My son is attending Oak Mountain Middle School in the fall and they had “Instrument Selection Day” at the middle school where they got to try out all the instruments and decide which one they liked.  He has always wanted to be in a rock and roll band.  He loves AC/DC, Aerosmith, Boston, Ozzy, etc.  so a few years ago at his request, I got him an entire drum set for Christmas.  He has some fine motor skills issues so I thought this would be better suited for him than guitar or piano. I just assumed he would have selected the drums.  I guess we should have talked about it first.   Well wouldn’t you know he came home and told us his first choice was the trombone and second choice was the drums.  The trombone???   My first instrument was the clarinet so who am I to judge the coolness of the instrument, but the email that came from the band director confirming the trombone selection also indicated that I am required to rent or purchase a trombone.   I promptly called the music store that the school has an arrangement with and they told me that the cost of renting is anywhere from $31/month for a used trombone that barely works to $52/month to rent a brand new one.  They also told me that renting a snare drum was only $27/month.

I emailed the director and told him I was concerned about the cost and that my son already had an entire drum set at home.    He told me my son had “scored” a 9/10 on the trombone and a 3/10 on the drums, whatever that means.  He also said he told the kids that they must score a 9 or 10 on percussion to be allowed to select that instrument.   This is absurd.   Since when do we tell children what instruments they can and cannot play?  Yes I know my son went and selected the trombone himself as his first choice, but when I reminded him that there is no trombone in AC/DC, he quickly remembered why the drums would have been a better choice.  I don’t suppose the “testers” discouraged him from selecting the drums based on his “test scores” and steered him to a less popular instrument, do you?

When I was in high school, Mr. Antonolli (widely referred to as Mr. Assaholey) was my Basic Programming teacher.    He told me that I did not have the aptitude for computers or programming because I could not figure out how to do a bubble-sort.  As a consequence, I took no more computer classes in high school or college even though it greatly interested me. How reckless and irresponsible is that??   Not only did I have the aptitude for programming, my career is programming which I picked up after college.  And I’m darn good at it.  Mostly self taught thanks to Mr. Assaholely.

I think the school has some nerve dictating which instruments a child is allowed to learn. The band director is clearly more interested in having all his seats filled than having 1 flute and 100 trumpets.   I played in the school orchestra from elementary to high school and I love music.  I really want my kids to play instruments and love music, but it may look like I’m switching him over to the chorus.

Need a crisis? Create one through the media. Swine Flu, it’s more dangerous than the drug gangs in Mexico, more dangerous than the Taliban in Pakistan, more dangerous than Iran going nuclear. At least that’s what the media wants you to think according to their coverage. Let me give you the facts and some perspective before you start running around like chicken little with a mask on and rubbing Purell all over everything.

20,000 - 40,000 Americans die EVERY YEAR from the influenza virus. People are so unimpressed with that statistic that many people don’t even bother getting flu shots. The Swine Flu is just the flu. Guess how many people died in the U.S. from the Swine Flu pandemic of 1976? One. How many people died from complications from the vaccine? One hundred. Before you praise the effectiveness of the vaccines, they were not given to anybody until 8 months after the initial death.

If you get the flu, you take Tylenol for your fever and drink lots of fluids and chicken soup and you’ll probably be fine. If not, go to the doctor. In general, the flu will not kill a healthy person in the United States and so far all the Swine Flu cases in the U.S. have been mild with no deaths. Want to survive the flu? Don’t be poor and live in Mexico.

So why all the hype? It’s a tremendous power grab by the CDC, WHO, and President. The CDC and WHO get tons of attention and money from panicked nations, and guess what happens when the “crisis” fades with very few casualties? President Obama will be praised as a hero for destroying the virus with his bare hands and saving us all. Seriously, they are setting him up to be a hero over a contrived crisis. It’s tremendously clever. He doesn’t have to do anything at all except tell people not to panic because he has it all under control. And don’t for a minute think that this isn’t connected somehow to his plan to socialize Health Care. If he can save us from Swine Flu, imagine what he can do for all diseases.

Mark my words, this crisis is all hype.

The New Haven, CT Fire Department created the most racially unbiased test they could with the intention of identifying the best qualified candidates for promotion based solely on merit. Only whites scored well enough to earn the promotion so what did the city do? In a move that defies logic and justification, they decided to not promote anyone.

Fox News Article:

Background: This racially-charged reverse discrimination case is the first significant affirmative action case to reach the high court in several years. It is also highlights the new Obama Administration’s view of the subject and exposes to criticism the decision reached by appellate court judge Sonia Sotomayor, one of the people often mentioned as someone President Obama could select for a seat on the Supreme Court.

2003 was promotions time for the New Haven, Conn. Fire Department. The city hired an outside agency to fairly administer a test to the firefighters looking for advancement. The test was designed to identify the best candidates in a manner that was as racially unbiased as possible. When the results were calculated, no African-American firefighters scored well enough on the test to earn the bump in title or salary. City leaders concerned over lawsuits that could come from acting on the test’s racially disparate results scuttled them and promoted no one.

These firefighters were deliberately denied a promotion SOLELY because of their race!!!  That is supposed to be illegal in this country yet for some reason it’s had to go all the way to the Supreme Court.

I’m getting fed up.  We might as well just pass a law that says white people cannot be promoted or hired until after all minorities have been promoted or hired ahead of them.  That’s seems to be the way things are going.

I tell my son, who is latin, do not allow anyone to give you any special consideration simply because of your ethnicity. Earn what is yours because you deserve it more than anyone else. Giving him an artificial advantage will not help him in life. It will just teach him that he does not need to work as hard to attain the same result. Just as when my son was struggling in spelling one year, the school wanted to give him an “accommodation” and lower the number of spelling words he needed to learn each week from 15 to 10. I went through the roof objecting. I told them if anything, they need to give him more words than anyone else instead of less if indeed the goal is to improve his spelling. I demanded to know how learning 33% less words than other students will make him a better speller. Of course the school was more interested in his self esteem. The school eventually saw it my way and I can assure you that my son has gotten all A’s in spelling since that day.

Let’s just say that two of these firefighters, one black and one white, achieve the same score on the exam. That job is automatically given to the minority. Fine. White people pretty much expect that these days. But what message does that send to the white person? It tells him, not only do you have to compete at a higher level than a minority candidate, you have to achieve a level where there can be no dispute that you are so exceptionally qualified that you get the job. Most people put in that position will rise to the challenge as was demonstrated in New Haven CT. The only problem is that no one was rewarded for their exceptional performance in this case.

Instead of lowering the bar for certain groups in this country, why can’t we raise the bar for everyone? When will we ever achieve a merit based, color blind society as New Haven CT so feebly and fleetingly attempted to?

Lately Texas has been flexing their muscles asserting their state’s rights and even threatening to secede. Then you find out that some cowboy down there wants to be a cowgirl. That’s right. A sissy boy crybaby from Texas, Nikolai Grushevski (not a very cowboy-like name), sued Hooters for not hiring men to work as waiters. If that is not a frivolous lawsuit, then nothing is.

Grushevski said he was suing on behalf of “all males across the country who applied for the position of waiter at a Hooters restaurant and were denied” Uh… that would be just you, Nikolai. No other males actually apply to be waiters there. Instead they go as customers. That is the point, moron.

The Vice President of Marketing for Hooters very rationally said, “If we lose this go around, you can next expect hairy-legged guys in the Rockettes to line up and male models in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.”

Stop the madness!!!!!!! We don’t have to be that equal!!!!!! Differences between the sexes should be celebrated, not blurred. I’ll tell you right now that if Nikolai tried to serve me at a Hooters I would leave and never go back. I’m sure Nikolai is a swell guy, but you don’t buy Cracker Jack for the popcorn, you buy it to get the prize inside. Nikolai is not the prize I would want at Hooters.

Come on Texas, deport this bozo. Send him to California.