In Praise of the Great Leader!

The lyrics are here (there were two songs) if you have the stomach for it. Now, I know the President didn't have anything to do with this, but when I saw this, it literally sent a chill down my spine. This is how you build up a cult of personality. We do NOT do this kind of thing in America!

As an adult, fine, sing whatever you want, you have the freedom to do so. But to teach children this kind of thing in school is just plain wrong. Music has power, it conveys emotions very effectively.

We teach children songs to impress upon them that some things are worthy of respect or worship. We teach them to sing about our country, and our freedoms because we have reverence for them. At Church we teach them to sing praise to God because we reverence Him.

We do not worship our leaders in this country!

We do not bow to kings or presidents. All men are created equal. This is not the Soviet Union, and this is not North Korea. Leaders come and go, we revere the freedoms and ideas upon which our nation was founded, not whomever happens to have won the last election.

Just two more points:

1. Whoever did this is completely ignorant of history at best, and insane at worst and should not be anywhere near children.
2. This is showing up almost nowhere on the news. Can you imagine the uproar if kids were taped singing a song praising President Bush or the Iraq war?
3. Ok, three points. Maybe we didn't need to worry about the President's address to school children, maybe we need to worry about which teachers have complete access to our kids every Monday - Friday for 6 - 8 hours.

Is this the next song they'll learn?

Finally, a Harmless Jihad . . . or . . . Why Bilingual Education is Important

Thank you FailBlog.org

One Man's Crap is Another Man's Treasure

Imagine spending seven years collecting rare specimens in the jungle to help write your doctorate dissertation -- only to have the university cleaning crew throw your collection away.

This happened to poor Daniel Bennett of Leeds University in the UK. The Daily Mail has the story here.

The odd thing is what he spent 7 years collecting:

A university has apologised to a scientist for throwing away his treasured collection of lizard [feces].

Graduate biologist Daniel Bennett, who spent seven years combing inhospitable jungles to amass his unique hoard, was told the 77lb bag had been thrown out during a lab clear-out. . .

Leeds University bosses admitted the gaffe, saying in a statement: 'The loss of these samples was an unfortunate mistake. They were thrown away in error because they were in an unmarked bag.'

My first thought was "lizard what?" followed closely by "seven years?!?!" followed by "77 LBS!!!"

What a load of crap! . . . Literally! Mr. Bennett was really upset:

Mr Bennett said: 'To some people it might have been just a bag of lizard s***, but to me it represented seven years of painstaking work searching the rainforest with a team of reformed poachers to find the [feces] of one of the world's largest, rarest and most mysterious lizards.'

'Whether it was the largest collection of lizard s*** in the world is uncertain. . . [but] Its loss left me reeling and altered the course of my life forever,' he told the Times Higher Education Supplement.

Mr Bennett said he had turned down an offer of £500 in compensation by the university and intended to 'see them in court'.

I sympathize with both sides here. I have a doctorate, and would have really been upset had anyone destroyed my materials while I was working on it. . . .

On the other hand, what is a cleaning crew supposed to do when they find an unmarked 77lb bag of crap sitting in a laboratory?

I think the lesson we can learn from this is two-fold:

• First: One man's crap really is another man's treasure, and
• Second (and of admittedly limited utility for most of us) Always, and I mean always, clearly and legibly label your giant bags of crap.

If this post saves even one giant bag of rare animal droppings from being thrown out, then all my work will have been worth it.

PS: Not to worry, the university says he will get his degree on time

Would You Visit This Family Therapist?

I ran across this story a while ago, but all the papers are running updates on it today. A woman in San Diego is trying to pay for a Master's degree.

So far, so good. It's how she's raising the money that's unusual. In order to pay for a degree in Marriage and Family Therapy, she's auctioning off her virginity. Talk about a mental disconnect somewhere. Who is going to listen to a marriage therapist with that in her past? I can only imagine the conversation:

Husband: I work and slave, and she socks all my money away in the bank.
Wife: I'm just trying to save for Missy's college.
Husband: Missy should earn the money!
Wife: How? She's only one year away from starting school.
Therapist: hmmmm . . . . . I have an idea!

But that's not all. She has bids of more than 2.5 million British pounds! I have no idea what to make of that. But I do know where she got the idea - according to the article, her older sister paid for grad school by working for 3 weeks as a prostitute in Nevada.

Nice. What a great example for her sister.

Who Knew Detroit Was This Bad? - Part II

As a former Michigan resident, I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for the state . . . well most of the state. I never did learn to like Detroit. I did learn to pity it, however. I have written previously about the problems facing Detroit. Here are some updated factoids, courtesy of MSNBC:

• The jobless rate has climbed past 21 percent
• There are 15 candidates for the Feb. 24 special mayoral election necessitated by the conviction of [mayor] Kwame Kilpatrick for trying to cover up an affair with a former top aide.
• The city's deficit is approaching $300 million, and he ordered all departments to cut their budgets by 10 percent.
• Several dozen schools have been closed in the past three years
• The FBI's latest statistics, for 2007, show Detroit with the highest violent crime rate of any major city. . . some offenders, notably those without homes of their own, were now expressing reluctance to leave jail when their sentences were done. (But, on the bright side, "property crime in some Detroit neighborhoods [has] stabilized or declined because targets of opportunity [are] fewer now that most remaining residents are poor and many of the homes have been abandoned and cannibalized.")
  
• About 44,000 of the 67,000 homes that have gone into foreclosure since 2005 remain empty, and it costs about $10,000 to demolish each vacant house. (do the math, and that means 440 million dollars just to tear down vacant housing created within the last three years).
• The residential real estate market is catastrophic, with the Detroit Board of Realtors now pegging the average price of a home in the city at $18,513. (According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, the average price of a new car sold in the United States is $28,400).

Keep in mind these stats were likely taken before the recent near-collapse of the American auto industry. If the "Big 3" go under, it may just be time to admit that the city has failed, move everyone out and just plow everything under. Over half the population has left in the last 50 years. I've never heard of a city being depopulated like that, not since the black plague in the Middle Ages.

One observer does manage to diagnose the root of the problem, however:

"Up until the '70s, you could come to the city without education, without speaking English, and get a job in the auto industry and instantly be in the middle class, economically speaking," said Mike Stewart, director of Wayne State's Walter P. Reuther Library and an expert on the auto industry. "A lot of folks in the city depended on these jobs for generations — they don't exist anymore," he said. "A lot of Detroiters are unprepared, educationally and technologically, to cope."

If a mind is a terrible thing to waste, then three generations of minds are . . .?

"Unprepared educationally" is a nice PC euphemism. What he meant was "illiterate." As I cited in my previous post on this subject Detroit has a 47% adult illiteracy rate.

The article points out that the surrounding areas aren't doing too bad. I can confirm that from personal experience. Prospects for improvement aren't good when all the need is concentrated in the area least able to deal with it.

Maybe we should declare a hurricane and disperse Detroit's population throughout the country, like we did with New Orleans. Many wouldn't return, but would that really be a bad thing? America can help that many people, Michigan alone can't, nor can the city of Detroit.

I wonder how much we'd need to pay Canada to take Detroit off our hands?

One Reaon Reason Our Schools are Failing . . .

(Nice title, you'd think I was the illiterate one - thanks Matt)

This story is amazing to me:

OCEANSIDE, Calif. -- John Corcoran graduated from college and taught high school for 17 years without being able to read, write or spell. . . In 1961, Corcoran graduated with a bachelor's degree in education, while still illiterate he contends. He then went on to become a teacher during a teacher shortage. . . For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher's assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students.

That explains some of the teachers I know.