Love to see a billionaire address coastal California’s housing issues by funding a beachside clinical-depression pen filled with windowless rooms for young people. independent.com/2021/10/28/arc…
“So the campus fronts the Pacific Ocean …”
“… okay?”
“… but we’re short of housing …"
“… right, so …”
“We need a way to help students stuck living in trailers or cars.”
“Got it. I have a brilliant idea. Jeeves, get the blueprints!”
“Hey Siri, show me the problem with a wealth-hoarding gerontocracy?”
Seriously: from Hope Ranch beach earlier this summer, I could see across the water to the site of UCSB (pictured below).
A billionaire wants to put kids who need campus housing into hundreds of windowless rooms _here_? Are people daft?
Previously, in “the UC system should just build some normal d*mned housing”:
The ‘critical race theory’ panic is essentially the upscale companion brand of ‘Great Replacement’ talk. It gives those trying to mobilize people who see themselves as part of the gentry, rather than the rabble, a way to dress racialized fear in safe, khaki-and-fleece garb.
That reality explains why we see the likes of Sully fanning the flames of ‘critical race theory’ panic—and why Fox constantly switches between serving up lite, easier-going CRT messaging on its dayside & Tucker’s uncut white-nationalist rhetoric at night. mediamatters.org/white-national…
Both lines of racialized nonsense share the same root fear: that some radical other is imposing a foreign culture or mode of thought on our children, and ‘we’ need to stop it. See what Sully wrote again:
This column by @ddayen — which berates the tendency by Congress (or Dems in Congress, more properly) “to resolve longstanding policy issues by erecting complicated systems that an untutored public must navigate” — is spot on. nytimes.com/2021/10/26/opi…
A thought that’s stayed on my mind through the protracted negotiations over BBB is the imperative of driving home to key Dem decision makers that we—despite our educations, our experience, our standardized-test verified wisdom—are not so smart.
What I mean by this: with our big brains, Dem wonks have the brainpower to work up the most byzantine policy designs. But whatever brilliance gets put to paper by Congress — the proposal to run paid leave through private insurance companies, for instance — has to get executed.
John Roberts might be the wrongest man alive in the United States today — yet he heads a branch of the federal government.
What the GOP proposes in Alabama is ridiculous. Its map splits Jefferson Co. (the state’s most populous) in half, bundles the wealthy Shelby Co. suburbs with lower-income Blount Co. — and stretches the traditional Birmingham district through the Black Belt almost to Mobile.
I’d have thought at any point in my life before recent times that such deaths would fill the headlines. Instead, they make a mere backdrop for, tonight alone, four stories that depict a country set morally adrift:
We are cursed, it appears, to live in interesting times.