ivan

you must be a very tedious person to deal w/ on a daily basis if i'm no good at promoting communism its probably b/c....wait for it...i'm not? nor have i known a single one of my libturd friends to quote das kapital or the little red book - feel free to keep telling me what i actually think though

them bastards at nwhikers? ahh, the endless fascination w/ reminiscing about golden ages that never were....

commie or not, i wouldn't wish the deep south on anyone as for "no use for commies" stalingrad sure would contradict that dip-tard notion

I like the Troll link OFF science! proving shit everybody knew already since 17-somethingorother.

a living, breathing dinosaur ladies n' gents

lenin was not the droid you were looking for

i think we've just finally solved this whole politics thing that and you can't say "cock-sucker" anymore

wasn't thomas jefferson a social theorist? and the very roosevelt feller so recently quoted? in fact, isn't anybody who gives a thought as to the ideal society, be it the status quo or something else, dabbling in said theory?

charlie don't text. spring break's april 4-13 - utard! i wanna do the desert shield. any weekend in march is fine 'cept the 15-16th as that's the boy's bday.

certainly the humble box-jellyfish is no fellow to trifle w/...

i'm not screaming for one either, but as the both of us are maxed out on the pay scale, every year the COLA goes unfunded we instead get the very opposite. our pay's decreased 16% in real dollars since the legislature started ignoring the law...

ditto. in my 15 years i've seen only a handful of crap teachers, and they all made quick exits as the job eats you alive when you're a cheap hack at it. my favorite was "big mama" perez, the spanish teacher that got hired at the inner-city school i was at - the position had been open for weeks unfilled 'cuz no god-fearing 'merican had the balls to wander into that environment unarmed - so the school hired a guy from mexico around christmas, his only qualifications being that he spoke spanish and had a heartbeat - after two weeks he started calling in sick - the first week he left "big mama's house II" as his sub plan - the second week he left the same movie...still in english - the third week he stopped leaving anything and we never saw him again....

lol. OK, so it's annoying because the website makes you subscribe if you have more than like 5 views, which makes it hard to average any kind of numbers -- but I assumed you must have done this since you certainly wouldn't have just jumped to the conclusion that "I see a whole lotta $70-$85k" just by glancing at the first page of 20 employees out of tens of thousands, right? so imagine my surprise when I discovered that a) it's pretty easy to bypass their registration screen and even query their database yourself and b) the average pay for teaching positions is not anywhere near what you suggest it is. Weird, right? Not sure how TTK's pet jellyfish derives average from I see a lotta, but hey, the point remains that teacher's poverty claims are questionable--at best. Especially given their 180+ a few schedule. As to Ivan's more thoughtful response, well, I agree it's total bullshit that a salary sort for, say, Seattle SD reveals pages of admin jobs (non-union, even!) that are pulling down more than the state Governor. Not to mention the guaranteed pension and health benefits that the common folk in the private sector no longer enjoy... wait, i though I was tvash's jellyfish?!? or was it lapdog? quite the menagerie that boy's putting together... good graph for showing the effect of unions on teacher pay - note the sunny union-busting glory that is the south - the first state i taught in, north carolina, was the worst paying state in the nation when i started - i see things haven't improved much - makes sense that some of the folks i knew from back then are still living w/ their parents - now there's an american dream come true! admins and paraprofesionals have unions too, actually, though the admin one is weird, given that in many districts it's made out of only a handful of members- their union has way more clout then mine as you correctly noted - way higher pay, much better benefits it sucks that so many private sector jobs have non-existent or shitty benefits - isn't improving their lot a better solution than dragging public employees down into the same swamp?

keep in mind folks in this database are not all members of my union - you also have paraprofessionals (teacher's aides and the like) and adminstrators (principals, head office types, etc)

i've only been a union member for 10 years but have never seen such a situation that you describe jay - what were the details of your guy's departure? parents routinely choose which school will get their money by choosing which school district they wish to buy a house and settle down in - i'm not rabidly opposed to school vouchers either - doesn't seem like they've made a big difference where they've been used and it seems like it just ends up adding admin and overhead, but whatever - give me a room and some kids and i'll make it work... the failure of the washington state congress to provide funding for the voter approved cost of living adjustments for the past half-decade has hurt, i assure you, but my union hasn't walked off the job.

and for pretty similar to reasons to what fdr stated - The People already have your best interests in mind, so what do you need to organize for? for my part, i don't think the union should be all powerful in the education world. it's one governmental entity that needs balancing by others. we advocate for our interests, the admins for theirs and the politicians in theory for everybody else. it's hard to have faith that The People (through their representatives) will look after all my interests since a decent number of them aren't really supportive of public education to begin with and would be perfectly happy to drown the baby.

i don't sweat it - hating organs of self-government is thoroughly american - i think my local's got a better approval rating than congress at least

my senator's one of the sponsors so i guess i can skip writing him he suuuuure don't like my union though....

what are the relevant bill numbers, tvash? i got a few minutes tonight and was gonna be writing them anyhow again about me dogdamned cola

whataday know, damn thing's got it's own wiki-page! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin,_Seattle well, after a brief read, i now have an obvious solution - the family that own's it wants to sell it - perhaps you can put together a group of like-minded folks to purchase it n' melt it down n' recast it into a more dramatic work depicting lucifer giving it to stalin something rough? at any rate, if bill's "never forget" mantra is in fact true, doesn't keeping a piece of tangible history about to remind you of that which you don't want to forget like...uh...a good idea? and what better than a giant statue w/ whatever artistic modification your local community feels like throwing at it?

pretty much sums up the whole dynamic of the middle-east! that philosophy sure do keep the world spinning around your analogies aren't so great - a statue of lenin (and again, one bought cheap off an empire that'd just gone tits up by a community of fruitie hippies) in fremont is more equivalent to a statue of george armstrong custer in malaysia than one of nathan bedford forrest in georgia

by "coolest attempt" i meant "coolest attempt that wasn't succesful in actually killing the president" jackson was the object of the first attempt on a president's life - the crazy dude who tried shooting him in the capitol entrance improperly loaded his two pistols, and when both misfired, the last at point-blank range, jackson beat the holy hell out of him with his cane and had to be pulled off the guy asked by the cops why he tried to kill jackson, he merely mumbled that his death would "make money more plenty." jackson, feeling that he'd had his fun and made his point, pressed no charges

love'em or hate'em, you gotta admit, the coolest assassination attempt in history was jackson's

great idea actually - stack enough up n' you don't even have to climb shit, plus you can have the mother of all bonfires way up there in the sky

you can clip the first bolt of p1 by either a) being 6'7 or b) stacking several convenient rocks on top of each other for a step i've never used a hook anywhere on route, though i do usually use a mini-cheater stick to get to the high bolt past the third anchor p2 and 3 combine neatly w/a 60 meter rope and is the recommended way - you don't need to leave draws but on every 3 bolts or so to keep it reasonably easy for the second to clean - i do recommend either a rope protector at the lip into the cave or to just fix the rope for the 2nd at the bolt below the lip (with the line then back up to the anchor in the cave of course) - i sawed through half my rope there once