Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Trains? Oh yeah…..and other tidbits….

In keeping with what has become the typical ‘walking-back’ of grand projections by government agencies, or even more likely, their highly prized ‘consultants,’ we pass along this recent update on the outlook for Amtrak service to Brunswick.  Note, of course, if you read the article, that the decline in outlook is because of selfish Brunswick residents, who have graciously provided an alibi for the usual suspects and their typically overblown sales jobs.

For a few years now, official bloviators have been promising 35,000 visitors a year to Brunswick, or an average of 100 per day, via trains from Boston.  Looks like that will have to be scaled back to 20,000 or fewer.  Lots of credibility here from all fronts, at least if you believe government agency spokespersons.

From the Forecaster: 

Update: Maintenance facility delay means fewer Amtrak Downeaster trips between Portland and Brunswick

We’re too worn out from fall yard clean up chores to comment at length on the news contained herein, with the following exceptions:

According to Quinn, a preliminary schedule has northbound trains passing through Freeport just before 12:30 p.m. and 10 p.m. Trains heading south from Brunswick will stop in Freeport just after 7 a.m. and 1:30 p.m.

Are you kidding?  Are these times supposed to make sense from any point of view?

He (Wayne Davis, chairman of the rail-advocacy group TrainRiders/Northeast) also expressed concern about the impact of decreased service on the Brunswick business community, especially new businesses at Brunswick Station that were expecting more than two daily round trips.

We’re trying our best to recall the “new businesses” at Brunswick Station, and all we come up with business-wise is Scarlet Begonia’s, Byrnes Irish Pub, and Park Row Interiors, none of which really qualify as ‘new businesses.’  If any of these chose their current location because they believed customers would come to Brunswick in droves by train from Boston to patronize their business, they have their collective heads up their collective…well, you get our drift.

Oh, we know, there’s the recently opened Mid-Coast walk-in clinic, and the orthopedic medical practice.  Are we supposed to believe they made their decision to open because of expected train passengers from Boston?  We were born at night, but not last night, to use the old bromide.

Look – it’s very simple; government agencies, their enablers, their consultants, and their assorted Kool-Aid sippers are all to willing to sell us pigs-in-a-poke, bills-of-goods, and fantasy land dreamscapes. 

It’s what they do, and it’s why we are at the brink of economic collapse from which there is no escape.

Teacher Pay

You already know where we stand on this subject.

That doesn’t mean we can’t burden you with our views yet again.

The most frequent shibboleth we hear on this subject is that ‘teachers are underpaid.’  Our view is that SOME teachers are UNDERPAID, and SOME teachers are OVERPAID.

in other words, we believer firmly that union contracts that reduce all teachers to a homogeneous group of nameless, faceless ‘members’ are an affront to the concept of professionalism, and more importantly, mock the very concept of teacher ‘excellence.’

We’ve said it once, and we’ll say it again: any system that pays the very worst teachers the same as the very best teachers is unfair, unjust, and an insult to those who teach our children.  We cannot, for the life of us, understand how the vast majority of ‘educators’ have allowed themselves to be roped into such an arrangement.

And until they extract themselves from said arrangement, their protestations and equivocations will fall upon deaf ears at these offices.

Enough for now.  Here’s a recently published commentary on the subject.  Form your own opinions.

As for us, we will not waver from our conviction that the teachers’ loyalty to their unions and their anti-education agenda is their own worst enemy.  We will not change our opinion until the teachers’ change their allegiance.

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