We are very sad to see the loss of a Jersey Shore icon , Surf Cub .
I saw this picture on Jersey Joel’s post last night & it struck me for a reason. I spent every summer working & playing there from the time I was 9 years old. I vividly remember walking on that beach for the 1st time after my Dad bought the place. I have all kinds of memories there, great, good, & bad. That’s Life. I personally would love to see the place rebuilt, but that decision is not up to me. My family has been moved by the all the pictures shared by people we know & don’t know. We miss summers there terribly and I personally made my livelihood there, working with some very creative people to do some really cool entertainment events like SurfStock, The Flying Mueller Bros, Saturday Night Disco & Sunday Jam Parties. My fondest memories are from the Teen Nights when my sons were old enough to run them and work on the themes with me. We were all so proud of the place and my Father for creating such a loving & wonderful work place to be in. I use to laugh to myself when people would say you should remodel and make the place more like this place or that place. They didn’t get it. It wasn’t about what the place looked like, it was about the 3 generations of families and beach/club goers who came there. So I guess we’ll see what happens from here. God Bless.Joey Jr.
Please join us at the Planning Board Meeting THIS Tuesday, June 2nd at Village Hall at 7:30 pm
Agenda: FINAL Public Hearing on the Revised Amendment to the Master Plan that was put forth on April 21st (Revised Amendment is attached)
We need your attendance at the next Planning Board meeting on Tuesday. We are close to the end, but we must still attend the meetings and continue to urge our Planning Board to act cautiously when altering our Master Plan. In our opinion, the Revised Amendment is still not appropriate for Ridgewood and will have long term negative consequences.
The new Amendment takes a one-size-fits-all approach to increasing density, offering the same benefits across all zones, regardless of the context or surrounding location — a risky approach that we do not support.
The new Amendment allows for up to 35 units an acre, with affordable for rent units included. While this is indeed an improvement from the 40-50 units put forth in the initial Amendment, in our opinion, this is still too big of a jump from the 12 units per acre that is permitted now and the 22 units per acre average that currently exists in our down town.
Several properties (West Bergen Mental Healthcare and neighboring lots) that were originally identified as suitable for high-density housing in the first amendment have been eliminated from the revised amendment, which puts Ridgewood at risk for legal action for spot zoning.
In the revised amendment, the much larger Ken Smith property has been lumped into the same zone as the smaller Enclave (Sealfon’s) site. These are two very unique properties and their zoning benefits should differ.
Our Village Planner insists that a minimum density (of approximately 35 units per acre) is necessary to economically incentivize developers to develop their properties and build housing, however, a lower density could be awarded that would still allow developers to build and profit. Below is a link to a Letter to the Editor that references developers in HoHoKus that are seeking much lower density than 35 units per acre.
NEW YORK, May 30 (UPI) — Bank of America has been hit with a $30 million fine for violating the rights of accounts owned by U.S. military servicemembers, officials said.
The law, known as the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, seeks to ease financial strain on servicemembers as a mode to help them cope with other stresses brought on by military service.
The law limits how much interest banks can charge on servicemembers’ accounts while they are deployed, and prevents banks from repossessing vehicles and foreclosing homes on soldiers without a court order.
Speaking from his ‘prison’ in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange explains the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty, which would link his home country of Australia with the U.S. economically. “It is mostly not about trade,” Assange says. “Only 5 of the 29 Chapters are about traditional trade.”
JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS: First of all, it is the largest ever international economic treaty that has ever been negotiated, very considerably larger than NAFTA. It is mostly not about trade, only 5 of the 29 Chapters are about traditional trade.
The others are about regulating the internet, and what information internet service providers have to collect, they have to hand it over to companies under certain circumstances, the regulation of labor conditions, regulating the way you can favor local industry, regulating the hospital, health care system, privatization of hospitals, so essentially every aspect of a modern economy, even banking services are in the TPP.
So that is erecting and embedding new ultramodern neoliberal structure over U.S. law and the laws of other countries. And putting it in treaty form.
By putting it in a treaty form, there are 14 countries involved, that means it is very hard to overturn, so if there is a desire, a democratic desire to do it on a different path. For example, to introduce more public transport. Then you can’t easily change the TPP treaty, because you have to go back to the other nations involved.
Now looking at that example, what if the government or a state government decides it wants to build a hospital somewhere, and there is a private hospital has been erected nearby.
Well the TPP gives the constructor of the private hospital the right to sue the government over the expect loss, the loss in expected future profits. This is an expected future loss, this is not an actual loss that has been sustained, this is a claim about the future.
We know from similar instruments where governments can be sued over free trade treaties, that that is used to construct a chilling effect on environmental and health regulation laws. For example, Togo, Australia, Uruguay are all being sued by tobacco company Phillip Morris to prevent them from introducing health warnings on cigarette packaging…
It is not even an even playing field, lets say you were going to let companies, make it easier for companies to sue governments, maybe that is right, maybe the government is too powerful and companies should have the right to sue them in certain circumstances.
But it is only multinationals that get this right. U.S. companies that operate in the U.S. in relation to investments that happen in the U.S. will not have this right.
MAY 31, 2015 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015, 9:38 AM
BY LINDY WASHBURN
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
They were moments of crisis for each family. A newborn who wasn’t breathing was rushed to intensive care. A 15-year-old skier who wiped out on a slope in the Catskills needed surgery to reconstruct his shoulder. A 65-year-old insurance agent who survived a heart attack needed urgent bypass surgery to clear his arteries.
The stress didn’t stop once these medical crises passed, however. Within a few weeks, each family received an unexpected medical bill.
They had been savvy enough to follow their insurers’ rules and choose in-network hospitals to maximize their coverage and minimize their out-of-pocket costs. But one or more of the physicians who took care of them — and over whom they had no choice — did not participate in their insurance network.
The real damage stems from the fact that, subject by subject, the ideologues who designed the Common Core curricula changed what we had by brutally dumbing the content down to the lowest common denominator. They were bent on denuding K-12 instruction of educational content, re populating it with politically-correct claptrap, and refocusing the ‘learning experience’ on process, process, process… This is why you see shining examples of classic literature unaccountably being tossed from high school reading lists and replaced with mundane how-to manuals. Reform math, so reviled locally, is also comfortably piggybacking its way back into the Ridgewood schools by way of the broader push in favor of adoption of Common Core. How the ugly truth of all this can escape the attention or grasp of so many parents of affected students and their well-meaning teachers is itself a mystery. We simply cannot allow re-branded versions of the same curricula to replace the worthless original Common Core versions we are jettisonning. There are simply too many highly-educated and worldly-wise parents, taxpayers and citizens in New Jersey to justify this kind of bureaucratic snow job on our children’s future being pulled off twice in close succession. Wake up, Jersey!!
MAY 31, 2015, 2:25 PM LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015, 2:25 PM
BY LINDA MOSS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
Two men and an accomplice stole two late-model Mercedes-Benz automobiles, apparently left unlocked and with the keys in them by the valet at the Ridgewood Country Club lot in Paramus on Saturday night, according to Borough Police Deputy Chief Robert Guidetti.
Department detectives were investigating the theft of a 2015 S55 four-door black Mercedes and a 2014 S550 white Mercedes sedan, which took place around 7:30 p.m. at the Midland Avenue club, Guidetti said.
Both vehicles had been parked by the club’s valet service, the deputy chief said.
A black car then drove into the club’s lot and two men got out, with each one jumping into one of the Mercedes vehicles, Guidetti said. The suspects then drove off in the two cars, and their accomplice took off in the black car.
“It’s not a carjacking,” Guidetti said. “The cars were parked at the valet … and these guys entered the cars. … They were able to start both cars and drove away.”
The two stolen cars had apparently been left unlocked with the keys in them, the deputy chief said.
“For vehicle theft tips, I will tell you, never leave your keys in a vehicle and always leave your car locked,” Guidetti said.
Paramus issued an alert for the vehicles to surrounding towns, but they had not been found, the deputy chief said.
May 31, 7:36 PM EDT
BY ERICA WERNER AND KEN DILANIAN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Security Agency will lose its authority at midnight to collect Americans’ phone records in bulk, after an extraordinary Sunday Senate session failed to produce an 11th-hour deal to extend the fiercely contested program.
Intelligence officials warned that the outcome amounts to a win for terrorists. But civil liberties groups applauded the demise, at least temporarily, of the once-secret post-Sept. 11 program made public by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, which critics say is an unconstitutional intrusion into Americans’ privacy.
The program is all but certain to be revived in a matter of days, although it also looks certain to be completely overhauled under House-passed legislation that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reluctantly blessed in an about-face Sunday evening. With most senators opposed to extending current law unchanged, even for a short time, McConnell said the House bill was the only option left other than letting the program die off entirely. The Senate voted 77-17 to move ahead on the House-passed bill.
But no final action was expected before Sunday’s midnight deadline after McConnell’s fellow Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul served notice that he would assert his prerogatives under Senate rules to delay a final vote for several days.
“This is what we fought the revolution over, are we going to so blithely give up our freedom? … I’m not going to take it anymore,” Paul declared on the Senate floor, as supporters wearing red “Stand With Rand” T-shirts packed the spectator gallery.
McConnell countered: “We shouldn’t be disarming unilaterally as our enemies grow more sophisticated and aggressive, and we certainly should not be doing so based on a campaign of demagoguery and disinformation launched in the wake of the unlawful actions of Edward Snowden.”
Writing the Declaration of Independence, 1776 by jean Leon Gerome Ferris, 1863-1930. (Photo: World History Archive/Newscom)
COMMENTARY BY
Thomas West
Thomas G. West is Paul Ermine Potter and Dawn Tibbetts Potter professor of politics at Hillsdale College.
Which approach to welfare policy is better for the poor: that of the Founders or that of today’s welfare state?
The more we spend on the poor, the harder it seems for them to attain decent, productive lives in loving families. The federal government has spent $22 trillion on anti-poverty programs since the beginning of the War on Poverty in 1965, but the poverty rate is nearly the same today as in 1969, fluctuating between roughly 11 and 15 percent over that time period.
As I argue in a new essay on “Poverty and Welfare in the American Founding,” these results are bound to continue unless we rethink welfare policy from the perspective of our Founders. Neither the contemporary left nor right in America properly understands their approach.
The left often claims the Founders were indifferent to the poor—suggesting that New Deal America ended callousness and indifference. Indeed, high school and college textbooks frequently espouse this narrative. Many on the right think the Founders advocated only for charitable donations as the means of poverty relief.
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Neither is correct. America always has had laws providing for the poor. The real difference between the Founders’ welfare policies and today’s is over how, not whether, government should help those in need.
The Founders
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin believed government has an obligation to help the poor. Both thought welfare policies should support children, the disabled, widows and others who could not work. But any aid policy, they insisted, would include work-requirements for the able-bodied.
Rather than making welfare a generational inheritance, Franklin thought it should assist the poor in overcoming poverty as expediently as possible: “I am for doing good to the poor.…I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
Moreover, local, rather than federal, officials administered this welfare, since they were more likely to know the particular needs of recipients and could distinguish between the deserving poor (the disabled and involuntarily unemployed) and the undeserving poor (those capable of work but preferring not to).
The Founders sought to provide aid in a way that would help the deserving poor but minimize incentives for recipients to act irresponsibly. They wanted to protect the rights of taxpayers by preventing corruption and abuses in welfare aid.
Above all, the Founders saw the family and life-long marriage as the primary means of support for everyone, rich and poor alike.
Modern Welfare
By the mid-20th century, intellectual opinion began to peel away the stigma attached to the behavioral aspects of poverty, and progressive politicians increased the benefits and number of welfare recipients.
During the New Deal, despite major expansions of welfare programs, the Founders’ approach remained intact at least to this extent: These programs still distinguished between the deserving and undeserving poor—a distinction based on moral conduct.
Until the mid-1960s, free markets, secure property rights, strong family policy and minimal taxation and regulation supported a culture of work and entrepreneurship. But through the rise of modern liberalism’s redefinition of rights and justice, welfare was officially reconceived as a right that could be demanded by anyone in need, regardless of conduct or circumstances.
Among the most destructive features of the post-1965 welfare regime has been its unintentional dismantling of the family. By making welfare wages higher than working wages, the government essentially replaced fathers with a government check. The state became many families’ primary provider.
Even more perverse, for many single mothers, marrying a working man may actually be a financial burden rather than a support because the marriage can diminish government benefits.
Though modern welfare programs grant more benefits to a greater number of individuals than the Founders ever fathomed, the Founders’ approach to welfare policy was effective in providing for the minimal needs of the poor and dramatically reducing poverty over time. Based on today’s living standards, the poverty rate fell from something like 90 percent in the Founding era to 12 percent by 1969.
If the goal of welfare is to provide for those in need while respecting the rights of all, Americans would do well to ponder the Founders’ outlook on welfare as a limited system, concerned with helping the poor who truly are in need and encouraging those who are able to work to leave their poverty behind as soon as possible.
MAY 31, 2015 LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, MAY 31, 2015, 2:43 PM
BY ELISA UNG
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
tonight, CNN
Globe-trotting chef and Leonia native Anthony Bourdain has brought viewers to his home state before, but this time he wanted to do it differently.
“It’s easy enough to sell New Jersey if you’re going to beautiful farmland and attractive bedroom communities and fine dining,” he said in a recent phone interview. “And I thought, you know what? I’m going to make Jersey look awesome by going to all the places that have been most traditionally screwed.”
So for tonight’s episode of “Parts Unknown,” he features the history and people of Camden, Atlantic City and Asbury Park. And he tries to “make even the refineries look somehow magical,” he said. “That was the challenge — to look at what most people make fun of about New Jersey or look down their noses at, and still sell it as an amazing place brimming with potential and beauty, if you bother to look.”
His first stop? A childhood favorite – the hot dog stand Hiram’s in Fort Lee, where he says he still goes a few times a year with his daughter, Ariane, 8.
Ridgewood NJ, Open to the Community! Support the Crew team at “An Evening with Kevin Zraly,” a world-renowned sommelier & author, on Monday, June 1 from 6:30-9:30 p.m. at Chakra Restaurant, 144 West Route 4, Paramus. Explore new wines, sample delicious hors d’oeuvres, mingle with supporters of Ridgewood Crew, as well as fellow wine and food enthusiasts. Tickets are $100 per person. Seating is limited and all tickets are sold in advance. Please reserve early.Proceeds support Ridgewood Crew, a team comprised of 67 RHS students. For any questions, comments, or to order tickets personally, contact: Odila Galer-Noel at [email protected] or Liz Lavin at [email protected].
At May 20 audience, he stressed that educating and raising children in the human values that form the “backbone” of a healthy society is a responsibility that each family has.
BY CNA/EWTN NEWS 05/20/2015
VATICAN CITY — In his general audience, Pope Francis spoke of the essential role parents play in educating their children, a role he said has been usurped by so-called experts who have taken the place of parents and rendered them fearful of disciplining their children.
“If family education regains its prominence, many things will change for the better. It’s time for fathers and mothers to return from their exile — they have exiled themselves from educating their children — and slowly reassume their educative role,” the Pope said May 20.
He gave harsh criticism to the “intellectual critics” that he said have “silenced” parents in order to defend younger generations from real or imagined harm, and he lamented how schools now are often more influential than families in shaping the thinking and values of children.
“In our days, the educational partnership is in crisis. It’s broken,” he said, and he named various reasons for this.
“On the one part, there are tensions and distrust between parents and educators; on the other part, there are more and more ‘experts’ who pretend to occupy the role of parents, who are relegated to second place,” he said.
By Patrick J. Michaels
This article appeared in TownHall.com on May 29, 2015.
Day after day, year after year, the hole that climate scientists have buried themselves in gets deeper and deeper. The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science.
The story is told in a simple graph, the same one that University of Alabama’s John Christy presented to the House Committee on Natural Resources on May 15.
The picture shows the remarkable disconnect between predicted global warming and the real world.
The red line is the 5-year running average temperature change forecast, beginning in 1979, predicted by the UN’s latest family of climate models, many of which are the handiwork of our own federal science establishment. The forecasts are for the average temperature change in the lower atmosphere, away from the confounding effects of cities, forestry, and agriculture.
The blue circles are the average lower-atmospheric temperature changes from four different analyses of global weather balloon data, and the green squares are the average of the two widely accepted analyses of satellite-sensed temperature. Both of these are thought to be pretty solid because they come from calibrated instruments.
“The longer that they wait to admit their overheated forecasts were wrong, the more they are going to harm all of science.”
If you look at data through 1995 the forecast appears to be doing quite well. That’s because the computer models appear to have, at least in essence, captured two periods of slight cooling.
The key word is “appear.” The computer models are tuned to account for big volcanoes that are known to induce temporary cooling in the lower atmosphere. These would be the 1982 eruption of El Chichon in Mexico, and 1992’s spectacular Mt. Pinatubo, the biggest natural explosion on earth since Alaska’s Katmai in 1912.
Since Pinatubo, the earth has been pretty quiescent, so that warming from increasing carbon dioxide should proceed unimpeded. Obviously, the spread between forecast and observed temperatures grows pretty much every year, and is now a yawning chasm.
It’s impossible, as a scientist, to look at this graph and not rage at the destruction of science that is being wreaked by the inability of climatologists to look us in the eye and say perhaps the three most important words in life: we were wrong.
Bill and Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation have been hit with a racketeering lawsuit in Florida court.
The lawsuit, filed by Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, includes a legal request to have the Florida judge seize the private server on which Hillary Clinton and her aides hosted their emails while she served as secretary of state.
Klayman has filed dozens of lawsuits against the Clintons and other prominent politicians.
The racketeering, influenced and corrupt organizations, or RICO, case alleges the former first couple and their family philanthropy traded political favors for donations or generous speaking fees for Bill Clinton while his wife was the nation’s chief diplomat.
“Negotiations by email about influencing U.S. foreign policy or U.S. Government actions to benefit donors to … The Clinton Foundation or sponsors of speaking engagements would not be captured on a U.S. Government email account because her emails would not be with a U.S. Government official,” Klayman said in court documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina told a packed audience that a huge, complex and sometimes corrupt government was “crushing the potential” of Americans.
“That is not hyperbole,” she said. “That is fact.”…
