Up To Date With Ethan Callender

  Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 25: Double Manchin Senator Joe Manchin is a Congressman tasked with representing the people of West Virginia. This is no easy task by itself, especially as a Democrat in such a Republican-leaning state. However, Manchin has completely failed at this task in the most spectacular way possible. By rejecting Biden’s Build Back Better plan recently, he is obviously trying to appease the Republicans in the Senate, and yet he has failed to please anybody in either party in this past year. He has become the Senator that both politicians and the masses alike love to hate, and he has even blatantly annoyed and angered President Biden and his administration. How did America get to the point where one maverick Congressman could hold up an entire agenda? What is the deal with Joe Manchin? For one thing, it’s worth noting that Manchin is a career politician with a longstanding reputation for being a rather conservative Democrat. Before joining the Sen...

 Up To Date Presents Food For Thought Entry 4:  Chemical Elements America is well known as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. It is also known as a land with many maladies for such a developed nation and is home to stores whose products contain many chemicals. Many of those are potentially toxic yet are protected from testing under the law. From lead to BPA and from mercury to atrazine, the market is saturated with potentially toxic substances. This is a normalization of toxicity in our products, and it is unacceptable. To start, the number of chemicals on the American market is over 84,000 (Loki 2020). To make matters worse, many of these synthetic substances are untested, and automatically presumed to be safe. In fact, AlterNet’s Reynard Loki puts the number of tested substances around only 1% of all chemicals on the market as of 2020. The reason for this is that the laws protecting American consumers from toxic chemicals are simply toothless. They vary by s...

Up To Date With Ethan Callender Entry 24: (Arguments) Shot Down DISCLAIMER: This entry discusses the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which may be extremely sensitive for some people. Reader discretion is advised. The news recently has been incredibly interesting, but due to various reasons, I was unable to write a new entry until now. Therefore, I want to quickly mention the verdict in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse. To begin, I want to state that in my non-expert opinion, no one side is correct about his case. For example, more liberal Americans are missing that the weapon Rittenhouse used was likely always in Wisconsin . More conservative Americans, on the other hand, are claiming he acted solely in self-defense. That would be a fair argument, but he drove himself to the scene as a civilian, thus proving he planned to be there. I don’t know about you, but if someone planned to be in a violent situation, that person shouldn’t be able to claim self-defense. What I’m saying is that he made ...