I’m Expecting Gasps, Applause

That describes my younger brother
Lefties are, by and large, hopelessly unrealistic about intelligence – how it works, how it’s distributed, etc – indeed they’re often perverse and doctrinaire. And education is pretty much dominated by lefties, and by the ideas of lefties.
Not really ideal, to say the least.

Happy blogiversary!

But she does announce her pronouns.

The true purpose of the neck tie is to hide any slight roundness afflicting the tummy region. It won’t hide actual fatness obviously but it’s a God-send for those of us who are doing OK in that department but don’t quite have the degree of perfect svelteness required to be able to get away with wearing a suit without a tie.

hide any slight roundness afflicting the tummy region
[ Slides enormous cardboard box along bar. ]
I can do you a good price on a second-hand smoke machine. It’s not quite as portable as one might wish, but once switched on, it will conceal any unsightliness around the belt area.

“Chestfeeding”
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/breastfeeding-is-now-chestfeeding-brightons-trans-friendly-midwives-are-told-pwlvmcnc7

For those of us who aren’t complete suckers with Washington Post subscriptions!
Say again all after hello ? This goes VFR direct to the article without subscription, unless maybe you are using some wonky browser.

Lefties are, by and large, hopelessly unrealistic about intelligence
A psychology professor I knew as an undergraduate was very confident that “education” could solve the racial IQ gap. And he was an exceptionally honest leftist because he admitted that there was a gap.

“During the coronavirus pandemic, alternative protein products have soared in popularity”
I’ll say it out loud: the Washington Post is lying–again. The coronavirus is not motivating people to seek out fake meat; it’s all propaganda on behalf of vegans, “green” fanatics, and veggie industries.
The increasing frequency of news items promoting “alternatives” to meat, whether plant-based synthetics or just bugs and worms, is disturbing. I recently read a novel about an ultra-long-term space mission in which the ship, as a closed ecology, had greenhouses to grow plants and bugs–intellectually interesting, but I emphatically do not want to eat fried crickets and stewed grubs and am hostile to those who would “nudge” me in that direction.

regarding bright kids, the credit that can be taken by educators is generally very limited.
I was directed into “enrichment programs” in lieu of classroom instruction between the ages of 9 and 11. My recollection is that I learned very little of anything useful, since the curriculum was the kind of thing M.Eds think bright children will be stimulated by. Had they given me the time to just sit and read the high school and college level books I was already reading, I expect it would have been more successful.
My experience with very bright children is that they seldom have any difficulty finding things to learn, and the best thing any educator can do is simply direct them away from the dangerous or illegal stuff while not actively frustrating that impulse.

I have always understood that the Vikings all around Europe and the Mediterranean and the ‘winning’ African tribes kept slavers and were major suppliers of slaves through history. The Romans and Greeks also took and kept slaves as did other ‘nations’ or empires.

Slavery has existed at one point or another in every culture.
As has cannibalism.

My wife’s 5 years experience teaching 2nd grade (don’t know what English wizarding school level that translates to) was quite enough to convince us that when the state isn’t actively, purposefully hurting children’s attainment of useful knowledge they do so unwittingly through sheer inefficient incompetence. The ‘rona panic has saved me from tiresome dinners with her former teacher coworkers and hearing them complain endlessly about a system that they will defend until their dying breath.
My (very bright, IISSM) child will be attending a school behind a paywall, as it were, where the goal of the institution is extremely clear and shared between all concerned parties. Connecting consumer directly with producer tends to focus the arrangement. Don’t fret for the government warehousing facilities – my taxes are still safely spent on their continued existence.

“African diseases were deadly to Europeans for quite a long time.”
TBF, they are still deadly to Africans, e.g.,

The WHO African Region accounted for 94% of all malaria deaths in 2018.

Given that malaria (in one or more of its forms) is prevalent in much of Central and South America and Asia, 94% in sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most lopsided stats around.
Throw in all the other parasitic and viral diseases that wypipo western medicine generally control, and the picture is worse. Fortunately I am Woke™ and know that the reason it is still out of control is structural racism, colonialism, yte supremacy, and transphobia.
I denounce myself for sarcasm and will report to the Thompson Centre For Cultural Enlightenment.

“During the coronavirus pandemic, alternative protein products have soared in popularity”
I’ll say it out loud: the Washington Post is lying–again.
They sure are. In the early days of the damnpenic (sic), when people started hoarding everything they could get their hands on, our local grocery store shelves looked bare in every section but the vegan “meat” area, which remained fully stocked through the whole ordeal.

They never figured out how he gained access to the accounting system
Unidentified collaborator who did have access?

They must be Harrison Bergeronians
It is characteristic of egalitarians that they are more interested in dragging down the high achievers than in helping the low achievers do better. (I believe this is partly a consequence of the abject failure of all those “affirmative action” reforms.)

Particularly infuriating are the “progressive” educators who strongly oppose tracks/classes for gifted children, demanding instead that the gifted children be held back so that they can “participate” in the education of the duller children. There is a special place in Hell for radical egalitarians.
The problem here lies in the idea that the child needs to be moved forward in all subjects. In the context of the usual generalization, some students excel at math and science, others at language skills, others at other stuff. Pushing children forward in things they are not ready for is just as bad as holding them back. Children do need to socialize with people their own age for various reasons. And just because a kid is “smart” does not mean that they cannot learn from the “dumb” ones, especially in more hands-on classes (again, generalization) like shop or home economics. Subjects that yes, even “smart” kids need to be taking. See also, especially, physical education.
But I fear much of this is too late. These things were apparent to me way back when I was in school. Why it is only being discussed somewhat seriously after Western Civilization has decided, I would say for these very reasons, to commit suicide is the real tragedy.
Ping arriving shortly.

Children do need to socialize with people their own age for various reasons.
My social interactions in junior high were focused on self-preservation — getting along with enough people to have a school to swim in, making friends with a couple of big fellas who could serve as bodyguards, and trying to remain invisible to the sadists.
Healthy social interaction was almost exclusively something that happened after school, whether it was shooting aliens on somebody’s computer, shooting hoops in the neighbo(u)r’s driveway, or shooting rats in the garbage pit out back. (Rural Pennsylvania is an interesting place.)

Having just written the above, it strikes me that this is a large part of the reason why I have so little patience for the Pronoun Brigade and their panoply of complaints about how hard the world is and how very downtrodden they are by people who think they’re freaks.
Adolescence *is* misery. The trick is growing out of it. It’s too bad that “grow up” and “get over yourself” never find their way on to the common lists of “life hacks” that seem to pop up all over the place.

Someday, all David’s random life event blessing snippets will be made into a movie and possibly a Broadway play.

and trying to remain invisible to the sadists.
Well here in lies another big part of the problem. A big part of the downfall of Western Civilization in general, IMNSHO. The way we allow bullying to fester where we treat the kid who fights back against the bully as part of the problem. This prompted me to do something I meant to check on a couple weeks ago and now I am fucking furious…
A couple weeks ago, whilst leaving a Office Depot or Office Max or some such store, there was an “anti-bullying” table set up. I hate these stupid campaigns as they ignore the real damage that anti-bullying efforts do to the victims. When the person there approached me I kind of lost my temper a bit and told her that the ONE thing that needs to be done, the thing that we need to focus on is this absolute BULLSHIT that fighting back is wrong. Punishing children for fighting back against bullies makes the victims victims all over again and only empowers the bullies. Adults…”adults” should understand this. Anyway, the woman gave a very convincing, off-the-top-of-her-head story about the organization “Stand for the Silent to End Bullying”. The way she told it, and I suspect in its origins this is accurate…in its origins…the organization was founded by parents of an 11 year old child from Oklahoma who fought back against bullying and was subsequently suspended from school. The child subsequently killed himself. They suckered a good bit of money out of me on that, I am ashamed to say. Oh, it’s a real organization and I’m sure it started out as stated as the first two children, chronologically, you will see on their “Those We Honor” page are from Texas and Oklahoma. But if you read the site in general, you will see very little directly about fighting back. The main point they make is “We are reaching the bullies!”. If you read their “10 strategies for bullying prevention for schools” there is nothing about fighting back. Clicking on their “expert advice” and search for the word “fight” here is what you will find. The typical boiler-plate crap.

Some kids do have the courage to stand up to perpetrators of online cruelty and to them I say, ‘Fight cruelty with kindness.’ Never sink to a bully’s level. Instead, try disarming them with a message of concern or kindness.

Fucking sickening. Seriously. What fucking bullshit. And I stupidly had a little bit of hope that someone, somewhere had gotten a clue. And I gave these bastards money. I swear to God I want to punch the shit out of someone right now. Our civilization is a fucking disgrace.

If this doesn’t convince you to wear a face diaper 24/7 nothing will.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

In for a penny, in for a pound.
*ping*
Bless you, sir, and madam. May your laundry hamper be unobtrusive. To all the senses.

@ Adam: “I hope he pulled aside 10% for the Big Guy.”
To be fair Telecom paid him a $40,000 bonus for his initiative and work rewriting their national computer billing program, flew him all around Australia so he could teach people how to use it and shortly afterwards closed their in-house IT department thus effectively dismissing him. Such is life.

A couple of childhood academic memories (in the case of 9-year-old Alex confirmed by mom).
In 4th grade, Miss Austin wrote the week’s 10 vocabulary words on the board and I noticed one was misspelled. I was too timid to call the Academic Authority Figure on it, so I went home and told my mother. Mom, who was and remains a jewel among mothers, went back with me to the school, confirmed that it was indeed incorrect, and politely pointed it out to the teacher. Miss Austin’s response “oh, well I’ve never been very good at spelling.”
$*@!%:*&!!!!
By 10th grade I was finally in the gifted program, but still had a few ‘regular’ classes. One of them was typing. Typing was an elective, which didn’t mean it was something I’d elected to take, instead it was something some counselor had elected to shove me into. The entire rest of the class was girls who spent every waking moment talking about hair, makeup, boys, and TigerBeat. I was a head taller than all of them, so none of them tried to pick on me, but it was still the most excruciatingly tedious semester of my life.

Leonard was one year held back so quite a physical disparity. It seemed that Leonard’s mission in life was to make my life hell at lunch and recess.
One man I met long ago had the opposite experience: he attended a high school attended by gifted children and the children of the wealthy. The one kid who was bullied was the slow one.

@ JG: “I hate to break it to e/em/eir/eirs, but cleavage just screams “she/her”.”
Perhaps ‘she/her’ should wear a tie, long and broad, to cover her cleft chest?

I found it very useful as it enabled me to touch-type all through university. But I took it in the summer.

Yeah, I wound up really learning it in an afterschool ROP class and it has served me well ever since. The ‘school day’ one was a waste of everyone’s time.

Much like the case of Rehtaeh Parsons, there is always more to the story than you’re being told. And the parents are absolutely the last people I would trust to be giving an accurate account of what happened.
If this:

The following Monday, after Ty had committed suicide, the bully “went up to a little girl and said that Ty died because of her,” Smalley says. “Then she tried to go home and kill herself.”

doesn’t set off your bullshit detector I’m not sure what to tell you.
Putting an 11 year old in a position of being punished, not only for something he didn’t do/instigate but for something he was a victim of
…has been going on for decades. It happened to me in elementary school, it happened to other people on this thread, it happened to lots of people who didn’t commit suicide as a result. Life isn’t fair, and children have been successfully learning that for years.

You’re telling an 11 year old boy that not only do the adults not care about his safety but ON TOP OF THAT, he is so unfit for his society that he doesn’t even deserve the right to defend himself. An 11 year old. And that doesn’t have potential to do serious psychological harm to anyone just because most people process it in a different manner. Right.

“In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Something, something, pound Penny…
wait, what?

@ RC: “… where said little angel wouldn’t talk to his parents about the *bleep* he was going through in school.”
I never told anyone or complained about the daily bullying at school or home. In the family only my brother knew of it and its effect on him has been described above. There was no point in telling anyone. My belief then was that bullies, even if cautioned, would always find an apparently ‘innocent’ way to make me suffer. One becomes totally conditioned and becomes fearful at the mere sight of them after years of being targeted. [A nudge is as good as a wink to a blind man.] At my school in the 1960s the senior boys kept discipline in the school yard at recess breaks and their attitude was laissez faire to say the least. The teaching staff retreated at recess times to the staff room. I didn’t even report the time when two lads, 6’3″ and 6’5″ grabbed me, one behind and one in front and choked me unconscious during year 11 while we waited for a teacher to arrive. [I’m 5’7″.] Those two lads went on to become sporting ‘Gods’ of the school and were highly honoured. Speaking now as a retired teacher and behavioural specialist I still hold to the belief that, for all the noble anti-bullying programs, the dynamic of active [adolescent] peer groups is such that adults would have to be on the spot nearly all the time to prevent bullying. Bullies are cunning and duplicitous. For me the daily/routine bullying tapered off in later years partly as I became so superbly fit and was extremely strong that the other lads started to show some grudging respect for my athletic ability, but there was never any doubt that I was at the bottom of the pecking order still.
I must also add that I experienced frequent bullying while working in a state government department for human services and the bullies were all trained in social work/welfare; they were really nasty people and not just to me. If one is different and stands out one gets hammered. There is one certainty I know: it is that autistics such as I who have extremely limited ability to empathise, but who are highly logical, don’t mix well with highly emotional [and often needy] SJW types.

Onwards to 20.
*hits tip jar*

Cheers, David.
*hits tip jar*
Bless you, sir, and madam. Should you run into an old acquaintance for the first time in several years, may it not be when your lockdown hair is at its most voluminous and unruly.

That. Getting my son out of state school was worth every penny.
Well, as you read these things, there’s often an air of smart kids being sacrificed for some supposed greater good. Such that a “good, responsible citizen,” as one Guardian columnist put it, is one who needlessly degrades the life-chances of their own children, and encourages others to do the same, while publicly applauding themselves for their nakedly dishonest socialist pieties. The children used as offerings will apparently “learn street sense, who to be wary of, who to avoid, how to keep their heads down.” Though how they will learn these things, and at what cost, is mysteriously unexplored.
And the people who mouth these pieties, as in the examples linked above, and who presume to confine the rest of us to state education – for our own good – are very often people with no first-hand experience of it. For instance, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams comes to mind. As I said some time ago,

Some may be wondering whether Ms Williams will send her own children, Thurston and Harper, to the nearest comprehensive, where teachers are apparently virtuous, noble and “believe in parity.” Or maybe she’ll choose somewhere more salubrious, like the school she attended, but doesn’t disclose, with its grade II listed buildings, nine science labs and educational trips to remote parts of the world.
If it’s the first option on principal, that seems negligent. The second option, however, is merely hypocritical. And if she won’t settle for a school similar to the one I attended and instead searches out a state school that’s a little less rough and ready, where children named Thurston and Harper won’t risk being whipped across the face just for being named Thurston and Harper, then that doesn’t exactly support her argument either.

Ms Williams’ own education was at Godolphin and Latymer, to which well-heeled lefties send their children while pretending it’s just like any other proletarian school – and where the list of extracurricular activities includes visits to Rome and Morocco and an eight-day tour of Barbados.

Ladies and gentlemen, Lords, Ladies, and serfs, The First Baron Sacremento speaks.

A paraphrase, but not by much.

Yeah…that was a translation from Spanish, Farnsworth. Peasants means like farmers.
Presumably he said “campensino” (which means “peasant farmer”), not “agricultor” (which means “farmer” in the generic sense). And that reminds me: as I recall the word for “farmer” in ancient Britain was “agricola”.

Yeah…that was a translation from Spanish, Farnsworth.
Even if it was, you know he was thinking it.
And that reminds me: as I recall the word for “farmer” in ancient Britain was “agricola”.
It was, at least when the Romans were there…

Sorry…my mistake. DR and RC are generally indicated by the same icon/avitar on my view of this blog so I have in the past gotten the two of you mixed up. I usually catch it. Either way, my criticism of the problem of bullying, and yes I acknowledge a good bit of the bullying campaigns are BS…WHICH IS HOW/WHY I STOPPED AT THAT DONATION TABLE IN THE FIRST PLACE…ahem… my criticism is ONLY in the context of punishing children for fighting back. THAT is my primary/only concern and point being that if we stop punishing children for simply defending themselves a great deal of this bullying BS goes away. I really don’t understand why this is so hard to get across to people of a supposedly “conservative” nature. And AGAIN, the story of the little girl has ZERO to do with the validity of the boy’s suicide. I’m not calling for zero tolerance of bullying. That is absurd. And I agree that to some degree it is a part of socialization that children need to learn to deal with. What I object to…seems I can’t say this enough as I am some sort of retard in being able to communicate this without shouting so here goes again…is STOP PUNISHING CHILDREN FOR USING THE ONE, PRIMARY, NATURAL TOOL through which any rational society can be built. This goes way beyond the bullying and the specific child victim. It is what has made our civilization such cowards. This idea that fighting back is wrong has been ingrained in generations of (now) adults. How the hell do you think we got to the point where our society is now being run by the “mean girl” contingent? The complacency, the keep-your-head-down-and-let-someone-else-take-the-heat mentality? This shit started in the 60’s, gained ground in the 70’s. It should have been stopped then.

…philologist Tolkien…
What he does in the privacy of his domus is his own business, even if it is still illegal in 18 states.
“Bidh romansan a ’dol dhachaigh !”

What he does in the privacy of his domus is his own business, even if it is still illegal in 18 states.
Sadly, with the the decline of education in America I suspect a significant number of professors would like to make his work illegal.

While researching a thriller writer for an interview (a minor author, you wouldn’t know her), Google helpfully included her Twitter feed, which included this gem:
“Trump was trying not only to stop the certification. He wanted the mob to kill at least Pence and Pelosi, the 2 next in line to the Presidency. That leadership gap would have added to the chaos and helped his coup. Trump isn’t this smart, but someone helping him had a real plan.”
I can’t even …

What double standards?
If it weren’t for double standards they’d have no standards at all.

Computer LabRat: Great point.
Myself, I’ve wondered how Trump can be accused of Insurrection since he was head of State and chief executive of the government at the time.
The charge reveals that the accusers see themselves as the rightful government even when not in office.
But we already knew that.

(I can’t do the proper) accent marks.)
It’s usually “ampersand (&)” “the letter (eg “e”)” “the type of accent (eg “grave”)” “semi-colon (;)” with no spaces between those characters. I’m often too lazy to put them in.
The result “è”.

Teachers were so effective at discouraging me that I did not realize until senior year that I was really smart. Not till college that I found out I was 1/1000 smart. I’ve never forgiven them.
Being a nerdy looking kid I had my share of bullies. I karate kicked one of them. He got even by blowing up my mailbox. I called it square.

Teachers were so effective at discouraging me…I’ve never forgiven them.
In my school it didn’t matter that I was smart and they knew it and I knew it; they still did their best to discourage me. I was consistently top three in the school for average and cconsistently number one each year in at least two subject areas. Teachers and guidance counselors tried to discourage me from going to university and pushed me towards community college. I think it was because my parents were blue collar. Dad worked at a tire shop and mom worked at a dry cleaners.
The irony today is they push almost all students towards university when they would be better served by a community college or trade school.

Myself, I’ve wondered how Trump can be accused of Insurrection since he was head of State and chief executive of the government at the time.
Calling for followers to riot to overturn an election sounds like incitement to insurrection. After all, Trump was only an elected president in a democratic republic, not a king calling for “insurrection” against opponents.
That said, it seems clear that Trump did not call for such mob action anyway, which makes the insurrection claim absurd.