Bunker Mulligan "Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." ~Mark Twain

The school year has officially begun. I had the first of what will be many kids come to the door selling things to help raise money for their school.

This time last year I wrote a letter to the local paper asking for them to take the lead and print a detailed school district budget. Nobody in this city really knows what it is. My school taxes here are double what they were in Dallas. And Tyler. So it isn’t an issue of city size. And the private schools I’ve worked with and for always seemed to manage on a much smaller budget.

They weren’t interested in even publishing the letter. And the school board likes to hold meetings during the day, probably to minimize the number of people who attend.

My #2 son played in a high school band which was selected to play in the Tournament of Roses Parade one year. We spent the entire twelve months prior to the event raising money. But we didn’t go door-to-door. We did a lot of different things to earn the money. I ran the biggest, which was the concession stands at the AAA Baseball park. Seventy home games, and I had to find manpower for four stands for each game, and manage hours worked as well as the inevitible problems within the group and with the team management. That was only one of our fundraisers. Everyone put in time, including the kids.

Schools send out children to beg. That’s all it is. We are rearing a generation of beggars who think they need only go next door and all wishes will be granted. Today was simply the first. And how do you turn down a kid you know, one who is pleasant and polite, and under the gun to bring in the most money so he can get some cheap prize?

Federal funding for all kinds of research pays great dividends. Sure. Much of the money goes to thing like boondoggles. Boondoggle is a term used often in the military. I haven’t heard it used nearly as much in the civilian world. RAMMER has.

The cost of water isn’t much and yet scientists keep getting grants to go on boondoggles to Sweden to keep reporters writing this sort of article. (By boondoggle, let me just say that the per diem for Stockholm is about $220 per day.)

This fits in nicely with my earlier post regarding fuel cell research. We could be spending that money on the development of nuclear power facilities which would actually accomplish something.

I have always been a Conservationist. I grew up hunting and fishing, learning to respect what nature offered. “Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.” The Environmentalist movement has done nothing of net value in the world. Yes, they’ve had successes. But those have been balanced by the losses due to their interference.

When RAMMER can spend a few minutes doing a little research into the cost of water, you’d think the “scientist” doing research work at a university under a government grant could take those few seconds himself. Ah…but then there would be no reason for the government to continue funding his pet project.

Never mind.

I think it’s time for me to pull out my worn copy of Strunk & White.

As Ben Yagoda writes,

We are not all destined to be Hemingways, nor would most of us want to be.

However, every writer who has mastered “style” in the Strunk-and-White sense has, or at the very least is capable of having, a style in the broader sense.

Isn’t that what each of us in the blogosphere is hoping to accomplish?

Found this on #2 Pencil.

And you guys thought teachers don’t have a sense of humor!

I don’t have the time to devote to reading that I’d like. There is just too much out there in this world that I don’t know, and so I try to follow Kipling’s mandate, “If you can think and not make thoughts your aim.” I’d like to learn it all, but have no reason to. So I limit myself too often to things I need to know.

Now Thomas Sowell comes out with a book list, ostensively for parents to give their children in school as summer reading. I admit I’ve only read a few of them.

He takes offense at some current school text books…

It speaks volumes about our schools and colleges that far-left radical Howard Zinn’s pretentiously titled book, “A People’s History of the United States,” is widely used across the country. It is one indictment, complaint, and distortion after another.

Anyone who relies on this twisted version of American history would have no idea why millions of people from around the world are trying, sometimes desperately, to move to this country. The one virtue of Zinn’s book is that it helps you identify unmistakably which teachers are using their classrooms as propaganda centers.

…and offers some good options for many issues of race, history, culture, and economics.

More for me to choose from.

I have always loved Bill Cosby. He is a real person. He has his feet on solid ground. If I were President, this man, with a doctorate in Education, would be my Secretary of Education. You want education reform and a real No Child Left Behind? Bill Cosby would deliver. It would be a sacred mission for this man, not just a job with perks.

He spoke at a dinner commemorating Brown vs. Board of Education:

“Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal,” he declared. “These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids — $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 for ‘Hooked on Phonics.’ . . .

“They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English,” he exclaimed. “I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t,’ ‘Where you is’ . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!”

The crowd loved it. NAACP President Kweisi Mfume was nearly speechless.

La Shawn has a post with some good comments running.