monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Ceausescu's Romania was something else...

Funny, but there's nothing red about Putin's Russia..

Axelrod is just joshing of course, but consider the stupidity of this tweet by Joy Reid:

https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/774288003678277633

Oy veh.

"communist"

דיטטאָ (english to yiddish for ditto)

This is such a crazy story line, and the reactions show just how topsy-turvy everything's gotten (and how politically situational people's responses are). I mean, I guess it's only fitting that this insane year ends with the left touting the CIA's judgement and defending its honour, while the right denounces and ridicules it.

The irony wasn't lost on me.

My wife and I spent several days in Bucharest a couple of years ago. The city was very pleasant and lovely, friendly people, beautiful well-kept parks, good restaurants etc. I had the feeling the city center had been modelled on Haeusmann's Paris of the 1870's, though I haven't researched the matter and don't know that for sure. Elise had travelled to Romania in the early 1990s just two years after the fall & executiion of the Ceaucescu's, and her description of it then isn't very different from what Glitterbag wrote above - similar details except she saw packs of appeaently wild dogs in then unkempt parks. (The woman is a bit crazy and thinks travel anywhere, anytime is a great adventure. We met in Bangkok and Singapore for nice adventures while my ship was in port in both places in the late 1980s and she said her next stop was China. I assumed that was Hong Kong, it was instead Beijing. Apparently it then was a bit like Bucharest. )

If you take the trouble to look for them, you can still see a few apartment relics of East Germany in present day Berlin - sloppy simple geometrical concrete construction, low ceilings, poor fixtures and devoid of architectural interest or embellishment. The rest of the city is very attractive, some of it quite beautuiful. I hope they keep them as reminders of the dull soulless products of socialism.

Anyway Trump continues to astound: I hear Rex Tillertson will soon be announced as the new Secretary of State with John Bolton as Deputy. This will likely be a shock for the sissys and bureaucrats who populate the place. They haven't had to do real work or face accountability for anything in a very long time. That will likely change fast.

Not sure how familiar you are with Jay Rosen from NYU. I think he's the smartest guy around on media. Here's a tweet from someone I don't know followed by Rosen's response

Christopher Stroop
‏@C_Stroop
Scholars are usually cautious. But many of those with expertise related to the current moment are convinced the situation is critical.

Jay Rosen ‏@jayrosen_nyu 2h2 hours ago
Jay Rosen Retweeted Christopher Stroop
If you're an editor and you follow me, this is a story. Assign it.

One of the observations we can make now is that what we're seeing in terms of the degree of really serious concern and the broad sweep of it is unlike anything that's happened in our lifetimes. That alone tells us something very important.

The old "appeal to the crowd" fallacy, eh, Blathy.? Except you've refined it. It's no longer the crowd in general that even gets referred to. Instead it's a select subset of people--the commie crowd only.

Nice try, cheese-eater.

I cited the CREDO stuty precisely for the extensive data in it, comparing third party measured performance of public schools and charter schools in every state, using identical tests.. I couldn't fund anything comparabele on the NEA site or on a couple of State board of Educartion sites I checked. I too found some criticisms of the report from some interest groups (teachers unions mostly) but all lacked specifics and focused only on the supposed unfair advantages charter schools have and the supposed "damage" they have done to their public school counterparts.

The statistical treatment of the data in the CREDO study looks rigorous, and the comparisons between public and charter school student performance on identical tests, measuring grade proficiency in reading and mathematics were apt and rather vivid. In the case at hand the tests showed that in Detroit charter school students in 2015 had 4% higher proficiency rates in both reading and math than their public school counterparts, though the report did acknowledge that both systems had a long way to go and one small group of recent charter schools had some problems and got more oversight as a result.

As a boy I attended Catholic schools in Detroit. The public schools looked pretty lousy even back then (I attended one for a few months in grade school after a move and still remember the relative chaos, and the fact that they were teaching stuff we did the previous year.) The unfortunate people of Detroit have been badly served by their local political leaders for a long time and their public schools are clearely failing, I believe these people, or at least the fraction of them who are willing to get involved in their children's education, deserve more than they have been getting. Their numbers are rising and they should be heard and accomodated.

Can you find anything with equivalent objective data that you would prefer, or would you rather stick with the vague data-free opinion sources you frequent? Perhaps you find some educational theoretical basis for your apparently preemptive rejection of the data. Is that the case?

No, george. Your credentials and your objectivity put Ms Ravitch to shame.

I suspect you'll like this

Razan Ghalayini ‏@RazanGhalayini_ 2h2 hours ago
the CIA protesting a right wing president being installed by a foreign power might be the funniest thing that has ever happened-@neontrotsky

Yeah, George, and that 4% is NOT just "4% better." That's scores on nationwide standards. The DIFFERENCE was 4% which amounts to about 40% BETTER, as I recall.

It was something like: Detroit public schools 9%, charter schools 13%. I made a long-ass post on this way back when Betsy was in the news. The way one report put it, for EACH YEAR attended, the charter schools were 3 months ahead. In other words 3 months ahead after first grade, 6 months ahead after second grade, 9 months (one full school year) ahead after 3rd grade, and so on.

You are correct - I should have noted that.

In my view the truly poignant part of this is that a growing number of the parents there are getting involved and trying to help their children get a better start in life. THAT is the essential driver that has propelled all Americans to success, and it is the thing that has made us the most successful nation in the world in assimilating people of different cultures and backgrounds, and in creating a composite common culture that is also unique in the world. These folks are our best hope for the future, and they are being bitterly opposed by teachers unions and education bureaucrats concerned only about tenure and pay, and whose only response to criticism of poor performance is to demand more money. We cannot afford to let these parents down.

link

That's right.. Bucharest was nicknamed "Little Paris" way back when.



"Plattenbau". Identical looking pre-fab, cheap apartment blocks, often endless expanses of it - and they can still be found all across the former Eastern Bloc.

I remember the first time I was at Budapest's Flórián tér; I think it was a year before the end of communism, and our mom had dragged us out there by tram and metro for the bit of Roman archaeology that's there. I was more impressed by the view around. Just this endless, massive circle of identical, uniformly grey, square-boxed towerblocks, in the rain, traffic rushing through the middle. I'm no small-town boy but I thought it was terrifying. It seemed to symbolize the oppressive harshness of life under communism. It looks a little better now that everything's gotten a lick of some colourful paint, and there's a lot more green.

But the role of this Plattenbau is a little more complicated than their ugliness would suggest to visitors. At the time they were built, apartments in these "lakótelepek", as we call them here, were quite sought after. Not just because the shortages that marked life in Eastern Europe in general, but because they were genuinely a step up from the houses many people had been living in before. Water, gas, electricity, bathrooms, kitchens - they were more modern and better equipped than what the masses were used to, especially in the villages.

Not all *that* different, in that sense, from the identikit, cheap high-rise developments that went up in suburbs across Western-Europe in the 50s/60s (and the US had its own "projects," right?) -- a good few of which have by now been torn down (in London, Amsterdam, etc), and many of which now are among the most notorious parts of towns (eg in the French banlieues) -- but which back then were a real step up and a source of pride for the residents who'd moved there from slum-like working class neighbourhoods.

It's always striking to me when I see photos of West-European cities in the 50s/60s, how "East-European" they looked. The modernist brutalism of the new suburbs. The neglect of the inner cities. The difference was that they'd kept evolving; Budapest etc still looked that way in the 80s.

The sheer scope of how many of them were built all across Eastern Europe was something else though. And to me, the "lakótelepek" still kind of all look the same, though not as viscerally oppressive as they used to seem. But apparently there's quite the hierarchy among them here in Budapest. Some of the high-rise ones in outer neighbourhoods (including one nicknamed "Havanna") are somewhat notorious. Others, especially low-rise ones and closer to downtown, are pretty popular.

The communist track record on architecture really is a bit of a mixed mess. Often the pre-war neighbourhoods were left to rot away while the regimes focused exclusively on building those massive new districts full of towerblocks, supposed symbols of the socialist 'New Man'. There were some excuses for that - the massive destruction of WW2, the acute shortage of housing, the financial efficiency of piling up prefab towerblocks compared with renovating low-rise, fin-de-siecle buildings. But it wasn't all necessity, it was ideology too, and so many once-grand neighbourhoods fell apart in a sorry state of neglect even four decades later, when WW2 really wasn't much of an excuse anymore. Ceausescu's deliberate mass destruction of communities stands out as a crime. And yet, there was a flip side too. You see photos of Polish cities after WW2 ... just complete and utter destruction. Hardly a building left standing upright. And an impressive amount of that was painstakingly rebuilt, reconstructed, restaurated. I've seen a couple of books with before-and-after photos, and - credit where it's due. Plus, some (though not much) of the modern stuff, like the Moscow metro, was impressive in its own right. Then again, that's all offset by the prestigious but tasteless Stalinist kitsch of eg East Berlin's Karl Marx Allee or Warsaw's "wedding cake" Palace of Culture and Science, an unwanted present from the Soviet "comrades"... they surrounded it with shiny new skyscrapers now, to try to hide it a bit.

OK, so, um... Trump, right. Trump and relevant contemporary events...

Jay Rosen is a commie now? Silliness.

Funny

"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." (Winston Churchill)

The first time I spent time in Warsaw, my hotel was located across the street from that "cake" building, and my room faced that building. On my second visit to Warsaw, that hotel was gone.

There was a similar tedious monotone uniformity to the massive home and suburb building that went on in the US after WWII as well. There was no wartime destruction, though new construction virtually stopped during the war. I suspect the drivers for us were the massive social disruption that occurred during and after the war with the until then unresolved dislocations associated with the depression, the wide-scale drop in the rural farming population, the migration of African Americans from the South and the large scale pent up family startups after our rapid demobilization. As was evidently the case in Europe, the new facilities were in many ways a more modern step up for many , but happily change continued.