Vox Popoli

From the St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Minnesota adopted a law in 1987 that clearly established the legality of home education. In 1985-86, an estimated 654 Minnesota children were home-schooled. This year, that number is 18,000. Today, Minnesota has some of the stricter laws overseeing home schooling….

For many years, Northwestern College, a Christian liberal arts school in St. Paul, has actively recruited home-schoolers, who make up 10 percent of its student body. It was a unique strategy — until now.

“Until recently, a number of colleges and universities were very skeptical of home-schoolers; they just didn’t know how to approach or deal with them,” says Ken Faffler, Northwestern admissions director. “That was fine with me; we wanted all of them we could get,” Faffler says. “We could see, on average, they’re above average … on SAT and ACT exams. And they also seem to have a slightly higher level of maturity — all this worry about socialization is something we knew we didn’t have to consider.”

Now, Ivy League schools, businesses like Apple Computer, PBS and many others are reaching out to the home-schooler.

Rather than simply picking someone, I elected to decide the matter in a very high-tech way, assigning each volunteer a number then rolling two ten-sided dice. Hey, it’s as close to role-playing as I’ve come since the time I had a bikini-clad Space Bunny rolling Traveller characters in the Bahamas*.

The amusing part of that experience was how Space Bunny was simply in agony over the fate of her characters, one of Traveller’s distinguishing characteristics being that you could actually kill off your character while in the process of making him.

So, after each die roll, she’d immediately cover her eyes, usually as a prelude to something that went like this:

“What happened? Tell me what happened!”

“Well, the good news is that you survived the raid. The bad news is that you were badly wounded, lost an eye and will be cashiered from the Imperial Marines without gaining any more skills. They did give you a nice medal, though.”

“I hate this game! It’s awful!”

Anyhow, next week’s pinata – that is to say, Guest Blogger of the Week – is ANIMATE MATTERS. In 750 words or less, get it to me sometime on Friday, Wes.

* Sure, it sounds bad, but this should not be held as evidence against me in any future Nuremburg Geek Trials. We held the rights to the game at the time and were in the process of designing a second-party title for Sega of America on what was then called the Katana, later the Dreamscape. Unfortunately for Traveller fans and us, Sega of Japan killed off SOA in favor of giving Arsenal a lot of money to put Dreamscape on their jerseys. Good for the Gunners, not so great for the Sega Dreamscape. I still have the Arsenal jersey.

Andrew Stuttaford writes of the impending French NO vote on the EU “constitution”:

Luxembourg’s prime minister, the evocatively named Jean-Claude Juncker, has proved that, contrary to the rumours, that dour bunch of eurocrats, placemen and rentiers located down in the Ardennes really do have a sense of humour. He’s saying that the EU will “continue to develop” if the constitution is voted right (true enough, alas), but that the process will slow down and that as a result “we would lose two decades, during which certain parts of the world would move ahead by adopting Europe’s model, while others would catch up with us.”

Quite why anyone else should want to adopt “Europe’s model,” which is best seen as the Ford Pinto of economic management and the Rolls Royce of corruption, is beyond me.

Stuttaford’s description of the European model is correct, but he seems to miss the crucial implication of what Juncker is saying, namely, that other parts of the world are already working on adopting Europe’s supranational model. Now, what parts of the world could he be referring to? And is it possible, perhaps even probable, tht this just might have a little something to do with the Mexican minister’s mention last week of US-Mexican integration?

From the Telegraph:

The BBC was last night plunged into a damaging general election row after it admitted equipping three hecklers with microphones and sending them into a campaign meeting addressed by Michael Howard, the Conservative leader….

Last night, the BBC claimed that the exercise was part of a “completely legitimate programme about the history and art of political heckling” and said that other parties’ meetings were being “observed”. However, The Telegraph has established that none of Tony Blair’s meetings was infiltrated or disrupted in similar fashion.

Of course, this would never happen in the USA, where journalists are trained to be objective, unlike that amateur operation at the BBC. And I’m sure it’s merely a coincidence that the employees at the government-owned and operated BBC should actively favor the party that supports increasing the size and scope of government.

No wonder the Democrats seek a nationalized media.

There’s no question that the NFL is the premier sports league in America. I daresay there’s more interest in the NFL draft than there is in any baseball or basketball playoff games this weekend.

I mean, the White Buffalo is in no less than THREE draft pools. It’s madness, I tell you, madness!

Although not as crazy as the idea of the Vikings taking another RB at 7. Unfortunately, the possibility is a real one given the low-wattage at which Mike Tice operates.

In the unlikely event that you care but aren’t watching, the first three were: Smith, Brown, Edwards. And if you don’t know exactly what that means, you really don’t need to know.

UPDATE – WR Troy Williamson. 6-2, fast, big-play receiver. A good pick. He’s got more speed than Mike Williams, who strikes me a more as a potential Keyshawn Johnson possession receiver than a Randy Moss replacement. It’s a roll of the dice in any case, but regardless of whether it was Brown, Williams and Benson being gone that forced the Vikes to do the right thing or not, it was a sensible pick, which for the Vikings is all one hopes for.

The question of filling a need higher than one has to is a bogus one; a need is a need. There’s a lot more genuine value in having Troy Williamson catching balls on the field than in a hypothetical higher value like Aaron Rodgers sitting on the bench watching Daunte throw the ball.

I usually find it difficult to post anything passing for even remotely thoughtful on Saturdays, mostly because I’m usually thinking about writing the following Monday’s column during the course of the day. And once I’m done with that, I’m not terribly inclined to post anything that requires the least bit of mental effort.

Also, the fact that the gym closes early on the weekend doesn’t help.

Anyhow, I’ve decided to try experimenting with rotating weekly guest bloggers. Each week I’ll select one blogger from a list of volunteers; you’ll have to be a member of the Reader Blogroll to volunteer… well, to volunteer successfully, anyhow. Email me the post by the following Friday and I’ll post it here on Saturday along with a link to your blog. Posts can be on pretty much any subject and do not need to be in accordance with my views, although if it’s something that’s over the top or likely to cause another host of idiots like the Atriocities to descend upon the blog, I won’t post it and you’ll lose your chance. Profanity and general indecency is likewise forbidden; if any such offenses require committing, I will commit them, thank you very much.

Posts can be any length up to 750 words. If you’ve got more to say, well, that’s what the link to your blog is for and you can continue the theme there if you want.

Any volunteers?

1928 1933

Communist 77 14.6% 81 15.3%
Social Democrat 143 27.1% 120 22.7%
Democratic 20 3.8% 5 0.9%
Center 68 12.9% 74 14.0%
Bavarian Volk 19 3.6% 18 3.4%
Economic 23 4.4% 0 0.0%
German Volk 30 5.7% 2 0.4%
Nationalists 41 7.8% 52 9.8%
Nazi 107 20.3% 288 54.5%

What’s interesting here is that while your average college professor will insist that the Nazi’s were right-wing extremists, drawing support from the more conservative elements of German society, he doesn’t usually know that the National Socialist party drew inordinate support from women and he almost surely doesn’t know what the actual vote totals from the last elections in the Weimar Republic were.

Carroll Quigley’s judgment on ideologies is suspect, given that he wrongly places the National Socialists on the extreme right, but I have listed the vote totals from the 1928 and 1933 elections as per his ideological classifications to demonstrate something interesting. (There were also elections in 1930 and two in 1932, but including them only serves to underline the point while making it somewhat complicated for a blog post.)

But if the electorate was moving to the right, why then would two of the three parties of the left, the Democrats and Social Democrats, lose almost eight percent to the National Socialists while the left-most party increased slightly? Especially when the second-rightmost party gained, as did the Center.

The picture makes more sense if one considers the National Socialists in their rightful place, a party of the hard Left with nationalist appeal. The other parties that prospered – the Communists and the Nationalists – showed that the German voters were increasingly supportive of A) hard left ideology, and, B) German nationalism.

Thus, it seems more reasonable to conclude that the SPD, the KPD and the NASDAP parties were all left-wing parties competing for a left-leaning electorate and it was the addition of nationalism to its socialism, combined with their advantage of economic credibility over the Communists, that gave the Nazis their popular appeal

And James Brown is dead…. Yes, my office is massively clean now, with a floor off which you could eat assuming you want to try to wrestle the Ridgeback. Did I mention that I like our new robot? She’s a little tired now after doing her happy dance, but I have a feeling that she’ll be acquiring some new friends soon.

I’m not saying that I’ve been evangelizing The Word According to Roomba around here or anything, but I am thinking about buying ten minutes on Sunday morning on one of the satellite channels.

Ya got’ta charge up!

By the way, has anyone noticed that the chirping “think I’m gonna dance now” melody when she gets started sounds more than a little bit like the theme from Intellivision NFL Football? Actually, it’s not really all that similar, but it’s close enough to make me think that some fake crowd cheers would be awesome. Also, strobing neon lights would be cool in the dark.

Between Roomba and Ron Mexico, I have to say, I’m having a pretty good week.

Today, of course, is the day we honor the birthday of that great man, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. While I have not yet realized my long-cherished dream of urinating on his corpse, I like to remember him on this, that most Soviet of days.

Oh, are we calling it Earth Day now? Well, piss on that too. One moment…. In fact, I just did.

Star & Sickle columnist Nick Coleman unwisely elects to write to PressThink:

Do you THINK the press is being de-certified? Which side are you on? I thought that was your game plan. You ripped me last fall without even speaking to me because I had the poor judgment (or maybe the balls) to confront right wing wingnut bloggers who have my newspaper (and most others) in the crosshairs of a constant all-out partisan attack. And they are winning, prof. The Star-Tribune now has hired a by-god certifiable right wing activist and power megaphone. Funny, I haven’t seen you make any mention of that yet. Nor do I remember you defending me in December when I criticized the dudes at Powerline, who I called extremists while most of the academic press fakers of the world were bending over to kiss their jodhpurs. By the way, in case you haven’t paid attention, many other journalists have since come to the same conclusion. I could cite chapte and verse, but why bother.

Nick Coleman is a being of scientific wonder. He’s both a prick and a pussy! As one PressThink commenter noted, where are those two anti-blog screeds? They seem to have mysteriously disappeared from his archive at the Red Star…. And of course, he’s a legacy media dinosaur, too slow to realize that in the blogosphere, what you write will be read, noted and commented upon regardless of whether it is an email, a blog post or a column. Didn’t you get the government memo? There is no privacy anymore.

I realize it’s hard for the legacy media types to get over the assumption that everything they write will vanish to the winds and be forgotten three days later, (and where are all those gunfights on Washington Avenue that the concealed-carry law was certain to bring about?) but some people just have to learn the hard way.

Nicki, my dear angry little chickadee, the reason Mr. Rosen wasn’t defending you is because, unlike you, he’s not dumb enough to think your position is a defensible one.