This non-review of Ray Raphael's A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence ​can also be found on Goodreads.

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Like most of the "People's History" catalog, Raphael's 2001 dive into the American Revolution is not an easy read, but it's an important one for anyone who knows that history is truly shaped by the masses and only focused through the actions of vanguards and élites. Major spoiler: Working people, women, and non-whites suffer a lot, and the aristocracy mostly benefits.

The legendary Sons of Liberty who planned and executed the Boston Tea Party were mostly upper- and middle-class Bostonians. They and the aristocrats in the Continental Congress and the officer corps, took major gambles to uphold certain principles of freedom and democracy. It took ten years for the gamble to pay off, during which time less fortunate folks in the colonies suffered various forms of privation, violence, and treachery. The People at Large, including millions of darker-skinned people, didn't get their share of the spoils. Freedom and democracy are much nicer if you have adequate food and shelter.

The chapters are arranged to explore the sufferings of:

1. Rank-and-File Rebels
2. Fighting Men and Boys
3. Women
4. Loyalists and Pacifists
5. Native Americans
6. African Americans
7. The Body of the People (this is more of a summary that ties the above together in an intersectional perspective)

Chapter 5 was the one I found most depressing, a relentless march through the many painful ways indigenous peoples got screwed out of their lands, liberties, and lives. Some of the screwing resulted from well-intentioned whites, whether on the Colonial or British side, forming alliances with the various nations and leading them into ruin. Divided loyalties brought the centuries-old Iroquois Confederation to a pitiful end. The closest thing to good news for natives is the one Raphael saves for last: The Catawba of South Carolina earned and received the respect of their white neighbors during and after the war. After about a generation of peaceful coexistence, the Catawba Nation faded away through a combination of not-so-benign neglect and white westward expansion chipping away at their territory.

If nothing else, read APHotAR for the impressive assemblage of primary sources—at-length excerpts of letters, journals, and memoirs from regular people in the revolutionary period.

There's something I've been meaning to tell y'all. I just haven't got around to it, because I'm having trouble getting around to much of anything lately. On top of my chronic depression, I now have a bad case of unemployment, combined with the nagging feeling that I have failed at life.

My job, along with a dozen others' at our small private university, has been outsourced to a company that takes over information technology functions for institutions of higher learning seeking to save some money. Only half the IT crew at the University of St. Thomas remains, all as contractors for Ellucian. The IT help desk is now a 24-hour operation, with calls re-directed to Ellucian personnel in New York and India.

Without going into too much detail, let's just say that UST has been struggling financially for several years. For a while, its graduate education and counseling programs were its steadiest sources of revenue, but then even that started to drop off. Eventually you run out of classroom teachers willing to fork over $100K for a relatively easy masters degree to become counselors and principals, especially when there are no more openings for counselors and principals.

UST is certainly not alone in the struggle: Private colleges and universities all over the US have had trouble making all their ends meet their means, with the exception of the extremely well endowed institutions like Rice and Harvard. Four-year colleges and universities as a whole are losing market share to community colleges and those dreadful for-profit degree mills with no admission standards other than willingness to incur mountains of debt.

We IT wranglers hadn't heard anything lately about possible cuts in our department in quite some time. Then, in January of this year, with an hour's notice we were called into a mandatory meeting, at which the university president announced that Ellucian was taking over, and that we were all guaranteed two more months of employment, after which those who remained would become Ellucian employees.

My assessment of the situation, backed up by others in the department, was that I would be kept on, that indeed it would be downright stupid to try to maintain the Blackboard Learning Management System without my experience and rapport with faculty members helping instructors use Blackboard to its maximum potential for online and hybrid courses. Ellucian thought otherwise. But the transition team did not inform me of their decision until 12 March, three days before the big switch-over was to be completed. They also informed me that only one of the six on my team would be retained, and that they had not even hired a person to take over the training and instructional design aspects. So the database administrator who remains is now responsible for the whole shootin' match.

So, as of next Monday, Kayleen and I are both without income, without health insurance, and generally without prospects. In my five years at UST, the IT training game has changed big-time, and unfortunately I have not changed with it. We are not entirely without savings, thanks to Kayleen's cashing out her Texas Teacher Retirement System funds, but we will not need to use that pile just to get through this year.

For about 14 months, during which Kayleen and I had proper salaries, we were starting to recover from our combined years of un- and under-employment, paying down some long-term debts. However, as a wise man once said, "The best-laid plans of mice and men get fucked over by late-stage capitalism."

As I constantly remind myself, a dozen of my co-workers are also suffering, suddenly unable to make mortgage or car payments or to put their children through college.

It really chaps my ass that education has become so commodified, mainly because the whole capitalist framework has us all convinced that A Degree Is Absolutely Necessary To Be Hired For Any Real Job—or even to be a barista at Starbucks, where your masters gives you an advantage over the mere baccalaureates competing for the position.

In a previous post or two, I have griped about adjunctification—i.e., the trend toward hiring adjunct instructors on a part-time basis rather than tenure-track faculty. Adjuncts might teach a class or two at four different schools, working for piddly wages, with no benefits from any of them. People pursue doctoral degrees because they love research or teaching, not because they expect to reap riches from it, but they should be able to earn a decent living for all their dedication.

These are mere symptoms of the rot infecting education at all levels. It's not about producing productive, job-ready citizens of the world; it's about the bottom line. Students are just revenue streams. Kayleen could tell you some horror stories about the several tricks the University of Houston System employed to screw her out of getting a masters degree, and how much money they made in doing so when they made her repeat courses she had already passed elsewhere.

Meanwhile, UST is moving full-steam toward NCAA Division III athletics, with its new or revived baseball and tennis programs—sports on which even the big schools routinely lose money. Priorities, y'know.

This nation of ours is so thoroughly screwed.

I'm taking some time off from this, hoping to get back at it in about a month. I'll still be active and opinionated on Facebook & Twitter.

This is me not caring about the Democratic race for the 2020 presidential nomination—not caring so hard that I'm writing about it again.

To be more precise, I am writing yet another post about Tulsi Gabbard, the candidate whose rhetoric thus far best embodies progressive ideals—yes, better than Bernie in that regard. And she delivers that rhetoric so calmly and smoothly. I'm beginning to wonder if she ever raises her voice to be heard over a cheering crowd.

This morning, inspired by the clip of Rep. Gabbard on The View, I took to Twitter and hammered out a nine-part thread. Rather than link to the tweets or embed them, I figured I should preserve them here. As of this afternoon, to my complete lack of surprise, Gabbard has yet to respond. She and her crew keep a rather busy schedule.

This was also inspired in part by a recent reminder in a secret Facebook group: The author of the post referred to Gabbard as a "tool of empire" and warned that as long as she remains a Democrat she will play a sheep-dog role in the campaign after the party nominates yet another centrist warmonger.

Figueredo has a lot to say about this View segment; Kulinski has even more. The first portion of her appearance is below the fold.

The 2020 General Election is less than 21 months away! The first primaries happen in less than a year! The first debates may happen in four months! And I still don't care!

The more the major network news vomitoria try to handicap the Democratic presidential reality show/beauty pageant—collecting polling numbers about undeclared and even speculative candidates, and completely omitting some who have declared—the more eagerly I want to push that shit away. MSNBC has given Tulsi Gabbard some air time, and that's probably for the last time.

The closest I get to caring about the 2020 mess concerns what strategies the Texas Greens or Movement for a People's Party might concoct toward a ballot access drive. In Texas, the collection of petition signatures begins the day after the state primary in March, with a statutory duration of 75 days. Crikey, if only the whole presidential campaign lasted a mere 75 days!

As Humanist Report sage Mike Figueredo admonishes us, be prepared in the coming months for a succession of disappointments from your progressive Democrat idols. In this video, I like the way he paints Barbara Lee as an "establishment progressive"—i.e., one who takes boldly leftish positions fairly consistently but still gravitates toward "viable" candidates like her fellow Californian Kamala Harris.

For amusement value, meanwhile, I recommend PDiddie's now-weekly takes on America's Next Top Democrat:

• today
• 8 Feb.
• 1 Feb.
• 23 Jan.
• 20 Jan.

On this St. Valentine's Day, I feel as if I should be addressing the issue of love, the most powerful force on earth. Kayleen gave me a lovely Valentine card this morning; I took her to the Chocolate Bar last night (which hardly makes it a special occasion, we're kinda regulars there). Instead, I'm thinking about a song from 1980, recorded just after Joe Jackson's "Sunday Papers" and well before Don Henley's "Dirty Laundry."

On both occasions I've seen Robyn Hitchcock perform live, he has made winking references to his admiration for Bryan Ferry. Ferry co-founded Roxy Music with Brian Eno and a guitarist named Phil Manzanera, who was born in London but spent part of his childhood in Venezuela. So there's the connection, I guess.

Allow me to confess right here that I have never been to Venezuela. I have known a few people from that oil-rich country, all of them from relatively privileged backgrounds. From them I have heard varying opinions on Hugo Chávez and the Bolívarian Revolution, as well as varying impressions on the economic situation there. What they have said certainly varies more than what I've been able to glimpse from mainstream media and analyses of MSM coverage.

From my cushy middle-class existence in the US, I have been rooting for the Revolution to succeed since its beginnings, despite misgivings about Chávez's autocratic tendencies. Since crude oil prices dropped six years ago, a drop from which they have yet to rebound, Team Bolívar isn't doing so well. Why have I been rooting for it? Why do I even care? Because I remember.

Anti-Semitic. I don't think that it means what you (knee-jerk Zionists and AIPAC beneficiaries in Congress) think it means.

​The relevant portion of Camp & Goldfield's podcast, embedded below, begins at about 39:30.

Five weeks into her first term in Congress, Rep. Ilhan Omar has dived into some hot water, and of course Twitter was quickly on fire over it. She was not pushed into that hot water. Her Twitter were impolitic and ill-advised, but not wrong and definitely not anti-Semitic in content. Nonetheless, her own party's leadership quickly and very publicly began throwing her under a whole procession of buses.

The story just broke yesterday, and I caught up with most of it this morning. Kyle Kulinski recorded a special rant about it, just a talking-head-and-smartphone video not on his regular Secular Talk set. There are plenty of other progressive takes, including The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald and Mehdi Hasan, saying essentially the same thing: All Omar has done is tell the truth.