Legendary White Crane-style Kung Fu Master Pei Mei, it is said, killed twelve fully-armed Shaolin monks using only the blade from his broken pencil sharpener.

South Carolina Low Country Island Packet has a story indicating that the Zero Common Sense policies associated with America’s bed-wetting, nincompoop haute bourgeoisie have spread even to within a stone’s throw of the US Marine Corps’s recruit training depot at Parris Island.

A 10-year-old Hilton Head Island boy has been suspended from school for having something most students carry in their supply boxes: a pencil sharpener.

The problem was his sharpener had broken, but he decided to use it anyway.

A teacher at Hilton Head Island International Baccalaureate Elementary School noticed the boy had what appeared to be a small razor blade during class on Tuesday, according to a Beaufort County sheriff’s report.

It was obvious that the blade was the metal insert commonly found in a child’s small, plastic pencil sharpener, the deputy noted.

The boy—a fourth-grader described as a well-behaved and good student—cried during the meeting with his mom, the deputy and the school’s assistant principal.

He had no criminal intent in having the blade at school, the sheriff’s report stated, but was suspended for at least two days and could face further disciplinary action.

District spokesman Randy Wall said school administrators are stuck in the precarious position between the district’s zero tolerance policy against having weapons at school and common sense.

“We’re always going to do something to make sure the child understands the seriousness of having something that could potentially harm another student, but we’re going to be reasonable,” he said.

Pious blithering letter to parents from school dated 9/11.

Police report (!). These idiots actually called the police over this!

Principal McAden “clarified” today, defending the school’s insanity and asserting that the child was “not suspended for having a pencil sharpener. He had an exposed blade which created a dangerous setting for the student and other children. The student was suspended for one day for inappropriate behavior in the classroom.”

Dangerous? Maybe a legendary martial artist could do something effective with a weapon of the sort (especially in the Hong Kong cinema), but an elementary school kid is going to do what with a marginally-edged one inch piece of metal?

They weren’t recorded, registered, taxed, or regulated. Naturally, urban-dwelling environmentalists hated the river shacks of rural South Carolina, and they recently succeeded in persuading the Palmetto State’s greasy pols to impose a permit system incorporating a sunset law completely eliminating these private refuges of individual freedom from South Carolina’s waters in five years. The state’s governor expressed regret at the death of a rural tradition, but he wouldn’t stick his neck out by vetoing the new law.

These days, Huck Finn would not be permitted to raft down the river to get away from Aunt Polly and her civilized regime of rules. Old ladies of both sexes have long since taken care to extend the jurisdiction of the Leviathan state right down every river’s main channel, and up every tributary and every backwater, lest some free American escape from civilization and its discontents, or evade its taxes and its rules.

New York Times:

For who knows how long, people have plopped these river shacks into watery coves and curves along the South Carolina coast. They permanently anchor their shacks miles from the nearest landing and use them to fish, hunt or just get off the grid for a while. Some contraptions are so modest that to call them shacks is too kind, while others are so well appointed that they all but cry out for granite countertops and potpourri.

It all sounds so innocent, so idyllic — so American, in a Huck Finn kind of way. That is, until you consider that the river shack owners are essentially laying claim to public property without paying license fees, taxes or, in some cases, even respect. A few people use the river as their personal toilet; others abandon their shacks, leaving the structures to rot amid the natural splendor.

But environmentalists who see these shacks as an affront to the concept of resource management recently succeeded in lobbying for their extinction. This spring the state passed a law requiring owners to seek permits for the structures — recent surveys counted at least 170 on several rivers and Lake Marion — with the stipulation that in five years all shacks must be removed from the water. ...

The issue even posed a dilemma for Gov. Mark Sanford, who ultimately decided to allow the river shack bill to pass into law without his signature. While he supports land preservation, he explained in a letter to legislators, he wonders about increasing gentrification, and “the idea that someone could tie a bunch of 55-gallon drums together and stake out a house on the waterway is representative of what I would consider the magic of ‘old time South Carolina.’ ”

But Patrick Moore, a lawyer working for the Coastal Conservation League, which led the legislative fight against river shacks, sees no dilemma. “The idea that these shacks are some sort of entitlement of our natural heritage is, frankly, an insult to that very heritage,” he says.

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An overly enthusiatic pair of 21-year-old lovers evidently fell 50 feet (15.24 meters) to their deaths from the roof of an office building in Columbia, South Carolina.

KNBC

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Failure of school authorities to impose discipline on unruly minority students due to political correctness has led to a legal award of damages to a white female teacher subjected to verbal obscenities in Charleston.

Real Clear Politics:

In a new twist in American race relations, a federal court has ruled that a white teacher in a predominantly African-American school was subjected to a racially hostile workplace.

The case concerned Elizabeth Kandrac, who was routinely verbally abused by black students at Brentwood Middle School in North Charleston. Their slurs make shock jock Don Imus look like a church deacon.

Nevertheless, despite frequent complaints, school officials did nothing to intervene on Kandrac’s behalf, arguing that the racially charged profanity was simply part of the students’ culture. If Kandrac couldn’t handle cursing, school officials told her, she was in the wrong school.

Kandrac finally filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and subsequently brought a lawsuit against the Charleston County School District, the school’s principal and an associate superintendent. Last fall, jurors found that the school was a racially hostile environment to teach in and that the school district retaliated against Kandrac for complaining about it.

The defendants sought a new trial, but U.S. District Judge David C. Norton recently affirmed the verdict. However, he did not support the jury’s findings of $307,500 in damages for lost income and emotional distress.

Although Kandrac clearly suffered—she was suspended from her job shortly after a story about her EEOC complaint appeared in the local newspaper, and her contract was not renewed—her case didn’t meet evidentiary requirements for damages. The judge said a new trial would have to determine damages, but the school district and Kandrac settled for $200,000.

Complete article

The Canadian would-be buyer of a three-bedroom, two-bath house in Jasper County, South Carolina discovered the developers had neglected to inform her of one little detail.

(The local reporter has a few problems with the English language, but one gathers that:)

In 1998, the then-owner of the 1700-acre Delta Plantation, Henry E. Ingram Jr. (a man of decidedly Southern irredentist opinions) when he sold his acreage to Bluffton Home Builders, inserted a few small covenants in the deed.

Mr. Ingram’s covenants stipulated that the property, or subdivisions thereof, could not be sold or leased to:

1. Yankees.

2. Persons bearing the last name Sherman (vide: General William Tecumseh Sherman).

3. Persons bearing last names whose letters could possibly be rearranged to spell Sherman.

Ms. Legare, the would-be buyer (who, being Canadian, would not be personally impacted by Mr. Ingram’s covenants, but who obviously might like to be able resell her house some fine day) and Bluffton Home Builders are now working with Mr. Ingram’s son, Mr. Ashley Ingram, a local attorney (who probably has some personal interest in the matter) to get those covenants removed. But Henry Ingram, now a resident of Corpus Christi, Texas disagrees. The older Mr. Ingram wants his covenants defended and enforced, and is planning to move to Costa Rica, presumably to get further away from those damned Yankees.
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FOLLOW-UP

Alfred L. Brophy tells us he covered the Ingram covenants back in 1998. (Did blogs exist in 1998?)

Mr. Brophy also provides addiional detail: Yankees are defined as people who’ve lived north of the Mason-Dixon line for more than a year or were born north of the Mason-Dixon line. But Ingram also included an exemption: if a Yankee takes a Southern loyalty oath and whistles Dixie as a sign of loyalty, then he is permitted to buy the property.

Paper by Messrs. Brophy & Ghosh on the Unconstitutionality of the Ingram Covenants offers excellent historical background and legal detail; but, alas! the authors do take an unsound view of the desirability of enforcing such covenants.

An alert neighbor snapped a number of photos of a six foot alligator clawing at the front door of Robert & Roslyn Loretta in Hilton Head, South Carolina. He missed the doorbell, but came awfully close.

The Lorettas believed the reptilian visitor was attracted by the smell of barbecuing chicken.

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