AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

I don't think that telling what the data says is racist, but asserting what it means might be.

I'm fairly confident that access to a good education and a properly funded school plays a considerable factor. I bet that if we were able to compare two populations of predominantly white schools where one was better funded, we'd also see trending in test scores.

Tests
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When my ex and I looked for houses, I noticed that if you traced the same size and style house through several communities, you could generally tell which had the best schools: the price of the given style house would be highest where the schools were superior.

pom, I wonder if you are confusing cause and effect? It may not be the quality of the houses that make the difference, or the amount of money that the people have that make the schools better. Has it ever occurred to you that more logically it would be the fact that the people that care more about their houses and are more responsible are likewise more responsible for their schools and care more about education? Attitudes apply to all kinds of things, how you live, how you learn, and what you do. I truly believe that liberals, as you are a good example, have this mistaken belief that success can be handed to you on a silver platter by simply giving you the appearance of it. In other words, give you the money to buy a better house or a better school, and you will thus become successful. Sorry to disappoint what I think are your mistaken notions, but it is up to people to change their own situations and improve them. For one thing, it does not take a new school or state of the art facilities to learn, it takes primarily a desire to learn. I think some of the most rural and poor communities of Oklahoma may score some of the highest, and many of those children go onto very successful careers.

I can vouch for my own experience, where I went to school. Our school was very old, we were too poor to have a football team, our baseball field was full of stickers and the backstop made of chicken wire, but the school produced kids that became successful lawyers, physicians, and other professionals, my brother and I included. Heck, our own house where I grew up did not have running water until I was 9 years old, we had an outdoor outhouse, to which we had to run outside at all hours even if it was below zero. The only heat in the house was produced by wood stoves fired by wood we had to cut ourselves, and we had no chain saws in those days. And no wall to wall carpet. I could go on for a while to describe it, but I think you should get the point, pom.

Aw, jeez. No Liberal believes that. Can't you avoid the worst exaggerations, Okie?

I mean, if you send kids to better schools they will do better. But you don't change people's lives by buying them things or throwing money at them.

Yaknow, it might almost be time for you to come to the realization that transmitting that message to people is part of what being a community organizer is about, Okie.



Yeah yeah, uphill in the snow both ways to school, had to eat dirt, we were tough in my day, kids nowadays have it easy... you couldn't be more of a stereotype of a grumpy old man if you tried.

Cycloptichorn

As an elitist, you can scoff at what I said if you want, but I do believe that hardships can teach us a few things if we want to learn from them. How we react to our hardships holds the key to life. I grew up with people, my parents included, that endured the depression and learned some very valuable lessons from it. I remember a neighbor that was so tight that she would have chicken heads and feet floating in the soup that she made. My mom loved to suck on the feet, she thought they were tasty. That neighbor I am convinced died a millionaire, and her one son became one of the most successful farmers in the area, a very hard working man that raised a wonderful and responsible family. Not one of them ever complained of a substandard school or asked for a government handout, nor did they ever need help to go register to vote, never, no need of a "community organizer" to organize them.

I am sorry you view anyone that disagrees with you as grumpy. Simply pointing out the realities of life is not grumpiness.

I'm most curious about when your house got electricity okie.

I would bet it got electricity under a Federal program if what you say about the conditions you lived in are true. But, damn, you pulled yourself up by your bootstraps without any government help though, didn't you.

You incorrectly assume that I view everyone who disagrees with me as grumpy. I only view those who display those characteristics that way.

Cycloptichorn

I don't know, parados, it was there when I can first remember anything from being maybe 3 years old. What difference does it make whether the feds did it or not, I am sure we would have ended up with electricity. I do remember improvements and additions of wiring that we did, that we did ourselves, if that matters to you. I know you will be greatly disappointed to learn that anyone would have the nerve to do something without the government helping them do it.

Every analyist, statistician, scientist, or anyone else that looks at data tries to assert what it means, no matter what kind of data they are looking at.
Are all of them racist?

It doesn't matter if the Feds GAVE YOU electricity? That seems rather cavalier about how the government spends it's money, don't you think okie?

Cut the claptrap. You can use the flimsiest of excuses to put liberals down.

So, let me clue thee in: Demand forces the price of houses up. People want their kids to go to the best schools and so they are willing to bid for a house, offering the seller more money than the list price. Basic economic theory: chasing scarce goods drives up their price.

You took the words right out of my mouth . . . uphill in the snow both ways. As Bugs Bunny were to say, were he to meet okie, what a maroon.

Do you suspect that some liberal woman he was courting laughed at him?

In one of his tirades against liberals in general and me in particular, okie indicated that he graduated from college in the late 60s.

I just tried to learn how much of Oklahoma was electrified in the late 50s, when okie would have been nine but could find nothing specific about that state. I did find this:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt realized that living standards in rural areas would continue to lag behind urban areas without electric service, and that it would take bold, decisive action to help rural Americans get it. So on May 11, 1935, he signed an executive order creating the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This federal agency helped rural Americans all across the nation form user owned cooperatives and provided them with loans needed to build a rural electric infrastructure. These co-ops, in partnership with USDA/REA, brought electric service to even the most remote corners of the nation. Electricity was the fuel for the economic engine that revolutionized rural life. In pre-electricity days, farm chores were often done by the dim light of kerosene or coal-oil lamps. Those flickering lights all too often illuminated faces of rural people crushed in their prime by the rigors of rural life, Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman said during an event in Washington, D.C., marking the 65th anniversary of the creation of the REA.

Glickman recalled the daily struggles of rural people in those pre-electricity days by quoting Senator George Norris, one of the co-sponsors of the Rural Electrification Act: "I had seen firsthand the grim drudgery and grind ... I had seen the tallow candle in my own home, followed by the coal-oil lamp. I knew what it was like to take care of farm chores by the flickering, undependable light of the lantern in the mud and cold rains of the fall, and the snow and icy winds of winter. I recall the ... scenes of harvest and the unending, punishing tasks performed by hundreds of thousands of women, growing old prematurely; dying before their time ......

President Roosevelt found these conditions unacceptable, Glickman said. "If private utilities wouldn't find a way to wire rural America, he would see to it that the government loaned the money necessary to make it happen." Within just a few years of that order, 300,000 rural Americans had electrical power, an increase of 25 percent. The rate of "wired" farms continued to climb with each passing year. Electricity eased many of the burdens for rural life. Work could be done much more efficiently and safely with electric light. Electricity meant that refrigeration systems which helped keep food supplies safe and created new opportunities for the production and shipment of perishable commodities became far more widespread. Electricity helped mechanize many tasks that had previously been done by hand. Electricity was not simply an added convenience for rural Americans. It helped make them the world's most productive producers of food and fiber and dramatically improved their living standards.

Continued:

To help educate rural people in the 1930s about how they could use electricity in their homes and on their farms, REA sponsored a traveling road show, which became known as the "electric circus." Louisan Mamer was one of REA's first employees, hired in 1935 to help stage those road shows. She was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award during the anniversary ceremony and shared some memories of those early days. Mamer recalled being intrigued by an REA advertisement seeking people with "a pioneering spirit." Born in 1910 and raised on a farm in southern Illinois, where her father cleared 1,000 acres of Illinois River bottom land, Mamer said she knew well the hard labor of rural life. So when the chance came to leave home to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana, she took it. The REA road shoe used two big circus tents, one for a general meeting and the other to demonstrate electrical appliances and farm equipment, Mamer recalled. One of her main duties was to speak to farm wives to help them "convince their husbands to pay to join a cooperative." Small radios and electric irons were among the first appliances sold. In the North, washing machines were in big demand, while refrigeration was more of a priority in the South.


Notice that this was a program from the 1930s when okie's parents would have been elementary school kids, perhaps, high school students.

Grumpy means cross or surly. The only grumpy person here is okie who has tried to talk down to me, who insulted everyone else. Ha!

I answered diest, who reminded the ever racist massagat, that data from two well funded white schools would offer a better comparison, that my ex and I learned that the price of domicile was highest where the schools were best and rec'd from okie a non-sensical tirade.

He has the gall to tell me that I know nothing of economics and yet he failed to recognize a basic economic principle in my response. Guess what, okie, I began studying economics in high school, then had to take it again in college. I went to business school briefly but left because it was too boring for words.

This man, who has never met me, views me through the lens of his own prejudice, which could be based upon his dissatisfaction with his own life. He wrote:

Sorry to disappoint what I think are your mistaken notions, but it is up to people to change their own situations and improve them. For one thing, it does not take a new school or state of the art facilities to learn, it takes primarily a desire to learn. I think some of the most rural and poor communities of Oklahoma may score some of the highest, and many of those children go onto very successful careers.
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So, Mr. Prescient, tell me my biography and where it is shown that I do not think people have to work hard. Tell me what my notions are and not your foolish biases.

YOU HAVE THESE MISGUIDED, UNFOUNDED STEREOTYPES THAT YOU LIVE BY AND YOU REFUSE TO UPDATE THEM.

I told you about all the hippies I knew that started businesses when they graduated from college and graduate school with liberal arts degrees, not business degrees, and you said you knew no hippie with a business.

That's probably because you boycotted those businesses because the proprietor had long hair.

BTW, according to data from 2006-07, Oklahoma ranked 36 in the nation. What it was like when you were a student, I do not know.

It depends on what point of view you start with. If you start by trying to prove Blacks are inferior to Whites . . . which there is ample evidence from posts you have made for years that this is your program. . . you will prove what you started out to prove.

I defy you to find EVEN ONE post from me where I have ever stated, asserted, or even suggested that anyone was inferior to anyone else!!!!

I have never made that claim, and there is nobody on a2k that can honestly say I have.
So, since you made the claim, it is up to you to prove it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7zbWNznbs

A Medieval look at the communists v the monarchists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAaWvVFERVA&NR=1

As mysteryman has already called you on it, please demonstate one example, even one, whereby any conservative has asserted that Blacks are inferior to whites, pom.

Further, you talk about me insulting you and talking down to you. What I have actually done is disagree with you and point out the error of your thinking, and you instead interpret it as talking down to you. Meanwhile, you continue to talk down to me, insult me, and accuse me of stuff that is totally and absolutely baseless, without any evidence whatsoever. One thing I have noticed on this forum with liberals, any disagreement with their opinions or their behavior is interpreted as talking down to them, not just a difference of opinion. Any difference of opinion is almost interpreted as an indication of hatred toward them, they will accuse you of bigotry, racism, and all manner of other things, simply because you disagree with their opinion. If it helps at all, pom, I have no hatred toward you at all, in fact I have complimented you in the past and have said you sound like a responsible individual, just misguided and I think you may have a pretty large chip on your shoulder. You have responded by talking about Oklahoma and okies as backward and a bunch of bigots and so forth. If anyone has prejudices, I suggest that you may have a very large problem in that respect. And I stick to my assertion that it is not up to the government to turn people around by giving them stuff, and it does not help people to give them the appearances of success or fabulous schools to excell, it is up to people themselves to decide what they want out of life and to value the things that will make their lives better, such as desiring an education and then applying themselves.

I get the impression you resent my little sermons to you about some of these things, yes, perhaps I understand how you can be put off by it, but one thing that bugs me constantly are people that whine all the time about their situation and expect somebody else to fix it, when in reality they need to look in the mirror, and that is basically what I am pointing out in the simple illustrations that I use in trying to explain some of this stuff to you that you may interpret as talking down to you.