Murtaza Hussain at The Intercept tells the story of Aswad Khan, whose life the FBI appears to have ruined after he refused to inform for them. It started, apparently, with "repeated" detainment of his known friends and associates, and since our government made it known to all of them that Mr. Khan was the reason for their detainment, they started distancing themselves from him, with some coming to believe that he had done something wrong. And now he's likely on a terror "watchlist," which (as Paul Craig Roberts has reminded us) now has so many people on it that we should be having a 9.11 every day. Needless to say, folks upset at the "nanny state" would better train their ire here than on, say, Social Security or clean water regulations.
Penn State epidemiolgist Suresh V. Kuchipudi discusses the issues surrounding the new Omicron variant of the COVID-19 virus, and in doing so raises the possibility, near the end, "that the unusually high number of mutations could be detrimental to the virus and make it unstable." Anyone who's ever torn down a load-bearing wall in their house could likely relate. (Full disclosure: I have never done that.) Personally I was holding out for "the virus chose the wrong 50 mutations because why should only humans be stupid," but I'd take "the virus mutated so much it couldn't infect very many people," too.
Ho hum, David L. Wilson at FAIR finds that "Media Don't Fact-Check Right-Wing Migration Myths." Lately our "liberal" media has presumed that six-figure settlements over the Trump Administration's family-separation policy -- a policy no longer in effect, remember that detail -- might induce more folks to migrate to the United States, though you can't demonstrate harm by a policy that no longer exists in a court of law. Of course plenty of actual science exists to demonstrate that folks come to America for work, not "frivolous lawsuits," and that science also maps cleanly onto common sense -- folks will work for $10/hour in America when the best job they can get in their home country pays less than that in a day. Also, too, NAFTA killed the Mexican economy, but our "liberal" media hardly remembers.
I should have realized this was going on, but Chris Walker at TruthOut tells us that big corporations have used inflation as an excuse to jack up prices. I mean, if non-financial sector corporate profits go up 37 percent and inflation goes up six percent, you would have every right to wonder whether maybe corporations could simply forego some of their largesse and help keep inflation down. They won't, of course, until we make them, but just remember that inflation (and economics, for that matter) isn't physics -- corporations will eventually use any old excuse to raise prices. Bernie Sanders gets the last word: "(t)he problem is not the worker who got a small raise and a $1,400 check 7 months ago. The problem is corporations making record-breaking profits while 700 billionaires became $2 trillion richer during the pandemic."
Finally, Jonathan Feingold at The Conversation says something fairly provocative: that the anti-critical race theory laws sweeping America actually enable more critical race theory teaching in public schools. I'll happily concede that laws prohibiting teaching that "[o]ne race or sex is inherently superior to another race or sex" give enterprising teachers an opening, but I doubt the school administrators who'll enforce the law will think as subtly as this, and I wonder how many teachers will exploit that opening, knowing that they might eventually win in a court of law, but suffer greatly in the meantime. One hopes it only takes one.
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