Mark and Ted discuss the top stories of the week, including more record setting gas prices and school funding practices that have plagued the state for decades.
Recent, related work from Wirepoints:
- Poor achievement, zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system – Wirepoints Video
- Suburban Chicago school district controversy: No plan to fix black academic failure
- Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system – Wirepoints Special Report
- Why the Chicago Teachers Union Always Gets What It Wants
- How can 84% of Chicago Public Schools students graduate when only 26% of 11th graders are proficient in reading, math?
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Here’s something positive and uplifting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TBqhGEU4FA
Mark & Ted: A topic that is often forgotten is that IL taxes collected today actually support services rendered decades ago.
Our Midwest neighbors enjoy an annual surplus while IL continues to dig a deeper hole and spend our kids’ and grandkids’ money.
BTW, sorry, but for the life of me I can’t come up with any good IL news. And I tried.
What you post is true but in Illinois, based upon elections, that is what the people want.
The Illinois aristocracy (public benefits entitlement tribe) does an excellent job disparaging those who point out facts about the destructive nature of their entitled attitudes…
Like ‘let them eat cake”, comments about looking at half-full-cup illustrate the deliberately-uninformed savagery of them who drink from cups overflowing with lifeblood wrenched from their empty-cupped neighbors.
Harshly put, yet poetic (and truthful)
I would like to hear from people something that accentuates the positive for the average Illinois citizen. We are getting bombarded with negative news day after day from all sides. There has to be some good news or as least encouraging news for the average person. Could anyone list some of them?
Freddy, here’s about all I can come up with: Illinois is getting increasingly inexpensive compared to most of the places that have been growing; the apartment rental market is rebounding in Chicago, surprisingly; and its tech community continues to thrive. Aside from that, we are watching Chicago, Illinois and most of the nation being destroyed by their own governments, and the fundamentals of Western Civilization are under assault by radical extremists. So, don’t get too carried away on the positive things.
The glass is always either half-full or half-empty. Happiness improves when one ponders the positives more than the negatives. To do the latter leads some to excessive depression, anger and even worse…..and to what positive result in their own lives?
James, IMO, happiness improves, instead, when one embraces the teachings of the stoics. To what end? Doing one’s part, however tiny, to head off the catastrophic course we are on.
Luckily for us, our forebears focused on reality. Not many who pondered the positives more than the negatives would have survived. Gratitude for positives is a beneficial virtue, but awareness of negatives is a necessity too.
I didn’t suggest otherwise. But, those who get it into their mind to the point of making an obsession risk having it start to show negative consequences in their lives in terms of health and personal relationships. If you can keep you can compartmentalize your life sufficiently, then its likely you and many others can escape the worst of that. Still, its essentially trying to gain control of something requiring the thoughts and actions of others to be in agreement. Rotsa ruck.
Most of the possitives I would list have to do more a higher set of appreciatiations: good health, living in peaceful and congenial community, having family harmony and pride in those relationships, living in a country that’s full of personal freedoms even though its broughts us all kinds of detractors and dissent. As for my appreciation as to living in IL I’d like to think IL citizens at large want to live in like ways and have both respect and general good will towards their fellow man in spite of the ongoing periodic bad news events of the day. Its… Read more »