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'Sale-leasebacks' offer to help homeowners needing cash. Some lose thousands
  • This was pretty much exactly how it sounds. People in financial trouble sell their house to the lender with an agreement to rent it from the lender and keep living there, then the lender jacks up the rent and they get evicted and the house is sold. After fees and everything else they may not get to keep much of the equity from the house sale and potentially could lose all equity and end up owing the lender. As tenants they don’t have all the legal protections a homeowner in foreclosure would have. The lender claims all its customers know what they are getting into.

  • Researchers invent 100% biodegradable 'barley plastic'
  • The question then becomes how well does this work in place of traditional plastics? Does it have the same strength and water resistance? It needs to hold up to moisture in order to be used for takeout. If food partially breaks it down, people will be ingesting it so toxicity is also a concern. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Even if it can only replace shopping bags, that will still be a huge improvement. So many bags blow away in the wind and I live in an area that made it illegal for cities to ban single use shopping bags.

  • Ted Cruz's secret playbook found in Senate refectory — and posted online
  • The ones who are in congress are the ones who are good at successfully navigating this system of campaigning. They don’t want to level the playing field for opponents who don’t have a strong network of rich donors ready to boost them.

  • Venue cancels anti-LGBTQ+ antisemitic conference at last minute, upsetting bigots
  • The white nationalists have been turning on the guy in the right in that photo, Jake Shields, because they found out he has mixed ethnicity and decided he isn’t white enough for them. Their movement is such a mess.

  • Texas megachurch pastor resigns after admitting to molestation claims in 1980s
  • Well this is a whole community that messed up. His church knew his past and decided to still put him in positions of trust and authority. They could’ve had him do work as a church landscaper or some other non-leadership role if they wanted to still keep him gainfully employed while going through treatment for his issues. Nobody forced the rest of the church leadership to keep him as a minister and pastor when they knew he was capable of abusing a young child for years on end. It is also the responsibility of pedophiles to not put themselves in positions where they have access to children. They might not be able to help their urges, but they can choose not to work around children or share a home with children. There are lots of jobs where children aren’t involved.

  • A Christian group teaches public school students during the school day. Their footprint is growing
  • I spent my high school years as a newly born again Christian in the Bible Belt, so I would’ve been the weirdo who loved something like this. This was definitely not a thing where I grew up. It is so weird to think of LA being a religious indoctrination hotbed, that is not something I expected.

  • Alex Jones cries after agreeing to liquidate assets to pay Sandy Hook families | CNN
  • I was following conspiracy theory communities prior to Sandy Hook and Alex Jones stood out because he had a track record well before that event of declaring any big tragedy that hit the news as a false flag event. His audience clearly loved that tactic because just about every day he had a new false flag current event with crisis actors. Sandy Hook wasn’t really given a unique treatment by Jones, as soon as I saw the headline that day, my first thought was that Jones was soon going to declare it to be yet another false flag event, because he always said shootings were faked by the government to take people’s guns away. The difference is in the public response to this one. The public couldn’t ignore the harassment of all these grieving parents the way it ignored the rest of his rants. We are a lot more sensitive to harms towards children than we are towards adults so this story got a lot more traction.

  • A real nut case: Cold Stone Creamery faces suit over lack of real pistachios in pistachio ice cream
  • Vanilla is a pretty expensive spice and vanillin can be synthesized from oil or wood, you should probably assume most things vanilla flavored are artificially flavored. There is way more demand for vanilla than the amount of vanilla pods grown in the world.

  • Trump Rails Against Broken Rally Teleprompters, Threatens to Stiff Contractors
  • As far as I know, it is contractors he stiffs. I don’t know what kind of clauses he has in his contracts but that is a little different than wage theft. I do think he should pay contractors for the work they have done regardless of what type of law they fall under.

    I can say that if you contact the department of labor over wage theft of a regular salary, they are actually really responsive. I have a friend who filed a report very recently over his employer manipulating his time sheet and not paying him for all of the hours worked and he got a call back within 12 hours even though they say it can take up to ten days. It was surprisingly quick. They set him up with a department of labor app to track his hours going forward to document any future discrepancies between his actual labor and the number of hours he is getting paid for. The situation is ongoing so I can’t say what the resolution is yet, but they sounded pretty supportive.

  • Mystery as Russian judge dies after falling from window
  • Some of the Russians who fall out of windows are shot, poisoned, murdered in prison, or have their planes blown up too? Did they get pushed out of a first floor window and then Russia had to initiate the backup plan when they survived?

  • Alex Jones says Infowars could be shut down within hours
  • He is an insane conman. He blamed a bowl of chili for not remembering basic facts about his children during his custody trial and behaved pretty insane during the defamation trials, too. He is great at dialing up the theatrics on his show to bring in the money, but he is also downright crazy.

  • Far Right Billionaires Are Waging a War to Capture State Courts
  • Single motherhood tends to be a ticket to poverty and impoverished parents can’t provide kids as much resources to support their education. Poor kids are more likely to have to enter the workforce sooner to provide for basic needs. An abortion might have allowed the parent to have more earnings and stability before raising a kid. Also plenty of anti-abortion activists are hypocrites and will make excuses for why their circumstances merit an abortion while everyone else needs their access blocked. When their kid gets raped by an uncle and can’t get an abortion, they will be left with an extra child care burden too that might have otherwise been negated with a secret abortion.

  • Louisiana set to become 1st state requiring 10 Commandments be posted in schools
  • This Supreme Court might decide to play favorites, maybe the next precedent is “only religions existing during the founding of the US can display texts in schools.” Just because previous courts protected the separation of church and state doesn’t mean this court has to abide by that precedent.

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