You know those "parent" groups opposing masks and critical race theory? The chances of them being funded by big dark money groups is actually pretty good. So the next time we see someone who's "just a mom" or "just a dad" getting up and acting all spastic about "kids wearing diapers on their faces," we'd do well to assume some rich school-privatizer might be behind them. And remember that school boards are representative bodies, aiming to, you know, represent parents' will, not give individual, very loud parents all the say about everything. A lot of folks on the right say they just want a voice in the public square when they really want to be the only voice in the public square.
When you confront the awful history of how consolidated farming has become over the last 70 years, you may well be tempted to ask: is there any area where monopolies don't make everything worse? And the answer would be no, there is no area. You may also be tempted to ask what kind of monster looks at a lot of folks farming and call that an "inefficiency" when, really, everyone should be farming. That's not one of the solutions author Zoe Pharo presents, but the others -- among them stopping big ag mergers and creating land trusts -- would do us all some good. Because no one will sit around a campfire one day saying we may not be able to raise crops anymore, but at least food was cheaper for a while, and a few corporate executives got richer!
So why do leisure/hospitality workers seem to be quitting their jobs more than anyone else? Because they get paid in dung pellets, they usually work on nights and weekends, and they constantly have to be nice to everyone, for starters. Now add in the COVID pandemic and its layoffs and furloughs, and having to fight (sometimes physically!) with customers who won't wear masks or get vaccines because they're so much better than the rest of us, and you've got a pretty toxic stew, there. A lot of folks in hospitality go on to get more education (and thus more debt, I fear) or go to work for themselves, which we all ought to do anyway and I wish them luck with that.
Ho hum, our "liberal" media can't stop talking about crime, and can't stop cherrypicking crime stats so we all talk about crime, too. This, even though also this "spike in murders" over the last two years still doesn't meet the standard set by murders between 1970 and 1996, and the answer can't always be "more cops" -- as if "cops" are mere tools we can throw at a problem, and anyway it ought to be "more cops who walk beats," at the very least. And the "awful lot of 'could have's, 'may have's and 'possibly's" author Julie Hollar finds in these arguments just so happen to resemble the could-haves, may-haves, and possiblys you see in right-wing arguments linking immigration with terrorism. Also too, murder is one crime; how are we doing with all the others? Oh, right, all those crime rates have gone down.
Finally, Turkish President/real peach of a man Recep Tayyip Erdogan, confronted with a 36% inflation rate, fired the head of Turkey's statistics agency. Well, I can't wait to see what next month's inflation numbers look like! Seriously, I can think of one guy at Mar-a-Lago who witnessed this and seethed with jealousy, though of course if he becomes President again, he'll do it just so he can declare he single-handedly killed inflation. (The article also tabulates Mr. Erdogan's other recent civil service firings, which I'm sure also makes Mr. Trump jealous.)
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