Month: December 2019

Not In My Day

Men & Women

Good grief.  I admit to being not easily shocked by people’s vicissitudes nowadays, but even so, this one left me gaping:

A married history teacher slept with at least five pupils at one of South Africa’s most elite schools, an investigation has revealed.
Fiona Viotti, 30, who is the niece of former South African national rugby coach Nick Mallett, was found to have slept with the boys at Bishops Diocesan College in Cape Town between 2013 and 2019.
The school called in lawyers to investigate Viotti after an 18-year-old pupil claimed he had been involved in an ‘intense’ sexual relationship with her, saying she became controlling when he tried to end it.
Investigators hired by the school found that she had been bedding pupils for at least six years, targeting boys who were over the age of consent.
Ms Viotti is also known to have filmed explicit videos of herself which were circulated within the school and online, but investigators failed to determine who she initially sent the footage to.
The probe found that she breached school codes and the code of ethics laid down by the SA Council of Educators [ya thank?–K.] likely meaning she will never teach again.
However, she will not face any disciplinary action from the school since she has already resigned. [!!!!!]

Needless to say, hubby has ditched her, and she is “receiving psychiatric help”.  Stupid bitch.

What makes this case interesting is that she’s a total babe, which would make her irresistible to most men, let alone callow adolescents — and yet she’s a pervert withal.  (Oh, of course  she’s a pervert;  if this had been a 30-year-old male teacher shagging his teenybopper girl students, he’d now be in chains [2,000-word rant about double standards deleted].)  Oh, and I should point out that in South Africa, the age of consent is sixteen.

En passant, I should also point out that Bishops D.C. is indeed one of the top high schools in South Africa (almost on a par with my alma mater  St. John’s College).  But clearly they do a better — or worse, depending on your viewpoint —  job of teacher recruitment than we did.

No Surprises There

Education

Like we couldn’t see this one coming:   we suck.

Results of the 2018 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) found American teens showed no actual improvement in reading, math, and science compared to the 2015 results.

Our ranking improved, though. Why?

The ranking of U.S. students improved only because the scores of students in other countries dropped.

So we’re getting dumber at a slower rate than the rest of the world’s kids?  How nice.  And guess what?

As Education Week reported, PISA reading results indicate American teens are able to comprehend the main idea and draw simple inferences in a medium length text, but comprehension and comparison skills when other texts and ideas are introduced – so-called critical thinking skills – are lacking.
Despite a decade of the Common Core State Standards, an Obama-era progressive education reform that was touted as one that would improve students’ critical thinking and eliminate the achievement gap between white and minority students, U.S. public schools appear to be failing in both areas.

So Common Core is failing… along with just about every other nostrum provided by the education establishment, most notably No Child Left Behind, which should now be renamed “Every  Child Left Behind”.  Here’s some more on the topic.

But all is not lost:  I see that SecEd Betsy DeVos has managed to shed 600 useless functionaries from the Education Department in just a couple of years.  Go, Betsy, go!  MOAR reductions!!!!

Neck What?

Grooming

I see that Insty is all over this thing called  “neck gaiters” — and I had to follow the link he posted just to see what the hell he was talking about.

Oh.  What we used to call “neck warmers”, I suppose.  Of course, people of my age have always had neck warmers, only we called them “scarves”.  Here’s your humble host, wearing one of the objects in question:

You will note that the thing is quite long, so that you can wind the thing around your neck multiple times if the weather turns Minneapolis on you, or else loosen it if a winter’s day in Rome turns out warmer than expected (as was the case above).

And the scarf’s advantage over the gaiter is that if your neck starts getting hot, you can simply loosen it to adjust the degree of warmth, whereas the gaiter is kind of a binary thing — it’s either on or off.

Failing that, of course, you can always wear a gilet with a zippable high collar:

…which I seldom zip all the way up because it’s a little tight — kinda like one of them gaiter things — and if I (literally) get too hot under the collar, I have to unzip it, whereupon my neck is exposed the the cold — once again, just like a neck gaiter.

Now that I think of it, the problem may be with the word “gaiter”, which to me has always referred to the things we wore over our army boots in high school:

…so using a footwear word to refer to something one wears around the neck is akin to calling gloves “foot-socks”.

Anyway, I think I’ll stick to my scarves.  I have about half a dozen of them, ranging from thick wool to loosely-woven cotton — and differently-colored withal, to add a touch of color to my otherwise-quite monochromatic outfits.  Plus, I’ve worn them in cold weather for decades, and I’m not one for change.

Not even if Insty likes neck gaiters.

Ditto

Conservatism

Yeah, you can count me among those people who no longer go to the Drudge Report for daily news.

I don’t know when it happened, but I think Matt decided that the role of his website is to be the “loyal opposition” to whoever’s in power.  Obama as POTUS?  Run links to anti-Obama events.  Trump as POTUS?  Ditto.

Or maybe, as a homosexual man, he believed the propaganda that Trump was going to set up gulags for fairies, hence his change of attitude.

That’s fine, I suppose.  Trouble is, I just couldn’t be less interested about another anti-Trump news outlet:  we’ve got plenty enough already with CNN-CBS-MSNBC-ABC-NBC-NYT-WaPo etc.  So like many, I’ve switched to WhatFinger News for my news jollies.  To be honest, I prefer the old Drudge Report because he always showed both sides of the aisle — but he doesn’t anymore.

Hell, I go to Insty more often than any of them, really.

MOAR Guns

Good Stuff, The Gun Thing

From the Examiner  comes this wonderful news:

Gun sales are expected to push past the 13.8 million sold last year, in part because buyers are growing more concerned that if a Democrat is elected president in 2020, sweeping gun control will pass in Washington.
Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting, a group that watches the arms industry, said today that it expects sales to reach 14 million this year.
Other groups said sales recently spiked as the Democratic presidential race heated up and after Virginia voters gave Democrats control of the state legislature in an election where gun control was a driving issue.
Last weekend, for example, a gun show in Northern Virginia reported that many dealers sold out.
Permits for those wishing to carry a concealed handgun have also surged to a new high.

This actually supports what I’ve noticed anecdotally:  just about every gun store I’ve visited in the past couple of months tells me that sales are brisk — especially among women buying handguns (!!!) — and I’ve already talked about gun shows, where the high prices reflect strong demand.  Also anecdotally, I commented on the ubiquity of AR-15 displays at said gun shows, which likewise seems to reflect steady demand for the Mattel poodleshooter.

And then there’s this:

Americans Bought Enough Guns on Black Friday to Arm the Marine Corps – Yet Again!
According to the FBI, over 200,000 background check requests associated with the purchase of a firearm were submitted to the agency on Black Friday, marking the second highest gun sales day ever. The previous record was set on the day after Thanksgiving in 2016. In both 2017 and 2016, enough guns were potentially purchased on Black Friday to arm every active duty United States Marine.
…
These numbers also do not take into account firearms which were purchased online. Those firearms will then be shipped to a license seller in the purchaser’s area and a background check will be done when they pick up the firearm, so those checks could be spread out over the following weeks.

Excuse me for a moment…

And so in the spirit of this joyous news, I will be running (completely unsolicited) gun ads each day for the next week or so (see below for the first).

Just because.