This Week
Discover more from Special Interests
How’s the Writing Going?
I didn’t do much writing this week but I did have a little epiphany about a character’s background that’ll help me flesh out his bio over the weekend!
In COVID News
3,247 human beings died of COVID between August 18th and August 25th in the United States, according to the CDC’s data.
If you’re using a take-home antigen test after being exposed to COVID, the FDA is recommending that you test negative three times - once every 48 hours - to ensure that you don’t have a false negative. Given that this process would take four days, it seems to me like it would be faster to hunt for a PCR test and wait for those results.
Readings
A former detective, Kelly Goodlett, admitted to lying to a judge to get them to authorize the raid on Breonna Taylor’s apartment in 2020.
The former detective, Kelly Goodlett, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of conspiracy, admitting that she had worked with another officer to falsify a search warrant application and had later lied to cover up their act. In pleading guilty, Ms. Goodlett became the first police officer to be convicted over the March 2020 raid, during which the police were searching for evidence of drug dealing by Ms. Taylor’s former boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover.
Inside a courtroom in downtown Louisville, Ms. Goodlett, 35, admitted that she had known there was not enough evidence to support approving the warrant, but had nonetheless failed to object when a fellow detective falsely wrote that the police knew Mr. Glover was receiving packages at Ms. Taylor’s home.
I wish the max for her contribution to this murder was more than five years.
You know, just a month or so ago I was thinking that off all the streamers I’d want my shows on, HBO Max was number one. The HBO brand lends to the idea of prestige, I’d be in good company among other diverse shows, and they seemed to have a good relationship with creators! And then Warner Bros. merged with Discovery and let some white man fuck it all up. From the article:
“I don’t think anyone knows just how white the staff is,” one former executive told The Daily Beast.
Former HBO Max staffers say there are barely any non-white people left in the upper ranks of content, with one naming Joey Chavez, an executive vice president of drama, as one of the few people of color still there. Because HBO Max and the original HBO channel operate somewhat independently, one former executive conceded that “there may be one Black woman on the HBO side. Maybe.”
Every year that I get older, I give white people and men less of the benefit of doubt. This kind of shit is intentional, and when they say they’re courting “Middle America”, they mean white people - despite there being a lot of non-white people who live in the Mid-West.
The New York Times’ performance rating system is racially biased, to the point where, again, it seems intentional.
Some went further, suggesting the company’s approach seemed tailor-made to avoid detecting any evidence of bias.
Rachael Meager, an economist at the London School of Economics, was blunt: "LMAO, that's so dumb," she wrote when Guild journalists described the company’s methodology to her. “That's what you would do if you want to obliterate signal,” she added, using a word that in economics refers to meaningful information.
“This is so stupid as to border on negligence,” added Dr. Meager, who has published papers on evaluating statistical evidence in leading economics journals.
None of their Black or Latine journalists qualify for the higher scores? Unlikely.
One Less Burden
Assuming everything works the way it should, $20,000 of the ~$24,000 that I owe in student loans will be forgiven under Biden’s new student debt forgiveness plan, which is fucking amazing because I was very worried about how high those payments were going to be once the freeze was over - I didn’t finally get a higher paying job just to give the difference to the US government.
How some folks sound right now.
I wish it was total student loan forgiveness for everyone, though - I don’t think getting an education should put people in debt. I don’t think colleges, especially public ones, should be able to charge as much as they do. And I don’t think everyone should be pressured to go to college. I always get frustrated by those news stories about high schools that have a 100% college acceptance rate. How many of those kids are being pressured into making decisions that could cost them a lifetime of debt when they’re barely adults? How many of them are the first in their families to go to college, and thus have little to no guidance on these big decisions? How many of them are working class kids who’ve been told that the only pathway to the middle class is a college degree, but haven’t been told that after they’ve walked that path they’re going to bring home a shitload of debt attached to their backs like a parasitic demon
?It was a lovely time, back when you could go to college for a relatively low cost and not just to increase your earning potential, but because you just wanted to know more about the world and be around people who were different from the ones you grew up with. But that time has ended - over a generation ago, it seems - and I think that if the costs aren’t going to go down, then our conversations around college-going need to change to reflect the current reality: College is now a (very expensive) tool. And, like with other tools, you should use a specific one, for a specific purpose, and only when you need it.
Anyway, Can't Pay, Won't Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition by Debt Collective is currently free in ebook form at Haymarket Books.
If I ruled the world…
I’ve, uh, been listening to a lot of paranormal podcasts lately.