One of my biggest problems with Trump is that he is old.

The president should probably be older than 30 or so, but no older than 45. Honestly, I’d rather have a 25-year-old president than a 74-year-old one. (Yes, I know the president must be 35 by the time inauguration rolls around.)

Why is this? Well, because an old man or woman doesn’t have to live with the effects of their actions. Trump is 74 now, for instance. He won’t be around or at least won’t have to live for long with the consequences of his most deleterious antics.

I know it’d never happen, but I’d support a law that said the president could be no older than 50 when taking office, with no minimum age (this doesn’t matter because Americans would never vote for anyone very young anyway).

Romanian is shockingly easy to read, for someone who can read French, Latin or Spanish.

It’s a Romance language (I mean, obviously — it’s right in the name) but I had this idea that it was some obscure offshoot with bizarre conventions so I never paid any attention to it.

But now I can read a newspaper (but not a novel) in Romanian with just a few days of practice.

Cool.

I’ve been poor and I’ve been (comparatively) rich, and if anyone believes the poor have easy lives, they experienced a kind of poverty that I’ve never seen, read about, or experienced.

Know how freeing it is to get to a point where you could quit your job and go live in France for a year or longer if you wanted to? To work somewhere because it’ll make your retirement more lavish, not to get your next meal or to keep your child from starving?

Being poor is a constant exercise in humiliation, calculating the incalculable, and the eradication of the self.

I remember my dad getting laid off from his job at Occidental Chemical in 1984 or so. That devastated us financially and the family emotionally. It probably led to my parents’ divorce indirectly. It meant the money for my future I’d saved which sat on my dresser in an old alcohol bottle disappeared without explanation. It meant nothing in the fridge. It meant my mom as in the cliché searching the couch cushions for enough change to put some gas in the car to get to her new waitressing job. And it meant young kids (my sister and me) worrying about what was going to happen to us.

That’s poverty. It’s not some life of leisure or indolence. It’s called “grinding” for a reason. And it’s horrible and abasing and no one should ever be subjected to it in such a rich country.

Let’s watch Grace do her stuff.

Fuckin’ hell, she wrote both of those songs herself. Now one of my favorite singers. Let’s hope she keeps on. Easy to get burned out in that industry.

Modern Goths really should learn to speak Gothic. I’d add a lot to their presentation.

Also, the Gothic alphabet is pretty…Goth.

These days, a sure way to tell that something is important and relevant is for mainstream Democrats and other pseudo-liberals to declare that it doesn’t exist or isn’t important.

Domination by the quants means no Jane Jacobs. Which is part of the goal, really. The ideas that you can prove with math and the ideas that have some truth are sets with few overlapping elements.

The goal of ubiquitous quantification is nominally to arrive at data with more veracity and consistency, more correspondence to reality. However, it is reality-constraining in effect as most of human experience that is true and meaningful is not amenable to quantification.

I’m not denigrating science nor apologizing for the excesses of religion, but rather asking people to recognize the limitations of their tools and their understanding.

Not gonna happen, I know. But I try.

(Also, Jacobs can’t have been smart because she didn’t have a degree. I mean obviously, duh.)

It’s not that many people thought Hillary Clinton was some evil greater than Obama or George W. Bush. No, it was the worry that she was the status quo evil who could not beat Trump.

Which, as it turns out….

Seeing how deep in denial so many Democrats still are means that Trump will have to get impeached to lose in 2020, basically.

From friends in academia, I’ve noticed that the rituals of persecution of the lower-ranked and subjection at the hands of the more powerful are quite similar to those in the military. Like, really quite close.

Rank matters a lot in both arenas, though in one it’s obviously more formalized. However in my opinion having it more systematized makes it easier to navigate.

It’s just funny that academia is often reflexively anti-military while an oppressed adjunct, post-doc or post-grad experiences conditions any lowly private would recognize immediately.

I disabled comments here, obviously. I doubt I will re-enable them anytime soon. It’s not that I care about people posting their thoughts whether in agreement or not, but simply that I don’t have the cognitive space to read them or deal with them at all.

I’m just not very social and even a little bit more than I can stand is way too much. I like to be in complete control of that part of my life. Hence, no Facebook. No Twitter. Etc.

This is my space to rant imperiously, to post unfounded assertions, and to generate my own alternative facts.

I kid, I kid.

But this blog is for me. I used to say that I’d write it if only one or two people read it. Now I realize I’d do so if no one did.

Post on your own blogs and link to me if you have something to say. I’ll probably read it.