Despite the snark, I sometimes miss it. Teaching, I mean, not grading.
Happy Grading to those who celebrate
Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja
Divestment at Yale
Well, they say it’s kinda frightenin’
How this younger generation swings
You know it’s more than just some new sensation
Well, the kid is into losin’ sleep
And he don’t come home for half the week
You know it’s more than just an aggravation
–Van Halen, “And the Cradle Will Rock…”
Yale Daily News, December 8:
Yale students overwhelmingly pass divestment referendum
Continue readingThe Yale College Council announced today that the student body has passed the divestment referendum by a large margin.
Bienvenidos a la Resistencia
Witherspoon Presbyterian Church
Princeton, New Jersey
I joined the Defensa del Barrio committee yesterday of my local Resistencia chapter–in “defense of the neighborhood,” also known by its slogan, ICE Out of Princeton. It reminds me that when I was in fifth grade, I wrote a short story in which my friends and I were forced to some woodland redoubt just outside of town, to organize resistance to hostile forces that had somehow taken over. I guess the adults had dropped the ball, leaving the defense of the town in our hands. I don’t remember who the hostile forces in my story were, or what we ended up doing about them. I just find myself wondering whether the story was coincidence or prescience.
Continue readingA Dispiriting Day in the OR
I started an “EVS Journal” back in 2020, when I worked in environmental services in the operating room of a small community hospital in west-central New Jersey. I ended up posting the first three entries of the Journal here at Policy of Truth (1, 2, 3), but posted the majority on Facebook under a private setting, largely to avoid repercussions at work. I’ve decided to start posting edited versions of them here, for whatever interest they might still have.
EVS Journal #4
December 4, 2020
A dispiriting day in the OR. It had nothing to do with the case load, which was moderately heavy in a normal way, but arose from something I’ve so far avoided mentioning in my daily missives here: the War Between the Shifts. I trained on the day shift (8:30-5) but now work on the night shift (technically, 3-11:30, but more like 3 to midnight). Each shift has a different supervisor, but the de jure supervisor of the day shift outranks the de facto supervisor at night. Continue reading
UHC, Denials, and Death
This post has been superseded by a new and improved version written a few days later (Dec. 18, 2024).
Let me just get straight to the point: I have a real worry about how people are reacting to the UHC killing. It’s not the usual worry that we’re being mean to Brian Thompson. It’s that a lot of what people are saying shows a misunderstanding of how the health insurance denials process works. I work in health care denials management on the provider side, and have in fact dealt with UHC‘s denials reps. I have no sympathy for them or for the insurance industry generally. UHC is the apex predator in an industry of predators. But on the whole, I don’t think it makes sense to say that insurance denials kill people. I’ll grant that excess mortality and morbidity are possible through an insurance denial, but death-through-denial is not the modal case of premature death or even close to it, and it’s a mistake to suggest otherwise. Continue reading
Divestment and Complicity
I’ve reproduced a comment of mine below the fold from the website of Princeton Alumni Weekly, responding to critics of the student divestment campaign described in my previous post. One critic had said: “I fail to see why students on campus should vote on how the University invests its funds.” Another had said: “Students shouldn’t be ‘running’ the University any more than alumnae/alumni should. Leave investing to the experts hired by the University to manage the endowment funds.” Continue reading
Divestment at Princeton
Princeton’s Silence Is Our Weapon
I’m happy to report that Princeton University’s undergraduate student Referendum #5 has passed by a margin of 68% to 32%. A referendum has to win at least 65% of the vote to pass, so this one did. The referendum calls on the University to disclose and divest all direct and indirect holdings in companies involved in weapons development, manufacturing, or trade, giving first priority to disclosing and divesting direct holdings in Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX (formerly Raytheon), and General Dynamics, weapons manufacturers with documented ties to human rights violations. It also calls on the university to increase communication and accountability on socially responsible investments with the student body and campus community. Continue reading
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Genocide
Work colleague A asserted the following in all seriousness to work colleague B, who related it to me:
All Palestinians are terrorists, and should be killed.
Granted, he was TUI at the time: talking under the influence of Fox News.
This is a slice of life from the “woke” corporation, where DEI mandates supposedly rule the day, and everyone supposedly cowers in fear that some innocuous comment of theirs might offend someone. In other words, welcome to the real-world corporate workplace, where 99.44% of the time, that woke-totalitarian scenario is just a right-wing fever dream.
Clearly, we need a new acronym. Call it “DEI + G”–Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Genocide.
Nothing new, really. Nothing I haven’t heard for the last fifty years. Just never thought to blog it before. A slice of life from a pie that some of us have been forced to eat all our lives.
Pete Hegseth is (Half) Right
Everywhere one looks, commentators are aghast at Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense. But as usual when it comes to defense matters, everyone is wasting their energies on the wrong questions. Hegseth has become notorious for his view that women should not play combat roles in the US military. This pointless red herring has now become the centerpiece of opposition to him. How could he believe such a thing? How could he say it? What kind of cretin rejects the universal belief that women should serve in combat roles in the US military? Continue reading
No Tears for Zvi Kogan
If you look at virtually any mainstream media outlet this morning (The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Forward, Fox News, The Times of Israel, The Jerusalem Post, etc.), you’re likely to encounter a story about the “murder” of one Rabbi Zvi Kogan in Dubai. Apparently, Kogan was abducted on Thursday and killed sometime between then and now. His body was found early this morning, Dubai time. Every “Western” outlet I’ve looked at his played this story in an identical way, one that essentially follows the PR line of the Israeli government: Kogan was a rabbi, a man of religion and peace. He was in Dubai to do outreach work on behalf of Israel–hence The Jewish People–to the Arab world. For this the good man was slain. His murder was a vile act of anti-Semitic terrorism, and that’s all it was. Let us all condemn the act, and let us all weep for the loss of the deceased, an innocent civilian lost to the murderous Jew haters of the Arab world. Continue reading
Policy of Truth 