Critical thinkers 

Chicken or egg?

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In the case of my favorite Grover Beach renegade, Allen Thompson, he thought he could keep both the chicken and the egg when it came to the short-term rental property he owned. Turns out, the city wasn't down with that. Grover Beach wanted a portion of the eggs that Thompson's rental property was laying, and it looks like he's going to be handing over more eggs than previously thought.

A settlement reached between the two parties in a recent lawsuit means that Thompson needs to pay the city almost $40,000 in back-owed transient occupancy taxes before the end of February. That's gotta hurt!

In the case of San Luis Obispo, the city counted its chickens before they hatched! After a very slow start to its nascent cannabis industry, SLO has come to the conclusion that it needs to make more space for cannabis businesses to exist. Cannabis tax revenues are lower than anticipated—no surprises there.

I guess we can thank Helios Dayspring for that! The city is still going to limit the number of dispensaries in town to three, but it suddenly has an opening that needs to be filled because of Dayspring's criminal conviction, which prevented the Natural Healing Center from opening.

In the case of the Paso Robles Joint Unified School District, eggs are the reason for the science curriculum discussion season. Board trustee Dorian Baker is simply convinced that the recently approved K through fifth grade curriculum has an anti-animal protein "agenda" and is full of misinformation.

Her experience with chickens is all the proof she needs, according to the comments she made at recent board meetings.

Apparently, the curriculum states that it takes about 50 gallons of water to produce one egg—a widely accepted data point fed by scientific studies of global commercial egg production and shared by the U.S. Geological Survey's Water Activity Center.

Baker, though, is not a sheeple! She treads her own path without believing any government "agenda" backed by real science. She's a scientific critical thinker, an at-home chicken hobbyist with a small brood of chickens that produce many, many eggs! So obvs, she knows what she's talking about—those chickens don't even come close to drinking that much water!

"Altogether," her chickens consume "less than 10 gallons per week," she stated at the Jan. 24 meeting. "There's no way that this information is reliable in this instance, even in figuring the amount of water that's used to produce the food that the chickens eat."

Yes, there's just no way that all the chicken producers in the world, who are trying to squeeze all the eggs they can out of their little cluckers as efficiently as possible, operate differently than the chicken or egg queen of Paso Robles.

And the things the curriculum said about the how much water it takes to produce beef? Baker was simply appalled!

She's convinced that the majority of water used to produce cattle falls from the sky—it rains on rangeland grasses and then the cows eat that, so how can it even be included in the calculations? I'm going to go out on a critical thinking limb and guess that the majority of the water used to produce cattle comes from the commercial feedlots and the copious amounts of corn and grain that we finish cows off with before they head to the slaughterhouse! That's where those fat, juicy steaks really pack on the pounds, baby.

Also, they have to rinse all that shit off those cows at some point. Has Baker ever been on Highway 5 just north of Kettlemen City or is she basing her bovine conclusions on Paso Robles bucolic, idyllic ranchitas?

I'm very confused as to how this retired teacher of 40 years is suddenly an expert on the scientific discussion surrounding how much water it takes to produce our food and why she's so opposed to children learning about that process. And she's very concerned that the curriculum isn't going to teach critical thinking—although I'm positive she's not an expert on that.

"We should be guarding against the politicization of our curriculum," she opined.

Sounds like the only politicization that's happening is on the Paso school board dais—something board newcomer Sondra Williams essentially said in the nicest, most opaque way possible.

Three members of the board wanted to delay adoption of the curriculum until the egg situation was addressed. But Williams questioned whether a delay and deeper dive into the curriculum would allay concerns. She said the concerns that were brought up during the meeting—which also involved social emotional learning (No surprises there, but what is the big deal with that, by the way?)—seemed to indicate a broader political agenda.

"No manner of digging or more time to digest it is ever going to give us a better picture than what was presented here," Williams said. "I think this is a bigger question about a lack of trust and the barrier that we [want to] put between teachers and curriculum."

In other words: She gets it. Ya'll parents who believe that teachers are indoctrinating your children with left-wing socialist fantasies want more control over the curriculum than you have. And, while that must be hard for you, there's a reason that it's teachers piloting new curriculum and not parents. Δ

The Shredder is a chicken and egg advocate. Send water to [email protected].