Dear COVID Millennials: Get a fricking clue about salaries

Yeah, it's easy to stereotype younger generations. But, when they serve up stupidity on a platter, it's not stereotyping.

Via an independent PR rep who regularly emails my newspaper:

A recent survey by Clever Real Estate found that while the average starting salary for college graduates is $55,260, current college students expect to make $103,880 at their first job...

Wow.

It's a wow on both the total and the percentages. In other words, they're expecting to make DOUBLE what is actually out there.

This reminds me indirectly of a self-survey by the original Occupy Zucotti Park movement that led me to conclude they were a mix of physics PhDs and mathematics MA and MS grads butt-hurt that they had missed out on being part of the "rise of the quants," along with a few new law school grads butt-hurt they'd missed out their big bucks writing legal paperwork for that.

The other interesting part is that this seems provoked by COVID, as the butt-hurt non-quants were provoked by the Great Recession. Clever says that in 2019, the estimates were off by a little over $10k, or about 22 percent. That's still bad, but not THAT bad.

Is it a self-reinforcing loop of too much social media? Inflation? Bad work by college career counselors? A mix of all of the above? Other items?

Because it is correlated, though not necessarily causally so, with COVID, I added that to the headline.

The Putin-Macron phone call — the REST of the story

Cue up your Paul Harvey dulcet tones.

Many media sites, especially across the pond, reported earlier this week on a Feb. 20 call between French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin, with Putin flippantly (allegely flippantly) telling Macron, "To be honest, I wanted to go play ice hockey" rather than have a summit with U.S. President Joe Biden to cut off the looming Russian invasion of Ukraine. Here's the Daily Mail's version.

The rest of the story? 

It starts with Putin complaining to Macron about Ukraine breaking the Minsk Agreements. As they have. And, this is important because France and Germany were the lead negotiators of these Minsk Agreements, and Putin is telling Macron, not just did Ukraine break them, but you know they did.

We need direct quotes at this point. Here's Putin:

'What can I say? You yourself see what is happening,' retorted Putin, accusing Ukraine of rupturing the Minsk accords that reduced the scale of a conflict that erupted in 2014. ... 

'In fact our dear colleague Mr Zelensky is doing nothing' to apply the Minsk accords, Putin alleged. 'He is lying to you,' he added, also accusing Macron of seeking to revise Minsk.

And, here's Macron.

'I don't know if your legal advisor has learned law! As for me I just look at the texts and I try to apply them,' snorted Macron. 

Putin then argued that the propositions of separatists in eastern Ukraine should be taken into account. 'But we don't care about the propositions from the separatists,' snapped Macron.

With that, it's obvious that Putin wouldn't really want to talk to Macron much more either. That's especially true since the "separatists" were promised autonomy within Ukraine under the Minsk Agreements that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, like his predecessors, was breaking.

And, after that, we have Macron letting the cat out of the bag:

'Do not give in to provocations of any kind in the hours and days to come,' he told Putin.

So, provocations, eh? And Zelenskyy not acting alone in this, perhaps, but rather, as I said in my piece about peace talks, NATO "barking" at Russia, per the one and only Pope Francis.

Rather than, like the Daily Mail, and whover its "they" is that thinks Macron came off as weak, rather, I think he got busted on trying to play "good cop" to Biden's "bad cop."

NBC has Ukraine fundraiser — will Madcow Maddow be there?

Per The Hill, I just threw up in Maddow's mouth.

As I quote-Tweeted Jeff St. Clair, from whom I heard this, have Merikkka's entertainers ever done this for Iraq? Afghanistan? Yemen?

Or, occupied Palestine?

Jeff had mentioned domestic issues like medical debt. 

It's true that Farm Aid was once a thing, but that was long ago, and while there are farmers with problems, there are a lot of Americans with a lot worse problems today.

Of course, NBC is probably expecting big ad dollars from DoD contractors and companies whose CEOs also sit on the boards of directors of Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ think tanks.

Guns, Delilah Barrios and "resisting tyranny" BS

Texas Green Party gubernatorial candidate Delilah Barrios, a Second Amendment absolutist, has this on her platform:

A free people must have the right to bear arms. “Civil Wars happen when the victimized are armed. Genocide happens when they are not.” ― A.E. Samaan

I'm sure it's a sentiment many a Rethuglican would endorse, including for ownership of a deadly AR-15.. Unlikely from a Dem, even a ConservaDem, at least not openly. But an "indigenous" Green? (Sidebar: I'm not here doing blood quantum checks, but is Barrios Hispanic, Indigenous [not the same in my understanding of US ethnic sociology] or whichever one fits the bill at the moment?)

Maybe so. I'll bet former Green, now Libertarian Cynthia McKinney, an African-American, entertains similar ideas, though I'm not hunting. Better things to do in life.

First, I reject absolutism, even on the First Amendment, where I would be closer to that. And, given the starkness of the statement, the fact that it's the ONLY statement about the 2nd Amendment or guns on her platform, her refusal to talk about gun control details (see below) and just who A.E. Samaan is (also see below), I consider this statement, and other things I've seen from her on Twitter, to qualify as Second Amendment absolutism. Also, not a word of praise or comment on the new gun control bill, weak tea as it is?

Second, contra SCOTUS post-Heller, and librul squishes like Laurence Tribe, I continue to affirm that the "corporatist" interpretation of 2A is the correct one.

Third, re "shall not be infringed" nutters, does Barrios want felons to own gunz? The mentally ill? (I take her silence on a direct Twitter question four weeks ago about red flag laws to be opposition. And, after she got butt-hurt over something else this last Sunday, and jumped into an exchange with a "Greens right or wrong" person I asked her twice more, three hours apart, for her stance on red flag laws. Crickets again.)

Here's me referencing the former convo with this tweet, after that "Greens right or wrong" person intervened:

Actually, we WERE having a dialogue here a couple of weeks ago, until I asked you directly, Delilah, your stance on red flag laws and you never answered me.

— TheRealSocraticGadfly (@real_gadfly) June 26, 2022

Then, three hours later, giving her more chance:

To check again, no comment on whether you support .... or oppose ... red flag laws? It was a legit ask 2 weeks ago, as it is today.

— TheRealSocraticGadfly (@real_gadfly) June 27, 2022

Well, there you go. And, no, Barrios, it's not "propping myself up." Gun control is a big issue to me, and your opposition to it is disconcerting. Plus, "Both Parties are Nazis" may not know this. (Or they may, and don't care, for one of several reasons.)

Fourth, is this really true?

There's several problems with the statement. One, it assumes, or seems to, that every society is slouching toward a level of dysfunctionality that will eventually reach civil war or genocide. That comes off as a determinist view of history, which I reject right there.

Second, as Rwanda shows, there can be genocides even when most the mass murderers don't have massive amounts of guns. Much of the Ottoman genocide against Armenians was done at the communal level without massive amount of guns. Yahweh's command to Saul to commit genocide on the Amalekites also shows that.

The real question is, who is A.E. Samaan? By his website, a sort of polymath, even if some of the poly is untrue.

By Goodreads quotes (page three there) someone who appears to lust for violence if citing the guillotine as the cousin of the Second Amendment. Someone who hates socialism in any form. An absolutist on the way he frames MANY actual, or purported, or fabricated, dichotomies, like the one in Barrios' quote.

His full list of Goodreads quotes, starting with page 1, is "interesting." He's also an anti-abortion absolutist, and, in a mastery of psychological projection, comes off as various types of absolutist period, all while claiming to attack absolutisms. If I had to sum him up in one phrase? "Anarcho-libertarian." (On page 2 of the quotes, he specifically identifies as libertarian.)

And, since Barrios says she supports single-payer, here's this tidbit from Samaan:

“Eugenics has always been the escape valve of single payer socialized medicine. Havelock Ellis was writing about them as one and the same prior to the fin-de-siecle. Culling out of control population growth and the economic drain of the incurably sick has always been a part of socialized medicine.”

First, note the absolutist "always." Second, eugenics in medicine has existed without single-payer. The death of King George V immediately comes to mind.

Third? "Resisting tyranny"? Anarcho-libertarianism leaves us even more subject to the tyranny of capitalism.

And, I've wasted enough time.

Man, if that's who Barrios is citing approvingly, I wouldn't touch her or him with a 10-foot pole. Or, to riff on Kinky Friedman, vote for her as dogcatcher of Utopia. This is the primary, but not the only reason when. Her playing footsie with COVID antivaxxers is another.

If Barrios doesn't like being called a "Second Amendment absolutist," it's in her power to change it. If "Greens right or wrong" flunkies don't like her being called that, it's in their power to change that, too.

And, if she doesn't like being associated with the full range of opinions of A.E. Samaan, it's also in her power to change on that.

Texas Progressives talk ...

The new gun control bill is better than nothing, but not THAT much. No age increase to buy assault weapons, let alone no bans, and it punts to courts defining exactly who falls in the "boyfriend loophole." Another piece makes clear that, contra claims of negotiating in good faith, GOP senators red-lined these and other things before even starting talks.

Off the Kuff looks at what that Cornyn gun control bill will and won't do, assuming SCOTUS doesn't toss it out.

From his second blog, SocraticGadfly looks at the details of a new Gallup poll showing a strong decline in belief in the existence of god (not the same as just "Nones").

Bidding wars for rent. Doesn't get more capitalistic than that, and thank tech-bros and other Californians Californicating Texas for being part of the problem. 

InnovationMap looks at how the Houston tech community can support LGBTQIA+ innovators.

The Texas Signal reads the Texas Republican platform as the threat it is.

The Houston Press talks to Ben Chou about the intersection of the LGBTQ and Asian-American communities.

John Coby tells how trolls in the city of Friendswood forced a decorated US Marine Corps veteran to drop out of being the Grand Marshal of the city's 4th of July parade.

Juanita improves on the Republican secession plan.

Steve Vladeck has a brief pedantic note about the numbers of the Dobbs decision.

After the Roe reversal, what's next?

I don't know if Ross Douthat is PERSONALLY challenging the pro-life forces to show they're not a bunch of anti-woman cranks in the wake of Roe being overturned, but he clearly notes, personal stances aside, that it will be a challenge, but there is an opportunity. That said, feminist pro-lifers like the one he mentions are surely as small of a minority in the movement as was the late secularist civil libertarian pro-lifer Nat Hentoff, and none of the six majority-voting justices comes off as anything but the stingy conservatives Douthat mentions.

New Mexico will become an abortion destination of choice for many Texans, but, I don't need the Trib to tell me that it really can't handle that.

Local decriminalization of Texas' soon-to-start "trigger law" could help ease the burden, but that ignores the "sue them" SB8 is also still on the books. And, while Texas doesn't have recall (nor initiative), nonetheless, Kenny Boy Paxton is probably eyeing the legal tools he already has, as well as looking for next year's Lege to give him more against city councils and DAs.

RU-486, etc., as Mimi Swartz notes in wondering what the Texas GOP will target next, is already illegal but hard to enforce.

Meanwhile, as noted before in polls, abortion isn't the hot-button issue for Dems on national issues right now; inflation is. Plus Democraps don't do "politics of outrage" as well as the GOP.

The new gun control bill is better than nothing, but not THAT much. No age increase to buy assault weapons, let alone no bans, and it punts to courts defining exactly who falls in the "boyfriend loophole." Another piece makes clear that, contra claims of negotiating in good faith, GOP senators red-lined these and other things before even starting talks.