In his 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler suggested a national childcare system that put pre-schoolers in the facilitated care of retirees in nursing homes during working hours. It would be a win-win, with daycare and elderly loneliness solved in one shot.

Just sayin'.

Please forgive the off-platform spam, but if you're bored tonight, join the Twitter Space @jackfortunati are hosting at 7 pm EST. We'll look at things that all non-right-wing/non-conservative voters have in common, how social media keeps people who are on the left spending all their time in thought bubbles and fighting among themselves instead of uniting. Set reminder by clicking the link below, it'll be awesome & groovy, I promise:
https://twitter.com/esaeger/status/1616082186255433733

People forget that there are groups that lobby on behalf of citizens' needs, like Public Citizen, which disassociated itself from founder Ralph Nader after many blamed his presidential run for Al Gore's 2000 loss (unfortunately).
We really need to get back to supporting those kinds of groups. These days they seem like lost relics of a better civilization.

In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee that top Wall Street executives shouldn't be prosecuted for the crimes they committed in 2008 - like completely nuking the entire world's economy - "because it could destabilize the economy."

Boy, it's really hard to take this country seriously sometimes, you know?

@tomtom4468 - Mindhunter was my favorite show ever.

@JLong - Monetary policy-oriented economists (basically every one that's famous, eg Krugman, etc) have a stake in it. Those people are no help.

Most people don't get it, but when politicians talk about not being able to pay for SS it's a myth, a fake red-blue argument to get votes. The government can print as many dollars as it wants. It does that whenever Wall Street and military industrialists ask for it. It could do the same thing for healthcare, college debt and whatnot. They just don't, so that people stay fearful and stressed about losing their jobs. This epic, colossal lie needs to be revealed for what it is, all the time.

I'd never gotten bot-swarmed until the other day, when I tweeted this:
--
In 2021 the New Hampshire Libertarian Party advocated for the legalization of child labor "because schools suck."
Monied interests don't care about your kids and they never will, not ever.
--
The NHLP responded, and for days, tons of accounts with 0-30 followers have boosted (Liked) anti-education replies. One non-bot guy started to lose it and I told him he sounded like Charles Manson.
I've been having *so* much fun. 😹

"We have the technology to produce chemical weapons. We will not remain idle forever."
"Meanwhile, doctors monitor bone marrow damage with [unintelligible] believed dead in Bethlehem."
"Someone came in a car with an Uzi and killed his friend in a grave down the crossroads by the mosque. The friend of the dead man promises 'We'll never forget'."

- Skinny Puppy, "VX Gas Attack"

Like the Fed, the Supreme Court is presented as a group of people whose wisdom is so deep that it can't be questioned by regular people.

The SC gave us Citizens United, Dobbs v. Jackson and Bush v. Gore, while the Fed - which traditionally does nothing more than mess with interest rates in order to "fix the economy" - raised them recently in a move that will cause stagflation.

Both bodies screw up so consistently and bigly that it's a wonder anyone takes either of them seriously at all.

@DaleNewton - Definitely. Giood times.

@JolieSaboteuse - heh heh.

@s3friedman - IKR, this ain'tour daddies' systemic failure like in 1929.

@JohnMeadows - Very true. Pretty hurtin'.

For destroying the entire US economy by scamming low-income home-buyers with subprime home loans, the final punishments were:

Bank of America: $16 billion fine
Goldman Sachs: $5 billion fine
Wells Fargo: $1.2 billion fine

Total current value of all 3 companies: $563 billion

Total executives arrested to date: zero

There's a teachable lesson in there maybe?

Seriously, between all the soul-crushing problems like the climate, middle class misery and *actual uncontrolled plagues* it feels like we have no leadership at all right now. It's just 10 rich vampire-ghouls cleaning out the bank vaults while they rest of us try to avoid having to live in our cars.

@kellykba 😹

@MookyTroubadour - Sold.

Every Ronald Reagan airport, library and public building should be renamed and his statues melted down for scrap, that'd be great.
And his supercarrier should be renamed the USS George Floyd.

@mcfate 😹