"When someone targets one of your people over something that turns out to be innocuous, it’s the accuser that needs to be disciplined. Anything less is a betrayal of the good people for whom we are responsible. You cannot conserve civility by constantly acquiescing to the uncivil."Civility is a tool, not a end in itself, therefore proposing that we are beholden to it is inappropriate. We are obligated to stand up for one another, though.
Plus, though central Iowa’s low jobless rate has helped workers of color, less-educated workers, younger workers, and others who face discrimination in the labor market, it remains true that it is the best-off that have done the best.They have to work pretty hard to find that downside, in an economy in which wages are rising faster than ever, and even the convict they interviewed -- who couldn't get hired for years due to his past -- now has a job he loves, making $21/hr plus benefits.
Once I called him on having told a story many, many times before and he seemed genuinely shocked that this wasn’t the first time I’d heard it – this being a story that he’d told me maybe two or three times a week since I was five years old or so. That was when I realized that he wasn’t talking to communicate to me, but for some internal reason, maybe as a form of talk therapy. Whatever the case, it turned out that he was paying even less attention to what he was saying than I was.
On Monday, [New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)] housing officials unveiled the staggering price tag to remedy the conditions and restore Nycha’s infrastructure to good working order: $31.8 billion over the next five years. . . .
Now we're closing in on $200,000 per apartment. The Zillow website gives the median value of a home in the U.S. as $216,000. So it looks like, any day now, it will be cheaper for NYCHA to buy each resident family a median home somewhere in the U.S., rather than trying to fix the deteriorated mess they have made for themselves.
Some immigrant U.S. Army reservists and recruits who enlisted in the military with a promised path to citizenship are being abruptly discharged, the Associated Press has learned.Spokespeople from the Army may not be able to comment on this to the press due to litigation, but they can answer to Senators. If you're inclined to call yours, you might press them to make an inquiry here and find out whether or not this is as bad as the story implies.
The AP was unable to quantify how many men and women who enlisted through the special recruitment program have been booted from the Army, but immigration attorneys say they know of more than 40 who have been discharged or whose status has become questionable, jeopardizing their futures.
“It was my dream to serve in the military,” said reservist Lucas Calixto, a Brazilian immigrant who filed a lawsuit against the Army last week. “Since this country has been so good to me, I thought it was the least I could do to give back to my adopted country and serve in the United States military.”
Some of the service members say they were not told why they were being discharged. Others who pressed for answers said the Army informed them they’d been labeled as security risks because they have relatives abroad or because the Defense Department had not completed background checks on them.
Spokespeople for the Pentagon and the Army said that, due to the pending litigation, they were unable to explain the discharges or respond to questions about whether there have been policy changes in any of the military branches.
Eligible recruits are required to have legal status in the U.S., such as a student visa, before enlisting. More than 5,000 immigrants were recruited into the program in 2016, and an estimated 10,000 are currently serving. Most go the Army, but some also go to the other military branches.
"Pressure is building for employers, and both hard data and anecdotal reports indicate that wage pressures are building,” Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors, said in a note. “With the economy still humming, employers are able to justify stronger wage increases to retain or attract talent, but it’s becoming a more challenging proposition.”A 'skills mismatch' is exactly what we have been told to expect for decades as automation changes which jobs do or don't need to be filled with people. So you need to retrain people for the jobs you have now, not the ones they did before. There are a number of ways to address that challenge. Labor unions do a lot of training, in spite of the negative press they tend to get on the right. So one option for companies who need electricians (say) is to go to the IBEW. In return for a collective bargaining agreement, the union can make sure that skilled labor is available as needed. Of course, that means higher wages and benefits -- but from my perspective, higher wages and benefits for US workers is an ideal outcome.
AMLO. Kim. Putin. About the only communists who are not willing to negotiate with President Trump are the Democratic Party.
“Abolish ICE” isn’t a solution, argues my colleague Ed Morrissey at the Daily Beast today, it’s a slogan. Indeed, and that’s being generous. It started as a Twitter hashtag, per HuffPost. As the phrase started showing up more online, desperate opportunists like Kirsten Gillibrand who are looking for an angle to shore up their left flank in the 2020 primaries glommed onto it. Just like that, the hashtag #AbolishICE had become the slogan “Abolish ICE,” which had in turn become a semi-serious policy proposed by a semi-serious U.S. senator. And once it did, other supposedly serious 2020 contenders had to keep pace with Gillibrand by proposing it too.How big a problem? Richard Cohen:
Suddenly Democrats have a problem.
The socialist label, combined with the demand to obliterate the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, is the nitro and the glycerin of a bomb that Trump can throw at the Democrats. It combines the bugaboo of socialism with the irrational fear of immigrant hordes rampaging through the countryside.Yeah, you're definitely winning back Rust Belt voters by describing people who share their views as "irrational" and "demented." And this is the sane part of the Left, the part that isn't openly advocating abolishing immigration enforcement and opening the border. They may still want to do it, and consider any opposition to doing it crazy and/or racist. But they're at least sensible enough to know not to say it out loud.
The latter fear is not to be messed with. In Germany, it may yet bring down Angela Merkel’s government and has already made doughty Denmark mad with anti-immigrant regulations that reveal a nation demented by cultural paranoia.
Overall, across the total population, “abolish ICE” sits at 21/44 — and that’s the more encouraging of the two recent polls for progressives. The other outfit to poll this question, Harvard-Harris, found trainwreck numbers for liberals when it asked if ICE should be disbanded...So what should be done instead? The polling on this is pretty clear, too.
“Do you think that people who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home?”This shouldn't be that surprising, because our actual laws say the same thing as these supermajorities. Crossing the border away from a port of entry is illegal; it's a misdemeanor, but nevertheless a Federal crime. Smuggling a child across the border is a felony. The laws haven't changed, and it is pretty clear based on last week's song and dance in Congress that they aren't going to change. The laws aren't going to change because the laws already say what most Americans want them to say.
Sixty-four percent -- 83 percent of Republicans, 47 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents -- said they should be sent home. Only 36 percent said they should be allowed to stay.
Penn then asked: “Do you think that parents with children who make it across our border illegally should be allowed to stay in the country or sent home?”
“The presence of children made little difference in the result,” York stated before noting that “61 percent -- 81 percent of Republicans, 40 percent of Democrats and 66 percent of independents -- said they should be sent home, while 39 percent said they should be allowed to stay.”
In the summer of 2009, I partook of a an hour long discussion with David Cameron, who was in the running for, and later became, the U.K. Prime Minister. The discussion was about how to make society robust, even immune to Black Swans, what structure was needed for both decentralization and accountability, and how the system should be built, that sort of thing. It was an interesting fifty-nine minutes around the topics of the Incerto and I felt great communicating all the points in bulk for the first time. The room in the elegant Royal Society for the Arts was full of journalists. I subsequently went to a Chinese restaurant in (London’s) Soho to celebrate with a few people when I received a phone call by a horrified friend. All London newspapers were calling me a “climate denier”, portraying me as someone part of a large anti-environment conspiracy.It turns out the reporter's understanding of the comment he did make was exactly backwards, but the only thing he heard during the whole hour that grabbed his interest. The news suggested both that Taleb was hotly advancing an agenda he wasn't, and that advancing this agenda was crucial to his argument.
The entire fifty-nine minutes were summarized by the press and reported from a tangential comment that lasted twenty seconds taken in reverse. Someone who didn’t attend the conference would have been under the impression that that was the whole conversation.
Many of these “rules” are outmoded etiquette, many are baroque in their level of detail, some should never go out of style, and many would be mocked and derided today as “political correctness.” Brookhiser “warns against dismissing the maxims” as mere politeness, noting that they “address moral issues, but they address them indirectly.The first rule, for example: "Every action done in company ought to be with some sign of respect to those that are present." That's an issue of honor, but honor has significant moral consequences.
Patroit Prayer organizer Joey Gibson told KOIN the clashes "good in terms that we showed that there's a political move right now to have the police stand down in order to impact free speech in some of these big cities."It does seem like this is a recipe for disaster. I think that local governments that order their police to allow protesters to be beaten and attacked are asking for a mess of trouble, and they're likely to get it.
"Portland's the last city on the West Coast that's doing that, so we just have to keep hitting it -- I don't see what else to do other than that," Gibson said. "We'll make Portland so ugly in terms of how they allow these protesters to charge us when we have a permit. The police stood down, we were told they would not stand down, so we have to challenge it."
