Muda69

Public Health Or Power Play?: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/public-health-or-power-play/

It has been espoused on this forum that it's almost sacrilege for a 2A school and a 5A school to play each other.

Yeah, the Danville starters can probably leave after the first quarter so they can start watching film and prepping for Western Boone next week. They should rename it the Hoosier Flatlands Conference to juxtapose with the Hoosier Hills Conference.

Joe Manchin Is Forcing Congress To Think About the Deficit. Good. https://reason.com/2021/09/30/joe-manchin-is-forcing-congress-to-think-about-the-deficit-good/ In truth, no one is sure how much money the federal government will be able to borrow before a crisis hits—piling up debt is like walking down an infinite hallway with an invisible pit, as Noah Smith has described it. But higher levels of debt are associated with lower economic growth even in places that haven't suffered major meltdowns. The surely catastrophic consequences of America going through a major debt crisis demands that even a small risk of one must be taken seriously. And there is no arguing with the fact that we are now in uncharted territory. "America is a great nation but great nations throughout history have been weakened by careless spending and bad policies," Manchin said Wednesday. "Now, more than ever, we must work together to avoid these fatal mistakes." Republicans and Democrats have mostly abandoned any interest in fiscal responsibility. But Manchin has decided, for whatever reason, that deficits actually do matter. And, right now, he's got the power to make the rest of Congress listen.

Vaccine Mandates Coming for K-12 Students https://reason.com/2021/09/29/vaccine-mandates-coming-for-k-12-students/

No thanks. It is an hour and 45 minute drive between Brazil and Frankfort, 2 hours and 5 minutes from West Terre Haute to Frankfort. Frankfort's best bet is either petitioning to join the Hoosier Heartland or groveling before the lords of the Hoosier Conference for a place at the table.

Jonathan Taylor happened.

Hail! Hail! Maconaquah! Hail to the Red and the Blue! Hail! Hail! to MHS, to our Braves we will always be true. Fight! Fight for victory, whether odds be great or small Honor, Love, and Praise we give to our Maconaquah!

I bet most other HH parents and fans are glad you are not the AD. Are there any circumstances whatsoever where you believe a high school should voluntarily leave an athletic conference for another?

Ok, you only need to look at the giant growth of your southern Hamilton county neighbors to find your answer. Do you really think a current day Rangline conference containing the like of Sheridan and Westfield is a good idea? Of course not. Schools leave for the "greener pastures" of improved competitiveness, reduced travel time, etc. Would you have any issues with the Hamilton Heights of today being in the same athletic conference with today's Westfield, Zionsville, Avon, and Hamilton Southeastern?

I think you'll answer your own question by looking at the conference history of your own loved Hamilton Heights Huskies. They were a charter member of the Mid-Capitla/Rangeline Conference, were they not? Why did that conference eventually fall apart and left it's members seeing greener pastures? The same with the Huskies relatively short stint in the Mid-Indiana Conference.

Yellen Is Wrong. The US Government Doesn't Always Pay its Debts. https://mises.org/wire/yellen-wrong-us-government-doesnt-always-pay-its-debts So how did the US government deal with this? Chamberlain notes “Roosevelt decided to default on the whole of the domestically-held debt by refusing to redeem in gold to Americans.” Moreover, with the Gold Reserve Act of 1934, Congress devalued the dollar from $20.67 per ounce to $35 per ounce—a reduction of 40 percent. Or, put another way, the amount of gold represented by a dollar was reduced to 59 percent of its former amount. The US offered to pay its creditors in paper dollars, but only in new, devalued dollars.1 This constituted default on these Liberty Bonds, since, as the Supreme Court noted in Perry v. United States, Congress had “regulated the value of money so as to invalidate the obligations which the Government had theretofore issued in the exercise of the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States.” This was clearly not a case of the US making good on its debt obligations, and to claim this is not default requires the sort of hairsplitting that only the most credulous Beltway insider could embrace. Indeed, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff in their book This Time Is Different list this episode as a “default (by abrogation of the gold clause in 1933)” and as “de facto default.”2 The Short Default of 1979 A second, less egregious case of default occurred in 1979. As Jason Zweig noted in 2011: Apparently, the United States sometimes does not pay its debts. While the 1979 default was relatively small, the 1934 default affected millions of Americans who had bought Liberty Bonds mistakenly thinking the government would make good on its promises. They were very wrong. So, it is simply untrue that the US “has never defaulted. Not once,” as Yellen claims. But this claim remains a useful tactic in sowing fear about “unprecedented” acts that would bring the entire US economy crashing down. Default through Devaluation But outright repudiation of contracts is only one way of defaulting on one’s obligations. Another is to deliberately devalue a nation’s currency—i.e., inflate it—so as to devalue the amount of debt a government owns in real terms. And Zweig writes investors view this as a real form of avoiding one’s debt obligations: This strategy, Zweig concludes, “stiffs bond investors with negative returns after inflation.” Zweig categorizes this as something separate from default, but Reinhart and Rogoff clearly consider it a form of de facto default. They write: “The combination of heightened financial repression with rises in inflation was an especially popular form of default from the 1960s to the early 1980s” (emphasis added).3 (In the United States, a key event in this respect occurred in 1971 when Nixon closed the gold window. This was an explicit repudiation of the US’s obligation to repay dollars in gold to foreign states, and it also greatly enabled the US government in terms of financial repression and monetary inflation.) Since the Great Recession, financial repression is popular again. This method of de facto default has enabled the federal government to take on massive amounts of new debt at rock-bottom interest rates. In real terms, the US government—or any government using this tactic—pays back its debts in devalued currency, essentially enabling the government to make good on the full extent of its debts. The cost to the public manifests in asset price inflation, goods price inflation, and a “hunt for yield” driven by a famine of income on safe assets. Americans of more modest means are those who suffer the most, and the result has been a widening gap of inequality in wealth. It may very well be that a default could lead to significant economic and financial disruptions. But let's stop pretending that a default is unprecedented or that the United States always pays its bills. It's true that the US's current debt machine, enabled through financial repression, is a form of slow-motion default. But that doesn't make the US government any less of a deadbeat. Yep, the U.S. government has been effectively bankrupt for decades.

Democrats Are Denying Basic Economics https://reason.com/2021/09/29/democrats-are-denying-basic-economics/ The Democratic party is the party of unhinged fantasies.

Anti‐School Choice “History” Keeps Getting the History Wrong https://www.cato.org/blog/anti-school-choice-history-keeps-getting-history-wrong A call for liberty that can only come with education pluralism was not pulled out of a historical vacuum, or based just on unhappy American Catholics, but centuries of European experience with religious strife. The need to defuse and avoid such strife is why many European countries, Canadian provinces, and other governments base education in choice of different religious schools and more. Of course, none of this gets a mention in MacLean’s piece. The other history that gets the silent treatment from MacLean is the mammoth and inescapable‐because‐government‐forced‐it segregationist history of public schooling. It was, indeed, government force that was the target of Brown v. Board, which is far more dangerous than private choice because it is ultimately imposed at the point of a gun. Even absent de jure segregation, government often de facto forced segregation via discriminatory housing policies, policies that have a lasting public schooling impact today. Perhaps because of public schooling’s long and expansive history of injustice, surveys have repeatedly shown that African Americans strongly desire school choice, which MacLean only hints at by writing that “some parents of color” have come to support choice. Research also suggests that private school choice in the United States has an integrating effect, as Friedman predicted. MacLean makes one more assertion: that Friedman wanted education to work as a free market, though she acknowledges that he said some government provision for the poor might remain. She then leaps to a conclusion: “The system…would produce staggering inequalities, far more severe than the disparities that already exist today.” MacLean offers no evidence for her conclusion. She just states it. This is a big problem, because the inequalities in the current, public school dominated system are very deep, with lower‐income students having much lower literacy and numeracy levels than wealthier children, whose tuition is often the staggering price of a house in a “good” district. More important, research suggests that choice not only leads to better outcomes for those who have it, but also public schools facing families with choice. Competition, it seems, powerfully incentivizes improvement. Of course, the ultimate case for freedom is not test scores or graduation rates, but that the massive force of government, which for so long was used to keep African Americans down, does not determine one’s fate. The formerly oppressed gain power of their own, no matter how much choice opponents try to claim the opposite.

New York Firing Health Care Workers as COVID-19 Heads Northeast https://reason.com/2021/09/28/new-york-firing-health-care-workers-as-covid-19-heads-northeast/ The National Basketball Association does not have a league vaccine mandate on its players, but government mandates in New York City and San Francisco mean that three teams (the New York Knicks, the Brooklyn Nets, and the Golden State Warriors) will be subject to the requirement. Brooklyn star point guard Kyrie Irving and Golden State forward Andrew Wiggins have been talking about missing all of their home games rather than acceding to the mandate. Far more consequentially, public school districts are beginning to adopt and enforce vaccine mandates on all eligible students. Culver City, California, started the trend, followed by the Los Angeles Unified School District, the country's second-largest. San Diego Unified was set to vote on a mandate Tuesday night. In a sign of blue-state policies to come, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona endorsed student vaccines last week. "I wholeheartedly support it," Cardona said during a visit to Detroit. "It's the best tool that we have to safely reopen schools and keep them open. We don't want to have the yo-yo effect that many districts had last year, and we can prevent that by getting vaccinated." Yet even unvaccinated kids remain overwhelmingly less likely to contract, spread, or suffer from COVID-19. Fears of the new school year generating a new surge of cases have proven unfounded so far. And the situation that Cardona is trying desperately to avoid—remote learning, which has proven educationally calamitous—will likely increase in communities where parents are skeptical about the cost/benefit ratio of vaccinating their kids. In fact, the LAUSD—where in addition to the vaccination mandate, all students and staff are tested weekly regardless of vax status—new enrollment figures for 2021-22 just came out, and they were three times worse than the district expected: a drop of 6 percent in just one year, after already falling 4 percent the year before that. Forcing vaccines on the unwilling has more consequences than merely increasing vaccination. So we're in uncharted territory here. If even 3 percent of any given population decides not to comply with vax mandates even under threat of government reprisal, that could have huge impacts on the public education system, the economy, and on hospital capacity. It's on that latter point in particular that policy makers should be looking at closely over the coming weeks, as they fire nurses and mobilize the National Guard. After the brutal COVID-19 wave in the South this summer, the 10 states with the biggest percentage increase in hospitalizations over the past two weeks, led by highly-vaccinated Vermont and Maine, are all in the north. Vaccine mandates may well be the last illiberal push that results in the U.S. reaching some mythical pandemic off-ramp. But they may also create health care shortages in the Northeast right as the virus once again rears its seasonal and regional head.

Cops Get Qualified Immunity After Jailing Florida Man for 'I Eat Ass' Bumper Sticker https://reason.com/2021/09/28/florida-man-jailed-i-eat-ass-bumper-sticker-free-speech-qualified-immunity-cops/

Something about a player testing positive for Covid-19 resulting in something like half the team getting contact traced. A couple other FHS teams (IIRC Tennis and Soccer) had the same thing happen last week as well. That said Western Boone got their easy homecoming anyway by scheduling an equally moribund Hammond Central team.

Frankfort is a "4A' school in name only. Due to socioeconomic realities it really only has about a 2A level talent/depth base. Therefore the Hoosier Heartland would be a good fit. The conference already has two 2A schools in Delphi and Eastern Howard.

I would support that.

Yep, Tipton fans are mostly turds. I remember the days when they played Frankfort and the FHS team bus got pelted with frozen hot dogs as it was leaving Tipton.

Hmm, in regards to football Crawfordsville is "fine". Really? : 2020 SEASON (0-10) 2019 SEASON (1-9) 2018 SEASON (1-9) 2017 SEASON (0-10) 2016 SEASON (2-8) 2015 SEASON (2-8) 2014 SEASON (2-8) 2013 SEASON (0-10) 2012 SEASON (1-9) 2011 SEASON (3-7) 2010 SEASON (1-9) 2009 SEASON (1-9) 2008 SEASON (4-6) 2007 SEASON (7-4) Looks like the citizens of Crawfordsville make tackle football the same priority as the citizens of Frankfort.

Look for the Sagamore conference to be gutted within the next five years. One can easily see the likes of Danville, Lebanon, Tri-West, and Western Boone fleeing to greener pastures of the Indianapolis metro/urban-sprawl athletic conferences.

My apologies. I meant SR75/SR32. SR47 goes thru Thorntown (had a great BBQ chicken meal at the Lions shelter during the Festival of the Turning leaves this past weekend) and SR75 goes south of town towards Dover. Hmm. It appears the Western Boone football program has outgrown the little 'ole Sagamore conference. It now has bigger fish to fry............... Look for the Sagamore conference to be gutted within the next five years. One can easily see the likes of Western Boone, Danville, Tri-West, and Lebanon fleeing to greener pastures of the Indianapolis metro/urban-sprawl athletic conferences.

Good quote. I like this oldie but a goodie as well: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin