Open thread 11/1/21
You might want to check to see if your area is voting tomorrow for school board members. Even if you usually don’t participate in local elections, this would be a great time to start.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
My latest post: Are You a Target?…or Maybe Just Collateral Damage?
https://ricochet.com/1083281/are-you-a-target-or-maybe-just-collateral-damage/
We are and we have. There are four of 7 seats up for election this year. For the first time there are slates of candidates. Four on the Left and four on the Right. The mask mandates seem to be the central issue, at least in public comments from the candidates. Reading the comments they have made on questions put to them I feel the underlining issues are CRT and parental control/input to the kids education. Being that we are very Blue now I think that the four on the left may take it all. My neighbors are of the same feeling as we are on whom they are voting for.
Where I live , about 90% of my outrageously high property tax goes to the school district.
I checked the US Dept of Education to see what was the average spending per pupil across the USA, as well as other sites to check what other school districts and/or states spend, on average, per pupil.
I did this to get some idea of what a “reasonable” per pupil spending should be.
Then I looked up my local school district per pupil spending; it was $20,000 per student.
So, when I hear that the schools here need to spend more money I know they are FOS.
Usually, those clamoring for more money for schools are or were affiliated with the local teachers union.
Surprise, surprise.
By they way, if every teacher were given a RAISE in salary of, say, $150,000 per year, how would that change – if at all – how they teach ? What would they do different?
Let me guess; NOTHING at all would change.
A very significant of our local school budget goes directly into the pockets of the teachers; pay, benefits, pensions.
I never had a job that gave me 2 to 3 months /year vacation, a bunch of “in service” days, holiday’s off for holiday’s nobody in the “real” world gets off. etc.
Not to say that teachers have an easy job, but then again, none of the jobs I ever had were easy.
Re: the shooting on the movie set of “Rust” I came across this video [link below] about how guns are prepared for use in film productions. I knew that semi and full auto guns had to have restrictors in the barrel to function with blanks however it would seem that even revolvers have barrels internally threaded for a restrictor plug to control the amount of flash and to help keep any pieces from the blank round from exiting. This makes me wonder if either the “Rust” set was using actual unmodified guns, a very dangerous thing, or if the crew not only had actual real rounds on set but also removed the restrictor plugs so they could go target shooting and then no one put them back in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnOUrRTf6jg
“Wisconsin Investigation Uncovers Potential Tip Of A Voting Fraud Iceberg —
“The investigation revealed both blatant violations of state election law by election officials and detailed evidence of voter fraud by stealing elderly Americans’ votes.”
https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/01/wisconsin-investigation-uncovers-potential-tip-of-a-voting-fraud-iceberg/
Peeling back the layers of the most fraudulent election in American history. One by one.
An economic warning that gets to the heart of the matter:
Why should anyone logically expect that “Biden” wishes to save the American economy?
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/interest-rate-are-going-go-bonkers-if-fed-comes-back-more-qe-pento-warns
IOW: What would happen if the Fed gave a taper[ware] party and then decided not to show up…
…continued…
IOW:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/australias-2y-bond-just-blew-after-central-bank-unexpectedly-refused-buy-it
How the Democrats expect to win in a Virginia? Just like it was done in 2010.
“Democrats Are Using The Same 2020 Election Shenanigans To Overtake Virginia This Year — So how do Democrats plan to ensure they win Virginia’s elections, from the governorship to its U.S. Senate seat? By using the same tactics they used in the 2020 contest nationwide.“
https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/01/democrats-are-using-the-same-2020-election-shenanigans-to-overtake-virginia-this-year/
How English teachers use Black American literature as agitprop for moulding teen minds into neoMarxist p, progressive and SWJ activists?
This review at the Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf Teachers Network, which tells you exactly how to do it: make current events told by the Bug Lie media relevant to a future history fantasy novel of the communal and anti-Christian and anti-American stripe.
Then indoctrinate all year long.
https://sites.middlebury.edu/bltnmag/2021/05/28/4749/
The BLTN is funded by The Gates Foundation, Annenberg Rural Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment, Ford Foundation, National Endowment for The Humanities, Partners in Heath and the CDC, the Educational Testing Service, various State Departments of Education, etc., etc., all for promoting social(ist) Justice.
https://www.middlebury.edu/school-english/teacher-network
Looks like the Ruling Class army of Educrats has our schools by the throat and runs them as many of them as possible to feed stock radicalism in universities forever!
Our America is dead unless this dragon can be killed and made extinct,
Our betters flew hundreds of private jets to a climate change conference in Glaskow on Sunday generating an estimated 13,000 tons of carbon dioxide in the process. It’s such a wonderful time to be alive when we have so many deeply caring billionaires who are willing to lecture us all on how awfully we treat mother Earth.
A few good men…
Peter Thiel’s Warning:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/peter-thiel-warns-centralized-misinformation-problem-created-fake-consensus
…but how many will listen…?
(And how many more will brutally attack the messenger?)
Allahu Brandon!
geoffb:
It certainly seems as though something quite irregular was going on on that set, although we don’t yet know what it was.
Excerpt from the first LINK ABOVE:
“George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Octavia Butler would have had a hard time coming up with a more dystopian plot than what we witnessed and continued to witness: the escalation of a pandemic, the government denying science [ie, Trump, allegedly], state senators arguing slavery was a necessary evil [uh, where? I missed that!], a far-right politcal movement gaining traction [the first label is a smear and the second is debatable], and massive protests weaving in and out of the streets of America.
[PULL QUOTE:] “During the Summer of 2020, conversations with BLTN colleagues raised challenges and opportunities for creating anti-racist teaching and learning spaces. In what I’d call a perfect Bread Loaf pedagogical storm, I discovered that Afrofuturism must hold a place in the contemporary English classroom, because of its decolonizing, anti-racist themes and imaginative potential. So I turned to Parable and studied Afrofuturism, as I listened and learned in BLTN conversations.’
“Afrofuturism, a sub-genre of speculative fiction, offers a critical lens to center the Black experience, and to lead teachers and students to analyze, synthesize, and discuss current social, environmental, and political issues. The pedagogical allure of speculative fiction is that it centers discussions of social justice around hope, and around what we want or don’t want our world, society, and country to look like. In the imagining of futures with Black perspectives featured prominently, students and teachers alike can resist and critique the present and the past. To give our students the lens of Afrofuturism is to give them a uniquely imaginative and restorative power.”
The novel under review for raducskuzi g teens in Hugh school is Octavia Butler’s 1994 “Parable of The Sower.” It invite imaginative projection from contemporary outrages, steered towards answering the cry of Black victimization. Thereby unleashing unconstrained emotionalism.
I have a 32 year old woman-friend attending a book club reading this book, which the NYTimes “Brilliant and endlessly rich…pairs well with ‘1984’ and ‘The Handmaids Tail.’ ”
In other words, it reinforces the unexamined the new ruling class’s prejudices about the real threats Americans face today, which only the CommieCrats will stamp out!
How convenient for the racialized party and its narcissistic moral superiority needs! COINCIDENCE? ENTIRELY not,
CORRECTION “raducskuzi g teens” to read radicalized g teens….” Sorry,
TJ: the author of that appalling BLTN piece, John Hall, is an English teacher at Presentation Academy, a *Catholic* prep school for girls in Louisville, Kentucky. Founded in 1831, it’s the oldest continually operating school in Louisville:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentation_Academy
Think about that for a moment.
Public schools are bad. Woke private schools are worse. Woke *denominational* private schools are the worst.
John Tyler–
If your school district is spending $20,000 per student, it’s getting off easy. According to the NY Post, the migrant kids being flown or bused into just four NY counties (courtesy of Brandon, dontcha know) cost $8,000 per head more than that: “Four counties alone, Suffolk, Queens, Nassau and Brooklyn, took in nearly 5,000 unaccompanied children in just 11 months, from Oct. 1, 2020 to Aug. 31, 2021, according to HHS. With public education in the area costing about $28,000 per child, per year, that’s a $139 million hit on New York taxpayers to educate children arriving unexpectedly just in those four counties. The arrival of these children, mostly teenage boys, in local schools is creating a classroom crisis that is strapping educational resources, costing taxpayers millions in un-budgeted dollars, and aiding gang-recruiting efforts, argue parents, teachers and immigration experts. . . . New York is the only state in America with four counties receiving more than 1,000 unaccompanied minors, despite its 1,700-mile distance from the southern border.”
https://nypost.com/2021/10/30/border-crisis-hits-classrooms-as-unaccompanied-minors-flood-ny-schoolsborder-crisis-hits-classrooms-as-unaccompanied-minors-flood-ny-schools/
This sounds about right:
“Pfizer Is Calling the Shots to Jab Kids”
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2021/11/01/pfizer-contracts.aspx
The article alleges that the pharmaceutical has achieved unprecedented powerf having maneuvered a significant number of countries to agree tp place themselves over the proverbial barrel to the extent that Pfizer can be said to control those countries’ COVID response without legally being responsible for any ensuing negative medical “issues”.
It also alleges that as part of the Pfizer contract to provide the vaccine to certain countries, those countries are legally compelled to discourage (or even must legislate against) the use of treatments other than their vaccines.
Horrifying and diabolical (and diablolically “clever”)….
Yes, there are 8 candidates for three slots in my school district. Unless one is actively involved with the board or attends school board meetings (which I am not involved and do not attend meetings) there isn’t a lot of information available about the candidates. Our local paper tries to do a short, brief, summary of each of the candidates every year. That’s about the only information that I can get.
Often I read that article to make my decision on who I will vote FOR. This year I am focusing more on who NOT to vote for by simply eliminating those who have said to raise teachers’ pay or they claim that more has to be done about the pandemic such as mandate vaccines.
Ha! 8 candidates running for 3 open slots and, now, I have whittled down my choices to only 2. That doesn’t say much for the candidates this year, does it?
One for all you Closet Z Man Aficionados. Yes, I know who you are!
A shortish article and worth reading and deciding which type of Rightist *you* are. I think he covers all bases in his taxonomy.
Tribes of the Right:
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=25540
“If it was possible to hold a convention of people who makes some claim to being right-wing, it would be a quite a crowd. Polling consistently shows that about 40% of white Americans identify as conservative. About 20% identify as liberal. The remaining 40% probably lean proportionally. People who claim to be “moderate” are always left-wing, often far-left. On the other hand, people with no interest tend to live right-wing, so it is hard to know for sure how the undocumented fall.
Regardless, the right side of the scale is a crowded place, but there is not much agreement on what it means to be right-wing in America. For example, many of the gentry conservatives would not be caught dead at the same convention as many of the tribes on the Right. These are the people who listen to Ben Shapiro and think the worst people are those hated most by the Left. These are the people who voted against Trump because, well, that is what they were told.
Another group that would hesitate to attend a convention of the Right are the people generally referred to as normies. These are people who think the Democrats are the real racists and Israel is our greatest ally. They get mad over CRT because it is bad for black people and immigrants. They voted for Trump, even though he was accused of being Hitler, because they are sure that he does not see race. These are the civic nationalists who are the majority of the Right.
.
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(Discussion of various other varieties of Rightists)
.
.
The bet by Dissidents is that realty still has some role to play in the life of the West and those disgruntled and disillusioned will at least entertain an alternative rooted in the natural reality of mankind. Alternatively, the various tribes of the Right will see that going backwards is not an option, so moving forward into a moral philosophy rooted in natural realty, however imperfect and incomplete, is the only option. In this regard, the Dissident Right is the optimism tribe on the Right.
The important takeaway from this survey of the Right is that the overwhelming majority of the people under a banner on the Right are still attached to the liberal order. They still believe they can vote their way out of the defects of democracy. There is a reason this point of view remains the most compelling. It offers hope. Reality and alternative fantasy have never held up well to the subtle utopianism of liberal democracy. That is a realty of the Right that Dissidents would be wise to explore.”
Got our ballots into the drop-box last week, and have my on-line tracking confirmation that they were received and accepted for voting.
This, BTW, should be obligatory for ALL non-in-person voting, as it would tell someone immediately if their ballots were purloined, instead of them only finding out at the voting booth, or not at all.
We had both city council and school board elections. The mailers and “news” reports and voter guides are basically worthless, anodyne boilerplate. Everybody is going to make things super hunky dory (there may be some problems using that old idiom these days), and loves kids and adores their city and schools.
Oh, and the candidate lists are “nonpartisan,” HAH.
I depend on a friend who is plugged into the local Republican party, who tells me the names that on the Right.
Our candidates are also now kind of running as “nonpartisan” slates, in that they mention each other, and speak together at town halls, etc.
Might as well put their party affiliation on the ballot, IMNSHO.
@ David – I’m feeling like both a target AND collateral damage, depending on the particular policy considered.
Love your “artisan child rearing” — it’s how most of us were raised, even if we did go to public schools (1940s & 50s), because our parents were much more involved in the “oversight” that’s missing these days, due to personal involvement (as volunteer aides) and community cohesion.
The “artisan” part took place after school, as everyone’s family had different conditions on after-school activities, and varying traditions in church or social circles.
Oddly, my most-liberal sister-in-law (not quite leftist; she is a small-business entrepreneur who hasn’t connected the dots yet) actually did go the artisan route with her youngest children (second family, essentially), by hiring a “teacher” (they don’t call them governess anymore) to educate the two of them just by themselves. She did a great job, very inventive, lots of creative exploration and field trips and personal interest sorts of things.
Takes money, but I suspect my SiL was making enough to handle it.
Somehow, it’s more “liberal” and “artisan” if you hire someone else to do what any home-schooling mom accomplishes.
BTW, this is where the USA is headed if we don’t take control of the ballot boxes. If Republicans lose any more elections they should realistically have won, some of Z-man’s conservative tribes will move on to the more kinetic boxes*.
(h/t Powerline – by a Russian emigrant – RTWT)
https://reason.com/2021/11/01/yes-it-was-an-evil-empire/?utm_medium=email
“Nearly every form of Soviet nostalgia gets the facts wrong.”
CATHY YOUNG | FROM THE DECEMBER 2021 ISSUE
*
http://www.commonsenseevaluation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Four-Boxes.jpg
Totalitarian Dystopia:
Shanghai’s Most Cyberpunk Areas Walking Tour | New Bund And Lujiazui | 4K HDR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNeZOe3169E
Notice that there’s less mask-wearing and in your face enforcement than in (say) Melbourne, Australia.
Mind you, the Chinese model is to go very hard when there is a Covid outbreak. The other night, they locked 30K people inside Shanghai Disneyland because one visitor that day tested positive. OTOH, they had everyone logged and tested and free to go if OK by 10:30pm.
Now you might decide that you’re living in some Ronald Reagan Speech from the early 80s and be worried about a government that could marshal resources and get a massive logistical task like that sorted in a few hours. Then again… it also probably could manage to ensure that you don’t starve or freeze to death in winter if things go sideways. See how that works out in NYC or Baltimore.
Short of full on Unabomber, it’s going to be a Tyranny one way or the other. Better to have Pisistratus of Athens rather than Caligula.
“We are all Lysenko now”, updated:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/brits-who-post-false-information-about-vaccines-could-be-jailed-two-years
AesopFan….my thought is to contrast Artisan work with Mass Production….’progressives’ generally detest mass production (at least they do when they’re not looking back nostalgically to the days of huge unionized auto and steel plants)….they would buy dishwashers custom-made by South American peasant craftsman using their traditional metalworking techniques, if they could…but when it comes to child raising, they’re all in for the Mass Production approach. With the child-raising factories to be fully unionized, of course.