Portland’s Inconsolable Rage

Kevin Williamson remarks upon the poor sportsmanship of LGTBQQ* Portland Thorns soccer fans, and takes no prisoners:

One can understand Portland’s inconsolable rage. It’s a second-rate Seattle, which makes it, by extension, a fourth-rate (2²) San Francisco. Which is to say: Austin without the sunshine and higher education and tacos. I’d be angry if I lived in Portland, too.

He lets the cat out of the bag about inclusion

There’s no logical reason that women’s sports should be an especially uncomfortable place for someone with traditionalist views about homosexuality. But the kulturkampf brigades will have only conformity, abject and absolute. That is part of the doctrine of “inclusion,” which, perversely enough, exists for the purpose of excluding certain people with unpopular political or religious opinions.

and clearly thinks Gay Pride has gotten too big for its britches (chaps? kilts? g-strings?)

It is not enough that gay people should be allowed to organize their own lives as they wish and to follow their interests and their pleasures where they will. You can decline to stand for “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but when they raise the rainbow banner, you’d damned well better stand up straight and salute.

Education and journalism schools get a solid, if glancing, blow as well.  As the Big Bad Bloggers say, READ THE WHOLE THING.

* I prefer the near-anagram GQ-BLT, with every innuendo (which endo?) intended.

Tip from the Instapundit, one the the Biggest and Baddest.

 

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Feline Fatal Attraction

I’ve long maintained that toxoplasma gondii is a pernicious parasite, and that folks with outdoor cats are taking a huge health risk.  Turns out there’s solid research backing my opinion.

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey agrees… His opinion stems from decades of research into the root causes of schizophrenia. “Textbooks today still make silly statements that schizophrenia has always been around, it’s about the same incidence all over the world, and it’s existed since time immemorial,” he says. “The epidemiology literature contradicts that completely.” In fact, he says, schizophrenia did not rise in prevalence until the latter half of the 18th century, when for the first time people in Paris and London started keeping cats as pets. The so-called cat craze began among “poets and left-wing avant-garde Greenwich Village types,” says Torrey, but the trend spread rapidly—and coinciding with that development, the incidence of schizophrenia soared.

Since the 1950s, he notes, about 70 epidemiology studies have explored a link between schizophrenia and T. gondii. When he and his colleague Robert Yolken, a neurovirologist at Johns Hopkins University, surveyed a subset of these papers that met rigorous scientific standards, their conclusion complemented the Prague group’s discovery that schizophrenic patients with Toxo are missing gray matter in their brains. Torrey and Yolken found that the mental illness is two to three times as common in people who have the parasite as in controls from the same region.

When’s someone going to do toxo testing on cat ladies?

Ooo, ooo! I have a better idea!

Those wily Brits have identified some major stumbling blocks in their education system:

Schools are removing analogue clocks from examination halls because teenagers are unable to tell the time, a head teachers’ union has said.

Teachers are now installing digital devices after pupils sitting their GCSE and A-level exams complained that they were struggling to read the correct time on an analogue clock.

It gets worse

Earlier this year, a senior paediatric doctor warned that children are increasingly finding it hard to hold pens and pencils because of an excessive use of technology. …”It’s easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they’re not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil.”

My remedy?  Establish some simple prerequisities: if you can’t hold the pencil, or read the analog clock, you fail the exam.

What a bunch of lightweights.

Tip from the GeekPress.

Cultural Appropriation for Me, Not for Thee

So some woke Chino-American gets his knickers in a twist because a Caucasian young lady wore a cheongsam as a prom dress.  But somehow, I don’t think he had a problem with something like this:

To me, women of color wearing Daisy Dukes is an especially un-woke cultural appropriation, since her TV brothers drove around in a car painted like this

By sv1ambo – 1969 Dodge Charger – General Lee, CC BY 2.0, Link

Is it just me? or has this whole “cultural appropriation” thing degenerated into a vicious farce perpetrated by spiteful little junior-high girls (of all ages and genders)?

Tip from Ed Driscoll writing at The Instapundit, who remarks “The entire corpus of Identity-politics ideology is just a new way to bully,” Jordan Peterson tweets, with “the additional twist of simultaneously claiming higher moral ground.”

So I guess it’s not just me.

Making America GLAMOROUS Again

Since Christmas, the oh-so-woke fashion and lifestyle press has aggressively ignored first lady Melania Trump.  Unlike her husband, she doesn’t bluster, tweet, or speechify; instead she speaks in the language of fashion.  For French President Macron’s state visit, she wore this:

Impossible to be ignored. The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan writes

On these official occasions, the first lady sometimes appears to be dressing for a fashion-shoot version of the event — a kind of heightened reality of an already rather surreal circumstance. But there is also the sense that she is stubbornly and confidently dressing up and refusing to relax into today’s accepted decorum. The result is that she sometimes seems to have a tin ear for empathetic dressing. And sometimes, she wears a hat, which, for women, long ago ceased being about fashion in this country and became more of an affectation, whether it be the religiosity of Sunday church service or the self-conscious flamboyance of the Kentucky Derby.

A hat is a celebration of oneself. It is about presenting one’s most adorned, spit-shined, upright self to God, social media or, in this case, the history books.

“Empathetic dressing?”  What kind of woke bullshit is that?  “Today’s accepted decorum” is sweatpants or basketball jerseys at a wedding reception, t-shirts at a funeral, and airheads in phony ripped jeans; grown men don’t even own a suit to be buried in.  Melania Trump reminds us that sometimes clothes do make the man; that we can be our very best selves.

The best part? “Taxpayers do not pay for the first lady’s wardrobe.”

Gee Whiz, GraphViz!

Sometimes you need to draw a simple network diagram, like this Hasse diagram

but you don’t have a good graph drawing tool.  Get Graphviz!  Easy to learn, scriptable, and FREE.

It’s not a Crock Pot meal, its an…

Eintopf.

And now I realize the annual “charity” fundraisers are just carrying on the tradition of Winterhilfswerk.

Tip from Debby Witt at National Review.