Ironhold

The 2024 Olympics actually brought this attention to the fore. A boxer who was in the women's boxing competition was actually *banned* from at least one previous event because their testosterone levels (et al) were too high, but the Olympics allowed the boxer to compete. This person hit so hard that one of their opponents actually surrendered a few seconds into the match for fear that if it continued they'd be seriously injured. This comes *on top of* years of people pointing out instances in which people who had been middling competitors as male athletes declared that they were now transgender and started dominating the female divisions of the sports they were in, raising questions about how many were sincere. It's a very complicated issue, but too many people want to sweep it under that metaphorical rug.

The human brain is hardwired to seek for patterns, and will even begin assembling patterns where none exists. In this case, there's enough in the way of controversial and horrific incidents involving LGBT individuals and children to where even a reasonable person could start forming a pattern. For example, for the past few years there have been incidents where drag shows not only invited young children (re: pre-teen and younger) to be audience but where these shows even had such young children *as performers*. Or we had the bit where the people in charge of Drag Queen Story Time for the Houston, Texas public library system didn't actually run proper background checks and so a convicted offender was able to work with the kids for about six months. Or we've had media that was clearly inappropriate for children being aimed at children. Et cetera. That's *on top of* a group of LGBT individuals who made a viral video in which they sang a song called "We're Coming For Your Children". Most people who are LGBT just want to live in peace, and are just as horrified about these events. But so long as they keep happening, they'll be a metaphorical bloody shirt.

There's a full video clip of it in context. He uses his hand to cover his heart, then gestures with it, producing the odd angle. So yeah, looks like an overly emotive gesture.

Official statement made by the ADL on their Twitter feed. It seems that the ADL is writing this one off as him perhaps awkwardly waving to or gesturing at some people, and so they're letting it go until anything further emerges to suggest otherwise.

IRL, there are days where I barely even get to the newspaper because of how much running around I do; the only paper I read when it comes out is the flagship for my columns, and even then I sometimes only have enough time to glance at them & make sure they ran and were the ones I'd scheduled *to* run that day. I literally don't remember the last time I looked at any of the church magazines...

For those who don't know, there's a long-running syndicated comic strip called "Curtis". The series is about the titular 10-year-old from the big city. He's very bright, very curious, and has already decided what he wants to do when he grows up (write & direct horror movies, which he's a fan of). But like most kids his age, he can't help but fall into misadventure and doesn't entirely understand how sitting in school for several hours a day will get him towards his goal. The strip that ran on 19 January 2025 (sorry, King Features Syndicate's Comics Kingdom website limits how many strips a person can view without a subscription) has Curtis meeting with the minister of the church his family goes to. As part of it, Curtis asks what to him is an important question: How do we know that we're actually, presently, living in reality? His concern is whether or not it's possible for a person to "die" but find themselves existing in a reality akin to the one they were living as a sort of afterlife in and of itself. In the strip, the minister shoves him out the door without even attempting to answer the question. To me, though, it does raise a point that I would imagine many individuals are indeed curious about: when a person dies, what tells them that they've passed on and that they need to accept that they are in the afterlife? What does everyone here think?

But yeah - Everyone needs to find a tempo, a rhythm they can live their life around. This will help keep you active without going too fast for your own good. If the beat's too intense, that means it's time to slow it down a notch, even if it means sacrificing something in life to do so.

I keep trying to make peace with my past, but all too often something crops up that forces me to revisit parts of it. Problem is, half the time I try to explain "A led to B, which is why I'm now struggling with C", someone freaks out and either offers a forced mea culpa or tells me that if I'd truly "forgiven" them I wouldn't ever bring the issue up again.

Remember the whole "Great American Melting Pot" bit from School House Rock? What's happening in Europe is that the UK, Sweden, and several other countries are host to large immigrant communities who have *refused* to meld into the overall public body. Rather, these communities are setting up enclaves in which they're basically trying to reconstruct the countries they left behind while still having the resources and privileges of the European nation they're in. The vast majority of incidents people are getting upset about are happening in these enclaves, but it's causing broad anti-immigrant hysteria across the board, especially given how loathe the local governments are to actually do anything about these enclaves. ...Hence why groups like Germany's AFD are seeing a surge in votes and support, and why people are now calling for the heads of several governments to resign. The more horror stories that emerge about what is or isn't happening in these enclaves, the more frenzied the overall anti-immigrant sentiment will likely become, as even legal immigrants who have melted into society are now finding themselves feeling the heat. Yes, I said "hysteria". I'm emphasizing that to make sure everyone understands what I'm talking about.

My oldest brother absolutely *insisted* that I take pre-calculus as a preparation for college. I pointed out that I had trouble in algebra because I kept getting the formulas confused, I had met all of my mathematics requirements so didn't need to take another math class anyway, and even if they *were* concerned about me needing another math class to stay focused there was a math & money course that should help me on my plan for an eventual business major. Mom sided with my brother. The end result was life-altering, and not in a good way. Classes were 90 minutes every other day. The pre-calculus teacher would take the first 30 minutes of those 90 minutes to go desk by desk and grade our homework on the spot so she didn't have to take any of it home. This ensured that she *never* finished discussing the chapter during the assigned lesson period, but she also *never* understood why that kept happening. Instead, we were just to finish reading the chapter and do the assigned homework accordingly. If we had problems we could come to before-school and after-school tutoring time, but her classroom was always packed. It took her writing a note inviting me to leave the class for my parents to *finally* understand that I wasn't lying to them about what it was like in there. But I didn't get moved into another class until semester break, by which point this class had *badly* damaged my GPA. You see, I'm in Texas. At the time I was in high school, if you graduated within the top 10% of your class, you could get free tuition to any in-state college courtesy of the state. This utter nonsense drama with the pre-calculus class meant that I missed the top 10% by six slots, something like 0.07 of a grade point. Cue me and my parents having to struggle to pay for me to go to college, which I caught eight different flavors of flak for by the very same parents who doomed me to this existence when they listened to my brother instead of me in the first place.

To add to this - I grew up high-functioning autistic in a time and place where most people only had "Rain Man" as their frame of reference for high-functioning autism, and I'll spare people the popular term that was used at the time to describe such individuals. I did well enough in school that I was classed as "gifted", which initially just meant being given extra assignments in school and spending a measured amount of time each week in what was supposed to be a specialized educational program. Problem was, as I got older a lot started going on in my life. I had a serious medical episode at 8 that had life-altering consequences, and I was only just barely getting out of that particular tailspin before other things started to hit me. Whenever I began showing the negative traits of autism, however, people treated it like it was some personal failing on my part and that I needed to get myself together & stop slacking off. Past a certain point so much was going on that I was just expected to be some better-than-perfect being who could do anything and everything under his own power and without any assistance so that everyone else could focus on their things. Failure was *never* an option in their eyes, never mind the fact that by the time I graduated high school I had basically been raised by a mix of anime, heavy metal, and "escapist" fiction because few adults in my life were making time for me and my autism was wildly out of control because I didn't have the methods in place to deal with it. I basically lost 20 years of my life to untreated mental health issues. One thing I've had to learn was to set a rhythm for my life. This list of things needed to be done in a given day at a pace that I could maintain without being overwhelmed, this list of things would be nice to get done but weren't mandatory, and this list of things could wait a while. That's how I finally even halfway started to get by.

What you're forgetting is that in the United States, "Jewish" is functionally an ethnicity. Ask yourself how many of those people are actually actively practicing any sort of religious belief system. Also, there are quite a few people of Jewish ancestry in the entertainment industry who are not engaged in what you claim they're engaged in. Classic examples include such talents as Jack Benny, the Marx Brothers, and Soupy Sales, while more recent examples include Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley. And I'm going to need to see your source citations on most of the rest of that. As it is, a *lot* of the deaths attributed to the early Soviet Union were actually the result of famine. The Soviet leadership refused to accept Darwinistic evolution as a theory regarding how humanity came into existence, and so Astroturf'd a fringe theory called Lysenkoism into the forefront. Lysenko's theory argued that genes in plants and animals like were changed by the struggle to survive, and so several key agricultural officials gave very foolish orders to the Soviet farmers in the belief that doing so would force the seeds to grow and thrive, orders like "scatter your seeds onto the snow packs so that they can grow hardy by having to resist the cold". Couple this with a lot of other key agricultural leaders not actually understanding agriculture, and you have people starving to death in droves. Famine was also a major cause of death in China's "Great Leap Forward", where land owners were forcibly deprived of their lands (and often their lives), land which was to be tended to by unskilled individuals who had been forcibly evicted from the cities and relocated to these farms without any sort of training or experience in how to grow crops or tend to livestock. ...And it's been a major cause of death in Zimbabwe, the result of the ruling government also confiscating land and redistributing it to people who didn't know what they were doing... In fact, to this day one can find supporters of communism, anti-white discrimination, and other such "progressive" beliefs who don't have the first clue how to run a farm or ranch yet are dead set on the belief that literally anyone can do it with no training at all...

The Marriott School of Business has a perennial spot on Bloomberg Business Week's top 40 list when it comes to business schools in the United States, and BYU's animation department is slowly getting attention.

As someone who has known - and been pet parent of - quite a few orange kitties in my time, I can testify that orange kitties are very unique in the sense that they are all, in fact, barely-contained balls of pure chaos energy in a fluffy covering. Imagine something you think no cat could ever do, and it's only a matter of time before an orange kitty will figure out how. Intellectually, they run the gamut. I've seen orange kitties who were smarter than many humans, and orange kitties whose learning curve had long since gone flat. They also run an emotional gamut, in that they will be fiercely loyal to and a loving companion of their designated human but but have no qualms turning into little furry buzzsaws at a moment's provocation. Orange kitty getting too close to a live crab? Not surprised.

I've actually read Gene's circa 2001 autobiography "KISS and Make-Up". In it, he claims that he, Paul, Peter, and IIRC Ace were brainstorming names while at a stoplight one day, and KISS was something they regarded as mutually acceptable; it was short enough to be easily remembered, but distinctive enough that it stood out. As it is, Gene went to Hebrew school after he and his mother arrived in New York City, and so he admitted in the book that he would frequently quote the Bible right back at people who accused him of Satanism back in the 1970s to see what their reaction was. The whole glam rock vibe? Gene claimed that he and Paul were bored with seeing bands that just stood around or sat around playing & didn't do anything to justify the cost of seeing them live. They figured that if they were going to make it worth it for people to buy their tickets they were going to put on an absolute spectacle.