When I was a kid, one of my teacher’s husband owned a small toy store. Even back then it was unique because he also repaired our toys. Fast-forward forty years and that store is no longer there. In fact, Toys Are Us has closed their doors and no one repairs toys anymore. No one delivers ice or milk door to door. Sears is virtually dead and Montgomery Ward is dead too. Blockbuster Video came and went along with the other mom and pop video stores.

Change is a part of history. Usually it is for the better, but I suppose that’s debatable. We can make our own ice now. We can drive the few minutes to the grocery store to get our milk. We can stream just about any movie we want any time we want. However, every once in awhile we miss that personal touch that those people brought to us.

That’s likely the psychology at play when conservatives fight tooth and nail to keep coal and gas alive. Trains are probably the only major thing that uses coal. Even many of them don’t do that anymore. Homes certainly don’t use coal anymore and there are fewer coal miners in the United States than people working at JC Penny. Anyone that’s been in a JC Penny lately knows how patently absurd that is..

So, coal is literally dead industry walking. People usually call those zombies. I don’t want to underscore the fear and anxiety that is caused by being a part of a dying industry. What do I do now? What else am I trained for? How do I feed my family? These are questions that have historically had answers, but those answers didn’t come overnight. Politicians could help in that regard, but they are too busy feeding that anxiety.

That brings us to oil and gas. A high school classmate of mine published a picture of the gas prices where he lives. They were over nine dollars a gallon. We can calmly explain rudimentary concepts of supply and demand. We can calmly explain that we knew this would happen. They taught us this in social studies classes. Fossil fuels are a finite resource. One day they will be gone. I don’t know exactly when that day will be, but I know we’ve been discussing it for at least forty years.

Another of his friends chose to lambast the Green New Deal. It has become the bogeyman for those resistant to change. He said there was no way that our infrastructure could handle a nation full of electric cars. So, somehow the left is responsible for the market collapsing before our very eyes. Then, we get the not so subtle misunderstanding of what the Green New Deal was all about. We also get to the not so gentle misunderstanding of why that infrastructure is not currently in place.

The Green New Deal is not even a single piece of legislation really. The whole idea is that we know coal and gas will go away and needs to go away. We know the environment can’t withstand unlimited amounts of emissions. We know that renewable energy is ultimately safer, cheaper, and better for the environment. We know that it would lead to energy independence. We know if we start making the transition now then those working in those industries can make smoother transitions to something else.

This post was written by our friend Deb T.  

A few days ago, Republicans in Ohio passed a change to state law under the guise of protecting girls sports. Now whenever you hear the phrase, “protecting girls sports,” it should give you pause. This is no exception.

Click the little one to see the big one.

.

Apparently, Greg Abbott couldn’t get enough volunteers so he had to hire people to campaign for him.

It did not work out as well as he suspected.

WATCH THIS:
"Everybody's gotta have a job, sir."@GovAbbott has to pay canvassers who don’t even support him due to no one volunteering.
pic.twitter.com/KJTph0kalG

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) June 4, 2022

Enjoy!

Others have commented on the police response in Uvalde, but I have not. I have been waiting for facts, but there have been so few up to this point. We know a few things. First, we know that the shooter went in through a back door, we know parents begged officers to go in, and we know they did not go in for over an hour. We should probably take each of those points one at a time because each has been a huge part of this story. It was initially reported that the shooter went through a door that had been propped open by a rock. As it turned out, she closed the door and naturally assumed it was locked to those outside. Apparently, it wasn’t.

As an aside, I went through this exercise with our daughter. We had her mentally track how many doors students could legally enter at her school and settled on four. We then asked her how many total points of entry there were and settled on fourteen. Keep in mind that there are around 130,000 documented schools in the United States. That’s not counting universities and community colleges. Could you imagine the expense and manpower it would take to guard each of those doors (even just the legal ones) and to secure the rest?

Let’s pretend that your junior highs and high schools have two points of entry and exit and all the rest are successfully locked down. Let’s go with what Ted Cruz suggested and have one point of entry at the elementary schools. Mind you, this would violate fire code and present other possible dangers, but can you imagine the manpower we are talking to have an armed guard at each of those doors? We are talking about over 200,000 people.

The second fact we know is that parents begged to save their children and cops refused. Did they do the right thing? I obviously wasn’t there, haven’t had any combat training, and certainly haven’t game played through any hostage negotiations. Would there have been more dead had the police breached the school and engaged the shooter sooner? Would they have saved more lives doing that? We will never know on both counts.

What is true in this light is how absurd an idea it is to arm teachers. I can count far too many reasons why this is an absolutely horrible idea. Let’s assume that the teacher is trained to fire their weapon as those on the right have suggested. That alleviates only one concern. The second concern would be storage of the weapon. Do you want them to store it on their person or keep it secured somewhere in their classroom? What happens if they or that location is compromised?

Then we move onto the actual gaming of the mass shooter scenario. They may be trained to shoot, but are they trained in that specific scenario? What does SWAT do when they see an armed intruder AND armed teachers? What happens if a teacher has a mental breakdown and become the shooter themselves? Even in the best of cases we encountered a situation where trained police felt powerless to do anything. Whether they were negligent or justified is important but also very telling when you consider what you are asking untrained teachers to do.

There is always a non-zero chance the worst will occur and there always will be a non-zero chance no matter what we do. We start with the most obvious thing and move are way down from there. Restricting the gun is the most obvious thing. Door control, armed teachers, and armed soldiers sounds lovely but ultimately ineffective without doing the obvious thing.

Now that Johnny Depp’s trial is over, maybe we can spend a few minutes on other issues not as important as celebrity mud slinging on national television.  A classified intelligence report is being talked about now in the press and it concerns Vladimir Putin, and it’s not pretty.  Intelligence officers who’ve read the report and who are talking to the press about it say this:

• In March, there was an assassination attempt on Putin by insiders.  Unfortunately it apparently failed.
• In April, Putin underwent treatment (some say surgery) for “advanced cancer”.  Physically he appears to be pretty frail and I recall video during his big Victory Day celebration last month he had a blanket over his lap.
• There are rumors (unconfirmed) of his impending death, and there is a lot of jockeying going on in the Kremlin.
• US intelligence is somewhat blinded now because of all the sanctions but they are staying very active as a power vacuum can be a very dangerous time.

I’ll bet that TFG is a little nervous at the prospect of losing his handler.  The new guys may not be as nice to him as Putin has.

This guy can’t die too soon, but it will be dicey when he finally does.

There are any number of things missing from modern society. Just listen to conservative commentators long enough and you will hear a long list. There’s the broken homes, there’s the lack of God, and then you get into the really offensive stuff. If we believe them then all of these things are to blame for all of the problems we have today.

So, speaking of shame is certainly ironic. It is ironic because we spend a great deal of time talking about how all of these things are just red herrings and then we land on the shame. Yet, this is different. It is nearly impossible to articulate, but we will give it a try.  Defamation of character is a serious deal. It causes someone to experience shame when they shouldn’t. We certainly feel for Depp if that is the truth, but unfortunately, some people are taking the wrong lesson from all of this. I bet you thought Kyle Rittenhouse went away, but apparently, he has been inspired by Depp. I know you thought he went away. I know you thought his 15 minutes of fame were up. I know you thought he would at least have the presence of mind to keep quiet until everyone had forgotten who this little son of a bitch was. I was right there with you. He apparently never learned anything from that experience.

As complaints go, this is a relatively minor one. After all, three people and their families never got justice for what happened to them. They were gunned down in the street and they were treated like the criminals. Hell, you had the judge in the case refuse to call them victims and then turn around and allow the defense to defame their character in open court.

That judge doesn’t feel shame. He should, but he doesn’t. Obviously, Rittenhouse has been robbed of this experience as well. It definitely impedes his moral development. At the very least, we had hoped that he would realize deep down inside what he had done. We are robbing people of that experience. We have robbed Rittenhouse of that experience.

Shame is the thing that keeps you from seeking the limelight after something like this. Shame is the thing that makes you realize you need to seek forgiveness or some sort penance even if your privaledge somehow exonerates you. Shame is the thing that aids in moral development. It’s the thing that tells you that you’ve done a horrible thing when you’ve killed three people.

Shame is the thing that tells you to go away. It is the thing that is missing all too often. It’s missing in this case because too many people have called this jackass a hero. It’s missing because that’s what he’s internalized and so he doesn’t understand why the mainstream media would say anything different. The best defense against defamation is the truth. The MSM has that in spades. Shame would have told him to leave well enough alone. Sadly, that shame wasn’t there.