At Brighton’s Council Rock Primary School, “Jingle Bells” has been removed from the repertoire because it has “the potential to be controversial or offensive.” Is it a wise step or well-intentioned overreach?
“Jingle Bells” is one of the most performed and well-known secular holiday songs ever written, not only in the United States, but around the world. It’s the first song to have been broadcast from space—by Gemini 6 astronauts nine days before Christmas in 1965. It’s regularly been sung at the White House—most recently by President Barack Obama and his family upon lighting the National Christmas Tree in 2016.
But “Jingle Bells” isn’t being sung anymore at Brighton’s Council Rock Primary School.
“Jingle Bells,” explained Council Rock principal Matt Tappon in an email, has been replaced with other songs that don’t have “the potential to be controversial or offensive.”
And the laughable, left-wing, neoliberal cancel culture continues their relentless march to the gates of Hell, trying to drag all people of good will with them. They have been attacking Christian Christmas songs for decades, and now these fun-suckers have set their eyes on secular holiday songs. I can see it now – Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer will be cancelled next because Rudolph was discriminated against and bullied due to his disability. After all, Coach Comet is an ableist, nose-shaming bully wearing a New England Patriots cap.
A funny thing happened when Covid-19, the Wuhan virus, hit the world. America’s retail pharmacy corporations volunteered their overworked, understaffed, mentally exhausted pharmacists to take on the enormous responsibility of administering 400,000,000 vaccines in the first 12 months of the vaccination program. That represents an approximately four-fold increase in total vaccines administered by American pharmacists for the 2020-2021 cycle. With no additional staff. So do you know what happened? Every pharmacist who could find a different job or retire did just that. We saw the storm coming and we quit. By the thousands. Those poor, indentured souls who had to stay got hit by a train, swallowed up by an earthquake, and washed away in a flood. The industry is in trouble, and it is a self-inflicted wound.
Pharmacists across the state and the nation are seeing a decrease in the control of their workload and their sense of community, as well as a lot more burnout, depression, anxiety and emotional exhaustion.
Alisyn May, an assistant professor of pharmacotherapy at the University of Utah College of Pharmacy, describes the profession as “high stress with low tolerance for error” — a job that already had a large problem with burnout before the pandemic started.
She noted that pharmacy includes a wide range of practitioners, including people like Peng, in hospitals, to those in local retail pharmacies, like Vickers. But no matter where pharmacists work, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically increased their workload and resulted in a wave of trained pharmacists and staff abandoning the profession, leaving those who remain with even more work and less support.
The largest U.S. pharmacy chain said it will close 300 stores a year for 3 years while adding primary-care offices at certain sites as well as converting more stores into so-called health hubs.
This is pharmacy reality – Please share it with as many potential pharmacy students as possible.
Most of you have heard of “trend colleges,” say for computer technology, medical assistants, pharmacy technicians, etc, and likely cringe at the thought of some poor kid taking out a loan for an education that is mostly worthless. These fly-by-night programs do not conform to academic rigors and standards of accredited universities and colleges. They simply part a fool from his money. This chicanery, this charlatanism, cannot possibly exist in major colleges and universities, who produce the great thinkers of our time, can it? A reputable institution of learning would never sell a student a worthless degree, would they? What about major universities offering advanced degrees in America’s most trusted profession, pharmacy? Surely, these very expensive and academically rigorous degrees will reap a financial and professional reward for their holders, right? Well, friend, sorry, they don’t. Not anymore. You did the work. You paid the bill. You earned the degree. The Uni separated you from your money, but thanks to the machinations of industry leaders like Walgreens, CVS, Walmart, and RiteAid (who control right around 30% of the job market), and pharmacy benefit managers, in league with your vine-covered institution of higher learning, the Doctor of Pharmacy degree has become an albatross of debt flailing on the back of a miserable, low paying job.
Once upon a time, pharmacy was a promising profession. The cost of education was reasonable, and the job market and pay were good. I spent six years at Oregon State University earning my pharmacy degree in the late 80s. The Grand Total – tuition, books, rent, and food – everything – came to $36,000. When I graduated I had a $42,000/year job (worth about $90,000 in today’s dollars) waiting for me. It was a good trade-off. Through the years I earned healthy raises and retired at the peak of industry wages. While Walgreens intentionally creates hostile work environments for nearly all its employees, at least the money was good, once upon a time.
Today, it will cost you ten times the dollars I spent to earn your pharmacy degree. Once you add in the cost of your undergraduate degree, you can expect to drop an average of $300,000-$400,000 before you earn your first dollar as a pharmacist. The academic inflation rate for a pharmacy degree is four times the US inflation rate over the past 30-odd years, meaning you just spent $350,000 on something that cost me $86,000 of your dollars, and you are bridging that gap with student loans. For instance, if you have student loans of $200,000, the service on that 10-year debt at 5% will be $2121 per month. Cheers, you lucky devil, you are now indentured, and your future employer knows it and will enjoy keeping their foot on your neck until you break.
What awaits today’s aspiring young pharmacist in the “new grad” job market? Not the job the sell-outs at APhA or your alma mater advertised – the job where you would collect a cool $125,000 a year – the job where you could actually afford to service your debt. Due to an irresponsible increase in pharmacy programs nationwide, 140 at last count – an increase of 30 over in just the last ten years, and the subsequent glut of pharmacists graduating every year, there are more pharmacists than there are jobs. A lot more. I mean, thousands more, and it is only going to get worse. It is like a broken fire hydrant flooding the streets with pharmacists, gushing out all wet, cold and desperate, and if you cannot find a job in the industry, your $350,000 degree is not worth the paper on which it is printed. You have no other marketable skills. Walgreens can smell your desperation like the nervous stench of a thirteen-year-old boy at a school dance.
Even a 2% unemployment rate for pharmacists is catastrophic, leaving over 6,000 debt-ridden practitioners desperate for a paycheck. Not to mention the underemployed – if you add the unemployed, under-employed, and pharmacists like me who simply walked away because the job sucks, and there are a lot of us, you will easily get a number at or above 2% if anyone cared to collate the stats.
The temporary surge in hiring and retiring pharmacists due to the Covid crisis will eventually collapse. Before Covid, every new hire I talked to had taken a substantial pay cut. Walgreens has managed to replace nearly their entire veteran North Idaho pharmacist staff in the past three years with cheap, new hires. A friend still on the inside told me WAG is currently offering $60-70,000 a year to new grads in the Portland market. The current pharmacist “shortage” is a self-inflicted wound by the industry. They, Walgreens and their ilk, treated so many of us so horribly, en masse, we took early retirement when Covid hit. We were already stretched beyond the breaking point, only to have the burden of Covid thrown on our shoulders. It was a painfully funny miscalculation on the industry’s part. They believed they could abuse us forever with no repercussions.
Number of Pharmacy Graduates by Year
While the number of pharmacists grows each year by 15,000 new graduates, only 7,000-10,000 will age out of the industry once Covid fades, and the number of available jobs is expected to shrink over the next decade by about 7,000. Think about that… an extra 5,000 debt-laden licenses a year, every year, for the next two decades. Do not forget, those 15,000 annual new grads have to compete against the thousands of unemployed and under-employed pharmacists already in the market. Today’s P1 student could easily come into a job market in 2025 with an unemployment rate of 5-10%. Think about what that will do to wages and working conditions. Big Retail knows you have no choice but take their paltry offer. This is one of the ways Walgreens plans on propping up is recently sagging earnings. Every $10,000 WAG saves in pharmacist wages results in a $270,000,000 savings the company can waste on their many harebrained schemes, like turning their pharmacists into mental health crisis counselors for store customers.
What awaits you, my pharmacy friend, is a job at Walgreens earning $60-70,000 a year, a nearly 25 year rollback in wages where you get to party like its 1999. A lousy, high stress, understaffed, hell-hole job, where the first $2100 of your paltry $3300 take-home pay gets nicked to pay your debt. That is if you are lucky. You might get stuck working a mishmash of unbenefitted part-time jobs just to make ends meet. At the end of day, you will see the real earnings of a minimum wage job for your first decade of servitude, and then you will turn a bitter forty years old. So, congratulations are in order! After all of your really, really hard work earning one of your university’s most difficult and expensive degrees, you will make about the same as the general manager at your favorite Denny’s Restaurant, only the Denny’s manager is not saddled with $200,000 in student debt, so they can afford a mortgage rather than moving into their parent’s basement to save on rent. A trucker with a GED and zero student debt likely makes as much or more than you, and already has fifteen years of earnings under their belt before you save your first dollar. Hell, if you are a USC grad (at the University of Spoiled Children, one of the biggest educational ripoffs in the known world, eight years costs about $700,000) you may never actually earn back the cost of your education. You, my friend, have just been “Trend Colleged,” only you lost eight years of your life instead of one, and Joe Biden ain’t gonna be able to forgive you student debt. You ought to sue for a refund, my pharmacy friend, just sayin’.
Lia Thomas, 22, formerly named Will, recently ‘blasted’ UPenn records in the 200m and 500m freestyle – posting times that beat almost every other female swimmer across America.
With a time of 1:43:47 in the 200m freestyle, Thomas would have been in line to secure a silver medal at the NCAA Women’s Championships, while her 4:35:06 in the 500m freestyle would have been good enough to win bronze.
To swim at the NCAA Division I level, you have to be a physical beast. To make the championship podium, you have to be world-class. Will Thomas was a physical beast, a high school standout, but not world class. His personal bests did not make a dent in the Ivy league, and he needed to shave at least 7 seconds off his 200M and 12 seconds off his 500M times to qualify for the NCAAs, where he had absolutely no hope of medaling. However, Lia Thomas, taking advantage of her male biology, just transformed into a 5th to 6th standard deviation female swimmer and potential Olympian.
AND THAT is a prime example of the SJW/neoliberal fake definition of gender equity. But is it just and fair? Nope, no by a long shot. But if you protest, and say it is an inequity rather than an equitable situation, the SJW/neoliberals will brand you with their fake definition of phobic. Unfortunately, there is no reasoning with people who branded Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist because he shot three white men, who were trying to do him great bodily harm if not kill him, in self-defense. Luckily, you still outnumber the lunatic fringe by a 7 to 3 margin despite decades of neoliberal indoctrination in the public school systems. You just have to firmly stand your ground and endure their madness and hate.
2,000,000 – News articles published on a daily basis
THAT IS A LOT OF NOISE. A lot of fierce competition. To the common blogger, someone who has a story or opinion or an experience they want to share, they are overwhelming numbers. Demoralizing numbers. Give-up-and-quit-once-you-realize-all-of-your-effort-garnered-three-readers-and-971-spam-attacks numbers. People who give up on their blog are everywhere. They had a great idea, got off to a good start, only to soon abandon their endeavor. Often times they discover they did not have nearly as much to say as they thought. Sometimes they dive into topics they know little of and found doing research and educating themselves was, darn it, actual work… work that led to facts… facts that then challenged their world view. However, sometimes they quit because performing a one-man show in a near empty theater sucks the spirit out of the performance… especially when there are literally a half billion one-man shows on e-Broadway doing their best to steal the audience. I follow a number of blogs and only three published regularly. One got his politically incorrect self banned by his platform for violating the terms of service, and now I only hear from two with any sort of regularity.
How do I see all of this? I simply do not judge the quality of my work by its relative anonymity. We live in a world where it is nearly impossible to break into The Club unless you are already a member of The Club. If you are in The Club, the world hangs on your every word no matter your ignorance and illiteracy. If you are not in The Club, no matter how educated, clever, and righteous you are, you will remain obscure. It is nothing personal, so I do not take it personally. I write for two fundamental reasons. First, I enjoy it. I enjoy crafting articulate ideas. I enjoy doing the work required to come to an accurate and valid conclusion backed up by facts.
The second reason can be summed up in the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25.
“The kingdom of Heaven is like a man about to go abroad who summoned his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one he gave five talents, to another two, to a third one, each in proportion to his ability. Then he set out on his journey. The man who had received the five talents promptly went and traded with them and made five more. The man who had received two made two more in the same way. But the man who had received one went off and dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.
Now a long time afterwards, the master of those servants came back and went through his accounts with them. The man who had received the five talents came forward bringing five more. “Sir,” he said, “you entrusted me with five talents; here are five more that I have made.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.” Next the man with the two talents came forward. “Sir,” he said, “you entrusted me with two talents; here are two more that I have made.” His master said to him, “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have shown you are trustworthy in small things; I will trust you with greater; come and join in your master’s happiness.” Last came forward the man who had the single talent. “Sir,” said he, “I had heard you were a hard man, reaping where you had not sown and gathering where you had not scattered; so I was afraid, and I went off and hid your talent in the ground. Here it is; it was yours, you have it back.” But his master answered him, “You wicked and lazy servant! So you knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered? Well then, you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have got my money back with interest. So now, take the talent from him and give it to the man who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough; but anyone who has not, will be deprived even of what he has. As for this good-for-nothing servant, throw him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.””
I am not the most talented, saintly servant… not even close… but if what I write makes a difference to even a few, especially in these days where virtue, morality, faith, truth, and reason are under attack in every corner of the world, I hope to not be empty-handed when the Lord returns and asks his due. We no longer live in a world where we can rely on the currents of society to flow with people of conscience. Instead, we are moving opposite to society’s flow, resisting and pushing against dark currents in order to live healthy, faith-driven, virtuous lives. Therefore, I am satisfied reciting my thoughts to a near-empty theater.
If you are writing stories, essays, news pieces, editorials, and the like… and I know some of you are… that are a counterweight against the growing evils of this world, do not quit simply because you feel your efforts are for naught. The right to speak freely that you enjoy today may be gone tomorrow. Many U.S. based digital platforms, in the name of secular corporate theocracy, have already banned legitimate speech based on the platform’s broken ideological moral compass. President Trump? Thumbs down. The Taliban? Thumbs up. They have become nothing more than propaganda generators canceling the free exchange of ideas and debate.
Each time you speak up, whether you reach a few or many, you are giving a return on God’s investment in you. It is human nature to be resentful of ‘little thanks,’ but if you have done a good work, sometimes few, but very real thanks will suffice. Write because you love it. Write good things so those few who do come to your theater know the light of goodness still exists in this world and refuses to be covered or extinguished by an increasingly secular, hedonistic, destructive society.
Glasgow, Scotland. UN climate gatherings are a unique blend of quiet international negotiations and a whirlwind of public announcements and programming from governments, businesses, and environmental stakeholders alike. As an official accredited observer, the Chamber has been in the middle of it all, highlighting the work of the business community in driving climate solutions.
Walking the halls of COP26, one can’t go far without bumping into young activists in bright blue shirts emblazoned with a simple request: “Let’s Talk About Nuclear.” Their accompanying social media hashtag—#NetZeroNeedsNuclear—speaks for itself, and is indisputable: achieving net-zero global emissions is simply not realistic without significant deployment of expanded nuclear generation. The activists and their allies seem to be getting their message across. As the conference winds down and we take stock of the most meaningful outcomes, strengthened support for nuclear energy is likely to emerge as a major COP26 success story.
The Knight and the Serpent - Conservative Words Proudly Shadowbanned by Google since 2017 