The back of one door is the face of another.
Proverb
Tweet of the Day
Line of the Day: "Venezuelan Bolivar Now Worth More as Toilet Paper Than as Money." http://t.co/b8Bv0Z4AHe
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) May 26, 2015
A Prager Video I Disagree With: US As Global PolicemanFirst of all, you have to admire someone who is actually willing and has the intellectual integrity to assert his favorable position on a question where many people actually pay lip service to opposing.
Now dealing with his arguments:
- We don't have any legal or constitutional mandate to serve as global policeman. The ability to assert use of force doesn't imply we ought to.
- We don't have the resources to do so, there can be literally dozens of wars going on simultaneously, and selecting the "good" interventions can be arbitrary. Just as the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan showed, we were spread too thin, our inventory and supplies were sharply degraded, our armed forces had low morale with many soldiers rotating multiple tours, We were highly vulnerable to a crippling third front. We typically don't have the logistics or relationships to operate effectively in a foreign context; consider, for instance, Bush's limited options to invading Iraq.
- Our actions are often inconsistent in principle. For example, the USSR, China, and Cambodia have engaged in forms of genocide under the Communists, but we didn't intervene for obvious reasons.
- If and when we do intervene, there are often unintended consequences. Consider WWI; the unintended consequences included the Russian Revolution, and the harsh settlement terms over the Germans laid the seeds to WWII. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, initially thought to be short-lived, cost thousands of fatalites and over a trillion dollars we don't have, and unwitting set the stage for ISIS and an unchecked, meddlesome Iran.
- Our policies have been morally hazardous; our allies are basically freeloading off our global operations and have little incentive to engage in more constructive policies or assert regional leadership.
RFRA and Religious Liberty
Facebook Corner
(IPI). Chicago Tribune: "A 2005 pension law was intended to rein in school districts' big salary spikes that boost retiree benefits and pension costs statewide, imposing cash penalties on districts that gave raises higher than 6% to outgoing educators.
However, the issuing of large raises hasn't stopped."
How does your district stack up?
What they should have done is cap pension coverage of income, period, plus reduce the incentive to spike by making the pension base some career mean salary. (Of course, I don't believe in defined benefit systems, period, but if you're going to do it, you don't make stupid rules without teeth in them.)
(IPI). Property-tax bills in Illinois are the 2nd highest in the country and 2/3 of this tax revenue goes to education and teacher pay.
Yet, unlike other states, Illinois taxpayers are left in the dark about the contracts schools negotiate with unions – until after the fact.
Pensions aren't the problem. That's just politician propaganda to deflect the blame onto someone else. My school district and myself send the state a check for the retirement fund. They spend it, divert it, however they feel like it. Then try to place blame on me. It's a load of crap. I would be happy, happy, happy if we could eliminate the state from getting the money and have it managed by private sector responsibly. This site continues to let the state off the hook, when it's the state that has the spending problem. They refused to support a bill from Rauner reducing spending. There is the enlightening news about why our state is broke and it doggone sure isn't the pensions, but the people SPENDING THE PENSION FUND!It's astounding all the economically illiterate "progressive" bullshit in this thread. SIx years into the "Obama bull market" you have a system that's only about 40% funded--never mind you are inevitably going to have a bear market that could reduce that by 40% or more. Many Illinois local governments have seen their pension outflows up to triple or more what they were budgeting 10 years ago--and less than half of Baby Boomers have retired. This has the potential of getting ugly really fast. Already Illinois taxpayers are taking a big hit on debt financing as you have de facto junk bonds yielding among the highest rates in the nation. You "progressives" keeping whistling "Don't Worry; Be Happy"; you're about to see reality kick you in the ass.
(IPI). 64% of Illinois school districts pick up pension contributions for teachers.
Ending teacher pickups is a simple, responsible way for school districts to free up money for the classroom.
This isn't the case in CPS - The teachers contribute to their pension.
This is so freaking unconscionable. Really, people; even if you disregard the fact that the combined contributions don't make a sustainable pension system for the given retirement lifespan distributions, most of us in the REAL economy, i.e., the private economy that the parasite ruling class (including government employees) live off, during tough times, employer matches are not guaranteed--and in my experience are typically capped at about 3%. And those matches are typically on a multi-year vesting schedule--which means unless you stay with one employer in an environment where you can be laid off in a heartbeat for several years, you can lose some or even all of that match. Now flash forward to the fact that termination rates in the public sector are typically one-sixth or even less of comparable employees in the private sector, and you have high-five or even six-figure public employees (as a PhD who had to sacrifice 3 years of decent pay during my residency period as a doctoral student, I as a professor in a far more demanding position made one-third or less of what some Illinois teachers make--even adjusting for the cost of living, that's absurd) who are getting virtually all of their retirement paid by taxpayers. There's a term most of us who know economics use called "skin in the game"; these guys pay very little into pension systems that all but guaranteed a million-plus retirement. no wonder why these parasites didn't say a word as the state built this Ponzi scheme over decades, believing if and when this game of musical chairs came to its inevitable end, the corrupt Illinois justice system had their backs. These parasites are about to see their day of reckoning--a taxpayer revolt is coming, and it's not going to be pretty.
Children and Beautiful Dogs
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Henry Payne via Townhall |
Cat Stevens, "Hard-Headed Woman". This song never charted, but I came across it on Cat Stevens' first hit compilation album--and it remains one of my all-time favorites. I'm still looking for my own hard-headed woman...
