That aint working: entry #1

Terminated UoM DEI Program Manager.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/04/a-dei-officer-bites-the-dust.phphttps://www.startribune.com/former-diversity-worker-sues-university-of-minnesota-after-firing-over-swastika-photo/600362010/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13357461/mashal-sherzad-sues-university-minnesota-damages-job.html

Whatever she was making… Yeah, no. She wasn’t earning it and it wasn’t a job they needed to staff ie it was a complete waste of govt money.

Yeah my character evaluation of who she is, is that she couldn’t have been a very productive employee such that she is… an influencer / model also. And not that it was the matter of these things competing for her attention. IMHO women who think they have model good looks are borderline impossible for a normal person to interact with. To say, you can have a very pretty woman in class / in the office. It aint that she’s pretty that’s a problem, and if it is it aint her problem of course. She can be model pretty. It’s if they think they have model good looks and are into model culture. That’s a problem, if that’s their personality. I’d guess it is for this gal. I’d guess she’s skated a bit her whole life because she’s pretty.

I’ll truth bomb also, "I think" being highly educated Afghan or Pakistani or Iranian in this country, you’re about as disadvantaged as if you were Chinese. Which is to say, you’re not, and "I think" you’re not really credible doing that job as her, as a pretty central asian woman. I briefly checked out her LI. Blake / Hamline. I’m kinda surprised she choose Hamline having gone to Blake, because I take it the right characterization of Hamline is its a value proposition as a private school. BUT. It does have a distinct and spicy cultural / political vibe these days, if the last year there explains anything.

Anywho, to say also… IDK how you are this person who is all sass and noise and not of disadvantaged bg and the people in the dept at the U hire you for this job… except that there’s the pretty and glamorous shiny object thing going on.

Public salary data is somewhat easily available. It should be for her, but she started this job merely last October, so there isn’t a current PDF with her in it on anyone’s website. I’ll take a wild ass guess on her salary: $135k. I’ll say it would be very easy for me to be wrong there $40k in either direction. Sometimes quasi govt jobs don’t pay as well as you think, sometimes they are cray cray.

I’m surprised she didn’t have more job protections at the U. Maybe she was in a probation period. You conjure up this scenario, maybe you foresee a hesitancy for that type org to fire this type person over ‘this issue’ where there’s a very pc prism through which to view the pro-Palestine cause. Meh, I’m not surprised that her department head fired her given the institutional temperamental prerogatives you’d understand govern a place like that.

Oh yeah she’s a glam lsebian as a Muslim woman as well. This has not gone unobserved, the LGBTQs in this country having politically aligned with retrograde Islam in the middle east. That dissonance is a hellova thing.

I’ll tell ya another gd thing, that I sussed out myself in life as a matter of personal presentation and temperamental governance. I learned it as a student of history, the news, and by navigating gun collecting. A person’s got no reason to have swastikas in their life. Don’t have them around, don’t make analyses that draws analogies to them. They’re bad.

Yes, that’s the basis of a discrimination claim based on marital status

https://minnesotareformer.com/briefs/senate-dfl-chief-of-staff-departing/

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2024/03/26/minn-senate-to-pay-former-top-dfl-aide-110k-to-settle-claims-over-her-dismissal

Let’s get legal.

Erin Murphy et al in the press release douche say essentially “that’s not marital status discrimination when you fire someone because you don’t like their spouse.” So me as catty as I can think about it, I’m trying to conjure up the worst example in my mind of what Erin Murphy would think this discrim clause would protect. I come to … when you’re trans and marry an effigy of Ru Paul, and a bigot employer fires you for that. That’s protected, Erin Murphy cheers on the employment action for that.

Not funny. I don’t have it on this, and I am aware and self aware enough to know it. Cringe. But the observation on whatever you want to say about Erin / DFL being hypocrites here is because they do believe in very strong statutory protections that allow for wrongful employment termination claims and litigation and dont think it covers, ya know, the reason they fired someone.

Superficially obviopiphany case on marital status is probably an office only hiring single women. This is what Erin Murphy thinks discrim on marital status is. They fired Carly Melin, I guess reason #1, because her husband Joe Radinovich is working for Don Samuels as he primaries Ilhan Omar. There are some other reasons. He is colored within DFL by his views on the Gaza war too.

That’s a wrongful termination claim for marital status. That would be credible in court and I bet it pays out in a judgment such that it gets there. So yeah you got to settle at the point you fired her and she makes a claim and you don’t want to explain it in court.

Other shitpoints:

• I, who has been fired a couple times (IT is hard), and not for interpersonality problems or train of thought train wrecks that the blog might illuminate 😆: Yeah I wonder how you reason out Carly’s termination form such that you don’t do it “for cause”. You can do it for poor performance, yes. I have a hard time envisioning writing up a senior DFL aparatchek for poor performance. When you don’t for poor performance, the other blanket reason there universally is “poor fit”. You get UI for either.
• Shit ton of money that job Carly was doing pays. They are saying “110k is about 6 months pay”. With the fringe benes I read it as a $150k salary job. Shit ton of money though. She’ll be fine, but my wise ass opinion is “those people” in the DFL public / non prof patronage blob flit from one 150k job to another without enduring much in selection process based on merit. So ya wonder what her prospects in that ecosystem are now such that you make someone angry when you hire her. AND… my astonishment there is that hangs on being married to someone with out crowd opinions on Gaza, fcs.
• Am I well read and partisan enough to be aware of Carly Melin generally? IDK, perhaps not. She went to Beaver State though and got elected to the state house at a very young age, so I am aware of her as wunderkind / prodigy out of the Beaver State diaspora.
• I wouldn’t say fixated yo… at least not for crude reactionary reasons…. but this blog does revisit a couple times a year the curiosity of Ilhan Omar having married her brother for fraudulent purposes and having gotten away with it because of who decides what’s fact in this country. I’d bet that’s gonna be revealed as truth someday, btw, when a person with the proper attributes to make that claim and make it stick in the ambient permission structure does so. IE, a Democrat. And there are, you’d think, a few dozen important institutional Democrats in the state party who understand the reality of her having married her brother and could pull the pin on that. But they’d only do it if it was the decider in a power struggle and they were OK with risking their career. So I’d wondered if it was going to be Joe Radinovich in the context of Ilhan vs Samuels. We’ll see.
• I remarked something here a couple days ago that was in disapproval of DSA / DFL hybridization. It was re Mary Moriairty as an example, and after I questioned myself in her case and broadly. I was like, why do I think that’s the reality right now, where did I get that vibe. Well broadly…. It was in fall with eye on these overtly DSA DFLers supporting Hamas. Radinovch is in the Latz faction that called that out, see Reformer article.chedck with vadim

The other polar in my bi

Politically. Where a conversation with a MAGA goes sideways and I get out the needle.

I went out for Bloody Mary’s Sunday Morning. Didn’t want to, because I knew consumption of 2 or more Bloody Marty’s would screw up my grip work vibe for the afternoon. But I did, cuz, sociable, needing some sociable yo. Also cuz it was Russ the cabinet maker’s domestic partner’s birthday.

I’m proofreading at this moment and I’m going to leave that Bloody Marty line. That’s what we call them from now on.

Sooooo.… one thing that happened, at this bar, I get talking to this guy, Russ’ neighbor. Very blue collar man. And he was fine. End up doing a little, so what do you do? Etc, as he did to me. He’s a roofing crane operator, 57 or so, and very well adjusted. Not political. I do a little Studs Terkel on him, and not in any way obnoxious, not intrusive. But I was like, “Is crane operator a $60/hr job?” And he volunteers, “No. I’m getting $43/hr but with the overtime in the summer I’m 1040ing like $120k a year gross.”

Instructive, interesting. Cuz… I think $100k is to 2024 what $40k was to 1984. Good money, but not crazy money, and a lot of people working seriously earn it. Sales guys, computer guys, auto techs, trades guys. That guy for instance W2s more than me by a little. He’s a 35 yr crane operator, I’m a 25 yr IT guy.

Anyway, [Borat voice] his wife…

Russ there, little bit of a provocateur and mischief maker. Also blue collar, and a little bit political, but … ANTI-TRUMP. Kinda against type. So I guess he knows this woman is super MAGA in the Boebert / MGT way, and wants to have this open conversation about who voted for who in the primary. I’m asked, and I say “Dean Phillips”.

This gal is “Isn’t he a Democrat?”

Yeah…

Well how did you do that, aren’t you a Republican?

Ya know, the answer to that is literally, … “no I’m not. I dont participate in Republican party politics, I dont donate, and I split tickets with regularity.” But I didn’t answer that that way to the gal. My answer was, “you can cross over in Minnesota primaries. I felt like voting for Dean Phillips.” ***

And the gal is “No you can’t, I’m a registered Republican and when I go in they give me a Republican ballot…”

So I’m “We don’t have party registration in Minnesota”. Which is a) true and b) me now knowing I could never have a meaningful conversation with this woman because she was 3 orders of magnitude less brainy to the deets of any of this stuff and sooo effing strident in that Green / MGT way ah “as a woman” yo.

Went around with her 3 or 4 times saying “WE DON’T HAVE PERSON PARTY REGISTRATION IN MINNESOTA. SUCH THAT THAT’S IN YOUR MIND, IT’S BECAUSE YOU’VE HEARD ABOUT IT FROM STATES LIKE NY.”

To no effect, I could not get her to accept that as fact.

She asked me then though, why dont you like Trump, and my answer was “Cuz he’s a fucking pig”. And that was a little bit of next level inflammatory and I knew it, but I ha ha’d it off. And Russ laughed, and then she laughed, sorta, and I went left the conversation to get another drink.

Roofing guy slides over to me, ya, you wouldn’t believe what I have to deal with at home, the Dan Bongino, the OAN, all the time….

*** Yeah it comes to pass voting for Dean was way out there. It was a throwaway vote for sure. I was not participating in a referendum on Joe Biden. It’s that I have some nostalgic affection for the idea of the DFL and it was an opportunity to vote for that. And also that Phillips is a St. Paul genX guy that I feel some very vague generational / locational kinship with.

Actually, no

https://twitter.com/MensHealthMag/status/1670642565907988480

Zingy fact checker: Hey this 87K new IRS agents thing in the Biden bill…

This is the kind of thing I “don’t like” and can be provoked into a rage vibe over such that it would be true. Would tickle my confirmation bias if I was that weak.

But I’m not buying it as Fox news / GOP chum in the water if you get my drift. Thing being, as a person with a feel for scale I wouldn’t guess there’s 87K qualified people to hire as IRS tax auditors in the US.

I dunno, maybe its aspirational IE a plan and funding that never comes to fruition. They ain’t hiring 87K auditors though alrite.

Update: Inevitable Wapo thing.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/08/11/hyperbolic-gop-claims-about-irs-agents-audits/

Right, totally.  the 87k used in a serious manner includes any employee they’d hire.  IT, management, etc….

Deep thought about the Russkies and their war making

In historical scholarship and evaluation, "we" do this thing in the US where we feel this pang of guilt that we only lost 450k guys in WW2 and the Russkies lost whatever they lost, 20M people. So, parenthetical "we". It’s just to say it’s kind of a widely accepted foundational piece of wisdom and sentiment, that the Russkies did the heavy lifting in winning the European war.

Counter observation, brought into focus by Ukraine and the Kotkin article https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/stephen-kotkin-putin-russia-ukraine-stalin

The Russkies suck at this stuff because it’s a barbarous barbarian society, and they lose 10 times as many people as they should because of the barbarism, and that’s not a thing to admire.

The South African ME at the Chauvin trial

*** So, this first thing might interest my long time reader who likes Africa and South Africa. Or not.

During the trial I was BSing on Twitter, and I made a reply in someone’s thread about the irony of Chauvin’s defense using an old Afrikaner medical examiner as an expert witness to say Floyd OD’d. Cuz ya know apartheid and South Africa racsim, get it.

Well I got about 200 replies from around the world telling me the guy, Fowler, was British diaspora South African and not Afrikaner. And I’ve never gotten more than 5 replies on anything in my life.

Touchy, touchy, people…

*** There’s one hyperlocal (to say, not Powerline) conservative blog left running in town, and my thing has been to visit there and poke them in the eye about their shit wisdom such that it’s all entirely racialized / racist. So, they believe the jurors were compelled to vote guilty because they feared riots. I said, it was an overwhelming prosecution and a crap defense, and if it would have been a better defense they could have swung a contrarian personality in the juror to force a mistrial, because inevitably there was such a contrarian personality among the 12.

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/28/us/derek-chauvin-george-floyd-trial-juror/index.html

Pull Quote: When it came time to deliberate, Mitchell told Campbell that the hours were spent primarily arguing with one person raising doubts as to Chauvin’s guilt.

“I felt like it should have been 20 minutes,” he said.

Just to say… I was right about that too, I know what I know.

***Oh, no doubt that Irish pulmocologist in Chicago was gold.  https://twitter.com/webster/status/1387385685083000837

This is the minor league equivalent of Medicare for All

Its to say, its completely fanciful.

http://www.startribune.com/baseball-stadium-being-proposed-in-shakopee-for-revived-millers-to-call-home/565421532/

No land, no team, no capital, no professional business people, no actual collaboration from the American Association…..its a couple guys with a vision statement fishing for some deep pockets… which are not going to appear.

Editorially speaking, what the paper is actually covering here is the qualitative equivalent of a couple guys playing Sim City. Its not a serious thing and it doesn’t actually deserve news coverage.

Quick hits

Donald Sterling: not a handsome devil, certainly not at this point.  This is what it’s come to with 80 year old billionaires?  To have a hot young girlfriend you have to accept you’ll be cuckolded, and the game then is to try and keep it discreet….so that you can have a hot young girlfriend that you have the privilege of supporting?  No thanks….

Donald Sterling’s girlfriend:  Not attractive, she looks like a space alien that’s had plastic surgery.  I’m mindful that when you travel in these rich circles you adopt their styles, which is high fashion groupie  trashy of a sort.  But it’s not attractive.  I’ll take “Midwest farmer’s daughter’ types any day.  I like Kate Upton a lot.  But who doesn’t, as my wife says.

Byron Smith – http://m.startribune.com/news/?id=257169671&c=y. He’s creepy.  Actually though Ms. Reporter, I don’t have any sense “Smith had become a symbol in the countrywide debate over so-called castle doctrine laws, raising questions about how far a homeowner can go to defend himself and his property.’

Benghazi – of course they lied their asses off.  Ya’ll can admit it now.