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‘Grok friend John Hawkins (RightWingNews) has a column over at Townhall on 7 observations he’s learned during the last year.  I’ve put the first one up in its entirety as it shows a massive shift on how a lot of folks on the Right are changing their view on morality and politics simply because the Left wins by ignoring traditional morality altogether – character no longer counts; only winning:

7 Things Conservatives Can Learn From Donald Trump’s First Year in Office

Donald Trump’s election felt like a revolutionary act and love him or hate him, his first year in office has rewritten the rules of the political game. That’s why it’s surprising how little political thinking seems to have shifted. There are some big lessons we can learn from Trump’s first year in office.

1) Conservatives Have Lost Faith That Good Behavior Will Be Rewarded: There was a time when conservatives took great pride in being the sort of people who wouldn’t tolerate a Ted Kennedy, Marion Barry or William Jefferson in their ranks. However, eventually conservatives have started asking a basic question: How does this benefit us? Do we get credit from the American people for being more moral than liberals? Is this helping us to succeed? What’s the pragmatic value of doing the right thing beyond feeling superior to the Left? When conservatives concluded there was no practical value to having high standards, standards declined. A lot. In a hurry. Is that a good thing? No, but when you create a situation where virtue is no longer rewarded, you can’t expect virtuous people to slam their heads into a wall forever.

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Union dues: Should state be collection agent?

That was the question asked by a UL editorial and one that I have been saying no to for quite some time.  After all, why should taxpayer monies be used for this – it isn’t for the common good, right?  It is for a special interest group as that is what a union is – a collection of people that extract more wealth (money, time, power) from the majority than they would otherwise be able to do.  Not a slam, not a whack – just a simple statement of what unions, bottomline, do.  Reformatted, emphasis mine:

When the New Hampshire House returns in January, it will take up a bill that would get state government out of the union dues collection business. HB 438, introduced this year by House Majority Leader Dick Hinch, would stop the practice of withholding dues from state employee paychecks, which would require unions representing those workers to collect those dues themselves.

It would not prohibit or restrict membership in unions in any way.

This is not union-busting and it isn’t creating what unions would call “a hostile work environment”.  It would just force them to collect their own damn money themselves.  Simple, easy – after all, if the unions are actually providing value to their members, the members will gladly fork over checks, right? So why are the unions spitting mad and scared?

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Reformatted, emphasis mine:

A 41-year-old pizza delivery driver from Imo’s told St. Louis police he was making food delivery when two men tried to rob him Thursday night, KTVI-TV reported. One of the suspects hit the driver in the head with a gun, the station said. When the victim ran back to his vehicle, KTVI said the same suspect began shooting at him, but the driver had his own gun and returned fire.

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…coded in an outdated assembler language…

Voyager 1 is an important vessel. It’s the fastest spacecraft we’ve got, traveling at around 11 miles per second. It’s also the farthest. Its twin, Voyager 2, is nearly 11 billion miles away from the Sun, pushing through the last layer of our host star’s influence on the space around our system. But Voyager 1 is over 13 billion miles away from the Sun, and has the incredible distinction of being the first human-made object to enter interstellar space.

Yet even from that great distance, the probe still sends messages back to Earth. That’s where the thrusters come in. For decades, a set of thrusters has served to set out tiny, split-second pulses to keep the craft’s antenna pointed toward us. Now those thrusters are getting old, and it’s taking more effort to make Voyager 1 move. The solution? See if the TCM thrusters—which on the one hand haven’t been worn out by constant use over the last few decades, but on the other hand haven’t even been turned on — could take on some of the legwork.

“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data

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“We don’t take any money from the state or the federal government. You know why? It’s because I don’t want to serve a piping hot bowl of red tape every day.”

From his UL Op-Ed, Matt hits the nail on the head.  The problem isn’t that the Feds want to make sure that their money (er, our money minus their vigorish) is well spent, it is that it all comes with micro-management. You may have the idea, you may have the sweat, you may have the willingness to do the right thing, but of course some government bureaucrat (or commission or board or some other entity that ISN’T doing the good work you want to do themselves) believes you don’t know HOW to do it – so you now have the privilege of paying taxes to them simply to have them tell you how to do what you want to do, how to spend that which you have left of your treasure, even as they simply sit in a chair with a keyboard (emphasis mine, reformatted):

Another View — Matt Mayberry: A piping hot bowl of red tape

I recently attended the 2017 Londonderry-Derry Chamber of Commerce Annual Dinner. That evening, the Sonshine Soup Kitchen won the Business of the Year Award. Linda German, a firecracker of an activist, talked about making ends meet during hard times, and she said something profound and unfortunately accurate.

“We don’t take any money from the state or the federal government. You know why? It’s because I don’t want to serve a piping hot bowl of red tape every day.” And she’s right. The federal government would come in and dictate things such as serving portions. These volunteers just want to feed people, provide fellowship, and comfort those in need.

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From Weekend Pundit (emphasis mine):

Speaking of small town New Hampshire, we are going through out budgeting process for both the town and school. It can be a time-consuming effort, with some wanting a lot more money this coming year and others making do with the same amount they spent this year. One of the biggest parts of the budget for our town is the school system which takes up over 68% of the money the town spends. The town side of the budget has managed to keep spending in check, with most budget increases coming in at approximately 1% or less (this coming year’s is no different). But there have been times when the school side has seen huge increase, both as a percentage and in actual dollars. Of course the reasoning we always hear for those increases are the usual “But it’s for the children!”

It’s funny how all that money “for the children” ends up paying rather high salaries for teachers, supervisory staff, and paraprofessionals. I would say it would be worth it if we had the best schools in the state and out kids performed at the top. However the reality is that our school system is really slightly above average. We spend a lot of money for ‘slightly above average’.

In fact, here’s how “slightly above average” our hamlet really does:

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Cemeteries.  Usually a very small part of any town or city’s budget but it is there.  It seems that every town has at least one within its boundaries; mine, due to historical reasons, has a bunch of them.  Many of them were old family plots started well over a hundred years ago and over time, the town took “ownership” of the land and care of the plots (and yes, if they were and descendants are now among us, I feel they should take care of those plots instead of socializing the costs across the rest of us but this is a beef from my last stint on the BudComm) as well as the “central” one across from our Middle/High Schools).  It’s not much of a budget – a couple of guys to properly take care of the grass and detritus that seemingly collects on the grounds.

And urn vaults….what, URNS VAULTS? Is this a Proper Role of Government? And is this a prime (if tiny) example of mission creep?

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With the Left all a twitter about the news of Flynn’s statement of lying to the FBI, never forget that the late US Senator Ted “The Swimmer” Kennedy, that “lion” of the Democrat Senate caucus, actually did connive and collude with Russians (the Communist Soviets at the time) to keep Ronald Reagan from being re-elected as President even as he was thinking about running for the Presidency himself:

Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy had “selfish political and ideological motives” when he made secret overtures to the Soviet Union’s spy agency during the Cold War to thwart then-President Ronald Reagan’s re-election, a Reagan biographer said in an interview with The Daily Signal.

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Court Says Two Women Cannot Conceive a Child, Same-Sex Divorcee Shouts ‘Discrimination!’

Again, who says the Left is the side that believes in Science and Reality?

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Each year, the Budget Committee devolves into sub-committees to handle each area or department of both the Town and the School District.  Yesterday was dedicated to three such meetings for me on the School Board budget: Federal Projects, Food Service, and “District Wide” maintenance.

Now those of you that have been reading the ‘Grok for a while know that one of my big bugaboos is the combination of TANSTAAFL and “free money” – the former being “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” (H/T: Robert Heinlein) and the “free money” really isn’t – somewhere someone is paying state or federal taxes in order for my hamlet to get “free money.”  I dunno about your elected or appointed officials but mine can very seldom put those two concepts together in a cogent fashion.  Actually, TANSTAAFL doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary but “free money” often is.

Well, our Assistant Superintendent for Business (chief bean counter) Scott Isabelle decided a bit of bamboozling was in order (paraphrasing here):

Of our total budget, we only have to raise X number dollars via taxes as Federal/State grants take care of the rest.

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Reformatted, emphasis mine:

Sales of new, single-family U.S. homes reached their highest level in ten years due to an increase in housing demand across the country.
The Commerce Department released a report Monday stating that home sales rose 6.2 percent, the highest increase since October 2007, according to Bloomberg Markets…Reuters polled several economists who originally predicted that new home sales, which comprise 11 percent of all home sales, would decline by six percent last month. Instead, new home sales have continued to increase for three months straight.

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We keep hearing that illegal immigrants are a “boon” to our economy – this example (like the meat packing plants of a few years ago) shows that American workers see a “boon” when illegal immigrants, working at lower wages, are removed from the workplace (reformatted, emphasis mine):

A huge Chicago bakery is now hiring Americans at higher wages, following a federal immigration enforcement action which forced the firing of 800 illegal immigrants. The forced departure of the illegal-immigrant workers at the Chicago-based Cloverhill bakery was a financial shock to the Swiss company which bought the bakery from a U.S. investment group in 2014. The illegals comprised one-third of the bakery’s employees, so U.S. sales fell by seven percent when the enforcement forced the company to rebuild its workforce by hiring Americans

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