Snubbed"?

FFS.

1. That a 16-year-old girl could be imagined to have made a meaningful contribution to global "peace" is derangement.

2. That she might have earned it by flying around the world to mumble stage-managed scientific and political inanities in front of oblivious, pandering media is despicable.

3. As Jack Shafer likes to say, "It's a shit prize, [buddyname]." He says that about all 'prizes.' Jack Shafer isn't saying that as a joke. Jack Shafter is correct.

3a. Arafat won it once, you know. Jus' sayin'.

4. It's weird that people could have such strong and proprietary yet offhand opinions about an "honor" awarded by an enterprise in which they take no part, certainly one to which they've contributed nothing. This presumption —that everyone in the world gets a vote, or even an opinion— on the products of (distant) civilization is an oblivious and accelerating corrosion of the liberal project. A Nebraska life insurance salesman, unexpecting & overwhelmed to be standing next to Spielberg on an elevator, might be forgiven for blurting something like You oughta make a movie where the X-men take on the Close Encounters kids for control of the Omaha concentration camps! The larger population of the world has no business presuming their pet ideas deserve serious consideration for investments in which they're not participating, and this CERTAINLY applies to the crook-mouthed Swedish snotchild herself.

5. The Nobel people are free to award whatever they want to whomever will accept it. The rest of us can be grateful that we don't need to know, or care.

Meanwhile, here's a readily-comprehensible demonstration of complex aviation physics.

I only see the hidden pattern the last two of these.

Another fairy tale vanquished.

Undulus Asperatus seems sexual.

If you're circa sixty (in both senses) and comsumed tawdry pop, these might amuse.

Lenona… Picking up the convo re: Sexual Harrassment in the Workplace from here...

I should have been more concise from the start.

When you say "something clearly needs to change," what do you have in mind?

So did Obama. Jus sayin.

The greenie weenies are at it again.

The Dark Side of the IVF Industry, From a Survivor:

https://naturalwomanhood.org/the-dark-side-of-the-ivf-industry-from-a-survivor/

BOOM!

Anger management issues.

New transportation technology continues to move forward.

Yes, gung-ho keyboard warriors, it's like that.

So, how are we gonna do Halloween this year?

Hey, I know, let's take a classic childhood icon and RUIN IT!!!

Hey - a question:

Vaccination, at least a minimum of such, is required to attend public school in most of the USA and has been a good idea all the time.

Yet blood tests prior to marriage have been dismissed.

Isn't it a positive to public health to DO those blood tests, to avoid the enormous personal and public loss of heritable diseases - many of which are certain?

This could be avoided, to cite just a single example.

You need to look up the costs vs. the benefits Rad. The very vast majority of marriages don't result in children with genetic diseases. Then you add on that 40% of US children are born out of wedlock, such a test wouldn't have any effect there. So you have a very high cost in a very few cases but averaged across the general populace the cost becomes negligible. Hence even a minimal cost for a blood test is greater.

Instead we do blood tests during pregnancy.

"It's weird that people could have such strong and proprietary yet offhand opinions about an "honor" awarded by an enterprise in which they take no part, certainly one to which they've contributed nothing."

Musing on this... There was a time when our institutions made an effort to be respectable to the public, or at least appear so. The whole post-WWII enterprise of Western civilization relied a lot on the perception that our institutions were working for the betterment of Western society in general, and that they were being run by serious, reasoned men who in particular would ensure that we not be led into another World War. All of this of course required that the citizens live by a social code, whose scope greatly exceeded that of what law was capable. Things like the Nobel prizes were intended to be celebrations of that. (Cue Donald Fagan singing "I.G.Y.")

Now, the Peace Prize has always been a more dodgy affair than the other four, particularly since it was intended to be awarded to well-known public figures in a particularly fawning manner. (As compared to the awards of the other prizes, who even in the era where scientists and theoreticians were better known than now, tended to be relatively anonymous. Of course, that's true in spades now. Quick, who won the Nobel in chemistry this year? Yeah, I had to look it up too.) Even so, the committee tried to choose people who had notable accomplishments on their record, even in the cases where said accomplishments were the opposite of what we might have wanted (hence Arafat).

The Peace Prize committee blew all of that away in a blatant gamble to establish themselves -- that is, the committee members -- powers behind the throne. I'm talking of course of the award of the Peace Prize to Barack Obama in 2009, when he had exhibited little skill for anything other than winning elections. The committee itself has since admitted that their goal was to become influential with Obama's administration and Obama himself. In other words, instead of merely rewarding the people who determine the direction of Western civilization, the committee members wanted to become those people, through the backdoor of the prize fund that they control. It backfired massively, of course; even Obama himself was embarrassed by the blatant fawning.

In a way, it set the direction in which Western politics is going now: people who desire power attempt to get it not through persuasion of the electorate, but via any number of un-Western-Civilization back doors. Such has become the pattern for our institutions; they no longer worry about the respect of the citizenry. Instead, they only worry about retaining and advancing their place among their class. It's Game of Thrones on a worldwide scale. We're all disgusted by it, and we've made our take on that very clear, via various public means, over the last several years. (Seriously, is there any other point in American history in which one could imagine someone like Donald Trump being elected President? Maybe the Jackson era, maybe.)

So in this regard, it's actually kind of gratifying to see the Peace Prize committee taking a step back from the edge of the cliff this year. We'll see if this is real or just "quo-forming" -- doing things to give the appearance of reform, in order to maintain the status quo. Our elites have done that to us before, in recent history. But it's not going to be so easy to get away with it now. We're wising up.

> There was a time when our
> institutions made an effort
> to be respectable to the
> public, or at least appear
> so.

Freshest annoyance along these these Lebron.

These lines, that was supposed to say.

> even in the cases where said
> accomplishments were the
> opposite of what we might
> have wanted (hence Arafat).

I accuse you of being a 'glass half full' kind of guy, because bleccchhh pitooie. BTW, Arafat was the most frequent overnight visitor to the Clinton White House. (Residential guests, like Obama's mother-in-law and Hillary's cheeseburger-adoring brother are not eligible for consideration in this category.)

> even Obama himself was
> embarrassed by the blatant
> fawning.

And yet he kept it!

> Seriously, is there any other
> point in American history in
> which one could imagine
> someone like Donald Trump
> being elected President?

Excellent question. Sensational question. Question of the decade.

You and Conan seem to be the readers in the group, so I've been waiting for you to answer it. But I've always presumed that in the earliest decades, our presidency could be claimed and assigned (or its acquisition financed) by a few strongman of business or nascent industry. Shitty government is the rule in human affairs.

But I agree completely: Trump isn't merely tawdry. It's not just that he's offending people who've grown too reflexively submissive to mundane political exigencies. He represents a distinct and probably unrecoverable break from important and nourishing patterns of American governance and public service. It's difficult to imagine better or as-good structures being put in place in our lifetimes.

Both Democrats and Republicans are cavalier about this. With very few exceptions and a trivial number of pure ones, everyone in America's first response to Trump is social posturing.

People would rather express butthurt than resist, or affirm, a revolution.

Crid:

Well, for starters, we should start pushing young PARENTS to realize that

1) sometimes YOUR child, male or female, is the school bully and it's your job to stop that development ASAP instead of denying it

2) don't assume that your kid will learn ANY good values by osmosis

3) if you wouldn't dream of ignoring it when your kid starts making racist remarks or worse, don't do any less when it comes to how your son

Got kicked off. That should read:

3) if you wouldn't dream of ignoring it when your kid starts making racist remarks or worse, don't do any less when it comes to how your son talks about or behaves toward girls. ESPECIALLY when you're not there to witness it.

Just because there may be a small percentage of ludicrous complaints by black people and women alike, in the workplace, does not mean that either racist or sexist hostility shouldn't get taken more seriously than it used to be, depending on which workplace we're talking about. (Yes, of course that includes anti-white or anti-male hostility.)

At any rate, the cure clearly has to start early in life, or any legal measures taken in adulthood will be little more than Band-Aids. (How easy is it to persuade anyone BORN to racist parents that their parents were wrong?)

Not that the kids can't convert themselves, sometimes. Example:

A white Southern woman, probably born in the 1950s, told how her mother was an impeccable lady and also “quite a racist.” However, the mother never said an unkind word about any person based on that person’s skin color, because “she was too much of a lady for that.” Even so, every time the mother and her daughter went shopping and had to talk to a black cashier or black sales employee, the mother used a tone of voice as if she were talking to a silly preschooler. So, wrote the daughter, (not verbatim) “she passed on her racist views to me without a single word being exchanged between us on the subject!”

And, from a 2017 thread:

Btw, on the subject of "teaching," do we all agree that no matter how young someone is, certain classroom behaviors, at least, MUST be nipped in the bud, and that if the parents are too lazy or uncaring, the teachers can and should stop it by any legal means - AND have free rein to do so, unlike now.

Examples of student behavior: Hitting, bullying, stealing, and calling the teachers epithets to their faces.

We agree that those must be stopped ASAP? Good. So what's the difference when it comes to "casual" racist or sexist remarks, which can easily turn into something worse when not taken seriously by adults? Or unwanted touching? (True example: A white preteen whose mother thought she'd been raising him to be tolerant casually said that a young black stranger on an expensive bike must have stolen it - and then got ANGRY when the horrified mother said that's a racist thing to say! Apparently, his understanding of the word "racist" was so limited that he really didn't think that counted.)

When you say "We should start pushing," who exactly do you mean, and what authorities will be involved?

Teachers and other parents, obviously. To begin with.

While parents of bullies have been known to sue schools when their children get punished, I think you-know-who had some good ideas in 2005:

http://archive.azcentral.com/families/articles/0330famparenting03311.html

From the second half:

...Unfortunately, many principals and counselors are afraid to discipline bullies because parents of bullies are notorious for being highly defensive enablers of their little homegrown criminals. Sometimes, school authorities will attempt to "spread the blame around" by suggesting, for example, that the victim must be antagonizing the bully or bullies. The fact is, nothing justifies bullying, especially when it is physical. Nonetheless, it's much easier for a school to treat the victim as the problem or act as if the victim can take care of the problem.

Many schools now conduct anti-bullying programs, which are fine in theory.

When a bully is identified, however, these same schools often go no further than attempting to counsel him (another way of avoiding the potentially messy measure of trying to discipline him). The problem is that counseling and traditional therapy tend to have no effect on sociopaths, which bullies most definitely are...

...the next time your son is physically bullied, press charges against the child in question. Premeditated assault is a crime, even if the perpetrator is 10 years old, and the juvenile justice system exists to deal with children who are engaging in criminal activity.

(or) Third, go to the principal and explain what happened when your son tried to get help from the counselor. There's a good chance he will take a more active approach. If, however, he balks at doing something assertive about the problem, I encourage you to look him in the eye and say something along the following lines: "As the principal of this school, it is your responsibility to provide a safe environment for my child while he is in your care. If you feel unable to do so, then perhaps I need to see what legal recourse our family has in a situation of this sort."

It shouldn't come to that, but if it does, that should sit him up straight.

(end)

What do you know, here's a follow-up. From 2012.

https://www.omaha.com/momaha/blogs/don-t-prepare-for-bullying-if-issue-isn-t-there/article_ed9bbce5-a929-59b3-8508-c6fc34058c70.html

...As for what to do about bullying when it actually happens, all parents should know several things: First, it is a school’s responsibility to provide a safe and positive learning environment for all children. Second, if a school is lax in responding to a bully, parents can and should (in my estimation) explore legal means of forcing the school to act. Third, if bullying is physical, then the bully has broken the law (which applies to children as well as adults), and parents have a taxpayer right to file a complaint with the police, and the police have an obligation to investigate and determine whether or not to charge the perpetrator with a crime.

The problem is that for all the hoopla schools make of their anti-bullying programs, many administrators, when push comes to shove, respond to bullies and their parents in decidedly less-than-effective ways. The reason may be that there are no parents more difficult to deal with, no parents who defend their children with greater ferocity, no parents more blind to reality, no parents more irrational, than the parents of bullies. They are world-class enablers and terrorists all rolled into one. The apples don’t fall far from the trees. As a result, many administrators handle them with kid gloves — unfortunate, inexcusable, but somewhat understandable at the same time.

I said as much on a Charlotte talk show recently, and then braced myself for a flood of complaint from outraged school administrators. It never came. In fact, I heard not a peep. That spoke volumes.

A number of years ago, I learned the value of letting law enforcement handle a lawbreaker, even when the lawbreaker is a child. When my son was 12, the neighborhood bully, around that same age, chased him into our house when we weren’t home and backed him up against a wall, threatening him with bodily harm. When my wife and I got home and the sitter informed us what had happened, I promptly called the police and filed a complaint. The boy, whose parents had consistently failed to recognize his budding criminality much less do anything about it, was served with a warrant. Two days later, a For Sale sign appeared on their front lawn and within a month, the family had vanished.

Enabling always comes with a price.

(end)

> Teachers and other parents,
> obviously. To begin with.

Not obvious, and "to begin with" betrays the iron fist in the kid glove.

Those entrusted with authority to contain bullying will always themselves turn into reckless bullies. Always. There have been zero exceptions. (I went to a horrible grade school like that for second grade. One despicable year. The particulars are too mundane to recite, but it was like moving back a century in American social history, and it was great to return to modernity for third grade. Circumstantially, it could only have happened in the town I grew up in... And typing these words now, I see how that enlightenment nourished my perspective on all the politics we've discussed her for the last 15 years.)

Why is Rosemond a 'you-know-who'?

There have been zero exceptions.
_______________________________________

For you, maybe. Obviously, we have a long way to go. Especially before we figure out how to tackle cyberbullying.
_______________________________________

Why is Rosemond a 'you-know-who'?
_______________________________________

Because you, of all people, should know how often I quote him here.

But if you like, here's another, different perspective of his, from Oct. 2016:

...On the website of the National Bullying Prevention Center, bullying is defined as “Behavior that hurts or harms another person physically or emotionally.” The definition is problematic because it depends to great degree on the subjective judgment of the self-identified victim. Was I bullying the young lady mentioned above? Is disagreeing with someone or expecting them to defend their opinions bullying? Is bullying strictly in the eye of the beholder?

This messiness is the consequence of a culture that has dumbed-down the definition of bullying to the point where school officials often cannot differentiate truth from hysteria. And so they give little more than lip service to complaints of bullying while pointing proudly to their bullying prevention programs.

In other words, to avoid giving legitimacy to parent-child co-dependency, schools often end up enabling bullies. A mess, for sure, and sadly, it will still be a mess on Nov. 1 (when Bullying Prevention Month is over).

(end)

In the meantime, there's also the time-honored tradition of shunning people who refuse to abide by the rules. Including the adult shunning of children. Here's what Miss Manners had to say in 1984 about "rotten apples" and the subtle art of protecting the rest of the "barrel" (I can't copy and paste this, unfortunately):

https://books.google.com/books?id=y-MM7zB-TTQC&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=%22rotten+apple+in+our+neighborhood%22&source=bl&ots=QOnoqrpB7S&sig=ACfU3U22HArbhDuirow0OID14wY1KNU3cA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj9lted6KHlAhUFqlkKHeluB_sQ6AEwAHoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22rotten%20apple%20in%20our%20neighborhood%22&f=false