Quote of the Day
To have and to want more that is life.F. Nietzsche
Cultural Fascism
Facebook Corner
(Cato Insitute). Millennials have a unique view on foreign policy, partially because so many of them came of age during the Iraq War.
To be honest, I don't think the average Millennial could find Iraq on a globe; they probably take their talking points from "progressive" academic groupthink and the mainstream media. Unlike older Baby Boomers; they've never faced a draft.
I myself am a younger Boomer who never had to face the draft, and I am a minimalistt/noninterventionist on foreign policy. I can also remember a time Clinton signed a bill with the goal of regime change in Iraq and public opinion initially favored the invasion. They may not know/remember that Hussein at one time had an aggressive nuclear program, and intelligence failures in Iraq went beyond the US. In hindsight, it's easier to see the blunder of Iraq policy. But let's recall Clinton and Bush the Younger came of age during the debacle of Vietnam and they both ended up nation building.
(IPI). Smoking is bad. That fact is widely known among Americans after decades of research, public advocacy campaigns and lawsuits against tobacco companies.
Knowing that, spending millions in Illinois tax dollars to further this message is something the state simply cannot afford.
It's not the function of the government to be Big Nanny; what becomes of individual responsibility? The fact of the matter is the tobacco settlement is a classic example of "taxation by litigation", and excise taxes have always been used to fund operational expenses. The quitline would be more effective if privatized. Illinois is not the first or only state to use settlement dollars to help close a deficit. Good work, Gov. Rauner; way to stand up against the corrupt special interests! https://mises.org/library/regulatory-sneak-attack
(a cultural fascist troll takes issue with my strong rebuke yesterday against Cato Institute's hypocritical embrace of the State imposing "gay marriage" on conservative communities)
And get off the traditional marriage bullshit. If you go back two hundred of those thousand years, women were pretty much voiceless in the process, then were treated like chattel. Modern heterosexual marriage has existed for about fifty years. Before that, your religious "moral" society used the same arguments regarding interracial marriage. I'm glad your dinosaur thinking will mostly die with your generation.
Quite frankly, ask me what I think of your revisionist/presentist bullshit. Marriage may have evolved over thousand of years, but it's been remarkably stable within its own context. Your socially experimental philosophy is morally bankrupt and will wither away, just like the LDS embrace of polygamy in the nineteenth century.
(separate comment)
Another point to the cultural fascist troll: no, I can't believe even you are retarded enough to bring up the anti-miscegenation laws. Marriage has been the key institution reflecting social norms for procreation and societal preservation. Procreation has nothing to do with racial differences. Just as an example, the Catholic Church argued vehemently against governmental restrictions (e.g., in legal challenges before SCOTUS) based on incidental characteristics like race. I will point out that the Catholic Church has been, is, and will always be against any perverse concept of marriage beyond one between a man and a woman.
(Cato Institute). "Why pay for something that someone else is willing to provide for you, for free? America’s allies consistently underprovide for their own security, and that has been the case all along."
The answer to that question is very simple. After WW2, the last thing the U.S. wanted was a remilitarized Germany or Japan. Providing them with military security was a means to prevent them from building back their own military.
70 years ago. Yes, our government knowingly and willfully shipped millions upon millions of jobs over seas to keep the idiot Europeans from killing each other, again. Unconstitutional , and a complete and utter failure as we are $19 trillion in debt as a result, and our freedom has been drained along with our treasury.
So much to object to in this thread. We have only 5% of the world's population and commensurately limited resources. The idea that Europe and Southeast Asia needed us to pick up their costs during the Cold War and after is both presumptuous and morally hazardous. We should have withdrawn troops from Germany and Japan decades ago.
As for "shipping millions upon millions of jobs overseas"? What a load of economically illiterate crap. In fact, the US was essentially unscathed (from an economics/homeland perspective) at the end of the war, with much global production capacity in ruins, the US was in a powerful position to export to the rest of the world. It is true that we've spent trillions on national defense, much of it subsidizing protection for other countries, but a lot of that was incidental to our own policy preferences, and let us not forget that national defense is only a portion of our budget (less than 25%).
(IPI). Under state law, teachers are obligated to pay 9.4% of their salary into the Teachers’ Retirement System in order to obtain a pension.
But over the years, school districts began paying that required contribution on behalf of teachers as a benefit.
One way local school districts can cope with the budget crisis is by having teachers make their mandatory retirement contributions.
As one might expect, the crony unionists, who made unsustainable corrupt bargains with Democrat political whores, are defending those deals. Does it matter that we've seen little, if any productivity increases that justify pay increases in the private sector, that compensation increases do not occur in the context of competition in public school monopolies given corrupt anti-competitive monopoly union privileges granted by political whores?
The median household lost ground during the Great Recession both in terms of income and net worth, tax revenues have suffered, but I've not seen the teachers take a comparable hit. I've never seen an employer not only give his full matching contribution to a 401K but pick up ANY of the employee contribution. And yet most of these self-interested, greedy jerks ask, "Where's my quid pro quo?". In fact, the job security of public teachers is probably six times or more of what's in the private sector--that's a fungible benefit. Many, if not most people are willing to trade compensation for job security, No more giveaways to public employees. You don't want to make sacrifices like the rest of us in the real world? Fine. We strip tenure and seniority-based layoffs, and we start demanding, like in accounting and IT professions, periodic recertifications of teaching credentials.
Marriage and Family
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Glenn McCoy via Townhall |
Dionne Warwick, "Reach Out For Me"
