I’ve now been unemployed for a week, and it’s been a roller coaster. I started an intensive business class and picked up a part-time job, and between homework and catching up on everything I need to know for a new project, I’ve had less free time than I did when I was working 40 hours a week. It’s kind of thrilling.
I haven’t lost all my cynicism, though. Filing for unemployment is a truly miserable process. A more conspiracy-minded friend of mine is convinced that the process is deliberately opaque to keep people from getting benefits. I blame incompetence rather than malice, but when the outcome is the same, the cause doesn’t particularly matter to the person struggling to pay rent.
I actually wrote to my state rep to ask if she knew how bad it was. Apparently, yes, she did: the system went into operation in 2013, several years late and several million dollars over budget, and was an immediate disaster. It’s a failure that’s still felt keenly around the statehouse. Deloitte Consulting was the vendor behind the debacle, although it didn’t seem to hurt them at all. (If I’ve learned anything from the first week of my project management class, it’s that nobody knows how to manage projects and they’re almost always disasters. The bigger and more important the project, the bigger and more horrific the disaster).
Collateral damage in the drug war
Jeff Sessions is reversing Obama-era guidelines that allowed states to regulate marijuana on their own terms. If it were not obvious before, this should underline the fact that “states’ rights” means only those rights that involve enslaving, incarcerating, abusing, and disenfranchising people of color. The drug war is not effective at stopping drugs. It’s effective at locking up and marginalizing minorities. That’s why Sessions likes it.
Meanwhile, cutbacks in opioid prescriptions have led legitimate chronic-pain patients to the black market. If only they could just smoke some weed…
Fire & Aim
Everyone’s talking about it endlessly, but if you read only one take on “Fire and Fury,” j/k nobody’s gonna stop at just one. Hot takes are the opiate of the commentariat. Anyway, N+1 has a pretty good one, comparing it to the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Purloined Letter.”
Cultivating deep thoughts
Trump’s botched Puerto Rico recovery efforts have meant that a lot of Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida. Voter registration drives aim to make sure their voice is heard in the 2018 elections.
Gin & Tacos linked to The Presidential Spectacle, which brings to bear on political science my favorite essay by Roland Barthes, about the spectacle of professional wrestling, how the outcome is preordained but everyone cheers it on anyhow.
58% of Americans over 65 watch cable news. Nobody should watch cable news.
The global population is making progress on poverty, literacy, disease, child mortality, hunger… so, it’s not all bad.
Cultivating oddity
The Awl describes the H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport as “The Most Homoerotic Little Archive In Texas.” They do not appear to be wrong.
Tumblr user selects some of Buzzfeed’s best selected content ripped off from Twitter.
Scottish farmers to use lasers to stop eagles from eating lambs.
In Florida, it’s been so cold that iguanas are falling from trees immobile… but they’re not dead. As someone learned when he loaded his car with frozen iguanas.
Cultivating joy
This dog has learned to ride a sled down a hill. And carry it back up the hill. And ride it down again. And carry it up again. And…
It may be cold out, but local weather reporters at least have some good jokes about it.
Sat photo of the storm.
Secretly Ironic 
