People would love some truth spoken into those mics, officer
People would love some truth spoken into those mics, officer Getty | Eric Thayer

Uvalde parents rightly want answers from local cops: And they're not alone. Rep. Joaquin Castro has asked the FBI to investigate the local law enforcement's response to the school shooting. Now that media has interviewed the parents who flocked to their children's school while the shooting was happening, they're providing firsthand accounts about how law enforcement responded that contradict law enforcement's initial descriptions of the shooting.

Here's the spokesperson from the Texas Dept. of Public Safety, completely in command of the situation:

If you'd like to be more helpful than that guy the New York Times has a roundup of verified donation funds to support the families in Uvalde.

Maybe cops should be required to take the Hippocratic Oath: Because it just hits different when an officer's incompetence likely cost a child her life. The cop told the kids to hide and then yell for help, and when one did, the shooter found her and shot her. If your heart hasn't already shattered into a thousand pieces this week, spend some time contemplating that a fourth grader had better sense in this crisis than someone the state pays to protect that child:

When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something so he won't find us," he said. “I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.

Alright, let's clear the air: This is the last blurb about gun violence I (and I imagine you) can handle. Instead of chasing every rumor or correction about how the cops may or may not have lied, do your small part to fight misinformation by relying on this roundup from the Washington Post. Also, before anyone starts shrieking about response times and needing more officers to stop incidents like this, consider that the Uvalde police station was a TWO-MINUTE DRIVE AWAY.

Just gonna leave this here:

Would someone leak the vaccine recipe already? I know, I know. It's not that simple. But if Pfizer can afford to cut prices for its "top-selling COVID vaccine and treatment" in 45 countries, it seems like maybe we could have just given them the recipe early and then spent the last two years building manufacturing capacity in places that were still struggling to vaccinate their populations. It's fine, though. It's not like this is a global disease or anything. Let's make sure that Pfizer does exactly enough good to get some positive press without presumably hurting their bottom line all that much.

Nothing to see here: Just a totally inconsequential admission that a fifth of adult COVID patients are experiencing some form of long COVID. I personally know someone with the condition who used to run half-marathons and who now can barely make it up a flight of stairs, but, y'know, keep not wearing your masks on transit you filthy animals.

Props to The Guardian for this headline: "Blow to Madison Cawthorn as appeals court reverses ‘insurrectionist’ ruling." The disgraced soon-to-be-former Congressman can potentially be barred from holding office due to his alleged participation in the January 6th coup attempt. If life were a TV show, this is where the crusty old dudes who Cawthorn accused of having coke-fueled orgies would start to worry about him turning into a state's witness. Sadly, this is real life, where he will almost certainly double-down on his MAGA nonsense and end up grifting from the far-right on Patreon.

Public service announcement for fellow candy-lovers: Double check if your favorite treat has been recalled due to a salmonella outbreak tied to JIF peanut butter products.

I wish I knew how this made sense: Apparently stocks are up (?) after Wall Street investors learned the Federal Reserve plans to hike interest rates. Because this is financial sector news where everything operates on speculation about what might happen soon instead of what's actually happening now, the confidence spike came from newly-released minutes of a Fed board meeting, not an actual adjustment in the interest rates. That will happen soon, but not as much as investors feared, and so now they're all bathing in Benjamins.

That last metaphor might be literally true for some CEOs: A new report shows that CEO pay rose 17% in 2021, largely driven by corporate profits hitting record highs. But wait, you might be thinking, aren't we headed into a recession while dealing with such terrible inflation that it's eating the purchasing power of workers nationwide, despite increases in wages? Yes. That is all true. But that hasn't stopped Expedia Group from paying its CEO more than a quarter of a billion dollars in compensation, including stocks and options. Surely entrenching an entire class of uber-wealthy elites making literally thousands of times more than the median worker in their firms won't have any destabilizing consequences for our society.

For the "why have gun laws at all?" crowd: