David McElroy

I know from years of experience that many successful politicians aren’t the same people in private that they are in public. I also know that on rare occasions we get to see scary glimpses of those people’s private lives. What you see should cause you to reconsider the notion of trusting human beings with the power that you willingly grant to governments.

Anthony Sanchez is a 34-year-old director of the Imperial County Irrigation District in California. It’s not a high elected position, but it’s the sort of lower position where ambitious young politicians get electoral experience before trying to move up. Until the last couple of days, there was nothing to distinguish him from thousands of other low-level elected officials across the country.

That all changed when a neighbor of Sanchez caught him on video in his back yard Wednesday instructing his 10-year-old stepson about how to play baseball. When the child dropped a ball or didn’t perform as Sanchez instructed, this fine young public servant beat the boy with a belt. (See video below. Note that there’s a lot of profanity toward the end.)

The neighbor confronted Sanchez from the window, telling him to stop. Sanchez was belligerent, clearly not seeing anything wrong with what he was doing. After some delay, the neighbor posted the video online. Eventually, he called police. Sanchez is now in jail on charges of felony child abuse. (Here’s video from police explaining the charges.)

Keep Reading

I’ll probably never know the full story behind this — and it has nothing to do with the things we normally talk about around here — but it was too amazing not to share.

After a mother chimp died at a zoo, one of the zookeepers brought her baby monkey home in order to care for it. The employee’s dog had just had puppies. Unexpectedly, the mother dog bonded with the baby chimp and the chimp ended up seeing the puppies as his siblings. You’ll find nine pictures on this page. I’ve included a couple just to give you an idea. If you love dogs — or chimps — you’re going to love this.

If anybody happens to run across the full story, such as where this happened, I’d love to update this.

Note: I still haven’t found anything definitive about this, but Jeremy Barger found a link with a slightly different version of the story. According to that version, it happened two years ago at a Russian zoo and the chimp’s mother had rejected him instead of having died. It’s hard to say which version is correct.

Everybody gets a trophy these days, because everybody is special. Except, well, most people aren’t special. Not yet. Not until they’ve done something exceptional.

At one of the nation’s best high schools, a teacher stood at graduation last Friday and told his departing seniors something that shouldn’t be remarkable. (See the video of the speech below and the full text underneath that.) What English teacher David McCullough said should be obvious, but in a world where children grow up being told they’re special just for being themselves — without having to earn recognition by doing something with their potential — it’s a radical step to tell the truth.

“You are not special,” McCullough said. “You are not exceptional. Contrary to what your u9 soccer trophy suggests, your glowing seventh grade report card, despite every assurance of a certain corpulent purple dinosaur, that nice Mister Rogers and your batty Aunt Sylvia, no matter how often your maternal caped crusader has swooped in to save you, you’re nothing special.”

Keep Reading