The wildly-uneven Detroit News has offered some helpful data to track the surge in violent crime in the Great Lakes State, breaking it down by city.
In our city of residence, it jumped by over 8 percent, with homicides and aggravated assaults driving the increase.
Little wonder our nearest firearms store just announced that it is opening on Sundays.
Even less wonder that variations on "defund" have no traction in a city that is 40 percent African-American.
If they pass, get used to having to close your windows or leave your open air front porch on pleasant days.
The lingering, worse-than-skunk-ass smell offers a whole new dimension to "second-hand smoke."
It hangs in the air--even in a light breeze--much more than any carton of Marlboros ever dreamed of.
Why? Try burning some wet leaves sometime and see how the smoke lingers.
Likewise with mary jane.
It will be a pot-smoker's world, and you'll all be forced to live in their hotboxes.
As with all "don't like it/don't do it" and "it won't affect you" claims, it too turns out to be bullshit in the end.
Signed,
A Gen-Xer Who Voted For Medical But Not Recreational Marijuana
And no, I'm not being sarcastic:
4 men enter Irish seminaries in 2021.
Sure, there's the NCs, too, but I will leave them out.
Actually, I can't resist this parting thought--the Neocats serve a valuable purpose for the western church:
They remind us that the current administration's concern with liturgical uniformity and respect for authority is really selective. Actual parish-rending schisms are tolerated when you have power and influence. See also the "Legion of Christ" [sic].
Back to Eire:
Yes, I'm surprised that four men actually made the leap. Given the (deservedly) low regard in which the Irish Church is held, that anyone heard--or heeded--a call to serve is remarkable.
When you add in leadership cadres which think an endless spiritual beta-test is ideal and which also demand believers have a sense of the past comparable to Leonard Shelby in Memento, it is more remarkable still. Committing to "at the moment," "perhaps" and "sorta...?" takes a genuine leap of faith.
That said, I wouldn't bet more than a couple of stray Euros that any of them will make it to ordination. Attrition is what it is.
Work conditions have been hellish for quite some time in LaLa Land.
It just took a pandemic to draw long overdue attention to it.
One is left wondering where State and Federal labor regulators and legislators have been all this time.
If your answer does not involve the phrase "in the studios' back pockets," it is partially invalid.
A lack of guaranteed meal breaks makes these long days even more taxing, according to some crewmembers. “I just worked on a feature in Atlanta where we never once had a lunch break. Not once did we have a lunch break for 40 shooting days,” says costumer and Local 705 member Eric Johnson. Union members claim that meal penalties, the fee productions pay when workers miss mandated meal periods, have become so affordable that productions bake them into budgets (Basic Agreement signatories have to pay members of at least some major IATSE locals between $7.50 and $13.50 per half hour after the missed mealtime).
And while the extra meal-penalty compensation can be helpful to those with low pay, “after 10 years of [missed meals], you just can’t sustain that,” says Johnson. Some productions advocate for “rolling lunches” where workers step away briefly and/or fill in for one another during an uninterrupted workday so they can grab food, but crewmembers in certain roles — like those in the camera department — say that they can’t realistically leave or have someone else briefly assume their roles.
On social media, IATSE members and their allies have advocated for guaranteed meal breaks. The studio source says the AMPTP offered an “alternative meal break solution,” with rolling lunches being just one of the options discussed, which was rejected.
* * *
Individuals in some of IATSE’s lowest-paid roles say that, beyond long hours, they face additional struggles due to what they describe as unlivable pay. Currently, writers assistants, assistant production coordinators and art department coordinators make a contractual minimum of $16 an hour or a little bit above, while script coordinators make, at minimum, $17.64 an hour.
While trying to learn how to make ends meet in her role, Bachiller remembers being advised by support-staff colleagues to, on Fridays, take “all the food that was about to expire from the kitchen and that would be our groceries for the weekend.” She adds, “That was just considered normal, that was just part of paying your dues.” Alison Golub, a writers assistant and Local 871 member, counts herself lucky that she’s an L.A. native and can live at home — “because I can’t afford to pay rent.” A strike would be especially challenging for members in these roles, and Local 871 is currently putting together a program, potentially financed at least in part by a strike fund, to offer financial support to them in the event of a strike; at least one other Local is working on an economic relief program.
Concern over crewmembers’ working hours, rest periods and low wages isn’t new, and has been building steadily for years. According to one union insider who spoke on the condition of anonymity, the issues the union is fighting for this round of negotiations are “the same five or six issues that we have been talking [about] with our employers for a decade,” namely, low wages, long hours, rest periods, compensation from new media, and health and pension plan funding. (“There are some issues that both sides, producers and unions, want to resolve in negotiations,” the studio source counters. “At the end of the day, there have been deals made the last five or six rounds of negotiations, and clearly both sides, including the union, agreed to the contract, so they must have agreed to those lists of priorities.”)
The 1997 death of second camera assistant Brent Lon Hershman in a car crash and the 2006 release of Haskell Wexler’s documentary on entertainment’s long working hours, Who Needs Sleep?, ignited similar conversations decades before. Members of the Motion Picture Editors Guild and the Costume Designers Guild have discussed a potential strike for years.
Our local hip hop empresario has opened a new spaghetti restaurant on Woodward in Detroit.
And by spaghetti, I mean that's it: the other menu items are garlic bread, meatballs and cheese.
How's the food, though?
It's not too far from something my own mom — who served us spaghetti at least once a week, often with sauce using tomatoes from the backyard — would have put on the dinner table, meaning it's more homespun than chef-driven.
The noodles are cooked just right, not too al dente and not mushy. The sauce smells sweeter than it tastes and has more of a tangy flavor. There's a hint of basil, some parmesan for texture, a flagrancy of garlic and it's less salty than your low-end sauce from a jar. The portion, served in a huge Chinese food-style takeout container open at the top with a plastic fork and slice of garlic toast sticking out, is massive and heavy.
Sounds pretty good, though--and having a limited menu makes a lot of sense.
The lines are nuts right now, but after the buzz dies a bit I'll have to give it a shot.
As the old proverb goes: What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
One of the many rhetorical flights into low-oxygen realms that the Roman Pontiff has gone on is to condemn gossip.
Which is welcome and salutary as a general concept.
The problem is he escalates it to a moral plane that undercuts any possible value he may have intended.
In his most ludicrous formulation, he has called it "terrorism," an exercise worse than the murderers of the Shining Path, a thankfully-dead communist organization responsible for more than 31,000 deaths in Peru.
Besides the morally-bankrupt overstatement, here's the problem.
If you glance back over his record, such edicts are a fascinating exercise in self-condemnation: because no one has been a more forthright public gossip than the pontiff.
Especially when he gets chatty with his Jesuit pals or the media.
For example, he recently sat down with a group of Slovak Jesuits and...engaged in gossip.
I can hear the high-pitched outrage from the usual and too-often square-headed cultists from here:
"What?!"
Why, yes, he engaged in two bits of full-on, chattypants gossip. First, relating an accusation about an unnamed Catholic television organization criticizing him. Naturally, criticism of Number One is "the work of the devil."
That eyeroll aside, here's the thing: we are reliably informed that the pontiff hasn't watched TV since 1990. So he's relaying what he's been told about (Gloria TV? EWTN?) this satanic network...making it simon-pure gossip.
By his own standards, that was worse than the bereaved weeping at the gravesites of those butchered by the Sendero Luminoso.
And then he followed it up by gossiping about a pair of newly-ordained priests who had (unwisely) asked their cardinal for permission to say the Mass of the Ages. In response, the unnamed cardinal (quite possibly Blase Cupich) told them they had to learn Spanish and then Vietnamese first.
And no doubt quite-possibly-Blase-Cupich will throw in Esperanto, Romansch, Basque and Quechua if they leap those hurdles. Cardinal QPBC related this pastoral smackdown to the gossiping pontiff who then happily shared it for the whole church to hear.
More terrorism, by the pontiff's own standards.
And let's not forget that he does this sort of point-making gossip as a matter of routine, with Rabbit Mom and slapping about the South African Catholic who introduced him to converts to the Faith.
In this, as with other matters, the giddy bomb thrower from the Vatican should be taken seriously only as a cautionary tale about how not to behave.
Don't forget to include the ridiculed subjects of the pontiff's IEDs in your prayers.
Most of you beadsqueezers have heard of Dom and Melanie Bettinelli and their lovely family.
Well, now they need your help: they have a horrific plumbing related problem that is forcing them out of their home and it's not remotely certain what insurance will cover.
If you can sling any cash their way, it would be greatly appreciated.
And you can do so knowing it's going to some of the finest, most decent people around.
Merck claims its new anti-viral halves hospitalization risk from coronavirus.
I genuinely hope so, but we shall see.
Overselling has been one of the myriad failures of the American medical establishment over the course of the pandemic.
As you may have noticed, my mood is...not chipper, he says, trying to keep the expletives down.
I had to restructure family travel and gathering plans, drop out of my first chance to be in a play since the corona deluge and otherwise scramble to accommodate a high-pressure schedule.
Until yesterday, when the person in charge of the high-pressure event arbitrarily kicked the schedule back 90 days.
So, no:
Amy Welborn finds that Commonweal has joined the "personification" crusade against the female half of the human species.
That once-formidable publication has taken the last part of "there is neither male nor female in Christ Jesus" to a new level.
And she has plenty of other examples, including the ACLU, the British Labour Party and now the LaLeche League.
At the rate we are going, they'll probably bring back lobotomization of women who object.
But always remember--blame anybody other than those acting like the Thought Police.
Eight hundred covid-positive Haitians quarantined in El Paso motel.
Note the source: not America's Praetorian-Corporate Media Complex, which at best underplays and more typically ignores disastrous decision-making by the current party in power.
The body count meter is suspended when you wear a "-D."
Covid is an especial problem amongst Haitians because less than 0.2 percent of that tragic nation are fully vaccinated. And those who are are almost certainly part of the corrupt ruling class who aren't leaving.
How bad is it? So bad that Laredo's Democratic Mayor is calling the policies of Orange Man Bad favorable by comparison. THAT bad.
Finally, take note: 60,000 more migrants surging north now.
But that's fine with both the ruling party and Wall Street. In fact, it's the whole idea: allegedly strengthening the ruling party's voting bloc(s), and ensuring a wage-depressing stream of ultra-cheap labor.
All during a pandemic we're forcing the locals to get shots for.
Lucky about that body count meter.
The interior of Saint Paul Melkite Greek Catholic Church, Harissa, Lebanon. I have decided to set up a Substack exploring Eastern Christi...
