Muda69

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/14/us/hmong-men-hotel-refusals/index.html Sad, but something you can definitely see occurring in Marshall county...............

No. Racism or racist acts only flow one way, from a Caucasian individual to a non-Caucasian individual. Not vice-versa. At least that is what the SJW snowflakes say................

If the only way to beat China is to become like China, then we've already lost.: https://reason.com/2020/02/12/corporate-socialism-bill-barr-suggests-the-u-s-should-counter-china-by-buying-nokia-or-ericsson/#comments

? So every individual in the United States of America will be forced into "Medicare-for-All" and a subsequent mandatory psychological evaluation to determine their "mental fitness" in regards to owning a firearm?

So back-alley engineering/machine shops will make firearms. There are lots of engineers and machinists out there who believe in the 2nd Amendment. Now please give us your detailed plan on catching, screening, and treating people before they are allowed to own a firearm.

Hey Chief, you made the comment. Not I.

Mud is good. It helps build character.

That seems to be what you are saying with your "162 games" comment.

US Mandatory Spending Projected to Increase Over a Trillion Dollars by 2023: https://mises.org/wire/us-mandatory-spending-projected-increase-over-trillion-dollars-2023 Agreed. The federal government needs to be reduced in size, scope, and power by at least 25% across the board. That means defense, education, and federal entitlements just to name a few. Think about the country we are leaving for our children and grandchildren, because our electives officials in Washington sure aren't.

So Dante, apply your logic to other goods and services that people wanted and government tried to take away. How did that end? I'll tell you: A failed prohibition on alcohol, a failed "war on drugs", and back-alley abortions. Now tell me how government prohibiting certain individuals (aka in your quote "the people") from possessing a firearm will this time turn out any different.

The Good News Is That We Probably Won't Elect a Socialist. The Bad News Is That We Already Have, Many Times.: https://reason.com/2020/02/12/the-good-news-is-that-we-probably-wont-elect-a-socialist-the-bad-news-is-that-we-already-have-many-times/ Even atheists, long a group shunned by voters, did better, with 60 percent of respondents saying godlessness would be a problem (that's up from 45 percent in 2007). Worse still, Gallup notes that "last measured these attitudes, in 2019, the results were within a few percentage points of those found today." In fact, socialism seemed less a votekill back in 2016, when 47 percent of respondents said that they were willing to vote one in. Gallup Still, Bernie's persistence and strong showing have centrist Democratic commentators seeing red. "To nominate Sanders would be insane," writes Jonathan Chait of New York magazine, who contends: Yet among left-leaning Democrats, Sanders would represent nothing more than Democratic status quo. At Vox, Matthew Yglesias coos, "On the vast majority of issues, a Sanders administration would deliver pretty much the same policy outcomes as any other Democrat." The big exceptions, say Yglesias, are foreign policy and monetary policy, "where Sanders takes issue with an entrenched conventional wisdom that is deeply problematic." Despite Sanders beating President Donald Trump in the averages of most head-to-head polls, only diehard Bernie bros seem fully confident that Vermont's self-declared socialist would go on to beat the president in the fall election (even Yglesias discounts recent polls, agreeing "it's a reasonable concern" that Sanders' edge would withstand "the sure-to-come cavalcade of attack ads from Trump"). That's putting it mildly. Progressives can claim that, despite surveys such as the new Gallup one, Americans really want "socialism," but there's a reason that no one as explicitly left as Sanders has been nominated—much less won—the presidency. For libertarians, however, the reason gives cold comfort: Americans don't even need to leave the comfort of the Republican Party to get a spendthrift president who may not be a declared socialist but nonetheless grows the size, scope, and spending of the federal government. Leaving aside the question of whether a president's budget proposal has a chance of being enacted as is, spending under Trump has already skyrocketed and it will go even higher if he gets his 2021 spending plan approved. Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute calculates that inflation-adjusted federal spending would climb by 10 percent (not including interest costs) during his first four years in office. Using an alternative method that only uses "actual budget amounts for the 2020 fiscal year" and compares them to ones from 2016, The New York Times' Alicia Parlapiano and Quoctrung Bui calculate that per-capita spending has increased by $1,441 under Trump. Americans may not want a socialist per se, especially one who promises to nationalize health care and create something approaching a single-payer system not only for K-12 education (we already effectively have that) but for higher education, too. But they seem totally ready to re-elect Donald Trump, whose approval rating has soared to as high as 50 percent in some recent polls.* And if it's not Trump or Sanders, it will be someone who goes along with spending more than what we are already spending, which is more than what we were spending a year ago. Uni-party to the max, and spending our country into oblivion.

https://reason.com/2020/02/12/illinois-bill-would-ban-adults-from-pumping-their-own-gas/ 68 people are talking about this Increasing safety is the best justification for Lilly's bill. It's still not a very good one. According to a study from the National Fire Protection Association, there were 5,000 gas station fires per year between 2004 and 2008, which resulted in an average of two deaths a year and $20 million in property damage. That seems like a pretty small risk given that there were 117,000 gas stations in the country at the time. The number of gas station fires has also fallen dramatically since 1980, the NFPA notes, even as self-service has become more common. There's also not much reason to assume that a gas station attendant who's responsible for filling up multiple cars at once is going to be more careful than individual motorists. While drivers in the states that still mandate full-service like to talk up the convenience of not having to get out of their car, the fact that the practice doesn't persist when it's not mandated is proof enough that people are not willing to pay the costs of this higher level of service. The Illinois Policy Institute, a think tank, notes that motorists in that state are already paying the third-highest gas taxes in the country. Self-service stations can also create convenience in other ways. The fewer staff members needed to man the pumps mean businesses can reassign employees to manning registers, making food, or performing other tasks their customers value more. Lower operating costs at self-service gas stations might also mean gas stations can afford to stay open later or operate in more remote locations, where business is slower. Oregon's legalization of self-service pumps in rural counties was all about increasing service levels in remote areas of the state where it wasn't economical to have a gas station attendant on hand 24 hours a day. Lilly's desire to create jobs is also a poor justification for either banning self-service gas stations or mandating staffing levels. The more consumers have to pay for a service they don't want, the less money they have to spend on other things that they do want. Higher staffing costs leave gas stations with less money to pay vendors or reinvest in their businesses. The effect is to make the economy poorer and less productive. That's not a win for capital, labor, or consumers. The one silver lining in Illinois' proposal is how much people hate it. In Oregon and New Jersey, motorists have strong negative reactions to rolling back their state's full-service mandates. Illinois residents are clearly having the opposite reaction. This demonstrates the small-c conservativism of many voters; once people have the right to do something, they are not eager to lose it. Yet another government "solution" looking for a problem.

That is the ultimate goal, yes. Are you going to answer my question or not?

Yes, and include seeding. Will make regular season games actually mean something. But is it possible to make 9?

https://reason.com/2020/02/11/finger-gun-school-tredyffrin-valley-forge-down-syndrome/ Lawmakers and policy architects frequently suffer from failures of imagination: They presume their laws and policies will be followed in exactly the manner they intend. But the officials who carry out and enforce said policies do not always exercise good judgment. Instead, they over-comply with the policy and follow it to the letter, which produces absurd results like these. Margot's situation is a good reminder that unthinking public panic about safety in schools—divorced from any actual danger that is statistically significant—has a cost: It drives bad policy that promotes overcriminalization and invites law enforcement to intervene unnecessarily in disputes between students and teachers. Kids who make mistakes should face proportionate punishment—like a timeout, in Margot's case. Police State.

Yang, who created buzz with freedom dividend, ends 2020 bid: https://apnews.com/dac9093037af268f867ed697a09d0556 When will Mayor Pete drop out, or he is mainly campaigning for a vice presidential bid?

Socialism Always Fails: https://mises.org/wire/socialism-always-fails However, as I pointed out three years ago, the collapse of the USSR and the eastern European socialist states did not “convert” Heilbroner to becoming an advocate for capitalism, nor did China’s transformation from Mao’s giant commune to a quasi-capitalist economy (and subsequent economic growth) change his mind. Indeed, socialists seem almost impervious to factual arguments, and despite a gaggle of “what would a socialist economy look like” articles in publications such as Jacobin, socialists have never refuted the Austrian arguments. For that matter, socialists really cannot appeal to economics at all despite their claim that their goal is to provide a better economic society for those ubiquitous workers. Jacobin declares: (Note that the Jacobins are famous for unleashing the infamous Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, in which thousands of so-called enemies of the state were murdered. That American socialists today willingly associate themselves with genocide speaks volumes of what these people will do if they ever gain real power here.) In other words, the implementation of a socialist order is not so much dependent upon a plausible model of a socialist economy, but rather is an exercise that depends upon convincing people that somewhere over the rainbow we can make the whole thing work, despite the failures of the past. And that is where the recent articles in The Nation and the Daily Mail reveal much about the socialist mentality. In The Nation, Ross Barkan argues that the barriers to implementing a socialist system are political, not economic. Indeed, in “Why American Socialism Failed” he writes that there was just too much political resistance to reorganizing the United States into something like what at that time was being done in the Soviet Union. (It should be noted that he seems to view the Russian Revolution with much sympathy—and fails to note that perhaps Americans at that time were not interested in implementing a regime that would mirror the atrocities being committed by the Red Army and the new Soviet government.) Instead of following the old political strategy of having people run as members of a socialist party, Barkan says that the better plan is for socialists simply to take over the modern Democratic Party by electing socialists from the presidency on down. He writes: In other words, the entire question of socialism is political; socialists can speak about their utopian visions, be elected on those platforms, but really don’t have to explain how they actually will make a socialist economy perform in a way that will even begin to match the output of a private enterprise–based economy. Yet, when confronted with the reality of the actual performance of a socialist economy, all the writer can do is to appeal to the election of socialists, which should not be surprising, since the end of socialism is political power and nothing else. The death of a Canadian teenager of leukemia while waiting for the government’s permission to have a bone marrow transplant speaks volumes both of the performance of socialist systems and the way that people under socialism submit to the system. Laura Hillier, 18, of Ontario died before she could receive a transplant, which is not particularly unusual in the Canadian system, as “standing in line” for care is the typical experience, even when a life is at stake. From the Daily Mail: Although Hillier’s obituary “slammed” the wait times in Canada, nonetheless, nothing will be done because Canada’s “single payer” system is both politically sacrosanct and a socialist politician’s dream. It is sacrosanct because it provides the “free healthcare” that socialists promise and a politician’s dream because it provides unending opportunities for “reform.” In reality, the economic calculation problem is front and center, making it impossible to “fix” the Canadian single-payer system, something no Canadian politician will admit. One doubts that Hillier would have died in the same way in the United States. For all of the criticism American medical care receives from the left (and the current system hardly fits the claim by socialists that it is “free market”), one can be reasonably assured that a young woman here would not die because of a lack of hospital beds. In Canada, however, such deaths are a matter of course, and for all of the “this shouldn’t happen” statements from both politicians and victims’ families, it will continue to happen. (Canada, perhaps not surprisingly, has relatively poor cancer survival rates.) Under socialism, one stands in line and does not challenge the system, since the system is based not upon the successful delivery of services, but rather on the prospect of such services being made available “to the people” for no fee, the product of a “compassionate” socialist state. Note that at no point in his article does Barkan write of any way that socialism would improve the lives of Americans. Socialism is not about providing needed services to those who cannot receive them otherwise, nor is it about raising the living standards of the poor, despite socialist claims to the contrary. Socialists do not create goods and services; they commandeer them for political purposes, and such things are useful only as a means of putting and keeping socialist politicians in power. No politician in Canada will be voted out of office for the premature death of Laura Hillier, nor will any hospital administrators be sacked. Had medical officials given in to sentiment and bumped Hillier up the transplant list, someone else would have died for lack of space. The enemy here is scarcity, and under socialism, scarcity is multiplied. Canadians have come to accept this situation, all the while convincing themselves that theirs not only is a morally-superior system to anything that exists in their neighbor to the south, but also enables them to receive medical services that they believe would be denied them if their government were not paying. They have become like the cave dwellers in Plato’s allegory, believing that the medical shadows they see on the wall represent the best care possible. Socialists might well take over the Democratic Party; indeed, American voters are capable of putting someone like Bernie Sanders in the White House. They well could make the electoral gains that the writers at The Nation have coveted for decades. What they cannot do, however, is tell the truth about socialism. Another article in Jacobin, written by Sam Gindin, demonstrates this last point: Gindin then goes on to “refute” Hayek’s “knowledge problem” critique of socialism (while ignoring the Austrian “economic calculation” issue). The rest of the piece essentially can be shortened into this one sentence: forget the past failures of socialism; this time we will make it work. We have been hearing this kind of thing for more than a century. Socialists tell us that if the rest of us will give them total power over our lives, this time they will provide prosperity, and unlike previous socialist regimes, they won’t strip us of our liberties. We should have as much confidence in their words as the loved ones of Laura Hillier had in the empty promises of Canadian medical officials. Spot on analysis by Mr. Anderson. And I personally I will take a system based on the successful delivery of goods/services (Capitalism) rather a system based on making those goods/services available "to the people" for "free" (socialism). The latter is doomed to failure, as history has repeatedly proved.

Instead of Removing Trump From Power, Remove Power From the Presidency: https://reason.com/2020/02/08/instead-of-removing-trump-from-power-remove-power-from-the-presidency/#comments Agreed. Mr. Welch is spot-on. The power of the Oval Office needs to be drastically reduced, along with the overall power and scope of the federal government.

Hmm, I see no explanation as to why the changing of this rule to include the shotgun formation. Handing more options and power to the offense, I guess. After all high school needs more 74-66 gems. That or we don't want the widdle shotgun quarterback having to actually have his hands in the vicinity of the offensive center's anus. Yuck!

Maybe you misread my question, so I will restate it. Is Mr. Allen just the following the lead regarding Preferred Walk On players as "tacking dummies" that has already been set for decades by traditional Big Ten powerhouse programs like Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, and Wisconsin?

Is this the current model at traditional B10 powerhouse programs like Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State, and Wisconsin?

Michael Bloomberg and the Imperious Presidency: https://reason.com/2020/02/07/michael-bloomberg-and-the-imperious-presidency-2/ Agreed. The size, scope, and power of the federal government needs to be reduced by 25%, across the board. Then maybe, just maybe it will once again become government by the people and for the people.

https://reason.com/2020/02/05/undercover-cops-hired-118-handymen-then-arrested-them-all-for-not-having-licenses/ The Sheriff's Office also released a compilation video of some of the handymen caught up in the sting operation, including several who had past criminal convictions, or who had been caught previously performing unlicensed contract work. Only eight of the people arrested as part of Operation House Hunters were repeat offenders, according to the Hillsborough County Sheriff's Department. The other 110 were arrested for first-time offenses. The bulk of those charges were for "unlawful acts in the capacity of a contractor," a misdemeanor offense that can come with a $1,000 fine and a 12-month jail sentence. Repeat violations can result in a felony charge. That the Sheriff's sting operation netted few master criminals is not surprising to Leslie Sammis, a criminal defense lawyer in Tampa, Florida, who has represented clients caught up in these sting operations in Hillsborough County. "The real con men that are trying to trick homeowners are usually too experienced to get caught up in one of these types of sting operations. So the stings tend to catch someone that crosses the line in an unsophisticated way," Sammis told me in an email. Frequently, she says, officers will hire a handyman on the pretext of performing work that doesn't need a license, and then during the course of the job ask them to do something that does, like unhooking a toilet or laying some tiles. "When the handyman says no, then the undercover detective moves the conversation to something else and then comes back to the question later in a different way," says Sammis. "By the time the handyman gets to the location, they want to make the homeowner happy and end up agreeing to perform work that they didn't intend on doing when they first arrived. The undercover detective are just creating a crime that probably wouldn't occur otherwise." Using stings to nab unlicensed contractors isn't unique to Hillsborough County. Cops and regulators have conducted similar operations in New York and California. Occupational licensing, whether it's of contractors or hair braiders, is often much more about protecting incumbent businesses and government licensing revenue than it is about safeguarding the welfare of consumers. Operation House Hunters is a perfect illustration of this, with cops going to great lengths to manufacture licensing law violations that either wouldn't have happened or wouldn't have produced unsatisfied parties. The more effort law enforcement spends entrapping handymen, the fewer personnel and resources they have to devote to deterring other, more serious crimes. "These sting operations rake in big money in fines and court costs," Sammis says. "Catching real criminals actually committing a crime is much harder." It appears that more and more "policing" is about generating revenue than catching criminals. And as one of the comments to this story states: "I hope the DA and County officers get very large campaign contributions from the licensed contractors. Job well done."

Not guilty: Senate acquits Trump of impeachment charges: https://apnews.com/93c85dcfb0e6b2185391965e77ebea51 Can we close this thread now?