Legacy? Does anyone really think that...

[Wat_Tyler]

He was expendable.


The Pierce is irreplaceable.


They (Pierces) were anachronisms by the Great Depression, but God Damn, were they ever put together . . . part of their anachronistic charm, i suppose.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I suffer from anachrophobia...



... and yet, my fellow man insists on dragging me into the past to go FORWARD!

http://www.jbs.org/media/k2/items/cache/77f5bc8e329ca4e57b0c9f6179e44569_M.jpg

 

[Wat_Tyler]

The past can be the horned toad that tells us where (not) to go.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The past can be the horned toad that tells us where (not) to go.

Too many horned toad wranglers to rely on history. Some people read the tail and claim that it wags the lizard...

 

[CandiCame]

It is a generationally shared delusion. I had Candi and Sean blasting me for the sins of our generation being visited upon them and I had to agree because in my youth, I thought the exact same way as they do now...

I wanted to crush the Leave it to Beaver world as badly as they do now.

Fiscal Cliff --> Cloward-Piven

That's not at all what happened. We told you that world never existed. Repeatedly. We don't want to crush it. We don't want to do anything. I even told you that your generation's "Can do" will crush our "won't try" every time, but it won't change reality.

See, if you can't remember what happened earlier this year in one conversation, that should give you clue as to why we don't believe you accurately remember the 50s- the time period that you claim to remember more clearly then any other person we talked to or our history books.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Good lord you are ignorant as to what has been done to you...

Education's Great Divide: My Time in the Trenches
Glenn Fairman
http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/educations_great_divide_my_time_in_the_trenches.html
December 9, 2012

In thinking about how valuable education is in cultivating the next generation of Americans, my mind took me back nearly twenty years to when I was a graduate student functioning as a substitute teacher at La Puente High School in Southern California. On one assignment, I was to cover a social studies class of some old-timer; he had written down in his instructions that since his classes were on a field trip, my sole duty was to show a movie at 6th period to those who did not attend. What I found that day opened my eyes.


In a dusty corner shelf of the room was a set of thirty-year-old textbooks from the mid-1960s, and although my memory cannot now relinquish their title, their contents burned themselves into my brain. As I flipped through the pages, I was astonished to find what I would now consider an upper-level college textbook under color of what in the high schools used to be termed "civics." This text contained a very detailed understanding of political theory, constitutional law, macroeconomics, American history, and comparative political systems. I spent the rest of the day in slack-jawed amazement, perusing what a student in a working-class town was expected to know before the mavens of education began tinkering with the curricula of our schools.


When the instructor returned at the end of the day, I revealed my astonishment to him, and he informed me that he had used those texts when he first hired on. Now, however, could not do so, since they would be incomprehensible to nearly every student -- especially considering that the nature of history and American government had been changed in the current texts. The teacher related to me that the current texts had been scaled down to what used to be a grammar-school understanding, and they carried within them a jaundiced view of America, preferring to accentuate the warts and blemishes rather than the achievements of our political system.


I then made it my business, when finding an older teacher, to ask if education had been "dumbed down." To a person, I found that this question unleashed volatile diatribes on how dull children had become since the responders had begun as idealistic young men and women in the field. Algebra teachers informed me that every year they were forced to eliminate problem sets that previous years had mastered. English teachers who once taught Shakespeare and Dante were now reduced to leading seniors through Orwell's Animal Farm or postmodern novels featuring teens in existential moral dilemmas. Moreover, the analysis of themes in book reports had been deconstructed into not what the author was attempting to portray, but what personal emotions were elicited in the reader.


Teachers, who are part and parcel the products of our New Education, can never be fully aware of what diminution has been wrought subsequent to the Great Divide. From elementary school and into the colleges, disciplines of objective knowledge have been either discounted or leveled, and critical thinking has been pushed aside for the subtle indoctrination of a specific worldview. Students are deemed to be merely clever animals, and the slow, simmering replacement of a spiritual for a biological self-definition is therefore woven into the fabric of how they are taught life and the world.


Campus speech codes and filtered curricula have denuded the classical goal of the acquisition of a free and analytic mind. The capacity to seek and apprehend truth has devolved into the project to fashion pliable minds with correct and proper opinions, in which truth itself is a problematic, wavering, conventional construct. Passion and commitment in service to a politicized cause are indeed more valuable than the veracity of that cause, since the absence of truth renders one construction of the world coequal with another.


The moral equality of lifestyles, as well as the preferred end of an equality of material results, is deemed by those who design curricula to be consistent with "anointed ideologies." All permutations of sexuality are to be held valid, protected from the scrutiny of blighted paleo-moral judgments. All cultures and religions are also worthy of celebration -- with the exceptions of Christianity and the American regime, who are guilty of a plethora of crimes throughout the earth and must therefore be lowered in stature to ensure the final egalitarian assessment of distinction-free understanding. The fiction must be implanted that we are all one worldwide loving and happy family, benevolent and divided only by geographical and artificial political overlays.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

The technique of these parties is based on the division of society into producers and consumers. They are also wont to make use of the usual hypostasis of the state in questions of fiscal policy that enables them to advocate new expenditures to be paid out of the public treasury without any particular concern on their part over how such expenses are to be defrayed, and at the same time to complain about the heavy burden of taxes.
The other basic defect of these parties is that the demands they raise for each particular group are limitless. There is, in their eyes, only one limit to the quantity to be demanded: the resistance put up by the other side. This is entirely keeping with their character as parties striving for privileges on behalf of special interests. Yet parties that follow no definite program, but come into conflict in the pursuit of unlimited desires for privileges on behalf of some and for legal disabilities for others, must bring about the destruction of every political system.
Ludwig von Mises

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience.
Noam Chomsky

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Does anybody actually thing that Obama will address the actual problem, spending?

Not a chance...

... spending has 'multipliers.'



Hey Candi, get a load of these millionaires:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/12/millionaires_billionaires_and_teachers.html

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Let's face it, we are now living in a banana republic. We still have elections and a democratic system but so do Venezuela and Argentina. Hugo Chavez was just re-elected in Venezuela with 54 percent of the vote. Obama got 52 percent. Is there a difference? Does Venezuela have an entrepreneurial class? Certainly, but as far as the majority and the left-wing press are concerned, they are Public Enemy #1, ripe for exploitation. As in America they are outgunned and outvoted by a lumpen mass that worships the Great Leader and wants him take care of them.

Look at the African-American vote. Almost every black person in America voted for Obama. In some precincts of Philadelphia was 100 percent. Even black Republicans such as Colin Powell and Charles Barkley voted for Obama. Why? "It's a black thing, you wouldn't understand." African-Americans want to see one of their own succeed. They don't care if Obama wants to put Republicans in prison, they'll vote for him. Blacks only constitute 13 percent of the electorate but voting as a bloc they have tremendous leverage. Will Republicans ever be able to make a dent in this by talking about school choice or black unemployment? Forget about it. That deadly combination of charismatic leadership and socialist economics is just too powerful.

Then there's the wet-your-pants media and the intelligentsia personified by Chris Matthews. For them the narrative of American has become the Oppressors versus the Oppressed. Nobody ever made it on their own in America. They only made it by joining tribes of fellow blacks, women, Hispanics, minorities, gays, lesbians, what-have-you, to fight against -- who? Why the White Male Establishment, of course, personified by the Republican Party. Mitt Romney was by the standard of any other era a remarkable example of a family man, faithful to his wife, raising a passel of children, making a success of himself, creating thousands of jobs for others, giving to charities, performing unknown acts of kindness without bragging about them. Yet for huge chunks of the population, this not only didn't resonate but was genuinely repulsive. Why was he involved in the War on Women? Why wasn't one of his children gay? Where were his two drops of Indian blood?

So the intelligentsia has gone overboard for Obama and is going to stay that way. Next comes Hillary and the same thing all over again. And let us not fail to note that while Middle America may be in the doldrums from all this, the intelligentsia is prospering. Last week I happened to be in Washington and when I boarded the Metro was handed a copy of the Express, a giveaway owned by the Washington Post, which carried the follow front-page feature:

STRESSED? OVERWORKED? NOT HERE: Washington workers are happier than you might expect, a Post poll finds.

Now some news that may seem counterintuitive, given the stereotype of Washingtonians as dull, stressed-out workaholics: We are happy. We like our jobs. If we work more than 40 hours a week, we don't seem to mind. We love our full lives.…

In interviews with a number of these poll respondents, we found residents of all demographic and geographic stripes determined not to let their work dominate them. We found people focused on spending time with their kids, spouses, boats -- intent on finding jobs that are fulfilling and meaningful, yet not overwhelming.…

"People in Washington have jobs and roles that are highly energizing. These are mission jobs -- it's not like you're washing cars. There are lots of smart young people enjoying each other's company; that's as energizing as the job itself," [says] Jane Weizman of Towers Watson, a human relations consulting company in Arlington…

Wait, Money Can Buy Happiness?

Part of Washingtonians' contentment may stem from the area's prosperity. We asked in the Post poll to describe the state of their personal finances, 68 percent of adults here said excellent or good. In a nationwide Bloomberg poll, only 27 percent said excellent or good.

If Republicans were running a regime in which a small contingent in Washington prospered while the rest of the country wallowed in despair, would the press fail to take notice? Would this story have a different spin? Instead, the Express article was festooned with figures of bureaucrats superimposed with happy smiling faces.

Republicans are being branded as The Party of The Rich and Big Business. They are not. They are the party of small business and non-cosmopolitan Americans not yet enveloped by the web of Big Government. Big business doesn't care who is in power. They always adjust. Look at General Electric. It is prospering on subsidized windmills while CEO Jeff Immelt heads the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. True, such fellow travelers may ultimately find the Wrath of the People turned against them, but by that time it's too late. Sorry, fellas.

William Tucker
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/12/10/time-for-some-ju-jitsu

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Obama wants another crisis to play with.

Exactly, more stimulus spending to be added to the bottom line of spending in an ere when the Senate has decided government can do without budgets; just continuing spending resolutions...




... you just cover your ass by screaming, "PEOPLE! THERE ARE STILL THE RICH TO BE TAXED!!!"

 

[RobDownSouth]

Does anybody actually think that Obama will address the actual problem, spending?

We just had a national election.

America rejected your pet thesis about "the actual problem is spending".

Deal with it. Or don't.

 

[mercury14]

Does anybody actually think that Obama will address the actual problem, spending?

There you go again with your nonspecific "spending" line. Man up and tell us what you really want cut. Medicare? The military?

Otherwise you're Jen.

 

[mercury14]

Exactly, more stimulus spending to be added to the bottom line of spending in an ere when the Senate has decided government can do without budgets; just continuing spending resolutions...




... you just cover your ass by screaming, "PEOPLE! THERE ARE STILL THE RICH TO BE TAXED!!!"

Passing a no-compromise Ryan plan means the Republican House has never made an actual attempt to pass a budget either, stooge.

 

[unregistered]

 

[unregistered]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Spending is good!

Debt is just an investment in the future!

THINK OF THE MULTIPLIERS MAN!!! THAT FREE MONEY GETS SPENT!!!!



What part of economics don't you get?

 

[RobDownSouth]

My pet theory?

Yep, your personal beliefs that have no basis in reality.

See also: "Let's kick all the non-Christians out of the military! Fuck those Jews! Fuck those Muslims!"

 

[mercury14]

Shut up ya big dummy, it's up to Obama to come up with the cuts.

So you don't have any thoughts or ideas of your own at all. And you think it's not on congress to come up with ideas either.

You're not a serious person then, you're just here to bitch and whine like a little pussy.

 

[unregistered]

 

[mercury14]

I have lots of ideas about what to cut, but it's not up to me to lay them all out. It's up to your AWOL President.

Yes I realize that the federal budgetary process does not rely on your Lit posting. But for the sake of discussion we like to chat and bullshit here.