Dollar Stores, good or bad for your community?

I like to watch Cheddar channel on Sunday when I cycle (inside, another 11 miles and I'll pass 11,000 miles). But because its focus is on youth, it's a bit thick with woke and SJW opinions and stories. Today its focus was on the scary, outrageous (hype) growth of the dollar store chains. Oh. My. They cater to low income and those with immediate shopping needs! Horror. Remember, these same greenie "save the world" types ran out investments in big box stores and chain grocery stores from inner city neighborhoods about 2 decades ago. It seems there are now more dollar stores than McDonald's. The save-the-earth  and make-all-minorities-victims groups also don't like McDonald's.  Consumers like them so much, everyone is obese or at least not eating enough fruits and vegetables from other sources.

It seems the SJW crowd are all for "mom and pop" stores, but only if run by an actual local family, who is probably white or Asian and middle class hoping to expand to something better. I've been hearing about "mom and pop" and the "small farmer" for decades. Look, they are in business to make a living. If we drive by on our way to Walmart, or the produce is too limp and old to make a salad, let's not blame a lack of diversity and equity in the "system." If "mom and pop" owners can sell the family business because the real estate is now worth $2 million and they only clear $30,000 a year working 12 hours a day, why would the SJW deny a small business owner that opportunity to move up and out by selling to a corporation?

I love the little dollar store a few miles from my home, and the one near Lakeside. Do you have any idea how hard it is to find small packages in large supermarkets? I prefer to pay more per ounce if I can lift the container! I love paying 2/$1.00 for greeting cards, or 5 shower caps for $1, or 6 packages of peanuts for $1. The store is clean, the staff pleasant, and they seem to meet the needs of the people now taking up residence in those awful apartment complexes that look like prison compounds. 

The Cheddar program reported that dollar stores target poor and minority neighborhoods--you know, so they can walk to the store, or find several items they can afford. What the SJW are really mad about is that market forces and capitalism are driving the growth of small scale, cheap to build money making stores. There are many suburbanites who shop there too, and they fill a need the big box stores don't. And they stayed open during the pandemic.

The final point in the program was that they attract crime (I suppose because of the minority neighborhoods?). Recently in Columbus, we've had a spate of shootings and robberies at suburban shopping centers and gas stations. Criminals aren't stupid, and they don't become bad people because of where investors put their businesses whether it's a kosher grocery in Boulder or a massage parlor in Atlanta.

But as I noted, Cheddar's focus, fast paced and trendy, is on the young--they have a specific market just as dollar stores do. But for them, I guess it's OK. Cheddar was founded by Jon Steinberg, President and Chief Operating Officer of BuzzFeed from 2010 to 2014. Its investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Raine Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Comcast Ventures, AT&T, Amazon, Antenna Group, Ribbit Capital, The New York Stock Exchange, Altice USA, 7 Global Capital, and Denstu Ventures.

About Cheddar. Cheddar is the leading post-cable… | by Michael Leibel | CheddarNews

Menstrual justice

If you can only make your life feel significant or sell a book by adding an adjective to the word "justice," you're impaired and there may be no hope. I just got an e-mail about menstrual justice.

I've read through the very wordy piece (satire?) and see that the words woman, girl, or female are never used. And that's because of the T in a certain acronym

Why are our churches talking justice and racial reconciliation now—it’s trendy and they are woke?

2020 wasn't about George Floyd. BLM was launched in 2014 by three lesbian feminists steeped in Marxism.

"Homicide is the leading cause of death for young black men in the U.S., and around 90 percent of the perpetrators are also black. Yet for months [2014] we’ve had protesters nationwide pretending that our morgues are full of young black men because cops are shooting them. Around 98 percent of black shooting deaths do not involve police. In fact, a cop is six times more likely to be shot by someone black than the opposite. The protestors are pushing a false anti-cop narrative, and everyone from the president [Obama] on down has played along.” . . . Jason Riley https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/race-relations-and-law.../

• When did we pray for the millions of babies aborted?
• When did we hear sermons on bitter divorces and the need for understanding and acceptance? In fact, when did we ever even hear a sermon about marriage?
• When did we pray for all the families who’d lost loved ones from cancer or heart disease as we do for Covid19?
• When did we as a congregation ask for justice for the trafficked child or abused woman?
• When the Columbus police were told to stand down during the summer riots, did our church collect money for the damaged or destroyed businesses?

Yes, we need reconciliation, but it’s between members, not races.

University of Illinois record enrollment

Congratulations on the record breaking enrollment at U. of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.  https://news.illinois.edu/view/6367/802663?  Enrollment was about 20,000 when I started in 1958, and I think the cost was about $1,000 year. It was about a 4 hour drive for my parents who lived in Mt. Morris, and it was up to me to get a ride home for holidays.

I lived in a private dorm owned by the Y right in the middle of the action, McKinley Hall on Wright St.   https://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2003/10/54-how-to-find-roommate-who-doesnt.html   I found a website for the YWCA in C-U down the street from the old McKinley Hall, but now it's just bogged down in day to day SJW missions and intersectional causes. It's actually where I met my cousin Chuck Ballard when we got together so he could give me a ride home. I think he was a senior--and incredibly handsome.

William B. McKinley was an Illinois millionaire, business owner and politician (not the president of the U.S.) and I went to a McKinley Presbyterian church down the street (visited website of the foundation--same SJW), and was sick in the McKinley Hospital now a health center, taught Spanish at Urbana high school that had McKinley Field, and walked on McKinley Avenue. https://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2003/11/67-ghost-of-william-b.html

Like the wealth of many 19th and 20th century millionaires which built so many schools, churches, colleges, orphanages, funded orchestras, etc., today the source is ignored and they don't even mention his name, or capitalism, on their websites

You don’t have to fund a bad college education

Imagine a country with free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly without being attacked--unknown through out most of history, and now close to being lost if we can judge from the 25 or so Democrat candidates and Colin Kaepernick's latest antics to stop patriotism by a major corporation. I know you'll be shocked to learn this, but there is a class at a public university where a conservative Christian is on the faculty. Dr. Duke Pesta, University of Wisconsin.

https://youtu.be/mTJTFOyr0fk

• Why are you funding 1) radical ideas at your kids' college, and 2) their debt? Sure, they may return to normal by 25 or 30, but why put up with it?

• Your tuition and fees for your kids have turned the universities into ideological cesspools (paraphrase). Why should the rest of us bail out the bad decisions of university administrations?

• Literature is not read for its own value, but students are required to read Shakespeare or the Bible or 19th century literature through the lens of radical feminism or "queer eye." How can you avoid these radical reeducation camps we call "college," or "higher education?" Maybe a year or two working first? Get a little maturity first? He suggests 20 as the starting age--have some money in the bank and some education from the job. Skin in the game.

• Universities are the church of progressivism, a bubble of Marxism, and professors are the preachers. These evangelists for Marxism have never worked in the real world, in many cases. How much more history do we need to know Marxism is a failure? Academe is a good example of the failure of Marxism/Socialism.

• Hypocrites graduating with mounds of debt; grad students acting as slaves for the tenured faculty. Universities are class based and hierarchical. Even in business schools social justice theory trumps capitalism. Speaker believes college students are graduating in 2019 with the knowledge a high school student may have known in 1970. (I think that's a stretch--more like 1940). 

• He’s really hard on "Common Core" as prep for college because it dumbs everyone down to the lowest common denominator. Sexual indoctrination into transgenderism for very young children. What worked for the Left in college is now transferred to elementary age as young as six. Even in liberal radical Madison, WI, it's too much.

Why Andrea walked away from the Democrats

Andrea voted for Obama twice, but didn't like Trump and didn't vote in 2016:

“Meanwhile, I watched the left ... just ... lose it.

I saw a party that once believed in restrictions on abortion go full-on-pro-baby-killing.

A party that used to believe in protecting women's opportunities now forcing women's sports teams to allow men to compete as trans.

A party that used to believe in securing our borders now encouraging people to break the law and bum rush our gates and attack ICE agents.

I saw identitarian social justice warriors emerge as the authoritarian thought police and start terrorizing anyone who challenged them.
I saw people that I used to admire advocate for the kind of political censorship and violence against dissenters that typifies a fascist dictatorship, all the while calling ME a fascist for defending the first amendment!!!

That's when I realized what hateful people the Democrats were becoming. I also began to see what their tax-and-spend policies were really doing to the country, their plan to turn us into a socialist economy, their constant race-baiting, their conspiracy theories, their kowtowing to Islamists, their trying to buy votes and destroy the electoral college ... not to mention the LIES told by the media about the president and conservatives in general... and I decided NO MORE!!!

If this is what liberalism is now, I want no part of it!!! "
from #Walkaway”

"Gibson's Bakery v. Oberlin College” comment by Michael Smith

If you haven't followed this case, you should take a look. Legal Insurrection has been on it from the beginning. https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/06/verdict-jury-awards-gibsons-bakery-11-million-against-oberlin-college/

Three black students were caught shoplifting, then claimed they were targeted due to their race (they later admitted to the crime), and SJW professors and administrators at Oberlin immediately assisted in organizing protests in an attempt to destroy the business, targeting the white family who owned and operated it.

It is a perfect example of how progressives can't deal with their own irreconcilable and conflicting feelings, the dead-end nature of their own reasoning and a need to signal just how awesome and virtuous they are while being neither. It's an example of how they project their own failures onto others, making enemies where there were none and the weaponizing of some group or organization against those imaginary foes - this time a college, Oberlin, was the weapon.

Perhaps the tide is turning - but not without pain. This family never should have faced the three years of hell they have had to endure."

Social Justice

Prager University can undo years of misinformation in college

 Prager U videos are really great--they can teach in a few minutes what you won’t learn in a semester at a major university. In under 6 minutes, you can destroy years of academic misinformation with a Prager U video.

 What does Social Justice mean?  Basically, it’s redistribution of wealth.  That’s how the United Nations defines it. It’s a little like “Women’s Reproductive Health” is actually code for abortion anytime, for any reason. We need F.A. Hayek’s definition: he saw to the core of the issue--a pernicious philosophical claim to amass power for the state.  To the snowflake progressive, it means whatever they want it to mean.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtBvQj2k6xo

Why do feminists persist with this oppression myth and the gender gap lie?  Because victims make better followers.  The need a base for their power position and interviews in the media and promotion in academe.  Most workplace pay gaps vanish if  you control all points, like part time work, or choosing a lower paying specialty like pediatrics instead of brain surgery.  And why wouldn’t greedy capitalists choose women employees over men if they can get them for less? Repudiate the victim myth, ladies.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oqyrflOQFc 

The Judeo-Christian culture has greatly elevated the role and status of women compared to other religions and regions of the world.  Women are commodities in the view of many Muslims.  Which value system do we want in the West? Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an author and activist, ponders the question why American feminists refuse to see what’s happening and won’t offer Muslim women the freedom they have in the West.  They excuse the inexcusable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJkFQohIKNI

Oh my. How did the SJW let this slip by? Oklahoma is the Choctaw word for "red people." Maybe when they are finished destroying the history of a vanquished foe in city parks, they can hitch a ride west with their hate? If they keep going, eventually the SJW will have to dismantle the elementary schools and streets named Roosevelt, because FDR sent Italians, Germans and Japanese to camps and prisons in WWII. That's after they've destroyed all those elite universities founded by Christians like Yale, Harvard and Princeton.