Perhaps some of you have clever thoughts, though?
The band has been recording and touring for 15 years now, and they’ve really matured in the last few. Their sound has deepened and sophisticated. I’ve heard that they spent some time with the last of the Waylors while Waylon’s old band was still alive, and learned how to make the rich sound that that band used to make in the ‘70s. Whether that’s true or not, they’ve now had time to fully integrate their approach. They really sounded good last night.
They also had some kind words for the audience coming out to see them during such a hard time, and played multiple encore songs.
In spite of the reputation of Outlaw acts and the promotional material promising a ‘rowdy’ show, it was a friendly crowd. A guy in a cowboy hat offered to buy me a beer. I thanked him and said I was ok. An hour or so later I walked to the bar, and another guy insisted on buying me a beer. Everyone was happy and there was no unpleasantness at all.
“It’s the clearest pathway to challenge Dobbs’ holding that women in their reproductive years have no right to privacy, but arguably, men do,” she told POLITICO, referencing the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade.
There’s no male right to privacy in a court case alleging paternity. A man can’t tell the court that it’s none of their business if he fathered the child or not. Now in many states, a mother can abandon her child at certain places (often including fire departments) and be freed of all responsibility; every state has some version of this “safe haven” law. This does not apply to fathers who wish to be freed of their children.
It’s a little alarming that the main right this group seems to want is the right to kill unwanted children. However, I would like at least for everyone to understand that there is no parallel right being enjoyed by men. Equality with us means substantially fewer rights than women currently enjoy.
Buncombe County is considering that most hateful of things to a government, cutting spending. What could drive such a drastic step?
Much of the estimated shortfall, which ranges from $15.1 million to $25.7 million, is tied to reduced sales tax revenue and unpaid property taxes. While state law doesn't allow property tax waivers due to natural disasters, the collection rate as of Jan. 13 was nearly 1% lower at the same time last year.
Anticipating that some property owners who sustained damage to their property will have difficulty paying their tax bill, paired with increased unemployment, the county is projecting property tax revenue to fall by 2-2.5% this year, resulting in a $4.8 million to $6.5 million loss. Property tax is the largest revenue stream for the county....
In November, Buncombe County’s Tourism Development Authority estimated that the county would see a 70% decline in tourism in the last quarter of 2024. For businesses, that could mean a $584 million loss in revenue, the Citizen Times previously reported.
The county is also projecting to receive up to $11.6 million less from the state and federal government, permitting and licensing, and other services like EMS fees.
Emphasis added.
I've been amazed by the tone of the journalism and remarks from government officials about the property taxes. 'You just owe us the money; it doesn't matter if you lost everything. It's the law! You've got to magic that money out of thin air for us, even though the property that your wealth was based upon was destroyed. We don't care that you can't even borrow against it because it all washed away. We recognize that you may "have difficulty" paying us given that your life savings was destroyed, but by thunder we intend to get it. We passed a law!'
Meanwhile, note that the state and federal inputs are actually expected to decline by eight figures this year. It's not just that storm aid isn't coming (not to North Carolina; California is slated to get lots). The year-over-year inputs are being sharply reduced.
Again, though, this is ultimately for the good. Cutting government spending will be good for Asheville, as it will be for everywhere where we manage to get government spending cuts. A lot of it is public-sector salaries and hiring, which are inflated. They're also looking at the public school system, which really ought to be eliminated entirely and replaced with private/voucher systems. The public education system, like the prison system, has at this point become positively harmful to the civilization it purports to support. We'll be better off the more thoroughgoing the reform finally turns out to be.
Books explicitly designed for sexual education also existed in the period [i.e. Regency England]. One well-known work was the grandiosely titled Aristotle’s Masterpiece, first published in 1648 but regularly revised and reprinted throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. (No connection to the ancient Greek philosopher is supported by the historical record.) The manual includes descriptions and diagrams of sexual anatomy, including an explanation of the clitoris as crucial to female pleasure.... Though Aristotle’s Masterpiece and its later editions were often published anonymously, print runs were high and the book sold extremely well — even when the medical information therein was considerably out of date.
One of the most consequential events in theology as a branch of philosophy followed a similar misattribution: Plotinus' work was translated into Arabic under the title "the Theology of Aristotle." In fact the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian metaphysics weren't even especially compatible, but the misattribution caused the Islamic philosopher Avicenna to spend a decade or so developing a system that harmonized them. This system was extremely helpful to later Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, who wanted to incorporate rediscovered Aristotelian natural philosophy (i.e. science) into a Christian intellectual world that had strong Neoplatonic foundations thanks to some early saints. To this day, much of Catholic theology rests on Avicenna's work as reinterpreted by Aquinas and others.
It's not clear that this other work had a similarly titanic effect. Hopefully it improved some marriages, however, which is not a small thing for human happiness.
In his 1896 biennial report to the Texas Legislature, the Superintendent of the State Penitentiary detailed the previous employment of the 4,446 convicts under his care.* I was interested to note that 9 of these jailbirds had been “ministers of the gospel,” which placed them on par with “barkeepers” (also 9), but well below “cigar makers” (3), “cowboys” (1), “prostitutes” (1), and even “journalists” (2).I would guess that Texas was then home to roughly the same number of barkeepers and ministers of the gospel, so we may suppose that the average moral quality of the men in these two professions was about the same. I can report, however, that the category “ministers of the gospel” came off better than that sump of turpitude and iniquity, the category of “school teachers.” Although statewide roughly equal in number to the ministers of the Gospel, pedagogues were incarcerated at nearly double their rate (17 total).
"Firefighters" wasn't a profession then, but it's pretty analogous to cowboying in many respects -- at least wildland firefighting like what is being discussed below, which has a lot of being outside, clearing land, and cutting fire breaks. Good for the soul, partly because it's real work for the body.
Build Back Better was a sweeping agenda of economic reform on the scale of the New Deal, meant to solidify its author as the “FDR-sized” president he wanted to be.
Dusting the text off now, you can feel that ambition. Across two bills — the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — it sought to spend over $4 trillion across a decade.... an epochal expansion of government spending and ambition, on par with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society.
Little of this became law, of course. The bipartisan infrastructure law enacted in 2021 included $250 billion in new transportation spending, less than half of the Jobs Plans’ number; even adding the $72 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act for electric vehicles doesn’t close the gap much. While the Jobs Plan included $1.6 trillion in climate spending, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures are estimated to cost less than half that much. The CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 appropriated all of $79 billion to support manufacturing, a far cry from Biden’s $590 billion bid, and largely didn’t appropriate money for science at all. And then there’s the American Families Plan, almost all of which fell by the wayside, not passed by Congress in any form.
Imagine the inflation associated with this titanic flood of Federal spending. What we got was bad enough. Your dollar wouldn't have been worth anything if all that planned print-money spending had been dropped into the market.
When I think of the 'Build Back Better' slogan, I always remember this video.
