The Real Reason Your City Has No Money. There are a lot of things wrong with this article. For one thing, there is no mention of the word pension. But the general point that there is a lot of pressure to build and build (both because that is what the feds and the states typically subsidize and because that is what creates the most short term jobs) regardless of the long term maintenance costs is a point that should be made more often.
Entertainment of the Day
Starts out boring but I got more interested as it went along.
The Fulcrum of the Balance. Since I publish so much bashing liberals for fake news I guess I should post a reminder that there are still people out there wistfully seeing a genius in Donald Trump. But on the plus side, Democrats are still writing things like this in a desperate attempt to save Trump from himself and ensure that he has a second term.
Supreme Court Seems Wary of Hurdles for Refunds of Fines After Exonerations. This country is not completely given up when the Supreme Court can act in a bi-partisan matter and do something right. I guess I should not say that till they rule, but from the comments they are making, I think they are going to rule the right way on this one. The flip side is that in a sane law abiding country, something like this would have never made it to the Supreme Court.
I find it interesting to see how other nations “Hollywood” interprets historical events for their audience. Here is a clip of some South Korean commandos saving the day for MacArthur during the Korean War. It has a very very lose basis in fact, but mostly is just the Korean version of Hollywood trying to make their customers feel good.
Jeff Sessions should have been a tough sell in the Senate, but he’s too nice. This is slander masquerading as news. If you read the article, you will find out that a Kennedy left a young girl to drown and this is likened to Sessions because he made racists comments in the past. Except that you are never told what Sessions actually did. It is always implied that he has this terrible dark past, but we are never given the details even though they had space in the story to recount Ed Kennedy’s most famous misdeed.
Dirty Money. Ever heard of door knobs? Hand shakes? Money is the not the primary victor of disease and nobody sane claims it is. But people who want to bring us into the brave new world will grasp at any straws.
Not the best production values, but a reasonable reconstruction of the 1986 Miami FBI Shoot Out. Note how different it is from a normal movie shoot out.
A lot of people would argue that the below clip is great journalism and not a bogus news story. It certainly speaks the truth so it does have that going for it. But the truth that it speaks is all things we already know, such as the Iraqi army is not the most competent or that journalists are the stupidest class of people on the planet. That truth was not worth the production of a video that contained this much shear stupidity. I was groaning before it had hardly got started and my blood pressure only went up as it went along.
Spare a thought for the soldiers though.They might not be the best in the world, but they are the only unit in the Iraqi army that will fight and so rumor has it they have been made combat ineffective by the amount of casualties they have taken in the fight against ISIS. Supposedly, this is one of the reasons the advance has stalled since this video was taken.
In The News
Liberal churches are dying. But conservative churches are thriving. Take the labels with a large pinch of salt. But it is true that when people talk about the massive drop off in church attendance, they are really talking about the old (and now liberal) mainline churches. To be sure, the “growth” of conservative churches is not enough to off set this and so America is becoming a country that by and large does not go to church. But you have to remember that this article is appearing in the Washington Post. So for that readership, it is a revelation that there is no benefit for a church to be “liberal.”
