"ALUMNI DIRT": A Commencement Speech I'd Like To Hear

“Me? Speak at Commencement? No. Impossible.”

“But why not?”

“I might say something funny. Someone might enjoy it. Completely out of line for a Commencement speech.”

“Bosh. Don’t worry. There isn’t a funny bone in you.”

There was more to the conversation, but you get the gist. In a fit of submission, I submitted. It was a ghastly mistake. At least the school said so when they tracked me down afterwards.

In any case, the moment finally arrived. I sauntered gamely to the lectern.

“Students, Parents, Grandparents, Faculty and Administrators, Trustees, Homeless Seeking a Glass of Free Punch,

I have been tasked with the responsibility of boring you all into slack jawed stupors for half an hour or so, and I shall do my best.

When, many years ago, I was badgered into volunteering here on a project to frame mouldering old pictures from the school archives so that the then current crop of promising young scholars could see they actually had predecessors who looked just like them, I commented to my overseer that the school newsletter was sorely lacking in anything worth rea...I mean: Pizzazz. It lacked Pizzazz.

It’s all very well to brag about how many were National Merit Scholars, which team had trounced all others in state competition, to which colleges and universities the graduates were fleeing, who had ponied up for the Alumni Fund and how much, but where was the single thing to which every jaded reader would first turn before all others?

No, not a faculty center-fold. Good grief: Get your minds out of the gutter.

However, since we are already speaking of the gutter, the newsletter really would be perked up with a column called something like “Alumni Dirt”.

What reader could possibly resist the latest on who has been indicted, the salacious details of truly sordid divorces, horrific revelations at trials, and which classmate was incarcerated where?

Imagine if Lizzy, your dear friend of Sophomore year, had achieved international prominence in the serial ax murder industry. Wouldn’t you want to know? For a modest fee, she might consult.

Everyone wondered why her junior year boyfriend hadn't come to the 5th Reunion pig roast she threw at her parents' lake house, until it came out in her trial that, in fact, he had.

And the poor country club. What were they supposed to do with the FBI digging up all the sand traps for numbers 3 through seven? I mean, people had standing reservations for tee times.

Suppose Lizzy was now doing thirty years to life in Sing-Sing. Why, simple alumni solidarity would dictate you drop Lizzy a note now and then. Once every five years or so seems about right: She isn’t going anywhere.

Lizzy always was suspiciously chirpy. Anyone that cheerful has to be an ax murderer. Or will be. You chirpy types: You know who you are.

Say your old friend Moxy who you used to double date with, has brought down the family bank with unauthorized trades, and all she got out of it was a measly $25,000,000 buyout. Wouldn’t you want to know so you could send a sympathy card to her at that absolute hovel she is reduced to in Cannes?

What about your sister’s boyfriend senior year. Is Interpol still looking for him? How much is the reward? Who would have imagined he was going to put a real blade in the guillotine he built in Shop class and go all French Revolution on those smelly community organizers? He certainly had them fooled.

And his sister, Sukie! Who else, I mean really, who else but Sukie would have taken some banged up beer kegs from that pick up bar she bought and turned them into an Iron Maiden? I guess she didn't actually like pick up artists, did she? She took enough of them home, though, according to the prosecutor.

Such is the news which stirs alumni souls.

At this point, our beloved alma mater apparently doesn’t even track, much less report, the most interesting alumni dirt. Why, I had to find out for myself that a classmate’s wife had quote “a really unusual legal situation, and spent the entire first year we were married in jail.” Unquote.

Now that is the sort of stuff to which readers would turn, especially if told that my classmate had managed to keep his mother in the dark about it. She apparently wondered aloud just why his dear wife was never home whenever MaMah called during that first year, but apparently accepted that Snookums was working late, meditating, at book club, or jogging with the goldfish.

As you go forth into the world, stalwart, proud, and bold, please don’t keep all the most interesting stuff to yourself. If you can’t say anything nice about anybody, write it down and send it to us.

Especially if they are our distinguished alumni.

Thank you.

Colleges Deduct 50 SAT Points For Being Asian-American

Gotta love that Race Conscious admissions policy.

Lee's next slide shows three columns of numbers from a Princeton University study that tried to measure how race and ethnicity affect admissions by using SAT scores as a benchmark. It uses the term “bonus” to describe how many extra SAT points an applicant's race is worth. She points to the first column.

African Americans received a “bonus” of 230 points, Lee says.

She points to the second column.

“Hispanics received a bonus of 185 points.”

The last column draws gasps.

Asian Americans, Lee says, are penalized by 50 points — in other words, they had to do that much better to win admission.

“Do Asians need higher test scores? Is it harder for Asians to get into college? The answer is yes,” Lee says.

The Los Angeles Times has the despicable, racist, story.

Washington Post Expose' On Scott Walker

It's ugly, too:

...he had trouble showing up on time for French.

...his father was a Baptist minister.

...On campus (Marquette U in MKE), Walker made a close group of friends, who gathered weekly to...cook dinner on Sunday nights. They remember Walker as fun, upbeat and cautious...

...“Kind. He’s very kind,” said Mary Riordan, a friend who is now a speech pathologist. She could remember four medical emergencies in which Walker volunteered to drive her to the hospital....“Scott carried me eight blocks to his car and drove me to the hospital,” Riordan said.

...“God’s honest truth,” said Quigley, remembering the epic un-hipness of their debates. “I remember him talking about being an Eagle Scout.”

...“I thought that the guy was too nice to ever be successful in politics,” Satran said.

Vicious racist lies. All of them. I hope Walker stands up for what is good and decent and demands a retraction and an apology. Then they can all get together at his house for a Puppy Milkshake Summit.

Read the whole sorry tale here.

Reading Proficiency Rates At Milwaukee Public Schools

Pretty impressive:

Five schools, for example, had not a single pupil score proficient in reading on the state tests, which are administered to students in third through eighth grades, and once in high school, in 10th grade. The state assigned those schools a 0 percent score.
On the other end of the scale, the best reading proficiency score at an 80/80 school was 21 percent at Hartford Avenue University School in MPS. Second (20 percent) was Franklin School, also in MPS. St. Marcus Lutheran was third (19 percent).

Hmmmm....Can't blame underpaid teachers: Milwaukee's teachers' salaries, adjusted for cost of living, are the highest in America. (Hawaii's are the lowest)

Something else is going on. Maybe lousy parents?

It seems to me that the simplest way to improve school outcomes, and reduce violence at the same time, would be to stop subsidizing bastardy, but I guess that would be racist. You get more of whatever you subsidize, though. You want more messed up kids? Subsidize unwed teen 'parenthood'.

Milwaukee's New East Library

Milwaukee has torn down the cruddy old public library building in my old neighborhood and replaced it with a mixed use building. In so doing, they improved the neighborhood, got a nicer building, and added a lot of housing units and parking to the block. Jeramey Jannene has the story in Urban Milwaukee:

The new East Library is only part of the much bigger project occupying the slice of land at the northeast corner of E. North Ave. and N. Cramer St. Legally speaking, the city owns a condominium inside a bigger building. This allows the city to own the library space, and to avoid paying a lease that would have to include taxes it would be paying back to itself. To make the complex ownership structure work, the city gave the land to the competitively-selected developer for free, in exchange for receiving the 16,000 square-foot library condominium grey box for free. The city then invested $3.9 million in building the library out. The developer invested approximately $15 million in the building. The developer had to also pay for a temporary library location.

...The building, which is already open, includes 99 apartments and 6,000 square-feet of yet un-rented retail space. There are 113 underground parking spaces an 40 street-level stalls (tucked under the building) for library patrons and employees....

...Besides the fact that the city gets more tax revenue when it can tax whatever is built above the library, mixed-use libraries have another advantage, they’re substantially cheaper to build. A new, non-tax-paying, 20,000 square-foot facility was estimated to cost $11.7 million to build. The new East Library, at 16,000 sq.-ft., will end up costing the city only $3.9 million — plus property tax revenue will flow to the city.

This seems like a win/win for everyone.

Honolulu could have taken a lesson from this with the new Aiea Library, which sits in the middle of nowhere and has no housing or rental space included. I wonder if satellite libraries will even be needed in 25 years: technology suggests a lot more books will be available online. At least Milwaukee's East Library should be readily convertible into rentable/sellable commercial space if that is true.

Another Public School Taken Over By The Mentally Unbalanced

Insanity, thy name is Public School Official.

It Makes Perfect Sense To Me

After all, if a vivisected, hormonized man is properly considered a woman, why wouldn't a vivisected, hormonized woman be properly considered a man? XX vs XY chromosomes and prior life experiences aside, of course. They don't count in the Liberal Arts, and Liberal Arts trump science any and every day. As we all know, and accept, they should, naturally. Science is just an opinion, while Belief is Truth.

I'm waiting for the President to stand in solidarity with himmer. Anything less would be racist.

Still, I might reconsider allowing my child to attend Wellesley at my expense.

IRS Targeted Those Teaching About The US Constitution

Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranzin the Washington Post:

It is now well known that the IRS targeted tea party organizations. What is less well known, but perhaps even more scandalous, is that the IRS also targeted those who would educate their fellow citizens about the United States Constitution.

According to the inspector general’s report (pp. 30 & 38), this particular IRS targeting commenced on Jan. 25, 2012 — the beginning of the election year for President Obama’s second campaign. On that date: “the BOLO [‘be on the lookout’] criteria were again updated.” The revised criteria included “political action type organizations involved in … educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

...the IRS was “on the lookout,” not for those who preach unlimited executive power, but for those who would teach about constitutional constraints.”

Tar and feathers may be too good for these people, but they will likely end up guzzling champagne and brie.

"Office Of Youth Engagement"

"Office of Youth Engagement"

That says enough, but the larger story is appalling: DC public schools essentially drove a 13 year old piano prodigy out of the system. Didn't matter that she was also an A+ student. Shut down the DC public school system, fire every policy maker, and start over with new people. Most especially cut the bureaucracy by about 75%. For starters.

The shame is that won't happen, because in DC, like too many other public school systems, the students, parents, and the taxpayers exist to serve the system instead of the other way around.

The entire system is supposed to be an office of youth engagement. There is a reason people are home schooling: Parents work for the interest of their child, not the interest of the bureaucracy.

Who Lost The Cities?

Kevin Williamson at National Review Online has some answers which should be pretty obvious.

Here.

David Brat Is Refreshingly Clear About The Nature Of Government

If only more were so, but then they cannot afford to be clear. It might dampen demand.


More here.

White Male Princeton Freshman "Checks His Privilege"

Apparently we white males are supposed to feel guilty about being white and male, although so far as I can figure, only racists and sexists could consider it a crime to be a particular race or sex.

Some commenters shriek and froth at the mouth at his temerity.

More here.

Cold War Recollections

I am about to post the following at another site, in response to a request for people's memories of the Depression and the Cold War. You can access it here.

I remember the duck and cover practice at kindergarten and grade school. We would all run into the windowless storage closet, which I suspect was built for that purpose, sit cross legged, bend over as far as we could with our arms over our heads, and wait for Mr. Khrushchev to explode a bomb over our school.

I remember stealing the first aid kit from the school bus when I was about 6 or 7, and hiding it in my closet, and filling wine bottles with water and putting them in the pump room, because that had a concrete ceiling. My parents didn't find them for months, and didn't mind when they did. They weren't into preparing, tho.

One of my better friend's parents, did, though. They built a fallout shelter in grandma's basement, which was used mostly for storing non prepping gear. I don't remember any food or water in there. Might have been.

I remember the two Nike missile sites, one in downtown Milwaukee by the lake, and the other in River Hills, which was another suburb nearby. Sometimes we would drive past one or the other and see the white missiles pointing up into the sky.

Mostly they lay down in concrete troughs to protect them. They were intended to be fired if incoming Soviet bomber fleets were over Wisconsin, and were to be exploded about 60 miles out, in the air among the fleet before they could get to Milwaukee.

It was years later that I found out that Nikes carried nuclear warheads, so we were planning on airbursts over Wisconsin (and probably over or near smaller cities like Oshkosh, which were more or less 60 miles out) in order to protect industrial Milwaukee.

So thinking back, we had nuclear weapons deployed in downtown Milwaukee, and in the suburbs, planned to be used over our own state. They were all over the country, of course, so long as there was a chance the Soviets would deliver bombs via bombers, rather than ICBMs.

I remember TV ads of Khrushchev pounding his shoe on a table, and the voice over saying "This man is saying "We are going to bury you."

I remember the Lyndon Johnson ad against Goldwater (which IIRC only ran once), of a little girl playing in a field full of flowers, picking the petals off a daisy, suddenly replaced by a mushroom cloud, with a voice over saying that we needed to love each other, or else. Vote for Johnson.

You can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Id_r6pNsus

I remember my friends and I turning the big crawl space under our summer porch into one of our numerous forts. I drilled a hole in the ceiling and ran an extension cord up to an outlet on the porch so we would have a lamp, and we used a loose board for a spy port and gun port for watching for Russians coming down the road.

We also had rock fights on the beach. One of my friends had a Nazi helmet his father brought back from the war, with a bullet hole on the right side and a small outward dent on the left side, which we would trade around during the rock fights. One time we were lobbing rocks/grenades at each other over a hedge and I had no sooner gotten the helmet on than a particularly big grenade landed right on top.

I still have a small scar on my forehead from where a friend's little sister hit me with a rock. I got two stitches for that one. I don't remember any parental admonitions about more rock fights, though. We were all allowed to do pretty much as we pleased.

We picked up a lot of planks by beach combing, and one time dug a big pit in the sandy soil of the vacant lot next door, covered it with driftwood planks and then newspaper, and covered it all up except for an entrance. It made a great bomb shelter, if not easily defended.

We were very big on rock fights, and playing army. Between the recent World War, the Korean War, and the Cold War, war was on the kids' minds.

I remember sitting on the kitchen counter when I was 9, home alone with my two older sisters, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and my sister telling us that Milwaukee was 35th on the list for the Russians to bomb. I have no idea if she was right, but I remembered.

Law Professor Tyler Cowen Pepper Sprayed At George Mason University

A little bizarre. Cowen blogs at Volokh Conspiracy, which was recently picked up by the Washington Post. I wonder if this was random, or if he was targeted. It sounds like the latter, in which case my guess is that the assailant is somewhat left of center. In any case, I hope he gets more than a slap on the hands.

Booth Tarkington's "Penrod"

“Penrod” was a childhood role model of mine. Booth Tarkington’s Penrod, that is, who lived in Indiana some time after the horse died, but before the stable was turned into a garage. Penrod was a boy after my own heart, or perhaps the other way around.

There is no finer exposition on American boyhood -nor any funnier- than “The Great Tar Fight”, which took up a couple chapters in Tarkington’s book “Penrod”. It is well worth the time to read. I read it many times as a boy, and as a man it still holds up as wonderful American literature about boyhood. Every 11 or twelve year old boy should read “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “Penrod”, and “Penrod and Sam”.

I would add, as was added to my own reading list, anything by Ernest Thompson Seton, founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Most especially “Rolf in the Woods” and “Two Little Savages”, both of which would in their day have been categorized as “morally instructive novels for adolescent youth”. Rather than beat boys over the head with “Thou shalts” and “Thou shalt nots” Seton let lessons flow by osmosis from his pen to his young readers.

Penrod was perhaps more subversive than Seton’s characters, but still moral, and very much a boy in an un-PC day. The next generation would be the better for having read all those books.

"No Guns" Stickers Protect Illinois Schools

Illinois schools are putting up "No Guns" signs to ward off evil. If only we had known sooner how easy it is to keep homicidal nuts with guns out of schools:

The image can be frightening, Byrne said, “but if it keeps the world safer, that’s OK. The No. 1 thing we do for kids in general is keep their school safe...If it’s reasonable to tell people this is a safe, no-gun zone, then we’ll do it.”

What a shame that Sandy Hook and Columbine didn't have these stickers in place before nuts with guns killed people.

Guns are also banned at parades and festivals, so expect to see these talismans protecting such venues as well. Apparently churches too, whether they want to be gun free or gun protected: The legislature has decreed.

Now all the homicidal maniacs will look at these talismans and go elsewhere, because they know that the last place they want to shoot up is a place where they know that no one else will be armed.

All this time...so easy. If only we had known.

Common Core Proponent: "the children belong to all of us"

Proponents of Common Core standards in education are at least open in their belief about our subservient nature:

Paul Reville, the former secretary of education for Massachusetts and a Common Core supporter, said...“An overwhelming majority of teachers are saying this is something...that makes sense.”

Reville continued, “Again, the argument about where it came from I think privileges certain sort of fringe voices about federalism and states’ rights.

"Privileges" fringe types who think the federal government ought to submit to the contract by which the states created and delegated powers to the federal government? Privileges fringe types who have the anti-social belief that they ought to directly control the schools for which their taxes pay, without having to persuade benevolent and all-wise bureaucrats in Washington to allow them to run schools as they believe proper for the collective's children? Those fringe types?

“Why should some towns and cities and states have no standards or low standards and others have extremely high standards when the children belong to all of us and would move [to different states in their educational lives]?”

How about because children are not the property of the collective, Benito? How about because when the federal government violates the constitution in order to impose federal standards, no matter how bad those standards are, no matter how suffocating the paperwork is, no matter how much money the system takes away from educating children and shoves into the pockets of test companies' pockets, there will be no escape? And how about because that is exactly what the collectivists are touting as a benefit: There will be no escaping their system, no matter where the parents take the collective's children? How about because fascism is anti-American? How about because there is exactly nothing in that radical fringe document called the US Constitution aka your favorite toilet paper, which empowers you to fund education or influence education in any way whatsoever?

But critics such as Lindsey Burke, a Will Skillman Fellow in Education Policy at The Heritage Foundation who has studied the standards, said the initiative is about federal funding and centralizing education rules.

That is indisputable: The proponents claim these as features.

“But most concerning, Common Core removes the ability of parents and teachers to direct academic content and will have a homogenizing effect on the educational choices available to families,” Burke said.

The collective's children shall be properly indoctrinated, as the Collective's rulers decree. 'There will be no escape from the Collective Wisdom of the State', quoth Benito.

But Jennifer Davis, co-founder and president of the National Center on Time and Learning who moderated the panel at CAP, told CNSNews.com that teachers are “truly embracing” Common Core.

“On the teacher side, I mean, all of the work were doing all over the country we’re finding teachers truly embracing and knowing that Common Core is important for their children and for their future in their schools,” Davis said, adding at one point, “It takes a village” to get this kind of education reform accomplished.

"this kind of education reform": yes, indeed, it does need a collective to get this kind of 'reform' accomplished. And once again, fascists like Benito Mussolini would have approved whole heartedly. Neither children nor their parents shall be allowed the anti-social option. No one shall escape the All Seeing Wisdom of the Village-State.

No one, because we all belong to Village-State.

All of us.

Submission is Freedom.

Some New Zealand Schools End Playground Rules

Apparently with good results.

Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don't cause bedlam, the principal says.

The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.

Principal Bruce McLachlan rid the school of playtime rules as part of a successful university experiment.

"We want kids to be safe and to look after them, but we end up wrapping them in cotton wool when in fact they should be able to fall over."...

"When you look at our playground it looks chaotic. From an adult's perspective, it looks like kids might get hurt, but they don't."

Fancy that. I wish this idea would run amok here.

And let's abolish zero-tolerance policies while at it. They are anti-American at their very core. Unless, of course, you think America is all about training children to become docile drones in a police state.