<p>Times Herald-Record
February 07, 2007
&byline2;
West Point </p>
<p>Curious why your first ever post on here would be this story.</p>
<p>These are kids. Kids make mistakes. It's interesting to note that less than 1% of the cadets are making this particular mistake. Compare that stat with civilian colleges.</p>
<p>Distributing and using cocaine is NOT a mistake -- it is pure stupidity and is a felony. This type of infraction certainly isn't worth 20 years in jail. :eek:</p>
<p>The article does state that there were only 12 serious infractions last year in a student body of 4,200. That works out to 0.3 percent.</p>
<p>GA,</p>
<p>You're correct and I didn't mean to trivialize the gravity of the situation. It's very serious. However, I still think the takeaway from the story is how rare these events are at West Point.</p>
<p>One of these cadets (a 4 degree or whatever WP calls them) is from my state. A search of my senators web site shows he was first nominated November "03" this means he tried three times to get in... Just damn</p>
<p>Wow, Cadet Simms is from my state and I know who he is. I played football against him. It's a shame to hear about this type of stuff happening.</p>
<p>Hopefully there is some sort of mistake but it doesn't look good</p>
<p>It happens. Some cadets think they can beat the system, but eventually it catches up with them.</p>
<p>At least USMA has never graduated a crazy astronaut kidnapper, which is more than I can say for another certain academy...</p>
<p>And Jimmy Carter too...</p>
<p>According to Bugle Notes, the creator of baseball was a WP grad. Abner Doubleday, class of 1842. That is the end-all argument to which academy is better. C'mon people, the American Pastime itself!!!</p>
<p>"In 1907, a special baseball commission recognized Doubleday as baseball's founder based on the testimony of a boyhood friend named Abner Graves. </p>
<p>'It's all part of American mythology and folklore, like Paul Bunyan and John Henry,' said Jim Gates, library director at the National Baseball of Fame & Museum in Cooperstown. 'But folklore is an important part of the American story.' </p>
<p>Doubleday was born in Ballston Spa on June 26, 1819, and graduated from West Point in 1842, which puts him at the U.S. Military Academy when Graves said he was supposedly playing baseball in Cooperstown, in 1839. </p>
<p>The Mills Commission, created by sporting good magnate Albert Spalding in 1905, undertook a nationwide effort to determine baseball's origins and settled on Graves' written testimony as the most acceptable story. </p>
<p>'His letter is full of holes,' Gates said. 'It's a weak document at best.' </p>
<p>Further complicating matters, Doubleday had a cousin also named Abner, 15 years his junior, who lived in Cooperstown. Graves and the cousin were the same age, so it's now believed that Graves was actually referring to him, not Ballston Spa's Abner Doubleday who went on to Civil War fame. </p>
<p>It wasn't until 1953 that Congress, citing the work of a New York City librarian, declared that Alexander Cartwright was baseball's true founder. Cartwright was involved with the earliest forms of organized professional baseball, in metropolitan New York, but his designation as baseball's founder is no more legitimate than Doubleday's."</p>
<p>a lot of you people have a major misconception of cadets/midshipmen. they're a lot more like college students then you think.</p>
<p>4 out of 4000 is 1/10 of 1 percent. I don't think there's much you can say about the other 99.9 percent of the Cadets, or a similar percentage of Mids, or Mosquitoes (or whatever it is they call themselves up in Colorado Springs) , based on the poor judgment of a few who don't belong at any service academy.</p>
<p>When I asked my cadet whether the kids at the academy are like other college students he replied, "No, we're nothing like them." Now that's a difficult position to defend, because there are lots of similarities, but they are a different breed. It's kind of like the similarities and differences between horses and cows....</p>