A Tennessee school board has banned a Pulitzer prize-winning novel from its classrooms over eight curse words and an illustration of a naked cartoon mouse.

The graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by New Yorker Art Spiegelman, uses hand-drawn illustrations of mice and cats to depict how the author’s parents survived Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
...
The graphic memoir elevated a pulp mass medium to high art when it nabbed a slew of literary awards in 1992 but appears not to have impressed educators in Mcminn county.

Ten board members unanimously agreed in favour of removing the novel from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing its use of the phrase “God Damn” and drawings of “naked pictures” of women, according to minutes taken from a board of education meeting earlier this month.
Read moreLess

Biden continues to scapegoat American businesses for government-created problems. On Monday, President Joe Biden gave a public address during a meeting with his Competition Council, discussing an executive order he issued last July. Why now? Because inflation keeps getting worse, and the Biden administration needs somewhere to lay the blame.
...
Inflation has been hitting its highest levels in decades. In late December, for instance, gas prices were up 51 percent, beef prices up 20 percent, and furniture prices up 11 percent. Food prices are up. Clothing prices are up. Energy prices are up. Used car prices are up. Booze prices are up. And the list goes on.

Part of this can be blamed on the pandemic, which has contracted the labor force, increased demand for certain sorts of goods, and caused disruptions in supply chains.

But government policies have made things much worse. There's been absolutely massive amounts of new government spending—and printing more money to pay for it. (The "supply of dollars has increased by nearly 40 percent over the past 2 years, which is an off-the-charts record," Reason's Nick Gillespie noted in December.) Meanwhile, Biden and Democrats just keep trying to spend more.

While raising interest rates is traditionally a way to try and keep inflation in check, "America's high levels of debt make the maneuver more fraught because higher interest rates will reverberate through the government's own debt," Eric Boehm points out.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. If there is too much cash chasing too few goods, prices will rise. t.co/KEu6UvdEeZ

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) December 10, 2021
With Americans feeling the pinch of rising prices all around, Democrats have been looking for somewhere to lay the blame that doesn't implicate their own policies. They've coalesced around blaming big businesses—a sort of "killing two birds with one stone" strategy.

Passing "antitrust" laws that give government regulators more control over tech companies and U.S. markets at large has been big on Democrats' recent agenda. Blaming big businesses for inflation lends give a good cover to this push.

Rather than come across as control freaks who want a say in how all U.S. companies run, they feign concern for consumer welfare, asserting that lack of competition is what's causing rising prices. "Lack of competition costs the median American family household… $5,000 a year," claimed Biden on Monday.

Don't buy it.

These type of claims are based more in politics than economic realities.
Read moreLess

The next-generation Subaru WRX has been a long time coming and should bring some significant changes for fans of the once-rally-derived model. Here’s everything we know so far about the model which made Subaru a household name ahead of the new version’s imminent arrival in early 2022.

Pop superstar Rihanna and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey are teaming up through their foundations to fund groups that support defunding the police.

Rihanna’s Clara Lionel Foundation announced its partnership with Dorsey’s Start Small LLC to give "climate justice" grants to a dozen and a half groups.
...
"We are proud to commit $15 million to 18 organizations working intersectionality on climate justice across the U.S. and Caribbean in collaboration with [Jack’s] [Start Small]," the foundation tweeted Tuesday morning, sharing a list of partnered organizations.

The Center for Popular Democracy, one of the organizational partners, published a blog post calling for the defunding of police in July 2020 during the riots following George Floyd’s murder.

Another partner, the Movement for Black Lives, wants to abolish the police and prisons entirely and fellow new partner Black Visions said the group envisions a "Minneapolis without policing" and has also called for the abolition of police and prisons.
Read moreLess

A man charged with groping a flight attendant has been sentenced to six months in prison, according to court documents.

Children unvaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 may still benefit through protection from vaccinated contacts. We estimated the protection provided to children through parental vaccination with the BNT162b2 vaccine. We studied households without prior infection, ...

Jussie Smollett, who was convicted last month for lying to police about a racist, homophobic attack that authorities said he staged, will return to court for sentencing March 10

An incredible video shows an African rock python swallowing an impala.

[IN 2008 The bANKSTERS blew up REAL ESTATE THIS TIME THEY'LL BLOW UP CORPORATIONS.]


By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: January 27, 2022 ~ The last thing a volatile stock market needs right now is more surprises from the dark corners of Wall Street. Unfortunately, we can guarantee you that more surprises are coming in the way of uncleared derivatives blowing up on the balance sheets of publicly-traded corporations.
...
How do we know this? The information in the chart above comes from a study quietly released last July by the Office of Financial Research (OFR). That’s the federal agency that provides research to bank regulators to prevent systemic financial contagion from taking down the Wall Street megabanks and the U.S. economy in another replay of 2008.

What the study actually shows, however, is that neither Congress nor bank regulators have done anything meaningful to prevent derivatives from once again blowing up the world’s largest economy. Instead, the watchdogs have simply allowed a rearrangement of the deck shares on the Titanic. While Wall Street megabanks previously concentrated their counterparty risk with each other and foreign global banks, necessitating that the Fed had to bail out dodgy banks on foreign shores, they’ve now shifted their counterparty risk to corporations.

CONTINUED AT LINK
Read moreLess

www.adultswim.com/comics/

THE GORE-NER
MIKE LAWRENCEwww.adultswim.com/comics/the-gor...
...
APPLE OF MY EYE HOLE
JEFFREY MAHANNAHwww.adultswim.com/comics/apple-o...
FILTH FORCE
M. WARTELLA
www.adultswim.com/comics/filth-f...
NIGHT SOIL
JAMES QUIGLEY
TALES OF THE PEEPER CREEPER
PATRICK SPARROW
www.adultswim.com/comics/tales-o...

Read moreLess

HBO Max closed 2021 with 46.8 million domestic subscribers when combined with linear HBO, up 5.3 million over 2020.

All out February 1.

Students helped crush Apartheid. Now they’re using the same tactics against fossil fuels.