Knackered

 I went to bed very early, I kept waking up. Between the stomach giving me fits, tearing off my CPAP mask, and the hip, I was up every two hours. I gave up at 3:45, and stayed up.

Reading around: History of Smut: On Kelsy Burke’s “The Pornography Wars” 

Senate Republicans get front seat to brewing Indiana Senate clash 

Two New Books on the Way From Angolan-Portuguese Novelist Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida 

All seemed well until the stomach started acting up again, so I called work and begged off the day. I crashed. Again, the very two-hour thing until I gave up around eleven. The stomach does not roll about, and the dry heaves have stopped. The solution, so far, is not to eat. I think that solution may have its own faults.

 In the email was my Merriam-Webster word of the day, knackered. It seemed appropriate.

My PO got back to me today after all my asking to confirm the date of my polygraph:

Scheduled for 2/2/2023 @ 10:00 AM. 

That is, of course, after I had already spoken with the polygraph operator and with him wanting to reschedule, a new date was set. See my What Kind of Day Is It Without a Screw Up? 

During lunch break last week, the discussion got around to the discussion got around to eggs. I cannot do eggs in the microwave, so I was pretty much ignorant on the issue. Then I see this headline in my newsletter from The Guardian: $18 a dozen: how did America’s eggs get absurdly expensive?. I suggest reading the whole article, but here are some points interesting to me:

There are signs that things might be turning around. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service promises an end is in sight: as of 20 January, loose egg prices have declined by 52% from their high the week of 18 December. But in the stores that I visited, that decline was not translating into lower prices for the consumer.

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The American Egg Board has blamed the price rise on an unprecedented outbreak of H1N1, a particularly virulent strain of avian flu that has a near 100% fatality rate among birds. This reduction in supply of egg-laying birds has sent prices soaring. But one farmer-advocacy group accuses major egg producers of gouging prices in a “collusive scheme” aimed at increasing profits.

The group, called Farm Action, examined publicly available financial data from the egg industry. In a letter calling on the FTC to investigate record prices, Farm Action determined that the avian flu outbreak had only had an “apparently mild impact on the industry”, generally lowering the average size of an egg-laying flock by no more than 6% compared with 2021.

“Egg prices in the grocer store have on average tripled for consumers since last year,” said Angela Huffman, Farm Action’s co-founder and vice-president. “Dominant egg corporations are blaming inflation and avian flu for price hikes, but if they were only raising prices to cover this cost, why are they raking in fivefold product margins? ”

NPR has a story on the same subject here.

Indiana's General Assembly may not expand universal choice for school, but looks to approve changes in high school curriculums: Indiana lawmakers weigh bill to create universal school choice program. Money is the issue with the former, and more money questions dog Indiana schools: To share or not to share is the referendum question`:

Public school referendum sharing could be one of the hottest educational topics of the 2023 General Assembly session. While school funding is always complicated, the notion of sharing referendum dollars is especially tricky and warrants some tedious study time in order to fully understand the decision legislators are being asked to make. 

On the surface it sounds easy. Public schools get a huge portion of the budget and that is divided up evenly among all schools, right? Unfortunately, it’s not quite that easy. In Indiana we have several different types of public schools with different funding formulas, accountability processes, and jurisdiction rules. 

For more than a decade Indiana has been home to a thriving school choice landscape. We are considered a national leader in offering families a spectrum of high quality public school options. Currently, the number one use of choice is families living in one traditional public school district choosing to send their children to another traditional public school district. In urban areas, primarily Indianapolis, there are high concentrations of charter schools and in rural areas we see very few public options.

The discussion about referendum sharing is really impactful to those areas where we see charter schools, which is estimated to be less than 40% of the school systems in the state. The most heated conversations on this topic are focused on the current Indianapolis Public School referendum.  

People wonder why I do not want to go back into practicing law, and there are many reasons, but I must say this one is not really one of them: A robot was scheduled to argue in court, then came the jail threats. Anyone can learn how to make a cogent, reasoned argument in a law court - if they know the substantive law and have read Aristotle's Rhetoric. Having a judge open to reason, with the ability to cogitate, is a different matter altogether.

A new magazine found: The Dial. They are taking on the world; no sign they are taking on fiction.

I wrote and published Reproductive Health in America - Indiana Considered Restrictive, and Muncie Meets the Oscars.

I wonder who doesn't have classified information. National Archives asks past presidents, VPs to look for classified items.

From McSweeney's a bit of motivational writing for the would-be writer: How to Become a Professional Writer.

Dealt with email, ate a pizza, no idea what I am doing for lunch tomorrow (I expect an early dash to McClure's for a pot pie), and did some reading and adding to this blog with posts schuled for another day.

I put in a job application. Some place to give my carpal tunnel a rest.

My great-nephew is talking photography and I went looking for a place for him to submit his stuff. Which lead me to Gulf Stream Magazine and The Good Life Review. The former looks very interesting, but is not taking submissions.

Submitting "Colonel Tom." Again. Hope springs eternal.The Good Life Review felt a bit perverse of a choice until I read  Who Takes the Bus in LA by Marc Eichen.

"Colonel Tom" was also sent off to Twin Bird Review.

Music so far tonight from WXPN and KDHX.

 The Times Literary Supplement came in and I spent some time reading it.

Makers of American ideology: John Locke and Adam Smith as misunderstood founding fathers
by David Armitage was the only I feel compelled to share at length:

Locke and Smith were both touchy about their reputations and invested in their legacies. Yet each was later co-opted into projects they could not have envisaged, for purposes they would hardly have approved. As Arcenas and Liu show, with detailed documentation and persuasive narrative strung around what Liu calls “inflection points in the history of canonization”, Americans deformed and truncated them into “Locke” the alleged father of liberalism and “Smith” the putative apostle of free trade. The historical Locke had no more knowledge of liberalism than he did of the internal combustion engine; only by selectively interpreting a few lines from the 1,100 pages of The Wealth of Nations could Smith be fashioned into the progenitor of neoliberalism. Yet these partial, unhistorical and aspirational images persist in the US (and, due to American influence, far beyond), in a display of craving for authority that marks at least parts of American intellectual life as more atavistic than independent.

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That would have surely have surprised Smith the reviser of The Theory of Moral Sentiments up to his death, Smith the anatomist of civil government as created for “the defence of the rich against the poor”, and Smith the big government proponent of public works, public education and inoculation against the civic lassitude and poisonous religious “enthusiasm” engendered by proto-industrial production. The Chicago construction of Smith does not survive much contact with history, or indeed with Smith’s entire, unfinished intellectual system. The “invisible hand” was not a general prescription for economic deregulation, but either an elaborate joke, drawing on Ovid (who in the Metamorphoses describes a killer’s hand as invisible because hidden deep in the guts of his victim, a centaur) and Macbeth (who refers to night’s “bloody and invisible hand”), or a highly specific account of mercantile investment strategy. All those Adam Smith neckties sold in the age of Reagan and Thatcher – 10,000 and counting by 1982 – were emblems of a flattened and even frivolous figure.

 Also from the TLS: A Socrates gone insane and A novelist’s philosopher.

It's all over now, baby blue:

 

Now I am going to explore Indianapolis. 

sch 9:09 pm