[This commencement address was originally published four years ago. We  rerun it annually at college graduation time. Feel quite free to send this to any recent college graduate you may know.]

Mr. Chancellor, Members of the Board of Regents, Members of the Faculty, Honored Graduates, Families and Friends:

It's funny that they call this ceremony a Commencement, for you've all reached the finish line:  college, goodbye, we're outta here.  Yet of course, "commencement" means a beginning, not an end.

But one is supposed to at least start - commence - a talk such as this by saying funny things.  So I'll start by talking about Clark Gable movies.  If you've heard of Clark Gable at all, you know he was the biggest movie star in Hollywood a long time ago.  His most famous movie was Gone With The Wind.

He made a movie in 1955 called The Tall Men with Jane Russell as his girlfriend and Robert Ryan as the heavy.  It's a pretty ordinary Western flick with outlaws and cowboys and Indians - and at the end, Ryan, the bad guy, and his henchmen get the drop on Gable, the good guy, and all seems lost.  Suddenly, surprise, Gable outfoxes Ryan and triumphs.  Gable makes his exit, and after he does, Ryan delivers a line that I want you to never forget.

OK, this is a shameless plug.  It has nothing whatever to do with geopolitics, history, science, or whatever else we at TTP normally focus on.  My kid sister Judy has written a book - and it would just be wrong if I didn't tell you about it.

Judy teaches natural history at the Heard Museum near Dallas.  What that means is that her calling is teaching children to love nature and the critters you find in it.  Now she's written a book to impart that love for children everywhere.

Entitled Jessica The Furry Baroo, it's about a dog, Jessica, and her encounters in the woods with various wild things like skunks and snakes.  It's an entertaining and fun way for a young child to understand and appreciate them. 

The book is beautifully illustrated, has a story kids will really like, so if you know a young person under 12 you might consider it for them.  It's also a fun book to read aloud to a child too young to read themselves.

So - congratulations to Judy, my sister the author! 

Bad news, everyone: the panda cam at Washington zoo has fallen victim to the US government shutdown.

Where before, US taxpayers (everyone else too: thanks US taxpayers!) were free any time of day or night to watch the pandas do exciting things like pacing around, sleeping and chewing bamboo on special government-funded spy cameras, now all they see is a black screen and an error message.

Sad, isn't it?

But I don't mean sad as in "Oh no you can't see the pandas." I mean sad that Western civilization has reached such a pitch of decadence that we consider it normal, acceptable even, for the government to confiscate our earnings through the tax system and squander it on fripperies like panda-viewing web cams.

Thus one of the most delicious ironies of this latest shutdown is that it's a curious inversion of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

A fellow I know, Dave Marlett, answered yes to this question and has come up with a real way to do so.  A real way any individual American can.

It happened when he wanted to get his house painted last spring.  He couldn't find, out of all the house painting businesses that he called, one that could guarantee it didn't employ illegal alien workers.

There have to be companies who follow the law and refuse to hire illegals, he told himself.  But how would he or anyone find them?  What if there was a way to find them, a sort of clearinghouse enabling customers all over the country to locate companies that have pledged to hire only legal workers?

That's how Dave conceived of ProAmericaCompanies.     http://rebelholiday.biz/    rebel holiday