Graduation Day

All college commencement speeches should, from hence forth, be this one.

Don’t moan. I’m not going to “pass the wisdom of one generation down to the next.” I’m a member of the 1960s generation. We didn’t have any wisdom.

We were the moron generation. We were the generation that believed we could stop the Vietnam War by growing our hair long and dressing like circus clowns. We believed drugs would change everything — which they did, for John Belushi. We believed in free love. Yes, the love was free, but we paid a high price for the sex.

My generation spoiled everything for you. It has always been the special prerogative of young people to look and act weird and shock grown-ups. But my generation exhausted the Earth’s resources of the weird. Weird clothes — we wore them. Weird beards — we grew them. Weird words and phrases — we said them. So, when it came your turn to be original and look and act weird, all you had left was to tattoo your faces and pierce your tongues. Ouch. That must have hurt. I apologize.

Read the whole thing.

Moving Windmills

Here’s a great story, told in only 6 minutes.

Obama’s Better Half?

Christopher Hitchens asks a very good question: How responsible is Michelle for Barack’s association with bad people? He hits some interesting points along the way.

In 1995, there appeared a documentary titled Brother Minister about the assassination of Malcolm X. It contained a secretly filmed segment showing Louis Farrakhan shouting at the top of his lungs in the Nation of Islam’s temple in Chicago on “Savior’s Day” in 1993. Farrakhan, verging on hysteria, demanded to know of the murdered Malcolm X: “If we dealt with him like a nation deals with a traitor, what the hell business is it of yours?” His apparent admission of what had long been suspected—that it was the Black Muslim leadership that ordered Malcolm’s slaying—is not understood or remembered (or viewed) as often as it might be.

I didn’t know that. And I love this:

I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama’s 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.” To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be “read” at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.

This is just creepy

Orwell saw this coming.

Yon: A Storm Before the Calm

Michael reports in the Daily News.

April saw 49 U.S. casualties in Iraq, the highest total in seven months. Does this mean, as some insist, that the enormous progress we have made since the start of the military surge is being lost?
As one who has spent nearly two years with American soldiers and Marines and British Army troops in Iraq – having returned from my last trip a month ago – here’s my short answer: no.