Subsidies: F to the Fourth. Food Stamps, Farmers, and Fast Food
The U.S. food stamp program was launched at a time when the nation was facing a tragic paradox: As millions of Americans suffered from hunger during the Great Depression, the country's farmers agonized under a crushing bounty. The economic collapse of the 1930s had sapped food consumers of their purchasing power, so farmers found themselves with a glut of crops and livestock. That glut, in turn, sent agricultural prices plummeting.
In order to create artificial scarcity and boost prices, the U.S. Department of Agriculture under President Franklin D. Roosevelt initially paid farmers to plow under their fields and slaughter their pigs. The destruction of food at a time when so many stomachs rumbled sparked an outcry that prompted the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation (FSCC), a New Deal agency established in 1933, to instead purchase excess food and distribute it directly to the needy at little or no cost. This initiative, however, dampened business for grocers and food wholesalers, who complained of government interference and unfair competition in the marketplace.
Facing the triple problems of farm surpluses, weak sales for grocers and hungry citizens at a time of 17 percent unemployment, the FSCC hoped tiny paper squares could solve its trilemma. Rochester, New York, then became the petri dish for a new government-run economic experiment.
One theology text used in some seminaries in the seventies was The Sexual Language by Andre Guindon. It specifically addressed the question of pedophilia. (Guindon uses the term pedophilia restrictively to denote sexual relations with a prepubescent minor.) According to Guindon, scientific research revealed that pedophilia was not harmful to children and that the real victim was “the defenceless pedophile” who is “scapegoated” by “parents and citizens who pose as do-gooders” (p. 374). One book reported that The Sexual Language was used at the seminary where Rudy Kos studied, a priest who was later convicted of pedophilia. That very same seminary hosted Fr. Paul Shanley to give a guest lecture. What was his topic? Shanley was a public advocate for the legalization of pederasty. After the Boston Globe report came out in 2002, Shanley was arrested and convicted of child molestation.
Raechel Olson, a 20-year elementary school teacher, testified in July before the Senate Education Committee to publicly oppose AB 493, a teacher training bill that instructs them to affirm homosexual, lesbian, and transgender students in the classroom.
The legislation predictably passed out of the Democratic-led committee in a 6-0 vote but not before Olson blasted the “gender training” she sat through and warned senators they were trampling on people's sincere religious beliefs.
Olson's brief but no-holds-bar testimony, in light of the far-left committee she was facing, was noticed by California Family Council, which was present at the meeting and published Olson's testimony (see video below) on Youtube.
Local high school student Pedro Sanchez has announced his 2020 run on a platform of offering the nation his protection and making everyone's wildest dreams come true. . . .
(Satire)
The first suicide bomber in English literature is a crazed anarchist professor in Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent who stalks around London wired up with explosives. Entranced by a vision of pure nothingness, he has only to squeeze a rubber ball in his pocket to annihilate the present and clear a space for a utopian future. His political comrades are a bunch of sinister continental freaks who succeed in blowing up a young boy with learning difficulties.
Anarchism, in short, has something of an image problem. Even Ruth Kinna, in this sympathetic, impressively well-informed history of the movement, has to admit that it has had its fair share of bombers and assassins. Yet she also illustrates its extraordinary creativity.
