Summer Rerun Season

It being officially summer, I think I’ll re-run some post from the past that I think are of continuing value. Maybe some other Chicago Boyz authors would like to do the same…

The Apprentices

If anyone would like to discuss President Trump’s proposal for an expanded role for apprenticeship programs in America…and related broader issues of workforce training and skills development…this is the place.  Some useful links:

Trump’s remarks on signing the executive order

Text of the executive order

Comments by Ivanka Trump and Labor Secretary Alex Acosta

Existing Federal regulations re apprenticeship programs

(There are also state regulations)

Thoughts?

Electric Six at Dante’s In Portland

Last night I went to see one of my favorite bands, Electric Six, at Dante’s in Portland on Burnside Avenue. They played a fun show and the band sounded great (my ears are still ringing). Here is their iconic singer “Dick Valentine” on stage. The band delivers hilarious onstage banter and are highly recommended. The crowd at Dante’s was also great and everyone seemed to be in good spirits.

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Craziness, Conformity, Cowardice, and Cruelty

Some stories about behavior of “progressives” and their institutions which represent the above characteristics in particularly egregious fashion.

John Wright’s sons were expelled from their Boy Scout troop…apparently based largely on accusations of ‘Islamophobia.’

Aisha O’Connor writes about her experiences at Bryn Mawr.  This was back in the early 1990s.  I doubt that things have gotten any saner since.

Rick Poach reports on a conversation (if you can call one-way communication a conversation) overheard in a diner last November 10.

Roger Simon writes about witch hunts and unhinged leftist rage.

Suits and Bean Counters

Along about the time that I started blogging … no, even well before that point, I was well-aware that there were personalities who could say and do flamingly stupid and insulting things on the public stage, and some would take no permanent career harm from having done so. Jane Fonda, for example, went on having a career for decades after getting the nick “Hanoi Jane” for her anti-war antics in the 1960s. Other personalities equally prominent, having said and done things just as injudicious appeared to walk away unscathed. It seemed to be a given that some public personalities were basically Teflon; as it would become even more obvious in the last decade, they had something that I call for lack of a better term douchebag privilege. Generally speaking, the lefty-intellectual-media lot like the Kennedys, the Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton brand of racial activists, and jerks like Michael Moore had douchebag privilege, whereas those of the other persuasion didn’t.

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