ksen

Very hectic until a couple of days ago.

ksen

PM me if you ever do post and I'll go ahead and throw a warning your way so you feel like you fit in.

ksen

Put me down for a fiver for a week and a half.

ksen

Thanks Cat, I think GA will become a place that is looked to as a forum people want to talk in.

We have a good bunch people all along the spectrum posting there. I don't think it'll take too much to weed out the troublemakers from both sides. There's no reason we can't have discussion about hard subjects without the "you're a godless miscreant" or "you're a brainwashed believer in a satanic diety" posts.

In my opinion it's all about respect. As a Christian I see us as all created in God's image and as a Christian I better give that some respect. If we treated each other respectfully then 99.99% of the troubles in that, and the other forums, would disappear.

Teshi

Sure. Robert "Fightin' Bob" LaFollette was governor of Wisconsin and congressman from Wisconsin (not at the same time, of course ) during the period from the turn of the century to his death sometime shortly after the end of WWI - I forget exactly when. He was one of the founders of the alas, now defunct, Progressive Party. IIRC they merged into the Republican Party. But their magazine is still being published - The Progressive.

He was extremely popular in Wisconsin for his anti-corporate, egalitarian ways - probably his biggest accomplishment was the 17th amendment to the constitution, but he also started the Teapot Dome investigation. Of course, this, and his opposition to US involvement in WWI, earned him a lot of enemies throughout the rest of the US.

As governor of Wisconsin, he created employee benefits for goverment workers and improved conditions for railroad workers (which had been a very miserable job), established a minimum wage, and fostered city-level governance, among other things.

But the real reason I know who he is is his creation of the Wisconsin Idea, which benefitted me, and is benefitting hundreds of thousands of other Wisconsinites right now, as it has been for a hundred years. It's the idea that the higher education system is really a gigantic state-wide creative laboratory, and that the state goverment and the universities have a symbiotic relationship. It's a broad goal, so it might be helpful to illustrate it with a more specific example: let's say the state is having a problem with pollution in Lake Michigan. The government would fund the universities to study and implement ways of dealing with this. For example, engineering departments might look at the impact of industrial waste and ways of reducing it; the economics department might look at how to create incentives for companies to pollute less; the environmental sciences department might conduct nature surveys to see precisely where and how the environment is affected; the business departments might look at how tourism affects the lake and how the lake affects tourism, etc. etc. This leads to students and professors gaining real-world experience, and local government to gaining workable solutions. It's practical, and it's also a really efficient use of taxpayer dollars, since it kills two birds with one stone - dealing with state government issues and funding public education all at once. Good stuff.

LoneStar

Thanks, Teshi!

Teshi

:thumbs: x 1,000,000

Teshi

No prob. Here are a couple of neat (not to mention, still relevant) speeches by Fightin' Bob:

http://www.uark.edu/depts/comminfo/cambridge/war.html

http://www.wisconsinhistory.org/teac...ancespeech.pdf (warning: pdf file)

Br. Max

all of my dealings with her have involved the appeals forum and have always resulted in a heafty dose of fascism. In fact she was the staff member that upheld a warning where the rules were changed after the fact. IN FACT - the rules were not changed until after I appealed the appeal.

Br. Max

welp will soon see if there is a glimmer of hope for my opinion of CF staff improving.