September, 2022 archive
A Class Act 0
The Portland Press-Herald’s Victoria Hugo-Vidal thinks that the sentiment agains President Biden’s student loan forgiveness is rooted in concepts of social class, that those who are being helped are somehow the “undeserving poor.”
Methinks she is on to something. Follow the link for her reasoning.
That Inconvenient Past 0
Writing at NOLA.com, Walter Kimbrough offers a perspective on President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. He argues forcefully that those who are shouting that Biden’s program is somehow “not fair” forget (or, I would suggest, are intentionally blind to) past unfairness. Here’s a bit of his piece; follow the link for the rest:
It isn’t fair that those same HBCUs were unequally funded, a practice that has continued for over 50 years. For example, between 1957 and 2007, Tennessee State University did not receive its matching state funding . . . .
He Wore the Grey 0
Warning: Short promo at the end.
I had ancestors who wore the grey.
They were wrong then, and those who would emulate them are wrong now.
Merchants of Death 0
At the Roanoke Times, Virginia Tech professor George McDowell tells the tale of “Big Pharma’s” equally toxic cousin, “Big Arma.”
Uncomfortable Truths 0
The aberrant abhor accuracy.
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
The Associated Press’s Gillian Flaccus runs the numbers. A snippet:
“We already had 400 million guns in circulation. So when you bump that up and include a lot of first-timers in the population, you get accidents, you get precipitous behavior, you get people reacting to small insults and conflicts with their guns because they’re in their pocket now,” he said.
What’s in a Word? 0
The Angry Grammarian parses President Biden’s recent speech about the danger posed by what he referred to as “MAGA Republicans.”
It is a worthwhile read.
Blast from the Past 0
We have been watching the old NBC show Emergency on Cozi TV, which is available on our cable.
I remember watching the show when I was a grad student at UVa in Charlottesville and could get only one station, the Richmond NBC affiliate, on my television in my basement apartment in a student slum.
It is hardly the best-acted or best-written show, but I liked it then and I like it now.
I think one reason I like it is that almost all the characters are good guys, who are either trying to help the victims of misfortunes or are, indeed, the victims themselves. And it has frequent doses of humor.
Sure, there is the occasional character who is a jerk, but never a character who is truly a villain.
I’m enjoying seeing it again.
All the News that Fits, Suffer the Children Dept. 0
Sam and his crew examine the right-wing disinformation campaign against the Children’s Hospital of Boston.