Month: September 2014

Got Company Man on Kindle?

Get it now at Amazon, Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968.

From the book, first page:

Five of us took the New York Central from Chicago to Cincinnati in August, 1950, arriving with hours to spare before our 6 p.m. novitiate-arrival deadline. Our destination was suburban Milford, 15 miles east of the city. Killing time, we cabbed it at one point. One of us wanted to buy a fielder’s glove. We asked the cabbie where we could find a sporting goods place. He picked up on the sporting part and was about to suggest a brothel. We cut him short smilingly. Athletic goods, yes. Sexual athletics, no.

From the book, last page:

On my last night, Brichetto and I and two or three others had a good hour or so chatting in the kitchen over a beer.  As we broke up, he commented that this is how we Jesuits should get together with each other, referring to our relaxed camaraderie.

Next morning after breakfast, five or six gathered at the loading dock to say goodbye to me.  My rental car was waiting, compliments of the Xavier U. minister, who also gave me $400 for the pocket.  I was good to go, as people say.  As we stood there, joshing briefly, Brichetto, who was not one I’d told of my leaving, passed the area and looked out at me from some 75 feet away, me in civvies and obviously on my way.  We caught each other’s eye.  He had a slightly bewildered look I had never seen on him—like Jesus being led away by Roman soldiers, looking at Peter, who had denied him.

Way in the back of my head, it was occurring to me that I was betraying him.  I wondered momentarily, how many others? The feeling disappeared and did not return.  I was off to my new life, simultaneously apprehensive and exhilarated.

In Detroit, thousands for TV, not one cent for water

The city water bills go unpaid.

The suburbs mostly buy water from the DWSD [Detroit Water and Sewerage Department] wholesale, so it’s mainly city residents and businesses who get billed directly, and over half of them—about 90,000 customers—haven’t paid up. Total past-due bills add up to nearly $90 million, with the average delinquent residential customer owing $540, or more than 7 months’ worth of service, based on an average bill of $75.

Entitlement mentality hard at work.

Eric Holder faced venom from 9/11 families, says NPR writer

Listing Holder brouhahas (a short list), NPR has this:

Another huge controversy — over his decision to try the Sept. 11 plotters in a New York courthouse in the shadow of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center — prompted venomous reaction from lawmakers, New York City officials and some victims’ families.

Ah those venomous lawmakers, NYC officials, and some victims’ families, spewing as they go.

On the other hand, we find this from same writer:

. . . even longtime aides say Holder didn’t do enough to help himself by shrugging off preparations and moot sessions before congressional appearances and speaking off the cuff — and obliquely.

But nothing about his non-investigation of the IRS scandal, which would have put him perilously close to nailing his fellow Dems.

Fire, he said, and they ran for the exits . . .

The crowded theater where it’s a sin to yell “fire” has become the masses who fear fear itself in the form of falsely alarming medical reports:

Almost 8,000 cases of pertussis, better known as whooping cough, have been reported to California’s Public Health Department so far this year. More than 250 patients have been hospitalized, nearly all of them infants and young children, and 58 have required intensive care. Why is this preventable respiratory infection making a comeback? In no small part thanks to low vaccination rates, as a story earlier this month in the Hollywood Reporter pointed out.

The conversation about vaccination has changed. In the 1990s, when new vaccines were introduced, the news media were obsessed with the notion that vaccines might be doing more harm than good. The measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine might cause autism, we were told. Thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury containing preservative in some vaccines, might cause developmental delays. Too many vaccines given too soon, the stories went, might overwhelm a child’s immune system.

Then those stories disappeared. One reason was that study after study showed that these concerns were ill-founded. Another was that the famous 1998 report claiming to show a link between vaccinations and autism was retracted by The Lancet, the medical journal that had published it. The study was not only spectacularly wrong, as more than a dozen studies have shown, but also fraudulent. The author, British surgeon Andrew Wakefield, has since been stripped of his medical license

Etc. Another panic, another bad result.

Next thing, we’ll hear about the seas rising and engulfing New York.

Why Your Plan Was Cancelled: Health Insurance and Obamacare video – Illinois Review

A certain # of plans will be cancelled because they don’t fit into ACA categories, which change every year. This is bureaucratic nonsense gone wild.

There’s a bizarre reason why millions of Americans saw their health plans cancelled in 2013 and, as explained in a new video featuring Robert Graboyes of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, millions more will lose their plans in years to come.

“Permanent turmoil.” Welcome to the world of central planning.

“Liberal” hijacked, what to call a free society?

Hayek racked his brain:

“In the United States, where it has become almost impossible to use “liberal” in the sense in which I have used it, the term “libertarian” has been used instead. It may be the answer; but for my part I find it singularly unattractive.

For my taste it carries too much the flavor of a manufactured term and of a substitute. What I should want is a word which describes the party of life, the party that favors free growth and spontaneous evolution. But I have racked my brain unsuccessfully to find a descriptive term which commends itself.”

— Friedrich August von Hayek
(1899-1992), Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences 1974
Source: “Why I Am Not a Conservative,” postcript to The Constitution of Liberty [1960] (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1972)

Walmart Banking — Free market working for low-income people

Only in America, where freedom works:

The free market caters to people at the bottom. The dollar stores do. Walmart does. They make high quality products and services available to people who have less money. The name of this game has always been the same: price competition. In four words: Save money. Live better.

Free checking, etc. Competition does it, not gummint..

Read about it at Tea Party Economist, who got it from the New Yawk Times.

(News Alert again, where the elite meet to learn about spreading the wealth around the old-fashioned way, by creating it.)