Tom gets feted, Repubs get fetid, students get paripatetic

1. Fuentes gets freedom prize

OC.Blog (http://www.ocblog.net/) has pics of a recent Orange County Young Republicans event in which Tom Fuentes received the OCYR’s annual Freedom Award. Not sure who’s sayin’ it, but, on the blog, someone gushes: “Thank you Tom for all that you have done and all that you do for our party and the conservative cause.”

Sheesh. Why doncha get a room?

What’s conservative about unscrupulous hardball tactics? Like black-balling a college program just to get back at a critic? Or spouting flat false factoids about the district’s instructors on TV? (Has he apologized? No.) Or imposing an incompetent and despised chancellor on a college community?

Nothing that I can see.

In one of the pics, Bruce Herschensohn (do you remember his diatribes on channel 7?) is shown giving our Tom the Freedom Fry Goblet. It’s a wonder the stage didn’t catch fire and spew sulphurous flames.


2. What to do?

There’s still lots of buzzage about George W’s OC visit tomorrow. Local Republicans don’t know whether to show up or not, what with the Prez siding with his big business cronies and gettin' all kind and gentle on illegal immigrants.

Check out this morning’s Times article, which quotes a Republican academic describing W’s visit as a “blunder”: Many in GOP will sit out Bush talk

3. Huell Howser at Joe's Garage

The IVC Foundation is doin' up a fundraiser Tuesday night at "Joe's Garage" in Tustin. The Foundation comprises more than its share of conservative Republicans (Fuentes' crowd). So it's at least a little odd to discover that the inimitable Huell Howser (of California Gold fame) is the guest speaker. Golly!

I wonder if those right-wingers know that Huell hosts another show, the environmentalist-friendly "California Green," or that Huell's "California Gold" is endorsed by the California Teachers Association(!), the California Federation of Teachers(!!), the California State Library Foundation (!!!), and the California Library Association(!!!!).

D'oh!

I'd go to this shindig, but I don't wanna miss Tuesday night's California Gold, which has Huell visiting a Cheeze Whiz factory at the absolute geographical center of the state.

4. “Celebrate Quack Day”

Tomorrow, IVC (student government/clubs) will host an Earth Day event, and that's great.

But wait a minute. The official flier says: "Join us for a Day of Holistic and Earth Preservation Activities!"


These include the usual "Recycling opportunities" and a trip to Caspers Wilderness Park.

But they also include "free massages," "Natural and Holistic Vendor Displays," and "Optimum Health."

What on earth do massages have to do with Earth Day?

And Natural and Holistic? Those are "alternative medicine" code words. What's the supposed link between environmentalism (Earth Day) and alternative medicines? There is no link, aside from the pesky fact that the "New Age" crowd and the "environmentalist" crowd overlap.

I gnash my teeth regularly.

Students who are fans of "holistic" and "natural" medicine might want to look up the word "quackery" in the Skeptic's Dictionary. (Quackery) They might want to visit Quackwatch as well. (Quackwatch) The upshot: if you learn a little critical thinking or a little scientific method, you'll stop wasting your time on holistic nonsense.

The flier mentions something called "Optimum Health." I Googled the phrase (with the caps), and I found mostly pseudoscientific claptrap. There's a laboratory called "Optimum Health." According to Quackwatch, Optimum Health Labs "cater to practitioners who engage in nonstandard practices." Translation: quackery practiced here.

The phrase "Optimum Health" seems to be associated with Dr. Andrew Weil, the "alternative medicine" guru. Maybe the Earth Day Optimum Health "activity" has something to do with him.

Stephen Barret (of Quackwatch) has this to say about Dr. Weil:

…According to Weil, many of his basic insights about the causes of disease and the nature of healing come from what he calls "stoned thinking," that is, thoughts experienced while under the influence of psychedelic agents or during other states of "altered consciousness" induced by trances, ritual magic, hypnosis, meditation, and the like.

…Weil's later books make many claims for ... "cures," as we shall see, but despite his reference to "abundant evidence," he almost never gives us anything more than the claim itself -- unsupported by objective and documented observations. To Weil, subjective belief, if persuasive enough to the patient, should be adequate to support the claim of reality. And by "reality" he does not refer simply to the patient's state of mind, but to the physical dimensions of the disease itself. The allegedly miraculous "cures" are not simply dramatic improvements in symptoms, but the disappearance of all physical evidence of disease. And why shouldn't this be reasonable if one believes, like Weil, that consciousness is the primary reality and that the physical aspects of disease, indeed the entire material world itself, are simply another aspect of mind?

A department of the NIH (the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine [NCCAM])--created by the lamentably New Agey Mr. Clinton--has been funding the testing of "holistic" and "natural" medicines for nearly ten years.

Guess what? So far, it has found no evidence that any of this stuff works.

No doubt, Bill feels NCCAM's pain.

5. “Swirling”

This morning’s New York Times ("College, My Way," by Kate Zernike) offers an interesting article about the phenomenon of dissatisfied students jumping from college to college to get what they want. It's called "swirling."

Community colleges are a part of the story. Here are some excerpts:

ERIN MADDEN laughs a little self-consciously referring to what she calls "my college tour." Not the kind that high school students take to look at potential campuses; hers started after she went to college and discovered she didn't like her choice. She transferred to another, and another, and another, and another, ultimately ending up with five colleges on her transcript when she graduated last year.

… These days, a majority of students take a similarly nomadic path to a degree; about 60 percent of students graduating from college attend more than one institution, a number that has risen steadily over at least the last two decades.

In large part, those numbers reflect the growing population of nontraditional-age students, adults who go to college later in life and often start at a two-year institution. But even traditional students like Ms. Madden — those who head to a four-year college right out of high school — are approaching the experience in a nontraditional way.

They transfer to get a more agreeable major or social life, or take classes at a college back home during the summer to get a leg up on the next year's credits. They take an online class, or earn credits during the year at a nearby community college where they find a required course cheaper, less demanding or at a more convenient hour. Or they do some of each.

College officials call it swirling, mix and match, cut and paste, grab and go. Whatever the term of art, it makes sense for the so-called millennial generation, students famously lacking in brand loyalty, used to having things their way, and can-do about changing anything they don't like…Some college officials see all this as the behavior of an overindulged generation, raised by helicopter parents and lacking in resiliency.