I assume everyone has heard of the CBC’s whitewashing of 9/11. Now labeled by them as “passenger jet crashes”. Leave it to the Babylon Bee for a response:
There are about 80 people fishing out here today. Practically shoulder to shoulder. More than I have ever seen at one time. The tide is dropping so they will soon spread out over about a mile and half. Also saw an Osprey with a fish.
That’s a smile-maker, for sure! (and that’s coming from someone who LOVES kids, but could never have any) Makes me happy for them. Beautiful family!
For any early risers out there. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope scheduled for launch tomorrow at 6:20 Eastern.
You beat me to it. I was just going to comment on the Roman telescope. Hopefully see good results come January. I wonder if it will produce more problems for the Big Bang…I suspect it will.
I certainly hope so. Not that I have anything against the Big Bang, but the whole reason for building bigger and better (and more expensive) telescopes is to learn something. Hopefully something fundamental.
Astronomy is a Big Data science now and this telescope embraces that. It will send back more data in its first few months of operation than Hubble has in its entire 30+ years. No human could hope to meaningfully analyze that. Neural networks and AI – two things I know almost nothing about – will rule the discipline going forward.
Representative Brendan Boyle told Politico that he believed President Trump had ‘absolutely no interest whatsoever in solving this problem,’ adding that ‘like it or not, this will be on the plate of the next president.’
Senator Tim Kaine said: ‘The senators elected this November will be here when we have to solve this. The next president who’s elected will be here when we have to solve this. So rather than wait till 2032, let’s go ahead and get this started now.’
Fears grow over Social Security cliff edge that could see millions of Americans lose $500 a month: ‘This train wreck is going to happen’
The subjectless sentence, the hallmark of legacy media propaganda. “Fears” are “growing”: where, in fields?
To avoid the shortfall they will either raise taxes or borrow more money, just like they handle every other “shortfall”. If necessary they will change the law in order to do it. It’s really that simple. Changing the law is as simple as passing a budget that says the funding is done another way. Budgets change the law all the time at both state and Federal level.
It might help to stop checking the Daily Mail except for breaking disaster stories.
🙂 Humble me lives good on less than a $1000 a month — they cut $500 of that and I need to start stacking up on Ramen noodles…
It’s highly unlikely that they will cut $500 per month from the lower-income recipients.
NC: I agree the short fall in SS or other entitlements will probably be met via monetary inflation, rather than honest bankrupcy.
For me the net question becomes: is/was there some failing in our last few generations or last century’s history that has made us, as a people, less able to be responsible self governing sovereign citizens? Or or we just examples of normal flawed humanity and our republican system was not sufficiently well designed or robust enough to allow us to muddle through?
The Founders clearly understood, even prior to 1776, the value and merit of education in preparing a people to be worthy of self governing. So they established plenty of schools and provided sufficient resources to generate that “education”. However, it seems we failed to ensure the content of that “knowldege” being fed to the student was in sync with the initial principles of the DOI and the Constitution; along with the study of human nature and why our experiment was structured the way it was.
Collapse via excessive debt seems to be a well established mechanism ending several (if not all) past empires, major regimes, and civilizations.
A energetic and entrepreneurial farm and rural restaurant-woman takes on the changing, or declining, measures of maturity (or immaturity) in a seriously thought-provoking opinion piece on changer mores amid surging social isolation at the Epoch Times.
Here’s a multi paragraph excerpt — there’s a lot more for the linking.
“There is nothing wrong with pajamas, a bonnet, or a teddy bear. The question is whether every setting needs to accommodate whatever makes us most comfortable. School is partly preparation for entering the world. Sometimes, that means learning that what is appropriate in your bedroom isn’t necessarily appropriate in a classroom or job interview.
“We have seen a similar conversation around emotional support animals. For a period, they became so common on airplanes that airlines were dealing not only with dogs and cats but with increasingly unusual animals being presented as necessary for emotional comfort. People with disabilities who rely on trained service animals are in an entirely different category.
“But culturally, something interesting had happened: ‘This makes me feel safer and more comfortable’ ’had become an argument we increasingly expected the world around us to accommodate.
“Perhaps what has changed isn’t our need for comfort. My mother and I are proof that previous generations had plenty of comfort habits. Perhaps what has changed is our expectation that adulthood should require us to leave any of them behind.
“There is psychological research supporting the idea that manageable discomfort serves a purpose. Researchers sometimes describe ‘stress inoculation.’ Overwhelming or chronic stress can obviously be damaging, but manageable stress, successfully navigated, can help us develop the ability to deal with future stress.
“If, every time a child encounters something difficult, we remove the difficulty, how will the child discover, ‘I can handle difficult things’?
For me the net question becomes: is/was there some failing in our last few generations or last century’s history that has made us, as a people, less able to be responsible self governing sovereign citizens? Or or we just examples of normal flawed humanity and our republican system was not sufficiently well designed or robust enough to allow us to muddle through?
— R2L
The collapse of faith is part of it. If nothing matters, then nothing matters. You might as well live for the present. Related to that is the fertility crash, which reduces investment in the future.
Another factor is longevity. People are, on average, living longer now than then when SoSec was set up, so they are able to draw on it longer. To be blunt, part of the calculation that went into SoSec was that a large swath of its theoretical beneficiaries would not live long enough to use it much or at all. Advancing medical science upended that.
The obvious countermove is to raise the retirement age, which is toxically unpopular. Many, possibly a majority, detest their jobs, and long for the day that they can be free of it. Pushing that day farther into the future is about as popular as root canal.
Also, there are differences between jobs. It’s one thing to ask an accountant or a programmer to work until they are 68 or 70. It’s another for a truck driver and an even bigger another for a coal miner.
Add in instinctive resentment as the wealthiest class keeps getting ever wealthier relative to everyone else, and raising the retirement age becomes politically explosive.
But another big part is simply the culture war. Most of the factions (and there are more than 2) in that political/social/religious divide would be fully prepared to address the budget issue by raising Other People’s taxes and cutting Other People’s spending priorities.
But nobody has been able to gain enough of an advantage over the others to implement that, and the deadlock blocks change.
@HC68:People are, on average, living longer now than then when SoSec was set up, so they are able to draw on it longer.
In 1937, when the payroll taxes were first collected, the men born in 1920 just starting to “pay in” had only a 70% chance of living to age 65, and the women had an 82% chance. Their average life expectancy post-age 65 was 15.4 years for men and 19.0 years for women.
In 2027, those figures for the 2100 cohort are projected to be 82% of living to age 65 for men, average post-65 life expectancy 19.6 years, and the corresponding figures for women are 90% with average post-65 life expectancy of 22.0 years.
Not only are people more likely to make it to retirement age they also live longer when they do.
You realize the 79th Congress managed to turn a deficit of 13% of gross domestic product into a surplus of 2% of gross domestic product in just two years. They did so without generating a catastrophic social crisis. In 1947, 54.5% of the civilian population over the age of 14 was employed. That’s somewhat lower than the historical median (which would have been about 59% of the civilian non-institutional population). We used to be better than we are.
==
It’s not that difficult to conceive of ways to close the budget deficit and distribute the burdens in a satisfactory way. The Democratic caucus refuses to cut anything and the Republican caucus is timid and held hostage by a small corps of cruddy careerists.
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I assume everyone has heard of the CBC’s whitewashing of 9/11. Now labeled by them as “passenger jet crashes”. Leave it to the Babylon Bee for a response:
https://babylonbee.com/news/7-tragic-world-events-as-reported-by-the-canadian-broadcasting-corp
There are about 80 people fishing out here today. Practically shoulder to shoulder. More than I have ever seen at one time. The tide is dropping so they will soon spread out over about a mile and half. Also saw an Osprey with a fish.
That’s a smile-maker, for sure! (and that’s coming from someone who LOVES kids, but could never have any) Makes me happy for them. Beautiful family!
For any early risers out there. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope scheduled for launch tomorrow at 6:20 Eastern.
So far so good:
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/roman/2026/08/30/nasas-roman-space-telescope-flying-on-its-own/
Mike Plaiss,
You beat me to it. I was just going to comment on the Roman telescope. Hopefully see good results come January. I wonder if it will produce more problems for the Big Bang…I suspect it will.
Paul Fellows, “Once Around Three-Mirrored Telescopes” (29:50):
https://youtu.be/ZwfLzMlcAc0
I certainly hope so. Not that I have anything against the Big Bang, but the whole reason for building bigger and better (and more expensive) telescopes is to learn something. Hopefully something fundamental.
Astronomy is a Big Data science now and this telescope embraces that. It will send back more data in its first few months of operation than Hubble has in its entire 30+ years. No human could hope to meaningfully analyze that. Neural networks and AI – two things I know almost nothing about – will rule the discipline going forward.
One of these days I will stop checking out the news… Fears grow over Social Security cliff edge that could see millions of Americans lose $500 a month: ‘This train wreck is going to happen’
Fears grow over Social Security cliff edge that could see millions of Americans lose $500 a month: ‘This train wreck is going to happen’
The subjectless sentence, the hallmark of legacy media propaganda. “Fears” are “growing”: where, in fields?
To avoid the shortfall they will either raise taxes or borrow more money, just like they handle every other “shortfall”. If necessary they will change the law in order to do it. It’s really that simple. Changing the law is as simple as passing a budget that says the funding is done another way. Budgets change the law all the time at both state and Federal level.
It might help to stop checking the Daily Mail except for breaking disaster stories.
🙂 Humble me lives good on less than a $1000 a month — they cut $500 of that and I need to start stacking up on Ramen noodles…
It’s highly unlikely that they will cut $500 per month from the lower-income recipients.
And some more “Peace Dividend” news!
“West Bank School Leaders Keep Backing October 7”—
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news-corner/west-bank-school-leaders-keep-backing-october-7/
NC: I agree the short fall in SS or other entitlements will probably be met via monetary inflation, rather than honest bankrupcy.
For me the net question becomes: is/was there some failing in our last few generations or last century’s history that has made us, as a people, less able to be responsible self governing sovereign citizens? Or or we just examples of normal flawed humanity and our republican system was not sufficiently well designed or robust enough to allow us to muddle through?
The Founders clearly understood, even prior to 1776, the value and merit of education in preparing a people to be worthy of self governing. So they established plenty of schools and provided sufficient resources to generate that “education”. However, it seems we failed to ensure the content of that “knowldege” being fed to the student was in sync with the initial principles of the DOI and the Constitution; along with the study of human nature and why our experiment was structured the way it was.
Collapse via excessive debt seems to be a well established mechanism ending several (if not all) past empires, major regimes, and civilizations.
A energetic and entrepreneurial farm and rural restaurant-woman takes on the changing, or declining, measures of maturity (or immaturity) in a seriously thought-provoking opinion piece on changer mores amid surging social isolation at the Epoch Times.
Here’s a multi paragraph excerpt — there’s a lot more for the linking.
“There is nothing wrong with pajamas, a bonnet, or a teddy bear. The question is whether every setting needs to accommodate whatever makes us most comfortable. School is partly preparation for entering the world. Sometimes, that means learning that what is appropriate in your bedroom isn’t necessarily appropriate in a classroom or job interview.
“We have seen a similar conversation around emotional support animals. For a period, they became so common on airplanes that airlines were dealing not only with dogs and cats but with increasingly unusual animals being presented as necessary for emotional comfort. People with disabilities who rely on trained service animals are in an entirely different category.
“But culturally, something interesting had happened: ‘This makes me feel safer and more comfortable’ ’had become an argument we increasingly expected the world around us to accommodate.
“Perhaps what has changed isn’t our need for comfort. My mother and I are proof that previous generations had plenty of comfort habits. Perhaps what has changed is our expectation that adulthood should require us to leave any of them behind.
“There is psychological research supporting the idea that manageable discomfort serves a purpose. Researchers sometimes describe ‘stress inoculation.’ Overwhelming or chronic stress can obviously be damaging, but manageable stress, successfully navigated, can help us develop the ability to deal with future stress.
“If, every time a child encounters something difficult, we remove the difficulty, how will the child discover, ‘I can handle difficult things’?
FROM “Why Are Grown Adults Carrying Big Stuffed Animals?” — as seen recently on a plane, for instance! https://www.theepochtimes.com/opinion/why-are-grown-adults-carrying-stuffed-animals-6076115
— R2L
The collapse of faith is part of it. If nothing matters, then nothing matters. You might as well live for the present. Related to that is the fertility crash, which reduces investment in the future.
Another factor is longevity. People are, on average, living longer now than then when SoSec was set up, so they are able to draw on it longer. To be blunt, part of the calculation that went into SoSec was that a large swath of its theoretical beneficiaries would not live long enough to use it much or at all. Advancing medical science upended that.
The obvious countermove is to raise the retirement age, which is toxically unpopular. Many, possibly a majority, detest their jobs, and long for the day that they can be free of it. Pushing that day farther into the future is about as popular as root canal.
Also, there are differences between jobs. It’s one thing to ask an accountant or a programmer to work until they are 68 or 70. It’s another for a truck driver and an even bigger another for a coal miner.
Add in instinctive resentment as the wealthiest class keeps getting ever wealthier relative to everyone else, and raising the retirement age becomes politically explosive.
But another big part is simply the culture war. Most of the factions (and there are more than 2) in that political/social/religious divide would be fully prepared to address the budget issue by raising Other People’s taxes and cutting Other People’s spending priorities.
But nobody has been able to gain enough of an advantage over the others to implement that, and the deadlock blocks change.
@HC68:People are, on average, living longer now than then when SoSec was set up, so they are able to draw on it longer.
In 1937, when the payroll taxes were first collected, the men born in 1920 just starting to “pay in” had only a 70% chance of living to age 65, and the women had an 82% chance. Their average life expectancy post-age 65 was 15.4 years for men and 19.0 years for women.
In 2027, those figures for the 2100 cohort are projected to be 82% of living to age 65 for men, average post-65 life expectancy 19.6 years, and the corresponding figures for women are 90% with average post-65 life expectancy of 22.0 years.
Not only are people more likely to make it to retirement age they also live longer when they do.
You realize the 79th Congress managed to turn a deficit of 13% of gross domestic product into a surplus of 2% of gross domestic product in just two years. They did so without generating a catastrophic social crisis. In 1947, 54.5% of the civilian population over the age of 14 was employed. That’s somewhat lower than the historical median (which would have been about 59% of the civilian non-institutional population). We used to be better than we are.
==
It’s not that difficult to conceive of ways to close the budget deficit and distribute the burdens in a satisfactory way. The Democratic caucus refuses to cut anything and the Republican caucus is timid and held hostage by a small corps of cruddy careerists.