Author: Kim du Toit

Oh, The Hardship

Education

Must our children suffer any more?  Yes, according to the headmaster of this school in Britishland:

A [school principal] has insisted that a 12-hour school day will give pupils ‘buckets full of endorphins’ – as the 7am to 7pm scheme comes into effect today.

Children at All Saints Catholic College in the affluent neighbourhood of Notting Hill, west London, will partake in a whole host of activities instead of spending the time at home on their devices when classes finish at 3.15pm.

This includes homework time and activity clubs from dodgeball, basketball, art, drama and cookery classes in a bid to break the cycle of smartphone ‘addiction’.

The controversial decision to introduce a 12-hour school day comes after the principal found ‘shocking’ things on confiscated mobile phones, including pupils blackmailing strangers and catfishing one another.

[He said:] ‘It’s pretty clear across the sector this is a real issue in terms of the vacuum that phones fill for children when they go home. There’s a crisis in attendance and if we look at the last 10 years or so there’s a depletion in services that are available to children after school. He said the school will ensure homework is done within that time, while also making sure that children take part in activities so they go home ‘with a bucket full of endorphins’.

Not to mention that the little shits should be too exhausted to get up to mischief.

Not that this is anything new, of course.  Allow me to present a typical day in the life of a schoolboy at my old school, St. John’s College, back in the day:

6.40am:  Rising bell
7.02am:  Roll call
7.10am:  Breakfast
7.35am:  School prep (make beds, get books together for class, etc.)
8.00am:  Morning Chapel
8.25am:  Classes begin
1.25pm:  Lunch
2.10pm:  Reading and study (classrooms or dorm rooms)
2.50pm:  Sports (compulsory; cricket, swimming, athletics, tennis, squash in summer;  rugby or field hockey in winter)
4.15pm:  Roll call
4.20pm:  Free time, unless taken up by extra duties: sports, choir practice, punishment (detention, hard labor etc.)
Day scholars could leave for home after roll call or after extra duties.  For boarders:
6.30pm:  Dinner
7.10pm:  First Prep (homework), in classrooms, with a 10-minute break at 8pm
8.10pm:  Second Prep, until 9.15pm
Lights out:  9.45pm

If the daytime classroom hours seem to be less than in U.S. schools, remember the two hours’ prep each night, and allow me also to point out that Saturday mornings were the same as weekday mornings, and pupils were only free after lunch — “free”, that is, unless the school sports teams were engaged in matches against other area schools, and attendance was compulsory (roll call again!) at First Team matches.

Boarders stayed in school on Saturday nights, which were taken up with “club” activities such as Bridge, Drama, Chess, Debate, History, Photography, Geography, Literature, Film, Pioneer (nature/history studies) and so on.  Membership of at least three clubs was compulsory. Then Sundays:

8.30am:  Rising bell
8.55am:  Roll call
9.00am:  Sunday Chapel & Communion
10.00am:  Boarders were excused to leave, with parents only
6.30pm:  Roll call
6.35pm:  Dinner
7.00pm:  Evensong & Sermon, until 7.45pm
8.30pm:  Lights out
…and the whole thing would start again the next day.

So when I read about “12-hour days”, I just giggle.

We were so exhausted (endorphins? pah) that we seldom had time to get up to mischief.  Officially, that was the theory, anyway.  The reality, especially for thugs like the Four Muscadels, was a little different.

And we didn’t even have phones.  Wouldn’t have mattered if we did, because the school would have banned and confiscated them.

Just like our Brit headmaster has.  In that, at least, we have something in common.

Eyeworm

Gratuitous Chick Pics

From Longtime Friend & Reader Mark Alger:

“So, if a song that catches your ongoing attention is an earworm, what is an image that accomplishes the same end? An eyeworm?”

Yes.  Here’s one of mine:

Try as I may, I just cannot.

More to follow.

Conundrum

Deep Thoughts, Rights

The old saying goes, “Those who choose security over freedom deserve neither.”

And yet… you have a situation like this one:

The man who transformed El Salvador from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the safest, President Nayib Bukele, is despised by liberals.

When he won reelection in a landslide, liberal media outlets ran headlines stating that democracy had ended in El Salvador and that the country had become a one-party state. However, El Salvador is not Cuba.

Bukele did not eradicate opposition parties, nor did he imprison them or seize control of the press. Instead, he delivered on his promises. He made the country safe by locking up criminals.

And how did he do this?

In 2022, after a gang war resulted in the deaths of 87 people over a period of just three days, Bukele took action against crime. He constructed the country’s largest prison, the Terrorism Confinement Center (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or CECOT), with a capacity for 40,000 gang members. And he began filling it.

Human rights groups, who live in safe, wealthy Western nations, have criticized Bukele for violations of the rights of suspects.

But the logic is flawless. Only gang members have gang tattoos. If anyone else gets a gang tattoo, they will be killed by the gang. The same is true for tattoo artists.

They would be killed for giving gang tattoos to non-gang members. Additionally, part of the initiation to joining a gang is to commit a serious crime, often murder. Once they become a member, their full-time job is to commit crimes. So, logically, anyone with a gang tattoo is a gang member and has committed crimes.

If this makes one think, “That sounds like the foul MS-13 gang”, then one would be correct.

I have often thought about doing this right here in the U.S. of A., as whole areas of the country have become terrorized by gangs like MS-13.  And as the gang members proudly wear their clan tattoo, why not just arrest them as self-confessed criminals?

Because that’s wrong — basically, it’s un-Constitutional, and on more than one level.  And here’s how it was done in El Salvador:

Bukele decided to let logic prevail, arrest the gang members, and put them in prison. He was more concerned about the rights of street vendors, business owners, school children, working people, and ordinary citizens than he was about the rights of violent criminals.

The state of emergency he declared in 2022, and has renewed several times since, suspends the constitutional rights of the gang members and bypasses the corrupt courts and justice system, which had allowed the criminals to reign for decades. Since then, 75,000 gang members have been arrested, and 7,000 have been released.

Believe me, there’s a lot to be said in support about measures like those of Nayib Bukele.  After all:

Bukele claimed that his country went 365 days without a murder. And while the exact number has been called into question, it is an indisputable fact that the country now has the lowest murder rate it has seen in 30 years, plummeting by 70%, and now stands at only 2.4 per 100,000 in 2023, making it the second lowest in the Americas, just behind Canada.

Okay, maybe that worked in El Salvador, which started off being a shithole country, and just dug itself a deeper one over decades of corruption and your standard Third-World degeneracy.  Desperate measures were called for.

But the U.S. has never been a shithole country, in no small part because of the protections that our Constitution affords everybody — and not just non-gang members, either.

I am profoundly disturbed by the tone of articles such as the one I’ve linked to and quoted from in this post.  Of course I can see the benefits of actions like that of Bukele.

But I can also see how that kind of thing can be turned around and used against, oh, people like MAGA supporters or, for that matter, gun owners.

And to quote a wise man (not a politician, but a playwright), who saw where this could lead:

“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

— Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons

Gratuitous Gun Pic: Twin Ruger M77 RSI Rifles (.22-250 Rem & .308 Win)

Gratuitous Gun Pics

Here’s a $5,000 solution to someone of a practical mind.  Let’s assume that you would like to have a couple of rifles that would do duty on varmints and on medium-sized game.  But you’d like them to be identical in every respect but chambering, so that you would be familiar with both the action, the trigger and the shouldering thereof.

Why not, asks Steve Barnett (Merchant Of Death Extraordinaire), get these two?  Here’s the Ruger M77 RSI in .22-250 Rem (which spells “death to varmints” in no uncertain terms):

…and here’s its twin, in .308 Win (which spells “death to pretty much everything else”):

Yes of course they’re identical:  that’s the whole point of the exercise.  And at under $2,500 each, it seems to me to be a very practical and elegant solution to the “one gun, two calibers” demand made for hunting.

Longtime Readers will also know of my inordinate fondness for the full-stocked rifle, and Ruger’s RSI line fills that to capacity, oh yes it does.

As for the boolets themselves, here’s a comparison (with ballistics):

All that remains is to mount two identical scopes with identical reticles to the above rifles, and the brief is filled, I think, pretty much to perfection:

And yes, I think the term “elegant solution” is entirely appropriate here.

Toolbelts Over Titles

Good Stuff

…the titles being useless shit like “PhD in Gender Studies”, “Vice-President of DEI”, etc.  Of course, Mike Rowe, bless his dirty, calloused hands, has noted this trend:

Kilmeade asked Rowe to comment on the data, which comes from the National Student Clearinghouse. It showed a 16% increase in overall enrollment for vocational-focused community colleges compared to 2022. The Journal also noted an increase of 23% for students pursuing construction jobs and a 7% rise in students enrolled in Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and vehicle repair.

While the “Dirty Jobs” star said he wasn’t “ready for the victory lap” after seeing the data, he said that he believes Gen Z is more willing to consider trades, which he believes is positive.

“The color of collars is no longer the thing it used to be,” Rowe said, referencing the classification of blue-collar versus white-collar workers. “I just don’t think it matters.”

However, in his usual forthright fashion, Rowe noted also:

“The idea that the generation that has become the biggest target for entitlements and a lack of work ethic… I mean, these guys are an easy target. They’re snowflakes, essentially. But… we’re the clouds from which the snowflakes fell.”

Which is uncomfortably true.  (My own kids are Millennials, and despite my best efforts they’re only a shade away from having Gen Z values, alas, but that’s a story for another time.)

And let’s be honest:  there will come a time when “learn to code” will be as obsolete a piece of advice to future youngsters as “get a degree” advice has become to the current crop.  Why?

Because at some point, “coding” will be left to the sardonically-named “artificial intelligence” — in fact, unless I miss my guess, most technological work will be performed by A.I.

But there will always be a need for guys with toolbelts, because A.I. can’t build houses — design them, maybe, but not actually hammer nails and pour concrete — and believe me on this, the Baltimore bridge rebuild will never be accomplished by A.I.

And once again, from Rowe:

“They’re seeing all of the craziness… Brown and Dartmouth and Harvard. They’re seeing a $52 billion endowment at Harvard. They’re seeing all the craziness that’s constantly in the headlines. And they’re just saying, ‘Look, why do I want to start a career in a major I haven’t even declared yet and go that far into debt to pursue a job that probably doesn’t even exist, when we got 10,000 other jobs over here… that don’t require a four-year degree?’ “

Maybe, just maybe, a future generation will see the inherent value in and the pride engendered by those “dirty jobs” that Mike Rowe supports, and eschew the dubious values of what non-STEM university degrees have degenerated into.