North American Campuses: Bastions of Batshit Crazy!

North American Campuses: Bastions of Batshit Crazy!

—October 27, 2016

Well, Kids, we’re more than halfway through the semester, so we’d better take stock of the level of Left-Wing battiness roiling North American university and college campuses to see if Loony-Left students, professors, and administrators are going even more bat-shit crazy than last year. All indications point to one big “yes,” which is hard to believe given the utter absurdity of many of their actions and pronouncements from last year. But then again, they’re probably feeling empowered as the mainstream Left seems to be adopting some of the inane belief systems and political correct ideals coming out of universities these days. Moreover, professors and administrators seem more emboldened and open about their Leftist tendencies and their influence on the behaviour and thoughts of their students.

To recap last year’s inanity, just recall the terms “Social Justice Warrior,” “cultural appropriation,” “self-identification,” “non-binary genders,” “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” “hate speech,” “micro-aggressions,” “patriarchal,” “white privilege,” and a host of other “privileges,” among other pertinent Leftist catch words. Or you can check out my blogs from the last school year such as “Free Speech Imperilled by Campus Political Correctness,” “Political Correct Absurdities of the Week,” “Better Put a Trigger Warning on This One,” “PC Potentates Declare Yoga ‘Culturally Insensitive,’” and “The Patients Have Taken Over the Asylum,” to name a few.

And without further ado, and in no particular order, here is a partial run-down of this school year’s campus follies to date:

freespeechzoneForget the campus establishment of “safe spaces,” as the new drive appears to be “free-speech zones.” This supports the ideal of making a campus one big safe space where speech that may be construed as harmful, inciting, triggering, or in any way controversial is prohibited except in specially designated free-speech zones.

You know, like that small parking lot behind the cafeteria next to the dumpsters.

A few universities have also experimented with “free speech walls” where students are free to post or write whatever they want without fear of retribution from the campus thought police. However, ever-so-tolerant members of the Left tend to destroy or erase comments they don’t agree with. These Lefties seem to take great umbrage at any mention of “Donald Trump,” and his slogan, “Make America Great Again.”

Speaking of which, the “chalking” of Trumpisms continues to be reported and investigated as a hate speech crime in campuses across America.

While considering such as “hate speech” is ludicrous enough, I’ve got to ask, “when did college kids start playing with chalk?”

Conservative speakers on campus? Hah! I’ve lost count of the number of conservative speakers who have had their speaking engagements cancelled by administrators over the past few months. Another trick to keep such harmful thinking off their campuses is to insist upon outrageous fees for security purposes.

Conservative speaking in general is frowned upon on college campuses with numerous campus conservative groups reporting incidents in which their meetings get disrupted by angry Social Justice Warriors. Of course, administrators take no action against the agitators, as the disruption  represents the exercise of their First Amendment rights.    

Overall, when a majority of university students polled say that the ideals of freedom of speech are over-rated or that the First Amendment should be repealed, I’d say we have a serious problem.

Campus bias-incident tribunals—or whatever names these campus Thought-Police prototype groups go under—seem to have become even more powerful in just the few short months since the end of the 2016 Spring semester. Instead of just waiting for students and professors to anonymously report their peers for possible acts of bias and dissemination of hate speech, these shadowy groups—whether composed of administrators, students, professors or some mixture thereof—are actively seeking out thoughtcrime. For example, dozens of these bias-incident groups have warned students at their respective schools not to wear Halloween costumes that may be offensive, with most threatening administrative action against potential transgressors. Tufts University in Boston even went so far as to warn the student body that campus police will be actively looking for potential violators.

My response to this is beautifully summed up by Paul Joseph Watson in this video:  

 “Inclusive language” policies seem to be an even bigger hit with administrators this year, with dozens of campuses launching new Thought-Police-like campaigns to discourage students from using words and phrases that may perhaps offend someone. This year’s policies are going way beyond the old-school PC efforts to to replace potentially offensive words with sugar-coated euphemisms that rely on soft catchwords like “challenged.” No, these policies—most of which suggest punishment for non-compliance—are going after those really hatful terms and phrases such as “hey guys,”“man up,” “mankind,” “man-made,” “color-blind,” and just about any word that might suggest exclusivity to a particular gender, race, sexual orientation or “ability” (or lack thereof).

And remember what I said about the Mainstream Left adopting emerging campus ideals? Well, the Obama Administration recently dictated that all those kind folks doing time in federal prison shouldn’t be stigmatized by being called “prisoners,” “inmates,” “convicts,” or “criminals,” and must now be referred to as “Justice Involved Individuals.”

It appears that last year’s identifying and shaming of potential “cultural appropriation” was just a warm up. Consider that fraternity and sorority members at the University of California Merced have been “instructed” not to use the terms “Greek,” “rush,” or “pledge” because they “appropriate Greek culture” and are “non-inclusive.”

Guess we’re going to have to change the name of the “Olympics,” so as not to offend those delicate Greek sensibilities.

Canoes, yoga, a whole range of food items, and a massive expansion of “inappropriate” Halloween costumes are also increasingly under the campus cultural appropriation gun.

Canoes? Yeah, how dare we white privileged Mo-Fos enjoy paddling in the native people’s traditional conveyance. Tell you what, we’ll give up our canoes if SJWs quit appropriating our modern transportation and communications systems.

“Toxic Masculinity” appears to be a new academic buzzword on several campuses, and is being taught as the primary reason for many of North American society’s ills, including mass shootings and violence in general. Orientation for incoming Gettysburg College students “who identified as male” included movies, lectures and group discussions on the subject, with one student reporting that the effort seemed to be driven to teach students that “masculinity is an unacceptable human trait.” Professors at the previously mentioned U of C—Merced lectured students that an Islamic student’s knife attack that seriously wounded four other students was driven by toxic masculinity and not radical ideology, despite his ISIS flag and hand-written radical manifesto. Students at this school seem to be already fully indoctrinated as all indications—Facebook postings, memorials, “teach-ins”—point to the stabber (killed by police) receiving far more sympathy and accolades than his four victims. And last, for the purpose of this blog, a Dartmouth professor is reportedly teaching a course that relates the Orlando shooting to toxic masculinity.

Yeah, my son’s definitely not going to any of those schools.

In the “irony of ironies” department, the pro-life, Catholic DePaul University banned public display of a campus pro-life group’s “Unborn Lives Matter” poster because the message is rooted in “bigotry” by theoretically mocking the Black Lives Matter movement, and might “provoke” other students….

You know, provoke those pro-choice students who probably have no business going to a pro-life school to begin with.  

And while this incident happened last year, a Columbia University student this month provided a Kafkaesque account of his experiences with the “Gender-Based Misconduct Office” after being accused by an anonymous student of referring to himself as “handsome” in Chinese during his Chinese language class. The Gender Misconduct administrator apparently told the student that his actions were likely the result of “white male privilege,” but the student refused to admit any wrongdoing, and after an hour or so of apparent “re-education” efforts the administrator gave up.

Like the student, I’m not quite sure what the offence was, but this just goes to show that SJW, Loony-Left culture on campuses is poised to find just about everything offensive.

And I could go on and on and on, but getting into it so deep is making me howl-at-the-moon crazy. I’ll just close by relating the latest Loony-Left campus story to hit my news feed: The University of Denver hasFree Speech wall placed “content restrictions” on what can be placed or written on the university’s “free speech wall.” Because the university has a “zero tolerance policy for discrimination, harassment and gender-based violence,” any form of hate speech put on the wall will be considered a violation. Not only is the university’s definition of “hate speech” described with especially broad strokes, but a camera has been installed to monitor what people put on the wall.

Oh, and the language that instigated the restrictions included the following (and is construed by the university as prosecutable hate speech): “I’m Sorry for Something I Didn’t Do/Lynched Somebody, But I Didn’t Know Who” and “GUILTY OF BEING WHITE/GUILTY OF BEING RIGHT!”    

“ARH-WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

The Necromancy, Artistry and Beauty of Traditional Paper Charts

The Necromancy, Artistry and Beauty of Traditional Paper Charts

—October 14, 2016

I have long been enamoured of nautical charts, by far my favorite navigational tool. And sure, I enjoy the convenience of navigating by GPS chart plotter, but there is no art or romance in it. A chart plotter is all push button and cursor with any resultant specific details available in whatever scale or format you desire. In this age of computerized instant gratification, the paper chart takes a bit of work, but you get to look and touch an artistic canvas, discern subtle details by your own eyes, and use the chart as a backdrop to mentally visualize the transit from point A to B.    

Give me a paper chart, compass, parallel rules, close approximation of the starting point and average speed, and I canChester Harbour guide a boat via dead reckoning (DR) to just about any point on a chart’s navigable waters, even in the face of a thick blanket of fog or shroud of night. To those unfamiliar with the art of traditional navigation methods it can seem like necromancy, and perhaps to some extent it is.

My friends were certainly amazed the first time I navigated a complete voyage by dead reckoning, taking them almost 40 nautical miles through thick fog via an unseen narrow channel and then over open ocean to meet up with another narrow channel at voyage’s end. It was wondrous enough that I got us to our destination without ever seeing land except at departure and arrival, but I was also able to successfully gain visual sight of all five sea buoys on the route. Mind you, I must confess to being lucky, or under Poseidon’s watch, because that navigation was just too perfect, and I’ve yet to make another DR voyage that perfectly on course.

Charts are magical. GPS chart plotters are just plastic viewing screens with a bunch of interior computer chips and a need for electricity. Charts might get inconveniently wet (or worse, blown overboard should you bring one topsides), but chart plotters can just quit working. My nine-year-old Raymarine chart plotter gave up the ghost the other day. A bit annoying, but no big deal cause I’ve always got the paper charts in reserve. I’m not so sure that such an event would be “no big deal” with the rest of the world’s recreational boating public.

My grandfather and stepfather, both of whom contributed to the evolution of my nautical skills, used to joke about the pandemonium on the water that would ensue should a GPS satellite or two go on the blink. That was back during the emergence of GPS chart plotters when most mariners—professional and recreational—still learned traditional navigation. Now it seems that few up-and-coming recreational mariners even bother with the traditional methods. Woe be unto them should a satellite, or even just their individual ship-borne GPS unit, give out on a cold, dark, stormy night.   

Cape Cod to Nova Scotia ChartBut enough of any such “doom and gloom” scenarios, as I was vying to speak of the “beauty” and “artistry” of nautical paper charts. And the subject matter of “nautical paper charts” only came to me earlier this week, when I opened a box containing a treasure trove of nautical charts.

They were my above-mentioned step-father’s charts—collected, I assume, over the past 60 years or so, and representing all of his voyages, both those actually travelled and those only dreamt of.

The former, covering the seas bounding Nova Scotia, Maine, Massachusetts, Belize, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey, are obvious. I long heard his sea tales, and his handwriting lightly adorns these charts, giving me visual representation of his thought process as he navigated from each Point A to Point B.

The latter—Newfoundland, West Indies, Venezuela, Brazil, and quite a few places I have yet to identify—are notable for their lack of written adornment.

I can only assume that they are places he longed to navigate and explore. I see this art and want to navigate and explore these places, too. 

—Originally published by Slidemoor.

Time To Talk About the “P” Word!

Time To Talk About the “P” Word!

—October 9, 2016

OK, kids, let’s just cut to the chase: “I love pussy!”

Whoa!

If you’ve been reading the news media lately, you’ll know that I just used a word equated with “vile,” “disgusting,” “revolting,” “lewd,” and “shocking,” among other excessively negative descriptions. The press and political establishment’s “shock and revulsion” reaction to Donald Trump’s use of the word seems akin to how the Muslim world might react should the ayatollah or other high-ranking Islamic clergyman refer to Muhammad as a dog.

Frankly, I’m finding it all a bit overdone.

But, for the record, The Donald’s banter with Billy Bush was downright moronic.

Don, you don’t just “grab ‘em by the pussy”—you’ve got to warm “‘em” up with foreplay first.

And yes, Donald Trump’s statements as recorded in 2005—and in all likelihood expressed at othertrump-cat1 times during his life—were definitely chauvinistic, misogynistic, sexist, demeaning to women, immature, and totally disrespectful to his then-new wife, Melania. In fact, she, more than anyone, should be taking him behind the woodshed for a beating. And yes, women across America (and beyond) have every right to heap scorn upon him and refer to him as a “pig.”

But all those male holier-than-thou politicians disavowing themselves from Trump for his remarks—as well as just about any other straight man calling for The Donald’s head on a stake for this latest transgression—need to shut their hypocritical selves the fuck up.

Because we men are “pigs,” and the vast majority of we straight ones talked about “pussy” all the time in our youth. In fact, from about the ages of 15 to 24 “pussy” is right up there with sports as a primary topic of conversation among men. With age, marriage, children and responsibility, the topic becomes far less discussed, but if you don’t think it comes up from time to time on the golf course, fishing boat or anywhere two or more men are congregating in the absence of women, you are seriously deluded.

Mind you, Trump’s braggadocio was quite a bit over the top, but would you expect anything less from his overinflated ego? So, no, most men don’t think that we can just “grab ‘em by the pussy,” or that women—and their pussies—are just objects for our enjoyment, but sometimes our “pussy talk” might make it sound that way.

In fact, we revere “pussy.” And in this reverence and banter we do generally talk about the entire female package, but “pussy” is akin to the “Holy Grail.”

And why not? What’s not to love about it?

Without “pussy” life just wouldn’t be as joyful.

Without “pussy,” I would have to use “Vagina,” which just doesn’t roll of the tongue as smoothly—or, have to resort to that “C-word” that rhymes with “runt.”

Without “pussy” I would not be writing this blog, and you would not be reading it.

So let’s lose those unearned vulgar connotations of the word and apply reverence to it instead. And yes, if you are female, you can chastise The Donald for how he used it, but let’s not vilify the word itself more than it already unjustifiably is. 

“Pussy”—C’est la joie et le catalyseur de vivre!