It’s everywhere in the U.K., but, at least through today, it’s been covered nowhere here across the pond. Guess this means what was true in the day of Liberty Valance remains true today:
Though we must confess confusion over the disparity of treatment accorded Black female representatives of a fabricated, farcical movement stealing the microphone from a White male Senator running for President (and who actually had a chance!)…
…and the White male representative of an equally farcical movement heisting the mike from a Black female Senator running for President (who hasn’t the proverbial snowflake’s chance in Hell!):
Meanwhile, we learn…
No reverse racism to see here, folks…just move along. Oh, as for Kim Foxx’s reputation; she don’ NEED no reputation; she be BLACK!
Just sayin’!
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead off the first edition of June with a simple question: will the real DeWayne Craddock please stand up?!? Are you the official we-never-saw-THAT-coming version peddled by the City of Virginia Beach to FOX News…
“The Virginia Beach shooter who killed 12 people and wounded several others in a municipal complex on Friday had submitted his resignation earlier that morning, officials said Sunday.
The gunman, identified as 40-year-old DeWayne Craddock, was an engineer with the city’s public utilities department for 15 years. In a news conference Sunday morning, Virginia Beach City Manager Dave Hansen described the man’s work performance as “satisfactory” with no ongoing issues of discipline.
In response to a reporter’s question, Hansen said the shooter had notified his chain of command of his intention to quit via email on Friday, hours before the shooting. Hansen also reiterated that Craddock was not fired or in the process of being fired leading up to the shooting.Police are continuing to investigate a possible motive for the deadly rampage…”
“The gunman who shot dead 12 people at a Virginia Beach municipal building had been facing disciplinary action for a violent fight at work, according to a report.
But he recently started showing serious behavioral problems and got into physical “scuffles” with other city workers, a sourcetold The New York Times. DeWayne Craddock, 40, was still employed as an engineer with the Department of Public Utilities when he went on his shooting rampage Friday, killing 12 and injuring several others, including a cop.
The source told the paper that the troubles had escalated in the week leading up to the mass shooting — and Craddock was involved in what it called “a violent altercation on city grounds.”
Craddock reportedly knew he was facing disciplinary action for the fight when he went into the municipal building with two .45-caliber handguns…”
Though we cannot speak to the veracity of the second version, if accurate, it certainly would explain Craddock’s motive…and leave Virginia Beach authorities with some splainin’ to do.
Speaking of those having some splainin’ to do, see if you can identify a recurring theme in these heart-wrenching tales of expatriate woe as CNBC‘s Annie Nova details how…
“Chad Haag considered living in a cave to escape his student debt. He had a friend doing it. But after some plotting, he settled on what he considered a less risky plan. This year, he relocated to a jungle in India. “I’ve put America behind me,” Haag, 29, said.
Today he lives in a concrete house in the village of Uchakkada for $50 a month. His backyard is filled with coconut trees and chickens. “I saw four elephants just yesterday,” he said, adding that he hopes never to set foot in a Walmart again. (Then again, Walmarts generally don’t carry malarial mosquitos, typhoid or any of a hundred other ailments common in India!)
More than 9,000 miles away from Colorado, Haag said, his student loans don’t feel real anymore. “It’s kind of like, if a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, does it really exist?” he said.
…Haag’s student loan balance of around $20,000 isn’t as large as the burden shouldered by many other borrowers, but, he said, his difficultly finding acollege-level job in the U.S. has made that debt oppressive nonetheless. “If you’re not making a living wage,” he said, ”$20,000 in debt is devastating.”
He struggled to come up with the $300 a month he owed upon graduation. The first work he found after he left the University of Northern Colorado in 2011 — when the recession’s effects were still palpable — was on-again, off-again hours at a factory, unloading trucks and constructing toy rockets on an assembly line. He then went back to school to pursue a master’s degree in comparative literature at the University of Colorado Boulder. (So, his solution to crushing student debt is go BACK TO SCHOOL and incur additional crushing student debt? SERIOUSLY?!?)After that, he tried to make it as an adjunct professor, but still he could barely scrape a living together with the one class a semester he was assigned. (Funny, Lieawatha makes some $400K/year teaching only one class a semester; guess Haag should have claimed to be 1/1,024th Cherokee!)
Haag had some hope restoredwhen he landed full-time work as a medical courier in Denver, delivering urine and blood samples to hospitals. However, he was disappointed to find that he brought home just $1,700 a month.(This must mean a Master’s in comparative literature doesn’t include a course on basic math or personal finance; like he seriously didn’t know his take-home pay before he took the job?!?)He had little money left over after he paid his student loan bill. He couldn’t afford an apartment in the city, where rents have been rising sharply.(Due primarily to Progressive policies!) He lived with his mother and rarely went out with friends.
“I couldn’t make the math work in America,” Haag said.
No, you couldn’t make the math work on your terms! Pardon us while we take a moment to brush away a tear.
Second…
…Chad Albright attended Millersville University, in Pennsylvania, where he studied communications and history. He graduated as the Great Recession was beginning in December 2007, and couldn’t find anyone to hire him in hischosen field.
“I went to interview after interview after interview,” Albright, 39, said.
Still, he had $30,000 in student loans and was soon faced with a monthly bill of around $400. Unable to support himself, he moved in with his parents in Lancaster and worked as a pizza deliveryman. “There was anger,” Albright said. “I couldn’t believe I couldn’t finda job in America.” (A job “in his chosen field”, which, with a degree in “communications and history”, from Millersville University, shouldn’t have (no offense intended) peaked his expectations.)
He fell behind on his student loans and feared the Education Department would garnish his wages.
…Seeing no future for himself in the United States, he decided to move to China in 2011.In the city of Zhongshan, he discovered he loved teaching students English. Unlike when he was delivering greasy boxes of pizza, he found his work meaningful and fulfilling. Though he earned just around $1,000 a month in China, the school where he was teaching covered most of his rent and the cost of living was much lower than in Pennsylvania.
Plus, there are lots of great Chinese restaurants!
Lastly, there’s number three:
…Katrina Williams was in a rush to find a job after she graduated from the University of South Alabama in 2013. She was looking at a monthly student loan bill of $700. “I had to take whatever I could so I could pay on the loans,” Williams said. (If Haag had monthly payment of $300 on $20K of student debt, and Albright a bill of $400/month on $30K, our math puts Ms. Williams total student debt at somewhere around $54K; we don’t know her major, but its a cinch she wasn’t expecting to find work “in her chosen field”. Nothing like planning for your future!)
She picked up multiple jobs, as a part-time barista at Starbucks, a substitute teacher and a delivery-woman for the United States Postal Service. At one point, she worked full time at a call center for Sears.
“I was working every day,” Williams said. “I had enough money left over to put gas in the car.” She lived with her mother and couldn’t afford health insurance. (Wait a minute: she graduated in May/June of 2013. ObamaScare went into effect January 1, 2014. Yet Williams “couldn’t afford health insurance”?!?)
Williams had a friend who had moved to Japan, and the idea of leaving the United States grew on her. In 2015, she moved to Chiba, also to teach English to students. “I love my work,” she said. Her job sponsors her visa. She has her own apartment now and doesn’t have to work seven days a week anymore. Yet Williams misses her relationships back home; she hasn’t been able to make many friends in Japan…”
Because, unlike the racist United States, Japan is so welcoming to foreigners. At least the bastages behind the federal government’s student loan shake-down are equal-opportunity oppressors!
Here’s the juice: there are three primary culprits in these tawdry tales of self-imposed woe: (1) the U.S. college and university system for offering degrees not worth the paper on which they’re printed; (2) the U.S. government for continuing to provide student loans to those seeking degrees not worth the paper on which they’re printed; and, (3) those who seek and finance the pursuit of degrees not worth the paper on which they’re printed in general…and those who only belatedly realize they’re actually expected to pay said loans backinparticular!
These three unfortunates either never watched Caddyshack or didn’t understand Judge Elihu Smails was referring to them when he so famously observed…
Since we’re on the subject of Millennials stupid enough to borrow tens of thousands of dollars for useless degrees in Comparative Literature or Queer Studies (just to name a few!), as forwarded by Balls Cotton, Townhall.com‘s Kurt Schlichter offers a simple solution:
“So, you’re a barista with a problem – you took out $200K student loans to get that master’s degree from Gumbo State in “LGBTQ2#v& Experiences as Reflected in 17th Century Bolivian Folk Songs” and now you can’t find an uncaffeinated career. Worse, those fascist monsters who you took money from based on your agreement to pay it back with interest now expect you to pay the money back with interest despite the fact that you really don’t feel like it anymore.
Well, I have a fresh solution to this crisis.
It’s an innovative strategy that totally and permanently resolves this problem in a new and exciting way.
Ready?
Here goes.
How about you pay your own student debt?
That’s it. It’s as elegant as it is simple. You.Pay. Your.Own. Debts.
If you follow this bold, one-step program – the one step is you paying your debts – then you will eventually be debt-free. And best of all, I won’t have to pay any of your debts.
See, a lot of Democrat politicians are promising “free college,” but what they really mean is “free for you.” Someone has to pay, and that someone is me, and I need to level with you.
I am not interested in paying for your college…”
Neither are we, having already borrowed/paid hundreds of thousands for our own children’s educations. Sorry, but our cash register’s empty. Okay, not empty…but its contents are intended for our retirement and enjoyment…notyour Elizabeth Warren/Native American basket-weaving degree from Whatsamatta U!
Now, after having served me either a Venti Carmel Macchiato or a #3 Supersize, can I ask how that degree not worth the paper on which it is printed is working out for you?!?
And in the EnvironMental Moment, writing at the WSJ, Bjorn Lundstrom suggests…
“You’ve probably seen the latest alarming headlines: Rising sea levels from climate change could flood 187 million people out of their homes. Don’t believe it. That figure is unrealistic—and it isn’t even new. It appears in anew scholarly paper, whose authors plucked it from apaper published in 2011. What the earlier paper actually found was that 187 million could be forced to move in the unlikely event that, in the next 80 years, no one does anything to adaptto dramatic rises in sea level.
In real life, the 2011 paper explained, humans “adapt proactively,” and “such adaptation can greatly reduce the possible impacts.” That means “the problem of environmental refugees almost disappears.” Realistic assumptions reduce the number to between 41,000 and 305,000—at most, less than 1/600th of the figure in those headlines.
Sober findings get less attention than alarming and far-fetched speculation. The United Nations’ climate-panel scenarios all show that the world will be far richer and more resilient by the end of the century. That means we’ll be better able to tackle challenges like flooding—as much poorer societies have done for centuries. We have more know-how and technology than ever to build dikes, surge barriers and dams, expand beaches and construct dunes, make ecosystem-based barriers like mangrove buffers, improve building codes and construction techniques, and use land planning and hazard mapping to minimize flooding.
Journalists looking for alarming headlines get help from climate scientists who gloss over adaptation and from public-relations teams that know their audience. A2018 paperlooked at two scenarios. In the first, sea levels rise almost 3 feet during the next 81 years, yet no one thinks to change the height of a single dike anywhere in the world. That would cost $14 trillion globally a year.
The authors acknowledge this wouldn’t happen: “It is clear that all coastal nations have, and will continue to adapt by varying degrees to sea level rise.” In the second scenario, they try to account for adaptation, though they assume that as soon as any nation gets as rich as Romania is today, it will freeze its efforts. Even with this odd assumption, estimated flooding costs still fall 88%. The press release announcing the study skipped the second scenario and trumpeted the $14 trillion figure.So did every news story…”
Why is this beginning to remind us of the reaction of Virginia Beach authorities to DeWayne Craddock’s killing spree?
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with yet another titillating tale torn from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and the story of one kinky copulating couple straight from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s News Releases:
“A Valrico man is facing charges after accidentally shooting a woman. Around 12:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 26, Andrew Shinault, 23, shot a woman, who is also in her 20s, while engaging in an act of foreplay involving his registered hand gun. The incident occurred at Shinault’s home on Grand Canyon Drive in Valrico. The woman, who was shot in the upper body, was transported to Brandon Regional Hospital where she later died.”
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.