Charity
The Guardian (yes, a well-known left-wing paper) is featuring a month-long "blogging challenge" aimed at discouraging people from volunteering to help orphanages. What? Do we hear lefties saying that orphans might be better off living with their cousins or grandparents, rather than in state-run institutions? Some facts are so obvious they overwhelm even political correctness...
http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/may/16/volunteers-stop-visiting-orphanages-start-preserving-families?CMP=twt_gu
Education
In New York City, it may be hard to fire a teacher for minor matters like failing to come to class...but, for ordering books at his own expense and, worse, asking students to reimburse even part of the cost?
http://nypost.com/2016/05/16/teacher-thrown-out-of-school-for-ordering-kids-books/
Funny Things
If you enjoy singing old songs, these two-liners should bring tears of laughter to your eyes:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/style-invitational-get-lucky-with-a-13-scrabble-point-neologism/2016/05/12/77381464-1620-11e6-aa55-670cabef46e0_story.html
Health
Partisan political prejudice aside, it is hard to assess exactly how toxic glyphosate is to humans, because different individuals react differently to different levels of exposure. That part of the science you can study for yourself. Visit somebody who uses "Roundup" and observe how many different symptoms different members of the family complain of having during the next week. "Hayfever" type reactions may flush airborne carcinogens out of the body efficiently enough to reduce the risk of cancer. Other reactions, including the intestinal laceration that may be caused by eating food "preserved" with glyphosate, seem likely to increase the risk of cancer, specifically of the colon. Brain tumors? Kidney cancer? In order to have absolute proof that glyphosate is "more" of a causative factor than any of the other carcinogens to which we're all exposed, a lot more people will have to die.
http://www.gmwatch.org/news/latest-news/16947
Politics
Slow death of democracy? An overtly biased "progressive" poll asked people whether they supported a "tax cuts package" that included tax cuts "for businesses and for millionaires," or reducing the tax cuts "to provide...cash assistance to low-income families with children." Oh please don't take our cash assistance away, they wailed, not realizing that the larger portion of the higher taxes would be used to bail out the "property management companies," car companies, utility companies, and processed food companies that gouge the money out of their pockets--and keep those prices nice and high, the way the people who can afford to buy the politicians want them.
My take? There's something about modern-style U.S. poverty that "inhibits brain function," as Arthur Brooks put it. "Poverty consumes so much mental energy that people struggling to make ends meet often have little brainpower left for anything else," as a Washington Post writer put it. (Oh, right, Gentle Readers. If you'd funded this web site better I would've written the Great American Novel by now!) In fact, when nobody is pushing the welfare-cheat lifestyle on them, people living in extreme poverty show extreme creativity in thinking of ways to reduce their own poverty. They invent ways of terracing and hydroponic gardening and recycling and generally turning garbage into pennies. But when people can get certain "needs" met only as long as they tune out their awareness of how much they're sacrificing to those "needs"...this does require that many brain circuits be shut down.
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/city-desk/blog/20780213/poll-majority-of-dc-residents-support-slowing-tax-cuts-to-boost-social-services
For some reason this Wordpress site doesn't want to take my comment: "This hurts me too, because the state of Maryland treated me like an "unpaid caregiver"...People who care for disabled family members at home *deserve* more than a paltry $55K for home health care, but the bottom line is, the U.S. can't afford it. Candidates Clinton and Sanders can't deliver it; they're talking about it in the hope of attracting votes, but we'd be lucky if, as a nation led by either of them, we were able to maintain disability pensions for the most severely disabled."
http://thesavvyage.com/paid-leave-for-family-caregivers-remains-elusive-from-government/
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