If you want to go to naked parties, first you have to be admitted to the appropriate elite college, and even if you don’t want to go to naked parties, you are going to need to get your ticket stamped in our credential-obsessed society in order to get any kind of serious job.

In my day, places like Yale, in the aftermath of Sputnik, were scouring the country in search of anybody with good standardized test scores. All you had to do was ace the 9th grade Stanford-Binet IQ test, then do well on the SATs and alumni representatives of Yale would come and plead with you to accept a full scholarship. Things are a bit more complicated today.

Daniel Akst, reviewing Andrew Ferguson’s Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College in the Wall Street Journal, has a lot of negative things to say about the process.

The most darkly humorous aspect of this often hilarious book is its depiction of an admissions process that corrupts everything it touches.

It’s a process that discourages reticence by requiring students to write revealing and disingenuous personal essays; discourages thrift by regarding parental savings as fair game in the financial-aid evaluation; discourages intellectual curiosity by encouraging students to pursue grades rather than knowledge; and discourages honesty by transforming adolescence into a period of cynical calculation.

“At its most intense,” Mr. Ferguson writes, “the admissions process didn’t force kids to be Lisa Simpson; it turned them into Eddie Haskell. . . . It guaranteed that teenagers would pursue life with a single ulterior motive, while pretending they weren’t. It coated their every undertaking in a thin lacquer of insincerity. Befriending people in hopes of a good rec letter; serving the community to advertise your big heart; studying hard just to puff up the GPA and climb the greasy poll of class rank—nothing was done for its own sake.”

This stressful process practically demands cynicism from all parties. To “climb the page” in the closely watched U.S. News & World Report rankings, schools solicit applications so that they can increase the numbers they reject, thereby appearing more selective. Elite institutions claim to be open to all but devote wide swaths of their entering classes to athletes, the offspring of donating alumni, members of minority groups and others with “hooks” that give them an edge.

Matters have been complicated in recent years by the success of girls, who persist in outperforming boys academically in high school and outnumbering them in college. But a university may admit so many girls that a tipping point is reached, making boys even less likely to apply or, as Mr. Ferguson notes, “attracting the wrong kind of boys for the wrong reasons.”

Admissions officers have tried to rectify this problem by making schools more appealing to male applicants, expanding math and science departments, adding sports—and lowering admission standards for males, most of whom are white. Asian boys generally don’t need any such help. “After several generations of vicious racism,” Mr. Ferguson says, “followed by protest marches, civil rights lawsuits, accusations of bigotry, appeals to color-blindness, feminism, and eloquent invocations of the meritocratic ideal, the latest admissions trend in American higher education is affirmative action for white men. Just like the old days.”

Typical Yale secret society initiation (clothed phase) (click on image for larger version.)

This year’s February 19th Pundits’ initiation party apparently featured slightly heavier drinking than usual. A student informant (who knows if he was telling the truth?) told the Yale Daily News that five attendees wound up at Yale-New Haven Hospital and six others at Yale’s Department of University Health.

11 out 50 attendees rendered so hors de combat by drinking that they had to seek medical attention? Not just impressive, Homeric really. Vital positions have been taken in military engagements whose memories echo through history with lower percentage casualties.

The same person (who could possibly be just a little prone to exaggeration) also told the YDN that he saw “a member of the Pundits forcing attendees to kiss each other and that a Pundit forced a male friend’s face onto another’s penis.”

Three Dog Night clearly composed this little number after one of the Pundits’ parties.

———————————————

This year’s Pundits initiation party rapidly achieved national news coverage.

IvyGate coverage

CBS tell all

New York Post story

———————————————

Some helpful (inside Yale) background.

A pundit is an expert, a vendor of influential, nay, determinative opinions. According to Wikipedia, it even seems most probable that the common vernacular use of the term pundit has “its origins in a Yale University society known as “The Pundits” which, founded in 1884, developed a reputation for including among its members the school’s most incisive and humorous critics of contemporary society. … Several members of the society have also gone on to become leading political pundits, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author and energy expert Daniel Yergin. Other notable Yale Pundits include A. Whitney Griswold, Lewis H. Lapham and Joe Lieberman.”

The founder of the Pundits, as an undergraduate at Yale, was the illustrious William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), who went on to become essentially the leading Humanities scholar in the United States in his day, and a long-time, enormously admired professor at Yale. Billy Phelps was, in fact, the original prototype of the star professor, whose lectures were so witty, so brilliant, and entertaining, that attendance at his course became known as a not-to-be-missed feature of the Yale undergraduate experience. Phelps was in the first half of the last century what Vincent Scully was when I was an undergraduate.

The Pundits (founded in 1884) doubtless did not originally hold naked parties, but contented themselves with assembling the wittiest and most brilliant members of the Senior Class for a weekly dinner at Mory’s, and participating in a series of elaborate pranks and lampoons intended to deflate pomposity and pretension.

When I was an undergraduate, late 1960s-early 1970s, the Pundits had become moribund and inactive. They seem to have been revived in the late 1970s, during a period in which a reaction to all the leftwing piety and politically correct cant of the Vietnam era set in and Yale undergraduates began once again reveling in undergraduate life, throwing parties, and reviving fraternities and other social organizations.

My Yale informants tell me that it was Yale’s oldest a capella singing group, the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, founded in 1938 and usually referred to as “The SOBs,” which began throwing regular naked parties during the late 1980s. The Pundits, known earlier for lobster-and-champagne lunches on the steps of Sterling Memorial Library, had some kind of ties to the SOBs and, from them, acquired the custom of the naked party.

I found, via the Yale Daily News, a Hustler article published in 2007, by a-then-sophomore describing the Pundits taking advantage of Ivy League naked parties hitting the national media to spoof the New York Times.

[W]hen the New York Times called, the Pundits weren’t about to cooperate. One of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers wanted to do a story about them, but the tricksters just did what they do best—they fucked with someone’s mind. Assigned to get a firsthand account of a naked party at Yale, Times reporter Rachel Aviv contacted the Pundits. They would later bring her to a real one, but not before throwing a special shindig on her behalf. Mr. E’s eyes light up recounting the story: “Instead of a lot of people drinking and mingling in a dark, well-decorated room, we brought her to a brightly lit library in which just a couple dozen of us were sitting around and playing board games.

After the Taboo, Uno, Scrabble, etc. were concluded, we did some naked charades and then, to top it off, some naked trust falls off a table.” Likewise, Ms. Aviv’s story on the seedy underbelly of an Ivy League school was collapsing faster than Judy Miller could say, “WMDs.” The Times reporter had to be freaking out, but maybe she was just confounded by the intensity of naked charades. The evening’s coup de grâce came when the revelers gathered into groups of three to eight, distributed condoms and left. The bewildered journalist could do nothing but struggle to jot down a few notes and then slide her pants back on. The Pundits, explains one tall and impeccably dressed member, “make sure there’s never a moment when everything’s okay.”

The resulting Rachel Aviv story.

If the Pundits were fucking with the media’s mind back in 2007 on the naked-parties-at-Ivy-League-schools meme, why, I wonder, do not reporters this year worry that those mischievous Pundits may be playing mind games with them again?

Undergraduate binge-drinking, hazing rituals, and naked parties are all ingredients perfectly calculated to make journalists sit up and beg the same way ham affects my basset hound.

It may very well be that this year’s Pundits’ initiation party scandal is just one more of the nation’s leading prankster organizations elaborate satirical spoofs.

William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943), founder of the Pundits.

Oleg Volk identifies gun control as a classic case of the assignment of collective responsibility.

Via Vanderleun.

Stuart Schneiderman quotes investment advisor Dennis Gartman:

Let’s get this straight. We’re going to be ‘gifted’ with a health care plan we are forced to purchase and fined if we don’t, which purportedly covers at least ten million more people without adding a single new doctor, but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee whose chairman says he doesn’t understand it, passed by a Congress that didn’t read it but exempted themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn’t pay his taxes, for which we’ll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security and Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese, and financed by a country that’s broke!!

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?”

Doppel-Glock-Pistole

From the Firearms Blog.

Things are certainly different in Switzerland. Can you imagine trying to get these federally-licensed in the USA?

The photo shows a pair of Glock pistols attached at their receivers, and set up to be fired full-auto… sideways.

Not one, but two, full-auto Glocks! (No safety, remember? Just that trigger lever.) And sideways, to boot. This has got to be the greatest firearms idea since the duck foot pistol.

Just the thing if the crew of your ship happens to take a sudden notion to mutiny, but otherwise completely useless and more than a little dangerous.

The Doppel-Glock-Pistole was produced by the Swiss arms manufacturer H.P. Sigg and featured in an article in Schweizer Waffen Magazin, in the issue of December 1997..

Someone recently sold a previous prototype using two CZ-52 chambered in 7.62 Tokarev on Egun . The bidding ended at 136,00 EUR ($18984.24)

The Glock set is comprised of more contemporary pieces, so it would probably bring more at auction, but the CZ-52s actually have safeties. They are kind of neat guns, but were crudely finished during the the Communist era.

Spanish edition: The Last Ringbearer — Discover the Other Side of the Legend

History is written by the winners, we all know. A mischievous Russian biologist and Tolkien fan named Kyrill Eskov decided to attempt to imagine the history of the concluding years of Third Age of Middle Earth from the perspective of the losing side.

As far back as 1999, he published a nearly 300-page alternative-to-the-Lord-of-the-Rings-version, titled The Last Ringbearer. The Eskov Ring was subsequently published in a number of other major European languages, but the closely-allied-to-the-Valar Tolkien estate idealistically has absolutely blocked its publication in English.

Finally, Yisroel Markov, a Manager of Investment Reporting at Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management, completed his own English translation (batted out over “a few dozen lunch hours”). He ran his translation past the author for correction and approval, and then made it non-commercially available on-line last December.

Laura Miller reviewed it in Salon.

Eskov treats the Tolkien version of Middle Earth history as pious myth and propaganda. The real conflict, in his version, was between the anti-technological Gandalf using barbarous and brigandish men as his cats’ paws against the rational and scientific civilization of Mordor.

Mordor, as you see, is much more favorably portrayed:

Barad-Dur rose six centuries ago, that amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle Earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic. The shining tower of the Barad-Dur citadel rose over the plains of Mordor almost as high as Orodruin like a monument to Man – free Man who had politely but firmly declined the guardianship of the Dwellers on High and started living by his own reason. It was a challenge to the bone-headed aggressive West, which was still picking lice in its log ‘castles’ to the monotonous chanting of scalds extolling the wonders of never-existing Númenor. It was a challenge to the East, buckling under the load of its own wisdom, where Ying and Yang have long ago consumed each other, producing only the refined static beauty of the Thirteen Stones Garden. And it was a challenge to a certain someone else, for the ironic intellectuals of the Mordor Academy, unbeknownst to them, have come right up to the line beyond which the growth of their power promised to become both irreversible and uncontrollable.

And Gandalf and Saruman are also a bit different.

Arnor, the Tower of Amon Súl
November, year 3010 of the Third Age

“A state that is unable to feed itself and is dependent on food imports cannot be considered a formidable foe.”

Those words were uttered by a tall white-bearded old man in a silvery-gray cloak with its hood thrown back; he stood with his fingertips resting on the surface of a black oval table, surrounded by four people in high-backed armchairs, half in shadow. By some signs, his speech had been a success and the Council was on his side, so now the piercing dark blue eyes of the standing man, which contrasted starkly with the parchment-yellow skin of his face, were focused on only one of the four – the one he would have to battle now. That man, huddling tightly in his blinding-white cloak, sat at a slight distance, as if already separating himself from the rest of the Council; he appeared to have a strong fever. Presently he straightened out, clutching the chair arms, and his deep and smooth voice sounded under the dark ceiling:

“Have you any pity on them?”

“On whom?”

“On the people, Gandalf, the people! As I understand it, you have just sentenced the civilization of Mordor to death, in the name of the higher good. But any civilization consists of people, so they would have to be exterminated, completely, with no chance of recovery. Right?”

“Pity is a poor adviser, Saruman. Haven’t you looked in the Mirror with the rest of us?”

Gandalf pointed to the large object in the middle of the table, which looked most like a huge bowl full of quicksilver. “There are many roads to the future, but whichever of them Mordor takes, no later than three centuries hence it will access the forces of Nature that no one will be able to harness. Would you like to once again watch them turn the entire Middle Earth and Far West into ashes, in a blink of an eye?”

“You are correct, Gandalf, and it would be dishonest to deny such a possibility. But then you should exterminate the Dwarves, too: they have already wakened the Terror of the Deep once, and it took all our magic to prevent it from escaping. You know that those bearded tightwads are mulishly stubborn and not inclined to learn from their mistakes…”

“All right, let us not speak of what is possible, and speak only of the inevitable. If you do not wish to look into the Mirror, look at the smoke rising from their coal furnaces and copper refineries. Walk the salt pans into which they have turned the lands west of Núrnen and try to find one living plant on those half-a-thousand square miles. But make sure not to do it on a windy day, when salty dust rises like a wall over the plain of Mordor, choking everything in its path… And note that they have done all that barely out of the crib; what do you think they will do later?”

“Gandalf, a child is always a disaster in the house. First dirty diapers, then broken toys; later, the family clock taken apart; to say nothing of what happens when he grows up a bit. A house without children, on the other hand, is a model of cleanliness and order, yet somehow its owners are usually not too happy about that, especially as they age.”

“Saruman, always have I been amazed by your cunning ability to turn another’s words inside out, and disprove obvious truths via sly casuistry. But by the Halls of Valinor! it will not work now. The Middle Earth population is now a multitude of peoples living in harmony with nature and the heritage of their ancestors. These people and their entire way of life are now under a dire threat, and my duty is to avert it at all costs. A wolf plundering my sheep has its own reasons for doing so, but I have no intent of figuring them out!”

“I am, by the way, no less concerned with the fate of the Gondorians and the Rohirrim than you are; but I look further into the future. Do you, a member of the White Council, not know that the totality of magical knowledge by its very nature can not grow beyond what was once received from Aulë and Oromë? You can lose it quicker or slower, but no one has the power to reverse the loss. Every generation of wizards is weaker than the previous one; sooner or later men will face Nature alone. And then they will need Science and Technology – provided you haven’t eradicated those by then.”

“They don’t need your science, for it destroys the harmony of the world and dries up the souls of men!”

“Strange is the talk of Soul and Harmony on the lips of a man who is about to start a war. As for science, it is dangerous not to them, but to you – or, rather, to your warped self esteem. What are we wizards but consumers of that which our predecessors have created, while they are creators of new knowledge? We face the Past, they face the Future. You have once chosen magic, and therefore will never cross the boundaries set by the Valar, whereas in their science the growth of knowledge – and hence, power – is truly unlimited. You are consumed by the worst kind of envy – that of a craftsman for an artist… Well, I suppose this is a weighty enough reason for murder; you’re neither the first nor the last.”

“You don’t believe this yourself,” Gandalf shrugged calmly.

“No, I suppose I do not,” Saruman shook his head sadly. “You know, those who are motivated by greed, lust for power, or wounded pride are half-way tolerable, at least they feel pangs of conscience sometimes. But there is nothing more fearsome than a bright-eyed enthusiast who’d decided to benefit mankind; such a one can drown the world in blood without hesitation. Those people’s favorite saying is: ‘There are things more important than peace and more terrible than war’ – I believe you’ve heard this one, no?”

“I accept the responsibility, Saruman; History will vindicate me.”

“I have no doubt that it will; after all, history will be written by those who will win under your banner. There are tried and true recipes for that: cast Mordor as the Evil Empire that wished to enslave the entire Middle Earth, and its inhabitants as non-human monsters that rode werewolves and ate human flesh…”

Eskov continues the pattern of debunking. Aragorn is a cynical and conniving schemer. Hobbits do not even exist. Nor do Nazgul.

[Correction: It never pays to post on books one has not finished, sigh. Yes, there are Nazgul. But, the major figure who gets killed in the Battle of the Fields of Pellenor is not the Chief Nazgul. See below.]

Compelled unwillingly to initiate war by raids on its vital food caravans crossing the fords of Osgiliath, Mordor tries desperately for a blitzkrieg victory, but on the field of Pellenor the Mordorian cause begins to appear doubtful as a force of zombies arrives at the army’s rear. The Southern Mordorian Commander hastened to the point of crisis.

A phalanx six deep and about a hundred men across moved unhurriedly across the field in total silence. The warriors were dressed in gray cloaks with hoods covering their faces, and were armed only with long narrow Elvish swords; they had no armor, no helmets, not even shields. There was something weirdly out of place about the soldiers in the forward rank,
and it took the commander a few seconds to understand what that was: they were literally studded with three-foot Umbarian arrows, but kept advancing just the same. They were commanded by a horseman in their rear, wearing a tattered camouflage cloak of a Dúnadan ranger, his faceplate closed. The sun was almost directly overhead, yet the horseman cast a long coal-black shadow, while the phalanx cast no shadow at all.

An aide reported to Commander-South that neither cavalry nor the mûmakil were able to breach the ranks of those warriors; the animals became wildly uncontrollable on approach. In the meantime, the invincible phalanx kept pushing northwest – fortunately, rather slowly. …

When the Commander-South neared the phalanx, his mount reared and almost tossed him from the saddle. Now he could see the enemy warriors clearly and knew that the numerous ‘panic-mongers’ were right. These were, indeed, the living dead: respectable-looking parchment-skinned mummies with eyes and mouths carefully sewn shut; horribly bloated drowned men dripping greenish goo; skeletons covered with tatters of blackened skin, cause of death now indeterminable to the best pathologist. The corpses stared at him, and a chillingly terrifying low growl went up; such is the growl of a sheepdog about to go for the enemy’s throat. The general had no time to be terrified, though – a dozen gray figures have already detached themselves from the rear right corner of the formation, clearly intending to block his way to the indecisively halted Dúnadan, so he spurred the stallion again.

He broke through the line of the dead with surprising ease: they turned out to be rather slow and no match for a fighter of his caliber one-on-one. A hanged man with a lolling tongue and bulging eyes had barely raised his sword when Commander-South sliced through his sword-arm with a lighting-fast horizontal flick of his wrist and then cut the enemy almost in half from the right shoulder down. The others backed away for some reason and made no more attempts to stop him. Meanwhile the Dúnadan was clearly deciding whether he should fight or run, and seeing that he had no chance of escaping, dismounted decisively and drew his Elvish sword. So that’s how you want it, eh? Fight on foot – fine. Shouting the traditional: “Defend yourself, fair sir!” the commander of the South Army jumped nimbly off his horse, thinking in passing that this northern bandit hardly deserved to be called ‘sir.’ The phalanx had already moved away a hundred yards or so and kept going; seven of the undead stood in the distance, not taking their unseeing eyes off the duelists; a ringing silence fell.

He suddenly realized with a clarity that amazed him that this one duel will determine the outcome not only of this battle, but the fate of entire Middle Earth for many years to come. His inner voice then said in an eerily pleading tone: “Think this through, while there’s still time! Please!” – as if trying to warn him without knowing how. But he had thought this through already! They are both lightly armored, so his curved scimitar will have a clear advantage over any straight western sword; the guy doesn’t seem to be a leftie, so no surprises there; it would’ve been better to fight on horseback, but let’s not be greedy… It’s all set – ready to serve, as the saying goes!

The Dúnadan awaited him without trying to maneuver: knees slightly bent, upraised sword held in both hands, hilt against the belt buckle; all his earlier indecisiveness was gone. The general quickly approached to within about seven paces, right up to the maximum reach of the northerner, and started feinting: right, left, then his favorite distracting move – a quick pass of the scimitar to the left hand and back…

A terrible blow in the back felled him. He managed to twist sideways (“Spine’s still there…”), lifted his head and thought distantly: yes, I have underestimated those deaders… so they can move real fast and real silent when needed… northern bastard… Amazingly, he managed to get up to one knee, using the scimitar as a crutch; the corpses, having already
surrounded him, stood still with swords raised, awaiting word from their commander. The latter was in no hurry; pushing the helmet to the back of his head and chewing on a straw, he gazed at his fallen foe with interest. Then his calm soft voice broke the silence:

“Welcome, Commander-South! I knew that you would come for a one-on-one fight, as is the custom by you nobles,” he smirked, “I was only concerned that you wouldn’t dismount, like I did. Had you kept to the saddle, it all could have been different… I’m glad that I didn’t overestimate you, fair sir.”

“You cheated.”

“You fool! I came here to win this war and the crown of Gondor, not some stupid duel. As Tulkas is my witness, I have often played heads-or-tails with death, but always for a goal, never for the hell of it.”

“You cheated,” repeated Commander-South, trying not to cough with the blood from his pierced lung slowly pooling in his mouth. “Even the knights of the North will not shake your hand.”

“Of course they won’t,” laughed the Dúnadan, “since they will be kneeling before the new King of Gondor! I beat you in an honest fight, one on one – so it shall be written in all the history books. As for you, they won’t even remember your name, I’ll make sure of that. Actually,” he stopped in midstride, hunting for the stirrup, “we can make it even more interesting: let you be killed by a midget, some tiny little dwarf with hairy paws. Or by a broad… yes, that’s how we’ll do it.”

What a scoundrel!

This is about as far as I’ve gotten so far, but it is apparent that the real protagonists are going to be a field medic from Umbar and an Orocuin recon scout. It seems unfair to wait for me to finish the whole thing before sharing the news and the link.

My own guess is that Tolkien would not have much liked Eskov’s pastiche and would have considered his perspective unsound, but I think he would have declined to block its publication.

Последний кольценосец, 1999.

A 2000 essay by Eskov on why he wrote his alternative history.

Yisroel Markov’s English translation.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Iowahawk catches Paul Krugman lying with figures and nails his slimy hide to the barn door.

Please pardon this brief departure from my normal folderol, but every so often a member of the chattering class issues a nugget of stupidity so egregious that no amount of mockery will suffice. Particularly when the issuer of said stupidity holds a Nobel Prize.

Case in point: Paul Krugman. The Times’ staff economics blowhard recently typed, re the state of education in Texas:

And in low-tax, low-spending Texas, the kids are not all right. The high school graduation rate, at just 61.3 percent, puts Texas 43rd out of 50 in state rankings. Nationally, the state ranks fifth in child poverty; it leads in the percentage of children without health insurance. And only 78 percent of Texas children are in excellent or very good health, significantly below the national average.

Similarly, The Economist passes on what appears to be the cut-‘n’-paste lefty factoid du jour:

Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows:

South Carolina – 50th
North Carolina – 49th
Georgia – 48th
Texas – 47th
Virginia – 44th

If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country.

The point being, I suppose, is that unionized teachers stand as a thin chalk-stained line keeping Wisconsin from descending into the dystopian non-union educational hellscape of Texas. Interesting, if it wasn’t complete bullshit. …

[A] state’s “average ACT/SAT” is, for all intents and purposes, a proxy for the percent of white people who live there. In fact, the lion’s share of state-to-state variance in test scores is accounted for by differences in ethnic composition. Minority students – regardless of state residence – tend to score lower than white students on standardized test, and the higher the proportion of minority students in a state the lower its overall test scores tend to be.

Please note: this has nothing to do with innate ability or aptitude. Quite to the contrary, I believe the test gap between minority students and white students can be attributed to differences in socioeconomic status. And poverty. And yes, racism. And yes, family structure. Whatever combination of reasons, the gap exists, and it’s mathematical sophistry to compare the combined average test scores in a state like Wisconsin (4% black, 4% Hispanic) with a state like Texas (12% black, 30% Hispanic). …

So how does brokeass, dumbass, redneck Texas stack up against progressive unionized Wisconsin?

2009 4th Grade Math

White students: Texas 254, Wisconsin 250 (national average 248)
Black students: Texas 231, Wisconsin 217 (national 222)
Hispanic students: Texas 233, Wisconsin 228 (national 227)

2009 8th Grade Math

White students: Texas 301, Wisconsin 294 (national 294)
Black students: Texas 272, Wisconsin 254 (national 260)
Hispanic students: Texas 277, Wisconsin 268 (national 260)

2009 4th Grade Reading

White students: Texas 232, Wisconsin 227 (national 229)
Black students: Texas 213, Wisconsin 192 (national 204)
Hispanic students: Texas 210, Wisconsin 202 (national 204)

2009 8th Grade Reading

White students: Texas 273, Wisconsin 271 (national 271)
Black students: Texas 249, Wisconsin 238 (national 245)
Hispanic students: Texas 251, Wisconsin 250 (national 248)

2009 4th Grade Science

White students: Texas 168, Wisconsin 164 (national 162)
Black students: Texas 139, Wisconsin 121 (national 127)
Hispanic students: Wisconsin 138, Texas 136 (national 130)

2009 8th Grade Science

White students: Texas 167, Wisconsin 165 (national 161)
Black students: Texas 133, Wisconsin 120 (national 125)
Hispanic students: Texas 141, Wisconsin 134 (national 131)

To recap: white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin, black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin, Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin.

The late Alan Clark (1928-1999) boasted an enviable form of automotive distinction by continuing to own for the remainder of his life a white Jaguar XK120 which he had purchased while attending Oxford in 1950.

I never thought I’d hear of a longer case of original ownership of a classic automobile, but Curmudgeonly & Skeptical reports on one which puts Alan Clark’s Jag 120 in the shade.

Mr. Allen Swift (Springfield , MA.) received this 1928 Rolls-Royce Picadilly P1 Roadster from his father, brand new – as a graduation gift in 1928. He drove it up until his death last year…..at the age of 102. He was the oldest living owner of a car [bought] new. …

He donated it to a Springfield museum after his death. It has 170,000 miles on it, still runs like a Swiss watch, dead silent at any speed and is in perfect cosmetic condition. (82 years) That’s approximately 2000 miles per year.

Sam MacDonald gives a nice compliment to a particular Yale undergraduate organization.

I honestly think that if I ever were to take a sharp right turn, I would very much prefer to send my kids to Brown than to one of the strongly “conservative” colleges. Just to challenge them. I don’t think kids are THAT malleable. For heaven’s sake, half of the conservative movement is run by members of Yale’s Party of the Right. They somehow managed to emerge from the indoctrination unscathed.

Hat tip to Tristyn Bloom.

When the American left needs to vent its rage at its reactionary opposition at the loudest volume and in the shrillest tones, when anything resembling rational debate simply will not do, when it’s time for a real old-fashioned over-the-top hair-pulling, fingernail scratching attack, the progressive camp turns to its fattest and flittiest combatants: Frank Rich and Andrew Sullivan.

Alas! America must really be turning to the right. Despite both men’s admirable records at releasing passion and their unequaled capacity for burying their adversaries in billingsgate, we learned yesterday that both would be moving on from their current well-paying and prestigious positions.

———————————————

Frank Rich

Jack Schafer notes that going from the New York Times to New York Magazine is not a step up the ladder of success.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight: Frank Rich is leaving a weekly column at the nation’s most important daily newspaper for a monthly column at the second best weekly in the country.

If Rich’s move is about wanting to spend more time with his family, gain greater distance from Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal, free himself to pursue his HBO projects more aggressively, or to work once again with New York Editor Adam Moss, with whom he has a mind-meld, I understand. But unless the deal came with Bloombergian bags of cash, it makes no sense.

I’m not suggesting that Frank Rich will disappear when he departs the Times for New York magazine, but the switch will transform him from the fat man in the biggest room in the oversized mansion of newspaper journalism to just another high-profile scribbler at a magazine. Oh, the New York press release says Rich will be editing a special “section anchored by his essay,” and be commenting on the magazine’s Web site, but it’s a step down. Today, Rich’s column appears in supersized format in the Sunday edition of the New York Times, which has a print circulation of 1.35 million, and more than 34.5 million unique monthly visitors to its Web site, compared to New York magazine’s 405,000 circulation and 8.5 million uniques.

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Andrew Sullivan

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin-hater-extraordinaire Andrew Sullivan is also moving. His Daily Dish is departing from from the prestigious Atlantic blog-site to become part of a shaky start-up web-site operation involving Tina Brown’s Daily Beast joining up with Newsweek. Newsweek recently was sold reputedly for $1 (and the assumption of a ton of debt) by 92-year-old Sidney Harman.

Union demonstrators chanting “Shame! Shame!” (rather hyperbolically and monotonously, I thought), and eventually “You Suck!”, hounded and ultimately trapped GOP State Senator Glenn Grothman near the doors of one of the entrances to the Badger State’s Capitol. (around 2:50)

It was beginning to look like the mob was close to attacking the white-haired state senator, when Democratic Rep. Brett Hulsey (wearing orange pro-union t-shirt) interposed himself between Grothman and the mob and managed to hold them off, as alarmed demonstration leaders in the rear hastily changed the chanting to “Peace-ful, Peace-ful.”

Remember Congressman Mike Capuano’s (D-8thMA) February 22nd statement that “Every once and awhile you need to get out on the streets and get a little bloody when necessary.”?

Capuano’s rhetorical call to spill blood in the cause of Unionism (later retracted and apologized for, after the comment received national attention) might very easily have been responded to in reality yesterday. Republican legislators had better take to approaching the capitol with bodyguards or police escorts.

Our friend Bird Dog from Maggie’s Farm linked the video below, featuring the 2004 annual procession in the Umbrian city of Orvieto celebrating the 1263 Miracle of Bolseno, in which a communion host produced blood during the moment of consecration of the mass, affirming the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

The procession carries the corporal of Bolseno (the small cloth on which the host rested during the consecration) through the city of Orvieto on the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, the date on which the Catholic Church celebrates the institution of the Holy Eucharist.

The feast day was created in 1264 by Pope Urban IV, reputedly on the basis of the inspiration of the miracle of Bolseno.

In any event, the procession is a remarkable spectable and a marvelous survival of an ancient European tradition. What an extraordinary number of groups and organizations Orvieto seems to possess!