Kangaroo Court
SCOTUS? More like SCROTUS, thanking the Mets, joining the bread line, and other thoughts.
It’s 3 am.
I’ve been napping all week, trying to claw back some of the energy I’ve lost worrying about my dad’s health for the past month. Couple that with the back-breaking news of my impending layoff from my day job, and let’s just say that I’m not exactly feeling 100% right now.
I have a bit of a bug up my ass because I’m tired and cranky.
If you’re reading this blog for the first time, may G-d have mercy on your soul and your eyes.
Back in the glory days of the Biden presidency, the federal government was getting ready to forgive outstanding student loan debt for millions of borrowers. It was a key campaign promise from 2020, and Joe Biden was finally ready to come through. Secretary of Education Dr. Miguel Cardona began executing this initiative through a provision granted to his agency under the Higher Education Act of 1965 to wipe away $10,000 of student loan debt for every borrower in the US making less than $250,000 a year. Those who received a Pell Grant could qualify for up to $20,000 in debt forgiveness. I know this because I was in that latter group, and my balance of $25,000+ at the time suddenly looked like it was going to come down to just 5,000 by the end of 2022.
Long before Trump Administration Part Deux, the vultures on the Supreme Court began dismantling Biden’s chances of hanging onto his mandate to clear the way for Daddy to re-ascend the throne on Pennsylvania Avenue. Thanks to infamous sexual predator Clarence Thomas, Harlan Crow’s favorite sugar baby, and the five other miscreants serving at the behest of the religious right, I was collateral damage in the conservative takeover of the highest court in the land, the single-most powerful buffer against executive overreach.
I’m not sure why I’m surprised by their latest crime against decency in which they gave the president as much power as possible to be a racist assclown and deport whomever he wants to at will, but once again, I join the millions of other Americans embarrassed by this nation’s continued insistence on punishing everyone BUT the child rapist in office and his enablers/co-assailants.
Biden v. Nebraska didn’t hurt me as much thanks to being gainfully employed until next Friday, but this latest travesty from the court tears right into this nation’s soul. And though I’m neither Haitian nor Syrian, one of this country’s core principles has been upended. Said principle is the very reason I’m even here in the first place.
My great-grandfather arrived in 1913 as an 18-year-old tailor to live a life he had no chance of attaining in his native Ukraine. Jews were second-class citizens, unable to receive an education, own property, or work in certain professions all because of Tsar Nicholas II’s anti-semitism. Had he stayed behind in his shtetl for another five years, he could have perished in the midst of the Russian Revolution. Two decades later, he would have ended up in a mass grave under the jackboots of Nazi occupiers. Point being, I know just how close one can be obliterated before ever coming into existence depending on when and where you were born.
And that’s coming from a white heterosexual American man in 2026. That’s the equivalent of winning the lottery three times in one lifetime.
Hell, just ask the raging shithead president about his own lineage! HE, TOO, IS THE PRODUCT OF IMMIGRATION! That’s what is so fucking maddening about all of this. No one person or group of bad-faith cynics should hold the cards for so many people trying to achieve the very American dream promised to them, the main calling card for why America is supposedly so great in the first place. The land of milk and honey, where the streets are paved with gold, the great American melting pot, etc.
Anyone wearing a shitty MAGA hat made in China should be barred from ever parroting those myths again. You voted for this bullshit, and you deserve to be ridiculed for doing so until you no longer draw breath.
I don’t wish to linger on the negatives in life right now despite having plenty of valid reasons to do so, so instead of fretting over the likely coming series loss/sweep at the hands of the Milwaukee Brewers this weekend, I’d like to take a moment to thank the New York Mets for letting me fall back in love with my baseball team, at least for a week.
This Cubs season has been a farcical parody of a Greek tragedy, resplendent with injuries to all the pitchers and even a few position players. But despite being a walking M*A*S*H* unit, Chicago managed to demolish the Mets for four straight games, sweeping the season series 7-0 and ending Carlos Mendoza’s tenure as New York’s manager. They even plucked longest-tenured Met David Peterson right off the roster! The Mets committed six errors in one game, including one from each infielder. They were outscored 33-17 at home despite outhomering the Cubs 10-5 in those four games. Dansby Swanson personally victimized them for 15 RBI, the most by any player ever in a single series versus the Mets. Swanson is in the midst of his worst year in baseball, but against the Mets, he was Ernie Banks:
I found myself thanking the Mets out loud for handing the Cubs three runs in the final game of the series due to a combination of boneheaded errors and perfectly placed pop-ups to Marcus Semien. Having spent my whole playing career in little league and rec league, game recognize game. The Mets couldn’t win the Little League World Series let alone make the actual playoffs. They’re by far the worst team in MLB, not for their record (the Rockies are a league-worst 32-50 at the moment), but for their record in relation to owning the second-highest payroll behind only the Dodgers. They’re basically baseball’s version of the Reflecting Pool: Vastly overpaid by incompetent morons and toxic to anything they touch.
Of course, I have little room to talk considering the Cubs have been dwelling in the basement of their own division despite having baseball’s eighth-highest payroll. And sure, the Mets have also been plagued by injuries. Still, getting clobbered at home by the A’s should have been Mendoza’s final failure long before this week. You just can’t be this awful with that roster. It’s not allowed. And he learned the hard way that no matter how badly your players execute in the field, the hammer typically comes down on the manager first.
Come to think of it, I empathize with Mendoza. We’ll be in the same boat on Independence Day this coming weekend. I, along with one other colleague of nearly five years, will be out of work thanks to shitty bosses, an old company with zero clue of how to compete in its respective industry, and the faults of owners with no clear path to fix the mess they created. A year prior, they had already laid off our previous boss, the guy who founded our department and had been with the company for ten years, so it was clear then that our days were numbered. I’ve been doing my day job since 2021, and my current career since 2017, and from the moment I entered this field, we were warned about the rise of AI. Long before slop bots began creating gaudy fake artwork, literal child porn, or kitschy songs about San Juan, AI crept into our industry ever so menacingly. It made our workloads faster and then eventually nonexistent. It got to the point that in between waiting for emails containing one of two or three assignments for the week, if I were so lucky, I was editing pieces for this very blog. It wasn’t out of laziness, but out of a literal lack of work. We were inevitably asked to incorporate AI into our workload. People we’d rarely interacted with were suddenly asking for pointers about how we do our jobs, as if they were trying to inform someone (or something) of how we do our work.
About two months ago, our boss subtly cautioned us to start looking for new opportunities.
The writing wasn’t so much on the wall as it was flashing in bright red letters in front of our faces. We knew this was coming. In my case, I just didn’t know it would be coming with my father still in the hospital while waiting to undergo a major procedure the very next day.
Corporate America is the purest form of capitalism on Earth, and it demonstrates its lack of fucks given towards employees every single day. We’re not a new story, just a continuation of the narrative that’s remained unchanged for too long.
I guess the good news is I’ll have some time to write on Substack.
If you’ve made it to the end, thank you for your support. It means more than you can imagine, especially now. I don’t have a set plan of what I want to do other than find gainful employment with good health insurance, but I do know that I want to keep this space going for as long as I can. I haven’t turned on paid subscriptions yet, but if you have already pledged a subscription, don’t be shocked by a statement on your credit card. It may be coming sooner than you think!