Guardian: Coroner calls for action, will Google and Amazon have the wisdom to ignore her?
Google and Amazon must act after a British woman made a suicide pact with two people she met online and bought the poison that killed her on the internet, a coroner has said.
WSJ: UW Chancellor Fired for Porn
WSJ: UW Chancellor Fired for Porn
The university system’s board of regents voted unanimously to terminate University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow during a closed session Wednesday evening. UW-La Crosse Provost Betsy Morgan will serve as interim chancellor following Gow’s dismissal, university system leaders said.
What could Gow have done that was so bad?
Scientific American: Theory that Man is the Hunter
Take a moment to appreciate the difficulties faced by a biologist. Retain your integrity and possibly lose your job, or advocate for Gender Identity Theory and try to act like the most obvious facts about humans and every other mammal are not true.
It’s much easier for anthropologists. They aren’t a hard science and their integrity was never cherished. They can sleep at night knowing that when this fetish goes out of favor, they will never be called to retract anything.
It’s Christmas Eve, and if I’m honest, Christmas music generally isn’t great. My condolences to anyone who ever worked retail during Christmas.
WSJ: Elon Musk on Woke Mind Virus
WSJ: Elon Musk on Woke Mind Virus
For months and months, the world’s richest man has been talking about the “woke mind virus”—let’s call it WMV for short. He describes it as a threat to “modern civilization” and says those concerns motivated his decision more than a year ago to buy the social-media platform now known as X.
People talk about the attributes of different generations, and it got me wondering who names the generations. They aren’t doing a good job: Baby Boomers, Generation X, Millennials, Generation Y and Generation Alpha.
This article from the Pew Trust explains some of it. Big national events and trends shape the children, giving the generations different characteristics.
I have often been asked by people over 35 or so, “Are we supposed to say ‘they want’ or ‘they wants’?” I always answer that the proper form is “they want,” but must it be? Instead, we could say this, which would make perfect and intuitive grammatical sense:
Singular: I want, you want, he/she/they wants
Plural: we want, you want, they want
My proposal is that we agree that male, man and boy refers to a person born with a penis, and that female, woman and girl refers to a person born with a vagina. For the exceedingly rare people born with neither or both, they can choose. My proposal has the advantage of being consistent across cultures for thousands of years.
Judd Apatow made a short documentary of the friendship between Bob Newhart and Don Rickles. It doesn’t seem like they’d be friends, but seeing them together, it obviously works.
NewYorker: Bob Newhart and Don Rickles
NewYorker: Bob Newhart and Don Rickles
“I love that they became friends because they both played Vegas and neither wanted to cheat on their wives,” Apatow said.
Free Press: David Sedaris Punching Down
Words, we are now regularly reminded, are violence. So too is silence. I read not long ago that capitalism is violence, as is misgendering someone. Ignoring someone is violence, but so too is paying them attention.
Sedaris is a cosmopolitan humorist, so he is describing coastal people and what is written by influencers on social media, but many young people don’t seem very resilient.
My dad was a waist gunner in a B-24 Liberator during World War II. He is the one we think of on Veteran’s Day, but other family members served. Uncle Pete was in the Navy, Uncle Nick was an officer, but I don’t recall which branch. My brother Chris was in the Air Force for the Vietnam War, and brother-in-law John was in the Army. Nephew Dusty was also in the Army. Mom would want me to mention that she volunteered for the USO, so really, she should get something. Remember the people who served, and listen to their stories while you can.
My dad tells some of his story:
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