Holy Pre-existing Conditions, Batman! It’s Obamacare-lite!

Last updated on: June 22, 2017 at 11:31 am By Jane the Actuary

The Senate healthcare proposal is finally out, and here’s my first, lunchtime assessment. Republicans have promised up and down that they’ll end Obamacare for one reason: that it’s not working. Does the typical consumer care about the taxes on high earners? No, not really. They care about how it impacts them, or about how they fear it’ll impact them in the future. Why is Obamacare failing? The bottom line: Insurers are withdrawing from some Obamacare markets, and raising premiums erratically... Read more

No good answers in the Castile verdict

Last updated on: June 22, 2017 at 2:00 pm By Jane the Actuary

In the news last week: A jury found St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez not guilty Friday in the fatal shooting of Philando Castile, whose livestreamed death during a traffic stop stunned a nation. And yesterday the dashboard camera video was released. I haven’t watched it, and don’t plan to — it suffices that writers with varying politics report that it horrifies them. But then why didn’t the jury convict Yanez? We have to look further than “white supremacism” or... Read more

Blockbuster, Borders, your local grocer?

Last updated on: June 21, 2017 at 10:04 am By Jane the Actuary

So Amazon is buying Whole Foods, and everyone is speculating that Amazon is on its way to becoming Buy N Large, selling everything and destroying its competition, and destroying the local grocery store, so that in a few short years, we’ll all be ordering our groceries online. Nevermind that this is the Peapod model (do all the pundits live in areas without Peapod?), but the few times I’ve looked at them, I’ve found them substantially more expensive than “regular” grocery stores,... Read more

Defining terrorism

Last updated on: June 20, 2017 at 12:14 pm By Jane the Actuary

The name of the Finsbury Park attacker has now been released: Darren Osborne, a 47 year old man from Cardiff, who ranted that “this is for London Bridge” after the attack, according to eyewitness accounts. According to neighbors, he was not known or perceived of as racist, but was “shouty” and his mother reported that “had been on medication for mental health problems.” He is alleged to have expressed increasingly antagonistic views towards Muslims in the weeks since the London... Read more

What the [asterisk] is going on with Illinois’ public universities?

Last updated on: June 17, 2017 at 10:07 pm By Jane the Actuary

Here’s a post that I started writing back in April. You see, back at the time, the Chicago Tribune had a stunning graph in its lead Sunday editorial, “Governor, start fixing higher ed in Illinois: How to pour more spending into classrooms and labs.” It’s generally known that Chicago State, due to massive mismanagement, has had stunning drops in enrollment. But a 40% drop at Eastern Illinois? a 25% at Northern, and nearly as much at SIU-Carbondale and Western? Holy moly!... Read more

The Finsbury Park attack (placeholder)

Last updated on: June 19, 2017 at 9:39 am By Jane the Actuary

Last night, a reportedly-48 year old white man plowed into a crowd near the Finsbury Park mosque in London. This is a mosque which, somewhat over a decade ago, was breeding terrorists, and was shut down, then later reopened “under new management” and, from all reports, claims the mantle of moderation. Here’s the obligatory link to a relatively recent story on the incident: from the BBC. One person is dead (though apparently not necessarily as a result of the attack),... Read more

“Swears” and the social compact

Last updated on: June 17, 2017 at 7:03 pm By Jane the Actuary

We were at Laserquest the other day, celebrating a birthday. Before you enter the “arena,” you are required to pledge not to misbehave, and this includes not running, not pushing anyone, and not using “offensive language.” But, as a mom with a group of 6 10-year-olds, who formed the majority of the players, but with a group of 5 teenagers also there, I wondered, “do teenagers (in particular, when raised in “none-ish households) still understand the concept of ‘offensive language’?”,... Read more

So in 14 days, my husband will be the pop-buyer of the family

Last updated on: June 17, 2017 at 5:09 pm By Jane the Actuary

Because, that is, he works in Lake County, and, effective July 1st, C(r)ook County will be implementing a 1 cent per ounce sweetened beverage tax. See the official ordinance for details, or a recent Eric Zorn column, in which he lists 10 reasons to oppose the tax. The tax is one of those that goes from bad to worse the more you read about it. The very idea of a soda tax, while politically favored among nanny-taxers, is ill-conceived to... Read more

Who is a “Catholic”? – About Schismatic Churches

Last updated on: June 19, 2017 at 4:35 pm By Jane the Actuary

An "Independent Catholic" church founded by a breakaway priest. Read more

About the age of majority, anyway

Last updated on: June 16, 2017 at 7:48 am By Jane the Actuary

So in a prior post I used the issue of the minimum age at marriage to talk about practices in some Christian communities and the extent to which we in the broader mainstream community feel like “that’s none of my business” or “it makes us look bad to talk about.” But there is definitely a bigger issue that I glossed over, and that’s the bigger question of what the right minimum age for marriage is, and how that should fit... Read more