Chicago had a mayoral election last night. It was a very strange election (yes, 14 candidates, and the top two head into a runoff, and a ranked-choice vote would have really been far preferable to this business of candidates dividing up constituencies), and the outcome was, to me at least, unexpected: Lori Lightfoot, 17.5% of the vote, Toni Preckwinkle, 16%, Bill Daley, 14.7%, Susana Mendoza, 9%, Amara Enyia, 8%, Jerry Joyce, 7%, Gery Chico, 6%, and a host of others... Read more
Or, “how I spent my weekend.” For eight years, I have, for one weekend a month, for most months of the school year, I have sent one or more sons off on Boy Scout outing, and, more often than not, my husband as well. November through March, they cabin-camp (yeah, I know, don’t @ me) or have a one-day outing, April, May, September and October they tent-camp, and in the summer they go to summer camp and the older boys,... Read more
Are you following the mayoral election in Chicago? It’s a crazy scenario, with 14 candidates, and many of them serious contenders. The election’s a week from tomorrow, and the top two will go into a runoff in April, and it’s looking like it might take no more than 15% of the vote to make it to that runoff, because the vote will be split so many ways. It’s nuts – and, like the winner-take-all state contests in the 2016 GOP... Read more
What, you ask, is the “third sex” or “third gender”? It depends. In Oregon, it’s a catchall category for “non-binary, intersex and agender people” who may now apply to have an X appear on their identity documents, including driver’s licenses. Retired soldier Jamie Shupe garnered headlines as the first such person to have one’s sex registered in this manner, after a court battle in 2016. Shupe, who had previously changed his sex to female and, while still in the Army,... Read more
Hey, readers! I just linked to my most recently published Federalist article, and have also, in addition to writing on the Forbes platform, started to put out some public-policy-but-not-retirement pieces at my personal Jane the Actuary website (for instance, this one about health care systems outside the U.S.). Occasionally I contemplate moving this whole blog over to the personal website (believe me, the pay per pageviews here are not generating any more than an extra cup of coffee every month),... Read more
In 1982, a child was born in Bloomington, Indiana, with a condition called a tracheoesophageal fistula, that is, a connection between the esophagus and the windpipe. This condition prevents an affected child from being fed but could be remedied with an operation with (even at the time) a 90 percent success rate. At the recommendation of the obstetrician, however, the child’s parents refused either to have this operation performed or even to feed the baby with IV fluids. Another physician attempted to... Read more
Let me start with a story or two about World War II. One visit home, we asked my parents what they remembered of the home front; both were born in ’39 so these would have been early-childhood memories. Neither of them had parents away fighting in the war (Mom’s dad was too old; Dad’s dad was in an essential-to-the-war-effort job), and nothing about it made any impression on Mom, but Dad remembers being sent out to buy groceries and losing... Read more
Yes, I know, the Ben Shapiro meme is “facts don’t care about your feelings.” But here’s the deal: Retirement is back as a topic of discussion in Congress, so, yay, me, I guess, since I have lots to write about, anyway, and today there was a hearing at the House Ways and Means Committee, which I had thought was narrowly about the new “expand Social Security” bill which the Democrats have great hopes for, but turned out to be a... Read more
This post has been updated since its original publication to reflect analysis of the Pastoral Center annual report. This weekend, in lieu of a homily, we listened to a recording by Cardinal Cupich telling us how very much he cared about victims of sexual abuse and how very saddened he was at all the bad things that had happened and how very hard he was going to work to fix everything. (I cannot find a link to a transcript.) It... Read more
To recap: in my prior post, I wrote about the new New York law, and the bill in Virginia whose sponsor, Del. Kathy Tran, confirmed that it would enable a doctor, without any second opinion, to perform an abortion any time up until the child is born, upon a claim that doing so was necessary to preserve the mother’s mental health. Virginia governor Ralph Northam confirmed his support, though with the claim that late-term abortions were always for the most serious of... Read more
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