Razing Kids Via Faulkner

I saw that curious headline last week in my parents' local agitprop rag over Thanksgiving.

HC is The College of the Holy Cross, probably Worcester, Massachusetts' best and most widely known attraction.

The summary quote:

The demolitions are part of a strategy by college officials to cut down on rowdy behavior and partying by students, which have driven a deep wedge between the Jesuit institution and its neighbors.

The college said it will aggressively seek to purchase other homes that come on the market, preventing absentee landlords from buying those properties and subsequently leasing them to students.

So let me get this straight, the college punks are rowdy....so the school is going to demolish nearby buildings?

Doesn't that strike y'all as a pretty *blunt* solution?

Now that same holiday I got to spend extensive time with two of my intellectually superior uncles, both of whom happen to have attended Holy Cross back in the 60s, before it went co-ed, and when it was allegedly ranked *up there with Harvard*.

On Thanksgiving, one of them told me about a professor of English he had at Holy Cross. Every week, the instructor, a priest I believe, would, in addition to a class, meet individually with each student for a half hour or so.

During that time, each pupil would generally have to present/read the paper they were assigned the week before.

So after one such meeting, Rev. Thomas Grace said to my uncle,

"For next week, I want you to read the Snopes trilogy by William Faulkner. And I want your paper to compare imagery, symbolism,...across the three books."

My uncle pooped his pants. Those books spanned *1300 pages* - and not just any 1,300 pages...1,300 PAGES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER with his drunken run-on sentences!

For example, from Absalom, Absalom!:

From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that-a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them. There was a wistaria vine blooming for the second time that summer on a wooden trellis before one window, into which sparrows came now and then in random gusts, making a dry vivid dusty sound before going away: and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children's feet, and talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.

And not only did my uncle have to read all those pages...

He had to PAY ATTENTION, UNDERSTAND, and COMPOSE A PAPER that would *take about 20 minutes to read* - all in a week's time!!!

(Not to mention keep up with his other classes.)

Do you think he and his classmates were throwing raucous keggers every weekend? Do you think they constituted a public nuisance?

Now this is Massachusetts, and I'm sure the *rowdy off-campus* behavior of today's Holy Cross students has been blown way out of proportion...

But still, if that school wants to sedate its student body, all that's really needed are a few more manly book assignments!



Shoot, that's Ted Williams at Holy Cross' Fitton Field!

WILLIAMS, FIRST at BAT, Holy Cross April 1939 - Baseball great Ted Williams at Fitton Field, Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts taken on April 14, 1939. According to popular historical information, the occasion was a pre-season exhibition game which turned out to be rookie Williams first day in a Boston Red Sox uniform in the team's home territory. In his first time at bat, shown here, Ted Williams belted in a Grandslam homerun, driving in three famous teammates and future hall of famers Jimmie Foxx, Bobby Doerr and Joe Cronin.

Worcester, MA - Old, Dumb, and Broke

My hometown of Worcester, Massachusetts, just like every other municipality in America, is broke.

Some ten years ago they issued bonds for the expressed purpose of gambling the proceeds in the stock market. This was done to close a *pension funding gap*. When one is losing, just hit up a bookie and double up, right?

A decade after issuing nearly $220 million in bonds to close its pension funding gap, the city of Worcester’s bet on the stock market is under water.

The gamble by one of New England’s largest cities that it could make enough in the markets to pay back bondholders and generate returns above the cost of the debt has fallen way short. In fact, Worcester’s pension funding gap widened considerably in the past year as a global economic crisis waylaid investment portfolios everywhere.

Worcester’s bogey, as DelSignore calls it, is a true interest cost of 6.31 percent on the bonds. To produce savings for the city, pension investment returns have to beat that target.

But Worcester’s 10-year return through the end of 2008 was 3.79 percent, leaving the city’s pension liability only about 68 percent funded.

These cities and towns were bankrupt 10 years ago....and they are even worse off now.

They simply have no shot at surviving the next leg down on Wall Street.

Here's the most damning excerpt from that article:

Pension-related costs are now Worcester’s third-largest expenditure. Even with some relief from the state built in, the pension cost for fiscal 2010 will be $39.4 million, including $16.6 million in debt service on the pension obligation bonds. That’s more than what the city will spend on police ($38.9 million) and fire ($32.2 million), according to the Worcester Regional Research Bureau.

As you can see, taxes are, more and more, just levied for *income redistribution*. In other words, taxes do not get spent on SERVICES!

There is a simple and elegant solution to this:

Abrogate pension obligations!

Make those free-loading 'old coots' and 'old bags' go live with their kids.

This is what they get for electing and RE-ELECTING all those Morons over the years.

Thanks to aupanner for sending me this link and reminding me of my *roots* - some two months ago!

Give me a break, I've still got 500 unread emails in this inbox.

Big Government Killing The Environment

That above pic is captioned:

Ken Gooch, Massachusetts Program Director for the Asian longhorned beetle program, walks Monday through an area in Worcester along I-190 which has been cleared of beetle-infested trees.

First read - Worcester Beetle - An Another Ill-Conceived Bailout.

So, after government agents rashly cut down 22,000 trees in New England's 2nd biggest city,....it comes out that apparently there is a pesticide that tree-owners can buy over-the-counter and protect their trees against both the Asian longhorned beetle AND the tree-felling Feds!

USDA Says Residents Can Treat Beetle-Infested Trees

WORCESTER — Contrary to earlier advice from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, residents in the Asian longhorned beetle infestation and quarantine area can obtain over-the-counter chemicals to protect potential host trees from becoming infested by the tree-killing bugs.

A letter from Christine K. Markham, director of the USDA's national Asian Longhorned Beetle Eradication program, states that earlier advisories that the USDA issued to residents indicating that no such protective treatment is available were inaccurate.

In the letter in which she retracted that earlier advice....

There's so much going on in this story I haven't time enough to fully comment.

We have a Big Government, which is moving full-steam ahead in co-opting more and more power to regulate the *environment*.

We have, with this revelation of an extant pesticide, an abundantly clear demonstration of rank Federal incompetence.

We have petrified homeowners about to pump tons of pesticides into their trees....just so they MIGHT be spared from the Federal extermination. How long before someone cries about the *environmental impact* of said chemicals!

And we have an irony of ire in Central Massachusetts. These clowns here have ceded everything in their lives to *government*. Now they are all grumbling left and right about the Feds ravishing their neighborhoods. And they just accept their subjugation like hopeless serfs, totally clueless to the fact they are simply getting the government they have voted for.

Here's a maple *marked for removal*:





Now I'm the last one to elevate trees, animals, or anything *natural* to the status of precious humanity....

BUT, this entire process, this tyranny of bureaucracy, of national agencies and their ill-conceived, ineffective diktats....

In some ways it hearkens back to another dark moment in our shared history.

Remember when these kids were systematically *marked* in Germany some 70 years ago?



Big Government can't handle an insect in Massachusetts and yet Morons all over the country think nothing of empowering it with hundreds of billions in new *green mandates*!

Who could be against a windmill, right?

Well, who could be against *teaching children to read and write*?

Remember that was how our utterly hideous and abominable *school system* was marketed, and expanded, and expanded.

Go take a gander at the disturbingly illiterate *comments* on YouTube and do your own assessment of how a well-intentioned Big Education has turned out.

You know how in many states (I think) one can't sell their house without a *septic inspection*?

Well I've heard that the *greenies* are already licking their chops to expand this un-Constitutional financial meddling. I've heard that they are trying to impose other *environmental* standards on owners of private property before they can effect a sale - energy efficient windows and whatnot. This will cost tax-paying Americans nothing, right? And the statist intermediation will end here, right?

Me, I'm against every single *harmless* windmill - and may even be impelled to vandalism!

Hey, if those eco-pagan terrorists can fire-bomb McMansions in Seattle....

Us *brownies* should be out there in force, battling mind pollution for the sake of future generations....and Father Nature!