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Making a Point
Relevant article showing photos of the London spikes here. Apparently the number of homeless there is increasing:
Katharine Sacks-Jones, head of policy and campaigns at Crisis, said: “This is happening in a context where rough sleeping has gone up massively. Over the last three years rough sleeping has risen by 36% nationally and by 75% in London. More than 6,400 people slept rough in London last year.””The reason for that increase is the continuing economic downturn, the housing shortage, and cuts to benefits, particularly housing benefit.”
Yay austerity! Why not add a dollop of hostile symbolism while you’re at it?
This week in That’s Disgusting: Oil Wastewater Irrigation
According to this Mother Jones article, the drought in California is leading to increasing amounts of oil wastewater being applied to crops. While I understand and support programs like Bill Gates’ effort to extract potable H20 from sewage water as a means of preventing disease in poor countries, this would not be quite the same. Benzene, a known carcinogen, is showing up in concentrations higher than is allowed for drinking water. As an official comfortingly reassures us in the MoJo article:
“I admit that [some oilfield contaminants] are in there,” says David Ansolabehere, the General Manager of the Cawelo Water District, “but they are at such a low level I wouldn’t think they are doing any harm. But we are looking into that to make sure there isn’t any harm being done.”
The trouble is, testing methods are badly outdated — only recently have officials begun testing for a wider range of industrial chemicals — and fracking chemicals tend to be trade secrets. Energy companies have a long history of claiming their chemical recipes are proprietary information. So how do scientists know what to test for?
I’ll take slightly more expensive clementines than ones laced with unknown industrial effluvia, thanks.
More info on Think Progress.
Loan Bone
Interest rates on Stafford Loans could double from 3.4% to a usurious 6.8% if Congress fails to act by July 1. Many Senate Democrats want another extension of the current rate; Republicans want a variable rate pegged to the market at a higher figure. As Elizabeth Warren put it as she argued for giving students the same rate as banks:
“Right now, the US government is out there investing in large financial institutions, offering them money every single night [for] three quarters of 1 percent, and yet our students, if the government doesn’t do something, will be paying nine times that much,” Warren said to an audience of about 70 students and staff at the Northeastern Visitor Center.
Adding to the debt of poor college students at a time of ever-increasing economic inequality (and record low interest rates) while companies like Apple practice massive tax avoidance is simply ridiculous.
School Lunches of the Future
The Trump administration announced its planned rule change on Michelle Obama’s birthday, which seems just gratuitously mean, but I suppose that’s the point. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Purdue described the change as “common-sense flexibility” — “flexibility” that will allow kids to choose pizza, burgers, and French fries every day. This will have real consequences, as we see increasing numbers of kids develop Type 2 diabetes.
Contact
To contact Jen, email: jensoren {at} gmail {dot} com
While I do read all my email, I regret that I can’t respond to most of them, or I’d never meet my deadlines. An increasing number of people have been sending cartoon ideas lately, which is flattering, though to be clear, I don’t use ideas from readers. This is partly because my comics have a particular format and voice, and I prefer writing them myself.
You may repost occasional cartoons to your personal blog as long as you link back to this site. For all other uses, kindly email me.
Please be polite, or be deleted. In the trash folder, no one can hear you scream.
The Great Acceleration
I’ve long been a fan of the film Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. It has always seemed obvious to me that the ever-increasing speed of late industrialization was both pointless and harmful to life on the planet. In recent decades, we have seen most productivity gains go to the very top; inequality has spiked, the climate crisis is exploding, and democracy is wilting under a rapid-fire glut of disinformation. Change is inevitable, but this degree of disruption and instability is simply inhuman.
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