COLLECTIVE MADNESS


“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

No Wine Before its Time.


The white working class has a clear picture of the real world experience of race in America. The white working class lives near, works near, and goes to school, (or avoids going to school) with the black community. It is no coincidence that white voters in states such as Vermont, New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho and North Dakota have different racial views than those in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, who have an up close and personal experience with the daily reality of black and white relations in America. 

The disparaged white middle class knows who are the day-to-day victims and victimizers in black on white crime. A white voter is 100 times more likely to suffer from crime by a black than the reverse. 

A nice speech may impress white liberals but Obama trying to explain the one-sided black experience in America is going to lose the votes of those who make US Presidents.


March 19, 2008
The Real Agenda of Black Liberation Theology
By Jeffrey Schmidt American Thinker

Now, suddenly, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright is misunderstood. Suddenly, so-called black liberation theology is misunderstood.

Wright's successor at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Reverend Otis Moss III, won't bow to the wishes of "they" to shut up. It begs the question: "Who are they?" The larger white cultural? Or liberals and Democrats who see all this unfavorable publicity hurting the election chances of Barak Obama?

The sad truth is that neither the Reverend Wright nor black liberation theology is being misunderstood. Both, thanks to the candidacy of Barack Obama, are being exposed. God, in fact, works in mysterious ways. And unless it's the aforementioned liberals and Democrats who are trying to hush up Wright, Moss and others of their ilk, sensible Americans want to hear more, for knowledge is power, the power to combat hate.

And make no mistake, what Americans are hearing, they don't like. In the Rasmussen poll, 73% of voters find Wright's comments to be racially divisive. That's a broad cross section of voters, including 58% of black voters.

In an article in the Washington Post, unnamed ministers commented that black liberation theology "encourages a preacher to speak forcefully against the institutions of oppression..."

And what might these institutions be? They are not specified. But it is safe to say that they are not the welfare state or the Democratic Party. Given that black liberation theology is a product of the dreary leftist politics of the twentieth century, the very vehicles employed by the left to advance statism certainly can't be the culprits.

For the left, black liberation theology makes for close to a perfect faith. It is a political creed larded with religion. It serves not to reconcile and unite blacks with the larger cultural, but to keep them separate. Here, again, The Washington Post reports that "He [Wright] translated the Bible into lessons about...the misguided pursuit of ‘middle-classness.'"

Not very Martin Luther King-ish. Further, all the kooky talk about the government infecting blacks with HIV is a fine example of how the left will promote a lie to nurture alienation and grievance. To listen to Wright -- more an apostle of the left than the Christian church -- the model for blacks is alienation, deep resentment, separation and grievance. All of which leads to militancy. Militancy is important. It's the sword dangled over the head of society. Either fork over more tax dollars, government services and patronage or else. And unlike the Reverend Moss and his kindred, I'll specify the "else." Civil unrest. Disruptions in cities. Riot in the streets.

Keeping blacks who fall into the orbit of a Reverend Wright at a near-boil is a card used by leftist agitators to serve their ends: they want bigger and more pervasive government -- and they want badly to run it.

If any further proof is needed that black liberation theology has nothing to do with the vision of Martin Luther King -- with reconciliation, brotherhood and universality -- the words of James H. Cone, on faculty at New York's Union Theological Seminary, may persuade. Cone, not incidentally, originated the movement known as black liberation theology. He said to The Washington Post:

"The Christian faith has been interpreted largely by those who enslaved black people, and by the people who segregated them."

No mention of the Civil War involving the sacrifices of tens of thousands of lives; no abolition or civil rights movements. No Abraham Lincoln. No Harriet Beecher Stowe. No white civil rights workers who risked and, in some instances, lost their lives crusading in the south to end segregation. And since the civil rights movement, society hasn't opened up; blacks have no better access to jobs and housing; no greater opportunities. The federal government, led by a white liberal, Lyndon Johnson, did not pour billions of dollars into welfare programs and education targeted at inner cities in an attempt to right old wrongs. And still does so. A black man, Barak Obama, on the threshold of winning his party's nomination for president, has in no way done so with the help of white voters in communities across the land.

In the closed world of Cone, Wright and Moss, Jefferson Davis and Bull Connor are alive and well. Black victimhood is the doing of white society, not the doing of angry black leaders and leftists, who see advantage and profit in keeping too many people in black communities captive.

Barack Obama knows all this, as a seventeen year congregant at Wright's church, and as a liberal community activist prior to his election to the Illinois Senate. That he feigns innocence, or that he professes forbearance for some of Wright's words because of the goodness others, is not the line one expects from a post-racial politician. It is what is expected from a man whose career is steeped in racial politics, a politics that does great harm to the very people it purports to serve.


88 comments:

  1. Rome is burning, and you're out there with a fiddle going on about race. The very fact that Obama is leading Clinton in the popular vote and delegate count proves that race isn't an issue. The economic melt-down is the issue.

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  2. I have said it since the start...

    this is one democrat that will never vote for the empty suit of barack...

    liberation theology, black islam, western hatred, ya'll can keep 'em...

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  3. Rome seems to be a little more steady this morning.

    Three of the last seven posts have been about the economic meltdown which has stopped melting this morning.

    The MSM is still reeling from thrills running up and down their collectives legs this morning.

    They are talking about the race and race.

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  4. The left loves to use leger de main when defending their positions. Which, in fact, is really not a defense at all. They prefer to point out the other side's perceived short comings, a barometric MSM measurement, in order to keep their own obsurd farcical positions out of the spot light. Rome ain't burning.

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  5. Who is going to be the first one to make the crack about Obama being old wine in a new wineskin?

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  6. And Elijah Took A Sword And Cut Off The Heads Of The False Prophets Says the voice crying in the wilderness. You won't fall asleep during this sermon.

    "You'll be scrapping up pidgeon dropping to make soup."

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  7. "No mention of the Civil War involving the sacrifices of tens of thousands of lives; no abolition or civil rights movements. No Abraham Lincoln. No Harriet Beecher Stowe. No white civil rights workers who risked and, in some instances, lost their lives crusading in the south to end segregation. And since the civil rights movement, society hasn't opened up; blacks have no better access to jobs and housing; no greater opportunities. The federal government, led by a white liberal, Lyndon Johnson, did not pour billions of dollars into welfare programs and education targeted at inner cities in an attempt to right old wrongs. And still does so. A black man, Barak Obama, on the threshold of winning his party's nomination for president, has in no way done so with the help of white voters in communities across the land."

    It's called the Civil Rights racket. During the Clinton years, we got an earful. We've come so far, was the mantra, but we've got so far to go. So, so, so far to go, wouldn't you know.

    (Don't think for a minute that much the same rhetoric isn't employed on the Right wrt the WOT. For many on the Left, it's always 1962. For many on the other side, it's always 1938. Would you buy a treadmill from either political camp? I wouldn't.)

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  8. Scientists puzzled that Ocean is getting colder
    This headline from NPR is so amusing, "The Mystery of Global Warming's Missing Heat." Well, one unconsidered option is that there is no global warming.


    Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

    This is puzzling in part because here on the surface of the Earth, the years since 2003 have been some of the hottest on record. But Josh Willis at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory says the oceans are what really matter when it comes to global warming.

    In fact, 80 percent to 90 percent of global warming involves heating up ocean waters. They hold much more heat than the atmosphere can. So Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans. . John Lott's Wedsite

    No surprise here, according to Dr. Bill. It's all that pressure from above, keeps the deep water just above freezing, very stable.

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  9. Takes Time For The Wine To Age

    This writer sees Iraq as a good thing, taken all in all.

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  10. gee, no ocean warming since 2003? I would hope that it wouldn't show any statistical increase in temperature over such a short period or we really would be f*ck'd

    Trish, to further follow up on your query a couple of threads back:

    "The saddest thing my son discovered in public school back home, ash, was the self-satisfied anti-intellectualism and anti-achievement of (suburban) black and Hispanic students. (The self-segregation seemed a byproduct of these.) Stories, he's got stories. I wish he didn't.

    What causes this? If factory schools (and this was most definitely at the top, factory-wise) do not ameliorate this corrosive and self-defeating state of mind, they are not the cause of it. An attitude like that is formed at home, ash, and is reinforced in a wider social network. And what's to be done about that?"

    I think the solutions lie in things that are generational in their time frame. One quick easy step in that generational change would be to put a black man in the white house thus putting a lie to notion that it could never happen. The same argument applies, of course, to women's grievances about glass ceilings.

    Other answers lie in directions anathema to libertarians. A large source of the problem is the urban wasteland, the hollowed out core, the sprawling suburbs/exburbs, that is the case in so many US cities. Increased attention to urban planning can help make cities more livable, less ghettoized. Better schools, better teachers - easy to say, hard to do.

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  11. I think the solutions lie in things that are generational in their time frame. One quick easy step...

    Ashgedanken.

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  12. ..." One quick easy step in that generational change would be to put a black man in the white house thus putting a lie to notion that it could never happen. The same argument applies, of course, to women's grievances about glass ceilings."

    Any other aggrieved parties to whom you care to give the keys to the most powerful office on the planet?

    Talk about an argument against universal suffrage.

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  13. The President is but a symbol, to be manipulated for propaganda purposes in the new America.

    A position that one can project their feelings upon. It worked out that way with Mr Bush and the "conservatives".
    He still held out as one, when there is no evidence that he is anything but another big Government man.
    One that uses Government to make US feel good about ourselves. The Compassionate Conservative. A liberal Statist, drunk on the power of Government to "do good". Light another candle, we'll have a point of light.

    But since he was not elected with a majority of the popular vote, the first time, it may be time to placate the majority.
    To give hope to the helpless.

    The direction of Government will not change, regardless of the name of the President. It will grow in power and intrusiveness. That is guarenteed, regardless of the candidate that wins the office.

    The NEA will not be abolished, nor the tax code reformed.
    Rome isn't burning, nah...
    Oil is not north of $100 per barrel and gold is not selling for more than $1,000 per ounce.

    There is no inflation, prices are steady and both the dollar and US banks are sound. No need to be concerned that the Arabs bought into Chase which bought Bear Stearns, for pennies on the dollar.

    No flames can be seen, just smoke.

    Housing values are not heading south, causing a deflationary push on savings, while prices of commodities soar.
    "Core" inflation numbers are stable.

    Let's listen to Uncle Earl's fiddle play a up beat tune.

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  14. Mr Bush gave his typical speach, today.
    Talked on about the evils of Saddam
    Skipped the central four years of his term in office
    Hailed the US defeat by Sunni insurgents as a victory, in Iraq.

    He failed to reinterate the need for the US to defeat the tribal society, disarm the militias and hand off to the government elected by the purpled fingered voters of Iraq.

    He has forgotten the definition of success that he himself laid out in 2003. Now claiming victory is stability, which had been achieved by 28Jun03, if he had been true to his word.

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  15. Increased attention to urban planning can help make cities more livable, less ghettoized. Better schools, better teachers - easy to say, hard to do.

    Wed Mar 19, 12:45:00 PM EDT

    The best school by far of my personal acquaintance was a small, parent-owned and -run school in the educational and cultural wasteland of central Georgia. It had precisely two certified teachers on the payroll, the rest simply very dedicated and capable instructors drawn from a handful of the professions. The entire upper elementary (about 25 students) was run on a budget of $500 a year. They pursued high school science in the 3-6 grades and college level history in the intermediate school. Among the students were some certifiably gifted kids, but most, from the preschool upward, were simply average youngsters that would have been mistakenly considered such at the regular schools (and poorly served by their Talented and Gifted programs).

    Now you could do this almost anywhere, but the fact of the matter is that most Americans seem not particularly concerned with or troubled by the state of education except in a distant, abstract sense. Their child goes to the appointed, local, public school and that's pretty much that. Someone else has done all or most of the thinking and planning for them.

    Until we return to making parents and children direct buyers and consumers of primary and secondary education rather than merely passive recipients, we're not going to have better schools. And, as usual, those who pay the highest price for bad schools are those who can least afford it.

    It's not a physical environment you're trying to overcome, but a certain mentality regarding education and the life of the child altogether.

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  16. That Peruvian math teacher in LA, that doug highlighted some months past, was exemplary of that. Took disadvantaged average students and taught them calculous or some such, to such a high level they "must" have been cheating. They scored so well on standardized tests.

    He was not paid extra, either.
    Dismissed, in the end.

    The System encourages mediocraty, averages down to the lowest common demoninator. That is the process.

    Just as in Iraq, defeat is redefined and then repackaged as success.
    Insurgents become "Concerned Local Citizens".

    We shake in fear of the 3,000 foreign fighters that aQI can field, in a country of 25 million with an indig armed force of over 350,000.

    Make me laugh.

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  17. true, trish, it isn't simply the physical surrounding but id does have strong effects upon the culture that follows. I saw a presentation on line that Jim Kunstler did and one example stands out in my memory of a convention center built in Boston. He was, rightly, very critical of the block length cement wall that was designed. A block that consists of a single huge concrete wall vs. shops, housing, and restaurants make for a huge difference in the culture that forms in such areas.

    My father used to tell me how it doesn't matter so much what subject you take but rather who you take it from that makes all the difference. A good teacher is worth far more then the subject taught. I have a fair bit of sympathy for the notion of parents and students 'buyers' of an educational product. More because I find public school systems terribly unresponsive to my concerns and needs. I'm pulling my hair out right now dealing with the bureaucracy trying to get my kids back in the public system after having rammed into the bureaucracy a number of years ago which, in the end, forced me to private. The downside to all folk 'buying' is they have terrible taste in things and just 'cause they are buyin' doesn't mean they'll insist on quality.

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  18. Standard policy in NEA Monopoly schools is to shuttle the worst teachers to the "inner city."

    Black parents have long been in favor of school choice, but dems, directed by the NEA, know better how to care for their protected charges.

    Good that the dems and Ash save the helpless Blacks from their own ignorance, and poor judgement.

    Good that they are being looked out for by the universal compassionate other.

    LA Unified recently aped the Catholic Church by transfering an administrator accused of sex with a 16 yr old to another school where he is now charged with plying his charms on a 12 year old.

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  20. The poor, ignorant masses, they know not what is best, for them.
    So the compassionate liberal/conservative will administrate their lives, for them.

    Light another candle.
    Illuminate the way, for the ignorant.

    What a load of BS.

    School busing was designed to take the students away from local controlled schools.

    Bus the black kids to the Irish nieghborhoods of Boston, their best interests will be seen to, there.

    Those affluent enough to bailout of the System, did so.

    What condesention ash has for the average folk.
    A Statists normal view from the:
    “Height of Arrogance and Condesention”.

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  21. DR, my musings are premised on what is implicit in Trish's question "How can WE CHANGE their defeatist attitude". You may think it is a dumb question but it was the question. I see your solution is to keep 'em in the ghetto out of your sight. Do you think we should build a wall so they don't wander down your street?

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  22. That school, BTW, is Montessori of Macon (GA). I know they remember my son. He was the only one sneaking in the side door mornings, in camo and boonie hat, lunch in an ammo box.

    : )

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  23. "My father used to tell me how it doesn't matter so much what subject you take but rather who you take it from that makes all the difference. A good teacher is worth far more then the subject taught."

    Yes, a good teacher is.

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  24. Montessori schools seem to have a good rep. My sister sent her kids there for awhile. Lots of treating little ones like they were adults is my memory of her enthusiasm.

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  25. There are good Montessori schools, mediocre Montessori schools, and bad ones.

    Treating a child like an adult is never the idea. Treating a child like a young human being, is.

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  26. Although I know what your sister means. They don't infantalize.

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  27. just my foggy memory of her gushing about the school a bunch of years ago...

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  28. Blogger 2164th said...

    Rome seems to be a little more steady this morning.

    Three of the last seven posts have been about the economic meltdown which has stopped melting this morning.



    My how much things can change in just a few hours...

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  29. The defeatist attitude is not "theirs", it is the Systems.
    When the majority of the parents want local control, the students are shipped cross town.
    When the majority of parents want vouchers, they are given stronger teachers Unions.

    That the Black bloc votes 90% for Democrats, and then is "Rode Dirty" by those same Democrats, that's the issue. There in lies the defeatism.

    When a Black politico or preacher has the audacity to speak of it, but confuses "Democrats" and the "System" with "America", the knives come out.

    Mr Wright had the same litney of complaints that doug has, just a "different" villian.

    Where doug blames the school fisaco on the NEA and Democrats, Mr Wright blames "America".

    Where many here at the Bar blame Democrats for the loss in Vietnam, I blame America. One and all.

    Where many look for individual poor performers, others see the whole.

    Mr Bush has not failed in Iraq, America has. Blame Bremer, Bush or Pelosi, but it is all of US that dropped the ball.

    That is how some of the spokesmen of the victims of the educational meltdown see it.

    My solution would be to take each parent, ash, and give them a voucher for the $4,000 to $6,000 that the average US school district spends per student, then let them pick a competitive school.
    Privatize the entire educational system. Let the "Public" schools compete for students, not be guarenteed them.

    They'd improve or be gone, but the students would be better served, instead of the teachers and their unions.

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  30. They're just "Little People," Trish...
    Kind of like Blacks.

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  31. I'd find a way to get your son a Silver Star if he had made it through the MAUI Montessori dressed like that!

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  32. Their parents were the most insufferable rich liberals I ever had the displeasure of being offended by.
    They'd swoop down on the Waldenbooks Store en masse, looking down their noses at the plebes, and exchanging coded sentences communicating their superiority.

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  33. At the time I was taking the kid up to presentations at the Supercomputer Complex, they were holding their classes there in one of the Taxpayer-Funded Brand new classrooms, so we had to put up with the a-holes there, too!

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  34. I forgot, a bunch of them were obviously New Age, no doubt organically pure.

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  35. Son's little rich kid friend whose family came from Haiti went their for a while.
    He came to our house and started into a whole diatribe about the Symbolic Values inherent to belts, wrt slavery and etc.
    I told him his teacher was full of shit!

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  36. Our kid spent a few hours teaching him how to program, before he graduated from one of the Ritzy Pomana Schools, he had started a computer-aided tutoring program!

    He now resides back on Maui w/his new wife who he met in the ritzyist high school here, his little business raking in the So Cal Coin.
    ...aided by a Phalanx of low-wage students.
    Carrying on in the family tradition!

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  37. His dad, a Berkeley Grad, gives gorilla camps of some kind somewhere in the Big Sur mountains in the summer.
    ...a university extension course for foreign students.
    Probly gets funding from Hugo Now!

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  38. You can't get a private school education anywhere close to 4-6k. The cheapest I've found here in Toronto has been 13k. 20-24k more the norm. I guess if you plan on warehousing the kids you might get away with 4-6k. Are you just looking to subsidize the privates?

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  39. More competition in education would drop the tuition. Supply and demand (doncha know?) More private education would also take care of the ever burgeoning costs of facilities.

    But as long as the unions have their way, the government monopoly will continue.

    BTW - Does "community organizer" mean union organizer? Or is that just one function of the job?

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  40. Oh yeah, his mom, dad's ex-wife, runs a similar govt-affiliated training facility to teach skills for climbing the ladder in the Hospitality Industry.

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  41. Matter of fact, you CAN, Ash, even on Maui:
    A Catholic affair.
    Used to be easy to find everywhere, now, not so much.

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  43. Wife says with the incredible competition for seats, she thinks it's gone up quite a bit.
    ...I'll check it out.
    The Price of Paradise, they call it.

    "Lucky we live Hawaii! "

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  44. You sure can, ash. In a market economy.

    We do it here in the US, almost everywhere.

    My daughter goes to one such school. Charter Schools they are called. The State pays the private school the same that the public schools recieve, per student, per day.

    These schools are thriving. Here in AZ. Just because you live in a System that discourages that type of innovation, that does not mean it's something that "can't be done". It means in Toronto "they" don't want it to.

    You're being "rode dirty".

    Arizona Conservatory for Arts and Academics is a college preparatory and performing arts school, serving grades six through twelve in North Phoenix.

    The ACAA is a tuition-free charter school offering an innovative schedule, high-powered curriculum, small class size, and a faculty of certified educators and professional artists who share a mutual determination to find a better way to educate the next generation.

    She's out of High School in three years, already taking College classes at the Community College, at night. Those College courses credited to both her High School and College certifications.


    Suckered into believing that want you want, need, is impossible. When it is readily available in a market enviorment.

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  45. 1959 was the High Point for Hawaii Public Schools, Deuce, in terms of number of quality students turned out.
    ...bout the time of statehood, I'd guess!

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  46. Money is not the issue. There is a public education industry that by any rational standard, should be Yutethanized.

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  47. Rat,

    The privates here in Toronto do exist in a 'free market' the best I can tell. That is they charge what they like no unions. They do have to teach to a similar level as the publics. I've seen the books at the school my kids are in and there isn't a lot of fat that can be cut. Certainly not down to 6k per kid without having loads of kids in a single classroom.

    Those charter schools, such as the one you link, what kind of class size do they have? Is this the voucher system you have in mind? They are breaking even at 6k a kid? Granted space is quite expensive here in Toronto but still getting the per kid cost down that low seems pretty difficult.

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  48. I share your disdain for the public system deuce. The bureaucracy is mind numbing. Cost is a huge issue here. I remember my life in the States and the mill rate increases destined toward education were constantly voted down.

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  49. I think the main job of a Communist Organizer is to enable access to govt funds, and govt jobs doling out Government funds, Whit.
    Girlfriend's mom in Marin was the only white gal I saw working in "Marin City" a govt ghetto pouring out minor league con-artists and extortionists.
    The rest in her office were fat Black Ladies that could talk the talk.
    Young black men that played the system would come by the house, trolling for the daughters.

    That's the closest I got to the drugs and violence involved in that culture.

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  50. More money means less education.
    Proven over four decades.

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  51. Her average class has less than twenty students, they operate out of an industrial/office park facility.

    They seem to be profitable.
    A young staff and administrators that also teach classes.

    They have a middle school and a high school, mixed, so grades Seven through twelve.

    Operate four days a week, on an extended daily schedule, each class an hour in duration.

    here is a list, in AZ, of Charter Schools

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  52. Are these charters the equivalent of the voucher system spoke of or different somehow? A number of years back the provincial gov. of the day (conservative) spoke of implementing a voucher system but it never happened. The present gov. (liberals) aren't talking about that at all. In the last election the conservatives were pushing the idea of extending public financing to all religious schools. They got trounced primarily because of that single issue.

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  53. "they operate out of an industrial/office park facility"
    ---
    What a shameful environment for students!

    Everyone knows they belong in Expensive, poorly maintained, Campi.

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  54. "Their parents were the most insufferable rich liberals I ever had the displeasure of being offended by."

    At MOM, there were some real lifesavers in that regard. The head of pathology at Emory comes immediately to mind.

    But there you have it, Doug, the "hippie school" of Macon (as my son calls it) beat anything else by a long shot. Including the local Catholic schools. (Most attendants were Catholic.)

    In our own local Catholic school back home, drugs had become such a problem that my neighbor, longtime Catholic educator, wouldn't send her children there.

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  55. In a round about way. While the parents do not recieve a voucher, the schools recieve the funding directly from the State.

    They are open to any student that is eligable to go to public school, so in that way they are "public", but privately managed.

    A voucher derivitive, seems to me.

    They are funded just as the "public" schools are, but without the public buildings. If there is a compensation for that, I do not know.

    The school provides a much better enviorment, for student and parent than the public schools in the area did. At least in my experience.

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  56. The Goldwater Institute re[ports:
    Total per-student funding consists of two types—those that vary according to the number of students in a district and those that are fixed.3 The first type is referred to in Arizona as equalized base funding. This is the amount the state has determined is tied to students when they enter the public school system, when they leave it, or when they change districts. The second type, omitted from most published reports, includes local, county, non-equalized state, and federal funding. This is the portion of perstudent funding that is fixed, or not based on student counts, and remains with school districts if students leave.
    This analysis finds that the average state base equalization funding per student ranges between $4,200 and $4,600, and the average per-student portion of nonequalized district funding is $4,309. Thus, the average total spending for an Arizona public school student is between $8,500 and $9,000.

    Understanding State Funding of Arizona Public School Students

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  57. 'Rat,
    What do you foresee as the major negative of a Cane Presidency?

    ...I of course, fear mass amnesty most.
    Maybe it would be better to have off the wall Barack turn the whole country and enough in the Senate against it?

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  58. Thanks for the link there Rat. I took a quick look at it.

    My rough take on it is that the charters get roughly that 4k per student. Another 4-5k represents the 'fixed' costs of each student and that would stay with the school district. I'm guessing those fixed costs would be cost related to the buildings ect.

    Anyway, I'm still curious how the Charter school can pay rent, teachers, and break even at approx. 4k per student with less then 20 per class. If you look at 80k revenue per year per class, teacher gets....50k? 30k left over for support staff and facility costs? Rough slashing at numbers of course.

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  60. I think the teachers get less, $35,000, for the nine months.

    Run a tight ship, seems to me.

    Well there's the amnesty, doug.
    Extended occupation of Iraq
    War with Iran, $200 per barrel oil.

    Recession, with a capital R.

    Fellow has no comprehension of business or nonGovernment work.

    To start.

    With Obama, maybe there is a Gingrich waiting in the wings, to run the House, in 2010.

    With McCain we retain Pelosi for the duration. The Senate looks bad for the GOP in '08. The Dems could get the sixty seats needed to run the Government from the Congress.

    Just got back from a drive, the protesters were out in front of McCains' office.
    "McCain = Endless War"
    That's their theme, I think they are right.

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  61. Shit, War w/Iran!
    The BC Cheering Squad would be ecstatic, for a while!

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  62. Say what we will about GWB, it does seem unlikely that we'd be getting, if indeed we are getting, a sane ruling on the 2nd Amendment without him. If the reports and predictions turn out to be right.

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  63. The folks at Christ Church in Moscow have a school--Logos--that has grown and has a lot of students--the students there did a little better on the state tests, than the students at Moscow High, which is filled with sons and daughters of professors. And yet, the Church itself is a controlled madhouse.

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  64. Doug: I think the main job of a Communist Organizer is to enable access to govt funds, and govt jobs doling out Government funds, Whit.

    Oh, THAT'S what Ben Bernanke is. corporate communist organizer, putting you and me on the hook for up to $30 billion in potential bad loans and giving all the potential upside to JP Morgan. Whatever happened to letting the markets run free to automatically reward good risks and punish bad risks? When it comes to homeowners, the Fed is all Adam Smith, but when it comes to their Wall Street buddies, the Fed is all Karl Marx.

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  65. Those same folk that projected their War on Islam onto GWBush.
    All they got was a defeat in Anbar that is touted, now, as success.

    War with Iran, McCain will half-step into it, not be decisive and bog US down even further.

    Playing into the Russo-Sino hand, with Hugo ready to flip his supply chain to China.

    A double dip of Recession, economic warfare in the 21st Century, with Top Gun McCain left on the carrier, in a jet, running on empty.

    Ready to fight the "last war" not the next one.
    Way outside his 50 year experience loop.

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  66. A war we'd lose, too.
    Just like Iraq.

    Perhaps we'd spin a storyline of victory out of defeat. Like Iraq.

    Should have left, when the leavin' was easy. A hand off and drive on to Damascus. Could have shook the world and killed the threat, instead we strengthen it.

    Nationbuilding, instead of deconstructiong the enemy.

    Putting the endgame, first.
    A rank error in judgement.

    Forgetting the words spoken, the promises made. A disdain for verasity on the part of the President.

    The magic, long gone.

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  67. The point was made today that Obama called for Imus to be fired over the nappy headed ho comment.

    Everybody ought to clean up their talk, I think.

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  68. Had some friends over for dinner last night. The girlfriend of the guy was really spooking me out. She's all into Nostradomas and says the first black president signals the beginning of the end times.

    Whacked-out bitch.

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  69. Whatever you say about Benake, aenea, true, or not true, that what I stated were FACTS that I saw with my own eyes.
    Those programs have not changed in substance, 40 years later.
    ---
    ...But while Obama concedes that "the erosion of black families" is "a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened," he fails to understand what
    "Wealth and Poverty"
    author George Gilder knew back in 1981:

    "What actually happened since 1964 was a vast expansion of the welfare rolls that halted in its tracks an ongoing improvement in the lives of the poor, particularly blacks, and left behind . . .
    a wreckage of broken lives and families worse than the aftermath of slavery
    ."

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  70. Obama Merely Changes The Subject

    Speaking in Philadelphia, steps away from where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were enacted, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination for president delivered an address that used the words "race" or "races" 11 times, "racial" or "racially" 15 times, and "racism" or "racist" six times.

    But Obama's recent troubles, which this much-hyped speech was supposed to put past him, are not about race relations. They're about one churchman who happens to be black, whose views from the pulpit are repugnant and from whom Obama doesn't seem to have the guts to distance himself.

    Reacting to being linked with a bigoted conspiracy theorist by lecturing the nation on race is like disgraced ex-New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer responding to his getting caught patronizing an international prostitution ring by giving a speech on the female physique.

    The supposed divide between black and white is not the issue here; Obama's longtime association with Jeremiah Wright is.
    ---
    The rest of Obama's speech was spent explaining and rationalizing hate such as Wright's rather than denouncing it. Wright's words "reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through," the result of which has been "a cycle of violence, blight and neglect" still haunting America.

    The solutions? Expanded government for one, of course.

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  71. Bernake, Bernaise, whatever.

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  72. You ask her if she listens to Coast to Coast? One must have Swedish scepticism to avoid becoming whacked out. Might explain it.

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  73. You might be able to sweep her out of your friends arms if she does:) If she's worth the sweeping. Mention Cedonia, drop the name Richard Hoagland, talk about chem-trails, that sort of shit. Throw in some ufo stuff, aliens, greys, nordics. TRIANGLES in the sky. The chuchacambra)sp?). Mel's hole, don't forget that, always gets 'em.

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  74. The original Mel's hole was located a little outside Ellensburg, Washington, up in the hills. Then there's another down in Nevada somewheres. Art was trying to reestablish contact with Mel before he got remarried, and that was the last I heard of it. There was speculation Mel may have fallen in the hole.

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  75. Toldja So

    Dad and I looked at a ranch one time that may have had Mel's Hole on it. But the guy was asking way too much. He offered to throw in 4 Arabian horses if we'd buy. Then we drove into town to check out where he lived, to see if he had ever made a dime on the place.(You can learn a lot that way.) Guy lived in a real dump, so we got out of there, but it might have been the buy of a lifetime.

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  76. More On Mel And His Hole

    Manastash Ridge--I swear that was where that ranch was.

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  77. It was one hell of a hole. Mel let out fish line and sinker in there practically forever and never hit bottom.

    The one down in Nevada was reported to have some kind of alien seal(you know, the kind that balances balls and stuff on its nose) in it, as I recall my daughter and I driving to Las Vegas one time, and found out from the radio program, which just happened to be on that nite, that we were near that hole! This kind of freaked me out, and I started to wonder if maybe I was Mel.

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  78. Mel's Hole

    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    I'll put this here, othewise I'll have a hundred angry skeptics breathing down my neck. True or not, it's a good story.

    It's a Coast to Coast AM radio program about some guy named Mel who found a bottomless pit on his property in Washington. Actually it's the second part of his story, where he is shown a second bottomless pit. The government appropriated his original hole.

    http://turbo.peteronline.net/melshole/

    Now it all comes flooding back, like yesterday! That's right, the government freaked out and eminently condemned Mel's first hole, but another was found, I think right on the edge of an Indian Reservation.

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  79. It blamed both incidents on supporters of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader in exile.

    They got that part right.

    Tibet Protests Spread

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  80. Eggshell and Pigeon Dropping Soup!
    That must reall suck.
    At least he's got the Latino Menace Right!
    :-)

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  81. Thanks for the ideas, Bob. I'll try some on her. See what other kind of crazy shit she says.

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  82. I really appreciated this article. Yes, Whites that live around blacks have a real understanding of blacks. We Whites know that blacks are slackers and whiners at best, criminals at worst. And yes black-on-White crime is a reality for many Whites in the Deep South and any other areas with large concentrations of blacks. In really multicultural places like California, you have black-on-everybody else crime.

    That more people are waking up to the real Obama is encouraging. Obama is an anti-White racist. Those rantings of his "mentor" Pastor Wright - people need to pay attention. Nothing excuses blacks victimizing Whites. I don't care about "black rage" or "underprivileged young black males." There is no excuse for young black men to shoot to death unarmed White college girls, rape them, and/or steal their cars. Contempt is the common bond of how blacks across this country feel about Whites and about America.

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