The boobs of Texas

As reported by The Guardian:

"Virginia’s state flag and seal, depicting the Roman goddess Virtus standing over a slain tyrant, her drooping toga exposing her left breast, has been banned from younger students in a Texas school district.

The district, Lamar consolidated independent school district, near Houston, took action against the image late last year when it removed a section about Virginia from its online learning platform used by third through fifth graders, typically encompassing ages eight to 11, sparking a row, Axios reported on Thursday...

The group said that after it filed a public records request, the school district acknowledged that “Virginia” had been removed from the website due to the lesson violating the school board’s local library policy banning any “visual depictions or illustrations of frontal nudity” in elementary school library material...

In 1901, Virginia officials ordered that the depiction of the bared breast be included to show clearly that the figure of Virtus was female."

The idea that a third grader should not see a woman's bare breast, or that a fifth grade boy who has access to Pornhub on his phone should not see "full frontal nudity" is totally ludicrous.

Addendum:  see also the adjacent post "A Denmark television program shows children the varieties of the naked human body."

Spanish for your nanny

 

The audio of this video is NSFW - and perhaps inappropriate for the 12-year-olds who visit this blog.  But since I have so many Spanish-English bilingual family members, I thought this would provide a few moments of amusement for them. 

Reposted from 2008.  Credit to [the now defunct] Growabrain.

"It's a big club, and you ain't in it"

YouTube link.

You either like George Carlin or hate him. If the former, you have probably already heard this rant. If you're in the latter category, you don't want to hear it.

In this performance he addresses the problem of public education. It's only a 3-minute excerpt from a longer stage presentation. There's a bit of profanity, but unlike the performances he gave when he was younger, the profanity isn't the point; now it's just used for emphasis. The focus here is broader (and more controversial).

[I originally wrote this post in 2008, but discovered today that the video link there was broken, so I've embedded a new version.  Note this presentation was done years before the Bailout and the economic downturn].

Reposted from 2011 because this video needs to be viewed more often.  Send it to your friends.

Chuckleworthy

Yes, yes, I know - this is totally politically incorrect and unworthy of insertion in TYWKIWDBI.  That's why I've closed the comments...

Hey, buddy - that's a nonconsensual kiss

"Very little ammunition is required for a culture war these days, so long as your troops are primed to mobilise at the drop of a blog. Julie Tremaine and Katie Dowd, two writers for the online newspaper SFGate, discovered this last month. Their review of the revamped Snow White ride at Disneyland was generally positive, but queried a new scene showing the prince giving Snow White the all-important “true love’s kiss”.

“A kiss he gives to her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening,” they wrote. “It’s hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021 would choose to add a scene with such old-fashioned ideas of what a man is allowed to do to a woman.”

Discussion of the current brouhaha at The Guardian, which ran a related story last month about potentially offensive stereotypes in the Disney catalogue.

Addendum:  An interesting comment from reader Charles - "In some of the earliest versions she is raped while she is unconscious..."

" One day, while a king is walking by, one of his falcons flies into the house. The king knocks, hoping to be let in by someone, but no one answers and he decides to climb in with a ladder. He finds Talia alive but unconscious, and "...gathers the first fruits of love." Afterwards, he leaves her in the bed and goes back to his kingdom. Though Talia is unconscious, she gives birth to twins — one of whom keeps sucking her fingers. Talia awakens because the twin has sucked out the flax that was stuck deep in Talia's finger. When she wakes up, she discovers that she is a mother and has no idea what happened to her."

Who sees this photo as symbolic of white privilege???

Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, a San Francisco public high school teacher, wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle objecting to the privileges symbolized by Sanders’ style of dress at the inauguration.

Seyer-Ochi addressed the topic with her students, who she said were also upset by what they saw as the implicit message being delivered by Sanders’s choice of outerwear.

“What did they see? They saw a white man in a puffy jacket and huge mittens, distant not only in his social distancing, but in his demeanor and attire,” Seyer-Ochi wrote, adding, “What did I see? What did I think my students should see? A wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens.

“I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie.”..

“I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel,” Seyer-Ochi wrote. 

Commentary and backlash to her outrage in an article on Yahoo News, where they note that "Sanders monetized his viral fame to raise more than $1.8 million for various causes from the licensing of T-shirts and other merchandise with the now iconic image. The beneficiaries include Meals on Wheels, Feeding Chittenden, the Vermont Parent Child Center Network, the Chill Foundation, the Bi-State Primary Care Association and senior centers."

Some people just need to feel victimized, IMHO.

Addendum:  an interesting variety of opinions in the comments.

Political discourse these days

Owning the liberals by sucking on a plastic straw embedded in a meat patty decorated with an incandescent bulb.

To be fair and balanced, we will admit that liberals pull similar stunts.

Via.

A tree is not a permanent carbon sink

And an old-growth forest is not a net producer of oxygen.

There are lots of excellent reasons to plant trees, but doing so to sequester carbon is a reflection of short-term thinking.  A tree does harvest CO2 from the air and converts it to various organic structures.  If it is a deciduous tree, all the leaves that sequestered carbon for the summer will return that carbon to the environment when the leaves decay in the fall and winter.

The CO2 that was sequestered in cellulose and lignin will be trapped in the wood for a longer period of time, but when that tree dies, the cycle reverses: CO2 is released as the wood decays.  The CO2 sequestration can be prolonged by cutting the tree down while it is alive, using the wood to make furniture for example, and covering the furniture with a layer of lacquer or paint or other preservative.  The ultimate sequestration of course is to bury the dead tree underground and let it turn into coal.

That old-growth forest of towering giant trees is not a net oxygen producer.  The living trees utilize photosynthesis and release O2, but the dead ones on the forest floor are decaying, consuming oxygen as the wood is "burned" back to CO2.  If you want to glorify a trees as an oxygen source, point to a stand of quick-growing "rubbish" trees or a tree farm of new plantings, not the ancient rain forest or the taiga.

I've held this view for a long time, but have seldom expressed it in social settings because the sentiment is so unpopular and frankly a "downer" in conversation, so why bother.   But the recent uproar about Amazonian fires has produced so much hyperbole that the Atlantic boldly posted an article entitled The Amazon is Not Earth's Lungs.  Herewith some excerpts:

The Amazon is a vast, ineffable, vital, living wonder. It does not, however, supply the planet with 20 percent of its oxygen.

As the biochemist Nick Lane wrote in his 2003 book Oxygen, “Even the most foolhardy destruction of world forests could hardly dint our oxygen supply, though in other respects such short-sighted idiocy is an unspeakable tragedy.”

The Amazon produces about 6 percent of the oxygen currently being made by photosynthetic organisms alive on the planet today. But surprisingly, this is not where most of our oxygen comes from. In fact, from a broader Earth-system perspective, in which the biosphere not only creates but also consumes free oxygen, the Amazon’s contribution to our planet’s unusual abundance of the stuff is more or less zero...

That is, Peters wanted to know what would happen to the atmosphere if you burned down not just the Amazon, but every forest on Earth, every blade of grass, every moss and lichen-spackled patch of rock, all the flowers and bees, all the orchids and hummingbirds, all the phytoplankton, zooplankton, whales, starfish, bacteria, giraffes, hyraxes, coatimundis, oarfish, albatrosses, mushrooms, placozoans—all of it, besides the humans.

Peters pulled up the next slide. After this unthinkable planetary immolation, the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere dropped from 20.9 percent to 20.4 percent. CO₂ rose from 400 parts per million to 900—less, even, than it does in the worst-case scenarios for fossil-fuel emissions by 2100. By burning every living thing on Earth.

“Virtually no change,” he said. “Generations of humans would live out their lives, breathing the air around them, probably struggling to find food, but not worried about their next breath.”

On their own, then, trees—and even entire forests and seas of plankton—are not enough to fill the atmosphere with a surplus of oxygen. If 99.99 percent of the vast reservoir of oxygen created by the living world is consumed by the living world, that gets you an atmosphere with 0.01 percent oxygen, not our modern 20.9 percent. Photosynthesis is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a world that is hospitable to white-hot oxygen-burning furnaces like us.

“The notion that we owe the breath we breathe to the rain forest, or the [phytoplankton] off the rain forests’ coasts, is just a little bit misinformed on the long timescale,” says Peters.

You don’t get to 20.9 percent, or an atmosphere that can host animal life, without geologic time, and without the fossil record. The tiny remainder of photosynthetic stuff that isn’t consumed and respired again by life—that 0.01 percent of plants and phytoplankton that manages to escape from this cycle of creation and destruction—is responsible for the existence of complex life on Earth. It’s the organic carbon that, once created, doesn’t get consumed again.

The rest of the article is worth reading in toto.

Should President Monroe's name be expunged from schools?

"Over objections from a vocal group of alums, the St. Paul school board voted Tuesday evening to drop James Monroe’s name from two school buildings.

Troubled by the fifth U.S. president’s slave ownership, parents and students at Linwood-Monroe Arts Plus spent a year and a half exploring the change before settling on Global Arts Plus. Students on Tuesday said the new name reflects the magnet school’s students, who come from all over the city and world to attend classes in the Summit Hill and West Seventh neighborhoods...

Its namesake, James Monroe, was the fifth U.S. president, one of 12 to own slaves during his lifetime and one of eight to do so while in office.

“It’s a critically important issue that James Monroe was a slave owner, and that doesn’t reflect the kids that go to Linwood-Monroe in the slightest,” PTO president Jason Johnson said in an interview.

Thirty percent of the dual-campus school’s students are African-American and about as many are white.

Patrick Fleury, a 1966 Monroe High graduate, called the name change a waste of tax money. New school signs and uniforms for the band and sports teams are expected to cost close to $13,000...

The St. Paul district has two other schools named for slave-owning presidents: the grades 6-12 Washington Technology Magnet and Jackson Elementary."

She was fired for saying the word "vagina" without previous approval

Allison Wint, a substitute teacher at a middle school in Battle Creek, Mich., told the Detroit Free Press that she was hoping to provoke a thoughtful dialogue about historical interpretations of O’Keeffe’s work on Friday when she used the word “vagina” during a discussion with eighth graders...

Wint told the Free Press that, in total, she estimates she used the word 10 times during the course of the lecture, prompting giggles from her students, but eventually a substantive discussion...

The next day, according to Wint, she was reprimanded by a school official, who noted that she had said the word “vagina … without previous approval.”

The official told her that referring to female reproductive organs without approval violated school policy, Wint told the Free Press.

She told the paper that she was instructed to gather her belongings and leave the school within one hour.

Good thing they got her out of the school "within one hour."  No telling how much damage she might have inflicted had she stayed until the end of the day.

Re the painting:

Flower of Life II - along with many to follow - presented the sexual anatomy of the flower in sharp focus. By drawing attention to the inherent androgyny of this subject, O'Keeffe could have been attempting to contradict the critical notion that her subject matter was related exclusively to her gender.

But if so, the critics in 1925 missed O'Keeffe's point (as most still do). They interpreted her flowers as they had interpreted her earlier abstractions, as expressions of her sexuality. In 1943, O'Keeffe finally responded: Well - I made you take time to look at what I saw and when you took time to really notice my flowers you hung all your own associations with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and see what you think and see of the flower - and I don't. ”

Benghazi fatigue

From The New Yorker.

Is the word "midget" per se offensive ?

Excerpts from the story reported in the StarTribune:

Chelley Martinka, a Rhode Island mom... noticed that Cains, a popular pickle brand in New England made by Minnesota’s own M.A. Gedney Co., had an offering called “midgets.” It’s a term that’s offensive to people born with dwarfism, as well as their families. And Martinka’s daughter, now 10 months old, had been diagnosed with the condition soon after birth.

So, she blogged about the issue, made a YouTube video and contacted Gedney, the 132-year-old pickle maker with a national presence and a brand particularly well-known in the Twin Cities. Gedney’s CEO, Barry Spector, called her earlier this month and said the company would indeed junk the midget moniker...

Martinka’s daughter Adelaide, has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism, which is caused by a genetic mutation. For those who have it, their preferred name is “little people.”..

Chaska-based Gedney has used the midget appellation in a version of its Del Monte brand of pickles, as well as in one item under the Gedney brand. But with its namesake brand — a big seller in local supermarkets — Gedney uses “Babies” and “Mini-Munchers” to describe most of its small pickles...

The United States Department of Agriculture defined the standards for grades and sizes of pickles in the United States. According to the USDA, a ‘midget’ pickle was the word designation for a pickle with a diameter of 19 mm or less.”

My dictionary shows midget as having been derived from midge (a tiny insect), in common use since the early 19th century.  From Wikipedia:

The term "midget" came into prominence in the mid-19th century after Harriet Beecher Stowe used it in her novels Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands and Old Town Folks where she described children and an extremely short man, respectively. P. T. Barnum indirectly helped popularize the term "midget" when he began featuring General Tom Thumb in his circus. "Midget" became linked to referencing short people put on public display for curiosity and sport.

I fully understand that the term is now considered perjorative when applied to people, but I'm surprised it would be offensive when used to refer to other items. 

Photo cropped from the original at the Daily News.

Should Santa Claus be depicted as a nonsmoker?

A new Christmas book puts the issue right in the title:

Twas The Night Before Christmas: Edited by Santa Claus for the Benefit of Children of the 21st Century

The book is a yet-another-publication of Clement Moore's classic poem, but the publisher and illustrator have excised this iconic passage: "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath."

Here's some commentary from a StarTribune column:

Not surprisingly, controversy has ensued, with the American Library Association protesting and Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert labeling the act "political cor-Xmas."..

"I want people to get mad at tobacco, not librarians fighting with me. All parents don't want their children to smoke, so we're all on the same page."  "I'm not cleaning up the most famous poem in the English language," McColl said. "I'm just coming at it from a smoking angle."

I am reminded of the 2010 sanitizing of a famous photo of Winston Churchill by the removal of his cigar stub, and the printing of a U.S. postage stamp with the cigarette plucked from the fingers of the actress.

With regard to the latter, here is the incisive commentary of Roger Ebert:

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart...

... Look, I hate smoking. It took my parents from me, my father with lung cancer, my mother with emphysema... When my mother was breathing oxygen through a tube, she'd take out the tube, turn off the oxygen, and light up. I avoid smokers. It isn't allowed in our house. When I see someone smoking, it feels like I'm watching them bleed themselves, one drip at a time.

So we've got that established. On the other hand, I have never objected to smoking in the movies, especially when it is necessary to establish a period or a personality. I simply ask the movies to observe that, these days, you rarely see someone smoking except standing outside a building, on a battleground, in a cops' hangout, in a crack house, in rehab, places like that. In an ordinary context, giving a character a cigarette is saying either (1) this is a moron, or (2) this person will die...

Two of the most wonderful props in film noir were cigarettes and hats. They added interest to a close up or a two-shot... These days men don't smoke and don't wear hats. When they lower their heads, their eyes aren't shaded. Cinematographers have lost invaluable compositional tools. The coil of smoke rising around the face of a beautiful women added allure and mystery. Remember Marlene Dietrich. She was smoking when she said, "It took more than one man to change my name to Shanghai Lily."

...Movies can't rewrite reality. The MPAA cautiously mentions smoking in their descriptions of movie ratings (even if it's the Cheshire Cat and his hookah). If, by the time you're old enough to sit through a movie, you haven't heard that smoking is bad for you, you don't need a movie rating, you need a foster home.

Women, rape comments, and voting results

One of the most salient comments I've seen in the election aftermath reportedly comes from (of all people) Alec Baldwin:

""You know your party's in trouble when you read this: A: The rape guy lost. B: Which one?"

Top image discussed at The Dish; lower one found at imgur.

The nonsense of "zero tolerance" in schools

Here is yet another in a seemingly-neverending series of incidents in which schools rigidly enforce "zero tolerance" of sex/drugs/violence/etc related matters.  In this case a three-year-old child deaf child who signs with his hands has been told to change his name sign because the hand gesture resembled the pointing of a gun.

Hunter Spanjer says his name with a certain special hand gesture, but at just three and a half years old, he may have to change it.

"He's deaf, and his name sign, they say, is a violation of their weapons policy," explained Hunter's father, Brian Spanjer.

Grand Island's "Weapons in Schools" Board Policy 8470 forbids "any instrument...that looks like a weapon," But a three year-old's hands?

"Anybody that I have talked to thinks this is absolutely ridiculous. This is not threatening in any way," said Hunter's grandmother Janet Logue.

"It's a symbol. It's an actual sign, a registered sign, through S.E.E.," Brian Spanjer said. S.E.E. stands for Signing Exact English, Hunter's sign language. Hunter's name gesture is modified with crossed-fingers to show it is uniquely his own.

Source link, via Neatorama.

Addendum:  I just noticed that the boy's name is "Hunter," which may explain the hand sign he was taught to use.  Also this comment from the Reddit thread -

...the boy is using SEE instead of ASL. Read through to the related article, and you'll see that the school district teaches to deaf children with ASL instead of SEE (the former is much more common). What most likely happened is that the school is just trying to teach the boy ASL, perhaps starting with his name, so the parents ran to the news to create the story that the school is trying to change his name due to their gun policy, when it's actually because their teachers don't speak SEE.

- which, of course, would put the story in a different light.

Librarian porn

Excerpts from an article in the Paris Review (NSFW pix at link):

It was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney...

Why did many of the best sex scenes in today’s librarian porn take place outside of a library? ... Long before the era of the public library, stories of sex among books were set in private collections, in secluded humanist studies. The protagonist of Antonio Vignali’s 1526 La Cazzaria (The Book of the Prick) examines a collection of raunchy books and manuscripts in a private study as he awaits the arrival of a lover....

Lucy’s very real encounter in the stacks is the modern library’s attempted rejoinder to the loneliness of life online. The physicality of the library space is presented here as a concrete alternative to the interminable virtualness of contemporary erotic imagination. It’s the last argument for the library’s continued relevance as a space and of the subversive potential of books...

Explaining the "14" and "88" memes

Excerpts from an article at Spiegel Online discussing subtle new neo-Nazi codes:

Openly Nazi symbols such as the swastika are banned in Germany, so neo-Nazis get around the law by using coded combinations of letter and numbers such as 14 and 88. A new book explains the meaning of such codes, and reveals that far-right style is becoming increasingly diverse and hard to spot...

According to Weiss, the number 14 is a reference to the so-called "14 Words," a phrase coined by the American white separatist David Lane ("We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children"). The meaning behind "88" -- often found in conjunction with 14 -- is slightly more complicated. Here, the number eight stands for the eighth letter of the alphabet, forming "HH" -- an abbreviation for "Heil Hitler," a phrase which is banned in Germany. Similarly, the number 28 signifies "BH," standing for "Blood and Honour," a far-right network that was banned in Germany in 2000.

"Diamonds are a girl's best friend"

These lyrics would today be considered at least old-fashioned (and more likely politically incorrect), but the song and dance sequence from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" is an iconic moment in an otherwise forgettable movie. 

Winston Churchill, nonsmoker. WTF??

The above photo was recently displayed above the entrance to a London museum.  Anyone with even a modicum of knowledge of 20th century history would know that this image has been digitally altered.  The classic photo looked like this:

No one admits to having perpetrated this travesty:

The Winston Churchill's Britain At War Experience, in South-East London, confessed to being astonished to discover that the image may have been doctored...

So just who did pinch the great man's Havana?

It wasn't the anti-smoking lobby, which has had no known contact with the museum; it certainly wasn't Churchill's family - his grandson Nicholas Soames said 'it doesn't matter one way or the other'; and it wasn't the museum itself - in fact it's got wartime posters advertising cigarettes on the walls.

But intriguingly the museum, which gives all profits to charity, declined to name who put together the display and, crucially, who enlarged the image for the poster.

Museum manager John Welsh was astonished to be told the image was missing one vital ingredient.

I'm a nonsmoking ex-smoker, and I'm frankly tired of this kind of manipulation of history for the sake of  modern political correctness.  The United States did the same thing when they honored Bette Davis on a postage stamp, using an image with a deleted cigarette:

Rogert Ebert offered some trenchant commentary:

Depriving Bette Davis of her cigarette reminds me of Soviet revisionism, when disgraced party officials disappeared from official photographs. Might as well strip away the toupees of Fred Astaire and Jimmy Stewart...

...Movies can't rewrite reality. The MPAA cautiously mentions smoking in their descriptions of movie ratings (even if it's the Cheshire Cat and his hookah). If, by the time you're old enough to sit through a movie, you haven't heard that smoking is bad for you, you don't need a movie rating, you need a foster home.

"... her head was burned right off..."

But the cooking-places were very very high up, and she could not reach them properly, so she pulled forward the big kettle in which the cook boiled the hot water. And got on to it. Then she found she could poke the fire splendidly, and she was very much pleased. But the kettle was round at the bottom, and not very steady, and suddenly it tipped over, and she fell into the fire, and her head was burned right off.

From The Story of Little Kettle-head (1904), by Helen Bannerman.  The rest of the story is at the link.  Via The Presurfer.