Muda69

https://reason.com/2022/04/06/major-league-baseball-dont-nationalize-it-privatize-it/ Agreed.

I don't know. I have yet to see the particulars of an active high school NIL contract. Have you?

Practically impossible these days for a high school student, working a part time job during the school year and maybe full time or close to full time during the summer months, to earn enough to pay for even maybe two years of college tuition along with room & board. Won't earn that much working at a fast food joint or delivering pizzas. "Free money" courtesy of federal government student loan programs has caused huge inflation in the higher education sector. And saddled thousands upon thousands of millennials with loan debt they can probably never repay.

I don't see how this can pass any sort of legal muster under discriminatory bounds.

A lot of millennials I know, especially couples, truly believe this:

Ughh, a real evil loser there. He should be locked up and the key thrown away. Doesn't appear to be any chance of rehabilitating such a repeat offender.

I tried warning my friend about playing Russian roulette. But it went in one ear and out the other.

https://www.cato.org/blog/playing-three-lies-truth-bette-midler-fairness-doctrine Agreed. The Fairness Doctrine was a failure, and it won't somehow mysteriously work this time if reenacted.

Did Ketanji Brown Jackson Flout the Law When She Reduced a Drug Dealer's Sentence? https://reason.com/2022/04/04/did-ketanji-brown-jackson-flout-the-law-when-she-reduced-a-drug-dealers-sentence/

Joe Manchin on Biden's Wealth Tax: 'You Can't Tax Something That's Not Earned.' https://reason.com/2022/03/30/joe-manchin-on-bidens-wealth-tax-you-cant-tax-something-thats-not-earned/ Agreed. Mr. Manchin at least appears to support some form of fiscal sanity in Washington, and hasn't swallowed the MMT kool-aid.

From free meals to bank commercials, nearly 100 IU athletes have NIL deals https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/indiana/2022/04/05/nil-deals-iu-athletes-making-after-new-ncaa-rules-indiana-hoosiers/9454236002/ (Note: story is behind a paywall) Hmm. I wonder if any of these NIL deals are with Big Red Liquor stores?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/transgender-youth-democrats-party-of-child-mutilators-kidnappers/ Here is a link to the fuller HHS document stating the administration’s position. Excerpts: That ought to send a chill down everyone’s spine. The Biden Administration is laying the policy groundwork for the seizing of minor children from parents, for the sake of jacking those children up with hormones, and mutilating their bodies with surgery! Got that? It is US Government policy that you must affirm, always affirm. There is no controversy here. None. Along those lines: I remind you that this very US government policy document actually states that there are “no scientifically sound” reasons to doubt whether hormones and surgery for minors is harmful, and to say, therefore, that children may be removed from their families so that their bodies can be altered by the state. This is the Democratic Party at work. This is what it means to have a Democratic government. Does having a Republican government mean reversing all of this? One hopes so. Folks, they really are coming for our children. It’s right there on the government website. They are propagandizing doctors to act as agents of the state in the seizure of kids. Read the document yourself! UPDATE: This is one issue on which I don’t believe it is possible to be too radical in pushing back. This stuff is absolutely intolerable. I remind you: they are talking about seizing children from families to put them through sex reassignment. Could that possibly be more dystopian?! Sure, they say that they are going to be careful about it, but the fact is they plan to do it at all. This is outrageous. People should be in the streets protesting this. The fact of the matter is our ruling class have decided that there is no reason anyone could possibly object to this without being the moral equivalent of a Klansman. They will continue to push and push for this with the full support of the Cathedral (= media, academia, law, medicine, government, NGOs, et alia). No, these positions aren’t popular with voters, but if you want to gain access to professional circles, including accreditation required to gain access to our non-hereditary aristocracy, you had better affirm this malicious garbage. Wake up, folks: institutional capture by the radical Left has gone so far that businesses, educational institutions, and others are appointing the contemporary equivalent of commissars (Soviet political officers) under the guise of diversity, inclusion, and equity. Meanwhile, we on the Right can’t run a bakery or a floral shop without being hunted down. Until these institutional advantages are negated, the Left will keep pushing the boundaries, and keep winning. This is why it should become the most important priority of a new GOP Congress, should it come into being after this fall’s election, to roll back Disney’s copyright extensions. That would be an atomic bomb dropped on the heads of Woke Capitalism, and cause these corporate titans to think long and hard before involving themselves in the culture war. Conservatives have to understand that we are not in the 1980s. Big Business is the enemy of families, and of anything traditional. They want our kids. If the Republicans in power cannot pull off a rollback of Disney’s extended copyright protection (which it bought by having standard US copyright laws changed for its benefit), then all the posturing about being a pro-family party is just that: grift. The Walt Disney Company’s executives bragged on video about inserting messages about queerness surreptitiously into children’s programming, and about their plans to increase trans visibility and the like in its programming going forward. One of them bragged that they have a blank slate in the minds of children. The Democratic Party is 100 percent behind this, at the leadership level. None of this is right-wing propaganda. We have the evidence, in those Disney videos, and in black and white, in this HHS memorandum. If we on the Right cannot fight this, and win, we might as well head for the hills and plant cabbages, because we are done as a meaningful political force. Scary, scary times.

Don't really care.

With the progressive woke movement subsuming almost the entirety of Ann Arbor I'm sure this kind of virtue signaling went over very well.

So what? As this story proves if their is a market for a good or service good luck with government actually stopping the sale and distribution of that item.

Smart.

https://reason.com/2022/04/01/a-high-school-banned-students-from-selling-snacks-predictably-a-black-market-for-snacks-emerged/ As one of the comments states "The only reason they're doing this is because it interferes with school fundraising. Government hates competition." Indeed it does.

Which points to the entire screwed up world of "big time" college athletics. Classically why does an individual enroll at a college or university? To get an education. But I guess now it's clear that many enroll to just play football, basketball, etc. with the hopes of becoming a professional at that sport one day. And education is a secondary priority, if it's a priority at all. So let's just stop the charade. Completely separate D1 college/university athletic departments, or at least the big money making sports like football and basketball, from being under the auspices of the university president and board of trustees. It will be become basically an "amateur" club sport organization that is allowed by the college/university to bear it's name, mascot, school colors, etc. Members of this club sport organization don't have to enroll at the affiliated university unless they want to, or they focus 100% on their athletic endeavors. Let's just stop the hypocrisy.

Handgun Carry Permits Transform a Right Into a Privilege https://reason.com/2022/03/30/handgun-carry-permits-transform-a-right-into-a-privilege/

Wow Dante, A free market solution, not one foisted onto a charter school by the state. You must hate it.

So supporters of school choice in Indiana are also racists. Got it.

What would have happened to Rudy Ruettiger if there had been a transfer portal back then?

https://mises.org/wire/nato-our-international-welfare-queens But here's the problem: a so-called no-fly zone would be a de facto declaration of war on Russia by NATO. Moreover, when we say “by NATO,” we mostly mean “by the United States." At around the same time, the Polish regime began its own scheme to escalate the war and bring the US into direct conflict with Moscow. Warsaw, apparently without consulting Washington, hatched a plan to send fighter jets to Ukraine via US military bases and then have the US “backfill” Poland's air force with F-16s. This would have constituted a significant escalation as well, and was fortunately quashed by the White House. This sort of behavior that free rides on the American taxpayer has become an identifiable pattern with countries that see themselves as benefiting enormously from US military spending but who contribute next to nothing to US security or even to the NATO alliance. As a result, when Estonian lawmakers—Estonia being a country that has no air force at all beyond a few unarmed surveillance aircraft—want a no-fly zone, these people know it will be mostly somebody else who will fight, die, and sacrifice to pay for it all. “Someone else,” of course, will often mean American pilots and American taxpayers. Moreover, the idea that these countries offer any sort of strategic advantage to the US in terms of defending vital American interests is implausible. The current war in Ukraine has well illustrated just how weak the Russian regime is in terms of projecting power anywhere beyond its immediate neighbors. The idea that Poland and Estonia serve as valuable “buffer states” between the US and a second-rate power like Russia is hardly convincing. These NATO members are simply not critical allies. Rather, they are net liabilities that may even end up forcing an escalation that draws the US into a war with another nuclear-armed power. The US's pledge to defend Eastern Europe through organizations like NATO can at best be described as a form of humanitarian aid for member states that have nothing to offer in terms of vital American geopolitical benefits. Who Pays for NATO? In collective security organizations like NATO, Americans find themselves in a position of financially supporting the military defense institutions of foreign states that not only benefit from the largesse, but have the potential of turning regional wars into a global Third World War. The unfortunate mechanism behind all this is NATO's key provision—article 5—which states that an attack on any member shall be considered to be an attack on all members. This means that when some NATO members court conflict and act recklessly, this could end up imposing large costs on all other NATO members. This enormous downside to NATO's structure is generally ignored in favor of focusing on NATO's presumed deterrent effect. That is, it is assumed that the enormous amount of military resources controlled by NATO members overall will prevent any outside state from attacking any NATO member. Some member states, however, contribute an outsized amount of this spending, while other states contribute very little. This is true of the two types of spending on which NATO and its deterrent effects are based. The first is NATO's operational budget, which funds NATO joint programs and institutions. In this, the US has historically put forth more than a fifth of all funding. As recently as 2019, for instance, 22.1 percent of NATO's "common-funded budgets" came from the United States. Germany came in second place with 14.7 percent, and France came in third with 10.5 percent. In 2021, NATO members adopted new budgeting that reduced the US's share. The current plan, to be in effect through 2024, has the US and Germany as the largest contributors at 16.3 percent of common funding. The United Kingdom and France are third and fourth, respectively, with 11.3 percent and 10.5 percent of common funding. Total spending on the NATO budget, however, is a small affair at only €2.5 billion. Military Spending by Member States The real benefit of NATO membership—felt mostly by its small-state members—comes from the deterrent effect that comes from the collective military capability of all members. For example, the total military spending of all NATO members combined is more than $1 trillion. So how much of this total is provided by US taxpayers? In the first graph, we see that the US's share of this is 70.5 percent, and that the top ten contributors constitute 95.0 percent of all military spending. That is, the US contributes 70 percent of all NATO defense dollars while the next nine states contribute an additional 25 percent. The other twenty NATO member states contribute a meagre and forgettable 5 percent of all spending. Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2020 figures in constant 2019 US dollars). In the second graph, we see this spending for 2020 expressed in constant 2019 dollars. (I've left off the US for the sake of providing a better sense of scale.) Most NATO members spend totals on defense that constitute a tiny fraction of US spending—which totaled $766 billion in 2020. The next largest spender—the UK—came in at less than one-tenth of US spending, with $58.4 billion. Estonia, meanwhile—where a majority of legislators call for the rest of NATO to enforce a no-fly zone—spent less than $1 billion. Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2020 figures in constant 2019 US dollars). Admittedly, of course, it is not reasonable to expect a NATO member like Latvia or even Hungary to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on military personnel and equipment. They're simply too small. But even when military spending is measured as a percentage of GDP, it is clear these countries are counting on someone else paying most of the tab. By this measure, the US still spends the most at 3.7 percent of GDP. Yet, no other NATO member even cracks three percent, and, at least as of 2020, eighteen members were spending less than 2.0 percent of GDP on defense. Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (2020 figures in constant 2019 US dollars). By pointing this out, I'm not congratulating the United States regime for spending enormous amounts of taxpayer wealth on the Pentagon. Indeed, military spending in the US is absurdly bloated. Much of this spending is claimed to be necessary on the grounds that the United States must "defend" Europe—and thus continue to allow Europe's regimes to milk American taxpayers, year in and year out. Nor am I claiming the US's regime is a victim here. The regime in Washington clearly benefits from this status quo since it ensures Washington retains an enormous amount of geopolitical power and well-funded military institutions. Rather, it is the US taxpayer who suffers in this corrupt bargain between Washington elites and the regimes of Europe. [Read More: "Russian Weakness and the Russian 'Threat' to the West" by Ryan McMaken] So, if the regimes of Europe are ever going to stop being the world's welfare queens—sponging off the hard work of America's productive population—the US regime is going to have to be starved of defense dollars until the regimes of Europe are forced to go justify the cost of military defense to their own taxpayers. As I've pointed out here, the medium-sized states of Europe have more than enough wealth and military potential to deal with a second-rate power like Russia. The American taxpayers, on the other hand, deserve a break from Europe's grifting. Agreed. Force the other members of NATO to pony up and defend themselves. The US should be done being the regions strong man.

So for you all private/parochial/charter schools should be forced to accept a quota system for admissions, where a certain percentage of the student body needs to be a racial minority. Is that correct?

Freedom. For all. So I take it you don't agree with the concept of Freedom Of Association?