You win some and you lose some, as the saying goes, and here in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough, where we hang our hats, we just won a local victory; one that has to do with schools and bathrooms.
A state superior court judge has upheld a Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District policy that restricts “transgender” students from using bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their confused ideas about their sexual characteristics.
The ruling was issued Thursday by Alaska Superior Court Judge Tom V. Jamgochian, marks a defeat for the ACLU of Alaska, which brought the case early last year on behalf of an elementary school student and his parents. The lawsuit had argued that the district’s bathroom rule violated the student’s constitutional rights to privacy and education.
At issue was MSBSD Policy No. 5134 BP, adopted in October 2022. The rule requires students to use restrooms corresponding to the sex listed on their birth certificate or to use a single-occupancy restroom as an alternative.
The judge determined that the policy does not infringe on rights guaranteed by the Alaska Constitution, citing the availability of a private restroom option as a reasonable accommodation. That finding rejected the ACLU claims that the rule discriminates against the plaintiff.
There is no discrimination. Not a jot. Boys will use boys’ restrooms, and girls will use girls’ restrooms. This is a policy with thousands of years of precedence. The only thing being debated here is the definition of “boy” and “girl,” which in humans, was decided millions 
of years ago; in mammals, this was decided around 200-some million years ago. It’s not subject for debate, and our daughters shouldn’t have to put up with a boy who has just decided he’s a girl and insists on invading their safe spaces, or vice versa, for that matter.
Those policies rarely end well.
Besides, these confused kids do have other options:
The ruling leaves the policy in place and means the student must continue using either the girls’ restroom or a designated single-occupancy restroom.
The case, filed in Palmer Superior Court, could next be appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court. The ACLU of Alaska has not yet indicated whether it will pursue further legal action.
Forget legal action, ACLU; why not instead take a science lesson or two? Specifically, biology, and mammalian reproduction.
Yes, my juxtaposition with the calling out of a dude cheating in women’s sports and the sprinkling of fulsome photos of an actual woman is deliberate.
A boy from California’s Jurupa Valley High School has been competing in girls’s track and field. The boy has not been named, but one of his competitors, an actual girl with two X chromosomes, made a great and defiant gesture after losing a first-place title in girls’ sports to a boy.
The second-place finisher to the trans athlete in triple jump, Reese Hogan of Crean Lutheran High School, made it a point to stand on the first-place 
podium spot for a quick and symbolic photo op. Footage of Hogan taking the top podium spot after the trans athlete stepped off went viral on social media over the weekend.
Hogan had just competed against the trans athlete in the prelims a week earlier. At that event, Hogan also came in behind the trans athlete in the triple jump, finishing third, and would have placed one spot higher were it not for the trans athlete. But Hogan did finish ahead of the trans athlete in the high jump.
“It’s just kind of sad just watching. He’s obviously a really talented athlete, we’ve all seen him jump and stuff, and I wish him the best of luck, but in a boys’ division,” Hogan previously told Fox News Digital about 
competing against the athlete. “It’s pretty obvious the certain advantages that he has, and it’s obviously just sad as a woman to watch that.”
Reese Hogan is clearly a young lady with a generous spirit. Were I to have a daughter in one of these events, who lost a title and possibly greater recognition, like a scholarship, to a boy – I would have been spitting nails. This practice is hideously unfair.
But wait! There’s more!
“It was nothing against the athlete itself, it was just an issue of fairness,” Hogan previously said. “Nothing that we can do, no amount of training, no amount of hours that we put in, we could never achieve the same amount of advantages that a man can have.”
Again, Miss Hogan is trying to take the high ground here, but there are times when a harsher approach is in order. This is one of those times. The unnamed little shit who is competing with girls is cheating. Miss Hogan is demonstrating great charity of spirit here, 
but it would be appropriate to have something against the athlete. He’s cheating. He’s a cheater. Pure and simple. He is probably a mediocre athlete at best when set against other boys, so he has found a way to cheat and make himself look like a greater competitor than he really is. It’s cheating. There’s no other word for it. He needs to be bounced off the girl’s team and stripped of any titles and trophies he has illegitimately won.
Can’t believe I’ve been doing this for eleven years, but it’s that time again – here, once more, is my super-motivational commencement speech, should any school or university be so inclined to invite me to deliver it.
“Graduates of the Class of 2023, let me be the first to extend to you my congratulations on this, your day of entry into reality.
For the last four years, you have been working towards this goal, towards this day. That’s a good thing. One of the most important skills you will ever need, one of the most important ways to achieve success in the world into which you are about to enter, is the ability to formulate goals, plan how to achieve those goals, and see things through until you reach those goals. Today you’ve shown you can do that. Congratulations and good job.
Now, before you go out to enjoy the rest of this day, before you go out to celebrate this goal you have achieved, let me tell you a few harsh truths about the world you’re entering. I’m not going to give you any trigger warnings; if you can’t handle what I’m about to say, there’s damn little future for you out there in the real world, so cowboy up. Moments ago I congratulated you on your day of entry into reality, so to get you started off right, here is a hefty dose of reality for you.
Despite what you may have been told during all your years of education, nobody owes you anything, and you aren’t special. Any perceived ‘need’ you may have does not entitle you to anything – most especially, not to one red cent of the product of anyone else’s effort. If any of your professors have told you that, then they are economic illiterates, moral frauds, or outright charlatans.
Our wonderful Constitution, which has stood for well over two hundred years as the founding document of our Republic, guarantees you the opportunity to your pursuit of happiness. It does not require anyone to provide you with the means to your happiness at their expense. You and you alone are responsible for your own life. You have no moral claim on anyone else’s productivity. Accept that fact and you are already one step ahead of most of your peers.
You are entitled to what you have earned through your own efforts, and not:
One.
Damn.
Thing.
More.
If you are accepting a degree today in LGBT Studies, or Women’s Studies, or any of the other assorted bullshit Underwater Dog Polishing degrees our universities crank out today, then you have my sympathies. You are the victim of a fraud perpetrated by our university system, a vicious and cynical fraud that has resulted in you spending a lot of money for no gain. But more importantly, you are the victim of your own poor judgement. 
You decided to pursue a useless degree, and now you’re stuck. Here is another harsh reality: You are responsible for your own situation. It’s not anybody else’s fault. Nobody else is responsible. You are.
Your university experience had one goal – producing a young adult with marketable skills, someone who can provide value to an employer and to the economy. In this your university has failed, and in choosing this degree, so did you. You have relegated yourself to uselessness in the workplace, and when a few years from now you are working as a barista or checkout clerk and crying over your six figures of student debt, remember what I said a few moments ago: You and you alone are responsible for your own life. You made a decision; now you get to deal with the consequences of that decision. Pull yourself up, look around at the other opportunities around you, and figure a way out of this mess your youthful indiscretion has landed you in.
But you still have one thing going for you. You have shown that you can set yourself a goal and achieve it. Do so now.
So, where do you go from here?
Because nobody owes you anything, including a living, one of the tasks ahead of you now is finding gainful employment. If you’re going to find employment, it will only be because you can demonstrate to the employer that you can provide value to him or her in excess of your costs of employment. Employment is an economic transaction. In any free market transaction, both parties have to realize a perceived gain in value or the transaction won’t happen. If a prospective employer doesn’t think you’re able to provide value to his/her business in excess of your cost of employment, which includes not only your salary but all the extra taxes, fees and other various government extortion that you never see in your pay stub – then they won’t hire you. So be able to present yourself as 
someone who can provide value, in whatever field you have been studying these last few years.
Once you have gained that employment, once you are in the workplace, remember these three rules for success:
Words that should never pass your lips include such things as “that’s not my job,” and “I don’t have time for that.” Your reputation in the workplace should be, to put it bluntly, the one who can get shit done. Results matter. Be the one that the boss can count on. Be the one who brings things in on time. Be the one who finishes the job. Be the one that produces value and you will never have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.
Bear in mind also that you are entering the workforce as a tablua rasa as far as potential employers are concerned. You’re not going to leave these halls and be CEO of General Motors. You will be working in an entry level job, probably not making a lot of money, probably doing work your longer-term co-workers don’t want to do. Suck it up. There are no lousy jobs, only lousy people. Any work that produces value is worth doing. How do you know if your work is producing value? The answer to that is 
trivially easy: If someone is willing to pay you to do the work, then you are producing value. Bear in mind also that the job belongs to the employer, not to you, and if you don’t meet the employer’s expectations, someone else will.
How do you meet those expectations? Better yet, how do you exceed them? When you are doing that job, keep these things in mind:
Be known for your integrity. Don’t say anything you don’t believe and don’t make promises you can’t deliver on. Your employers and co-workers must know you as the person who means what you say and who delivers on your promises.
Be known for your reliability. Show up on time, every day, for every event. Show up on time for meetings. Your 
employers and co-workers must know you as the person who will always be there when you’re needed.
Be known for your responsibility. If you take on a task, finish it. If you commit to a timeline, meet it. If you accept responsibility for something, own it. It’s yours. Don’t expect anyone else to take care of it for you. Your employers and co-workers must know you as the person who, when put in charge, takes charge.
Be known for your dependability. Plan your tasks to bring them in on schedule. If that means long hours, work them. If that means working a Saturday, work it. Your employers and co-workers must know you as the person who can get the job done.
Success isn’t a mysterious thing. It’s not that elusive and it’s not even all that hard. I did it, and you can too, but it does involve one four-letter word:
Work.
Thomas Edison once said “people often fail to recognize opportunity when it knocks, because it usually shows up in overalls and looks like work.” At these commencement events it’s common to be told to follow your dreams, and that’s nice, flowery stuff, but in most cases nobody is going to pay you to follow your dreams. They will pay you to produce value, and that means work. Follow your dreams on your own time.
Finally, I will leave you all with some unsolicited advice:
All through your life, people will promise you things. Most of them won’t deliver. Many of those people will be people seeking political office, and many more of them will be people pushing some sort of supposed business opportunity. Some years ago the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein observed a fundamental law of the universe, which law is represented by the acronym TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t No Such Thing As A 
Free Lunch. Remember that; if someone offers you something for nothing, they are lying. If someone is offering you something at someone else’s expense, they are offering to commit theft on your behalf. The only moral answer to such offers is outright refusal.
There are only three types of economic transactions and only one of those – a free, unfettered, voluntary exchange of value – is morally acceptable. If a transaction is done by force, that is theft. If a transaction is done by deceit, that is fraud. Have no interaction with anyone who advocates either.
Accept responsibility for your own successes. Accept responsibility for your own failures. Learn from both. Rely on yourself. Rely on your own skills, your own abilities. Many other people will let you down, but you can always rely on yourself.
In her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, author Ayn Rand presents the protagonist, John Galt, describing his decision to solve society’s troubles by an epic act of creative destruction. He describes the ultimate moment of his decision process with two sentences, two sentences which I have found more inspiring than any long-winded ethical or political monologue ever delivered since the times of Plato and Aristotle. These words are the very essence of the self-directed man of achievement:
‘I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.’
Those are good words to live by. Now, today, you graduates see what has to be done.
Go out and do it.
Thank you and good luck.”
If anyone was offended by anything contained in this hypothetical speech, too damn bad.
How the hell is it the last day of February already? Wasn’t it just New Year’s Day a few hours ago?
Never mind that. If you haven’t visited the new (since January 20, anyway) White House website yet, take a look. It’s a bold new look, but I’ll tell you right now, the meat of the thing is in the Executive Actions section. Here are a few humdingers you’ll want to be familiar with if you aren’t already.
Implementing the President’s “Department of Government Efficiency” Cost Efficiency Initiative
This one is, as my Grandpa used to say, a sockdologer. The DOGE may well be the last-ditch attempt to return to some semblance of fiscal sanity; it may well be the last chance we have to avoid utter fiscal ruin. My only fear is that it won’t go far enough. But his order places a freeze on government credit cards, it orders an inventory of the government-owned and leased real estate, and a lot more; it’s the order that put the teeth in the DOGE.
Suspension of Security Clearances and Evaluation of Government Contracts
There are a lot of folks out there who, candidly, shouldn’t have security clearances. Some of his may look like payback – but read the specifics. Security clearances are really too generously handed out.
Establishing the National Energy Dominance Council
Energy. Everything’s about energy. President Trump vowed to make America not only energy independent but a net energy exporter. We have the resources for this. We just need to go after them, and believe you me, we have plenty of resources right here in Alaska. The Great Land is a veritable treasure chest. President Trump gets that, even if his predecessor didn’t.
Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws
This seems like kind of a petty item to rate a presidential order, but think about it for a moment; it’s a visible signal to end some of the climate-panic stupidity that marked the administration of goofy, befuddled old Joe Biden. People were, in many places, forced to use these saggy paper straws that collapsed into wet ruin before one was halfway through one’s drink. Enough of that crap. Give me a nice solid plastic straw.
What the hell, why not?
The President, as head of the executive branch, actually does have authority over geographical names and so on. He can do this. While the United States has more than half the Gulf’s shoreline, it’s important to note that President Trump ordered the name change not to the “Gulf of the United States,” but the “Gulf of America.” Mexico is in North America. But North America isn’t Mexico.
As far as here, though, most Alaskans I know will keep on calling our great mountain 
“Denali.” The Gulf of America borders on several states and several countries. Denali is ours. We should have some say in what we call it.
President Trump has been damn busy this last month. It’s been a challenge for us to keep up with. Can he keep this pace up for four years? Can he set things up so the GOP holds the White House in 2028? That all remains to be seen – but he’s sure off to an interesting start.
Before I get into this stupidity (see headline) make sure to check out the latest installment of my buddy UnCivilServant’s Prince of the North Tower as well as my next chapter of The Weavers over at Glibertarians.
Now then: If you didn’t need another reason to get rid of the unconstitutional federal Department of Education (ED) then here’s one anyway. It seems that over the last few years, the ED has poured $200 million into DEI programs at American universities.
A new report from Parents Defending Education alleges that since 2021, the Department of Education has awarded over $200 million to forty-eight universities injecting DEI content into counseling courses that include topics on antiracism, microaggressions, white privilege, and whiteness.
“The federal government spends billions of dollars on mental health initiatives each year – but it’s imperative to investigate how counselors and social workers are trained, because some practitioners may do more harm than good,” Nicole Neily, president of Parents Defending Education, told Fox News Digital. “As the Trump administration looks to eradicate DEI from American institutions, these education and training programs merit close scrutiny, as do the professional associations overseeing such work.”
Yeah. Shut it down. President Trump, if you’re listening, work with Congress, do whatever you have to do. Take it to the courts – the 10th Amendment actually precludes Washington being involved in education. Take it to Congress. Whittle down their budget to next to nothing, so they don’t have $200 million in taxpayer’s money to spend on this foolishness.
We need to cut spending. Our government spending and debt are out of control. There’s a lot to cut, but cut this first. The ED is clearly too stupid to continue.
National treasure Dr. Victor Davis Hanson recently spoke with City Journal’s Brain C. Anderson to talk about his latest book, titled The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation. As you might guess from the title, this was a serious topic. I can’t go through the whole interview – read it, by all means – but here’s the intro, and the real kicker:
Brian Anderson: So, in this new book, The End of Everything, you chronicle the demise of four civilizations, classical Thebes, Punic Carthage, Byzantine Constantinople, and then the Aztecs. And there can be, you write, degrees of obliteration, and you described them in each of these examples, but there are also striking similarities in the wartime destruction of whole societies. So I wonder, just to start out, how do you define the total destruction of a culture? What do you mean by that?
Victor Davis Hanson: Well, it’s different than just the obliteration of their infrastructure or the mass killing, as we saw during World War II when we firebombed Japan and we bombed Dresden and we left the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire a shell of their former selves, but we quickly allowed them to recalibrate under democratic auspices. And today there’s a thriving German culture. In some ways, there’s a continuity all the way back to the beginning of a united Germany. And the same is true of Japan. But what I was interested in is these rare occasions in history when a society, a civilization, a city state, an empire, a nation goes to war and they lose. And they not only lose their infrastructure—either it’s destroyed or simply absorbed and swallowed by the victor—but the civilization disappears. And by that, in the ancient world, in the pre-modern world, that’s usually either by mass murder or killing during combat in addition to 
enslavement. In all these cases that proved to be true.
This sounds a lot like what Hamas attempted on October 7th of last year. It sounds a lot like what they would do to the United States, were they given the opportunity.
Consider also that the barbarians are already inside our gates. While the Biden(‘s handlers) administration has literally thrown open the doors, illegal immigration has been a problem for decades; it’s probably inevitable when a wealthy, advanced nation shares a two-thousand-mile border with a poor, failed narco-state. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort, though, to enforce that order, or to kick illegals the hell out when they are caught.
The point is at this point, we have millions of people in the country who are here illegally.
We h
ave very little idea who most of them are. We don’t always know where they really came from, where they intend to go, or what they intend to do when they get there – but in some of those cases we had better assume the worst.
Dr. Hanson concluded:
I don’t think we have the ability to ensure that people are not coming into our country with ill intent. And I say that as someone who lives 12 miles away from a biolab in Reedley, California of all places, a little tiny agrarian town. Right in the very packing house where I worked as a kid, they found a Chinese biolab with vials on the floor of cholera, malaria, HIV, Covid, SARS virus, every deadly type of pathogen, and dead genetically engineered mice, right in the middle of this little town. And it was somebody with connections with the Chinese government who claimed that he was trying to create a testing service, but there was no 
evidence of that. No one to this day knows what it was all about, except it was very dangerous.
I think Dr. Hanson is a master of understatement. Having been educated in biology, and also having been through the U.S. Army’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical warfare training, I will say that bugs scare me more than nukes or gas. Bio-weapons are horrible; lethal, self-spreading; if they don’t scare the absolute kapok out of you, you need to read more on the topic.
Dr. Hanson is, I’m afraid, a voice crying out in the wilderness, as are many of us in the right-leaning media. What’s coming may be inevitable, it’s for sure unimaginable, and it may be impossible to avoid.
It’s that time of year again when high school and college graduates all over the country are trying on caps and gowns and making post-graduation plans. Today, for the tenth year, (holy crap, I’ve been doing this for ten years?) I will present here my own carefully prepared commencement speech to those grads – presented here because there’s damn little chance of my being asked to deliver it in person to a group of impressionable yutes.
So, here it is. Enjoy.
“Graduates of the Class of 2023, let me be the first to extend to you my congratulations on this, your day of entry into reality.
For the last four years, you have been working towards this goal, towards this day. That’s a good thing. One of the most important skills you will ever need, one of the most important ways to achieve success in the world into which you are about to enter, is the ability to formulate goals, plan how to achieve those goals, and see things through until you reach those goals. Today you’ve shown you can do that. Congratulations and good job.
Now, before you go out to enjoy the rest of this day, before you go out to celebrate this goal you have achieved, let me tell you a few harsh truths about the world you’re entering. I’m not going to give you any trigger warnings; if you can’t handle what I’m about to say, there’s damn little future for you out there in the real world, so cowboy up. Moments ago I congratulated you on your day of entry into reality, so to get you started off right, here is a hefty dose of reality for you.
Despite what you may have been told during all your years of education, nobody owes you anything, and you aren’t special. Any perceived ‘need’ you may have does not entitle you to anything – most especially, not to one red cent of the product of anyone else’s effort. If any of your professors have told you that, then they are economic illiterates, moral frauds, or outright charlatans.
Our wonderful Constitution, which has stood for well over two hundred years as the founding document of our Republic, guarantees you the opportunity to your pursuit of happiness. It does not require anyone to provide you with the means to your happiness at their expense. You and you alone are responsible for your own life. You have no moral claim on anyone else’s productivity. Accept that fact and you are already one step ahead of most of your peers.
You are entitled to what you have earned through your own efforts, and not:
One.
Damn.
Thing.
More.
If you are accepting a degree today in LGBT Studies, or Women’s Studies, or any of the other assorted bullshit Underwater Dog Polishing degrees our universities crank out today, then you have my sympathies. You are the victim of a fraud perpetrated by our university system, a vicious and cynical fraud that has resulted in you spending a lot of money for no gain. But more importantly, you are the victim of your own poor judgement. You decided to pursue a useless degree, and now you’re stuck. Here is another harsh reality: You are responsible for your own situation. It’s 
not anybody else’s fault. Nobody else is responsible. You are.
Your university experience had one goal – producing a young adult with marketable skills, someone who can provide value to an employer and to the economy. In this your university has failed, and in choosing this degree, so did you. You have relegated yourself to uselessness in the workplace, and when a few years from now you are working as a barista or checkout clerk and crying over your six figures of student debt, remember what I said a few moments ago: You and you alone are responsible for your own life. You made a decision; now you get to deal with the consequences of that decision. Pull yourself up, look around at the other opportunities around you, and figure a way out of this mess your youthful indiscretion has landed you in.
But you still have one thing going for you. You have shown that you can set yourself a goal and achieve it. Do so now.
So, where do you go from 
here?
Because nobody owes you anything, including a living, one of the tasks ahead of you now is finding gainful employment. If you’re going to find employment, it will only be because you can demonstrate to the employer that you can provide value to him or her in excess of your costs of employment. Employment is an economic transaction. In any free market transaction, both parties have to realize a perceived gain in value or the transaction won’t happen. If a prospective employer doesn’t think you’re able to provide value to his/her business in excess of your cost of employment, which includes not only your salary but all the extra taxes, fees and other various government extortion that you never see in your pay stub – then they won’t hire you. So be able to present yourself as someone who can provide value, in whatever field you have been studying these last few years.
Once you have gained that employment, once you are in the workplace, remember these three rules for success:
Words that should never pass your lips include such things as “that’s not my job,” and “I don’t have time for that.” Your reputation in the workplace should be, to put it bluntly, the one who can get shit done. Results matter. Be the one that the boss can count on. Be the one who brings things in on time. Be the one who finishes the job. Be the one that produces value and you will never have to worry about where your next meal is coming from.
Bear in mind also that you are entering the workforce as a tablua rasa as far as potential employers are concerned. You’re not going to leave these halls and be CEO of General Motors. You will be working in an entry level job, probably not making a lot of money, probably doing work your longer-term co-workers don’t want to do. Suck it up. There are no lousy jobs, only lousy people. Any work that produces value is worth doing. How do you know if your work is producing value? The answer to that is trivially easy: If someone is willing to pay you to do the work, then you are producing value. Bear in mind also that the job belongs to the employer, not to you, and if you don’t meet the employer’s expectations, someone else will.
How do you meet those expectations? Better yet, how do you exceed them? When you are doing that job, keep these things in mind:
Be known for your integrity. Don’t say anything you don’t believe and don’t make promises you can’t deliver on. Your employers and co-workers must know you as the person who means what you say and who delivers on your promises.
Be known for your reliability. Show up on time, every day, for every event. Show up on time for meetings. Your employers and co-workers must know you as the person who will always be there when you’re needed.
Be known for your responsibility. If you take on a task, finish it. If you commit to a timeline, meet it. If you accept responsibility for something, own it. It’s yours. Don’t expect anyone else to take care 
of it for you. Your employers and co-workers must know you as the person who, when put in charge, takes charge.
Be known for your dependability. Plan your tasks to bring them in on schedule. If that means long hours, work them. If that means working a Saturday, work it. Your employers and co-workers must know you as the person who can get the job done.
Success isn’t a mysterious thing. It’s not that elusive and it’s not even all that hard. I did it, and you can too, but it does involve one four-letter word:
Work.
Thomas Edison once said “people often fail to recognize opportunity when it knocks, because it usually shows up in overalls and looks like work.” At these commencement events it’s common to be told to follow your dreams, and that’s nice, flowery stuff, but in most cases nobody is going to pay you to follow your dreams. They will pay you to produce value, and that means work. Follow your dreams on your own time.
Finally, I will leave you all with some unsolicited advice:
All through your life, people will promise you things. Most of them won’t deliver. Many of those people will be people seeking political office, and many more of them will be people pushing some sort of supposed business opportunity. Some years ago the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein observed a fundamental law of the universe, which law is represented by the acronym TANSTAAFL: There Ain’t 
No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Remember that; if someone offers you something for nothing, they are lying. If someone is offering you something at someone else’s expense, they are offering to commit theft on your behalf. The only moral answer to such offers is outright refusal.
There are only three types of economic transactions and only one of those – a free, unfettered, voluntary exchange of value – is morally acceptable. If a transaction is done by force, that is theft. If a transaction is done by deceit, that is fraud. Have no interaction with anyone who advocates either.
Accept responsibility for your own successes. Accept responsibility for your own failures. Learn from both. Rely on yourself. Rely on your own skills, your own abilities. Many other people will let you down, but you can always rely on yourself.
In her epic novel Atlas Shrugged, author Ayn Rand presents the protagonist, John Galt, describing his decision to solve society’s troubles by an epic act of creative destruction. He describes the ultimate moment of his decision process with two sentences, two sentences which I have found more inspiring than any long-winded ethical or political monologue ever delivered since the times of Plato and Aristotle. These words are the very essence of the self-directed man of achievement:
‘I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.’
Those are good words to live by. Now, today, you graduates see what has to be done.
Go out and do it.
Thank you and good luck.”
If anyone was offended by anything contained in this hypothetical speech, too damn bad.
Thanks as always to The Other McCain, Pirate’s Cove, The Daley Gator, Flappr, Whores and Ale, and Bacon Time for the Rule Five links!
Now then: Who the hell thought this was in any way appropriate?
Deer Creek School District released a statement Friday afternoon after a video was sent to Fox 25 that showed students licking toes during an event for the school’s Wonderful Week of Fundraising.
“It was surprising,” an anonymous student told Fox 25. “I didn’t think they were going to do all that. I was just shocked. I didn’t really have like a feeling. I was kind of disgusted, and then kind of glad I wasn’t over there.”
“Whenever she told me yesterday that was happening, I had to ask her, ‘Wait, what? They’re licking peanut butter off of toes,” an anonymous parent said. “What?”
The week was spent raising money for Not Your Average Joe Coffee, which employs people with intellectual, developmental, and physical disabilities.
“I am all for fundraising and all for really fun and silly things, but that right there just seems a little excessive,” the parent said.
What the actual fuck? Here’s the video:
🚨GRAPHIC WARNING- Video sent to FOX 25 shows students at Deer Creek High kissing and sucking on feet yesterday. @DCAntlers confirms the video, saying the students volunteered in challenges to help raise money for their annual philanthropy week. More at 9pm tonight on @OKCFOX. pic.twitter.com/3FaG8BbeAE
— Wendy Suares📺 (@wsuares) March 1, 2024
The statement claims that no Deer Creek teachers or faculty took part in this disgusting exercise, which begs the question: “Then who did?”
Oklahoma’s State Secretary of Schools had the right reply:
This is disgusting. We are cleaning up this filth in Oklahoma schools. Our agency is investigating. https://t.co/XdWGFy3Hc2
— Superintendent Ryan Walters (@RyanWaltersSupt) March 2, 2024
Damn right, this needs to be cleaned up. Anyone in the school system who enabled this in any way should be cashiered, forthwith. If the schools, or indeed any organization want to use school-aged kids for fundraisers, let them do sack races, or chili cook-offs, or something sensible. For example: Here in the Great Land, every April there is a gun show down in Big Lake, that raises money for the Big Lake High School boy’s hockey team.
Plenty of folks on the left will no doubt rheeeee about that, but it’s sure as hell a lot saner and healthier than having school kids lick peanut butter off adults’ toes.
Honestly. Just when you think you’ve hit Peak Stupid, some shit like this comes up.