Guns From the USS Arizona and the USS Missouri

Matt Carden of The Carden Chronicles asked me to disseminate this information, and I'm happy to do so. First, from azcentral.com:

Arizona has big plans in the works to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7 - so big they have to be brought in by train.

The U.S. Navy has granted Secretary of State Ken Bennett permission to indefinitely**house two World War II warship guns - weighing 70 and 140 tons - in front of the state Capitol. Bennett will soon begin trying to raise up to $500,000 in private funds to transport the two guns from Virginia and Maryland, clean them up and display them...

Bennett originally wanted just the one gun, but military officials were hesitant to give him the last USS Arizona gun. Instead, they offered him a 68-foot gun from the USS Missouri, the ship that was the site of the Japanese surrender that ended World War II.

"We thought about it ... and I said, 'Forget this,' " Bennett said. " 'This is Arizona.' "

So Bennett came back with a new offer to take both guns and position them around the items the state already has from the USS Arizona, as bookends representing the beginning and end of the war.

Next, from Matt's site:

Although the website (http://gunstosalutethefallen.com/) is under construction and is not set up for contributions yet, checks made payable to AZ SOS Salute The Fallen Project can be sent to 1700 W. Washington Street 7th Floor, Phoenix, AZ 85007.

Doing it without tax money is the right way to go. Let's all chip in!

A Perfect Description of Candidate Obama

He was a typical hothouse product of our self-satisfied liberal elite culture: untested, insulated from reality, but marinated in the intoxicating certainty that the liberal consensus he represented was the key to enlightenment and prosperity — provided, of course, that those angry, narrow-minded people who “cling to guns or religion” would get out of the way. link

How anyone could have expected a result at all different from the pathetic presidency we've had to endure for the past two-plus years is beyond me. Transformational? Light-bringer? Uniter? Post-racial? Post-partisan? Fantasies, all. Clearly those on the left believe in religion, too, as "faith" was obviously a component in their election choice.

Teachers Union Honesty

An op-ed from the Washington Examiner:

American Federation of Teachers officials have disavowed an internal report after it was posted on the union's website following its annual conference, embedded on each of its 19 pages with the union's logo and signed by a union official.

The report, titled "How Connecticut Defused the Parent Trigger," was replaced on AFT's website with a note saying "we have received complaints about these materials and have removed them because they do not represent AFT's position."

Education activist RiShawn Biddle copied the report before it was removed from the AFT website. The report describes in detail AFT's strategy for subverting school reform legislation in Connecticut, a strategy that relied greatly on deceiving legislators and interested parents.

Who's surprised, anyone? Anyone?

Evidence That Being An "Academic" Means Losing Your Mind

From The Scotsman:

STUDENTS should be able to sell their kidneys for tens of thousands of pounds to pay off university debts, according to a Scots academic.

Sue Rabbitt Roff believes making it legal to sell the body part would boost the number of organs available to save lives and help students struggling with money.

If you're looking for a specific point at which you can determine that a college education just isn't worth the cost, I think Ms. Roff has just provided it for you.

And if you're thinking about being a professor, there will be plenty of Ms. Roffs for you to work with. Enjoy!

Going Too Far?

Trying to legislate morality often doesn't work, should we expect different results when trying to legislate common sense?

Missouri has passed a law making it illegal for state teachers to friend their students on Facebook.

College Clubs

Should clubs on campus be able to exclude people? Would the College Democrats really want to put up with being compelled to have Tea Party members?

A federal appeals court has ruled against Christian groups who challenged a nondiscrimination policy at California state universities...

The groups, which are restricted to Christian members, argued the policy violated their religious freedom.

The appeals court disagreed but said there was concern about whether the policy is evenly applied to all groups. The case was sent back to a lower court to decide that issue.

This is why student clubs should be self-supporting and should not be funded by mandatory fees.

Teacher Suspended For Blog Post Back On The Job

Remember that teacher I wrote about last February, the one who said such foul things about her students on her blog and created such a firestorm? Well, she's back, because "she has a legal right to her job":

An English teacher suspended over blog postings in which she referred to students as "disengaged, lazy whiners" was reinstated because she has a legal right to her job, but dozens of students have already asked to be kept out of her classes, school officials said Wednesday.

Requests from students who ask not to be placed in Natalie Munroe's English and debate classes will be honored, Central Bucks East High School Principal Abe Lucabaugh said at a news conference. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports ( http://bit.ly/n5A9lz) that about 60 such requests have been made so far.

In a statement, the district said Munroe was reinstated because she has a legal right to her job. The district also said it would continue to monitor the environment at the school.

She wasn't as discreet on her blog as I am on mine, that's for sure. All teachers sometimes think what she wrote, but most of us know better than to post it online.

I wonder if there's anyone out there, perhaps a union supporter, who actually wants their kid in her class. Just tossing that idea out there....

Government Transparency In California

You still don't believe me when I tell you we're screwed here in California?

The California Assembly says the public has no right to see lawmakers' current office budgets and spending projections, documents that could show whether punishment is doled out for key votes.

Assemblyman Anthony Portantino raised the issue last month, saying that his budget was slashed shortly after casting the lone Democratic vote in the Assembly against this year's controversial budget.

Portantino, The Bee and other media outlets submitted Legislative Open Records Act requests seeking, among other things, current office budgets for each Assembly member and any changes to them.

The answer came Monday: No way.

Will Passengers Still Have To Undress?

Last week in Las Vegas I went through the nudie scanner, but reported that the output has been modified from naked images to a Gumby-like drawing with questionable areas marked with dots. As I wrote then, I saw my output and the scanner identified the screw in my knee. Thankfully, no one was stupid enough to ask to see my scar.

The Boston Herald reports that TSA employees at Logan will be trained to look for subconscious cues as they question travelers:

But security experts wonder whether Transportation Safety Administration agents are up to the challenge after an embarrassing string of blunders — including patting down a 95-year-old grandmother in Florida and making her remove her adult diaper and frisking a 3-year-old girl who screamed “stop touching me” at a checkpoint in Tennessee.

“I’m not convinced that the TSA has good enough people to make the Israeli approach work on a large scale,” said Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who has followed the TSA at his blog, Instapundit.com.

But he noted, “Almost anything would be an improvement over the clown show we’ve got now"...

Under the SPOT program, as passengers hand over their boarding passes and identification, specially trained agents will ask three to four questions — from “Where have you been?” to “Do you have a business card?” and “Where are you traveling?” — while looking for “micro expressions,” such as lack of eye contact, that might hint at nefarious intent.

Suspicious individuals will be pulled aside for more questioning, full-body scans and pat-downs. If the encounter escalates, agents will call in state police.

If passengers pass that test, will they still have to undress and be x-rayed? If so, how many terrorists does TSA expect to catch with this new program that they aren't currently catching?

The article also brings up the civil libertarian angle regarding profiling. I'm all for profiling. I'd rather Muslim males aged 15-55 traveling on one way tickets with passports from certain countries, or even people who look shady, receive a little more attention than young children or grannies in wheelchairs or Medal of Honor winners anyway.

Christianity, A Social Safety Net, and Public Indebtedness

I've said many times, specifically here, that social safety nets are not "Christian charity", that having government programs for the poor may be good earthly policy but they can in no way be justified as Christian.

So it was with great interest that I read this article, Whom Would Jesus Indebt?:

It is immoral to ignore the needs of the least of these. But it’s also immoral to ’serve’ the poor in ways that only make more people poor, and trap them in poverty longer. And it’s immoral to amass a mountain of debt that we will pass on to later generations. I even believe it’s immoral to feed the government’s spending addiction. Since our political elites have demonstrated such remarkably poor stewardship over our common resources, it would be foolish and wrong to give them more resources to waste....The religious left has monopolized the language of morality and justice when it comes to matters of government spending. If we should ask, ‘What would Jesus cut?’, then we should also ask ‘Whom would Jesus indebt?’ and ‘Whom would Jesus make dependent on government?’ Since the poor are the first ones hurt by a damaged economy and low unemployment (sic), there is a deeply moral case to be made for serving ‘the least of these’ through policies that promote a flourishing economy and culture.

The writer certainly has valid points.

Pros and Cons of Standardized Testing

As he so often does, Mike at EIA distills a difficult and often emotion-laden topic to its core:

I’ll begin with an admission: standardized tests are overused, and misused, in our public schools. Test critics are correct to note the limitations of such tests, and they are right to be suspicious of efforts to apply them to evaluations for which they were never intended.

That being said, the prominence of standardized testing didn’t spring into being out of nothingness. There is a reason people have taken hold of an imperfect measure of school quality and run with it. And the Save Our Schools March itself helped illustrate why...

Cody said the event “accomplished some important things.” He thought ”everyone who participated felt a great sense of energy and power as a result of taking a positive action” and “made a real mark on the consciousness of the education community.” Strauss also asked about the low turnout.

Not to belabor the obvious, but what Singer, Strauss, Cody and others are doing in the wake of the march is evaluating its quality. Popular measures include turnout, media coverage, demonstrated enthusiasm of the crowd, and comparing results to previously stated goals.

In other words, there was a desire to find an empirical standard by which to measure the success or failure of the march...

The self-evaluation by Cody is similar to what we hear about public school performance all the time from people employed by the system...

Calling a school successful because of high reading and math scores on a standardized test may be a flawed method of evaluation. But is it any more flawed than calling a school successful “because we say so?”

I play Devil's Advocate all the time with teachers--actually I don't, because I actually support the idea behind standardized testing. When discussing the issue I always remind my fellow teachers that tests came about because of public pressure through the legislature; the public lost confidence in what we were doing. The news and talk-show hosts didn't create this wagon, they just jumped aboard.

Mike is right: tests are often misused (and that needs to stop), and we do have to have some objective measure of how students, teachers, and schools are performing. Both sides--administrators who claim only to want to "help" teachers by using tests for evaluation, and teachers who "just want to teach"--need to understand that "trust me" isn't going to work anymore. Trust is earned, not merely given.

I Was Supposed To Leave For Iceland Today

Canceling that trip was, and remains, the right decision. Despite my progress I still would have a very difficult time doing many of the things I'd planned--hiking all over Heimaey, exploring the Thingvillir, and climbing the stairs in the tower of the Hallgrimskirkje, for example. It would have been a string of disappointments.

Of course, it's still a disappointment, as Icelandair is run by rat-bastards.

I Just Want To Remind Everyone About That Whole Civility Thing

You remember that, right? Where people who get heard, especially politicians, should stop using martial terminology because it might lead to some congresswoman's getting shot in the head, you remember that, right?

Right?

Update, August 2, 2011: Only people on the right seem to notice this. It's not like the MSM is going to point out its own faults and start covering this angle, as they'd be, to use a martial metaphor, massacring their own people:

So flashforward to this week. Tom Friedman — who knows a bit about Hezbollah — calls the tea partiers the “Hezbollah faction” of the GOP bent on taking the country on a “suicide mission.” All over the place, conservative Republicans are “hostage takers” and “terrorists,” “terrorists” and “traitors.” They want to “end life as we know it on this planet,” says Nancy Pelosi. They are betraying the Founders, too. Chris Matthews all but signs up for the “Make an Ass of Yourself” contest at the State Fair. Joe Nocera writes today that “the Tea Party Republicans can put aside their suicide vests.” Lord knows what Krugman and Olbermann have said.

Then last night, on the very day Gabby Giffords heroically returns to cast her first vote since that tragic attack seven months ago, the vice president of the United States calls the Republican party a bunch of terrorists.

No one cares. I hate the “if this were Bush” game so we’re in luck. Instead imagine if this was Dick Cheney calling the Progressive Caucus (or whatever they’re called) a “bunch of terrorists” on the day Giffords returned to the Congress. Would the mainstream media notice or care? Would Meet the Press debate whether this raises “troubling questions” about the White House’s sensitivity? Would Andrea Mitchell find some way to blame Sarah Palin for Dick Cheney’s viciousness? Would Keith Olbermann explode like a mouse subjected to the Ramone’s music in Rock and Roll High School? Something inside me hidden away shouts, “Hell yes they would!”

Update #2, August 3, 2011: I could almost give the LA Times credit for publishing this, even if it is only on their blog:
Vice president's reference to opponents as 'terrorists' deserves condemnation
The author is too clever by half, though, spending 2/3 of the post attacking former Vice President Cheney and then saying the equivalent of "Haha, fooled you, it was really Biden who said this!" Of course, most people will have stopped reading it by the time they get to that punchline, having gotten the wrong message.

Maybe the author isn't too clever by half, but actually planned it that way?

Update #3, August 3, 2011: Here's an O'Reilly clip showing plenty "civil" liberals calling Tea Partiers "terrorists" or worse.

A Triumphant Return

I did not wade ashore for the newsreels, there was no parade to announce my entrance, and young girls did not toss rose petals into the air before me, but today I made my first visit to the gym since my accident over 3 months ago.

It felt good.

I discussed it with my physical therapist last week. He said it was OK, but warned me that even on upper body exercises I would not be able to do near as much as what I think I should be able to do or want to do. He made sure I understood that I should try for repetitions and not weight, and that's what I did.

The moment of truth came on the leg press. My left leg has atrophied so much that not only is it visibly smaller than my right leg, but it's almost useless as an appendage--my right leg has been doing all the work. So I adjusted the machine, set it for 10 pounds, sat down, lifted my left leg into position, and pushed. The plate went forward! After a few reps I added 5 pounds and tried it out, and kept adding 5 pounds and trying it out until I reached a weight that didn't seem excessive and allowed me to do several reps--30 pounds.

I kept the workout short; I think I was out on the floor for only 45 minutes or so, and in addition to the leg press got in light workouts on the major upper-body muscle groups. I'm home now, enjoying that weakness that comes from a good workout.

I look forward to going back, perhaps even tomorrow.

Here's a look at my bleach-white chicken legs. The left leg is much smaller, even though the knee is still swollen over 14 weeks later:


And if, in that picture, you happened to notice the garbage can that I've had forever and a day, well, here's a better view of it:
It's somehow appropriate....

One Of The Many Stupid Ideas To Come Out of Ed Schools

There are so many, to which one, you might ask, am I referring? Differentiation:

To differentiate instruction means to provide a different learning experience for every individual student in the class. Perhaps there is a student who is just learning English in your class. And perhaps that student sits next to another who wants to have an in-depth discussion about Shakespeare. Should these two students prove difficult to teach at once, a normal person might consider what the root problem is -- that they shouldn't be in the same class. But the wise education bureaucrat knows that any problem here must be the teacher's -- he must not have differentiated his instruction enough.

Not to worry, it's entirely possible to teach "algebra" (however a non-math person wants to define "algebra") to someone who doesn't understand fractions.

Hat tip to Joanne for the link above.

"President For Life" of a Teachers Union

I think "President For Life" has a nice, Latin American sound to it, don't you?

The most powerful woman in Mexico carries $5,000 Hermes purses and can make or break a presidency.

She's head of the nation's principal teachers union, the largest syndicate in Latin America, and once gave Hummers as gifts to loyal teachers.

Elba Esther Gordillo commands the patronage of more than 1.5 million teachers, and in election years, that means more than 1.5 million votes. Almost every political party courts her...

Then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari anointed Gordillo in 1989 as president of the National Syndicate of Education Workers, or SNTE, after she'd spent years as a tireless and fiercely loyal climber in the party and the union.

In 2007, at a closed-door meeting protected by private guards, the union leadership purportedly made Gordillo "president for life." A dissident group of unionized teachers has been threatening ever since to denounce her to the International Labor Organization for abuse of office.

Nothing fishy here. Let's see if we can find something juicy in another part of the article:

Her union has not had to open its books to the public; its finances, including Gordillo's salary, are kept private. However, there are growing demands by critics and some politicians that the organization undergo an audit. Gordillo said that she'd be happy to have the finances inspected, one day, but that she won't do so under pressure.

Why should they? After all, shouldn't anyone be able to carry a $5,000 Hermes handbag without scrutiny?

Hat tip to Larry Sand of the California Teachers Empowerment Network for the link.

The Soft Bigotry of Low Expectations

When your teachers care about you so much that they help you cheat on state tests because they don't think you can learn, what exactly is it that they care about?

MTV

What a difference 30 years makes.

This Monday, August 1, MTV celebrates its 30th birthday. It might as well be the 30th birthday of KMET. Remember KMET? Of course you don't. It's an old Los Angeles classic-rock radio station. And it's dead. Dead just like radio. Dead just like MTV. The revolution is long over, and MTV is just another in a long line of corporate stooges trotting out corporate stooge bands trying to pass themselves off as something anti-establishment. It’s filled with a bunch of reality nothingness celebrating a life of consumerism. The "M" used to stand for "music." Now it stands for "meaningless." EmpTV. Empty. It's all one self-conscious, soulless bore.

Ah, but on August 1, 1981, it was magic. Nothing but '80s video goodness and the whole world in front of us. Big hair, padded shoulders, and lots of guitar hooks. Here are the first 10 videos played that day in order. Let the good times roll.

I remember visiting my aunt and uncle in San Jose that summer, and marveling at that new channel they had on cable. It was heaven. The link lists the first 10 videos. I knew the first two (had a trivia question about them a few months back!) but don't even recognize the 3rd, 5th, or 8th songs. I wouldn't have guessed most of them for MTV's first season; The Pretenders' Brass In Pocket, for example, came out in 1979, and had pretty much been played into the ground by the time MTV rolled around.

You'd never know it today, but back then, MTV was something very special.

What A Freakin' Whiner!

Students of mine know the funny sound I make when students whine about something; it sounds something like dee-tee-tee-boo-poo-poo. Well, if I encountered this woman in person and she started talking, I'd raise my voice an octave or two, give her a sad face, and say dee-tee-tee-boo-poo-poo:

We have become victims of the Tyranny of 87. This is not a reference to the years immediately preceding the French Revolution of 1789. I am referring to July 2011 in the United States of America, the greatest democracy in the world. Or so I thought.

The Tyranny of 87 is the bizarre, surreal, but all too real situation we are in right now in the midst of perhaps the most significant and economically turbulent issue that has been before Congress in decades: the raising of the debt ceiling.

The tyranny is coming from the 87 members of Congress from the tea party caucus, whose selfish and irresponsible demands during the debt ceiling negotiations may very well mean either outright default or what could be even worse and too late to avoid -- the downgrade of the country's gold standard AAA credit rating. What is worse, these 87 little tyrants have no clear understanding of the fallout of either scenario.

She's got her panties in such a bunch, I can't help but wallow in schadenfreude. She's horrified--horrified!--that some Americans actually expect the government to spend less money and live within its means! Her disdain is apparent throughout, and yet in the last sentence quoted she even notches it up a bit by questioning their intelligence. I mean, smart people like her just know what's best for us rubes!

Sorry, lady, that ain't how it works anymore.

But what can you expect from someone like this?

Maria Cardona is a Democratic strategist, a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a former senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, and former communications director to the Democratic National Committee.

I could almost feel sorry for her, if I weren't mocking her so much.

Cute Picture of the Day