The mission of Citizens for Successful Schools is to develop ideas and engage people to move education forward. We take Trenton Central High School as a local example needing change. The same issues affect other schools as well, and we believe answers here will generalize broadly. The founders of CSS have just published an valuable new book, which puts the issues discussed here in a readable, usable form.
“The Secret Knowledge” by David Mamet
All religions stem from the same universal needs. Each contains awe, obedience, grace, study, prayer, and submission. Each religion will order and stress these elements differently, but their root is the same—a desire to understand the Divine and its intentions for humankind.
The political impulse, similarly, must, however manifested, proceed from a universal urge to order social relations.
UK Military Wives Choir
He took a group of vulnerable, anxious Army wives, whose husbands were fighting in Afghanistan, and turned them into a choir whose heartbreakingly beautiful performance at the Royal Albert Hall in front of the Queen for the Festival of Remembrance is simply impossible to watch without weeping.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2067895/BBC-The-Choir-army-wives-We-need-men-like-magical-Mr-Malone.html#ixzz1k26CyizD
“Ameritopia-The Unmaking of America” by Mark Levin
My premise, in the first sentence of the first chapter of this
book, is this: “Tyranny, broadly defined, is the use of power to
dehumanize the individual and delegitimize his nature. Political
utopianism is tyranny disguised as a desirable, workable, and even
paradisiacal governing ideology.”
Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Marx’s
workers’ paradise are utopias that are anti-individual and antiindividualism.
For the utopians, modern and olden, the individual
is one-dimensional—selfish. On his own, he has little moral value.
Contrarily, authoritarianism is defended as altruistic and masterminds
as socially conscious. Thus endless interventions in the individual’s
life and manipulation of his conditions are justified as
not only necessary and desirable but noble governmental pursuits.
This false dialectic is at the heart of the problem we face today
Dead People Receive Ballots in NH Primary
On January 10th, Project Veritas reporters walked into New Hampshire Polling Locations during the Presidential Primaries, saying dead people’s names. We stated the name of a dead person we got from the NH obituaries. The names of the deceased were both Registered Republican and Democrats And in almost every case, saying a dead person’s name, we were handed a ballot to cast a vote. We used no misrepresentation and no false pretenses. in fact, in almost every case, we insisted we show ID and they insisted that we vote without showing ID. Thanks to DailyCaller.com for breaking story.
Vaclav Havel (1936-2011), RIP
Vaclav Havel, who became the first Czech president after leading the bloodless Velvet Revolution against communist rule, died yesterday aged 75.
The dissident playwright was instrumental in opening the door to democracy in Eastern Europe by loosening the Soviet grip.
Tributes flooded in from world leaders who hailed him as ‘the greatest European of our age’.
Havel was invited by Margaret Thatcher to 10 Downing Street during his first official visit to the UK after the collapse of communism in 1989.
A Happy & Blessed Thanksgiving To All!
Bless this house, O Lord, we pray. Keep it safe by night and day. Bless these walls so firm and stout, keeping want and trouble out.
Don’t be afraid to say it: ‘We are the 1 percent’
It is time to stand up and be counted. I am the 1 percent. Let’s be plain about this. Though I have a good job and a good paycheck, I have virtually no wealth, no savings and no need for tax shelters. I have substantial debt. My family owns three vehicles, the newest of which is a 1999 Ford Windstar worth about $2,000. That’s our “good” car. If it breaks down, we would have to go further into debt to fix it or replace it. I cannot afford to put my three children — the oldest of whom is in high school, the youngest in diapers — through college. We vacation 20 miles away in Whitefish because we can’t afford airfare or gas for a long trip. We live in a hundred-year-old house without central heating and we are happy to have it. Sometimes we do look with envy at a our neighbors’ houses that have modern plumbing and electric systems that don’t short out when you run the pancake griddle and the space heater at the same time, and sometimes we do wonder why we can’t own a brand-new SUV like so many other families do. But envy is cheap; SUVs are not.