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12 Things to Know About the Other Thin-Skinned Billionaire Speaking at Tonight’s RNC

by LakeishLeavens Posted on July 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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At least one person speaking at the Republican convention tonight might actually be a match for Donald Trump when it comes to taking things (ahem) over the top. Tech investor Peter Thiel used to be best known for his early bet on Facebook—”the most lucrative angel investment in history”—although recently he’s garnered more attention for his controversial positions and personal vendettas. Here are the 12 things you should know about Silicon Valley’s most eccentric, (now) openly gay, Trump-loving libertarian billionaire.

Thiel was accused of “demagoguery”—by Condi Rice: As a student at Stanford University, Thiel founded the Stanford Review, a highbrow version of the notoriously conservative Dartmouth Review. A few years later, he and another former Stanford Review editor wrote a book titled The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, which criticized political correctness in higher education. Then-Stanford provost Condoleezza Rice (later George W. Bush’s national security adviser) accused the pair of concocting “a cartoon, not a description of our freshman curriculum,” and added that the book was “demagoguery, pure and simple.”

Thiel is known around the Valley as “Don of the PayPal Mafia”: In 1998, Thiel co-founded the online payments company that would later become PayPal. He hired many Stanford Review alums, who, in the company’s early days, were known to keep Bibles in their cubes and hold workplace prayer sessions. Former PayPal counsel Rod Martin later tried to start a conservative version of MoveOn.org, and former VP Eric Jackson founded the book-publishing arm of the conservative WorldNetDaily, which famously released the children’s tale Help! Mom! There Are Liberals Under My Bed. (Two other members of the PayPal Mafia, Elon Musk and Keith Rabois, also went on to become billionaires.) Thiel later wrote that he’d wanted to create “a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution—the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were.”

Thiel is a self-described “conservative libertarian.” He supported the presidential bids of Ron Paul, donating more than $2.6 million to a Paul super-PAC in 2012. “I think we are just trying to build a libertarian base for the next cycle,” Thiel said at the time. But that was before Trump arrived on the scene in a substantial way.

Thiel launched one company that is extremely non-libertarian. In 2004, he co-founded Palantir Technologies with a $30 million investment. The company’s other major investor is In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. The FBI and the NSA employ Palantir’s data-mining and surveillance technology to monitor domestic and foreign terrorism suspects. Thiel has said civil liberties advocates should welcome Palantir. “We cannot afford to have another 9/11 event in the US or anything bigger than that,” he told Bloomberg. “That day opened the doors to all sorts of crazy abuses and draconian policies.”

Thiel blames women and welfare for destroying democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009 on the blog of the libertarian Cato Institute. “The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Thiel was the inspiration for Peter Gregory, the Aspergers-y billionaire venture capitalist on HBO’s Silicon Valley. In the following clip, Mike Judge’s arch comedy lampoons the Thiel Fellowship, which each year offers 20 “uniquely talented” teenagers $100,000 scholarships to forego college and pursue “radical innovation that will benefit society.”

Back in the real world, if you want a job at Thiel Capital, he will expect you to have a “high GPA from a top-tier university.”

Thiel is a climate skeptic. The idea that human activity alters the climate is “more pseudoscience” than science, he told Glenn Beck in 2014. Thiel is also somewhat uncertain about the veracity of Darwinian evolution.

Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. He spent $10 million on the Hogan lawsuit to get back at Gawker for outing him as gay (an open secret at the time) in 2007, and for writing negative articles about his friends. “It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” he told the New York Times.

Thiel recently invested in a marijuana company. His Founders Fund last year sank an undisclosed sum into Privateer Holdings, a Seattle-based company that, among other things, grows pot in Canada and owns “the official Bob Marley cannabis brand.”

Thiel wants to create sovereign micronations on the high seas. He is a major funder of the Seasteading Institute, a think tank that envisions floating city-states as incubators for alternative models of governance. (On Silicon Valley, the Peter Gregory character has an offshore haven populated by autonomous machines.)

Thiel wants to cheat death. He has signed up with a cryogenics company to be deep-frozen upon his death in the hope that he will later be revived by future medical advances. And his foundation has supported anti-aging research.

Thiel’s support for Trump is an oddity in Silicon Valley. Trump’s stance on everything from immigration to mass surveillance is anathema to Valley techies. “In the Obama years, much of Silicon Valley has become very close to Democrats,” notes the New York Times‘ Farhad Manjoo. “This year there was an opportunity for a Republican to make overtures to tech—but with Mr. Trump, that chance seems to have passed.”

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12 Things to Know About the Other Thin-Skinned Billionaire Speaking at Tonight’s RNC

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Fracking and immigration activists unite 60 feet above the RNC

by CathyNpykchtei Posted on July 19, 2016

moral highground

Fracking and immigration activists unite 60 feet above the RNC

By on Jul 19, 2016Share

Four anti-fracking, pro-immigrant activists scaled 60-foot flagpoles a few blocks from the Republic National Convention on Tuesday morning, then unfurled a massive banner that read “Don’t Trump our communities.”

What are these two groups of activists doing together? Their issues overlap. In many places around the country, immigrants live in areas where oil companies use hydraulic fracturing to release natural gas and oil. Most of the fracking in California, for instance, happens in the Central Valley, near fields where undocumented workers harvest crops to feed the rest of the country. Fracking sites are more likely to be in neighborhoods of color and poverty.

Emmelia Talarico, an activist who traveled to Cleveland, Ohio from Maryland for the protest, said that “communities directly impacted by oil and gas extraction have come together with immigrant communities being torn apart by deportations to take a stand against an unjust system that targets us all.”

Three of the four activists were arrested and are now raising money for bail.

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Fracking and immigration activists unite 60 feet above the RNC

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Now Tesla Wants to Buy a Solar Company

by Eldon9341hrlsbq Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Elon Musk—future Mars settler, founder of Tesla—stepped into the solar business earlier this week with Tesla Motor’s $2.5 billion bid to buy SolarCity, the top home solar company in America.

Shareholders from both companies still have to approve the deal. And if they do, Tesla promises the results will be awesome. Musk says that he never wanted Tesla to be just a carmaker. Buying SolarCity will turn Tesla into a company that will sell you an electric car and the power to charge it. “This would start with the car that you drive and the energy that you use to charge it, and would extend to how everything else in your home or business is powered,” Tesla wrote in its company blog.

Then Wall Street frowned. The day after the announcement, Tesla’s stock slumped 10 percent, and Morgan Stanley cut its rating on Tesla’s shares.

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So what gives? Does Wall Street not have the vision to get with Musk? Is the most futuristic car company in America about to drive off a cliff?

Here are a few ways of looking at it:

This whole thing is really a family drama.

Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s co-founder and CEO, is Musk’s cousin. Is there some kind of family power struggle taking place? According to Eric Weishoff, founder of Greentech Media, Rive “didn’t sound happy enough for a man that just got $77 million dollars wealthier.” And why should Tesla buy Solar City when the two companies have been collaborating on batteries for half a decade now?

Tesla’s stock is sinking because Wall Street doesn’t get Silicon Valley.

Tesla was born in the startup culture of Silicon Valley, where it’s all about taking bold stands and getting big or going home. In Silicon Valley, companies eat other companies for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night snack.

Worriers, however, have good reason to wonder why Tesla wants to get into the solar business so badly when it has 375,000 pre-ordered Tesla Model 3s that it’s supposed to be making. There’s the also the example of Sun Edison, an actual energy company that went bankrupt after a massive company-buying spree.

This smushing together could actually work, because, you know, synergy!

Tesla’s current clientele is, to put it mildly, loaded. Three-quarters of Model S buyers make more than $100,000 a year. It’s entirely possible that they are exactly the kind of people who might wander into a showroom, order a car, and impulse-purchase an entire solar installation to go along with it.

Solar City sells 100,000 solar installations a year to a wide demographic. If the price of the Tesla Model 3 manages to drop from the current sticker price of $35,000 and keep dropping, it’s imaginable that SolarCity’s current customers could be persuaded to choose a Tesla for their next car.

What we really need are lots of little Teslas, not a bigger Tesla

It’s been clear for a long time that Musk is a crazy dreamer of the Steve Jobs variety. But building a big company, even a really cool big company, cannot get America to low-carbon car heaven alone. The Big Three automakers—GM, Ford, and Chrysler — arose out of a Cambrian stew of automotive experimentation in the workshops of Detroit. Many have made the point (including me) that three still wasn’t enough to create the kind of competition that the American automotive industry needed to avoid getting its ass kicked by automakers in Germany and Japan.

This sale — if it goes through — might lead to great things. But what the world really needs are many Teslas, enough to create a large ecosystem of entrepreneurs working on cars, batteries, and solar. We need this a lot more than we need to buy solar panels from a car company.

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Now Tesla Wants to Buy a Solar Company

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Bitcoin, Meet China. May You Have Many Happy Days Together.

by KieranE25pdjh Posted on June 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Tyler Cowen points me to this from the Economist:

Most trading in bitcoin takes place in China: Huobi and OKCoin, two Chinese exchanges, are thought to account for more than 90% of transactions. The currency seems to have become an outlet for Chinese savers frustrated with their limited investment options and searching for high-yielding assets. The Chinese authorities are worried enough to have banned banks from dealing in bitcoin, but individuals are still free to speculate and have been doing so with gusto.

….China has also become the global hub for bitcoin mining, the process by which heavy-duty computing power is used to process transactions involving bitcoin, earning those doing the processing some new bitcoin as compensation. Over 80% of new bitcoin are now minted in data centres in places like Sichuan and Inner Mongolia.

One of the selling points of e-currencies like Bitcoin is that their decentralized nature makes them inherently free of government meddling. But is that really true? I’ve long thought that techno-evangelists show far less respect than they should toward meatspace assets like nuclear bombs, gun-wielding police forces, ownership of fiber optic networks, vast fortunes in physical goods, and so forth. This is, for example, why so many of them were naive enough back in the 90s to believe that the internet would spell doom for traditional marketing—only to wake up a few years later and discover that traditional marketers had adapted remarkably quickly to their supposed revolution. It turned out that high IQs aren’t limited to Silicon Valley, and that websites and Google searches and Facebook advertising posed no more of a challenge to the existing order than television did in the 50s.

So is Bitcoin really safe from government meddling? It has been so far, but only in the same sense that an ant is safe from my boot as long as it doesn’t annoy me. China, however, has already proved that a meatspace government can, in fact, crush the digital world if it’s sufficiently motivated to do so. It’s not even all that hard. So if e-currencies are now mostly a ploy for evading Chinese capital controls, I’d say we’re about to learn pretty quickly whether (a) e-currencies can grow big enough to matter, and (b) national governments are truly helpless to do anything about them. I’ll put my money on the meatspace men in Beijing if push ever comes to shove on this.

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Bitcoin, Meet China. May You Have Many Happy Days Together.

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Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

by MikaylaBazile Posted on June 1, 2016

A little fishy

Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

By on Jun 1, 2016 10:09 amShare

Over the weekend, Donald Trump told voters in California, a state that is now suffering through its fifth year of drought, that “there is no drought.” Instead, Trump says, the state is suffering from harmful policies crafted by environmentalists. Or, in Trump-speak, “they’re taking the water and shoving it out to sea.”

A lot of outlets pilloried the remarks.  The Atlantic said they were “beneath contempt.” Slate called them “oblivious.”

But Trump has gotten far too much credit. He’s not being his usual creative self. He’s just repeating an argument that’s been popular among conservatives for years. Ex-Republican-darling Carly Fiorina made this same argument repeatedly during her brief presidential run, calling the California drought nothing more than a “man-made disaster.” Conservative media, including Fox News, National Review, and the Wall Street Journal, have long taken aim at environmentalists for exacerbating the drought.

Think of it as off-brand climate denialism. Drought deniers believe overzealous environmentalists got California into this mess. State and federal conservation laws call for a certain minimum level of freshwater to flow through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in Northern California, where two of the state’s largest rivers meet. Drought deniers say there’s an easy fix to the state’s water problems – take away those laws and divert more of that water to the agriculture industry.

The longstanding symbol at the center of this fight is the delta smelt, a three-inch-long fish protected under the Endangered Species Act.

Roughly half of the water that flows through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta is supposed to be left to sustain the delta smelt and the broader environment, and the rest is to be divided for human uses like agriculture and household consumption. But that’s in a normal year; in recent drought years, California has already been making exceptions to regulatory safeguards. The U.S. House of Representatives is now considering a bill to amend the Endangered Species Act and allow even more water to be redirected to the dry Central Valley and Southern California. Even Senate Democrats are  considering a bill that would give the federal government more leeway to divert water for human use.

But as water from the delta makes its way out to the ocean, it doesn’t just nurture the delta smelt.  By supporting the whole ecosystem, it supports fishing industries as well. The health of the delta smelt population is a rough approximation of the health of the ecosystem and other species in it, including salmon, and right now that health is poor. Ironically, even the quality of human drinking water would be negatively affected by diverting more water from the delta for human use.

Letting farmers and other interests use as much water as they want wouldn’t begin to solve the larger problems posed by drought and climate change. It wouldn’t suddenly mean there is more snowpack and rain. It wouldn’t make California any less hot. In fact, this Band-Aid approach might only make California worse off in the decades to come, as megadroughts become a reality; if the state doesn’t figure out how to conserve water now, it will only have more problems down the road.

So it isn’t as simple as Trump promises: “If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.”

Trump and other drought deniers have another thing in common: They tend to ignore the role of climate change in making California’s drought more extreme, and reject climate science altogether. They are certain that the drought is man-made, but they’re still unconvinced that humans have caused climate change.

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Here’s the real story behind Trump’s drought denial

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SFMOMA Is Great, But it Could Be Better

by LenoraSalomons Posted on May 29, 2016

Mother Jones

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Michael O’Hare is delighted with the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but he does have a couple of complaints:

What’s not so great, so far: while it’s free for anyone under 19, standard admission is $25. This is very bad, and a big deal: if you spend that much to get in, you are under pressure to try to see too much and stay too long.

….There is only one open evening a week, otherwise it’s 10-5, which is as silly as a theater programming nothing but matinees. Museums have a disagreeable tradition of being for tourists and the unemployed wives of wealthy businessmen. A museum is the ideal place for a first date, and even to meet new people (no pressure, and lots of stuff to talk about); why make it so difficult to go there after work?

On the second point, this is a good example of my habit of being wary of obvious complaints. I’m certain that every art museum executive in the country is aware of this issue, so it’s pretty unlikely it’s happening out of ignorance or malice. There’s probably a very good reason for it. We’d just have to ask. At a guess, that reason is that it’s been tried by lots of museums before and it’s a steady money loser because nobody comes. I’ll also guess that oldsters like Mike and me might be wrong about kids thinking that SFMOMA would make a dandy first date. Just saying.

The first point is a little different. Sure, high admission prices are also an obvious problem, but I’m surprised museums don’t try a theme park solution that was pioneered by, of all companies, Blockbuster. (Well, that’s the first place I encountered it, anyway.) Keep the price at $25, but make every ticket automatically good for three days. My guess is that this would have a minimal effect on revenue, but for those few who’d like to wander back in a day or two instead of conducting a one-day death march, it would be great. There might be issues with people giving away or selling their tickets after visiting for a day, but I’ll bet there’s a tech solution for that. Silicon Valley is only a few miles away, guys. Maybe every ticket includes a photo. If you don’t want your photo taken, then it reverts to a one-day ticket. This might well be worth giving some more thought to.

And if you’ve made it this far, here’s your reward: San Jose Teen’s Glasses Prank at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Goes Viral. Really, you need to click on this. It’s hilarious. A Sokal hoax for the modern art biz.

Link:

SFMOMA Is Great, But it Could Be Better

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A Brief, Checkered History of Prom in America

by DamianDarden950 Posted on May 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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Do you remember how you were asked to your high school prom? (Or how you asked?) Maybe it was some cheesy romantic gesture. Or maybe it was a very informal conversation that took place near your locker between classes. Either way, it probably wasn’t documented and put online to become a viral hit. America’s prom tradition, instead of fizzling over the years, has only grown more sacred with time. From April to June, prom season reigns in high schools nationwide as juniors and seniors pair up, beautify, and ask older siblings to snag them some bottom-shelf booze to pass around at the after-party. But before party buses, $400 dresses, and hotel ballrooms were a thing, prom was just an annual dance that took place in the school gym under the watchful eye of teacher chaperones. With the season upon us, we decided to take a look back at the history of this peculiar institution.

1920s: The “democratic debutante ball” makes its high school debut. In theory, any student can attend a “promenade”—but teens of color are excluded thanks to Jim Crow and unequal access to education.

1930s: With the Depression in full swing, some Chicago principals cancel prom to ensure poor students aren’t “psychologically wounded.”

1950s: During the postwar boom, one advice book offers a warning: “Girls who try to usurp the right of boys to choose their own dates will ruin a good dating career.”

1960s: Despite the repeal of Jim Crow, white-only proms persist in the South.

1969: Jessica McClintock takes over dressmaker Gunne Sax and becomes America’s prom-dress queen, draping two decades of high school girls in “leg o’ mutton” styles—marked by puffy sleeves and corset bodices.

Sissy Spacek will forever be remembered as the telekinetic teen outcast in the movie Carrie, who gets drenched in pig’s blood at prom. MGM/Red Bank Films

1974: In Stephen King’s Carrie, a telekinetic outcast terrorizes her classmates at the prom. Sissy Spacek stars in the 1976 film.

1975: First daughter Susan Ford hosts prom at the White House. “I was told that we had to choose a band that didn’t have any kind of drug charge,” one organizer recalled later. “It was pretty hard.”

Susan Ford’s White House prom. Joseph H. Bailey/NGS/White House Historical Association

1979: Police in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, show up to protect the first openly gay couple in prom history. “Many students came over and congratulated us,” one of the boys said, despite threats to “tar and chicken feather” the pair.

1980: A Rhode Island senior sues his school after his principal rejects his request to bring a male prom date. A federal judge sides with the boy.

1980s: Hollywood goes gaga for prom flicks, with Valley Girl (1983), Footloose (1984), Back to the Future (1985), and Pretty in Pink (1986).

Jon Cryer and Molly Ringwald in 1986’s Pretty In Pink (left). Nicholas Cage and Deborah Foreman in 1983’s Valley Girl (right). Paramount Pictures, Valley 9000/Atlantic Releasing

1994: A biracial student in Wedowee, Alabama, sues her principal and school board after they threatened to cancel prom to keep interracial couples from attending.

1997: Actor Morgan Freeman offers to cover the cost of a prom in Charleston, Mississippi, so long as all races can attend. No such luck. The city’s proms remain segregated for 11 more years.

2009: Students at Fairfax High in Los Angeles pass over eight girls to select a gay senior boy as prom queen. “Tears were almost falling down my face,” a jubilant Sergio Garcia tells ABC News.

Amy Poehler, as the obsessive mother of popular girl Regina George (Rachel McAdams) in the 2004 hit Mean Girls, snaps a shot of her daughter. Paramount

2013: A group of girls from Georgia’s Wilcox County High holds an all-inclusive prom, eschewing the segregated affairs. The school makes it official in 2014. “The adults should have done this many, many moons ago,” notes the mother of one of the girls.

2016: #promposal is the hot Instagram meme: One student gets a cop to pull a girl over and hand her a “ticket”—his prom invite. Another takes his girlfriend to a gun range, with “yes” and “no” targets set to go.

I’ve got good aim

Others are more creative in design:

Thank you for the most legendary promposal in the 607â&#157;¤ï¸&#143;

A photo posted by Shayna Will (@shayna_will) on May 11, 2016 at 4:50pm PDT

I guess being pulled over isn’t always a bad thing

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A Brief, Checkered History of Prom in America

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Irony Alert: Latinos May Determine Donald Trump’s Fate

by SarahMarquardt Posted on May 3, 2016

Mother Jones

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Call it justicia divina.

After serving for months as punching bags for Republican candidates, Latinos may ultimately decide the outcome of the race. An upcoming report from two GOP consulting firms argues that Latino votes in California could prove decisive in 11 of the state’s 53 congressional districts—a swath that confers more delegates than 20 other states combined. “If Trump is going to be held under 1,237″—the number of delegates needed to avoid a contested convention—”it will largely be the result of Latino Republicans voting against his candidacy,” says Mike Madrid, whose firm, Grassroots Lab, co-authored the report with the GOP analytics firm Murphy Nasica.

Latino Republicans have far more clout than their numbers would suggest. Fewer than 1-in-5 California GOPers is Latino, but Madrid calculates that their primary votes, on average, will be worth a staggering 6.5 times more than those of the average white voter.

This situation stems from the state GOP’s quirky rules. Each congressional district confers three delegates in a winner-take-all election, regardless of how many Republicans live there. So a majority-white district in Orange County with 166,000 Republicans is worth the same as a majority-Latino one in East Lost Angeles with just 30,000 Republicans. In other words, those Republicans living in Democratic districts have the most powerful votes, and a disproportionate number of those Republicans, Madrid calculates, are Latinos.

“Finding Latino Republicans in these districts is like finding the Holy Grail,” he says. “The irony is that those votes have become the most effective and valuable for amassing delegates, but they are extremely hard to find because the party has not been there in these areas for 25 years.”

The Cruz campaign has invested heavily in targeting Latino-heavy districts in the Central Valley, Los Angeles County, and east of San Diego with phone banking and precinct walking. “We are the only campaign that has the organization to do it,” says Mike Schroeder, the campaign’s California co-chair. “It’s not complicated; it’s simple, basic, nuts-and-bolts politics.”

But it’s also an uphill climb for an ultraconservative candidate like Cruz, who has staked out positions on immigration nearly identical to Trump’s. Cruz’s lead among Latino Republicans in California stands at a mere 4 percent and is unlikely to widen much before the June 7 primary, Madrid speculates. “Cruz has built his entire operation in appealing to Southern, white evangelicals,” he says. “It’s too late to pivot.”

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Irony Alert: Latinos May Determine Donald Trump’s Fate

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General Mills is doing GMO labeling, because it’s just easier

by Larae9589jlya Posted on March 18, 2016

General Mills is doing GMO labeling, because it’s just easier

By on 18 Mar 2016commentsShare

General Mills announced Friday that it would start labeling its products containing genetically modified ingredients. You’ll see them on packaging soon, and you can already check the status of your Count Chocula Cereal and Nature Valley Granola Bars at a company website. The move comes ahead of a Vermont law mandating GMO labels in that state, and because there is no easy way to separate products going to one state, the company decided to add labels nationwide.

“We can’t label our products for only one state without significantly driving up costs for our consumers and we simply will not do that,” wrote Jeff Harmening, General Mills’ chief operating officer, on the food giant’s blog.

The announcement follows a failed bid earlier this week by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) to fast-track a bill that would have blocked the Vermont labeling law. The Senate shot down that bill on Wednesday. But the measure is likely to re-emerge in coming months, and could still pass. Apparently, “likely” and “could” aren’t reassuring enough for General Mills.

With the exception of organic companies, the food industry had been united in pushing against mandatory labeling of genetically engineered ingredients. But as the Vermont law comes into effect July 1, companies are beginning to break ranks.

Campbell’s Soup announced earlier this year that it would begin labeling its GMO products, and support either a mandatory labeling law or a voluntary labeling law, as long as it established a national standard. Now General Mills seems to have decided that it can’t gamble on Congress providing a deus ex machina, and followed the lead of Campbell’s Soup. It’s likely that more will join them.

Companies that were marching together are now breaking out of formation. If each company goes its own way there will be much less pressure on Congress to pass a bill blocking labeling.

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General Mills is doing GMO labeling, because it’s just easier

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I’m Now a Certified and Legally Responsible Non-Harasser of Women

by AXIJacinto Posted on February 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Hey, look what I got. That’s right: I’ve completed MoJo’s required course on sexual harassment, no longer limited just to supervisors.

This doesn’t have much practical value, since I work at home and have no one to harass even if I wanted to. Nonetheless, I was eager to take the course. You see, I’m immersed in opinions about PC culture and diversity and the idiocy of it all etc. etc. But I have no personal experience of it. If you’re talking about schools, I graduated 40 years ago and I have no kids. If you’re talking about Silicon Valley or Wall Street, I have no clue about either. If you’re talking about workplace harassment, it never really came up at any of my previous jobs, and I haven’t participated in an actual workplace since 2001.

So how was it? Pretty boring, really. If someone rejects your advances repeatedly, back off. Don’t fire someone for rejecting you. Don’t go into a woman’s cubicle a dozen times of day to take a deep sniff. (Yes, that was a real example.) Don’t spend three hours a day watching hardcore porn in your office. Don’t go around telling black people they’re “articulate” or Asian people that “of course” they’re good at math. Don’t lose your temper. Talk out your problems. Don’t be an asshole.

Of course I, along with almost everyone who reads this blog, is an overeducated know-it-all who finds all this stuff trivially obvious. That’s not true of everyone by a long way, and stuff like this is probably useful for them. This was also a pretty breezy course, not like the 8-hour sessions that are apparently required at some places. (I guess. How would I know?)

Bottom line: I didn’t learn much, but I suppose plenty of people would. And it really wasn’t very onerous. Mostly just common sense, not lefty indoctrination. So what’s everyone complaining about?

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I’m Now a Certified and Legally Responsible Non-Harasser of Women

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