The inmates are running the asylum at UCLA. If you express an honest thought or doubt, the DEI police will come after you. Doesn’t sound much like inclusion to me.

The whole DEI thing has become a cult using HR as the thought police, and employment/advancement as the weapon. Diversity? Great, we’re all for it so long as your thoughts and speech agree with ours. Sign right here. Equity? Well, equal opportunity wasn’t enough, so now we need equal outcomes. My community college failing sister-in-law deserves the same compensation as that privileged boomer Nobel Prize winner. Equity, right? And inclusion? Dude, we’d love for you to join our cult. Just keep your mouth shut, tow the party line and we won’t have to hurt that nice little career you have. Capishe?

Yeah, I know, I sound like the old get-off-my-lawn guy. But a set of principles alleging to promote inclusiveness, then used as a weapon against any dissenters, rubs me the wrong way. Fucking hypocrites.

And yes, this kind of wrongheadedness exists across the whole political spectrum. In a mirror image action, here’s a bunch of knuckle draggers who will be happy to be your neighbor, but only if you join their little flag fetish cult. I’ve been known to fly the American flag on holidays, but these guys…a whole different level of virtue signalling. And weaponized behavior rules.

I guess I woke up a little cranky this morning. It happens.

And oh yeah, it’s the 4th of July. If you want to know what that really means, go read some Heather Cox Richardson. Not just her Independence Day post, but everything she’s written lately. That lady should be named our US National Historian.

I can’t stop watching and listening to this video of Tame Impala replaying his/their inaugural recording Innersystems, ten years later at an Australian beach house. The first track especially, It’s Not Meant to Be. That repetitive 30-second guitar riff just burns into my brain. I can hear it all day. I know Tame Impala isn’t everyone’s cuppa tea, but damn, it sure is mine. My favorite music these days:

• Tame Impala
• Khraungbin
• Billie Eilish
• Jackson Browne (still and always)
• David Gilmour
• Rush (in small doses, almost exclusively concert videos)
• Diana Krall

With the extra time I have on my hands these days, I’m listening a bit more than usual. Good for the soul.

Another 24 hours, another turn of the wheel. Another three IV sessions, another day spent lazing around (at least that part isn’t tough). Just under two weeks left of imposed discipline.

So there’s time for opinions on the SCOTUS school loan case. In this case SCOTUS ruled that the Biden administration did not have the authority to grant forgiveness to student loan borrowers, leaving Biden scrambling for another lever to provide relief to a constituency he made a campaign promise to. Here are my thoughts on this.

• I should start out by saying that these loans are a legal contract and the borrowers should hold up their end. That’s the simple answer, and that should be the end of the story, but nope.
• The student loan program is tragically flawed; always has been. The government outsourced the loans to predatory lenders, making any delay in paying them back very, very punitive. The loans are the only debt I know of that are exceptions to bankruptcy law. The interest and penalties charged are usurious. It’s common for a $50K loan to become a $75K debt after years of simply paying the monthly fee. You can’t dig your way out of that hole without a very big shovel (cash).
• How many of us are really equipped to make a good, informed decision at age 18, 19, or 20? A decision that will affect them for years, maybe decades. Young people often only see the upside – wow, I get to go to college! They make bad decisions.
• Having said that, I can detect no sense of responsibility on the parts of borrowers/protesters. They have a big financial problem and they want someone else to fix it – at least that’s what comes across in news stories. They’re playing the victim card, which reduces my sympathy quite a bit.
• The millions (?) of young people who have now paid off their loans, including my daughter, will feel cheated if another large group of borrowers has the debt erased. That feeling would be justified, and I see no easy way out of that dilemma.
• I think Biden was handed a political win by SCOTUS. Now the loan forgiveness is out of his hands, and the youngsters wanting relief know who to blame.

So lots of conflicting thoughts on this, but I think there *are* better actions available. The government could tell borrowers that they will in fact forgive all or part of a loan if the borrower would agree to put their education to use in an area where they are most needed. Poor communities, rural communities, minority communities – anywhere the population is underserved by teachers, doctors, dentists, etc. Or serve in a military branch. That could be a win-win. Serve a year of your life in an area needing your expertise, get 20-25% of your debt erased.

Did SCOTUS get it right? Maybe. Their job is not to come up with a better, perhaps creative outcome. That’s Congress’ job. And every story that end with “…that’s Congress’ job” has the same result. No action. Congress is too busy fighting stupid culture wars to actually do anything to help the people they “represent”. Useless fuckers.

Well, everyone else in the world has weighed in on this shit, so I may as well. On the current flurry of SCOTUS decisions.

First, the CO website designer versus a gay couple. This one is bad – it opens the door wide for many types of discrimination AND it is based on a lie. SCOTUS ruled that yes, a service provider could indeed refuse to provide an advertised service because they didn’t like the resulting message. From NPR:

In a major decision affecting LGBTQ rights, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday carved out a significant exception to public accommodations laws–laws that in most states bar discrimination based on sexual orientation. 

By a 6-to-3 vote, the court sided with Lorie Smith, a Colorado web designer who is opposed to same sex marriage. She challenged the state’s public accommodations law, claiming that by requiring her to serve everyone equally, the state was unconstitutionally enlisting her in creating a message she opposes.

Said like that, it doesn’t sound…terrible. But there are a few things wrong here:

• Turns out the plaintiff isn’t a web designer, at least currently and for quite some time.
• Turns out the defendent isn’t gay, didn’t make the service request and has no idea what the plaintiff is talking about.

So SCOTUS wrote a major decision, sure to be used to increase the wedge of discrimination in commerce, based on a scam. Who the fuck does the due diligence for the court? Deputy Barney Fyfe?

I predict that this decision will be used by the oh-so-judgemental Xtain right to justify all kinds of discrimination. “Sorry, we can’t serve you because we disagree with the message that will send to other customers.” Hmmm, that sounds a lot like southern restaurants in the 1940s.

The hell of it is, I get it, as a business owner I do not want to participate in sending a message that I fundamentally disagree with. For example, if I own a T-shirt shop, I’m going to turn down an order for 1000 “Trump2024” shirts. That’s my right, and my decision to turn down the job isn’t based on the buyer’s race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or gender (the Protected Classes). So it’s legal and not discriminatory.

And that’s where it gets complicated. Only a gay person/couple would request the website message cited in the case, so is the refusal to serve really based on the message or the sexual orientation of the buyer? Those two things are intertwined. And if it’s the latter (it is, IMHO), then Pandora’s box just opened for court-approved gay segregation. SCOTUS fucked up here, both in the basic due diligence of the case’s facts and in opening the door to all kinds of new “I don’t like that person because reasons” discrimination.

Next up, let’s consider the Affirmative Action case, in which SCOTUS ruled against two universities using race as a factor in college admissions.

I may have to recuse myself because I’ve been affected by Affirmative Action my entire working life, some 45 years. I remember in my first job, when we learned about AA hiring guidelines, thinking, “Huh. So they want to fight discrimination with a different kind of discrimination. We’re supposed to give minorities an advantage over any non-minority, all else being equal.” My co-workers and I shook it off and just moved ahead. It was and is clear that discrimination is and was real, and that some classes of people – back in the 70s-80s it was mostly black people – had in fact been excluded systematically from parts of society. No argument there. But my concern about the logic of discriminating to end discrimination turned out to be real, as corporate culture in the 2000s became very simple. It became an obvious liability to be a white male working in a company that championed diversity. At my last employer, some 90% of all promotions to VP went to someone other than a white male. The bias had become so obvious that it was an inside joke.

Perhaps it was just timing, as I ended my career at a point where I think the pendulum had swung too far. Yes there was a glass ceiling for women, yes, white males in corporations acted in a chummy/clubby exclusionary way for decades. But now we have this corporate culture where diversity trumps merit, and I’m not OK with that.

This latest decision affects universities directly, but will bleed into corporate culture over time. SCOTUS is saying that you can’t use race as an explicit factor in making decisions on the merit of an applicant for admissions. In general, I’m OK with that. In this case of a decades-long attempt to right the wrongs of the past (Affirmative Action), I think the pendulum has already swung far enough; indeed, too far. So I find myself agreeing with the court on this one.

I’ll save commentary on the final big decision of last month – the student loan forgiveness debacle. Lots to think about on that one.

It’s an auspicious day. Saturday, and the start of a holiday weekend (though that distinction doesn’t really matter to me anymore, as I’ve been freed from the endless wheel of toil called full-time employment). It’s July 1st, meaning the year is officially half over. And the new California rainfall season resets. We finished this past year with 25.8 inches, the second largest rainfall in 20+ years. It’s the beginning of my birthday month, once a cause of joy but now a day triggering a quiet reflection on life and thankfulness for still being AD (above dirt).

And today I’m still mourning the loss of my great friend John Wiseman, who passed away in Ohio about 36 hours ago. John had been very ill for a couple of years – esophageal cancer that progressed rapidly – and only entered hospice last week. John and I met at my first full-time job, at Goodyear Aerospace where we joined a team building what were then the fastest computers in the world. It was a gathering of extreme geeks, and I was in heaven, jobwise.

John was the person I tried (unsuccessfully) to model myself after once we met and I realized how little I knew about the world. John was everything I wasn’t at age 23 – calm, confident, worldly, sure of his place in the world, extroverted, interesting – a completely different species than the naive eastern KY person I was at the time. He came from a family of education and money, while I came from a loving but dirt poor and insular environment. And yet John and his new bride Dorothy accepted me and took me and my wife into their circle of friends. For the nine years I worked at Goodyear John and I were best of friends. We worked, exercised, and socialized together. John was responsible for my ongoing interest in high-end audio. I’ll never forget his speakers when we first me – he had a pair of A/D/S floor-standing speakers, each about the size of a recliner, that he called the Voice of the Neighborhood. We had a lot of fun with them.

And then in the mid-80s inexplicably I scratched the itch to move to the west coast and San Diego. We were never as close after that, and I think John may have been surprised and hurt by my decision to leave Akron in pursuit of better climate and god-knows-what. So we only touched base with each other once in a while, less frequently in our 40s and 50s. And then he got sick. We did manage to talk and text and reminisce about our salad days, but as his condition got worse his focus quickly and rightfully became his family and those he’d spent the last 30 years with.

The world was a better place with John in it. I’m thankful he’s no longer in pain, but I’m acutely aware of a hole in the world that can’t be filled. I’ll always miss you, Wise.