Neofascist Giorgia Meloni will be the next Italian Prime minister. I feel I have to write about this being in Rome, but I am clueless as to how it happened (I wasn’t optimistic a year ago – I was expecting authoritarian xenophobe demagogue Matteo Salvini to be the next Italian prime minister — I guess the photo of him wearing a Vladimir Putin T-shirt when on Red Square might have cost him the authoritarian but not that authoritarian vote). A much...
Read More »What News was in My In-Box
Kind of a mixed bag of what news was showing up in My In-Box. It was evenly spread amongst various topics. Ford building a battery plant just like everyone else is planning. Wall Street buying up residential homes. That purchasing of houses will come to no-good for the average citizen. ACA Preventive is under threat by a looney federal judge in Texas and SCOTUS has to decide. Non-Opioid pain treatment sounds like a good idea. If you do not like the...
Read More »Ted Cruz’s School Security Bills
Senate Democrats on a Wednesday back a while ago blocked two bills from Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas). The bills would be using COVID-19 stimulus funds to bolster school security and mental health resources for students. Sounds like a much -needed idea given past circumstances. Cruz’s proposals: The Securing Our Schools Act, which was cosponsored by Sen. John Barrasso (R., Wyo.), would double the number of police officers in public, charter, and...
Read More »Money In Politics
I have two thoughts. The first is that major party presidential candidates would be wise to stop participating in big dollar fundraising events. The second is that we can identify the effect of money on political success, but usually assume that correlation is causation. I think that three major party candidates have seriously hurt themselves while raising money from rich donors. Barack Obama wishes he hadn’t said “clinging”, Mitt Romney wishes...
Read More »Ezra Klein on ARPA-H
As usual it is best to just click and read as the column is well crafted and I can’t summarize or explain well. The topic? “On Monday, President Biden announced that Dr. Renee Wegrzyn, a biotech executive who previously worked at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, better known as Darpa, would be the first director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health, ARPA-H.” Klein is very enthusiastic. I know something about the...
Read More »Crushing an Owner’s Altered Emissions Pickup Truck
“Diesel Ram Owner Crushes Truck After New Jersey DEP Orders Deleted Emissions Fix,” (msn.com), Caleb Jacobs One diesel pickup truck owner was hoping to sell his modified diesel engine pickup truck. Unfortunately, the State of New Jersey DEP would not be issuing a new title unless he restored the pickup truck to its former EPA required condition. The DEP issued a violation to back up their demand. This came after attempting to sell the modified...
Read More »Large Student Loan Resulting from Interest, Fees, and Penalties
Alan Collinge at Student Loan Justice Org. is showcasing on Facebook various people who still have student loans even after the small loan relief. With these student loan holders, the ten or twenty thousand will go to fees, interest, and penalties as they exist or as rolled into loans. Very little (if it does) will touch the loan origination amount. The funds become gifts to the loan industry which originated the loan or the present holder of these...
Read More »On September 17, 1787, they did
“September 17, 2022,” Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson, (substack.com) In 1761, 55-year-old Benjamin Franklin attended the coronation of King George III and later wrote that he expected the young monarch’s reign would “be happy and truly glorious.” Then, in 1776, he helped to draft and then signed the Declaration of Independence. An 81-year-old man in 1787, he urged his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to...
Read More »A Student Loan Story as Told by Kate
This is one of Alan Collinge’s associates who comment on many of his posts. This also reflects a point I bought up a while back on student loan debt. The size of the loan was large and probably could have been handled. The issue is not so much the loan as it is the interest fees, interest upon interest, paying back the interest first, etc. A $10,000 forgiveness will go to the interest first on the student loan debt and never touch the principal....
Read More »Breaking Into Agriculture: Episode 2, Small Scale Multi & Monocrop Farming
With the Breaking Into series we will explore US agriculture, the least complex, the most complex, the failures, frustrations, sustainability, costs, and future of each topic that makes up modern agricutlure. On this episode we are going to explore a more complex, yet still small, system of farming for profit, Small Plot Farming. Small Plot Farming in a name can seem inadequate, small, not useful in the bigger picture of global agribusiness, but...
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