With around 25 employees, John King owns one of the largest non-union electrical contracting businesses in the Toledo, Ohio area. As a non-union contractor, his business happens to be doing well at a time when unions in the construction industry are suffering. This, it seems, has made the usual animosity unions have for him even greater, making him a prime target of union thugs. So much so, that one of them tried to kill him last week at his home.
Much more at the link, including the union’s long history of harassing and threatening John King, and also a news video.
Do you have a 401K? I do. I’ve been paying into it for more than 30 years. And right now, it’s worth just a bit more than it was 13 years ago, despite constant contributions. It should have at least doubled in that time. But there have been four major stock market crash and burns in that time. The thing is this: no one (or almost no one) was predicting the first three before they happened. The dot com bubble, the 9/11 attacks, the real estate mortgage bubble, all had a tiny number of prescient predictors, but it wasn’t obvious that it was going to happen when it happened, and it wasn’t obvious how huge it would be WHEN it happened. My employer provides access only to one of those restrictive 401Ks where I can’t buy gold, can’t buy inflation-proof financial vehicles, and it boils down to either risking your money in stocks and bonds, or watching it shrink as money market interest doesn’t keep up with inflation. That’s the nature of the TIAA-CREF agreement with my employer.
But this last crash and burn was totally avoidable, and nearly everyone saw it coming. All the US government had to do (all OBAMA had to do, really) was to show seriousness about cutting spending, about getting out of the way of a business and employment recovery, about stopping the roadblocks to a recovering economy. It did none of these.
Talk of “income gaps between rich and poor” and “we need to tax the rich more” and so on has been a non-effective smokescreen for the simple fact that Obama’s policies have seriously harmed the US economy. You can’t spend money you don’t have. If you tax people who produce, they’ll produce less, and hire fewer people to do it. If you make enough rules that people find annoying, they’ll play the game less. A LOT less. You can’t get rich by borrowing money year after year because you spend more than your income. These are simple, common sense understandings that can be explained to a 10 year old.
These simple principles have eluded the elites, the geniuses, the intelligentsia, and they have surely eluded Obama and the business-as-usual Democrats.
I am ticked off. Royally. I have worked hard my whole life. I thought several years ago that I would be able to retire in 7-8 years from now (really 5-6), and if the Barney Franks of the world hadn’t insisted on government guarantees for mortgages that shouldn’t have been offered, to people who couldn’t and wouldn’t pay them, my house would be worth a lot more than it is today. If the fools (I use the term advisedly, and accurately) in Washington who fought for the right to spend other people’s money on everything under the sun, and to stick our children with the bill, had instead stopped using the power of the government credit card and printing press to buy votes and influence, and if they had cut spending, there is a very good chance that the markets would have seen that seriousness about the debt and the deficit, and given Washington a chance to make its newly sober policies work.
As it is, those who could took what profit they could, and got out of Dodge. For those of us in “managed” and restricted 401Ks with few options, the message seems to be “tough luck.” If you want to “avoid risk” then you can just lose money more slowly to inflation by parking it in low interest accounts. Of course, the people who are making these decisions to spend our children’s money are all in “defined benefit” government plans, that are not affected by the overall economy or the stock market. Work so many years, get so much retirement, simple as that, if you’re a government drone. And if you’re a congress critter, you get just about the cushiest retirement deal (even for minimum years in congress) you can imagine.
At this point, my health is OK, and I hope to be able to work another 15-16 years…. about the time I think it will take for me to be able to “retire.”
Having become recently weary with claims made by various folks about how Jesus would do this, or wouldn’t do that, or just the very silly WWJD (What Would Jesus Do) line that some people seem to think is the all-time discussion ender, I have a few to propose myself.
What baby would Jesus abort?
What mother would Jesus tell, “It’s your body and no one should tell you what to do”?
What person would Jesus rob to provide for someone else?
What child would Jesus fail to protect?
What person would Jesus make helpless by stealing her only weapon?
What person would Jesus send federal marshals to, in order to collect unpaid taxes to be used to support other people?
What school system would Jesus sue, for allowing prayer to Him?
Some will say these are unreasonable questions, and that others are just as fair. I’ve heard a few. Here goes:
What person would Jesus allow to starve? Answer: many hundreds of thousands during His lifetime and ministry, based on likely world population at the time and known economic conditions. “You will always have the poor with you.” It is simply impossible to make the case that Jesus’ life and death were mostly about “taking care of the poor” in an absolutist, goal oriented sense, where that goal is understood as transcending almost all others, because He did not Himself live that way, nor did he demand that others do so. He spoke against “injustice” in relation to the poor. You may argue about what that means, but only in the light of the fact that He did not Himself attempt, even with his human abilities, to spend every moment and every resource in taking care of the poor, let alone His divine power, which could have been used subtly in very many ways to essentially end poverty in Palestine… and elsewhere. We have no reason to think there were not still plenty of hungry people when he left one town for the next, and scripture gives us no reason to think otherwise.
What person would Jesus arm? Answer: Shepherds. “Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” Who is responsible to protect sheep, and themselves, so they can protect the sheep? Who ARE the sheep? You decide.
What would Jesus drive? Answer: Whatever would get him where he needed to go, within reason. I don’t suppose he’d have driven a semi-truck. Maybe on food deliveries. Probably not.
Who would Jesus bomb? Answer: See above about arms and shepherds. Sometimes, life is hard. But Jesus would surely not have suggested that Britain allow itself to be bombed without self-defense, which, sadly, often means “bombing back.” Response question: Which British child would Jesus have selected to be killed because British forces didn’t return fire on German factories and infrastructure, even admitting the limited accuracy of then-current technology, and knowing innocents would be killed? Secondary question: Which Polish Jewish child would Jesus select to be gassed because the Allies were stupid in their prosecution of the war, starting with when Hitler occupied the Rhineland with military forces? It is safe to say that all of Europe could have done with better “shepherds” than Chamberlain and Daladier.
The point: very few slogans are up to the job of telling the truth. And particularly, I am very suspicious of slogans involving the name of our Lord.
CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon says that Marcus Bachmann, the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, and two members of her campaign staff pushed him into a golf cart during a campaign stop at the Iowa state fair in Des Moines before Bachmann’s victory in Saturday’s straw poll.
I find myself liking Bachmann more and more.
The incident comes less than a month after a similar scene at a campaign stop in Aiken, South Carolina, where ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross said he was “manhandled” by two of Bachmann’s bodyguards.
Look, Messrs. Lemon and Ross. Either something illegal occurred (like an actual assault) or it didn’t. If it did, file a police report… since you’re in public, you should have plenty of witnesses. If nothing illegal occurred, i.e., you were NOT actually assaulted, then shut up, grow up, and move on. I very, very strongly suspect that absolutely NOTHING of note occurred, for the very simple reason that if it had you would have witnesses lined up and you would be prosecuting, since reporters are mostly inherently publicity hounds, and since we all know either of you would do anything to get to be the one who destroyed Bachmann’s candidacy. After all, she is becoming a Palin-size target in this election cycle.
Either way, whining about something that isn’t actually illegal is just another way of claiming personal privilege because you’re a bigshot reporter.
The painful images and graphic stories of repeated violent assaults and vandalism by mobs of black teenagers had gotten to be too much for Mayor Michael Nutter.
As an elected official and a “proud black man” in the nation’s fifth-largest city, Nutter felt he had to go a step beyond ordering a law enforcement crackdown.
So he channeled the spirit of another straight-talking Philadelphian: Bill Cosby. Nutter took to the pulpit at his church last weekend and gave an impassioned, old-fashioned talking-to directed at the swarms of teens who have been using social networks to arrange violent sprees downtown, injuring victims and damaging property. Moreover, he called out parents for not doing a better job raising their children.
Exit question: would a white mayor who said the things reported here and on my blog be called a racist?
A Telegraph editorial makes the case that the causes of Britain’s current unrest are very much related to the USA’s own problems, in that they spring from common roots, in A palpable change in the national mood
More than 20 years ago, the American sociologist Charles Murray wrote a series of articles about the emerging British underclass. He identified in some of our towns and cities the same trend that had been seen in America: a rapid rise in the number of children born into homes with no resident father and where the principal source of income was welfare benefit.
Murray predicted that this growing phenomenon would be concentrated in certain inner-city communities, creating a value structure largely divorced from mainstream society. Several consequences would follow: the children brought up in these circumstances would be poorly educated and lack the desire and wherewithal to work; and the communities themselves would be prey to high levels of crime.
What Murray foresaw has come about. Indeed, Britain did not change this week when the rioters took the streets to burn and plunder, it changed a long time ago. Despite the varied social backgrounds of many of those now before the courts, most of the youths who were at the heart of the appalling scenes of lawlessness will have come from the communities that Murray described. They are not the product of bankers’ rapacity or high-level political venality, although the moral context for bad behaviour is, as Peter Oborne observed in these pages yesterday, a matter for the wealthy and powerful to consider as well as the poor.
This crisis has been building for years. It is the result of a major cultural shift that took place in the 1960s and 1970s, and the long-term decline of the conservative values and institutions that had underpinned British society since the late 19th century. This process was marked by a collapse in the belief in marriage, a retreat of the police from the streets, a move away from tough penalties for property crime, the rise of moral relativism and rampant consumerism, the diminution of stigma as a restraint on bad behaviour and the entrenchment of welfare dependency. It was not about poverty, but a collapse in values. Today, the benefits system sustains the underclass and poor state schooling is unable to compensate for the harm caused by broken homes and absent fathers. Inadequate policing cannot suppress the symptoms of crime and disorder. These communities are trapped in a vicious circle, where violence, crime, intimidation and hopelessness are quotidian. It is a world from which most of us are insulated until it spills into the wider community, as it did so nightmarishly this week.
So what is to be done? It is not true that politicians have been unaware of or indifferent to what is going on. The last government’s “respect” agenda tried to tackle the anti-social behaviour that blights so many inner-city areas; but Labour woefully failed to get to grips with welfare dependency or take up a consistent moral position on the fecklessness of many in receipt of benefit. As was evident during the emergency session of Parliament on Thursday, the party still fails to grasp the extent of its own failure in this regard or understand how public opinion has hardened against the failed nostrums of the past four decades.
Here, then, is an opportunity for David Cameron to seize a rare moment in recent British history when the cacophony of liberal voices has been silenced by a palpable change in the national mood. Since he broke off his Italian holiday to take control of the response, the Prime Minister has shown an ability to articulate a sense of outrage, even if the harsh penalties he promised are unlikely to be visited upon many of the culprits. He has been more surefooted than most, including Boris Johnson, who after his tardy return to the capital needs to show that his political strengths are not limited to the good times.
Others have also been found wanting this week. Nick Clegg appeared unable to comprehend the gravity of the situation when he was temporarily in charge of the Government on Monday; police chiefs, such as Sir Hugh Orde, continued to defend tactics that patently failed to stop the unrest spreading, notwithstanding the bravery of the front-line officers, and firefighters, themselves; Theresa May, the Home Secretary, was spoken of only a few weeks ago as a rising star, but has seemed somewhat uncertain; and a host of Labour politicians from Ed Miliband downwards still think that yet more public spending is the answer. In fact, the one thing that has been tried, to no avail, is throwing money at the problem.
What Mr Cameron must now do is unambiguously pursue the remedies that have been available for years, but which successive governments have been too frightened to adopt for fear of offending a vocal progressive minority which no longer has any credibility. These include a tough policy on welfare, whereby recipients accept a job or lose their benefits; police reforms to ensure proper democratic accountability and the imposition of the order that communities need to see on their streets if anything is to improve; and an overhaul of schools to offer an opportunity denied to so many children in the sink estates. None of these ideas will be sufficient on its own, but taken together they might at least begin to undo the damage of the past 40 years.
Will Britain take the hard steps necessary to reclaim the shards of its national heritage that still remain salvagable? Honestly, I really, really doubt it. So does that perceptive pundit, Mark Steyn, whose new book has some comments exactly on point (actually, pretty much a whole chapter, it seems). The problem, when the majority line up at the public trough for three squares, lodging, and entertainment, is that even politicians who are very determined to change things must stand for the next election. Can Britain summon up a generation’s worth of electoral will to turn things around? It doesn’t seem likely to me. The dominant media are too left, and it’s just too easy to demonize politicians who cut spending and introduce reforms that actually require people to make better decisions, reforms that don’t essentially subsidize bad behavior.
It is not clear to me that the USA will fare better in this regard, in the long term, painful as it is to acknowledge.
Crop circles are contended by some to be the work of aliens (maybe from some other dimension or something), and by others to be the work of hoaxers. A new theory for how crop circles are created is described in Crop circle creation theory: physics, not aliens |
The question led researcher Richard Taylor of the University of Oregon to rule out at least some traditional explanations of the tools involved in creating the circles. Taylor contends that in the modern age, planks and ropes (to flatten plants) and even bar stools to jump from one area to another undetected, are just too cumbersome to produce results in the comparatively brief period of their creative incubation.
Instead, he argued that latter-day crop-circle auteurs use high-tech gadgets such as GPS monitors to place the shapes and magnetrons (tubes that use electricity and magnetism to generate intense heat) to cause the crop stalks to fall over at high speed.
It seems to me that any scientist who actually believed his own theory could simply prove that it’s possible for crop circles to be created this way. All it takes is some of the high-tech gear described above, a field with some crops, and nice evening with decent weather. Go to it, experimenters. Create a convincing full-sized crop circle in a night.
Or, alternatively, admit you don’t have a clue about what’s going on and leave it for someone else to first devise, and then demonstrate a reasonable method for producing them, in situ and in one night.
Personally, I strongly suspect it is the work of the Lithuanian Espionage Service…. but that’s just because I frighten easily.
Outside of the obvious melanin in their skin, they appear to be spiritual “brothers” in a more significant sense, that of world view and basic expectations for young people in a civil society.
But the solution will take time, and be painful (though not more painful than what’s happening now). And the people who implement the solution of removing incentives for bad behavior, and then punishing bad behavior with more certainty than now exists, while simultaneously rewarding good behavior (with the non-egalitarian results that are bound to occur), are going to be the people who are vilified by all sides, especially by the demogogues and race hustlers.
One point is obvious: the “black caucus” of congress mostly doesn’t care a bean about the majority of blacks, but only about their own political power and re-election prospects. They have the platform and the power to effect real change in the calculus of incentives in the inner city…. but they use it to tell lies and buy votes.
