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Saint Louis University has a phased retirement program for tenured faculty with sufficient time in service. For up to five years, a qualifying faculty can drop to 70%, 50% or 33% effort, with a commensurate reduction in compensation. They can start at 70% or 50% and drop to a lower level, but they can’t go up to a higher level. Part of the contract is that by the end of the five-year period, the faculty fully retires. This isn’t institutional magnanimity. It’s a kind of buy-out. Indeed, the university has offered tenured faculty buy-outs now and then: quit now, and you walk away on day one with a full year of compensation. These are ways of off-loading tenured faculty who can’t otherwise be fired except for cause.  I took the phased retirement, mostly because I wasn’t emotionally ready to quit cold turkey. And I stayed at 70% of my last pre-phase compensation the entire time, which netted far more money than the buy-out. At the end of the five years, I was ready to be unemployed/re...

Monday evening, we went out to the East Providence library to hear a trio of folk musicians perform (mostly) Celtic music. The instruments included guitar, 5-string banjo, fiddle, harp and bodhran. The performers played both tunes and songs, balancing all the instruments well. The harp was a special highlight; my only beef was that as a Celtic band with a harp, they didn’t play anything by Turlough O’Carolan. In addition to Irish and Scottish melodies, they referenced music from Appalachia and Cape Breton. All three musicians have some Irish background, and the music was interspersed with stories. While the guitar player was re-tuning, the harpist told a couple jokes. This is the one I remember: Joe picks up the morning paper and finds his obituary in it. Shocked, he calls his friend Mick on the phone. “Mick, my obituary is in the paper this morning!” Mick says: “Yeah, I saw that. Where are you calling from? 

A major bulwark protecting the US economy has been that the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. Now, Trump’s “excursion” (don’t say “war”) is looking to change that. “ A senior Iranian official has told CNN that Tehran is considering allowing a limited number of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz — but only if cargo is traded in Chinese yuan, not US dollars. The condition, if formalised, would represent the most significant challenge to the petrodollar system in its fifty-two-year history, striking at the financial architecture that underpins American global power rather than at US military assets.” *snip* “ What makes the Iranian proposal structurally significant is not simply that it challenges the dollar — de-dollarisation rhetoric has circulated for years without materialising into meaningful change. What is different here is the mechanism. Tehran is not merely proposing that some bilateral trade occur in yuan. It is proposing that access to the world’s most critical ener...

I registered for the draft as a high school senior during the Vietnam war. At the time, you registered at 18, your lottery number was assigned at 19, and you were drafted at 20 if your number was low enough. In the event (a) my number was high enough that I wouldn’t get drafted and (b) the draft ended by the time I turned 20. The Vietnam War was very much a shaping event for me. By the time I was a postdoc, I embarked on a project of learning history the history of war that began with Stanley Karnow’s book “Vietnam.” Eventually, I realized I couldn’t understand the Vietnam war without understanding the Cold War, I couldn’t understand the Cold War without understanding WWII, and I couldn’t understand WWII without understanding WWI. 40 years and over 200 histories and biographies later, I’m still filling in gaps in my understanding of history and how it informs the present. I just finished “McNamara at war: A new history” by  Philip and William Taubman. McNamara, as JFK’s and LBJ’s S...

Now, Trump is threatening to double down on his Iran disaster. “President Donald J. Trump   threatened Friday   to destroy Iran’s major oil terminal on Kharg Island if Tehran continued to obstruct shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.” Trump fancies himself as a deal-maker. Any deal-maker who can bankrupt a casino is a fool. This latest threat is foolish on stilts. Ca. 90% Iran’s oil ships out of Kharg. If that terminal is destroyed, it will effectively cut off all oil income to Iran. Trump apparently thinks either (a) Iran will cave at the threat or (b) he can in will carry out the threat and only Iran will pay the price. Trump has forgotten the Samson Option. “Iran, having been deprived of its livelihood at Kharg, will take down the oil facilities of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. It has the drones and missiles to do so. Oil is, to say the least, flammable. So it can be done. As we saw in Kuwait after the Gulf War, when Iraqi troops set oil rig fires in Kuwait, they are...

I get it. As a parent, I had a claim to the supervision of my minor child. And I wouldn’t deprive any other parent of the rights I expect.   But your rights end where my nose begins.  If your parental rights mean dictating the public-school curriculum my child is taught, you need to find a private school. If your parental rights entail exposing my child to your unvaccinated child, you need to find a private school or home-school. If your parental rights mean recruiting the nanny state to teach your backward religion, you need to find a private school or home-school. You have rights, but so do I. I’m fortunate in that my daughter is an adult and a parent herself, so these issues no longer affect me personally. And I live in an enlightened state, where right-wing extremism masquerading as “parental rights” has no purchase. But as an American, I still care about how my tax money is spent, and I don’t want it spent to advance intolerance. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/the-nex...