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We’ve written a lot on the efforts of the nine NH Regional Planning Commissions’ efforts to begin the process regionalization here in NH, using Fed dollars from DOT, EPA, and HUD to rewrite and “Federalize” our local zoning codes.  We are certainly against this as this is nothing but top-down centralized planning where “Professional Planners” have the hubris in that they know how we should be geographically limited, housing limited, transportation limited, water limited, energy limited, property rights limited…

…and be taxed more for their happiness and our misery.  Well, this movement by our tin-pot ruler wannabees (“hey, it’s only for your own and our Collective good – stop your *itching!”) has been going on for a while in other places in the country.  Like in California, for instance.  My co-worker just sold her nice house and moved because Regional Planners (peace be upon them as they practice their environmental religion in “saving the planet” and totalitarian leanings) “captured” her town and several others in setting their idea of “Planning Utopia”.  RightInSanFrancisco has the story from the San Fran Bay area; some excerpts (reformatting, emphasis mine):

– The nine counties of the Bay Area (which include San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, and about 100 smaller municipalities) have two primary regional planning agencies with professional bureaucracies and Boards of Directors comprised primarily of locally elected officials.

– The Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) which serves as the primary conduit for federal and state housing money.  The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which collects the tolls from seven bridges and recently purchased a $180 million office building in San Francisco, also serves as the primary conduit for federal and state transportation money.

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One just shakes their head – WHY would NYC Nannier Mayor Bloomberg (in which he believes no one should have a gun) even think to put his AstroTurf group Mayors Against Illegal Guns that visited NH this week (ably covered by Groksters Rick, Susan, Tim and Steve here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) on New York City Government servers?  Ace has the story (emphasis mine):

At first I pinged mayorsagainstillegalguns.org and found that it was resolving at a New York City government IP address.

Pinging NYC.gov returns the same information.

It turns out I didn’t even have to look that closely, because the mayorsagainstillegalguns.org domain is registered to the city of New York. As you can see there, the registrant name is “NYC DoITT”, which is the New York City Department of Information Technology & Telecommunications.

According to this, Mayors Against Illegal Guns appears to be a 501(c)(4).  The action fund arm of MAIG is a 501(c)(3). Even if MAIG is reimbursing the city for these services, questions would still remain. Like, would New York City offer these same services to NYCTeaParty4Eva.org? Section 1072(p) of the city’s charter on information technology appears to give the Mayor a little leeway, but I can’t imagine it would cover his personal nonprofit groups.

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My feeling is that the most significant factor behind a student’s success in school are engaged parents.  I remember Mom having me sit at the kitchen table and watching me do homework AFTER she had gone over the material herself.  It wasn’t until I hit subjects like finite match, calculus, and programming and AP biology that she stopped ensuring that homework was done, done on time, and done right.  She did keep on reading my essays and tearing those up until they were rightly finished.

But it also took teachers that weren’t counting down the last years until retirement or clueless from the get go.  I had some great teachers, some that were characters, and some I hated simply because they were never satisfied and demanded more (and years later, I understood that THEY were the best of all).  The greatest will always be great regardless of their beginnings; the rest of us need to be trained.  However, it seems that those that train the students that teach our children are neither the brightest or best – an indictment of teachers programs all over; here is part of their Executive Summary:

…There’s no shortage of factors for America’s educational decline: budget cutbacks, entrenched poverty, crowded classrooms, shorter school years, greater diversity of students than in other countries. The list seems endless.

NCTQ’s Teacher Prep Review has uncovered another cause, one that few would suspect: the colleges and universities producing America’s traditionally prepared teachers.

Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the Review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student diversity.

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It’s a Wednesday.  A work day.  Short, short notice.  Still, quite a few people and a showing for the TEA Party as a movement again.  No, not the HUGE rallies that we saw BEFORE the IRS started their targeting of conservative groups (and religious and educational and….well, anyone holding social or political values other than the official Government outlook as defined by Obama, the IRS, Eric Holder, Big Sis Napalitano, just about all of the DOJ, the EPA, the Labor Dept….aw  heck – ANY part of Big Government that thinks we, their employers, are turning on them (yeah, ponder upon that)).

Jack Kimball of the Granite State Patriot Liberty PAC went down to DC and sent back these pics:

More after the jump

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At the sake of breaking Godwin’s Law right from the get-go, that quote is from one of the world’s master propagandists, Herr Goebbels.   But we also have another in-kind phrase from a more up to date personage:

…of deciding what American children should eat: “We can’t just leave it up to the parents.”

That would be from First Lady Michelle Obama. In the mind of Progressives and Collectivists (hey, let’s add one more: MSNBC’s Melissa Harris_Perry), your children really do not belong to you, Parents, they really belong to us.  To feed, to clothe, to install morals, to mold – parenting is too important to leave to amateurs; we, the paid bureaucracy will raise them properly.  I’ve oft talked about teachers also having the ‘tude that they are more important to their children students than their own parents; here’s one more fact to add to that growing pile of evidence?  Who cares what the parents have been teaching their children “about guns” – we, the Teaching Profession, shall show them the Shining Path:

An elementary school will hold a toy gun exchange Saturday, offering students a book and a chance to win a bicycle if they turn in their play weapons.

Strobridge Elementary Principal Charles Hill maintains that children who play with toy guns may not take real guns seriously.

“Playing with toys guns, saying ‘I’m going to shoot you,’ desensitizes them, so as they get older, it’s easier for them to use a real gun,” Hill said.

… “Having a group of children playing cops and robbers or cowboys and Indians is a normal part of growing up,” said Yih-Chau Chang, spokesman for Responsible Citizens of California, a group whose goal is to educate the public about the facts behind gun rights.

Really, Principal Hill? 

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From WattsUpWithThat, an essay, not the religion of “White Guilt” but of ”

There are at least two ecologies: one rational, the other nonsensical; one that broadens our outlook while the other narrows it; one democratic, the other totalitarian. The first wants to tell us about the damage done by industrial civilization; the second infers from this the human species’ guilt. For the latter, nature is only a stick to be used to beat human beings. Just as third-worldism was the shame of colonial history, and repentance was contrition with regard to the present, catastrophism constitutes the anticipated remorse of the future: The meaning of history having evaporated, every change is a potential collapse that augurs nothing good.

The whole essay here by Pascal Bruckner here.

Guilt to the extreme – and the only resolution of the environmental angst of guilt, the only penitence of the extreme environmentalists can accept, is that of the “live smaller and smaller” lifestyles by all.  Which demands complete dedication in homage to Gaia (Earth Mother).  Otherwise, there never can be a propitiation of their enviro-guilt and presumed sins individually until we either bow to them voluntarily or suffer the totalitarianism they demand.

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Update: Apologies to Leigh Webb for misspelling his name – posts are being corrected.

That post is here – totalitarianism of the environmental movement. Yeah, I’m still banned over at TreeHugger (you can tell by its name, yes?).  I guess that I keep sinning – Strict Environmentalism heterodoxy cannot allow for any straying from the permitted speech.  Sure, there is a “Conservative heterodoxy” here at the ‘Grok as well, but as long as you don’t run yourself against Rule #1, we tolerate most other views or outbursts the vast majority of the time.

But not at TreeHugger. This time, they are trying to cover for Nanny Bloomberg who cares not a whit for what people want for themselves but only for how he thinks they should behave.  This time, the headline is “Bloomberg plans to get New Yorkers composting”

Sidenote: just like NH State Representative Lee Leigh Webb who recently summed up his (and the Democratic and Progressive philosophy):

“The role of government is to legislate behavior“

Once again, in a single sentence, we see the underlying mantra of the totalitarianism that is the Progressive Democrat agenda: You WILL do what we tell you to do – and we are redefining “freedom” such that you still think you have some.

Back to the post – the problem with the headline should be obvious – yes, Nanny Bloomberg IS planning composting for NYC but the operative word failure is “get”.  However, that is the wrong word – the proper word, if you read the post, should have been “force“.  Once again, we see a Progressive that believes that what he knows to be best for all will force others to do it – voluntary participation will not be part of the final solution.

Yet again, I could not help myself – even having been banned (hey, hope springs eternal – or is it merely waving a red flag?):

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