Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the wildly influential and anti-LGBTQ “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account, is working her followers into a rage because, she claims, a Texas school is making kids design their own “fursona.”
“A second grade teacher in Austin ISD allegedly gave students worksheets on furries,” she wrote with pictures of furry worksheets. “These included a furry wordsearch and an activity on designing your own furry persona.”
The pictures included came from Facebook. One of them asks, “What would your fursona be like?” and asks if they’re male, female or non-binary and if they have fur, scales, or feathers.
Another sheet Raichik included announces a “Culture Month,” complete with a week devoted to goths, furries, and other “youth subcultures.”
Raichik also shared a screenshot of someone saying that they are a concerned parent in the Austin school district who is “frankly disgusted” that their second grade daughter is being taught how to be a furry.
But the whole thing is a hoax.
Tucker Carlson and other conservative figures are spreading a conspiracy theory about the national food supply.
The conspiracy is based on an image that circulated last week on Facebook showing local news headlines about fires and other mishaps at food processing plants around the country, and rumors of trouble in the food supply then spread from Telegram to Fox News, reported The Daily Beast.
“Industrial accidents happen, of course, but this is a lot of industrial accidents at food processing facilities,” Carlson said during the April 21 episode of his highly watched prime-time show.
Seattle talk radio host Jason Rantz then joined him to discuss the “very suspicious” fires, even if neither conservative broadcaster could explain exactly what was going on.
The conspiracy theorists have vaguely suggested the Biden administration was behind the “attacks,” without explaining why, or blamed them for rising food prices, and Carlson was unable to say whether the number of fires was noteworthy.
“What are the odds of that?” Carlson said. “I have no idea.”
Today, I got to experience what it’s like to be unbanked in the USA.
I brought my two stimulus checks with me when I came to visit family in Kansas (checks do not exist in Japan, so I did not have any way to cash them there). One for 1,400 and one for 1,800. The second one was the stimulus for 2020, and it was issued in July 2021. No bank would allow me to cash either check without an account, and they all said that they no longer cash third-party checks, so I could not just endorse them to my sister. I could open a new account, but there would be a hold on the checks for longer than I will be in the US.
The check for 1,400 was issued a couple of months ago, so I was able to cash it at Wal-Mart for a processing fee of 8 dollars, but they would not cash a check that was over 6 months old. And so, I had to take the check to a seedy payday loan place where they made me submit to a quick background check (I had to give them the name and address of the subsidiary of my Japanese company here in the US). They then took a 3% (54 dollar) processing fee.
And that’s not the kicker. They gave me 746 dollars in cash and then a prepaid debit card with a balance of 1,000…which has a bunch of fees of its own. Luckily, I can get cash from the card with cashback at a supermarket, but that has to be split into several transactions due to the daily maximum.
For people who do not have the means to get bank accounts in the US, they have to put up with this kind of bullshit all the time. Wal-Mart also would not have let me cash the newer check at all if I did not have a driver’s license. It’s a damn shame.
Yep. The vast majority of people, even those in the lower middle class, don’t realize how exponentially harder everything gets as you descend the economic ladder.
Want to watch a banker recoil in horror? Suggest that the Bank of Canada dust off its old retail persona, opening an account for every Canadian (ready for their tax refunds, of course), handling basic bill payment, debit cards and inter-account transfers at zero cost, paying the 10y rate plus inflation as interest. Heck, maybe doing the “easy” stuff like index funds and good quality mortgages.
Suggest to the banker that, since they are clearly so smart, they can handle the difficult stuff…
Yep. Everything. Try buying a used car as an unbanked person without a smartphone. Not impossible, technically, but takes days of waiting in lines in any place I had to do it. Nevermind how you get to the places to wait in line if you don’t already have a car.
I don’t want anyone to have to go through this stuff, but since they do, I wish part of congressional on-boarding included having to do basic stuff like doing laundry or buying a used car as one of the “less fortunate” so they could see what a shit show it is.
They do, but the bank receiving the direct deposit has to be a US bank, so I would have needed to have an account from the beginning. No US banks operate in Japan (and good riddance to that). I had a joint account with my father before moving to Japan in 2005, but that account passed away when my father did.
I could have avoided all of this if I could have traveled to the US sooner…
It just really drove home how hard life is for those without bank accounts even in normal times.
Probably has to be a US financial institution OR a foreign banking institution that operates in the US. If @Jesse13927 had an account with a Japanese bank that has U.S. offices, that may have worked.
This reminds me of the movie Time After Time. Malcolm McDowell is going door-to-door banking, looking for David Warner, and it was amazing how many foreign banks had a location in SF. While some of them may have been made up, I do remember several of the ones shown.
the taxes on a gift like that must be astounding. im imagining since he’s theoretically “penniless” he’d have to cash the coin in immediately to pay for it, and i also wonder if anyone would really give him a million dollars in cash for the coin. minus whatever exchange rate he’d have to pay, maybe he’ll go bankrupt for real this time just from the gift alone
Right now it feels like every day is a fuck today on a personal level.
Three months ago I took a break from the news and large chunks of the internet, completely blockng some sites and restricting my access to others. I still haven’t recovered enough to deal with most of it, although enough of the real world news gets through to stress me even when I am trying to avoid it. Maybe that’s why I haven’t recovered yet.
On top of that I have been rationing some of my medication for the last month because there are no local pharmacies with it in stock. Thankfully it isn’t my hormones.
This year isn’t as bad as the violent abuse I got in 2004, but it is a bad thing that I feel the need to compare the two.
(raccoon) as revealed by a pre-leavinng-for-school eyeshadow makeup disaster… 
banker recoil in horror? Suggest that the Bank of Canada dust off its old retail persona, opening an account for every Canadian (ready for their tax refunds, of course), handling basic bill payment, debit cards and inter-account transfers at zero cost, paying the 10y rate plus inflation as interest. Heck, maybe doing the “easy” stuff like index funds and good quality mortgages.
