, whose fingerprints are all over the legislation in question… and they, in turn appoint the President.  The principal qualifications to be a Regent for a state university in Texas are simple: you must be a rich Republican who neither knows nor cares anything about higher education except as a means of advancing a political agenda.  Abbott certainly found his flock at A&M.

Remember, too, that last fall a young woman described by Curmie as “a single narcissistic and reactionary student” objected to a discussion topic because it violated an Executive Order from Dear Leader, and the professor, department chair, dean, and president all lost their jobs. 

By the way, it’s been reported that the reason that the department chair (and presumably those up the food chain) got in trouble was that they allowed the prof to teach something that wasn’t in the course description.  As a side note: when Curmie came to the university form which he is now retired, the catalog description for the second half of the Theatre History sequence said the course stopped chronologically at World War II.  Curmie said he was going to extend the timeline to the present, thereby including absurdism, the Angry Young Men, Off- and Off-Off Broadway, playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, feminist dramaturgy, deconstruction… well, you get the idea, Gentle Reader.  

And get this: Curmie’s boss agreed to it without any hesitation!  Such insubordination from a department chair!  We did, by the way, change the course description, but it took a couple of years to get the revisions through the system.  In the meantime, it would appear that Curmie and his boss were both very naughty, indeed.  Luckily, the statute of limitations has run out.

But revenons à nos moutons.  The powers-that-be had their chance to challenge or even circumvent the state’s censorial policy and passed on the opportunity.  If the Regents actually wanted to halt this unconstitutional idiocy, they would have done so.  Nope.  They’re absolutely complicit.

So now we turn to the other contender for “3-D chess” designation: 47’s stated intention of annexing Greenland through whatever means necessary.  Actually, the CNN story Curmie read references MAGA-dom’s belief that Dear Leader is playing 4-D chess, and similar inanities have apparently been uttered not infrequently for some time, especially with respect to events in Venezuela.  Curmie either just didn’t see them or succeeded in ignoring them.

Last Friday, Chris Cillizza’s YouTube post (which Curmie didn’t see until today) opened with some pretty open mockery of the idea that “Donald Trump is always playing 3- or maybe 4- or maybe 5-dimensional chess, while the Democrats, the reporters covering him, everyone else, is sort of playing checkers at best.  The essence of the argument is that Trump is so strategically smart that he’s always multiple moves ahead of everyone else.”  Cillizza proceeds to talk about the strategic stupidity involved in describing that Susan Collins, the most vulnerable Republican Senator seeking re-election, as a “disaster” who “should never be elected to office again.”  Collins, of course, only votes against GOP directives when it won’t make any difference (a point Cillizza doesn’t raise), and of course her vote on a procedural matter that will lead to nothing substantive fits that description nicely.

So Cillizza has a point.  But the true coup de grâce came a couple days after Cillizza’s piece, when Greenland became the topic of conversation on Sunday and then again on Wednesday.  The apologists’ argument is that only by threatening to invade an ally could Trump get Western Europe to send troops to protect Greenland, even if the perceived enemy is… well… us.  Pursuing this policy is far stupider than attacking Susan Collins. 

Sure, Greenland has some strategic importance, and we’d rather not have it taken over by Russia or China.  But first of all, that isn’t going to happen, and secondly, the downside of 47’s bluster is enormous.  His recklessness on the international stage has already cost this country more than can be regained in a decade or more of actual diplomacy and ethical leadership.  What ally would possibly trust the US now?  The idea that there would actually be a US military operation against Greenland would be laughable if we had a sane President.  As it is, the possibility looms. 

And if such an invasion were to take place, the situation would change from bad to cataclysmic.  There’s commentary out there that has been attributed to Brent Molnar (although why it doesn’t appear on his Facebook or Bluesky pages is a mystery).  Regardless of who wrote it, it’s pretty scary.  Curmie suspects it may be a little alarmist (“the world as we know it ends” may be a bit much), but virtually everything mentioned in the piece is at least a possibility if not a probability: the destruction of NATO is virtually assured; closure of American military bases in Europe, economic retaliation from the EU resulting in staggering inflation, the expulsion of US corporations from European countries, cessation of trans-Atlantic travel: all well within the realm of possibility…  It’s not a pretty picture.  

More to the point, not only would the loss of status, economic stability, and the moral high ground be devastating, there would be no upside.  The only country to gain from this ill-begotten fever dream is Russia, since European powers would be distracted away from supporting Ukraine.  Curmie judiciously refrains from wondering if that was the whole point.

Curmie would like to think that military leaders would either talk Dear Leader out of doing something so suicidal to American interests, or that they would listen to Senator Kelly and refuse an illegal order.  But when the Generals and Admirals are our last line of defense against a sociopathic POTUS with the maturity of a pampered toddler, we are neck deep in the shit and sinking fast.  Suddenly, “Doctor Strangelove” doesn’t seem so funny anymore.

So, no.  Neither the folks at Texas A&M nor in the White House inner circle are playing 3-D chess.  They’d be lucky to handle the complexities of Go Fish.

Curmie Doesn't Like ICE Unless It's Cooling His Drink

Thirty-ish years ago, when Curmie was in grad school, he had a paper accepted for a conference in Greece.  It turned out that one of the professors with a courtesy appointment in Theatre (his “home” was African and African-American Studies) was also going, so we planned to travel together, room together to save money, etc.  But our plans were altered by the fact that Curmie’s colleague was a Nigerian citizen.

How is that relevant?  He had a visa for Greece, after all.  (Curmie, being an American, didn’t need one.)  Well, we were scheduled to change planes in Germany.  That’s it: we’d never even leave the international terminal at the airport.  But Nigerians needed a “transit visa” (I think that was the term) to even set foot in the airport.  When we checked in at the airport in Kansas City, it took a little time to convince the airline staffer that all we were doing was changing planes, but everything seemed to have been worked out, and we boarded the plane for the first leg of our trip. 

Then a couple of armed security types showed up to escort Curmie’s companion from the plane.  That was embarrassing for Curmie, let alone for his travel partner, who actually wouldn’t be allowed to land in Germany.  That meant, among other things, that the first leg of his voyage would take him to a different American city than where Curmie was headed.  He could then make a connection through Amsterdam instead of Munich or Frankfurt (Curmie connected through one going to Greece and the other on the return trip; he can’t remember which was which); he’d get to Greece a couple hours after Curmie, but he could at least get there.  The kicker is that the border between Germany and the Netherlands is open: Curmie’s friend could have entered Germany from Amsterdam without as much as having to show his passport if he’d arrived by car or train or bus.

This is the part that’s relevant to this post.  There’s more to the story about the return trip, but that can wait for a future post.  What matters is the idiocy of the rules.  This time, the problem was with German regulations, but let’s just say that those folks don’t have a monopoly on this sort of stuff.  Yesterday happens to be the 10th anniversary of Curmie’s finally getting home at about 3 a.m. with a British exchange student who had been held up by Homeland Security.  You can read about that incident here.  There was another variation on the theme (that Curmie didn’t write about) a few years later.  And, of course, there were the two times Curmie himself got stopped trying to re-enter his own country.  Yeah, there’s a lot of stupid enforcement of stupid rules by stupid (but ever so self-important) people out there.  The Trump administration does not have a monopoly.

None is this attempt to deny the importance of border safety.  True, with the exception of some restrictions on Asian immigrants, prior to the Immigration Act of 1924 (barely a century ago), you entered the US pretty much by walking or driving across the border or landing at the dock in the harbor.  Trans-oceanic flights hadn’t happened yet, but there were passenger flights between Havana and a couple of destinations in Florida.  Still, it’s easy to understand why countries would want to be able to keep foreign bad actors out and to reserve citizenship rights to those who go through appropriate channels.  There are also legitimate national security issues involved: not enough to justify a lot of what’s happening now, but worthy of attention nonetheless.

Curmie has several foreign-born friends who went through the process, and are now US citizens.  A couple of them still have accents associated with their birthplaces; others could just as easily have been born in Omaha.  (And some of Curmie’s born-in-the-USA friends grew up with (legal) immigrant parents, learned a different language (generally Spanish) before English, and still haven’t completely lost the accent.)

What this post is about, then, is not about the legitimacy of ICE as an agency.  For the sake of argument, let’s take that as granted.  This is about conduct.  If ICE really attempted to go after “the worst of the worst,” as their apologists keep asserting, the level of criticism, from Curmie, at least, would be significantly reduced.  It’s tough to make an argument that we wouldn’t be better off without foreign-born murderers, thieves, rapists, and similar purveyors of perfidy, after all.  But in fact ICE is under strict orders not to pursue those violent criminals.  Stephen Miller, who’s really in charge of this show, wants numbers and obviously doesn’t care about anything else, including whether the people being harassed are American citizens, and it’s a hell of a lot easier to detain a grandmother or a hotel maid than a gangbanger who might shoot back.

ICE agents are universally bullies.  Hence the strutting around as if they are answerable to no one.  Hence the masks, which serve the dual purpose of being intimidating and protecting the identities of the real criminals: the agents themselves.  Bullies are all cowards, after all.  There have, of course, been numerous assaults and robberies committed by felons pretending to be ICE, too: if we’re not allowed to know who’s behind that mask (even a badge number), then anyone wearing a mask and carrying a weapon is protected.

Again, if ICE agents actually needed a warrant or even actual probable cause to detain someone; if they were more interested in serving the community by detaining actual illegal aliens rather than in playing demolition derby, crashing into cars for no other reason than that the driver is brown (no, SCOTUS, that isn’t enough, even if you idiots think it is); if they obeyed the law, themselves…  then, it would be a lot harder to argue against their presence.  But they don’t do any of that, and they’ve got the entire administration—Trump, Vance, Noem, Bondi…—ready to lie to protect their little Sturm Abteilung cosplayers.  Not really SA, though, of course: no one would ever use the term “elite” to describe these bozos.

ICE agents have no right to detain anyone who isn’t a legitimate suspect of an immigration-related offense or who isn’t actively interfering with their attempts to do their jobs.  Spraying tear gas or pepper spray into a non-violent crowd exercising their 1st Amendment rights or directly into the face of a protester isn’t acceptable.  Nor is intentionally crashing into someone’s car and dragging them out. (Oops, that was an American citizen.  They’re generally free to go after a few hours without food, water, toilet access, or legal counsel.  Don’t expect an apology, let alone restitution, of course.)  Photographing public ICE actions from a distance is perfectly legal, but don’t tell that to the goons on the ground or the prevaricating pols.  Oh, and giving a speech behind a podium displaying a quotation from a literal Nazi isn’t cool, either.

A decade ago, a career in ICE might have been an ethical course of action.  Anyone in ICE today is by definition an idiot or an asshole… and probably both. 

George Orwell Had 47 Figured Out

 

George Orwell, 1903-1950

With all due respect to Heather Cox Richardson, Robert Reich, et al., the keenest observer of the 47 regime has been dead for almost 76 years.  He was a fella named George Orwell, and his two best known books, Animal Farm and 1984, encapsulate the reign of the Mad King of Trumpistan.

The latter has been much quoted of late, and we’ll return to it in a moment, Gentle Reader, but Animal Farm hasn’t been given enough credit for its apt analysis.  The animals join together to revolt against the imperious Farmer Jones.  Their linkage is born of negativity: a sort of enemy-of-my-enemy bonding that leads to the overthrow of the shared adversary.  But, of course, the alliance begins to crumble as the pigs begin to assert absolute control.  One particular pig, Napoleon, becomes fully as megalomaniacal and indeed evil as Farmer Jones had been, and all the other animals—hens, horses, sheep, etc.—are in at least as bad shape as they had been before the revolution.  They work harder than ever, while the pigs in general and Napoleon in particular reap all the benefits, all the while proclaiming the glorious economic and political glories of the regime. 

Eventually, we see new slogans that are presented as dictates: “Napoleon is always right” and, ultimately adding an addendum to the rallying cry, “All animals are equal”: “…but some animals are more equal than others.”  The book may have been originally intended as a critique of communism, but it works just as well as a parable about the 47 regime.  The animals represent the MAGA horde, happily overturning the old order, but many are gradually realizing that the self-proclaimed “Mr. Tariff” is destroying their livelihood: making imports of raw materials more expensive and exports harder to sell because of reciprocal actions by other nations.  Health care costs are skyrocketing, especially for those on Medicaid, who are disproportionately… MAGAs.  Those tax cuts for billionaires are important, after all.

Napoleon… well, that’s pretty obvious.  The name suggests someone who wants to be emperor.  Think of someone remarkably porcine in appearance.  Someone who is the most piggish, in both senses of the term—greedy and vulgar—of any American politician Curmie can think of or even imagine.  And, of course, someone far more interested in consolidating power than in solving any problem, as demonstrated, hypothetically, of course, by scuttling a bi-partisan border bill for the sole purpose of not allowing the political opposition to get a victory: something to campaign on is deemed more important than making progress on an issue of concern.  Wonder who that could be…

There is one place where the analogy breaks down, of course.  Farmer Jones really was cruel and abusive.  The American political system and its leaders in early November of 2024 had plenty of faults, but the MAGA world wasn’t really oppressed; they just wanted to pretend they were.  They needed someone to blame for their problems, and their version of Napoleon supplied them with a list: Hispanics, Muslims, Queer folk, et al.  The great thing about the hate list is that it’s enormously flexible: any group (blacks, Asians, Jews, women…) that isn’t People Like Us can be construed as The Problem.

It’s 1984 that gets referenced more often of late, however, and for good reason.  Curmie lost track of how many of his FB friends recently posted one of the most famous lines from a book cluttered with memorable phrases: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”  We’ve certainly seen that scenario play out of late.  First (hardly really the first, but the first this week), there was (and still is, alas) the bizarre and utterly mendacious page on the official White House website blaming the Capitol Police, Nancy Pelosi (and Democrats in general), and Mike Pence for the debacle that was January 6, 2021.  (The New York Times analysis of this remarkable display of chutzpah is pretty good.)  It wasn’t outrageous enough, apparently, that the stack of pardons (almost certainly signed by autopen, by the way) wasn’t just for those who may indeed have been overcharged, but also for those who literally attacked law enforcement officers, injuring scores of them, some permanently. 

More importantly, we all saw and heard what happened.  Here’s the thing: if, Gentle Reader, you don’t think Trump’s speech that day rose to the level of incitement, Curmie will listen.  He’ll disagree, but he’ll listen.  At the very least, however, Trump could have done a lot to prevent things from getting out of hand and didn’t.  If you want to argue that the January 6 Committee was something of a partisan witch hunt and a waste of taxpayer money, Curmie will even agree.  But if you want to claim that the violence was initiated by the Capitol Police, he’ll call you a liar.  Why?  Because he refuses to reject the evidence of his own eyes and ears.

And that, of course, brings us to the events in Minneapolis, where an ICE goon killed Renee Nicole Good.  Curmie would say “murdered,” but of course just because that’s the accurate term doesn’t mean it can be used until and unless there’s an arrest, a trial, and a conviction.  Unfortunately, it’s pretty certain that will never happen.  The wagons have already been circled.  Minnesota police have been shut out of the investigation by Kash Patel’s incompetent and politically subservient FBI (murder is a state, not federal, crime, remember), potential evidence has been removed from Jonathan Ross’s house, and the three most incessant and unrepentant liars in the country—Trump, Vance, and Noem (yes, even worse than Hegseth)—have all declared Ms. Good a “domestic terrorist” or some variation on the theme.  Indeed, the most persuasive argument that Good was not, in fact, a violence-prone leftie insurgent is that that trio of sociopaths says she was.

Again, we’ve all seen the videos. 

Curmie, as you probably know, Gentle Reader, taught college-level theatre courses in six different decades, beginning in 1979.  For many years in Play Analysis class he used David Ball’s Backwards and Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays.  One term Ball uses is grimly ironic in the current circumstances: “trigger.”  What he means is that every action is a response to another specific, immediate, action.  Thus Hamlet, who surely knows of Claudius’s treachery and has just watched his mother die from poison, does not act attack Claudius until Laertes declares, “The King, the King’s to blame.”  That’s the “trigger” for what happens next.

We know that Good seemed perfectly pleasant in uttering what turned out to be her last words, “I’m not mad at you.” There would be no reason to expect even the potential for violence on either side.  But we also know that Ross then tried and failed to intimidate Good’s partner (wife?); she responded “You want to come at us?  I say, go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”   And then he walked around to the front of the car, handgun already in hand.  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that a hypersensitive and cowardly asshole like Ross wasn’t really fearing for his life at all; he just wanted to show them fillies who’s boss.  Hence, the ever-so-endearing “Fucking bitch” line with which Ross (or perhaps one of his fellow goons) responded to the shooting.

We also see that Good was trying to steer away from him, which means that he had stepped into her path.  We know that it’s a violation of protocol to do so, that it’s illegal to use deadly force against someone merely fleeing, and, significantly, that there was a review a little over a dozen years ago that found that Border Control agents near the US/Mexico border were intentionally stepping into the path of moving cars in order to justify the use of deadly force.  Two questions: 1). How sick is that?  2). Guess where Jonathan Ross was at the time?

We also know that Ross walked away from the incident apparently uninjured, certainly not “lucky to be alive” or any of that bullshit spewed by POTUS and his minions.  And that also means that he was already out of the path of the vehicle when the car lurched forward after Good was shot.  We know also, from a different video that a doctor sought to examine Good—to render assistance if that was still relevant, or to pronounce her dead at the scene.  He was stopped by a different ICE asshole who proclaimed that “we have our own medics.”  According to one report, those medics didn’t arrive for another 15 minutes.  It’s certainly possible that Good was already dead, but getting her assistance immediately—which, by the way, is required in any officer-involved shooting—might conceivably have made the difference between life and death.  To suggest that ICE is unconcerned with the lives of anyone but themselves, that they’ll cheerfully defame an innocent person if it gets one of theirs off the hook: this is to be too kind to them.

A few other points, and this is where, once again Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that he is not a lawyer, so if there’s someone out there who knows more about this stuff than he does, please comment.  No, Curmie is not a lawyer, but he’s read a lot of stuff from people who are (or at least purport to be).  According to several of those folks, ICE has jurisdiction over one thing and one thing only: people who are in the country illegally.  In other words, they had no authority to order Good out of her car (or to yell at her to move, which also happened).  One lawyer said that in matters involving traffic, they have less authority than a school crossing guard.  They have no right to detain anyone about whom they lack probable cause to believe is an illegal alien.  Yet they strut around like they don’t answer to any laws… unfortunately, they may be right about that.  And, of course, they’re real tough when they’re armed to the teeth and confronting an unarmed mom.  When they actually start going after the “worst of the worst,” give Curmie a call.

The good news here is that tens of millions of people saw those videos.  Irrespective of what anyone in the administration says, we know better.  They can cover up all they want at this point, but we all know what happened, and we’re not going to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.

But wait!  That’s not all!  Our lad George has been on this administration’s case for a long time.

The incursion into Venezuela prompted a Friend of Curmie to post, “I am deeply concerned that this action is going to draw resources away from our war in Eastasia.”  We have, after all, always been at war with Eastasia.

“War is Peace.  Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”  Well, we’ve got a POTUS who has ordered military strikes against three other nations and threatened at least three others, including a NATO ally… and thinks he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.  Curmie isn’t sure that anyone in the administration thinks freedom is slavery, but there are plenty that think (economic) slavery is freedom.  And ignorance is indeed the strength by which this regime maintains power.

“Big Brother is Watching You.”  Turning over private records of every American to the unvetted DOGE techbois wasn’t enough, apparently.  Now they’re breaking out the spyware to pry into the private conversations of people who… you know… attend the kind of protests protected by the 1st Amendment.

There’s more, but we’re approaching 2000 words, so it’s probably time to wrap this up.  We close with this, also from 1984: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

Be careful out there, Gentle Reader.

One More Reason Curmie Is Glad He's Retired: So He Doesn't Have to Deal with Crap Like This

Regular readers of this blog will know that Curmie is a retired professor who taught for two decades at a state university in Texas.  He taught theatre, mostly the “academic” stuff like theatre history and play analysis.  As mentioned in a previous post, he taught plays and essays by a wide range of authors: some concentrated on race, others on gender, others on sexual orientation.  He showed a video of the Noble Call of Irish drag queen Panti Bliss after a performance at the Abbey Theatre. 

Some authors were communists; others were monarchists.  Their religious beliefs were Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu or… you know, atheist.  Some wrote realism; others wrote anti-realism; others a hybrid.  Many wrote before the concept of “realism” existed except as mimesis, the “imitation of an action.”  Outside the classroom per se, Curmie directed at least three plays (As You Like It, The Breasts of Tiresias, and A Servant of Two Masters) which involved cross-dressing in one form or another, and at least three others in which a role written for a man was played by a woman.  Curmie’s job was to bring as much of the depth and breadth of theatre to his students as he could, to broaden their horizons, and ultimately to turn them loose on the world, whether they chose to pursue a career in theatre or not.

He was, and is, something of an intellectual snob: not in the sense that he believed himself to be the authority on all things theatrical, but in the confidence that he knew what material needed to be covered in a theatre history course or a topics course on Asian theatre or Non-Realism Between the Wars at least as well as, and probably better than, anyone up the food chain, certainly better than anyone more than one step up.  He was lucky enough to have deans and provosts who stayed out of his way, and department chairs who may have given the occasional piece of advice, but never commands.  And partisan political hacks would do well to steer clear.

Was Curmie further emboldened by being granted tenure and further still by reaching the point where he could retire as opposed to resign if things got too problematic?  Yeah, probably.  But he also remembers a moment in grad school when some idiot state legislator (there’s another kind?) demanded that the university submit a list of all the courses that contained any reference to homosexuality.  Curmie’s solution, articulated in a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper, was simple: send the asshole a copy of the course catalog.  You might be able to strike a math course here or there, but the chances that Pythagoras engaged in activity that would now be called homosexual conduct at some point in his life are actually pretty high.  Besides, the demand was for a list of those courses, not for only those courses, and it we wouldn’t want to inadvertently leave something out, now would we?

Anyway, yesterday was an interesting day in the world of 1st Amendment rights for university professors.  On the one hand, Darren Michael, the Austin Peay State University theatre prof who was fired for posting a link to an article about Charlie Kirk’s argument that the 2nd Amendment was worth preserving even at the cost of a few lives, settled his lawsuit with the university.  As Curmie predicted, he got his job back along with $500k and a couple other goodies.  (Curmie didn’t predict the amount, but he knew it would be substantial).  All told, it was a nice FAFO message for the Austin Peay administration.

On the other hand, we also learned of Martin Peterson, a Philosophy professor at Texas A&M being essentially told that he’d either have to stop teaching Plato in his Contemporary Moral Issues course or be re-assigned to a different course, one that meets at 8:00 a.m.  Well, that’s slightly over-stated.  He’d have to skip the parts of Plato that some idiot state legislator (or weenie dean, or whoever) believes are icky.  As usual, Gentle Reader, please excuse the redundancy of both “idiot state legislator” and “weenie dean.”

Two essential points here: First, Texas A&M is a state institution, which means that the 1st Amendment cannot be circumvented just because a university administration or state legislature wants to do so.  Second, this isn’t some grad student in charge of this course.  Dr. Peterson is not merely a Full Professor; he’s got an endowed chair.  His MA and PhD are from Swedish universities, and he taught both in Sweden and in the Netherlands before accepting his position at A&M.  Oh, and he was a Research Fellow for three years at some place called Cambridge University.  Curmie is pretty sure he’s heard of that one.  If this man says that a particular reading from Plato is essential to his course, Curmie is going to believe him.  Nor are we talking about some obscure writing of Plato’s: it’s the Symposium, which is hardly a minor work.  Of course, Peterson is also the Chair of the Academic Freedom Council at A&M, which makes him an especial target for the censorial asshat brigade.

Professor Peterson dutifully submitted his syllabus for what he called “mandatory censorship review.”  That probably didn’t win him any points with… well, with the censors, but his description is apt.  There is a new policy adopted by the Board of Regents, declaring that “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity.”  Peterson is politic enough not to mention that forbidding discussion of race or gender ideology is in fact a means of advocating a position on those issues: that the social conservatives’ dogma and suppression of other viewpoints should be unquestioned.  Curmie, you will have noticed, Gentle Reader, is not similarly politic.

What Dr. Peterson does argue is that his course “does not ‘advocate’ any ideology.”  Rather, he “teach[es] students how to structure and evaluate arguments commonly raised in discussion of contemporary moral issues.”  No reasonable interpretation of the word “advocate” would suggest that Peterson should be forced to alter his course in any way.  Of course, Professor Peterson also cites a litany of legal precedents in support of his contention that the system policy in question is unconstitutional.  Needless to say, he’s right about that, too, but it probably did him more (short term) harm than good to point out that the emperor was in a state of deshabillé.

Texas, of course, has a terrible record with respect to 1st Amendment guarantees, especially during the regime of Grand Censorial Poobah Governor Greg Abbott.  There was the illegal suppression of student protests at the University of Texas in the spring of 2024; Angelo State’s banning of discussion of discussions of transgender issues and the spread of that attempt at thought control throughout the Texas Tech system; West Texas A&M’s ban on drag shows (subsequently ruled unconstitutional); the ongoing investigations of anyone deemed insufficiently hagiographic in describing Charlie Kirk; the horrific SB37, which restricts curriculum and radically reduces the faculty’s input into decision-making; and SB2972, which is downright silly, and so on.  And on.  And on.

Texas A&M itself, of course, was the site of a major contretemps last fall.  Here’s Curmie’s description (it’s the first link in this essay): “a single narcissistic and reactionary student circulated a surreptitious video of challenging a professor for including a discussion of verboten (by Trump/Abbott) topics like gender identity and transgender people.  A grandstanding pol got involved, and soon the professor was fired, the dean and department chair demoted, and the president at the very least under fire.”  This is not what universities are supposed to do.

And now there are perhaps as many as 200 Spring ’26 courses at A&M that may be subject to censorship, lest the cherubim hear something that challenges their ignorance.  Dr. Peterson’s case is the tip of the iceberg. 

The good news is that every free speech and academic organization you can think of is all over this story.  Here’s FIRE: “The board didn’t just invite censorship, they unleashed it with immediate and predictable consequences. You don’t protect students by banning 2,400-year-old philosophy.”  And PEN America: “Censoring classical texts in service of political orthodoxy is antithetical to the goals of education. Universities exist to engage students in difficult inquiry and not to suppress ideas just because they make some uncomfortable.”  And the AAUP: “A research university that censors Plato abandons its obligation to truth, inquiry, and the public trust—and should not be regarded as a serious institution of higher learning.”  You get the idea, Gentle Reader.  Curmie, of course, is honored to join the chorus.

So, you may well ask, what is going to happen to Professor Peterson’s course?  Curmie was rather hoping that the good prof would sue the university, its president, its regents, Greg Abbott, and anyone else he could think of.  After consultations with his lawyer, however, Dr. Peterson has decided to revise his syllabus.  Instead of the readings from Plato, he’s going to substitute an article from the New York Times which deals more directly with contemporary moral issues.  Its title: “Texas A&M, Under New Curriculum Limits, Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato.”  

Well played, Professor.  Well played.

San Francisco's Bizarre Reparations Bill

Rare image of Daniel Lurie 
actually looking to the right.

Curmie can’t remember the exact circumstances, but a few years ago a friend presented him with a check for $100 million with the warning that “it might be difficult to cash.”  That moment was called to mind recently when Curmie read about San Francisco mayor Danie Lurie’s signing a bill to create a reparations fund for black residents.

The headline on the Financial Express article, in particular, caught Curmie’s attention. “Over 4600 Californians likely to get $5M reparations under new law.”  “Likely”?  Seriously?  The first sentence of the piece by Aditi (whoever or whatever that may be) tells a more accurate tale: “San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie has signed an ordinance creating a Reparations Fund that could one day offer up to $5 million to eligible Black residents, though no city money has been allocated yet.”  Seldom have more modifiers been crammed into a shorter space: “Could.”  “One day.”  “Up to.”  “Eligible.”  Not to mention that literally no money has actually been designated for the purpose. 

<Sigh.>

Let’s not completely leave aside the whole issue of whether reparations ought to exist at all, even in theory.  Curmie thinks not, but you’re free to disagree, Gentle Reader.  Certainly there has been historical prejudice against blacks, but the same could be said in varying degrees to people who are female, gay, or short, bald, or left-handed, for that matter.  There are about 11,000 people of Japanese descent living in San Francisco.  Some of them, no doubt, were interned during World War II for no crime other than where their ancestors were born.  A good many more are their direct descendants.  Yet there is no movement to offer reparations to those whose claims to have suffered directly are so readily, objectively, provable.  Go figure.

But even if you think reparations are appropriate, lump sum payments or $5 million seem a bit extreme.  And the logistics are daunting, to say the least.  Who is eligible?  How black is “black”?  Would bi-racial Barack Obama be eligible if he lived there?  Or does the fact that he doesn’t need the money disqualify him?  How long must a prospective recipient have lived in San Francisco to be eligible, or is the city going to pass out millions to every black person who moves into the city?  Are there any criteria other than race?  For example, must an applicant demonstrate specific harm?  And on and on…

Exactly where that 4600 recipients number noted in the headline above comes from is unclear, as it represents fewer than 10% of the black population of the city.  But even that number would mean a total outlay of $23 billion.  Expand that to the entire black population of the city and the cost balloons to about $275 billion, or the entire city budget for over 17 years.

There’s literally no way the San Francisco will ever come up with anything like the kind of money we’re talking about here, especially since the city is broke, running a $1,000,000,000 budget deficit.  So no money is being allocated for this agency.  That’s the good news.  Ah, but you see, that’s where the private donations come in.  Riiiiiight.  So we’re expecting billionaires (because that’s who it would take) to fund a program that helps only black people, and only those who live in San Francisco.  Curmie would suspect that anyone interested in the general cause of helping black people would rather donate to, say, the NAACP or the Thurgood Marshall College Fund.  Still, if people want to voluntarily fund this program, that is their prerogative.  Curmie thinks it’s silly, but so is buying a Trump Bible or investing your life savings in bitcoin.  Stupid is as stupid does. 

If the fund is going to rely on individual donations, as it must, then the logical solution is to turn the whole business over to a private foundation to administer.  That’s the real rub: by signing on to this idiotic bill, Lurie is indeed committing city funds to the program.  Merely establishing the agency means someone has to run it, even if there’s no money there to allocate.  And the logistics of trying to figure out the details would not only be time-consuming, but would almost certainly lead to litigation, costing the city even more money to support a program that is unwieldy, unethical, and legally problematic to say the least.  Curmie supposes that establishing the new agency is some form of perverse virtue signaling, but he confesses he doesn’t see the virtue involved.  When Curmie was a lad, San Francisco was pretty much synonymous with drug culture.  It would appear that the hallucinogens are still plentiful there.

We are left with two possibilities as to why Lurie signed this bill.  Perhaps he’s a brilliant strategist, willing to spend a tiny fraction of the city’s budget to get the proponents to shut up for a while.  Or stupidity and cowardice are in a death struggle to become his defining characteristic.  Curmie leans towards the latter explanation.

Perhaps the Stupidest F*cking Idea in the History of Stupid F*cking Ideas

Thirty-something years ago, Curmie gave a paper at a conference called The Core and the Canon: A National Debate, held at the University of North Texas.  (A revised version of that work was subsequently published in what amounted to a Proceedings volume.)  As a direct result of his participation in the conference, Curmie was invited to join the rather newly founded National Association of Scholars (NAS), only to receive a snotty and condescending rejection letter because at the time he didn’t have a PhD (he was chairing a department at an accredited college, but that was insufficient, apparently).  Today, membership is open to anyone whose credit card payment goes through.  Curmie, needless to say, is not a member.

The NAS webpage claims that the organization “upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.”  As Curmie is wont to say, “if you have to tell me, it ain’t so.”  The NAS is predictably right-wing, even de facto advocating signing on to that absurd Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education.  But if the Compact was a really bad idea, one of the NAS’s more recent forays into the world of educational policy is a classic of pseudo-intellectuality and downright daftness.  Indeed, this is a contender for the coveted title of Stupidest Fucking Idea in the History of Stupid Fucking Ideas.  The NAS was apparently primarily responsible for drafting this nonsense.

The proposal in question is something called the Faculty Merit Act.  It would require:

… all parts of a state university system to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position, of every applicant selected for a first interview, and every applicant selected for a final interview. The Act also requires the university to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department. It finally requires everyone in the hiring process, both applicant and administrators, to affirm under penalty of perjury that they have provided every standardized test score.

Predictably, the National Review proclaimed this “a very good idea.”  It is not.  It is not in the same universe as a good idea.

This inanity is based on a series of, shall we say, dubious speculations masquerading as facts: that universities “draft job advertisements with specializations that will ensure only radicals need apply,” that “few close observers believe that the average professor of ethnic studies is as acute as the average professor of physics,” and above all that a standardized test score, albeit that it “is only a rough proxy for academic merit,” nonetheless will “provide some measure of general intelligence.”  All of this suggests a quantification fetish, completely oblivious to the fact that such a measure is virtually meaningless… or, perhaps, not so much “oblivious” as “fully conscious of the fact but seeking to avoid admitting it.”

First off, even the NAS admits that “Some professors will have a greater ability to teach and do research than appears on a SAT score.”  Please substitute the words “virtually all” for “some” and add “or lesser” after “greater” in the previous sentence, Gentle Reader; then it will be accurate.  The idea that a 40-year-old PhD should be judged at all by how they did on a single day when they were 17 is beyond laughable.  Standardized test scores are determined by a lot of variables.  Native intelligence is one, but so are the quality of teachers a student has had up to that point, socio-economic status, whether the test-taker has taken this kind of exam before, whether they’re running a fever or just heard some bad news about a dear friend or family member… 

Curmie has written about his own experience with standardized tests several times.  He won’t link them all here; you can use the word search feature on the blog page as well as he can, Gentle Reader.  But it might be worth mentioning that Curmie did better on the GRE than on the SAT, and better on the SAT than on the PSAT.  Did he learn something between taking those exams?  Sure.  But so, presumably, did everyone else in his age group, and the competition was presumably getting tougher: in Curmie’s day, at least, everyone took the PSAT; you took the SAT if you were part of the smaller percentage of students intending to be college-bound, and the GRE only if you were looking at grad school.  Curmie did better because he’d learned how to take that kind of test, not because he’d grown appreciably in intellect.

More to the point, those scores tell us literally nothing about someone’s skillset, only about a very rough approximation of their aptitude.  (That’s the “A” in “SAT,” after all.).  Curmie actually got a perfect score on the GRE in math.  But he’s never been more qualified to teach a college-level math course (except perhaps what is euphemistically called “College Algebra”) than his colleague in the Math Department is to teach Theatre History or Acting.  Even at the most introductory collegiate level, specific disciplinary knowledge and teaching ability are both vastly more important than intelligence, even if those standardized tests really did measure the latter.

But then we get to what the NAS considers the principal benefit of their proposal: “Perhaps most importantly, this information will provide a mass of statistical information that can be used for lawsuits…. The Faculty Merit Act will provide a mass of information that can be used by plaintiffs against discriminatory colleges and universities” (emphasis added).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition, he might suggest that the NAS’s real goal is to dismantle public post-secondary education: add to the administrivia, costing a mountain of time and resources; limit applications because there will be a lot of prospective candidates who decide it’s none of anyone’s damned business how they did on a standardized test decades ago; and, above all, open the university up to frivolous lawsuits just because some rejected candidate who would put coffee to sleep got good board scores.  Curmie hasn’t received a single offer to teach math despite his GRE score; he’s a white male and therefore a victim of woke ideology, and dammit, he’s going to sue somebody.  😉

Curmie also notes that David Randall, the director of research at the NAS who seems to be running point for this operation, does indeed have a PhD and some scholarly publications.  What he doesn’t appear to have is any experience whatsoever as a university faculty member.  Imagine Curmie’s surprise.

This proposal is particularly diabolical because some of its foundation is indeed true: there have been plenty of DEI hires that didn’t exactly work out to the benefit of the university or its students.  Are job applicants individuals or representatives of a group?  The answer, of course, is “yes.”  To the extent that they’re the former as well as the latter, the impetus for this proposition is understandable.  That doesn’t make it anything other than moronic.

Curmie first learned of this proposed legislation from Peter Greene at Curmudgucation.  Unsurprisingly, we’re in agreement.  But you might want to check out his take, too.  Let’s give him the last word, shall we? “The Faculty Merit Act is just dumb. It's a dumb idea that wants to turn dumb policy into a dumb law and some National Review editor should feel dumb for giving it any space. If this dumb bill shows its face in your state, do be sure to call out its dumbness and note that whoever attached their name to it is just not a serious person.”