Skip

HB 628: Paid family and medical leave

SurPRISE!  Yet another Op-Ed in the Concord Monitor genuflecting at the Altar of Big Govt: “Pray, give us this “benefit” even as we could do it ourselves? Once again, supplication from one whose industry very well could be sucking at yet another teat of Government (you know, the medical part of Family and MEDICAL Leave Insurance system).  Golly, who’d a thunk that a past Prez of the NH Medical Society would be holding out the tip jar?  Notice how he starts out with the “gifting” part first – who DOESN’T want a brand new goody (especially of the lion’s share of the cost comes from others) (reformatted, emphasis mine).  Just like Steve Duprey, here’s the hand on the take right off the bat:

Creating a family and medical leave insurance system would ensure workers the benefits they need and help businesses of all sizes be more competitive. More than 100 New Hampshire businesses, including Concord Hospital, have signed a letter asking our lawmakers to pass HB 628.

That’s right, give me some of that old time religion Govt money!

Read more

“There are two sides to bigotry. There are those who openly oppose it, and then those who foster it. People who stay silent in the face of this bigotry provide quiet support for it.

I have no idea how I got put onto the “Cinema Libre Studio”‘s (that would be “Free Cinema” – will they be sending out free tickets?  I rather think not) email list but such as is it.  Given my response to their email, I don’t think that I’ll be on it for long.  I’ve bolded the part of this victim filled inbound email that caught my attention (and look at who is starring in it – CAIR and the Southern Poverty Law Center, Black Lives Matter…and nary a word that it is those of the Jewish faith that are most discriminated against (anti-Semitism anyone?):

Trump’s CDC Word Ban and the Reality for Minorities

THE UNAMERICAN STRUGGLE

Los Angeles, CA, December 19, 2017 (Newswire.com) – Winner of the Award of Merit at indieFEST Film Awards and Best Political Documentary at Atlanta Docufest, THE UNAMERICAN STRUGGLE documentary is the first examination of the rise in hate crimes and bigoted rhetoric since the election of Donald J. Trump.

Last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that hate crimes had increased by nearly 5% since 2015 in their annual Incidents of Hate report. The report recorded that 5,818 “single-bias” incidents occurred, in which one or more offense types, or incidents, were motivated by the same bias. Of those, 59.2% were motivated by a racial, ethnic and/or ancestry bias; 19.7% by a religious bias; 17.7% by a sexual orientation bias; and 3.3% by a gender identity, disability or gender bias.

For activists on the front line of the identity politics movement, this rise in hate crimes is not a surprise, and many of them feel the numbers are underreported.

Read more

Of course I can’t just leave this issue with just a post – I left a couple of comments where I hope Dr. Oge “Big Government” Young (seemingly both a rent-seeker and someone that believes that Government can and should solve all ills – sure thing, sport).  Sure, it was the primary bit for the post but I went a bit further:

“Creating a family and medical leave insurance system would ensure workers the benefits they need and help businesses of all sizes be more competitive.” Really?

Benefits used to be voluntarily offered by companies above and beyond what one receives as a salary or wage (that is, until Government decided to mandate them as with Obamacare). And in this case, the legislation MANDATES that employees take part (a la Obamacare) – where’s the Live Free or Die choice in that?

Further, if this was such a lovely idea to make businesses “more competitive”,

Read more

If an average classroom size is about 25 students and we multiply that by the average spending, that gives us $275,000 per year per classroom. If you’re in a school with 40 classrooms that’s $11 million per year to run a school. “But Kira, not all that money is for the classroom. What about principals, staff, and other administrators at the district and state level? Surely those things suck some money out of the classroom.”  You have pinpointed the exact problem. Indeed, much of that money does get funneled to staff and off-site administration. So much that in many places administrative costs have massively outpaced school population growth. In some states, like Louisiana, the public school population actually decreased even as administrative hires exponentially increased.

From 1950 to 2009 the student population increased by 95% while school personnel grew by 386%. In contrast, teacher hirings increased by just 252% while administrators and other school staff increased by a shocking 702%.

The actual post started from a very different place and wound up here – go read it.  I will tell you how LITTLE

Read more

Yes, I am deliberately being shameless in “culturally appropriating” a line from a well beloved Christmas carol – deal with it because FREEDOM!  That’s what Americans do – take from other cultures (after all, there’s plenty to “borrow” from) and repurpose it to make our culture better.  But here, the question fits as now the massive flurry of subcommittee meetings and report writing has calmed down and one can actually start to sit down and meditate, cogitate, and try to do something more than a surface cursory level analysis.  Like “how come it costs so much?”

Read more

And being close to the North Pole, Canada give us another reason to ignore them.  From an official Government of Canada website:

Santa is moving to the South Pole

What?

Thanks to rising global temperatures, rapidly melting Arctic ice and growing human operations in the North, Santa Claus has signed an agreement with the International community to relocate his village next year to operate in an exclusive zone in the South Pole.

So What?

Read more

This from a guy who lives behind a 39 foot high wall:

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis strongly defended immigrants at his Christmas Eve Mass on Sunday, comparing them to Mary and Joseph finding no place to stay in Bethlehem and saying faith demands that foreigners be welcomed. Francis, celebrating his fifth Christmas as leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, led a solemn Mass for about 10,000 people in St. Peter’s Basilica while many others followed the service from the square outside.

Yes, he is preaching – let everyone into your country on his say-so. After all, it’s the Christian thing to do.  Yet, this:

Security was stepped up, with participants checked as they approached St. Peter’s Square even before going through metal detectors to enter the basilica. The square had been cleared out hours earlier so security procedures could be put in place.

Gee, Mary and Joseph were never metal detected and

Read more

EPIC trolling by Fox News’ Jesse Watters on this topic by having a Ph.D candidate, Anne DeLessio-Parson, who maintains that eating meat is  perpetuating “toxic masculinity”.  Best as I can tell from reading the blogosphere, that’s basically third wave militant feminists doing more man hating and hating the fact they haven’t feminized men to act they way they want (er, subservient). Yeah, sure – I suppose that the Eldest serving in Iraq in the Marines and the Youngest with the 101st in Afghanistan would be prime targets of these self-deluded full of themselves “speakers of twaddle”.

Anyways, you gotta love how Watters handles the entire interview:

Oh yeah, she’s a vegan – and ran away from Watter’s question of how does meat eating do this.  That’s a first order action by a nitwit who knows that the jig is up.  What is most dangerous, however, is that 

Read more

Yup, everything is racist, every one that disagrees with Progressives/Democrats/SJWs/Leftists is a racist. Especially all you deplorables and irredeemables that refuse to stop clinging to your Bibles and guns. Why can’t you just admit that you lost and now you should be like us who are desperately trying to be European Socialist Intellectual chic. Because RACISM!

Tucker Carlson has put together a whole long list of 100 things that became racist one night while we Normals were sleeping and then were accused of being such even as we all went “huh?  When?”

Read more

Treehugger’s Lloyd Alter is on his own jeremiad about cars, technology, suburbs, cars, that people don’t like cities, and cars.  His post is about Elon Musk – you know, that smart smart guy behind Tesla, Sun City, SpaceX, PowerWall, the Boring Corporation, and a few others.  The thing that many have noticed is that he is especially great at rent-seeking vast subsidies from various levels of government to keep his companies going.  That, however, isn’t Alter’s rant – rather that Musk is enabling a future that goes completely against what Alter believes our future should be (in short, rack’em and stack’em in micro-apartments that would force you to walk everywhere and shop for your food every day because he hates anything big including normal size fridges).  Anyways, it apparent he’s all in on “planners” being in charge and making many of decisions for “us” instead of we ourselves.  Commenter “professor” seems to agree (emphasis mine):

Professor 
Couldn’t agree more with this article. So much of today’s tech just seems like a bunch of band aid “solutions” to problems that wouldn’t exist if cities were planned properly as complete communities.

As someone who has written his fair share about the dangers of Sustainable Communities Initiative (as it was renamed from Agenda 21 here in NH), that grabbed my attention. So yes, I went satire on him:

Read more