Vin Suprynowicz

There it was, right under the May 24 headline that announced “Student meth use declines” — based on the always reliable CDC methodology of simply asking teen-agers how many of them have been breaking the law.

(I’m told a survey using the same “Why would they lie?” methodology revealed more than 20 percent of Clark County teen-age pregnancies result in virgin births, but that this equally reliable result was suppressed, for some reason.)

Further down the page, the headline which provides our topic for today read: “Marchers want legality for undocumented teens.”

A few dozen local college kids were out to express their outrage that another amnesty for illegal aliens (the last one was in 1986) — a “DREAM Act” that would have allowed illegals brought to this country by their parents when they were 15 or younger to “move toward legality” — failed in the U.S. Senate last year, 52-44, after voters got wind of what they were up to. More »

There are precedents, though they’re weird.

In some ancient cultures, we’re told it was customary to choose one or more citizens of the city and treat them as royalty for the period of one year. Freedom from labor, the best food and drink, a free hand with the temple prostitutes, whatever.

Then — on some particularly propitious day, usually tied to the annual cycle of crop fertility — the otherwise “lucky” individual would be doped up and have his head cut off, his blood being ceremonially drained into the ground as a sacrifice to the gods of crop fertility, or whoever else was held to be in need of some urgent supplication.

The notion that such rituals may have survived into modern times provided disturbing metaphors for Shirley Jackson’s play “The Lottery,” and later for films including “The Wicker Man.”

In more modern times, of course, actual kings and tyrants More »

In one of his murder mysteries based around the book-scouting and used book trade (hang onto those true first editions of “Booked to Die,” friends — around $700 and I wish I had one), former Denver bookman John Dunning refers to Las Vegas as a “bad town for books.”

True enough, few folks come here to luxuriate in the splendor of our world-class libraries. Standing across Maryland Parkway from the UNLV Student Union, looking in all directions for the quaint brick-fronted coffee shops, vintage clothing emporia and used bookstores heaped high with leatherbound time travelers, the visitor is not likely to be fooled into believing he or she has been transported to Oxford, Heidelberg, Paris, Cambridge, Berkeley, or Boulder — or even Providence or Chapel Hill.

Some vintage book emporiums of note do persist here, though. At risk of the inevitable “What About Me” letters, I note the Amber Unicorn has finally reopened — seven days a week — in spacious new quarters between Chapala’s Restaurant and Trader Joe’s on the west side of Decatur at O’Bannon. Hard to find but worth the hunt is Greyhound’s Books, nestled out of easy sight at the southeast corner of Western and Oakey, kitty-corner from the site of the former Papa Gar’s. (Am I starting to sound like an old-timer around these parts?) (Phil keeps threatening to move Greyhound’s to a higher-traffic location. We’ll see.)

The nice fellow at Academy Books on West Charleston shocked us when we asked about Marie Corelli, some time back, by leading us to a whole collection stacked above one of the lintels. “Not a lot of call” for them, he explained. More »

Nevada’s university regents jumped at the chance when millionaire TV station owner Jim Rogers said he was willing to serve as chancellor of the state university system on an interim basis, a few years back, for little or not pay. After all, Mr. Rogers has proven more than capable of helping colleges and universities in the Southwest raise millions of dollars in donations.

From time to time, though, the dynamics of the no-longer-temporary relationship have left some wondering who’s working for whom.

Last August, Mr. Rogers said he and his family would no longer consider donating $3 million to the University of Nevada, Reno, after a regent’s negative comments on his job evaluation.

A costly miscalculation.

Last week, another local group discovered Mr. Roger’s charities aren’t exactly “blind.”

Since 2005, Mr. Rogers by his own reckoning has spent about $40,000 to $50,000 sponsoring a series of monthly Diversity Forum luncheons which are held alternately in Las Vegas and Reno.

But Mr. Rogers told leaders of the state’s minority community Tuesday that he would no longer sponsor the Diversity Forum luncheons because those community leaders were not purchasing $500-a-seat tickets to a Saturday fund-raising dinner for Mr. Rogers’ pet project — the Nevada Health Sciences System. More »

Dear Mr. Suprynowicz —

Thank you for your article on education in the May 18 Review-Journal. I am just visiting your city and I’m very grateful to you for addressing what I see as our most pressing issue if we are going to solve any of the massive problems facing humanity.

Besides the issues you describe in your article, I see five more issues or what contributes to the things you mention:

* We have become so embedded in developing our capacity to work within current systems that we have lost contact with the reality of existence and the reality of life. Since we have institutionalized alienation from ourselves, children are developing an artificial intelligence or artificial mind in order to conform. More »

A local reader writes in:

“I have been reading your series of columns on schools with much interest and I’m in full agreement with you. But I was wondering if you are aware of what goes on in the Clark County school system in regards to the treatment of students, … policies and actions that border on something straight out of a prison.

“Students who are deemed ‘behavior’ problems are expelled from regular school and sent to something called ‘behavior school’. Once there they can expect to be strip searched — strip searched. I still find this hard to comprehend. The system apparently treats children as some sort of enemy, to be controlled, to ensure docile compliance.

“Some schools have instituted dress codes whereby a student can be expelled if their clothes are wrinkled, if they wear a belt deemed ‘inappropriate.’ … One mother expressed to me her feeling that it’s almost as if the district wants students to quit, rather than bother trying to actually educate them in anything. More »

Goosed by an environmentalist lawsuit seeking a decision by Thursday, the Interior Department Wednesday declared the polar bear a “threatened species,” saying it must be protected because of the decline in Arctic sea ice caused by global warming.

The department certainly couldn’t say it was because polar bear numbers are down. Both the Edinburgh Scotsman and the London Telegraph report there are some 25,000 polar bears in the wild and their numbers are growing explosively — an increase of between 15 and 25 per cent over the past decade.

“We’re seeing an increase in bears that’s really unprecedented, and in places where we’re seeing a decrease in the population it’s from hunting, not from climate change,” Canadian polar bear expert Mitch Taylor told the Scotsman in 2005. “In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometer region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today,” added the Telegraph, last year.

Rather, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne cited dramatic declines in the size of Arctic sea ice sheets over the past three decades and computer projections of continued losses. These declines, he told a news conference, mean the polar bear is a species likely to be in danger of extinction in the near future. (Polar bears are experts at hunting ringed seals and other prey on sea ice. But they’re so unsuccessful on land that they spend their summers fasting, losing more than two pounds a day.) More »

Native Las Vegan Harry Pappas was appointed to the Bureau of Land Management Citizen Advisory Council by then-Congresswoman Barbara Vucanovich. He later represented the State Rifle & Pistol Association on the Clark County Tortoise Advisory Council.

“They said the (desert) tortoise was threatened, so they had to fence off these huge areas and shut out all the cattle, which means no one is out there shooting the coyotes and the raven or trapping the lions any more, so of course that wrecked the hunting,” Mr. Pappas recalled, back in 2001. “They said anyone who found a tortoise had to turn it in” to Clark County authorities.

“So what happened? They got so overrun with tortoises being turned in that they told us they were going to have to start euthanizing them. I said ‘Hold on a minute, here. Euthanize them? Why don’t you just drop them out in the desert?’ They said ‘Oh no, they’ll fight with the native tortoises that already live out there and they’ll kill each other, because all these lands are already at saturation levels.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, now: Which is it? How can they be ‘threatened,’ or ‘endangered’ … but now you tell us all these lands are at ‘saturation levels’ for tortoises?” More »

For decades, sensible skeptics have warned that government tariffs and subsidies designed to encourage the conversion of corn to alcohol and requiring fuel distributors to mix this corrosive stuff into our gas tanks was not going to “solve the energy crisis,” reduce dependence on imported oil, or do anything helpful for “the environment” — unless by “the environment” you actually meant “the bank account of Archer-Daniels-Midland.”

If the critics failed to mention this expensive boondoggle could also promote starvation and food riots around the world, it was probably only because they were afraid of being ridiculed for “piling on.”

Guess what.

While both Congressional Democrats and Republicans were cheering a fivefold increase in mandated ethanol use as little as a year ago, and President Bush was calling the cornfuel program a key to his strategy to cut gasoline use by 20 percent by 2010, today The Great Ethanol Mandate seems to meet Count Galeazzo Ciano’s definition of an orphan. (“Victory has many fathers,” etc.)

Former “renewable fuels” champion Lester Brown now writes in the Washington Post “It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that food-to-fuel mandates have failed.” More »

Why a presidential caucus or primary?

Last fall, officials for both “major” Nevada parties were loudly celebrating “all the new people this will bring into the process.” Then, when those people actually showed up at their state conventions this spring, chaos ensued.

The Democrats hadn’t rented a big enough room for enough time to even sort out who was a credentialed delegate and should be allowed to vote. They had to close down and do it all again, a few weeks later.

And what happened at the GOP carnival in Carson City two weekends ago was even harder to sort out, at first. Reports from party regulars were that the Ron Paul minority (the Texas congressman came in second to Mitt Romney in the party’s Nevada caucuses this winter) had shown up and tried to “take over” the convention, or else “wreck it,” though no one could explain precisely why they’d want to do that.

After talking to a number of participants, both those who were on the stage and those out in the cheap seats, I must conclude More »