Margaret Atwood, most famous for “The Handmaid’s Tale,” summed up gender relations succinctly when she said, “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” And schoolkids are afraid that when those laughed-at schoolmates take their revenge, they’ll take lots of bystanders with them, as the Texas school shooter apparently did.
Texans predictably have blamed television, Ritalin, the news media, political correctness, Common Core, the lack of armed teachers and school buildings with too many doors — anything, that is, but the easy access to guns. Craig Hunter of Daily Kos notes that heightened surveillance of social media is among the proposed solutions, along with high-tech gizmos like facial-recognition technology, which seems incredibly stupid considering many of the shootings are committed by students. Such tyrannical measures are necessary because a few fanatics want to keep their guns in case of tyranny.
Facebook is facing opposition from all directions. Democrats on the left want to force it to sell off other social media platforms it has acquired, and Republicans want it to knuckle to their baseless complaints of bias the way legacy media has. Couldn’t happen to a more weaselly guy.
Speaking of slippery quadrupeds, like a blind pig finding an acorn, Trump (more accurately, his negotiator) has identified legitimate problems with NAFTA, argues liberal economist Robert Kuttner. IMO, Kuttner is making a mistake common to hopeful leftist pundits writing about Trump: thinking that he’ll follow through on any of his left-leaning notions. Republicans have blocked such ideas at every turn — remember the trillion-dollar infrastructure investment? — by the simple expedient of having Fox & Friends say it’s a bad idea.
From the Guys Who Had a Worse Day Than You Dept.: Some schmo in Hawaii was watching the volcanic lava show from his third-floor balcony when a nearby fissure ejected material known as “spatter.” Lava spatters “can weigh as much as a refrigerator and even small pieces of spatter can kill,” a spokeswoman told Reuters. This one struck the man and shattered his leg from his shin down. If that’s not enough to convince you this is the flip side of paradise, the lava has reached the sea, causing clouds of something called “laze,” which consists of hydrochloric acid, steam and fine glass particles. Sounds like a sidewalk cafe in hell. “Beelzebub, party of two!”
Barbara Ehrenreich, the muckraking writer who brought us “Nickel and Dimed,” is 76 now, and has turned her attention to the “wellness” industry. As usual, she quickly nails the class differences expressed in the very idea of “wellness.” She also thinks the American preference for expensive procedures — should everyone get a colonoscopy, or should we use less invasive and expensive screening methods first? — amounts to a racket.