Things Currently P*ssing Curmie Off

Given the name of this blog, Gentle Reader, you might be justified in thinking the title of this entry would be a little redundant.  You might be right, but we’re going there, anyway.

Retirement Follies I.  Curmie is trying to negotiate the process moving into retirement, or at least enough of retirement that he’s no longer getting employer-paid insurance.  So now it’s time to figure out Medicare Part B.  I had a question… HR should be able to answer the question, but instead tells me to call Social Security.  Curmie does; is on hold for over an hour before giving up.  They’re not available for in-person (COVID is very, very, scary if you’re a US government employee, just not for the rest of us, who are pretty much required to return to something very much like “normal”).  Dear SSA: hire some more people.

Retirement Follies II: Curmie is now four phone calls into the process of actually extracting some of the funds from his retirement account.  Everyone at the financial services provider has been very pleasant, and they’ve all provided useful information… but it’s taken all four calls to find out that I can do most of this online; it’s just that the link is hidden well enough to be a secret passage in a mystery/adventure movie.  The process is not helped by the fact that two former employers (one of which I left over 20 years ago) still listed me as a current employee (and therefore ineligible to withdraw money) and another requires Beloved Spouse’s signature to allow me access to my own retirement funds.

In the World of COVID.  The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia’s Regents refuse to require masks on state university campuses, but do so in their own companies.  It’s even worse in Texas, where mask mandates are not merely not required but forbidden. 

Such is the inevitable result of having Regents or Trustees or Councilors or WhateverThey’reCalled be hypocritical political appointees, beholden to especially cretinous governors (Kemp, Abbott…)  BTW, don’t get Curmie started on Regents in general, given what has recently happened at Curmie’s university.  Only the time-honored dictum of “don’t shit where you eat” prevents a lengthy screed about their abrogation of responsibility.

More on Moron Government Agencies I: Curmie’s department has a long-standing exchange with a British conservatory.  We had two students scheduled to come last fall, but COVID intervened.  Then they were set for spring, but that got delayed, too.  So their arrival was pushed off again until this fall.  We worked out their class schedules in March, and they started the process of getting the appropriate visas in April.  We let them know when we wanted them to arrive.  Sometime in the middle of the summer, Curmie got an e-mail that there were delays getting a visa.  We finally heard from them: they couldn’t even get a visa appointment until the day after we needed them here; they finally arrived over two weeks into the semester.  These are student visas.  Curiously enough, academic calendars are a thing.  Dear State Department: do your damned job.

Moron Government Agencies II.  The students unsurprisingly looked for the best rate for their airfare; although there are direct flights, they found a better deal changing planes in Newark.  Then they got held up by the idiots of HSA (apologies for redundancy), without explanation… for just long enough to make them miss their connection.  Luckily, they were able to get a flight later that evening… to a different airport, a half-hour further away from here.  So instead of being able to move them into their apartment about 9:00 p.m., it was after 1:00 a.m.  Luckily, they’re quite lovely and patient people.

Unsurprisingly, Curmie had a flashback to another long night of waiting for HSA to take their thumb out of their ass.  You can read about that one here.

Obviously False Claims.  There’s a commercial that Curmie hears fairly often on the car radio.  It’s for an app called GetUpside.  It claims users can get “up to 25 cents off every gallon” of gas, and that you can “make up to $200-300 a month.”  How can they get away with this crap?  Let’s be conservative and say the user gets the full 25¢ a gallon and gets reimbursed “only” $200 a month.  So that’s 800 gallons of gas in a month.  At a conservative 20 mpg, that’s 16,000 miles in a month.  Let’s say someone can average an unlikely 65 mph.  That means driving over 246 hours in a month.  A full time job, Monday through Friday: a maximum of 184 hours in a month.  So… uh…

Just Stupid Ads.  There’s an ad for one of the ubiquitous foreign-language programs (Curmie can’t remember which one, having done everything possible to forget).  You know the kind, Gentle Reader.  This one talks about an upcoming vacation to Paris, so learning French becomes particularly attractive.  At the end, the “student” cheerfully proclaims that after a mere few weeks he can say “Je suis les États-Unis.” 

Everyone immediately rushes out to buy the product… except that what he says translates to “I am the United States.”  We’ve had a couple of Presidents who might think they follow in the footsteps of France’s Louis XIV, of “L’étât, c’est moi” (“The state is me”) fame.  Any democratically inclined American begs to differ.  Note: the lower-case “d” in “democratically” in the previous sentence is important.

Cable Companies.  No one has anything good to say about any of them.  Ours, Suddenlink, seems particularly inept.  Talking to anyone at the local office is reminiscent of a koi pond, as know-nothing minions exhibit the latest fashion in carp-like gawping.  But at least they’re pleasant, unlike literally anyone I’ve ever talked to in their (ahem) “customer service” department.  A more rude and condescending collection of self-important jackasses has seldom been assembled… and Curmie has seen political conventions.

The internet signal is shaky: rare is the day Curmie doesn’t get a pop-up on the laptop that internet has been “restored”; streaming from PBS, BritBox, Acorn, and Netflix generally involves at least a half dozen pauses while the system buffers, and we get to watch the swirly wheel. 

“It must be raining in Tyler” (an hour or so away, where Suddenlink’s local headquarters is) is code in my family for “the internet is out again.”  This happens maybe once a month.  We’re not talking here about actual severe weather—hurricanes or the nasty cold spell this February—but simply unexplained (and probably unexplainable) outages occurring with grim regularity.

Usually, we’re talking about an hour or so, but Chez Curmie was recently without cable, internet, or wifi for well over 24 hours for no discernible reason.  But you knew that, Gentle Reader.  It’s a cable company.

Apparently Suddenlink is trying to expand into the cell phone business.  Curmie has been less than thrilled with AT&T, but Suddenlink?  In the words of several of Beloved Spouse’s colleagues: Oh. Hell. No.

Final comment: don’t ask about the formatting of this post.  It's blogspot.com being blogspot.com.

High School Follies: First Round of the Season

Curmie needs to write faster, because even if we’re talking about just high schools, it’s hard to keep up.  Anyway, here we go.  Note: a couple of more egregious cases aren’t included here; they’ll be treated separately… soon, I hope.

Not All Stupid Dress Codes Are about Girls.

The hair that signals the end of civilization.

Curmie has railed against school dress codes for years.  Most of the time, the stupid rules are aimed at girls, lest they be (gasp!) distracting to boys.  So: no visible shoulders, cleavage (or even collarbones), thighs…   Sometimes there’s a more general stupidity: no hair dye, no pro sports paraphernalia, no untucked shirts, that sort of stuff.  But there’s another option.  Years ago, the son of one of Curmie’s colleagues wanted to wear an earring.  Of course, the local school district would not countenance such an outrage; the lad wasn’t a girl, after all.  There was a battle at the school board level, and Curmie is pleased to report that the good guys won this one.

Ah, but that was long ago, even if not far away.  About three and a half hours from Curmie, there’s a place called Sanger, whose educational establishment has adopted one of the more repressive dress and grooming codes Curmie has seen.  In addition to the usual sexist injunctions against cleavage, spaghetti straps, skirts (or even shorts) shorter than fingertip length, yoga pants without a long blouse over the top, etc., for girls, there’s also all manner of paranoia directed at boys who aren’t short-haired and clean-shaven.

Curmie is pretty sure the last time he would have met all of Sanger’s criteria was when he had to shave and get a haircut for an acting role… in 1975.  Of course, Curmie would be okay at Sanger High now, even though he has a goatee and his hair is several inches too long, because it’s only students who are expected to “project a positive image for the student, school, and District.”  Staff aren’t expected to comply, presumably because they have a choice whether to be at that particular school, and would offer a monodigital salute on their way out the door if expected to comply with the silliness of the regulations.

Anyway, there’s a Change.org petition started by the mother of a boy who just likes to wear his hair long… and by “long,” I mean shorter than Curmie’s has been in several years.  I suppose it’s good news in a perverse sort of way that it’s not just girls running afoul of the defenders of 1950s styles (although Sanger has a history of punishing them, too, as evidenced by this Change.org petition from two years ago).

Of course, it’s also more than a little ironic (or hypocritical) that one strongly suspects that a good many members of the Board of Education, especially if they’re Curmie’s age or thereabouts, wore things in their high school days that they’d condemn now, and they’d have us believe that they turned out all right.  On second thought, maybe the standards really are appropriate, because those BoE folks are a taco short of the #4 special.

You’re Pledging Allegiance to WHAT?

In California (that part almost goes without saying), a teacher named Kristin Pitzen had her students pledge allegiance to a Pride flag.  Well, sort of.

Kristin Pitzen

According to her own social media post, Pitzen took down the American flag in her classroom during COVID (as if we aren’t still “during COVID”) because “it made [her] uncomfortable,” packed it away and hasn’t found it yet.  (It’s unclear how hard she looked.)  She had already instituted a policy whereby students could stand or not, say the words to the pledge or not, etc.

But when one student in her 3^rd period English (or ESL?) class questioned how they could face a flag that wasn’t there, Pitzen giggled (or at least she does in the re-telling) and pointed to a Pride flag.  In a previous post, she had mockingly stated “I pledge allegiance to the queers.”

Okay.  Three stipulations up front.

• There is nothing wrong with celebrating Pride Month, or with efforts to symbolize inclusiveness of virtually any variety.
• 2.  It’s easy to lose things.  Curmie has lost two very important documents somewhere in his office in the last couple of weeks.  You know: I put them somewhere “safe.”
• 3.  The Pledge of Allegiance has always been problematic.  I don’t owe allegiance to a flag, which is at most a symbol.  I can muster respect.  Allegiance?  No.  “Under God” is a troublesome phrase for a secular country, especially if we’re expected to swear obeisance.  And, of course, reciting the pledge starts as an exercise in rote memorization: Curmie “knew” the pledge long before understanding what is meant by “allegiance,” “republic,” “for which it stands,” or “indivisible.”  

Few people think about the words they’re saying, because they’ve been trained not to.  And the idea of demanding such a declaration runs counter to all the best things about this country. 

All that said… What the Serious F*ck?  This isn’t cute or funny or whatever the hell Ms. Pitzen thinks it is.  It’s just… well, stupid.

They Played WHO???

This one starts weird and keeps getting weirder.  The last weekend in August, ESPN aired, on its main channel (!), a high school football game between IMG Academy and Bishop Sycamore. 

The score isn't the only ugly thing here.

Exactly how Bishop Sycamore, a school no one has heard of (and for good reason: see below) was deemed worthy of national coverage for a game against a sports powerhouse is unclear, although clearly officials at BS (appropriate initials) lied, and neither ESPN nor Paragon Marketing, which scheduled the event, could be bothered to do a little basic fact-checking.

Um… if there’s no school at the address listed and no curriculum listed on the website, that might be a clue.  Of course, that would take… hell… maybe 15 seconds to check.  We can’t expect people engaged in scheduling events on a major television network to do that kind of intensive research, now can we?

But the story is just getting started.  Bishop Sycamore had played another game two nights earlier, and a lot of its athletes play both offense and defense, creating a level of fatigue that was potentially dangerous, even if the two teams were otherwise evenly matched, which, of course, they weren’t.  And a number of them had apparently already suited up for junior college games.  And there is considerable debate as to whether Bishop Sycamore is actually a school at all.

And it gets weirder.  A former Assistant Director of Officiating and Sport Management at the Ohio High School Athletics Association went public with an accusation that the whole business was a “scam.”  Bishop Sycamore is not recognized by the Ohio Department of Education for the 2021-22 academic year, although they were last year as a “non-chartered, non-tax supported school.”  And the new football coach proclaimed that Bishop Sycamore is “not a school,” but rather a “post-grad football academy.”  Not a very good one, apparently.

The problem, you see, was “a mistake on paperwork.”  Catchy euphemism for shameless mendacity, don’t you think?  Oh, and they allegedly passed over $3500 in bad checks to the hotel where they stayed the weekend of the IMG game.  Indeed, there’s a laundry list of offenses linked to the former coach (the one who coached the IMG game), and a similar list of promises to prospective… erm… players which no one had either the ability or the intention to keep.  Rather, they preyed on mediocre recent grads who weren’t offered D-1 scholarships, probably for very good reason.

Of course, IMG is also pretty much a scam, too, but that’s a rant for another day.  And, of course, Paragon Marketing richly deserves to be out of business.  And ESPN owes literally every sports fan a profound apology.  (Well, they do for a lot of reasons, but this one has got to be at the top of the list.)

Sigh.

They cancelled WHAT?

This event never happened.

Students at Eastlake High School in Sammamish, WA, wanted to recognize the anniversary of 9/11 with a themed event with student attending the football game wearing red, white, and blue clothing.  Okay, maybe it’s a little on the faux Patriotic (capital letter fully intentional) side, coming as it does from students who weren’t even born at the time of the event being commemorated.  What it isn’t, is offensive.  Not in actuality, not in potentia.

But don’t tell that to the school’s administrators, or their “leadership teachers,” whatever the hell that term means. Actually, do tell them, because they’re individually and collectively too stupid to understand that.  What passes for a brain trust at Eastlake High decided, quoting both principal Chris Bede and assistant principal Darcie Breynaert (how convenient that they had, word for word, the same inane response to students’ and parents’ complaints), “I know tomorrow is 9/11 and understand the sacrifice and values our flag represents, but I think they just did not want to unintentionally cause offense to some who see it differently.”

Who, exactly, is likely to take offense at commemorating a significant event in recent American history?  What is even potentially offensive about wearing red, white, and blue?  Does the apparent reference to the football opponent being a majority-minority school have anything to do with the decision?  If so, are they presuming that black and Latinx students are too dim-witted to know that it’s the weekend of the 20^th anniversary of 9/11?  Are they saying that black and Latinx students aren’t really Americans?  Or how, exactly, does all this work?

The saga goes on and on, with EHS officials digging themselves into deeper holes with each announcement.  What isn’t clear is why the students didn’t simply, oh-so-coincidentally, wear whatever the hell they wanted to the game.  The only plausible explanation is that the decision to abandon the “themed” wearing of red, white, and blue was presented to the students, intentionally or otherwise, as a prohibition against sporting those colors at all, and the students, knowing what morons their administration are, might have feared punishment.

Curmie, ever the theatre historian, is reminded of the “Bottle Riot” in Dublin in 1822.  The details of the case would take too long to explain here, but the judge in resulting trial set the standards for well over another century of theatre disturbances: you can boo if you want to, and you can even go to the theatre with the express intention of booing, but if you gather your friends together with the intention of booing, that’s conspiracy.  I’d think the same concepts would be at play in terms of (gasp!) wearing patriotic colors.

Community College Administrators Behave Unethically and Irresponsibly. Water Remains Wet.

When Curmie first read about this story, he sent a quick e-mail off to Jack Marshall at Ethics Alarms, suspecting (correctly, as it happens) that Jack would be both interested and more likely than Curmie to get a post up first. 

Jack, being a lawyer, is able to take a different tack than Curmie, and introduce (or at the very least better articulate) legal arguments Curmie couldn’t.  Jack also suggests that I might see nuances he doesn’t.  I’m not so sure about that, but let me see what I can make of this.  I start by mentioning that Curmie learned about the case from a post by FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education), an organization that purports to be non-partisan and, at least to a very large extent, is, although it’s been branded right-wing by some on the left (just as the ACLU has been branded left-wing by some on the right).

Allow Curmie to repeat what he’s said not infrequently over the years: that although his own politics are probably to the left of 95% of the population, in the area of free speech he has more to fear from the remaining 5% than from the multitude to his right.  (You may check out a similar assertion from a decade ago here.)  I remember one incident from over 20 years ago, when I was called into the Dean’s office and reprimanded for something I’d said in class because it “made some students uncomfortable.”  Apparently, “good” was not the desired response to this admonition. 

Anyway, I described the passage I was referencing to the Dean and asked two questions: was my comment accurate, and was it relevant?  He agreed that the answer to both questions was “yes.”  I then asked if I had been accused of using inappropriate language (racial or sexist slurs, that sort of thing).  I had not.  I therefore told him the requested apology would not be forthcoming.  Occasionally making students uncomfortable, frankly, ought to be part of the job description.  (I didn’t articulate this last part.)

OK, enough of that; here’s the story: This February, Kaylyn Willis was enrolled as a nursing student at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.  She was taking a course called Chronic I, taught by Patrick Harris.  

Apparently one of the goals of the course was to get students to employ “critical imagining” to better understand the perspective of a patient suffering from a chronic disease or disorder.  A few weeks into the class, the assignment was “to reflect on the support systems of chronically ill individuals and how a person with a chronic illness might respond to the sudden and unexpected loss of a support system.”  (The quotation is from the FIRE story; it’s unclear whether this was the exact wording of the assignment.)

Ms. Willis submitted an imaginative story about an ALS sufferer who shoots and kills her husband, who was that support system.  It’s actually an intriguing take, looking at the possibility of self-inflicted damage caused as an indirect result of the affliction.  It’s inspired by a 2015 Wisconsin case in which a jury found an ALS victim not guilty of murdering his wife and sister-in-law because he suffered from a neurocognitive disorder.

Mr. Harris teaches nursing, not literature, and proceeds to prove it by, to use Jack Marshall’s phrase, “flip[ping] out.”  Without evidence, or any appearance of thought, he decided Ms. Willis’s post was a joke.  He gave it a zero.  He may be a good nursing teacher, but he is singularly unqualified in terms of both credentials and temperament to judge an assignment like this. 

He responded to an email from Willis with this: “Do you honestly think that your post on a nursing school assignment was appropriate?  Joking about killing your husband?  I’m really questioning your critical thinking if you think this was an appropriate discussion post.”  Actually: 1). Yes, it was appropriate, since it met all the criteria of the assignment.  2). It wasn’t a joke, as any sensitive reader would understand, or at the very least suspect.  3). I’m really questioning how anyone this oblivious could possibly presume to judge someone else’s “critical thinking.”

Here’s the thing.  A faculty member is ethically obligated to apply what amounts to an “innocent until proven guilty” approach to dealing with student motives.  You think a student plagiarized?  Without proof, it’s just another paper.  You think a student isn’t taking a project seriously?  What you think doesn’t matter.  What can you prove? 

Eliminate all other options before making a decision.  Sure, call that student in and ask some hard questions.  Curmie has done that dozens of times over his career, and he’s developed something of a reputation for catching and punishing cheaters.  But intent matters.  If a student didn’t know s/he was breaking the rules, it’s time for a teaching moment, but not (necessarily, at least) for penalties.  Curmie isn’t a mind-reader, and Harris is even less of one.

Harris did the exact opposite of the ethical response, scurrying off to punish Willis even further, and the student was promptly removed from the program (!).  Seriously? 

Completely apart from the 1^st Amendment issues described by FIRE and on Ethics Alarms, this is some really hasty and frankly sloppy decision-making.  And let’s be real: violations of a handbook prohibition against “[a]cts which are dishonest, disrespectful, or disruptive” could be absolutely freaking anything.  Forbid the “dishonest,” absolutely.  But (insert B-movie gangster voice here) Curmie’s got your “disrespectful” and “disruptive” right heah. 

This kind of language is more common in high schools, where principals want absolute control and school boards are stupid enough to give it to them.  But the hierarchy of community colleges tends to work the same way: they believe their handbook came down from the mountaintop, and that its authors elbowed Moses and his tablets out of the way to get to the publisher first.  In fact, their little rulebook is seldom more than a thinly veiled declaration of absolutely not-to-be-questioned administrative authority.

Unsurprisingly, Ms. Willis appealed the inane decision, but the case was turned over to an anonymous (!) “grievance panel” which, shall we say, was not comprised of the brightest lights in the marquee. 

The panel highlighted a sentence in Willis’s inherently fictional response to a writing prompt as if… well, damned if Curmie can figure that part out, but it was very, very, very bad, whatever it was.  Willis, you see, in her post, “did not establish a caring relationship or create a positive environment.”  1).  Bullshit.  2).  Any such requirement for a class assignment is intrinsically flawed, and an instructor who either willfully misinterprets a students intentions or is too dim-witted to ascertain them truly has created an unhealthy environment.

She also “failed to take into account the culture of UCC by being insensitive to the October 1, 2015 event.”  1). Not her job.  2). Recreating the specific circumstances of that “event” (a student shot and killed a faculty member and eight students before killing himself) would indeed have been insensitive.  This wasn’t… or else literally any reference to any shooting anywhere under any circumstances would send the entire administration and professoriate diving under their desks like a bad parody of “duck and cover” drills.

The panel also accuses Willis of “[choosing] the wrong communication modality and technology.”  Stripped of the jargon, this means that Willis is deemed unfit as a student because she posted online, when that is what the assignment required.  Seriously, how can these people feed themselves?

Oh, and Willis also “described unethical and immoral behavior.”  Are you fucking kidding me?  First off, “described” (!).  Not “participated in” or “advocated,” mind you… “described.”  Of course, the panel seems to regard what Willis did as “unethical and immoral,” and here they are, describing it.  (Switch to Geico gecko voice now) Oh dear, oh dear.

Curmie is going to skip the rest of that incompetently thought-out document, instead merely citing Jack Marshall’s simple and direct statement that “The student didn’t have to justify her story for it to be fully protected speech.”  (Note here the parallel to the case of track star Brianna McNeal, who was similarly under no obligation to provide a reason why she missed a drug test, and to that of Courtni Webb, the high school student threatened with expulsion for writing a poem which sought to understand the motives of Newtown shooter Adam Lanza).

And then, of course, FIRE got into the act, and the college’s lawyers responded, and FIRE replied with this: “Willis may be in trouble for her fiction, but it’s UCC that can’t accept reality…. UCC is pretending that Willis’ rights don’t exist.  FIRE knows better.  We won’t close this chapter until Willis is reinstated and allowed to complete her program.”  Yeah, what they said.

FIRE’s goal would be a step.  But a better outcome would be for Ms. Willis to transfer to an institution a little less recto-cranially inverted, one that has some basic respect for its students and/or the US Constitution (either one would have been sufficient in this case).  Perhaps Mr. Harris doesn’t deserve to be fired, but he should certainly be reprimanded and not allowed to teach this particular course again.  Ever.  The various administrative minions who carried out this little purge should be demoted or (ahem) encouraged to resign. 

One final thought: it is quite likely that Ms. Willis is “that student,” the one who doesn’t really fit but does just enough good things and just few enough bad things to remain in the program.  Curmie has seen dozens of them over the years, and the urge to find something, anything, to legitimize a removal from the program is powerful.  But that’s not how it works, and behaving unprofessionally to enforce silly and misapplied standards of pseudo-professionalism would seem to be especially contra-indicated. 

One More Thing about the Texas Abortion Bill

One-Star Reviews?

Curmie has been putting off writing about one of the most contentious issues of late, especially to those of us currently inhabiting the 1-star state (kudos to whoever first described the “Lone Star” as representing our Yelp rating), namely the new abortion law.  

What Curmie doesn’t want to talk about is whether abortion should or shouldn’t be legal or under what circumstances it should or shouldn’t be.  There are good, intelligent, and moral people at virtually every spot on the spectrum.  Maybe the absolute extremes in either direction are untenable, but Curmie knows of few zealots who would insist that a fetus should be prioritized over the life of the mother and literally no one who thinks that a late term pregnancy should be aborted simply as a means of birth control.

Determining the beginning of human life, after all, is a matter of philosophy more than biology.  At first breath, as even evangelical churches were proclaiming into Curmie’s teens?  At conception?  At viability?  There are reasonable arguments for any of these positions.  And must these positions be regarded as absolutist?  Might it be reasonable to argue that abortion ought to be illegal as a form of birth control but not for victims of rape or incest?  When two ethical positions collide, a compromise solution may be the best available option.  Or perhaps not.

So whereas Curmie is firmly in the pro-choice camp, and would be particularly insistent regarding rape or incest victims, he holds no animosity for those who have an honest disagreement with his position.  This geniality does not extend, however, to the authors of the Texas bill, those who voted or it, or (especially) the state’s mendacious and misogynistic governor, Greg Abbott.

The bill, of course, is blatantly and no doubt intentionally unconstitutional.  Curmie can’t believe that even Abbott and his cronies are stupid enough to think this monstrosity would actually pass muster in the courts, even the politicized remnant of a once ethical deliberative body that is now SCOTUS.  But that’s the point: winning isn’t the goal.  Playing to the base and having ongoing battles to fight are what bring in the campaign contributions.

But this essay is not about a provision by which those who act on the basis of a lower-court ruling declaring this law unconstitutional can still be charged if that decision is subsequently overturned.  (Curmie is no lawyer, but he does know ex post facto when he sees it.)  Nor is this about a law so sloppily written that it’s not clear if the Uber driver who takes a woman to Planned Parenthood could be charged even if said driver had no knowledge of the woman’s intentions (news flash: PP offers countless services that have nothing to do with abortion).  

It’s not about the bullshit “fetal heartbeat” language when the cut-off date happens long before there’s anything in an embryo that even resembles the specialization of heart muscles.  It’s not even about Abbott’s disingenuous argument that a woman would still have six weeks to decide to get an abortion (it’s maybe as much as a fortnight).

No, this essay is about something that has been little discussed elsewhere, a tactic that would make the KGB blush.  Apart from the constitutional issues involved, there is the apparent desire to turn every Texan (and even non-Texans!) into a nark.  This legislation incentivizes, to the tune of $10,000 a pop, neighbor turning against neighbor, inevitably sowing distrust and even paranoia.  Curmie, being a theatre geek, thinks of Bertolt Brecht’s one-act, The Informer, in which the mother and father of a young boy in the Hitler Youth fret at his absence.  Has he been telling the authorities of his parents’ criticism of the Nazi regime?  He returns home, having apparently only stopped to buy some chocolate… or did he?

Gentle Reader, you are free to blame whichever political party you don’t belong to for the widening schism in American politics: it’s Barack Obama’s fault or Mitch McConnell’s fault, Donald Trump’s fault or Nancy Pelosi’s fault.  (Hint: all of the above.)  But surely you must agree that this new tactic, if ever truly employed, would not only destroy the possibility of civil political discourse, but would bring the entire society to its knees.

Of course, stupid and unethical behavior begets stupid and unethical behavior.  Curmie’s Facebook page has been littered with more than a few memes and political screeds encouraging attempts to crash the system by overloading it with junk: everything from fake names and addresses to Shrek porn.  This isn’t the answer, and “they did it first” smacks too much of a standoff between primary school siblings.

Curmie is certain the pseudo-Christian hacks that comprise the Texas GOP are pretty proud of themselves for their attempted end run around not merely good sense, ethical behavior, a concern for the viability of the state’s government, and… oh yeah… the Constitution.  But as any football fan knows, a good free safety will make any offense attempting an end run wish they hadn’t.  “Free safety”… has a nice ring to it.

The Socialist Who Wasn’t

This was originally intended as part of the collection of short discussions, but pulling them all together took longer than expected, and the other stories fit together under a general heading, so this will be a briefer-than-usual post.

Nathan J. Robinson
A Socialist when It’s Convenient for Him

One of the more intriguing headlines of the last couple of weeks was this one from vice.com: “Socialist Publication Current Affairs Fires Staff for Doing Socialism.” Nathan J. Robinson, the author of Why You Should Be a Socialist and editor-in-chief of the journal Current Affairs, which is described on its webpage as “Socialism with Cajun Characteristics,” essentially fired virtually the entire staff when they advocated for a workers co-op.  Apparently all this talk of actually doing socialism instead of talking about it made Robinson, who plays Napoleon the pig in this community theatre production of Animal Farm, nervous about losing the absolute control to which he believed himself entitled. 

He referenced “his vision for the Current Affairs as published in the first issue.”  That statement of purpose seems intended more to entertain than to illuminate.  Indeed, it’s difficult to find anything there to support Robinson’s current position.  A cardinal principle that the magazine is “firmly against the hurting of other human beings” certainly doesn’t jibe terribly well with his recent actions.  Indeed, that opening salvo expresses particular disdain for “the libertarians, who despise every tyrannical act unless it happens to be done by the boss.”  Um…

You can read statements from two staffers who were… ahem… asked to resign here and here.  It certainly looks like a mess.  But Curmie is less interested in Robinson’s outrageous antics per se and more in a brief exchange over on EthicsAlarms (you’ll have to scroll down pretty far).  I’m particularly fond of the comment by Glenn Logan: “Socialism is one of those things that looks good on paper, but when you experience it, you convert to capitalism mighty fast…”  

What he’s really saying, of course, is that if you’re an insecure, hypocritical, asshole willing to betray the trust of your friends for a little more perceived power, capitalism is the most proven means of accomplishing your goals.  Well, that assertion is difficult to dispute.

Biden Is Feeling the Heat over Afghanistan. And He Should Be.

Not the photo any of us wanted to see.
But it was pretty predictable.

First off, the situation in Afghanistan is a debacle of enormous magnitude.  Those who would excuse the incompetence of the decision-makers by saying that the withdrawal was overdue are simultaneously correct and disingenuous.  The US’s presence in Afghanistan had been a money pit for decades, and the twin evils of mission creep and presumed allies who were the perfect combination of fecklessness and corruption long since ensured that there would be no “successful” outcome to the mission. 

But it wasn’t the fact of the retreat or even its timing that’s at issue: it’s the utter lack of planning, the carelessness with respect to the lives of non-military personnel (both American and Afghani), and the stench of mendacity emanating from every official source from the President on down that makes the right wing outraged.  Many critics, of course, blather about how stupid we all were to elect Joe Biden.  Curmie would agree, except for one thing: the alternative was Donald Trump.

Curmie has noted earlier that “Joe Biden won the election not by being a strong leader, an intellectual, or even a fundamentally honest candidate: he’s none of those things. His entire candidacy was based on a single issue: he was Not Trump.”  Curmie voted for him on that basis, and would do so again, given the only other plausible choice.  Curmie has voted against Trump twice, both times “for” a candidate he despised a little less than he did the venal buffoon whose disastrous presidency we recently endured.  (Side note: Curmie would have supported the 1988 version of Joe Biden, just as he might well have supported the 2000 version of John McCain.  But timing matters.)

Did Curmie suspect that Biden would show less managerial acumen than the average freshman who’s assistant stage managed a production Curmie directed?  Let’s just say it wasn’t a surprise.  Right wing talking heads now bluster about how we should have known that Biden would sell out our allies and compromise American assets (both personnel and equipment), allowing them to fall into the hands of unfriendlies if not outright enemies.  These people casually forget, of course, that Biden’s predecessor had already done precisely the same thing with respect to Syria and the Kurds.

So we’re left with a choice between someone who might do something colossally stupid in central or western Asia and someone who had already done so.  To be fair, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was handled with even less finesse than the departure from Syria.  On the other hand, there’s a case to be made that the betrayal of allies was even worse in ethical terms in the latter case.  In both instances, the defense of the action was that the action had to be taken because continued presence could not be justified. In both cases, this argument was demonstrably true… and demonstrably insufficient.

The one difference other than minor matters of scale between the two withdrawals is in the response from politicians.  Even leading Republicans criticized Trump’s maneuvers, but Democrats are trying to see if obfuscatory rhetoric will work to protect Biden from the opprobrium he deserves.

Or does he?  Please note, in advance, that this argument applies equally well to Trump in 2019 and Biden in 2021.  Yes, we all know about “the buck stops here” and similar political adages, whether or not they were in fact applied by their presumed adherents.  But the fact is that the details of these operations weren’t, directly at least, under the auspices of the Commander-in-Chief.  

Curmie freely admits that he doesn’t know much about how these things work, but it’s unlikely that Biden (or Trump) micromanaged the withdrawals.  It’s difficult to believe that the President (either one) was much concerned with whether X came before or after Y.  Those guys just said, “We want out by such-and-such a date.  Make it happen.”  It’s the military who seems to have fucked things up royally in both cases.  All the Presidents did was try to take a little heat off the generals.  Whereas this might seem out of character, especially for Trump, it’s pretty much what happened.

It doesn’t help that no American President for the last 40 years has had a clue what to do with Afghanistan, a virtually medieval nation with literally nothing to offer except the real estate standby of location, location, location.  A pretty good case could be made that every President in that period has changed course and has managed only to bungle things worse than his predecessor. 

So whereas Biden may really be guilty only of inheriting an insoluble situation and trusting in a military establishment that let him (and all of us) down, the fact that he’s getting hammered for it is perfectly reasonable.  In the world of politics, the person in power gets the credit if things go right and the blame if things go wrong, end of story.  And that leaves President Biden in a big hole and all he knows to do is keep digging.  

The Nirvana Baby Still Chases the Dollar

Is it just Curmie, or does it seem to you, Gentle Reader, that there’s some kind of rule that to truly reach the heights of rock and roll immortality, you’ve got to release at least one controversial album cover? 

There was The Who’s “Who’s Next,” featuring an image which seemed to suggest the band-mates had just urinated against a concrete piling.  The Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” showed a crotch shot of a man in tight jeans, complete with a little bulge suggesting an erection and, in the initial release, a working zipper that revealed underwear-like fabric underneath.  Supergroup Blind Faith stayed together for only a single eponymous album, which features a topless pubescent girl on the cover.  

Led Zeppelin’s cover art for “Houses of the Holy” shows naked children climbing a hillside of basalt rocks.  (A post about Facebook’s censorship of this image a couple of years ago—a decision they quickly reversed after public uproar—came around on my feed just last week.)  Even the good-guy Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today” shows the Fab Four posing with slabs of meat and broken doll parts (not to mention the photo of fully nude John and Yoko on the cover of their “Two Virgins.”)

The album cover in question.

Nirvana wasn’t yet at the summit when they released “Nevermind” in 1991.  (Curmie may not include them in the pantheon now, but that’s only because he never really got into the grunge sound.)  The record is significant in numerous ways.  It was their first with drummer Dave Grohl, subsequently the driving force of the Foo Fighters.  It featured at least two songs, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Lithium,” which are legitimately regarded as classics (whether or not an individual listener likes them).  And there was that album cover.

After attempts to find a photo that was neither too graphic nor subject to a steep royalty the producers didn’t want to pay, the band hired a photographer and sent him out to local swimming pools.  The photographer had a friend whom he knew had a baby boy. According to the boy’s father, “[He] calls us up and was like, ‘Hey Rick, wanna make 200 bucks and throw your kid in the drink?’  I was like, 'What’s up?' And he’s like, ‘Well, I’m shooting kids all this week, why don’t you meet me at the Rose Bowl, throw your kid in the drink?’”

And so was born the now famous shot of Spencer Elden, then aged four months, in the water.  Elden is naked, and his penis is visible.  Add a little computer magic, and the shot now shows the baby apparently swimming after a dollar bill with a fishhook attached; fishing line leads out of frame to the top of the picture.  The symbolism isn’t hard to comprehend.

Elden has become a minor celebrity in the ensuing 30 years.  He reportedly has “Nevermind” tattooed on his chest, has developed a cottage industry signing copies of the record, and has posed for underwater photos on several anniversaries of the album’s release.  All involved swim trunks, although he told the New York Post that he wanted to do the 25^th anniversary shot naked.

A few examples of how assiduously
Mr. Elden has avoided the horrors of
his infancy.

Needless to say, Elden has been an active participant in this process.  Ah, but now, at age 30, he’s suing the band members and anyone else he can think of for “extreme and permanent emotional distress with physical manifestations,” plus loss of education, wages, and “enjoyment of life.” He claims his parents never signed a release for the photo, and accuses virtually anyone he could think of—the band, the producers, the record company, and everyone who ever bought a copy of the record—of dealing in child pornography. 

OK, I made up that last part.  But let’s look at those arguments point by point.

“Extreme and permanent emotional distress.”  This is the guy who pronounced his notoriety as “kinda cool,” and who would be unknown if he hadn’t decided to publicize his own identity as the “Nirvana baby.”

“Physical manifestations.”  Name them.  Next.

“Loss of education.”  He is now a student at the Art Center School of Design in Pasadena; it’s unclear whether he is a grad student or an undergrad.  What is clear is that just tuition (not counting incidentals like food and lodging) there is at least $47,000 a year for undergrads, and more for grad students.  Somehow, the loss of education argument seems a little strained.

Wages:  How does that work?  Is he truly arguing that someone wouldn’t hire him because of something that occurred when he was four months old?  He’s worth a half a million dollars, by the way.  Curmie has a fair number of 30-year-old former students, college grads (and good ones) who would be willing to undergo such financial suffering.

“Enjoyment of life.”  Apparently exploiting one’s own purely accidental celebrity status just isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

Parents never signed release: assuming this to be true, then the time to deal with this was 30 years ago, and the people to do it were his parents.  But to imagine that a professional photographer and an established record label wouldn’t have the necessary paperwork in hand before proceeding with the cover design rather strains credulity.

Child pornography.  Two responses. 

Response #1: Bullshit.  Shyster lawyer Maggie Mabie, Elden’s mouthpiece, argues that “The focal point of the image is the minor’s genitalia.”  This statement can have two equally possible explanations: 1). Mabie is lying.  2).  She’s really, really creepy.  Curmie must have seen that image a dozen times before even noticing the boy’s penis.  The focal point, of course, is what appears to be the stretch towards the dollar bill.  As even a relatively dim bulb like Chris Cuomo points out,

I don’t ever remember anybody ever writing or anything being out there in society about this image as a sexualized or pornographic image.  I always thought that it was a suggestion of how right out of the womb, people are just grabbing for money and doing anything they can. I thought it was more about capitalism than it was sexuality.

That, Chris, is because the image is not sexualized, and only an attention-seeking jerk or his utterly irresponsible lawyer could see it otherwise.

Response #2: if this is true now, it was true 30 years ago.  Why the wait?  Could it be that the average music consumer today wasn’t even born when Kurt Cobain died, and that the demand for Nirvana memorabilia has dwindled accordingly?  Could it be that this is one last desperate effort to exploit a situation Elden did not create?

Many Curmiphiles will know that Curmie often seeks a parallel between life and art.  This time it’s Betsuyaku Minori’s The Elephant that provides the latter.  The central character in that is a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing.  He survives by posing shirtless, showing off his keloid scars and allowing himself to be photographed—for a price—by and with tourists.  But the scars fade over time, and even when covered in baby oil they don’t shine the way they used to.  So it would appear to be with 30-year-old baby pictures, even famous ones.

Finally, there’s Elden’s other lawyer, James Marsh, who opines that anyone who thinks he’s an unethical hack who demeans the experiences of people who really did experience some form of abuse is indulging in “idol worship when it comes to famous people, bands and places.”  Marsh is almost as disingenuous as Mabie, and even more pompous.  It would be a stretch to say that Curmie has any particular positive feelings towards the defendants in the case.  He couldn’t care less if they’re famous, and recognizes that to most of them $150,000 borders on pocket change.  But he also knows a money-grabbing hypocrite when he sees one.  Elden is a jerk.  His lawyers are worse.

None of this changes the ethical quagmire that surrounds the use of the picture to begin with.  It, and at least the Led Zeppelin and Blind Faith examples noted above, are problematic, not because they are necessarily sexualized (although you could make a pretty good case in regards to the latter), but because those photos are now eternal, and the subject of them was in no position to give consent.  If you want to argue the laws ought to be configured differently to better protect minors from exploitation (in whatever form), Curmie’s ready to at least listen.  

But to bring a lawsuit that most experts agree has little if any chance of success, some 30 years after the fact… yeah, when you describe yourself as “being a total little bitch about this,” Curmie can’t help but agree.  And Ms. Mabie and Mr. Marsh are walking lawyer jokes.

When "Not Guilty" Shows the Defendant is REALLY Guilty

Curmie is way behind on writing. Let’s start his return with a story that received far too little attention when it broke a couple of weeks ago. The NCAA announced a slap on the wrist penalty for Baylor University’s athletics programs after a years-long investigation into allegations that “Baylor shielded football student-athletes from the school’s disciplinary processes and did not report allegations of misconduct by football student-athletes” over a period of several years in the early 2010s. 

Despite finding the university’s “failings” to be “egregious,” the NCAA handed down a series of rather mild sanctions, the most serious of which is four years of probation.  (Let’s face it: a $5000 fine isn’t going to make a very big dent in Baylor's annual budget of about $800 million.)

How we ought to react to this announcement depends very much on where we focus our attention. The NCAA has long been a contender for the world’s most corrupt and incompetent sports organization, vying with the IOC and FIFA for that dubious distinction. (The International Handball Federation may have achieved a fair amount of well-deserved derision for their monumentally sexist insistence that female competitors wear bikini bottoms instead of shorts, but really, who cares about beach handball, which is virtually unknown in the US and isn’t even an Olympic sport?) 

So for the NCAA, with a reputation for over-reaching to dizzying degrees, to admit that they can’t punish Baylor without being able to point to a specific NCAA rule the university broke is something of a breakthrough. True, it took them years to come to this decision, but… baby steps… baby steps. Still, the rationale behind the decision is more than a little chilling. Here’s the key section of the report:

The panel found that those instances of non-reporting did not constitute impermissible benefits to football student-athletes because of a campus-wide culture of nonreporting. That culture was driven by the school’s broader failure to prioritize Title IX implementation, creating an environment in which faculty and staff did not know and/or understand their obligations to report allegations of sexual or interpersonal violence. Because the culture of non-reporting was not limited to cases involving student-athletes, the panel could not find that these instances resulted in impermissible benefits. (emphasis added)

In other words, the university escapes significant penalties for failing to report incidents of sexual violence by football players because they also couldn’t be bothered to report similar cases in which the perpetrators were non-athletes. 

To be sure, there are those who would disagree with the assessment that football players weren’t treated differently than other students would have been. A lawsuit alleged that no fewer than 52 rapes were committed over a six-year period by Baylor football players. That’s a lot. It doesn’t mean they all happened, of course, but it's a pretty damning statistic.  Another suit filed by a former volleyball player who claims to have been drugged and gang-raped by football players alleges that the Baylor program was such that “football players became increasingly emboldened, knowing that they could break the law, code of conduct, and general standards of human decency with no repercussions.” That comment, too, seems to me to be pretty specifically about football players.  (That suit, in case you were wondering, Gentle Reader, was settled out of court with no details released; the unidentified young woman transferred to another school.)  

In this case, by the way, the police, who ought to be the ones investigating the allegations, weren’t even notified. It is reasonable to argue universities ought not to be involved in investigating and reporting serious crimes at all, but Title IX demands that they do so, and the law is the law. But because the university argues it violated federal law on a consistent, across-the-board basis, they cannot be punished by the NCAA for violating the statute as respects felonious jocks, who according to this logic received no special treatment. 

This means, of course, that Baylor will be able to receive millions of dollars in television rights, post-season payouts for bowl games, etc., because they were even worse than previously imagined, creating a truly horrific culture in which not just pampered athletes but the entire student population is insulated against the repercussions of their actions. 

Art Briles: $15 million buyout 
for being an unethical ass

Curmie sees little evidence of contrition on the part of the university. True, they got rid of football coach Art Briles (they also paid him over $15 million as severance, hardly an agreement designed to teach him lesson in ethics!), athletic director Ian McCaw, and university president Ken Starr (yes, that Ken Starr). There were many pious proclamations, stopping just short of clichés about a new sheriff in town. And a couple (but far from even most) of the culprits were indeed brought to trial and convicted. But it’s difficult to believe that more than the names have changed; the culture simply ran (and runs) too deep. 

Baylor was found not guilty of the most serious offenses. They should be far more ashamed of the strategy employed to get that result than of any guilty verdict.  Should be...