Surprise, surprise, months after cops shoot an activist at a Cop City protest in Georgia, an autopsy reveals that said activist had their hands up when they shot them, which revelation also just so happens to contradict official police testimony about the matter. C’mon, even NPR’s reporting it! Nice to see the very first sentence refers to the activist being “shot and killed by Georgia State Patrol,” though – and maybe I’m just being a jerk about this – that sentence also uses the passive voice. For an active voice example, see the first sentence of this paragraph.
Also surprise, surprise, former Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) – he of the Dodd/Frank financial service reform legislation of 2010 – has lately been trying to ease the banking regulations he worked to pass on behalf of the recently-shuttered Signature Bank. Wait, let me guess: they were my boss, so of course I pushed for lighter regulation!. I would retort that you should never let your source of income capture your values like that. And yeah, that’s hard, but so is anything worth doing.
Amanda Marcotte at Salon instructs us that the recent collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank reminds us that “Tech Billionaires Are Just as Bad as Wall Street Bros.” “Beyond the thin veneer of social liberalism,” she writes, “Silicon Valley libertarians have the same ugly views about the economy that old school Republicans have: the government has no role in regulating business but the taxpayers should be on the hook for bailing out rich people from their own mistakes.” But Ms. Marcotte thinks we might actually be getting over our culture-wide man-crush on tech bros, and I sure hope she’s right. In a sane, moral, and decent society, she would be right.
When I hear that an ivermectin “influencer” suddenly died, likely because of the side effects of taking ivermectin for a decade, I remind myself that one must temper any glee one might have at a jerk getting his final comeuppance, not merely because it isn’t particularly kind, but also because this fellow still has legions of followers, and he’s helped them give ivermectin to children. But we should also temper our glee because when ivermectin abusers rail against “our failed western medicine which only cares about profits and not the cure,” they’re not entirely wrong.
When I hear that Nazi wannabes yelled and screamed and said “sieg heil” at a drag story event for kids, I have to say that I just don’t understand how some people can be so evil. And when I hear these morons claim that drag queens “groom” kids merely by existing, I remember that I watched a lot of Monty Python’s Flying Circus growing up, and it didn’t make me want to dress in women’s clothes any more than it made me want to blow up penguins on top of TV sets.
Finally, Novo Nordisk announces it’ll slash prices of several of its insulin products, and though we’ve got much further to go before we make health care affordable again, never let anyone tell you the Big Stick of Bad PR doesn’t work, or that giving Medicare the power to negotiate drugs doesn’t work. Certainly don't let people tell you that “government doesn’t work.” Obviously it does, if we make it.
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