Wow! He is so smart, so grounded, so clear and so obviously not a fraud. When he talks, he says something. Chris Christie for president! The first fat American president!
Actually, not the first. Who was it who weighed 400 lbs and couldn’t fit into the White House bathtub? The first modern fat American president, I should say.
I
Rune said a little more than ‘I’, but I’ll try again lol
“I Heart Him :)”
mizpants: I must say that I find the fact that Christie, unlike most politicians, is somewhat stout (as my mother world delicately say; she prefers that word to its synonyms) to be one of the refreshing things about him.
I’m charmed by your mother’s euphemism, Neo, but Christie is REALLY fat. I saw a full-body shot of him on TV. I find his fatness refreshing too, especially since he is so bright-eyed, energetic and utterly unselfconscious.
I really think he’s going places. The country needs somebody like him.
mizpants,
It was Taft.
Sadly, these type of people don’t last long in politics. They usually compromise themselves to keep power or are dropped by an ungrateful public.
I would get on the Christie bus , but fear that if I dissented with one of his positions, I wouldn’t get thrown under the bus, but would be subjected to a full-body slam from the Guvnah. Not many people could survive that. 🙂
Seriously, he is an excellent off-the-cuff speaker. I would love to see him debate our TOTUS, without any assistance of teleprompters.
And I thought the only good thing about Joisey/Jaisey was the Turnpike! (After NYC roads, the Turnpike is great!)
The first fat American president!
right… and taft was svelt…
i will send the large post content to neo..
it gives history of a lot of this leading up to what Cristy is taking on. and he is hoping that the people will protect him (as will the truth)
will it?
do note that the related things to this are Dodd, Teachers union, IWA, AFL, CIO, Dewey, Gompers, Marxisms core origins, peirce, soviet union, and more.
i am attempting to make those who want short posts happy, and those names and all that, if you know the history, would be referencing it.
rather than explain, i am making reference to it, and how and what is arrayed around this situation…
as one can trace a direct lineage from Obama, Ayers, SEIU, AFL-CIO, IWA, Gompers, Marx…
[lets see if this works rather than a large post]
He’s so right. Just imagine if every business demanded dues from its employees for their own political ideology to get persued. This union bubble is on the road to bursting and the leftist/liberal recession/depression will begin on that day.
As a teacher let me say…
I refuse to join a union. Fortunately, I’m not in Jersey, so I don’t have to contribute a penny to a union.
One of the reasons for refusal is the most incompetent teachers are the union officers and cheerleaders. They bully teachers, too…the ones on the ground include competent teachers. As The Fat Man (remember Nero Wolfe?) says, the unionist first enrich themselves, then they defend tenure, then they go for raises and free benefits.
Union officers do not teach effectively…they generally don’t try: they’re not interested…Christie’s right about that.
Schools with unions have faculties that are divided. One lunch in the teachers’ lounge brings that point home.
And what is the division? You can tell union teachers right away. They can tell you to the day how much longer it is to retirement and their pensions. They stopped learning their subject the day they received tenure…
One union organizer told me not to teach areas of chemistry: “the kids are too stupid for that.” BTW, she “Taught” “Environmental Science”. Her major was “Physical Education”, but she hung around long enough to get seniority in class choice. Also, she thought I was a wise guy because I actually majored in chemistry (B.S. in same from Caltech).
I could run an artfldgr length comment, but you wouldn’t believe half the crap I have seen and endure with teacher unions.
My ALL union organizers rot in Hell…Dante would suggest the third circle…
I wish him – and hope for success; and when he wins – to continue the good fight by going against Construction Workers Unions. And then eliminating the rule (law?) mandating that all public/government/GSA construction and capital improvement projects should be given Exclusively to unionized companies. That would be the day!
During the campaign, Corzine tried to pussyfoot around the “stout” issue during an exchange with Christy, and Christy stopped him cold. Said Christy, if you think I’m fat, then just say so. Man up!
He gave a great speech to the Manhattan Instititute about a week ago. The video is available on the Manhattan Institute website. It takes about an hour to watch the whole thing, but it’s worth it if you have the time. He lays out in easy to understand terms how NJ got in the position they are in and how absolutely utterly unsustainable it is. It is so refreshing to hear a straight talker, who understands how dire the situation is, and has a real plan how to to right the ship (not this hope and change emotional garbage) .
But I agree somewhat with Hong. The “sacrifice” some people are going to have to make won’t be popular with many. Just look at Greece, where the welfare state is going broke, and those on the public dole are rioting because they have an entitlement mentality stretching for decades.
I’ve been watching him now for some time, with growing admiration. He consistently performs like this: honest, forthright, and replete with common sense. He also has a remarkable ability to connect with ordinary Americans.
At this point, he’d tentatively be my first choice as a candidate for President. Can you imagine a debate between Christie and the Messiah? That would be something to behold, and to cherish for the ages. They could put it on PPV and put a dent in the national debt. It would be the intellectual equivalent of Mike Tyson vs. Pee Wee Herman.
I could run an artfldgr length comment, but you wouldn’t believe half the crap I have seen and endure with teacher unions.
oh yes i would… 🙂
and see how not having a common reference point forces a long post IF you want to teach, prove, reveal, these areas that are not known, obfuscated, half truthed, etc.
and i would suggest reading (to start) the underground history of american education
by John Gatto. the whole book is here, but if you like it, then do go out and buy one. http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
i was educated like Abraham Lincoln and many many other notables… by myself…
The state must prepare to consciously guide human sexual selection, said Mé¼ller. School would have to separate worthwhile breeders from those slated for termination.
Just a few months before this report was released, an executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected “to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.”
You can’t get much clearer than that. WWII drove the project underground, but hardly retarded its momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school became a major domestic battleground for the scientific rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination.
but alas..
there is so much and most of it NOT common knowlege.
so Good ole Charlie.. i do beleive that everywhere that socialism is, there is division, jealousy, envy, and other ills… so i DO believe you when you allude to the stories you can tell in such a place.
In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children…and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. Occasional Letter Number One (1906) Rockefeller General Education Board
“We must continue to produce an uneducated social class.” Gerald Bracey
sorry… i had already wrote a big one, and sent to neo. i can tell you that there is a lot i can put down, lots more names. and like you, no common context.
just the list of names to look up would take three pages!!!!!!!!!!!!
The deeds were monstrous, but the doer [Adolf Eichmann]….was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial…was something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness…. Might not the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty for thought
– Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about “the perfect organization of the hive.” [Goddard was head of the Psychology Department at Princeton]
The edifice of universal education was, roughly speaking, completed… in 1870; and the Yellow Press was invented twenty years later–as soon, that is, as the first generation of children from the national schools had acquired sufficient purchasing power–by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the educational labour of love could be made to yield a royal profit. – Toynbee
Forty-two million Americans over the age of sixteen can’t read.
Fifty million can recognize printed words on a fourth- and fifth-grade level. They cannot write simple messages or letters.
Fifty-five to sixty million are limited to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade reading.
Thirty million have ninth- and tenth-grade reading proficiency. This group (and all preceding) cannot understand a simplified written explanation of the procedures used by attorneys and judges in selecting juries.
About 3.5 percent of the 26,000-member sample demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today.
Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need for other people to interpret information for us. National Adult Literacy Survey / 1993 analysis
so yes i do have a reason why i think that reading long texts shouldnt be a problem.
if 96.5% are mideocre at understanding printed text. and they basically behave as i described, in that they pick the idea that someone tells them, that they like best… so debate ends up being them parroting talking points but not understanding things.’
they want shorter NOT because shorter is actaully better, but because longer taxes their ability…
and if so many are so poor, is it any wonder that they dont actually read and understand marx, hayek, and others, but are just picking teams to join?
and that school since the progressives of the middle of the 1800s are all connected to it.
all those strange names, and ideas, and things that happened that you thougth could never happen.
OT: Art, thanks for the Mitrokhin archive tip. I’m just finishing the first book (The Sword and the Shield) – great read.
Thanks again.
I know some people are concerned that Christie will bow to the pressure and back off… but from the another video a few weeks ago and watching this one – he won’t bow. He might be voted out, but he won’t give in on what he thinks is right. As he has said, he’s been voted in to do a job, not to get re-elected. I am just astounded that such an astute articulate man even got into politics. I think he’ll get the job done. And I do heart him too!
Art, I appreciate your posts. You contribute much good information and analysis to this site.
I find it not a little ironic, however, that in your post regarding the deplorable state of literacy in the U.S., the only portions which are properly capitalized, punctuated, formatted and grammatically correct, are the portions you didn’t write.
I don’t mean to discourage you from posting. I encourage you to not be content with continuing to post poorly-written commentary. You are obviously intelligent enough to do much better, if you chose to do so. Those of us who would like to benefit from your experience would greatly appreciate it, and you would set a better example for the semi-literate among us.
I heart Christie as well — mancrush! It will be very interesting to see how it all plays out in NJ over the next few years. If he is ultimately successful, and is able to resist the temptations of power which have corrupted many good men before him, I’d love to see him in a national post.
As a “manly man”, I have to say I’ve got a serious man-crush on this guy.
Christie/Ryan 2012.
Does anyone else find that 96.5% figure impossible to swallow?
Christie is great! WOW. I’ve known of him since he hit the national news but simply hadn’t bothered to investigate.
Based on what he just said and, more importantly his demeanor (we all have a highly evolved BS detector) when he said it, I don’t see him compromising to keep power. As for being dropped by an ungrateful public, that’s what happened to Schwarzenegger in Ca. when early on he tried to rein in spending, so it could certainly happen to Christie.
But I don’t think it will happen because “the times they are a changing”. The electorate is scared, they know that things are hanging on the edge of very grim indeed. For many, it’s less about the specifics of whatever course a leader might suggest and more about them taking seriously the public’s concerns; astronomic deficits, borders being swamped with illegals and violence, radical legislation forced down our throats with absolutely no transparency, debate or reflection. The sense that they’re being lied to…
Arnold was too far ahead of the curve and then went RINO when he didn’t get the public backing he sought.
Of course, when the public unions (teachers, police and fire) went postal on him with an extensive TV campaign, he didn’t fight back much, which he could have by spending a few of his many millions, so obviously his commitment to conservative principles is questionable at best.
Christie’s a different animal, he gets it and has the very unique combination of intellectually grasping the relevant issues and speaking in a logically concise, to-the-point manner. That’s political gold and I agree, this guy is going to go far, health permitting.
Hopefully he has good genes, Churchill rather than Chris Farley.
He’s not really so smart. He simply calls it like Republicans see it, which is that Unions have a stronghold and they use propaganda.
Like politicians and corporate America don’t?? The entire system from top to bottom is full of bullies. That’s the American way.
If he is willing to raise the wages of teachers in NJ
then we don’t need unions. But he won’t bother to do that.
Heh. MDL, I smell a vested interest. Either that or I stepped in something.
He’s not really so smart.
Then Buraq’s got nothing to worry about in debating him.
Yet I bet Buraq will have need of plastic undershorts if he ever does debate Christie, who will mop the floor with the Indonesian Imposter.
And we both know that that’s true.
“”If he is willing to raise the wages of teachers in NJ then we don’t need unions””
A teacher who can’t negotiate her own compensation based on her own individual merit and performance, has no business teaching any child anything.
If he is willing to raise the wages of teachers in NJ then we don’t need unions. But he won’t bother to do that.
Make ’em a deal. We fire 20% of the union members, and distribute the savings among the remainder. The union membership gets to decide which 20% get the boot.
Tatyana writes ” . . . eliminating the rule (law?) mandating that all public/government/GSA construction and capital improvement projects should be given Exclusively to unionized companies.”
That’s the prevailing wage law your speaking about, aka the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which enacted it as federal law. In California its part of the labor code, Section 1770 et seq. The company does not have to be unionized, only pay the “prevailing” wage.
The construction industry is riddled with companies employing illegal immigrant labor. They pay perhaps one-third or one-half of the prevailing wage (generally now around $40/hour), submit fraudulent certified payroll reports, and then the first thing the companies do when threatened with a lawsuit is threaten the laborer with exposure.
I should explain myself a bit more. I’m a retread: I went into teaching in my Golden Years after some time as a substitute teacher. I decided to go for a regular license as something to occupy my time rather than sit home, play golf, and turn into a vegetable.
Got into a good Master’s program. I first found out about Battle Conditions when I was about to do my practice teaching. when the time came to divide into a group and a mentor, I went into the gym to find a mass of bodies milling around. There were ten groups of eight: nine Elementary ed, one High School (that’s me).
When I remarked to my mentor that “That’s a lot of El Ed”, he laughed and said that by the end of the semester, the groups would be 4 and 1. The actual classroom experience would shake out the faint hearts and people who were incompetent.
But then he laughed again and said: “Won’t get them all. The incompetents that have nowhere to go will sneak through and ultimately become union bozos.”
He was right…and he was a retired high school principal from a largish urban high school.
More anecdotes on demand…this one is dedicated to artfldgr…
Occam, are you dissin’ Barry O’Bama, our first Irish-Hawai’ian President?
Splashman,
I agree, good points. I do not write well unless i have time to write well. i will suppose that the people i copied from were paid for what they wrote, and i am not. in fact, i risk loosing my job in this economy writing.
yes i am slapdash (a new moniker?), but i will point something out that experience has taught me, and fancy this, it does pertain to this thread.
another angle that you can take with this discussion is not to focus on the Jews and Israel, but to focus on what i call secret worlds. entering one, and not being used to it, one generally has the reaction that neo has had.
its literally world changing…
it does it all in those seconds because its so truthful, and eye opening, and shows you, if you take the time to think in larger swirls about it, that wherever you are, you have no real clear view outside your world.
your blind, and until some aspect puts you in a different structural position, you dont realize your blind and that so many people can have conflicting views and all be right. (Rashoman explores a facet of this).
this is also the reason for the jewish idea of save a life save a universe. (and a whole host of such thoughts more common to those who really practice religion).
until the change in position, neo discounted the level of hate that some people experience as more situational, and less automaton hate.
well, i have learned with my writing, having experimented with varying it and working hard at it, not working at it, etc… and i have had the same with art… and other areas. (and i think doc of the bay refers to it)
there is this 1000 to 1 relationship… a thousand of you out there, and 1 of me… to each of you, you have this experience which you feel whatever you think would make you happier, would also make others happier. (and if you read as many studies i have, you would also feel that when people say what will make them happy and then get it, they are often VERY wrong)
the majority accept what i have to offer the way i give it and like listening to a radio with lots of static your used to, get what they can.
others try to give some form of assistance, but sometimes to them i seem polite, and sometimes to them i seem harsh. but there is a very fine line between assistance and a veiled passive agressive game, and other ‘games that people play’.
what i have found, as the marxists have found, is that you cant come up with a thing that everyone likes. at best in general you can get 20% to like you, maybe more for short times. (ergo their solution is to vary the same theme endlessly and scoop up and collectivize the power through collusion of the different groups of people thinking they are in different things because a few surface points not critical to the ideological ends are different).
i used to write for mens news daily… i might still be able to, but my time and life do not permit pools of time large enough to polish things off.
sometimes i can take the time and i can put this into word and i can click till all the red is gone, then the green, and then format it. and so on.
want to know what? wont make a difference… the ONLY difference it makes is that i wasted a whole lot of time with all that work.
what it ends up boiling down to is that you have a camp that dont want to read, dont say much and vote with their scroll or feet… (given neos popularity with the anchoress and such, they arent running away).
and there is another group, that will tolerate bad grammar for diamonds in the dirt…
they pay the fee to get the gems..
and then there are the few who as mentioned above want to help.
some want to insult or build little groups of me too, and will focus that way to perhaps do that (ie, they think there are enouhg people to link up over some misery. humans tend to commiserate on misery more than happiness)
my favorite are the clever ones. the ones who have an agenda, who have followed me from place to place under different names and have had similar debates.
we had one here who wants to save his fathers name. when he appeared i said hello to him, long time no see, and he didnt stay all that long.
why? because he and i have tussled and the more he tusseled the more information i put out. in essence while trying to correct some point, he would end up having more points.
years ago, i had a few russians follow me from site to site, and they spent an inordinate amount of time getting me to spend a lot of time to refute their points, but who were never really debating.. but the idea was to use up my time.
they came after the ones who would debate history. that is they would appear and like the wild west take me on in history. but after a while, they suddenly all disappeared, as if someone told them to stop because the more they debated, the more history i was able to get out and tie together.
take your pick… which subgroup of the masses do i make happy? what will they give me if i do? so far in general, the only ones offering anything are those who are complaining and want to pretend to offer me more popularity. something they actually cant give me, and something that i know (from experience) wont come from better grammar if i take the time.
all that will happen is that a new set will pop up and that if they cant complain about grammar, they will complain about size. if the size is kept low, and grammar good, they will go to tin hat or other names.
in general thats why each person doesnt change much when we talk or tell them to. especially as we get older and our world opens up and we are no longer children with the amount of life we can take in mediated by our parents and state…
so i appreciate your offer of advice… but i will probably write the way i write because i have been doing so for almost half a century. blame it on the teachers who gave me star grades because my stories, content and other points were so much more interesting, that they didn’t give a hoot much for grammar or handwriting.
they always got what they assigned, but it was seldom what they intended. 🙂
by the time i got to Junior High i no longer attended classes other than to take tests…
example: essay assignment in English class: what did you do this summer?
result 200 papers… a few had interesting families… most were completely repetitive and pedantic and grammar was what you HAD to grade on.
my paper… i figured they didn’t say it had to be autobiographical, and that it couldn’t be fiction… did they? I would slap dash off a piece where i was some other in some other place…
and thats the story of my life
put that with a father who is a real artist, with friends who are famous artists as i grew up..
and you had a cadre of adults advising me never to compromise who i am by listening to the drone of people telling me how to improve and be something they want and not accepting of you as you are….
so i am also stuck philisophically too…
ergo i am the immovable object to all these ultimately resistable forces.
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
Ansel Adams
and this is a common sentiment amount the “artist class”:
No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
Ansel Adams
and last i leave it to
I yam what i yam and thats all that i yam
take it or leave it
so thanks for the advice..
you will know that i have succeeded and become wealthy when my writing changes for that would be a signal that i have time. 🙂
Thanks, Tatyana!
In all seriousness, I think that that sort of approach may be a useful way to drive a wedge between various leftist constituencies: namely, here’s the total sum we’re willing to allocate, you collectively (no pun intended) decide how to divvy it up between the various unions, and between union members and union bosses. Make it a zero-sum game, and set them at each others’ throats. After laying in a considerable supply of popcorn, of course.
Occam, are you dissin’ Barry O’Bama, our first Irish-Hawai’ian President?
Richard, I prefer to characterize it as giving Barry all the respect he deserves.
Arnie never did take on the teachers’ union head on. He put three complex initiatives on the ballot and said “trust me.” He campaigned with straight talk and when he met the first opposition, he started to “negotiate”. Then when he lost on his ballot initiatives–which, IMO, deserved to go down–he appointed all of Maria’s friends to major posts. Talk about a Girly Man!
ACK!!!! i also dont know how long they are until i hit submit… (i type near 100 wpm)
Occam,
glad you like the book. its not an easy read though if you dont know the history that they are referring to in a lot of that.
and i am glad you came out of it without getting paranoid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
though if you read the second book out, which india is not to happy with, its just as interesting but more international.
makes a lot of things make a lot more sense and it sure takes the blinders off.
problem is with the blinders off its a scary world made scarier because you weren’t cognizant of most of it (which is why i am glad it didn’t induce paranoia. nothings changed other than you know more).
but when you couple it with the real history and you connect who are driving things now, you really get queasy…
and little things like the article over at american thinker about the number of nuclear weapons covers.
Bill Clinton was only Arkansas’ Attorney General back in 1978. He had spent some of his student days hobnobbing with top Communists. According to his biographer, David Maraniss of the Washington Post, young Bill Clinton spent an entire week in the apartment of Bedric and Irina Kopold, members of the Czech Communist Party Central Committee. No one on my warship would have been allowed access to classified materials with a record like that. In fact, if we had known that about Bill Clinton then, we could have kept him from setting foot on our ship
and i am like duh.. he was a Fulbright scholar who went on exchange to live and go to school in the soviet union (when it was the soviet union) rather than serve in Vietnam… Ergo staying at different important peoples lives and having them ‘groom’ him with opinions and such… (fulbright was investigated, remembe?)
the more you have a memory, the more you can remember all these little details and connections and when names pop up, you know whats going on.
and the less you believe the commetnary and spins which are made for consumption and so on.
which is why i worry about cristy.
Cristy is a good guy… and so he is up against what given what you read? Palin is more complicated, as she rose up the same way…
if Cristy keeps talking like that, and doing all that what will that do for merit and such in the electorate?
you only have to know that people have said good things as to him running for president
to those he would compete with what does all that mean, sound like, etc?
that cristy has to be neutralized before he teaches the people how they can fix things and start holding them to merit again…
he is just lucky he is dealing with menshiviks (social democrats) not bolsheviks..
The Mensheviks (Russian: Меньшевик, Russian pronunciation: [mʲɪnʲʂɨˈvʲik]) were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
The split proved to be long-standing and had to do both with pragmatic issues based in history such as the failed revolution of 1905, and theoretical issues of class leadership, class alliances, and bourgeois democracy.
While both factions believed that a bourgeois democratic revolution was necessary, the Mensheviks generally tended to be more moderate and were more positive towards the “mainstream” liberal opposition.
the end of the cold war was only the end of bolshivism, not the end of menshivism..
take lenins party name, cut it up and you have the two socialist parties on each side of the pond.. social democrats, and labour…
take a bit of time and read about the founding of the AFL, particularly how the founder met the founder of the IWA… (and how they are all connected to the teachers unions and the other parts)
if you notice, others are mentioning that what we are experiencing is the fall of “social democracy”
that just as bolshivik communism failed, menshivic communism (social democracy) is failing.
the question is will the world let them put bolshivism back, or something else?
there is no way to avoid whats coming…
unless you have enough to place bets in lots of places and if any one of them dont fall, you have enough… you know, like the fat cats we dont see as fat cats.
Yep, and he failed to take on the major dailies – the LA Times, SF Chronicle, and the most right-wing, TASS – when they picked him as the target, froze him, personalize the attacks on him, and polarized their loyal apparatchiks against him.
Christie, not surprisingly, is much brighter than Arnold. Christie’s turning the tables on the Reds, seizing the initiative, and forcing them onto the defensive. He’s chosen the bosses of the teachers’ union as the target, frozen them, and is polarizing New Jersey residents – including rank and file members of the teachers’ union – against them. Brilliant.
Sorry, my preceding comment was of course in response to Judith L’s comment re Arnold.
and i am glad you came out of it without getting paranoid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How do you know I’m not paranoid? Are you reading my mind again? Is that you parked in the van across the street? /g
Seriously, I’m no more paranoid than I was before. Much like reading Witness, the parallels between Communist activities described in each book and today’s headlines is disturbingly close.
Just finishing The Sword and the Shield now. After which, the other Mitrokhin archive book.
MDL:
If he is willing to raise the wages of teachers in NJ
then we don’t need unions. But he won’t bother to do that.
RUTHERFORD – Governor Christie on Tuesday told a borough teacher to find another job if she did not feel she was compensated enough as he defended his state budget cuts and promoted a plan to cap annual growth in property tax collection..
But borough teacher Rita Wilson, a Kearny resident, argued that if she were paid $3 an hour for the 30 children in her class, she’d be earning $83,000, and she makes nothing near that.
“You’re getting more than that if you include the cost of your benefits,” Christie interrupted.
The first commenter had a link for Rutherford Schools Board Minutes. Rita Wilson makes in excess of $86,000 a year. Search pdf link for “rita.”
Ten percent unemployment, lovely Rita makes in excess of $86,000 a year, the state is going bankrupt, and lovely Rita wants a raise. Lovely.
Any thoughts on that, MDL?
Rita O’Neill-Wilson makes $86,329 per year (page 10 of pdf)
She also makes $652.50 for Interact, which is some sort of school actitvity (page5 of pdf)
What say you, MDL?
Gringo: There’s a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure, cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
By the way, good work. Nothing works like facts.
If he is willing to raise the wages of teachers in NJ then we don’t need unions.
Maybe taxpayers need a union too.
Unions are like a giant ponzi scheme that favors the bullying few. The fact is if everybody were in an overcompensated union, the advantages of it would disappear as we all paid forty bucks or a plastic spatula and twenty three bucks for a Mcdonalds combo meal.
Curtis – no, I was talking specifically about unions.
It is a law in NYC – all GSA, state and city buildings construction jobs go to bid only and exclusively to unionized labor.
The labor market is skewed. On one hand – there are licensed GC with unionized workforce, who raise construction cost up to $500/sf (a 1.5yr ago figure; it could be higher now) – that’s what estimators assume when calculating budget for government-client buildings – all because of wages and rules imposed by union dictate. Materials cost per/sf are about 20%, the rest – labor.
Government is obligated to bid out these projects to unions, so the inflat4ed cost of construction is siphoned into the unions’ membership and bosses pockets, and the quality of buildings suffer – and then taxpayers are surprised that a building costs $50mil and have nothing to show for this price tag.
On the other hand, private client can not afford to pay such tremendous, artificially inflated wages – and so he looks for unlicensed GC, and he doesn’t care if the workers GC employs legal or not.
Unionized labor is not paid “prevailing wage” – if it was true, the unlicensed contractors would value their workers in approx. same range. In reality, their pay is 3-4 TIMES lower: that’s their real market value, real evaluation of skills and training required for construction professions.
If not for unions, with their guaranteed GSA jobs, construction costs in the country were 1/2 lower. It’s the nice racket they preserved for themselves – at our, taxpayers’ expense.
Art, I’m afraid I don’t have much appetite for red herrings. None of the commenters here get paid for writing comments, and I doubt many are wealthy — least of all myself. Yet most are motivated to attempt proper grammar, punctuation, etc., even though it may reduce their typing speed. I say, “Thank God for that.”
Cheers.
I can read Art’s post just fine. The only reason i use capital letters and punctuation is out of habit. I assume Art has his way for the same reason.
Christie is brilliant: it is always good practice to run straight at the Lefties because they scatter like pigeons.
Still, I wonder, what is the correlation of forces in New Jersey?
Steve: I, too, am able to read his posts if I choose; that’s a non-sequitur. And if your only motivation for using proper grammar, punctuation, etc., is habit, I will not attempt to persuade you otherwise.
“A teacher who can’t negotiate her own compensation based on her own individual merit and performance, has no business teaching any child anything.”
Speaking as someone who worked in at-will, nonunion workplaces, I have to say that the only time you can really negotiate a salary is when you get ready to join or are willing to leave it. Although the opening has a price attached to it, there are so many perks and tweaks that take place in-between that it’s hard to even know what the other guy is making. It wasn’t until I left my last corporate employer that I found out that the inexperienced girl in my department was being paid the same as I was – and I was doing OT clean-up jobs that she couldn’t manage. And then there was the job performance reviews which were used to justify low bonuses. (Later this was remedied by demanding 10-15% increases in profits, even as their own profit projections were modest.)
Also, public employers don’t have a lot of room to negotiate their individual contracts. A taxpayer-funded job doesn’t have quite the same share-the-profits model as a private corporation. One of the best schools in my area pays squat (a 20-year teacher caps out at around $40K) because they don’t have the tax-base, even though the kids outperform some of the more well-funded schools.
It’s also why the Michigan legislature imposed a 3% contribution out of the teachers’ salaries to go into a medical fund for retired teachers (and a carefully-worded stipulation that they can’t expect to draw from it when they retire.) They are also debating right now whether to impose a 5% salary reduction across the state for teachers and other state employees. If it passes, neither unions nor individual teachers will be able to negotiate anything better. That’s reality.
As a funny (well, maybe not) aside: When Florida lawmakers decided to give bonuses based on performance, they didn’t give one to their Teacher-of-the-Year. She had worked hard and turned around a whole group of students – but they weren’t scoring high enough on standardized tests for her to be considered a good teacher. But at least she didn’t let it get to her and stuck with the kids.
I’m also afraid of people pushing Christie too far too fast because we are setting him up as a target before he has a chance to show that his ideas work. The country really needs people like him at local and state levels–people who can resist conventional wisdom and grand schemes where it counts. Christie has the ability to get normal people to think on a broader scale while applying the common sense they use in everyday life. For too long, thinking has been dulled by provinciality and pork. Murthas have been the result. This will have to change one city government, one school board, one state legislator at a time because America only functions bottom up.
Once asked about the biggest difference between America and Germany, I replied off the top of my hat that America deals with chaos better. I have come to realize how true that is, and it results from a population that sees problems as something they can solve. Here in Europe, endless debates, ideology, and top down thinking paralyze people. I hope that instead of promoting Christie as the next national saviour, we give him time to show what New Jersey can do. I hope he awakens the somnolent in other states and causes them to ask why they can’t do that. Illinois, are you listening?
Well, close examination of the whole pack of lying hyenas and weasels that infest our political scene–out only for themselves and grown arrogant, double-chinned, and very well dressed at our expense–makes me skeptical of all politicians and their statements and actions but, so far, Christie comes across as a very unique political type these days; an honest man who says what he means and means what he says, who is not afraid of a fight, and one who has a very commonsense and honest approach to politics. Christie appears to be motivated by what used to be called–when it was much more prevalent and taught in our schools–“civic virtue”; an all but lost and forgotten concept these days.
Christie is an example of what many of our politicians were like in the early days of our Republic, and shows just how low they have sunk, and what they have ceased to be. If what I see is reality, then Christie has to be destroyed or compromised in one way or another by the current political establishment, because he is a mortal threat to them and everything they stand for.
While it is very easy to dismiss Glenn Beck as a over-emotional clown and purveyor of conspiracy theories, so far I have found that everything he asserts pans out, and if you merely start to read some of the books on American history he recommends, read–in detail and depth–the Founder’s own words and arguments, read the stories of historical figures that have been very deliberately erased, or have been made to say things they never said, and made to stand for things they never would have stood for, you will start to realize just how truncated, obscured and twisted the American history current in the Academy, printed in textbooks and taught in our schools, laid out in works of non-fiction and fiction, on TV and in plays has been made.
We have been presented with a whole alternative and fraudulent landscape that has been carefully fashioned over many decades by the hard work by the Left–laid over and obscuring the real landscape–crafted to present us with a totally different geography, new mountains and valleys, different landmarks, and signposts pointing in very different directions than they do in actual reality; a supposed “reality” and one with a much darker, secular, amoral, and different feel then the real geography.
Once you read some of these books and this real landscape starts to be revealed, you start to appreciate just how radically different it is from what you have been very carefully led to believe. You see that–in sum–this true landscape is informed by, means, and stands for an entirely different set of assumptions and principles than what we are told today the faux landscape of American history means and stands for; for the American history we know today is a patchwork of deliberate lies, false heroes and villains, and great empty patches of whitewash and forgetting.
Finally, on the issue of literacy; I once burned a lot of research time trying to find good solid statistics on literacy in America, and discovered that while all sorts of advocacy groups published their own statistics, when examined there were no good statistics collected by state or federal government.
I believe there is a reason for this, as there is a reason for the fact that there are no good and comprehensive statistics on things like the number of crimes prevented by citizens who use guns to protect themselves, or the number of homeless, or the number of illegal aliens in our country.
Simply put, if those in authority make a determined effort not to collect statistics, then no proof can be offered against the validity of whatever position they are pushing.
I noticed, too, that in the specific case of literacy, various interest groups collecting statistics weaseled around with how they defined “literacy,” as opposed to looking at “functional literacy.”
My impression was that, if we were talking about the real life issue of “functional literacy” i.e. can someone read and comprehend a newspaper, compose a simple letter to the editor, read and understand a political argument or a law, a credit card agreement, a will, job application, or a mortgage application–for, if he can’t, while he might be able to write his name and fake the rest, he is not really functionally literate, and is, thus, at the mercy of those who can very competently read and write and comprehend what is on a printed page–the percentage of “functional illiterates” in our society is quite high, and deliberately so, for such functional illiterates are so much more easily tricked and led. Thus, the ritual handing out of high school and college diplomas to many people who cannot really read and comprehend what is written on them; a feel good but deeply cynical and fraudulent exercise.
Is it a prerequisite for being seen “presidential” to remind Linkoln in constitution?
expat,
Your not the first to have such assessments as to America and her qualities. for more, I would suggest Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (Alexis de Tocqueville) as a read.
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[he never thought to fear the opposite more!]
In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.
Alexis de Tocqueville
It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[ergo the secular assault]
and in terms of what you mentioned
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
Alexis de Tocqueville
on socialism..
The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult – to begin a war and to end it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
and the way things changed from below would shock him
There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[ergo the lefts idea of judicial activism]
What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America (1835), his major work, published after his travels in the United States, is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
the behavior of money and wealth is much like convection in a large liquid.
as money pools (heat) it causes a convective current, and it starts to rise. those in the current rise too (all ships etc)… what socialists ARE more aware of (from their top positions not bottom), is that if such current is allowed to rise, what happens to the mass of wealth already at the top?
and so that too works like convection. the top tend to spread themselves out, to work too many things at once, and their children tend to “cool their heels” or work as professionals not work to wealth (guarantee less but a guarantee).
and so such wealth breaks apart, becomes less effective and so becomes cold and moves down letting the warmer newer better more efficient and contextually superior to take its place.
those on top know that convection of economy took them there AND they know that if convection keeps going, they will cool and they will sink…
the fear they feel is real, and so humankind goes through cyclical dark ages… when those on top get enough power or collusion to halt this cycle…
too much heat up top will stop the convection… until it cools down, it cant start up again…
so what they do is seek to break the system to break this convective flow and halt the churning cycle that would make them only successes in time, not all time.
Splashman: your requests are in vain. Every three months or so someone points out that he could reach others more effectively if he abandoned his apparent stream of consciousness delivery and presented his comments in a logical and concise way. They also point out that his editing of his grammar would be a first step toward that end. Expect a slight change in his posts (it will last a week or so) and then it will be back to business as usual. As I said, your requests are in vain. Since it’s not my job as a reader to do the work he should do, I simply scroll over his comments.
I should point out that allowing the economy to grow is a replacement for letting the economy cool…
that is, if the top gets too much, its too hot and it cant circulate until their stagnation cools so much they dont have the power to halt the circulation any more.
however, ANOTHER way to stop that is to expand the pool of liquid… the hot layer spreads out and the system continues until that new peaks circulation is halted..
where does socialism come into this?
its the mechanism of taking heat from the top and distributing it among the bottom which homogenizes the thermal gradient, and so halts or fixes for a while, the churning and evolution of the system.
by promoting regressive actions they halt the machine for a while. and genetically speaking, the longer they halt the ferris wheel the longer they get to live in the rarified air and the more their genes dominate as people seek mating as a means to change class as industry provides few convective channels…
this model amounts to the situation that they are trying to build tubes in which they can pump down some wealth and mine the oxygen and other things they need up top in a controlled way. this way. if something cool happens that in an open system would clobber them, like some new disruptive technology (web, browsers, lasers, etc), it will come up to them, not some random place they all cant collect around and feed on.
sometimes i abstract way too much…
Christie is no Arnold that’s for certain. And thank goodness since Arnold’s been a huge disappointment for some. I never had much hope for him. I cared too much about his public image. The rougher economic times might be adding greater ballast to Christie’s message but I think it’s too soon to tell if it’ll penetrate the minds of enough voters in New Jersey. NJ is a smaller state and Christie was elected in the traditional manner with a clear majority so I’m more optimistic he’ll succeed.
Hong,
I think Arnold probably had in his social circle a lot of Hollywood and Kennedy that he tried to accomodate to some degree. Christie seems to have a wife who is on his side–no small thing when you are bucjing the crowd.
While I am at it, let me say that one of the great lessons I am taking from what I am reading and hearing via Beck is that the society of pre-Revolutionary America and for more than a century after our founding was based on and infused with Christianity, and the morality and viewpoint Christianity taught. The Founders believed that a free, law abiding, and prosperous United States could not continue to exist if it were not based on and infused with the ideas fundamental to that Christianity, and they believed and foresaw that, if this religious foundation were eliminated, we would lose our freedom, our relatively law abiding and peaceful society, and our prosperity, and that we would decline and oscillate between anarchy and tyranny as had all other previous societies, and they were right.
It has thus been among the central aims of the Left/Progressives who want to hijack and control our society to not only fabricate a false History for us, and to foster our general illiteracy and ignorance, and to deny us the tools we need to function as citizens, particularly knowledge of the Constitution*, but also to eliminate the religious foundation of our country.
They accomplish this elimination by various means; by having their almost totally controlled MSM, Academia, and Entertainment industries “Elmer Gantry” religion, making it out to be the province of greedy charlatans and fanatics, by characterizing and making religion out to be narrow, old fashioned, not cool, and the preoccupation of mouth-breathing and ignorant fools, snake handlers, and, as Obama said, of those “who bitterly cling to their Bibles and guns.”
The Left also accomplishes its work by infiltrating and watering down our religious denominations from within, making many of them little more than social welfare organizations, social clubs, political organizations and pressure groups, and “caring” organizations without firm principles, that ape whatever is the current fad. Religious organizations and religious leaders much more concerned with the here and now–with bake sales, providing new amusements for aimless “youth,” increasing membership and church size and property, and with promoting the Left’s social and political agenda than with teaching what–from the evidence–seems to them to be the unnecessarily strict and “constraining” morality and ethics of the Bible, or exploring, interpreting, and understanding the great mysteries and questions of life.
I’d say that, on the whole, in this area as in others, the Left has been extremely successful in their campaign of denigration, watering down and sabotage.
* Some forty years ago I spent a horrible year in Law School, and always wondered why our “Constitutional Law” class hardly even mentioned the Constitution, much less studied it it detail or even explained why we were not undertaking such a study or referring back to the Constitution’s basic principles when discussing cases.
After watching Beck, I now understand that Progressive Roscoe Pound, Dean at Harvard Law School, succeeded in the 1910 through 1930 period in redirecting the study of law in America–from its traditional focus on the Constitution and the law and precedent which derived from the fixed “pole star” of our Constitution, and which always referred back to it for its justification–down an entirely different track, that of “sociological jurisprudence,” one focused on “case law,” not on the precedents always derived from our firmly rooted Constitution, but, instead, on an ever changing Judge and attorney produced case law and the precedents it produced, law based on “current conditions.”
A course which has enabled those on the Left in the legal establishment to steer our legal system increasingly far away from the guidance of the pole star of our Constitution, and the fundamental and fixed principles it embodied, and, instead, in a direction antithetical to the Constitution, an ever altering course that they themselves determined and one directed at the goals of the Left, a course which finds us today increasingly isolated and remote from any reference to the original fixed philosophy and intent of the Founders, and the unchanging principles embodied in Constitution they created.
Yes, the founding fathers were Christian, though not in the main dogmatic. As the following quotes demonstrate;
George Washington,
“It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”
“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
“To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest Glory to laud the more distinguished Character of Christian.”
John Adams,
“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.”
“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
Thomas Jefferson,
“The only foundation for useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion.”
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
“To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others…”
“I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented…”
Benjamin Franklin,
“I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded either here or hereafter.
“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.
“The pleasures of this world are rather from God’s goodness than our own merit.”
Franklin @ Congressional Congress, 1787
“I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth–that God Governs the affairs of men…
“We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel…
“I therefore beg leave to move–that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service.”
John Jay
(America’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice and Co-Author of the Federalist Papers)
In his Last Will and Testament, John Jay wrote:
“Unto Him who is the author and giver of all good, I render sincere and humble thanks for His merciful and unmerited blessings, and especially for our redemption and salvation by his beloved Son.”
The reason why the founding fathers being religious is important lies in these words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…”
That statement posits that our rights are inviolate because they have been granted to us by divine providence, not by man. Thus no man can take them away from us, as only the creator has the power to abrogate what he has granted.
‘rights’ created by man are subject to Dostoevsky’s observation,
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
Which inexorably leads to; if everything is permitted, then there can be no right or wrong. (Because we are reduced to mere opinion and whether opinion be individual or the consensus of the majority, it remains opinion)
And, if there is no right or wrong,
then all that is left is the law of the jungle…
The implications of that, are profound;
Civilizations don’t do well in jungles. Bad things roam the streets and visit in the night.
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Wow! He is so smart, so grounded, so clear and so obviously not a fraud. When he talks, he says something. Chris Christie for president! The first fat American president!
Actually, not the first. Who was it who weighed 400 lbs and couldn’t fit into the White House bathtub? The first modern fat American president, I should say.
I
Rune said a little more than ‘I’, but I’ll try again lol
“I Heart Him :)”
mizpants: I must say that I find the fact that Christie, unlike most politicians, is somewhat stout (as my mother world delicately say; she prefers that word to its synonyms) to be one of the refreshing things about him.
I’m charmed by your mother’s euphemism, Neo, but Christie is REALLY fat. I saw a full-body shot of him on TV. I find his fatness refreshing too, especially since he is so bright-eyed, energetic and utterly unselfconscious.
I really think he’s going places. The country needs somebody like him.
mizpants,
It was Taft.
Sadly, these type of people don’t last long in politics. They usually compromise themselves to keep power or are dropped by an ungrateful public.
I would get on the Christie bus , but fear that if I dissented with one of his positions, I wouldn’t get thrown under the bus, but would be subjected to a full-body slam from the Guvnah. Not many people could survive that. 🙂
Seriously, he is an excellent off-the-cuff speaker. I would love to see him debate our TOTUS, without any assistance of teleprompters.
And I thought the only good thing about Joisey/Jaisey was the Turnpike! (After NYC roads, the Turnpike is great!)
The first fat American president!
right… and taft was svelt…
i will send the large post content to neo..
it gives history of a lot of this leading up to what Cristy is taking on. and he is hoping that the people will protect him (as will the truth)
will it?
do note that the related things to this are Dodd, Teachers union, IWA, AFL, CIO, Dewey, Gompers, Marxisms core origins, peirce, soviet union, and more.
i am attempting to make those who want short posts happy, and those names and all that, if you know the history, would be referencing it.
rather than explain, i am making reference to it, and how and what is arrayed around this situation…
as one can trace a direct lineage from Obama, Ayers, SEIU, AFL-CIO, IWA, Gompers, Marx…
[lets see if this works rather than a large post]
He’s so right. Just imagine if every business demanded dues from its employees for their own political ideology to get persued. This union bubble is on the road to bursting and the leftist/liberal recession/depression will begin on that day.
As a teacher let me say…
I refuse to join a union. Fortunately, I’m not in Jersey, so I don’t have to contribute a penny to a union.
One of the reasons for refusal is the most incompetent teachers are the union officers and cheerleaders. They bully teachers, too…the ones on the ground include competent teachers. As The Fat Man (remember Nero Wolfe?) says, the unionist first enrich themselves, then they defend tenure, then they go for raises and free benefits.
Union officers do not teach effectively…they generally don’t try: they’re not interested…Christie’s right about that.
Schools with unions have faculties that are divided. One lunch in the teachers’ lounge brings that point home.
And what is the division? You can tell union teachers right away. They can tell you to the day how much longer it is to retirement and their pensions. They stopped learning their subject the day they received tenure…
One union organizer told me not to teach areas of chemistry: “the kids are too stupid for that.” BTW, she “Taught” “Environmental Science”. Her major was “Physical Education”, but she hung around long enough to get seniority in class choice. Also, she thought I was a wise guy because I actually majored in chemistry (B.S. in same from Caltech).
I could run an artfldgr length comment, but you wouldn’t believe half the crap I have seen and endure with teacher unions.
My ALL union organizers rot in Hell…Dante would suggest the third circle…
I wish him – and hope for success; and when he wins – to continue the good fight by going against Construction Workers Unions. And then eliminating the rule (law?) mandating that all public/government/GSA construction and capital improvement projects should be given Exclusively to unionized companies. That would be the day!
During the campaign, Corzine tried to pussyfoot around the “stout” issue during an exchange with Christy, and Christy stopped him cold. Said Christy, if you think I’m fat, then just say so. Man up!
He gave a great speech to the Manhattan Instititute about a week ago. The video is available on the Manhattan Institute website. It takes about an hour to watch the whole thing, but it’s worth it if you have the time. He lays out in easy to understand terms how NJ got in the position they are in and how absolutely utterly unsustainable it is. It is so refreshing to hear a straight talker, who understands how dire the situation is, and has a real plan how to to right the ship (not this hope and change emotional garbage) .
But I agree somewhat with Hong. The “sacrifice” some people are going to have to make won’t be popular with many. Just look at Greece, where the welfare state is going broke, and those on the public dole are rioting because they have an entitlement mentality stretching for decades.
I’ve been watching him now for some time, with growing admiration. He consistently performs like this: honest, forthright, and replete with common sense. He also has a remarkable ability to connect with ordinary Americans.
At this point, he’d tentatively be my first choice as a candidate for President. Can you imagine a debate between Christie and the Messiah? That would be something to behold, and to cherish for the ages. They could put it on PPV and put a dent in the national debt. It would be the intellectual equivalent of Mike Tyson vs. Pee Wee Herman.
I could run an artfldgr length comment, but you wouldn’t believe half the crap I have seen and endure with teacher unions.
oh yes i would… 🙂
and see how not having a common reference point forces a long post IF you want to teach, prove, reveal, these areas that are not known, obfuscated, half truthed, etc.
the deliberate dumbing down of america
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com
and i would suggest reading (to start) the underground history of american education
by John Gatto. the whole book is here, but if you like it, then do go out and buy one.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/index.htm
i was educated like Abraham Lincoln and many many other notables… by myself…
The state must prepare to consciously guide human sexual selection, said Mé¼ller. School would have to separate worthwhile breeders from those slated for termination.
Just a few months before this report was released, an executive director of the National Education Association announced that his organization expected “to accomplish by education what dictators in Europe are seeking to do by compulsion and force.”
You can’t get much clearer than that. WWII drove the project underground, but hardly retarded its momentum. Following cessation of global hostilities, school became a major domestic battleground for the scientific rationalization of social affairs through compulsory indoctrination.
but alas..
there is so much and most of it NOT common knowlege.
so Good ole Charlie.. i do beleive that everywhere that socialism is, there is division, jealousy, envy, and other ills… so i DO believe you when you allude to the stories you can tell in such a place.
In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions [intellectual and character education] fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply. The task we set before ourselves is very simple…we will organize children…and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way. Occasional Letter Number One (1906) Rockefeller General Education Board
“We must continue to produce an uneducated social class.” Gerald Bracey
sorry… i had already wrote a big one, and sent to neo. i can tell you that there is a lot i can put down, lots more names. and like you, no common context.
just the list of names to look up would take three pages!!!!!!!!!!!!
The deeds were monstrous, but the doer [Adolf Eichmann]….was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial…was something entirely negative; it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness…. Might not the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty for thought
– Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind
H.H. Goddard, said in his book Human Efficiency (1920) that government schooling was about “the perfect organization of the hive.” [Goddard was head of the Psychology Department at Princeton]
The edifice of universal education was, roughly speaking, completed… in 1870; and the Yellow Press was invented twenty years later–as soon, that is, as the first generation of children from the national schools had acquired sufficient purchasing power–by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the educational labour of love could be made to yield a royal profit. – Toynbee
Forty-two million Americans over the age of sixteen can’t read.
Fifty million can recognize printed words on a fourth- and fifth-grade level. They cannot write simple messages or letters.
Fifty-five to sixty million are limited to sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade reading.
Thirty million have ninth- and tenth-grade reading proficiency. This group (and all preceding) cannot understand a simplified written explanation of the procedures used by attorneys and judges in selecting juries.
About 3.5 percent of the 26,000-member sample demonstrated literacy skills adequate to do traditional college study, a level 30 percent of all U.S. high school students reached in 1940, and which 30 percent of secondary students in other developed countries can reach today.
Ninety-six and a half percent of the American population is mediocre to illiterate where deciphering print is concerned. This is no commentary on their intelligence, but without ability to take in primary information from print and to interpret it they are at the mercy of commentators who tell them what things mean. A working definition of immaturity might include an excessive need for other people to interpret information for us. National Adult Literacy Survey / 1993 analysis
so yes i do have a reason why i think that reading long texts shouldnt be a problem.
if 96.5% are mideocre at understanding printed text. and they basically behave as i described, in that they pick the idea that someone tells them, that they like best… so debate ends up being them parroting talking points but not understanding things.’
they want shorter NOT because shorter is actaully better, but because longer taxes their ability…
and if so many are so poor, is it any wonder that they dont actually read and understand marx, hayek, and others, but are just picking teams to join?
and that school since the progressives of the middle of the 1800s are all connected to it.
all those strange names, and ideas, and things that happened that you thougth could never happen.
OT: Art, thanks for the Mitrokhin archive tip. I’m just finishing the first book (The Sword and the Shield) – great read.
Thanks again.
I know some people are concerned that Christie will bow to the pressure and back off… but from the another video a few weeks ago and watching this one – he won’t bow. He might be voted out, but he won’t give in on what he thinks is right. As he has said, he’s been voted in to do a job, not to get re-elected. I am just astounded that such an astute articulate man even got into politics. I think he’ll get the job done. And I do heart him too!
Art, I appreciate your posts. You contribute much good information and analysis to this site.
I find it not a little ironic, however, that in your post regarding the deplorable state of literacy in the U.S., the only portions which are properly capitalized, punctuated, formatted and grammatically correct, are the portions you didn’t write.
I don’t mean to discourage you from posting. I encourage you to not be content with continuing to post poorly-written commentary. You are obviously intelligent enough to do much better, if you chose to do so. Those of us who would like to benefit from your experience would greatly appreciate it, and you would set a better example for the semi-literate among us.
I heart Christie as well — mancrush! It will be very interesting to see how it all plays out in NJ over the next few years. If he is ultimately successful, and is able to resist the temptations of power which have corrupted many good men before him, I’d love to see him in a national post.
As a “manly man”, I have to say I’ve got a serious man-crush on this guy.
Christie/Ryan 2012.
Does anyone else find that 96.5% figure impossible to swallow?
Christie is great! WOW. I’ve known of him since he hit the national news but simply hadn’t bothered to investigate.
Based on what he just said and, more importantly his demeanor (we all have a highly evolved BS detector) when he said it, I don’t see him compromising to keep power. As for being dropped by an ungrateful public, that’s what happened to Schwarzenegger in Ca. when early on he tried to rein in spending, so it could certainly happen to Christie.
But I don’t think it will happen because “the times they are a changing”. The electorate is scared, they know that things are hanging on the edge of very grim indeed. For many, it’s less about the specifics of whatever course a leader might suggest and more about them taking seriously the public’s concerns; astronomic deficits, borders being swamped with illegals and violence, radical legislation forced down our throats with absolutely no transparency, debate or reflection. The sense that they’re being lied to…
Arnold was too far ahead of the curve and then went RINO when he didn’t get the public backing he sought.
Of course, when the public unions (teachers, police and fire) went postal on him with an extensive TV campaign, he didn’t fight back much, which he could have by spending a few of his many millions, so obviously his commitment to conservative principles is questionable at best.
Christie’s a different animal, he gets it and has the very unique combination of intellectually grasping the relevant issues and speaking in a logically concise, to-the-point manner. That’s political gold and I agree, this guy is going to go far, health permitting.
Hopefully he has good genes, Churchill rather than Chris Farley.
He’s not really so smart. He simply calls it like Republicans see it, which is that Unions have a stronghold and they use propaganda.
Like politicians and corporate America don’t?? The entire system from top to bottom is full of bullies. That’s the American way.
If he is willing to raise the wages of teachers in NJ
then we don’t need unions. But he won’t bother to do that.
Heh. MDL, I smell a vested interest. Either that or I stepped in something.
Then Buraq’s got nothing to worry about in debating him.
Yet I bet Buraq will have need of plastic undershorts if he ever does debate Christie, who will mop the floor with the Indonesian Imposter.
And we both know that that’s true.
“”If he is willing to raise the wages of teachers in NJ then we don’t need unions””
A teacher who can’t negotiate her own compensation based on her own individual merit and performance, has no business teaching any child anything.
Make ’em a deal. We fire 20% of the union members, and distribute the savings among the remainder. The union membership gets to decide which 20% get the boot.
Deal?
OB, that was positively Machiavellian!
[first and only laugh of the day. thank you, sir]
Government workers make more than twice as much as private sector workers [including teachers]
Tatyana writes ” . . . eliminating the rule (law?) mandating that all public/government/GSA construction and capital improvement projects should be given Exclusively to unionized companies.”
That’s the prevailing wage law your speaking about, aka the Davis-Bacon Act of 1931, which enacted it as federal law. In California its part of the labor code, Section 1770 et seq. The company does not have to be unionized, only pay the “prevailing” wage.
The construction industry is riddled with companies employing illegal immigrant labor. They pay perhaps one-third or one-half of the prevailing wage (generally now around $40/hour), submit fraudulent certified payroll reports, and then the first thing the companies do when threatened with a lawsuit is threaten the laborer with exposure.
http://www.abc.org/Government_Affairs/Issues/ABC_Priority_Issues/Davis_Bacon_Act_Prevailing_Wage/Prevailing_Wage_Studies_and_Davis_Bacon_Act_Studies.aspx
I should explain myself a bit more. I’m a retread: I went into teaching in my Golden Years after some time as a substitute teacher. I decided to go for a regular license as something to occupy my time rather than sit home, play golf, and turn into a vegetable.
Got into a good Master’s program. I first found out about Battle Conditions when I was about to do my practice teaching. when the time came to divide into a group and a mentor, I went into the gym to find a mass of bodies milling around. There were ten groups of eight: nine Elementary ed, one High School (that’s me).
When I remarked to my mentor that “That’s a lot of El Ed”, he laughed and said that by the end of the semester, the groups would be 4 and 1. The actual classroom experience would shake out the faint hearts and people who were incompetent.
But then he laughed again and said: “Won’t get them all. The incompetents that have nowhere to go will sneak through and ultimately become union bozos.”
He was right…and he was a retired high school principal from a largish urban high school.
More anecdotes on demand…this one is dedicated to artfldgr…
Occam, are you dissin’ Barry O’Bama, our first Irish-Hawai’ian President?
Splashman,
I agree, good points. I do not write well unless i have time to write well. i will suppose that the people i copied from were paid for what they wrote, and i am not. in fact, i risk loosing my job in this economy writing.
yes i am slapdash (a new moniker?), but i will point something out that experience has taught me, and fancy this, it does pertain to this thread.
another angle that you can take with this discussion is not to focus on the Jews and Israel, but to focus on what i call secret worlds. entering one, and not being used to it, one generally has the reaction that neo has had.
its literally world changing…
it does it all in those seconds because its so truthful, and eye opening, and shows you, if you take the time to think in larger swirls about it, that wherever you are, you have no real clear view outside your world.
your blind, and until some aspect puts you in a different structural position, you dont realize your blind and that so many people can have conflicting views and all be right. (Rashoman explores a facet of this).
this is also the reason for the jewish idea of save a life save a universe. (and a whole host of such thoughts more common to those who really practice religion).
until the change in position, neo discounted the level of hate that some people experience as more situational, and less automaton hate.
well, i have learned with my writing, having experimented with varying it and working hard at it, not working at it, etc… and i have had the same with art… and other areas. (and i think doc of the bay refers to it)
there is this 1000 to 1 relationship… a thousand of you out there, and 1 of me… to each of you, you have this experience which you feel whatever you think would make you happier, would also make others happier. (and if you read as many studies i have, you would also feel that when people say what will make them happy and then get it, they are often VERY wrong)
the majority accept what i have to offer the way i give it and like listening to a radio with lots of static your used to, get what they can.
others try to give some form of assistance, but sometimes to them i seem polite, and sometimes to them i seem harsh. but there is a very fine line between assistance and a veiled passive agressive game, and other ‘games that people play’.
what i have found, as the marxists have found, is that you cant come up with a thing that everyone likes. at best in general you can get 20% to like you, maybe more for short times. (ergo their solution is to vary the same theme endlessly and scoop up and collectivize the power through collusion of the different groups of people thinking they are in different things because a few surface points not critical to the ideological ends are different).
i used to write for mens news daily… i might still be able to, but my time and life do not permit pools of time large enough to polish things off.
sometimes i can take the time and i can put this into word and i can click till all the red is gone, then the green, and then format it. and so on.
want to know what? wont make a difference… the ONLY difference it makes is that i wasted a whole lot of time with all that work.
what it ends up boiling down to is that you have a camp that dont want to read, dont say much and vote with their scroll or feet… (given neos popularity with the anchoress and such, they arent running away).
and there is another group, that will tolerate bad grammar for diamonds in the dirt…
they pay the fee to get the gems..
and then there are the few who as mentioned above want to help.
some want to insult or build little groups of me too, and will focus that way to perhaps do that (ie, they think there are enouhg people to link up over some misery. humans tend to commiserate on misery more than happiness)
my favorite are the clever ones. the ones who have an agenda, who have followed me from place to place under different names and have had similar debates.
we had one here who wants to save his fathers name. when he appeared i said hello to him, long time no see, and he didnt stay all that long.
why? because he and i have tussled and the more he tusseled the more information i put out. in essence while trying to correct some point, he would end up having more points.
years ago, i had a few russians follow me from site to site, and they spent an inordinate amount of time getting me to spend a lot of time to refute their points, but who were never really debating.. but the idea was to use up my time.
they came after the ones who would debate history. that is they would appear and like the wild west take me on in history. but after a while, they suddenly all disappeared, as if someone told them to stop because the more they debated, the more history i was able to get out and tie together.
take your pick… which subgroup of the masses do i make happy? what will they give me if i do? so far in general, the only ones offering anything are those who are complaining and want to pretend to offer me more popularity. something they actually cant give me, and something that i know (from experience) wont come from better grammar if i take the time.
all that will happen is that a new set will pop up and that if they cant complain about grammar, they will complain about size. if the size is kept low, and grammar good, they will go to tin hat or other names.
in general thats why each person doesnt change much when we talk or tell them to. especially as we get older and our world opens up and we are no longer children with the amount of life we can take in mediated by our parents and state…
so i appreciate your offer of advice… but i will probably write the way i write because i have been doing so for almost half a century. blame it on the teachers who gave me star grades because my stories, content and other points were so much more interesting, that they didn’t give a hoot much for grammar or handwriting.
they always got what they assigned, but it was seldom what they intended. 🙂
by the time i got to Junior High i no longer attended classes other than to take tests…
example: essay assignment in English class: what did you do this summer?
result 200 papers… a few had interesting families… most were completely repetitive and pedantic and grammar was what you HAD to grade on.
my paper… i figured they didn’t say it had to be autobiographical, and that it couldn’t be fiction… did they? I would slap dash off a piece where i was some other in some other place…
and thats the story of my life
put that with a father who is a real artist, with friends who are famous artists as i grew up..
and you had a cadre of adults advising me never to compromise who i am by listening to the drone of people telling me how to improve and be something they want and not accepting of you as you are….
so i am also stuck philisophically too…
ergo i am the immovable object to all these ultimately resistable forces.
In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of exploration.
Ansel Adams
and this is a common sentiment amount the “artist class”:
No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
Ansel Adams
and last i leave it to
I yam what i yam and thats all that i yam
take it or leave it
so thanks for the advice..
you will know that i have succeeded and become wealthy when my writing changes for that would be a signal that i have time. 🙂
Thanks, Tatyana!
In all seriousness, I think that that sort of approach may be a useful way to drive a wedge between various leftist constituencies: namely, here’s the total sum we’re willing to allocate, you collectively (no pun intended) decide how to divvy it up between the various unions, and between union members and union bosses. Make it a zero-sum game, and set them at each others’ throats. After laying in a considerable supply of popcorn, of course.
Richard, I prefer to characterize it as giving Barry all the respect he deserves.
Arnie never did take on the teachers’ union head on. He put three complex initiatives on the ballot and said “trust me.” He campaigned with straight talk and when he met the first opposition, he started to “negotiate”. Then when he lost on his ballot initiatives–which, IMO, deserved to go down–he appointed all of Maria’s friends to major posts. Talk about a Girly Man!
ACK!!!! i also dont know how long they are until i hit submit… (i type near 100 wpm)
Occam,
glad you like the book. its not an easy read though if you dont know the history that they are referring to in a lot of that.
and i am glad you came out of it without getting paranoid!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
though if you read the second book out, which india is not to happy with, its just as interesting but more international.
makes a lot of things make a lot more sense and it sure takes the blinders off.
problem is with the blinders off its a scary world made scarier because you weren’t cognizant of most of it (which is why i am glad it didn’t induce paranoia. nothings changed other than you know more).
but when you couple it with the real history and you connect who are driving things now, you really get queasy…
and little things like the article over at american thinker about the number of nuclear weapons covers.
Bill Clinton was only Arkansas’ Attorney General back in 1978. He had spent some of his student days hobnobbing with top Communists. According to his biographer, David Maraniss of the Washington Post, young Bill Clinton spent an entire week in the apartment of Bedric and Irina Kopold, members of the Czech Communist Party Central Committee. No one on my warship would have been allowed access to classified materials with a record like that. In fact, if we had known that about Bill Clinton then, we could have kept him from setting foot on our ship
and i am like duh.. he was a Fulbright scholar who went on exchange to live and go to school in the soviet union (when it was the soviet union) rather than serve in Vietnam… Ergo staying at different important peoples lives and having them ‘groom’ him with opinions and such… (fulbright was investigated, remembe?)
the more you have a memory, the more you can remember all these little details and connections and when names pop up, you know whats going on.
and the less you believe the commetnary and spins which are made for consumption and so on.
which is why i worry about cristy.
Cristy is a good guy… and so he is up against what given what you read? Palin is more complicated, as she rose up the same way…
if Cristy keeps talking like that, and doing all that what will that do for merit and such in the electorate?
you only have to know that people have said good things as to him running for president
to those he would compete with what does all that mean, sound like, etc?
that cristy has to be neutralized before he teaches the people how they can fix things and start holding them to merit again…
he is just lucky he is dealing with menshiviks (social democrats) not bolsheviks..
The Mensheviks (Russian: Меньшевик, Russian pronunciation: [mʲɪnʲʂɨˈvʲik]) were a faction of the Russian revolutionary movement that emerged in 1904 after a dispute between Vladimir Lenin and Julius Martov, both members of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party.
The split proved to be long-standing and had to do both with pragmatic issues based in history such as the failed revolution of 1905, and theoretical issues of class leadership, class alliances, and bourgeois democracy.
While both factions believed that a bourgeois democratic revolution was necessary, the Mensheviks generally tended to be more moderate and were more positive towards the “mainstream” liberal opposition.
the end of the cold war was only the end of bolshivism, not the end of menshivism..
take lenins party name, cut it up and you have the two socialist parties on each side of the pond.. social democrats, and labour…
take a bit of time and read about the founding of the AFL, particularly how the founder met the founder of the IWA… (and how they are all connected to the teachers unions and the other parts)
if you notice, others are mentioning that what we are experiencing is the fall of “social democracy”
that just as bolshivik communism failed, menshivic communism (social democracy) is failing.
the question is will the world let them put bolshivism back, or something else?
there is no way to avoid whats coming…
unless you have enough to place bets in lots of places and if any one of them dont fall, you have enough… you know, like the fat cats we dont see as fat cats.
Yep, and he failed to take on the major dailies – the LA Times, SF Chronicle, and the most right-wing, TASS – when they picked him as the target, froze him, personalize the attacks on him, and polarized their loyal apparatchiks against him.
Christie, not surprisingly, is much brighter than Arnold. Christie’s turning the tables on the Reds, seizing the initiative, and forcing them onto the defensive. He’s chosen the bosses of the teachers’ union as the target, frozen them, and is polarizing New Jersey residents – including rank and file members of the teachers’ union – against them. Brilliant.
Sorry, my preceding comment was of course in response to Judith L’s comment re Arnold.
How do you know I’m not paranoid? Are you reading my mind again? Is that you parked in the van across the street? /g
Seriously, I’m no more paranoid than I was before. Much like reading Witness, the parallels between Communist activities described in each book and today’s headlines is disturbingly close.
Just finishing The Sword and the Shield now. After which, the other Mitrokhin archive book.
MDL:
Here is Governor Christie in Rutherford.
The first commenter had a link for Rutherford Schools Board Minutes. Rita Wilson makes in excess of $86,000 a year. Search pdf link for “rita.”
Ten percent unemployment, lovely Rita makes in excess of $86,000 a year, the state is going bankrupt, and lovely Rita wants a raise. Lovely.
Any thoughts on that, MDL?
http://www.rutherfordschools.org/boardofed/boardofed/minutes/minutes2009/MT071309.min.pdf
Rita O’Neill-Wilson makes $86,329 per year (page 10 of pdf)
She also makes $652.50 for Interact, which is some sort of school actitvity (page5 of pdf)
What say you, MDL?
Gringo: There’s a sign on the wall, but she wants to be sure, cause you know sometimes words have two meanings.
By the way, good work. Nothing works like facts.
Maybe taxpayers need a union too.
Unions are like a giant ponzi scheme that favors the bullying few. The fact is if everybody were in an overcompensated union, the advantages of it would disappear as we all paid forty bucks or a plastic spatula and twenty three bucks for a Mcdonalds combo meal.
Curtis – no, I was talking specifically about unions.
It is a law in NYC – all GSA, state and city buildings construction jobs go to bid only and exclusively to unionized labor.
The labor market is skewed. On one hand – there are licensed GC with unionized workforce, who raise construction cost up to $500/sf (a 1.5yr ago figure; it could be higher now) – that’s what estimators assume when calculating budget for government-client buildings – all because of wages and rules imposed by union dictate. Materials cost per/sf are about 20%, the rest – labor.
Government is obligated to bid out these projects to unions, so the inflat4ed cost of construction is siphoned into the unions’ membership and bosses pockets, and the quality of buildings suffer – and then taxpayers are surprised that a building costs $50mil and have nothing to show for this price tag.
On the other hand, private client can not afford to pay such tremendous, artificially inflated wages – and so he looks for unlicensed GC, and he doesn’t care if the workers GC employs legal or not.
Unionized labor is not paid “prevailing wage” – if it was true, the unlicensed contractors would value their workers in approx. same range. In reality, their pay is 3-4 TIMES lower: that’s their real market value, real evaluation of skills and training required for construction professions.
If not for unions, with their guaranteed GSA jobs, construction costs in the country were 1/2 lower. It’s the nice racket they preserved for themselves – at our, taxpayers’ expense.
Art, I’m afraid I don’t have much appetite for red herrings. None of the commenters here get paid for writing comments, and I doubt many are wealthy — least of all myself. Yet most are motivated to attempt proper grammar, punctuation, etc., even though it may reduce their typing speed. I say, “Thank God for that.”
Cheers.
I can read Art’s post just fine. The only reason i use capital letters and punctuation is out of habit. I assume Art has his way for the same reason.
Christie is brilliant: it is always good practice to run straight at the Lefties because they scatter like pigeons.
Still, I wonder, what is the correlation of forces in New Jersey?
Steve: I, too, am able to read his posts if I choose; that’s a non-sequitur. And if your only motivation for using proper grammar, punctuation, etc., is habit, I will not attempt to persuade you otherwise.
“A teacher who can’t negotiate her own compensation based on her own individual merit and performance, has no business teaching any child anything.”
Speaking as someone who worked in at-will, nonunion workplaces, I have to say that the only time you can really negotiate a salary is when you get ready to join or are willing to leave it. Although the opening has a price attached to it, there are so many perks and tweaks that take place in-between that it’s hard to even know what the other guy is making. It wasn’t until I left my last corporate employer that I found out that the inexperienced girl in my department was being paid the same as I was – and I was doing OT clean-up jobs that she couldn’t manage. And then there was the job performance reviews which were used to justify low bonuses. (Later this was remedied by demanding 10-15% increases in profits, even as their own profit projections were modest.)
Also, public employers don’t have a lot of room to negotiate their individual contracts. A taxpayer-funded job doesn’t have quite the same share-the-profits model as a private corporation. One of the best schools in my area pays squat (a 20-year teacher caps out at around $40K) because they don’t have the tax-base, even though the kids outperform some of the more well-funded schools.
It’s also why the Michigan legislature imposed a 3% contribution out of the teachers’ salaries to go into a medical fund for retired teachers (and a carefully-worded stipulation that they can’t expect to draw from it when they retire.) They are also debating right now whether to impose a 5% salary reduction across the state for teachers and other state employees. If it passes, neither unions nor individual teachers will be able to negotiate anything better. That’s reality.
As a funny (well, maybe not) aside: When Florida lawmakers decided to give bonuses based on performance, they didn’t give one to their Teacher-of-the-Year. She had worked hard and turned around a whole group of students – but they weren’t scoring high enough on standardized tests for her to be considered a good teacher. But at least she didn’t let it get to her and stuck with the kids.
I’m also afraid of people pushing Christie too far too fast because we are setting him up as a target before he has a chance to show that his ideas work. The country really needs people like him at local and state levels–people who can resist conventional wisdom and grand schemes where it counts. Christie has the ability to get normal people to think on a broader scale while applying the common sense they use in everyday life. For too long, thinking has been dulled by provinciality and pork. Murthas have been the result. This will have to change one city government, one school board, one state legislator at a time because America only functions bottom up.
Once asked about the biggest difference between America and Germany, I replied off the top of my hat that America deals with chaos better. I have come to realize how true that is, and it results from a population that sees problems as something they can solve. Here in Europe, endless debates, ideology, and top down thinking paralyze people. I hope that instead of promoting Christie as the next national saviour, we give him time to show what New Jersey can do. I hope he awakens the somnolent in other states and causes them to ask why they can’t do that. Illinois, are you listening?
Well, close examination of the whole pack of lying hyenas and weasels that infest our political scene–out only for themselves and grown arrogant, double-chinned, and very well dressed at our expense–makes me skeptical of all politicians and their statements and actions but, so far, Christie comes across as a very unique political type these days; an honest man who says what he means and means what he says, who is not afraid of a fight, and one who has a very commonsense and honest approach to politics. Christie appears to be motivated by what used to be called–when it was much more prevalent and taught in our schools–“civic virtue”; an all but lost and forgotten concept these days.
Christie is an example of what many of our politicians were like in the early days of our Republic, and shows just how low they have sunk, and what they have ceased to be. If what I see is reality, then Christie has to be destroyed or compromised in one way or another by the current political establishment, because he is a mortal threat to them and everything they stand for.
While it is very easy to dismiss Glenn Beck as a over-emotional clown and purveyor of conspiracy theories, so far I have found that everything he asserts pans out, and if you merely start to read some of the books on American history he recommends, read–in detail and depth–the Founder’s own words and arguments, read the stories of historical figures that have been very deliberately erased, or have been made to say things they never said, and made to stand for things they never would have stood for, you will start to realize just how truncated, obscured and twisted the American history current in the Academy, printed in textbooks and taught in our schools, laid out in works of non-fiction and fiction, on TV and in plays has been made.
We have been presented with a whole alternative and fraudulent landscape that has been carefully fashioned over many decades by the hard work by the Left–laid over and obscuring the real landscape–crafted to present us with a totally different geography, new mountains and valleys, different landmarks, and signposts pointing in very different directions than they do in actual reality; a supposed “reality” and one with a much darker, secular, amoral, and different feel then the real geography.
Once you read some of these books and this real landscape starts to be revealed, you start to appreciate just how radically different it is from what you have been very carefully led to believe. You see that–in sum–this true landscape is informed by, means, and stands for an entirely different set of assumptions and principles than what we are told today the faux landscape of American history means and stands for; for the American history we know today is a patchwork of deliberate lies, false heroes and villains, and great empty patches of whitewash and forgetting.
Finally, on the issue of literacy; I once burned a lot of research time trying to find good solid statistics on literacy in America, and discovered that while all sorts of advocacy groups published their own statistics, when examined there were no good statistics collected by state or federal government.
I believe there is a reason for this, as there is a reason for the fact that there are no good and comprehensive statistics on things like the number of crimes prevented by citizens who use guns to protect themselves, or the number of homeless, or the number of illegal aliens in our country.
Simply put, if those in authority make a determined effort not to collect statistics, then no proof can be offered against the validity of whatever position they are pushing.
I noticed, too, that in the specific case of literacy, various interest groups collecting statistics weaseled around with how they defined “literacy,” as opposed to looking at “functional literacy.”
My impression was that, if we were talking about the real life issue of “functional literacy” i.e. can someone read and comprehend a newspaper, compose a simple letter to the editor, read and understand a political argument or a law, a credit card agreement, a will, job application, or a mortgage application–for, if he can’t, while he might be able to write his name and fake the rest, he is not really functionally literate, and is, thus, at the mercy of those who can very competently read and write and comprehend what is on a printed page–the percentage of “functional illiterates” in our society is quite high, and deliberately so, for such functional illiterates are so much more easily tricked and led. Thus, the ritual handing out of high school and college diplomas to many people who cannot really read and comprehend what is written on them; a feel good but deeply cynical and fraudulent exercise.
Is it a prerequisite for being seen “presidential” to remind Linkoln in constitution?
expat,
Your not the first to have such assessments as to America and her qualities. for more, I would suggest Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (Alexis de Tocqueville) as a read.
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word, equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.
Alexis de Tocqueville
I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[he never thought to fear the opposite more!]
In politics shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.
Alexis de Tocqueville
It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men which give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.
Alexis de Tocqueville
The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[ergo the secular assault]
and in terms of what you mentioned
The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults.
Alexis de Tocqueville
on socialism..
The Indian knew how to live without wants, to suffer without complaint, and to die singing.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There are two things which a democratic people will always find very difficult – to begin a war and to end it.
Alexis de Tocqueville
and the way things changed from below would shock him
There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember reading the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin.
Alexis de Tocqueville
There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.
Alexis de Tocqueville
[ergo the lefts idea of judicial activism]
What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America (1835), his major work, published after his travels in the United States, is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
the behavior of money and wealth is much like convection in a large liquid.
as money pools (heat) it causes a convective current, and it starts to rise. those in the current rise too (all ships etc)… what socialists ARE more aware of (from their top positions not bottom), is that if such current is allowed to rise, what happens to the mass of wealth already at the top?
and so that too works like convection. the top tend to spread themselves out, to work too many things at once, and their children tend to “cool their heels” or work as professionals not work to wealth (guarantee less but a guarantee).
and so such wealth breaks apart, becomes less effective and so becomes cold and moves down letting the warmer newer better more efficient and contextually superior to take its place.
those on top know that convection of economy took them there AND they know that if convection keeps going, they will cool and they will sink…
the fear they feel is real, and so humankind goes through cyclical dark ages… when those on top get enough power or collusion to halt this cycle…
too much heat up top will stop the convection… until it cools down, it cant start up again…
so what they do is seek to break the system to break this convective flow and halt the churning cycle that would make them only successes in time, not all time.
Splashman: your requests are in vain. Every three months or so someone points out that he could reach others more effectively if he abandoned his apparent stream of consciousness delivery and presented his comments in a logical and concise way. They also point out that his editing of his grammar would be a first step toward that end. Expect a slight change in his posts (it will last a week or so) and then it will be back to business as usual. As I said, your requests are in vain. Since it’s not my job as a reader to do the work he should do, I simply scroll over his comments.
I should point out that allowing the economy to grow is a replacement for letting the economy cool…
that is, if the top gets too much, its too hot and it cant circulate until their stagnation cools so much they dont have the power to halt the circulation any more.
however, ANOTHER way to stop that is to expand the pool of liquid… the hot layer spreads out and the system continues until that new peaks circulation is halted..
where does socialism come into this?
its the mechanism of taking heat from the top and distributing it among the bottom which homogenizes the thermal gradient, and so halts or fixes for a while, the churning and evolution of the system.
by promoting regressive actions they halt the machine for a while. and genetically speaking, the longer they halt the ferris wheel the longer they get to live in the rarified air and the more their genes dominate as people seek mating as a means to change class as industry provides few convective channels…
this model amounts to the situation that they are trying to build tubes in which they can pump down some wealth and mine the oxygen and other things they need up top in a controlled way. this way. if something cool happens that in an open system would clobber them, like some new disruptive technology (web, browsers, lasers, etc), it will come up to them, not some random place they all cant collect around and feed on.
sometimes i abstract way too much…
Christie is no Arnold that’s for certain. And thank goodness since Arnold’s been a huge disappointment for some. I never had much hope for him. I cared too much about his public image. The rougher economic times might be adding greater ballast to Christie’s message but I think it’s too soon to tell if it’ll penetrate the minds of enough voters in New Jersey. NJ is a smaller state and Christie was elected in the traditional manner with a clear majority so I’m more optimistic he’ll succeed.
Hong,
I think Arnold probably had in his social circle a lot of Hollywood and Kennedy that he tried to accomodate to some degree. Christie seems to have a wife who is on his side–no small thing when you are bucjing the crowd.
While I am at it, let me say that one of the great lessons I am taking from what I am reading and hearing via Beck is that the society of pre-Revolutionary America and for more than a century after our founding was based on and infused with Christianity, and the morality and viewpoint Christianity taught. The Founders believed that a free, law abiding, and prosperous United States could not continue to exist if it were not based on and infused with the ideas fundamental to that Christianity, and they believed and foresaw that, if this religious foundation were eliminated, we would lose our freedom, our relatively law abiding and peaceful society, and our prosperity, and that we would decline and oscillate between anarchy and tyranny as had all other previous societies, and they were right.
It has thus been among the central aims of the Left/Progressives who want to hijack and control our society to not only fabricate a false History for us, and to foster our general illiteracy and ignorance, and to deny us the tools we need to function as citizens, particularly knowledge of the Constitution*, but also to eliminate the religious foundation of our country.
They accomplish this elimination by various means; by having their almost totally controlled MSM, Academia, and Entertainment industries “Elmer Gantry” religion, making it out to be the province of greedy charlatans and fanatics, by characterizing and making religion out to be narrow, old fashioned, not cool, and the preoccupation of mouth-breathing and ignorant fools, snake handlers, and, as Obama said, of those “who bitterly cling to their Bibles and guns.”
The Left also accomplishes its work by infiltrating and watering down our religious denominations from within, making many of them little more than social welfare organizations, social clubs, political organizations and pressure groups, and “caring” organizations without firm principles, that ape whatever is the current fad. Religious organizations and religious leaders much more concerned with the here and now–with bake sales, providing new amusements for aimless “youth,” increasing membership and church size and property, and with promoting the Left’s social and political agenda than with teaching what–from the evidence–seems to them to be the unnecessarily strict and “constraining” morality and ethics of the Bible, or exploring, interpreting, and understanding the great mysteries and questions of life.
I’d say that, on the whole, in this area as in others, the Left has been extremely successful in their campaign of denigration, watering down and sabotage.
* Some forty years ago I spent a horrible year in Law School, and always wondered why our “Constitutional Law” class hardly even mentioned the Constitution, much less studied it it detail or even explained why we were not undertaking such a study or referring back to the Constitution’s basic principles when discussing cases.
After watching Beck, I now understand that Progressive Roscoe Pound, Dean at Harvard Law School, succeeded in the 1910 through 1930 period in redirecting the study of law in America–from its traditional focus on the Constitution and the law and precedent which derived from the fixed “pole star” of our Constitution, and which always referred back to it for its justification–down an entirely different track, that of “sociological jurisprudence,” one focused on “case law,” not on the precedents always derived from our firmly rooted Constitution, but, instead, on an ever changing Judge and attorney produced case law and the precedents it produced, law based on “current conditions.”
A course which has enabled those on the Left in the legal establishment to steer our legal system increasingly far away from the guidance of the pole star of our Constitution, and the fundamental and fixed principles it embodied, and, instead, in a direction antithetical to the Constitution, an ever altering course that they themselves determined and one directed at the goals of the Left, a course which finds us today increasingly isolated and remote from any reference to the original fixed philosophy and intent of the Founders, and the unchanging principles embodied in Constitution they created.
I heart Jan Brewer. Let’s make a ticket.
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com/
[For a light hearted take on our present peril]
Wolla Dalbo,
Yes, the founding fathers were Christian, though not in the main dogmatic. As the following quotes demonstrate;
George Washington,
“It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.”
“Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.”
“To the distinguished character of Patriot, it should be our highest Glory to laud the more distinguished Character of Christian.”
John Adams,
“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak and that it is doing God’s service when it is violating all his laws.”
“The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
Thomas Jefferson,
“The only foundation for useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion.”
“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
“To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines in preference to all others…”
“I consider the doctrines of Jesus as delivered by himself to contain the outlines of the sublimest system of morality that has ever been taught but I hold in the most profound detestation and execration the corruptions of it which have been invented…”
Benjamin Franklin,
“I never doubted, for instance, the existence of the Deity; that he made the world, and governed it by his Providence; that the most acceptable service of God was the doing good to man; that our souls are immortal; and that all crime will be punished, and virtue rewarded either here or hereafter.
“Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.
“The pleasures of this world are rather from God’s goodness than our own merit.”
Franklin @ Congressional Congress, 1787
“I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth–that God Governs the affairs of men…
“We have been assured, Sir, in the Sacred Writings, that “except the Lord build the House, they labor in vain that build it.” I firmly believe this; and I also believe that without his concurring aid we shall succeed in this political building no better than the Builders of Babel…
“I therefore beg leave to move–that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessing on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to officiate in that service.”
John Jay
(America’s first Supreme Court Chief Justice and Co-Author of the Federalist Papers)
In his Last Will and Testament, John Jay wrote:
“Unto Him who is the author and giver of all good, I render sincere and humble thanks for His merciful and unmerited blessings, and especially for our redemption and salvation by his beloved Son.”
The reason why the founding fathers being religious is important lies in these words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights…”
That statement posits that our rights are inviolate because they have been granted to us by divine providence, not by man. Thus no man can take them away from us, as only the creator has the power to abrogate what he has granted.
‘rights’ created by man are subject to Dostoevsky’s observation,
“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
Which inexorably leads to; if everything is permitted, then there can be no right or wrong. (Because we are reduced to mere opinion and whether opinion be individual or the consensus of the majority, it remains opinion)
And, if there is no right or wrong,
then all that is left is the law of the jungle…
The implications of that, are profound;
Civilizations don’t do well in jungles. Bad things roam the streets and visit in the night.