NEW PALTZ JOURNAL

I’ve been saying for a few years that the New Paltz school district is over-funded by about one-third. It has been bloated up by overly-generous contracts with teachers and administrators negotiated by people sitting on the same side of the table, with help from the union lobbies in Albany.

The only thing that local taxpayers have is the annual vote, which usually presents a choice between more and more more. This year the board of education, trying to make up for cuts in state aid by passing the difference on to local property owners, overplayed its hand with an initial budget that exceeeded the tax cap, required a 60% majority to pass, and failed to get it.

This time the board presents a budget that sits right at the tax cap, such that it requires only a simple majority.

So here’s a chance for taxpayers to get themselves up and out, realizing that the school district has a solid voting bloc of employees and their spouses that gives them an instant advantage, and rally to put this budget down against the odds. Voters did that with the Middle School bond proposal and the recent proposal to purchase land next to the Lenape elementary school.

It would be a good thing, using the only tool that voters have at their disposal, to force this arrogant school district to cut its budget down to size. As usual, the first thing that they do is threaten the music and sports programs. There’s never any mention of holding the line at the next teacher contract. And it’s always positioned as “for the children” blah, blah.

Well, here’s a chance to pull it together and tell the school district to cut more and start rethinking things. That’s the only message worth sending, in my opinion. And it would be nice if school district employees and their spouses seized an opportunity to vote some small relief for their neighbors, instead of voting for higher taxes to benefit themselves.

The people who run the New Paltz school district are a self-interested lot, who never stop pleading “but it’s for the children” in their relentless efforts to maintain and increase their funding with other people’s money.

I try to avoid getting into the personalities involved because it’s not about personalities. It is really about the power of teachers unions (in league with all public employee unions), locally and in Albany, and even nationally. It is about a historical trend among Progressives to take control of citizens’ lives by first targeting them as children, beyond the immediate reach of their parents, and conditioning them to accept elites exercising power over them through government. It’s about a worn-out, moribund concept of public education, that if it isn’t already dead sure is startin’ to smell funny. And only lastly is it about the unwitting and useful slobs and factotums and placeholders who run the thing on-site at the public school penal colonies.

But all of this morass of expensive compulsory institutionalization has now been swept away conceptually by the internet, and by the vast resources for learning online from the best teachers available, without the current abject institutional confinement and the resulting formation among students of immature peer group cultures (and the now multiple-generation conspiracy against adult reality) that public school advocates attempt to call “socialization.”

This dysfunctional horror show is now six or seven generations deep in America. Parents who think fondly (often aided by the darkest rose-colored glasses) of their time going through it want to believe that they are giving their children something “even better” than what they had, usually unaware that public schools have continued to march on toward odder and odder goals, including the “diversity” fetish, which boils down to “we are replacing your values with ours.”

So it was with great wailing and gnashing of teeth, when the New Paltz school budget failed to pass on Tuesday with the required 60% vote (because the school district had proposed a budget that exceeded the property tax cap set in Albany), that the usual suspects, those who think that all good things come from government, and that there is never, ever enough of such good things, were very very very upset. Whining slob Lefties and blackguards that they are, any setback for the agenda is a deep offense against their moral vanity, which is immense and based in vapors so thin that they barely function intellectually, such that they are consumed in the offense they take that anyone would, or possibly could, disagree with them.

Despite my effort to resist taking the matter down to the personalities at the local level, every once in a while an individual will catch the light of the moment in just the wrong way and I’ll go there very quickly indeed, and I’m almost there with at least one of these people, someone I’m calling for now the “lovable fuzzball commie.”

Watched the PBS American Masters bio of Johnny Carson last night. Great bit where he says to Muhammed Ali that he had boxed about eight fights himself in the Navy and Ali said to him that he must have been pretty good because he had no marks on him. Carson told Ali that he didn’t have any marks on him either. Ali says, well, I’m pretty good. This was the later, quieter Ali, not the coarse loudmouthed early Ali. And right there those two might have been the two most famous people in the world at the time.

Something I never noticed before, and this might have been part of what limited mystique George W. Bush had, is the resemblance between W. and Carson. It’s not pronounced, but it’s definitely there. Both apparently got the same results out of drinking as well.

One thing I did not know about Carson was that he was a philanderer. At least he had the decency not to flaunt it.

His schtick, the head whipping from side to side, the darting eyes, all the rapid moves were born in his youthful obsession with magic tricks, his early self-training at being an entertainer. He was trying to hold his mother’s attention, at first, and maybe for a lot of his life. She was apparently indifferent. But it worked on almost everyone else.

Most impressive was the part about how when the television writers went out on strike for several weeks, Carson wrote the entire show himself. He was also a generous man, who helped people in dire straits all the time and never took any credit for it. Was also a voracious reader and a loner, who could spend his time with everyone in the world or just himself. In the end, everyone knew Johnny Carson and no one knew him.

Here we are in the middle of it.

More: Michelle Malkin on the jobs lost to the drilling moratorium.

A note on this “separation of marriage and state” dodge that is becoming popular with libertarians and others who want to avoid confronting the “gay marriage” issue. All modern Western states have inherited the fundamental social institution of marriage, which has existed for millenia. States neither invented it, just as they did not invent its natural basis, nor have they (or “the people”) any power to change its basic meaning, which is grounded in biological reality and the oppositional and complementary nature of the two sexes, and in actual (not simulated) sex and natural reproduction. Its purpose is as a moral covenant between a man and a woman and it is a framework for reproduction and the family. States, like our civilization itself, exist because of marriage, not the other way around. Likewise states have inherited much of the legal framework (states have not invented the law either) that supports and adjudicates marriage. That does not give said states any power to fundamentally mess with marriage. In other words, marriage means something. In the Western civilization it has been optimized as a monogamous institution, just one man and just one woman. Marriage can exist without the state, but since it has as clear a meaning as 2 + 2 = 4, it cannot be redefined by individuals any more than it can be redefined by the state. Individuals can do as they please, but marriage is what it is. It is something, the way a road or a house is something. If the state or “the people” pretend to change it, they are in fact destroying it by destroying its meaning, which is as well the destruction of meaning itself, which no civilization can survive.

It was clear to me as it happened that the ’08 election was a trip back to the 1930s, and not just to the American 1930s, but to the European 1930s. The Democratic Party underwent the transformation from a corrupt American political party to a political religion, the single most dangerous thing that happened in Europe in the 20s and 30s (via Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler). The Democrats fell captive in ’08 to a messianic figure who came out of a radically politicized black church whose teachings were a combination of Marxism and black supremacy (blacks, not Jews, are the Chosen People according to “black liberation theology”). Yet the messianic figure would be positioned as a “racial healer.” This was hidden in plain sight but it was right there for anyone who bothered, as I did, to go to a library and find out about it. The media refused to report it. And it followed, of course, that anyone who criticized the messianic racial healer was instantly accused of racism by his proxies. With the charismatic skills of those European leaders from the 30s, this orthodox Marxist, wearing the deliberate disguise of a “community organizer,” embarked on a program of “transformation” for the American economy and society. It was all wrapped up in riddles and lies, and now that it has predictably failed on the economic side, the culture will be assaulted. That’s why as a preliminary move to the Chief Executive leading an assault on marriage, the symbolic leader of America’s public schools announced that he supported the assault on marriage. I did not see one single person in the media raise that point, that the federal leader of the schools had thusly gone to work on “the children.”

The only thing new here is that they’re actually using the word Communism, probably because the work done in the public schools and universities throughout the West has been so successful at getting the stink of death, torture, deceit, and failure off of it. Although, there will still be a stigma attached to the use of the word when anti-Communists use it. So, as usual, there’s a healthy dose of doublethink mixed in. An anti-Communist calling a Communist a Communist will still be an offense that will mark someone as a “McCarthyite.”

The new vanguardists of Communism are the Communist intellectuals who actually admit to being Communists. After decades of making up all sorts of new names (and retrieving old names) for themselves, they’ve finally come full circle and returned to the gold standard.

Mark Steyn gives a classic Steynian treatment to the 1/32nd Cherokee of Harvard, Elizabeth Warren. This, my friends, is a riot.

Andrew McCarthy is saying that the Obamafeds are busy airbrushing jihadist doctrine out of all their photos of Islam. Never forget that the Left loooovvvvveees violence. Loves it. Just so long as it’s good old revolutionary violence. Remember my theory in ‘Corpse‘ about how the Left views Islamic violence as a culiminating attack on the decadent bourgeois infrastructure of the West that will start the wheels of history turning again? And according to the “science” of socialism, history’s wheels must inevitably move toward what? That’s right, toward socialism.

She ran the diversity scam on Harvard Law School, claiming to be a Cherokee on the basis of one distant forbear possibly being of the tribe, and Harvard ate it right up.

In America the state has become the state religion and its catechism is taught in the public schools and the methods of the public schools have become unsound. The doctrine of “diversity,” for instance, which translates, “we are replacing your values with ours.”

Direct, concise, and sober.

Well, I’d say he’s worse.

Conrad Black sees FDR as a great hero, to whom he compares our President Nosferatu unfavorably.

My comment from that thread:

It’s only because I admire Mr. Black that I hesitate to point out that Pharaoh Roosevelt had scrambled eggs for brains, had no experience at all with anything much at all, was resentful and envious of those who could create wealth (his intense animus directed at Andrew Mellon, for instance), was deceitful and arrogant beyond comprehension (his arbitrary manipulation of the price of gold), had totalitarian instincts whence the line can be drawn directly to our President Nosferatu, currently sitting, and believed in the state, not the people, but began in earnest the conflation of the two. He had no idea what he was doing, but he loved jamming it to people who did. As for Social Security, it was the great scheme by which Americans of a certain age would be assured that they could live in retirement in the manner they had grown accustomed to during that very Great Depression.

…endless bullshit.

Martin Bashir: An empty cubicle with a British accent.

Alex Wagner: Using a magnifying glass and wearing gloves lift her upper lip with chopsticks and check for fiber optics.

Andrea Mitchell: A blonde Corinthian leather sheath stretched tight over a linoleum phallus, with eyeliner.

Chris Matthews: A stacked eructating hundredweight of wavering thinly-sliced fried baloney, with inflammable flatulence, drops names during a bombing run over the ruins of an amphitheatre filled with mesmerized cannibals.

Rachel Maddow: Queer Theory, bulked up on a diet of corporate carpet, preaches to the inverted at the Megachurch of the Electric Messiah.

Ed Shultz: Rejected at the processing plant loading dock for Arnie’s Whole Beef Halves.

Mika Brzezinski: Plain vanilla GaGa mousse on a glass cracker, shaved by a Galician barber.

Willie Geist: A shot glass of liquor puris cheats for a high score on the Sebaceous Aptitude Test by stealing glances at the answer sheet of Smug Insight.

Al Sharpton: Cloaca Maxima rides a Harley up the disabled access ramp into NBC News’s ass.

Lawrence O’Donnell: A stick figure in orthopedic shoes takes a nasty tumble while running with scissors and cuts off his own dick.

Joe Scarborough: “Headless Body Found in Topless Bar.”

Heather Mac Donald on The New York Times’ near-sighted view of welfare.