No, Karen, human beings are not basically good, kind, one smile away from hugs & singing in harmony while lifting a soft drinks to the sky. Except the thing is that most are. The problem is that some cannot understand that there's a difference between "generally" and "universally," and that this difference is crucial. "Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet." Mattis 2:23

The primary threat of extra-judicial punishment when I was young consisted of "Wait until your father hears about this." I wonder how much trouble could be solved simply by bringing fatherhood back into vogue.

The downside was that, when I first voted as an adult myself, it was almost boring, and not the rite-of-passage it usually is... Your introduction to voting sounds remarkably like my introduction to beer. I suspect that in each of our cases, we've awakened some mornings with serious misgivings about the previous day's activities.

Brexit Derangement Syndrome One can only assume that Quadrant pays by the word, because I made it about 1,200 words into that thing before I realized I was less than halfway through and decided to skip to the end. There was no fulfilling punchline, alas.

She once accidentally bent space and time while playing the ocarina. Sounds like she spent too much time playing Legend of Zelda in her youth.

Dammit, I stuck in an extra /i and everything.

If a poor hispanic, asian, or black person becomes a lawyer or engineer through hard work, he's "acting white", and that must be stopped. There's a foundation in town that just started advertising how our high schools are failing children of color, with large achievement gaps that refuse to close. I work with a number of school districts who are picking up on the campaign (which is really nothing more than another cash grab for the teachers' union, but that's hardly a surprise). On those occasions when I've asked whether their efforts include pushing back on the stigma around "acting white," I get nothing but uncomfortable silences and people politely checking their phones and discovering they're needed elsewhere. None so blind as those who will not see.

So the simple font where everything always lines up is a design abomination, and the fancy font that can't be substituted or manipulated without losing visual coherency is God's One TRVTH. So glad we cleared that up.

The Board justified the changes by claiming that words like “prisoner,” “convict,” “inmate” or “felon” essentially “only serve to obstruct and separate people from society and make the institutionalization of racism and supremacy appear normal.” Sloppy language from our intrepid reporter, as the Board's attempt to "justify" the changes falls well short. Also, one cannot help but notice the assertion that these words help to institutionalize racism. Does the City use different labels for ex-cons depending on their skin color? Or is it the case that some races tend to spend more time imprisoned than do others? One feels that the Board of Supervisors may be overdue for a session in the Scolding Chair. And while we're at it -- is Shakespeare no longer taught in San Francisco's schools? How is it that these nincompoops don't understand that changing the label on the jar does not change its contents: O! be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call a crook/ By any other name would smell as foul; So D'Vontayus would, were he not D'Vontayus call'd, Retain that dear feloniousness which he owes/ Without that title. Finally, in closing, let me share my deep, deep disappointment that the Board of Supervisors did not suggest "People of Conviction" as their alternative label. Had that been the case, I might have simply nodded and smiled at the whole affair.

Re: global warming and its limitless capacity: Zegre says, "So yes, we are expecting both too much water and too little water in the future and you can imagine how difficult that makes it to run businesses or governments, schools, hospitals, in communities with that kind of variability, where some times in the year it will be too wet to handle and other times too dry." Rephrased slightly, the climatologist is suggesting that Appalachia may become more like California. Which, last I checked, had quite a few businesses, schools, hospitals, &c. One can only imagine the horror the locals would feel at such a possibility.

A civil partnership... Finally, a little civility! One hopes that the enclosed will be put to good use buying something nice for the honeymoon, as opposed to just piling on some more swill for the wedding guests.

Why does the Trabi come with a rear-window defroster? To keep your hands warm!

How can we be sure that 4chan isn't there already? I mean, it would explain so much...

I've helped short guys as well as short gals, common courtesy aside, it helps keep the overhead bin conga line moving. This. A thousand times, this. Truth is, Middle-Aged Whiteguy wasn't even being polite to her. He was being polite to everybody further back in the plane, who were going to be stuck back there until this silly bint wrestled her wheelie bag out of the overhead, probably hitting a couple of other passengers with it in the process. Problem is, she's a petty little thug who gets off on making everybody else wait for her. Like most Twitter trolls, she doesn't mind the fact that everybody looks at her with annoyance, just so long as they're looking at her. Middle-Aged Whiteguy tried to rob her of that little thrill, so now she's set herself to repeating it on social media. Where again, she doesn't care about the ratio -- she cares only that so many people are paying attention to her, validating her sense of being the center of the universe. When she was four, she would kick and scream and cry and go limp, forcing her mother (or her nanny, more likely) to drag her bodily through the market. She loved the attention it brought, but because such behavior isn't tolerated among the perpetual grad-student age cohort (at least not yet), she has found other ways of causing a scene. One might feel sorry for such damaged creatures, if they weren't so hell-bent on damaging the rest of us.

Per previous discussions on toxic masculinity: my parents' home took a glancing blow from a tornado on Friday evening. House is in pretty good shape, but many trees are down, along with electrical service. Unbelievable amounts of toxic masculinity on display in the cleanup and recovery efforts. I'm not sure which sight is more devastating, honestly...

Heh. I think it’s safe to say it’s not quite achieving whatever non-creepy, non-car-crash aesthetic it was actually going for. I thought the whole thing was a public service to help keep kids from turning to Furry culture. I have to assume that the coming protests will be even more disturbing than the film itself.

Does anyone else...become deeply depressed when hearing intellectuals? I trace my bitterness to the day I realized that the adults in the real world were every bit as stupid and horrible as my monstrous schoolmates. For most of my life, I believed that after graduation I would be able to leave all the pettiness and stupidity behind. Finding out that grownups were just as stupid as adolescents (without the excuse of youth) was a hard pill to swallow. I've really never gotten over it. You can only imagine the feelings I get when I see the monsters proudly wearing their misanthropy. How dare they! Do they not realize that they have it all backwards?

When I am an old man I shall wear purple With a red hat that frightens all the wokelings, And I shall spend my pension on whisky and fishing tackle And a Carhartt jacket and say we've no money for unskilled peasants pouring across the border.

Teacher, may I mambo dogface to the banana patch?

Professors are smrt. Why anyone would think this is actually profound is a mystery (if it even happened), but it is nice to see that the commenters are not buying the BS. The commenters at Paul Caron's place, sure. The ABA Journal article he links has no comment section, just an e-mail to which one may send one's thoughts. I'm guessing that the chances of the word "codswallop" appearing in their next issue are inversely related to the number of e-mails filling up that poor sub-editor's inbox.

...this ‘reflects the beliefs of many Indigenous Australians that they have always been in Australia, from the beginning of time, and came from the land.’ Is there a recent survey showing how many Aborigines really believe this creation myth? I mean, I shudder to think that this could be a case where the severely educated Woke Whites reduce a minority group to a two-dimensional cartoon in order to protect them from something they've never worried about before. Heavens forfend!

It's a particularly pathetic attempt by humanities students (the 'A' stands for Arts) to co-opt the STEM acronym. Daniel's correct. While a single extracurricular club may not have an active Arts component, there are more and more districts implementing STEAM as a regular academic program, part of the primary curriculum. Ironically, in some of the districts I've worked with, the initiative is actually blowing up in the faces of those who are trying to shoehorn the arty students in with those who can do math. As it turns out, forcing STEM types to spend a few hours a week reading classical literature or learning to paint or play a musical instrument isn't that big a deal for them. For many, it's a waste of time, but they're attending high school in a public school district, so they already have lots of experience with pointless wastes of time. For others, it's a chance to stretch their legs a bit, and some find that they really enjoy music or painting or literature. (Hell, my degree is in Physics, and I can hold my own discussing literature with my lovely bride who graduated with honors in English Lit, and I enjoy noodling around on my guitar as a favored pastime.) In these cases, the STEAM curriculum actually does some positive good. On the other side of the coin, you have the arty students who are expected to spend a few hours a week learning something about S, T, E or M. You might find this hard to believe, but in real life, it's a lot easier for a budding scientist, engineer, or computer geek to write a paper about Shakespeare than it is for a budding interpretive basket weaver to learn the difference between a cosine and a tangent, or to work his way through a geometric proof. In one district, I heard the argument made that painting a picture of a sine wave should count as partial credit toward a kid's trigonometry requirement. Because our society really needs bridges designed and built by people who paint nice pictures of bridges. In the end, mathematics will separate the wheat from the chaff.

For the most part, we have better things to do, and better people to spend time with. It will just get worse, and then worse still, and then one day they'll attack the wrong person. Maybe they trap a car in one of their roving traffic barricades, and when the driver panics and tries to escape they drag her from the car and leave her bloodied on the street. But maybe it's a photogenic young mother whose toddler is screaming from the back seat the whole time, and the footage goes viral. Or maybe it's a City Councilman's favorite niece. Then I think the LARPers will be astonished at how quickly the backlash wipes them out. This, of course, is a best-case scenario. The more likely path is that they try to drag a veteran out of his car, and he shoots three of them dead on the spot. This is the outcome they're really after, since it will justify all their preemptive violence to this point, as well as the escalation of violence they've been working toward. I shudder to think about what that city will look like when the police are told that they can only intervene on behalf of Antifa, to prevent the townspeople from protecting themselves. At that point, open war between the citizens and the Mayor's private security forces is only a matter of time, and the ramifications of that kind of violence will likely finish the unraveling of the social fabric that we've seen fraying lo these many years. Which, of course, was the purpose all along.

Corporate Rollover: At Dictionary.com we take words very seriously. They are foundational to how individuals think about themselves, and they can influence the perceptions of others. When it comes to the language of identity, the words we use are especially important. Thus begins their introduction to their essay on why it's so important that they keep the Newspeak dictionary up to date. It's not often that you see the battle lines drawn out quite so obviously! I'm hopeful that JeffG will pick up the case now that PW has returned, as this is his bread and butter, and a big reason why I started reading his work in the first place.

Rooster is the embodiment of phrases like “Men don’t cry,” and “Rub some dirt on it.” This alpha dog rejects vulnerability by preaching about how sissified city dogs are. The character is disturbing in his unapologetic validation of behavior society as a whole is trying to eradicate. He equates courage with arrogance and other outdated perceptions of manliness. Two things pop out at this disinterested observer: 1) The assertion that "society as a whole" is trying to eradicate traditional masculinity. 2) The horror that an animated children's film is not enthusiastically working to assist in this popular effort. Last year, I was on a wilderness canoe trip when my brother had a seizure, flopped out of his canoe and nearly drowned. Rescuing my brother from the cold water, and getting his lungs clear, and going back to fetch my 70-year-old father and his capsized canoe before hypothermia got the better of him, and then jury-rigging a temporary camp with the equipment we hadn't lost, and then paddling off to civilization to find help -- let's just say that "being in touch with my feelings" wasn't anywhere near the top of the list of helpful traits and skills that came into play that afternoon. I'm virtually certain that this movie reviewer was tormented as a kid, and as such he will forever confuse traditional masculinity with the bullying he experienced. I just wish that he and his fellow travelers could put their vaunted powers of nuance and empathy to work just one single time and realize how deeply insulting it is to have one's masculinity constantly characterized as "toxic," something to be ashamed of, to be driven out of oneself, or to be atoned for. You'd think that somebody who has spent his life insisting that queerness is nothing to be ashamed of would be a little more circumspect about insisting that everything non-queer is. You'd also think that people who can't kill a spider on their own would be more circumspect about calling for the eradication of a hundred million men who are handy with axes and guns and power tools and machinery. But then, as our gracious host has observed so many times, self-awareness isn't usually a strong suit for people like this.