It’s Friday, June 21st, the longest day of 2019…but before we begin, are we the only one who’s head is spinning over what should be a very simple answer to a very simple question?  To wit…

IAAF claims Olympic champion Semenya is ‘biologically male‘

“…Semenya was legally identified as female at birth and has identified as female her whole life. But the IAAF says she is one of a number of female runners in elite athletics who have medical conditions known as “differences of sex development” and who were born with the typical male XY chromosome pattern. That gives them some male biological characteristics, male levels of the hormone testosterone after puberty, and an unfair athletic advantage over other female athletes, the IAAF says…”

The question isn’t whether she’s “identified” as a female, but rather IS she a female!!!  In other words, if you’ll pardon our bluntness, was she born with a uterus and ovaries, or a penis and testicles?!?  If it’s the former, she’s a female; and, provided she isn’t artificially increasing her testosterone levels or using performance enhancing drugs, any legitimate medical condition which naturally provides her an advantage in track events isn’t her fault.

Sorry, but should Michael Jordan have been forced to wear weights to limit his prodigious leaping ability against his less gravity-defying competition?

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of NRO via The Boss, the great Victor Davis Hanson relates the increasingly sorry condition of…

“‘Third World” is now an anachronistic geographical term of the old Cold War. But after 1989, “Third World” was reinvented from a political noun into an adjective to mean more than just Asian, African, and Latin American nations nonaligned with either the West or the Soviet bloc.

Rather, the current modifier “Third World” has come to transcend geography, politics, and ethnicity. It simply denotes poor failed states all over the globe of all races and religions.

Third World symptomologies are predictably corrupt government, unequal or nonexistent applicability of the law, two rather than three classes, and the return of medieval diseases. Third World nations suffer from high taxes and poor social services, premodern infrastructure and utilities, poor transportation, tribalism, gangs, and lack of security.

Another chief characteristic of a Third World society is the official denial of all of the above, and a vindictive, almost hysterical state response to anyone who points out those obvious tragedies. Another is massive out-migration. Residents prefer almost any country other than their own. Think Somalia, Venezuela, Cuba, Libya, or Guatemala.

…In 1973, when I first visited and lived in Greece, the roads were medieval. The old Hellinikon Airport was dysfunctional, if not creepy. Highway rest stops were filthy. I have lived in or visited Greece in the ensuing 45 years since, including occasionally after the 2008 meltdown and European Union standoff. And yet today, the freeways, chief airport, and rest stops of relatively poor Greece are in far better shape than are California’s. (Yeah, but does Greece have high-speed rail under construction between Wherethefugareweika and Middleofnowheressia?!?) LAX’s poor road access, traffic, uncleanness, crowds, and chaos seem premodern compared with the current Athenian airport.

It is an eerie experience to see America’s once premier state, currently at its supposed acme, now resemble Greece of the colonels a half-century ago, while 2019 Greece seems more like a functioning 1973 California. Athens and Thessaloniki are still dirty in a few places, and there are homeless and illegal immigrants. But one does not see needles and feces on the sidewalks, and it is safe to walk in the evening. Greek public restrooms, once notorious, are far more sanitary than those at rest stops in Fresno, San Francisco, or Los Angeles…”

Here’s the juice:

And have been for decades!!!  P.S. Any number of other bastions of Socialism ain’t far behind.

In a related item forwarded by G. Trevor which is a must-read in its entirety, writing at The American Spectator, Dov Fischer details…

What AO-C’s ‘Concentration Camp’ Comments Tell Us About the Deconstruction and Breakdown of American Education

Makeup and lipstick are a terrible thing to waste.

“…We all have seen the street interviews: Jay Leno “Jaywalking” at Universal Studios, Jesse Watters, all the others. The first reaction we have when we see those is to say: “Oh my L-rd! Are these morons ever so stupid! Where do they find such idiots?” But we are missing a point when we react that way.

Many of those people, particularly those under 30, are not as stupid as they seem. That is, their abstract intelligence is not lacking. Give them squares and circles, and many of them will be able to figure out which shapes fit into which cut-out segments on the board that accompanies the pieces. There is something deeper going on than “Stupid.” The problem is that they are (quite purposefully!) being taught ignorance.

If you take a smart mind and teach it nonsense, it will spout forth nonsense for many years until the sheer experience of life itself ultimately teaches otherwise. There is a reason that all polls find that voters become more conservative as they mature. If you go through four years of Columbia University without ever learning American history, after not having it learned it through the prior twelve years, you will not know it. If — even worse — you do not learn from objective books but instead from the jaundiced lectures of life-tenured Marxist professors of “soft sciences” like political science, sociology, philosophy, and Identity Studies — tenured professors who call themselves “Socialists” but actually are “Marxists” or “Communists” — then you come out learning what they teach you to memorize and to spout back to them on final exams and in term papers.

Less than she is a person, Ocasio-Cortez is a Specimen. (AOC, if you are reading this, a “Specimen” is not someone who flies to the moon.) The Left Media and their Democrat patrons make a grave error when they present O-Cortez as a person of thought. She is not an original thinker. (Assuming she thinks at all!) Rather, she is a metaphorical Laboratory Rat who demonstrates repeatedly what happens when someone born with a mind that seems capable of operating properly emerges from the present-day American university system. Thus, she is not an “idiot” or “moron” in the objective sense — not unless she truly has come up with all her “ideas” on her own, a highly doubtful proposition. Having observed O-Cortez’s public communications for a year, I am more convinced than ever that she simply is the product of a broken education system that deconstructs facts and reality, teaching instead that there are no facts at all. Rather, I have “My Truth,” and you have “Your Truth.”

Remember: She attended Boston University on a John F. Lopez Fellowship. She interned in Ted Kennedy’s office and was smart enough never to ride in a car alone with him. She graduated cum laude from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences in 2011, majoring in international relations and economics. Because she got good grades, she clearly reflects the “education” she received. If you are served the most wonderful steak imaginable, and then they pour a gallon of kimchi on it and grind that kimchi into it, you better like kimchi because that is what it will taste like. Her grades mean that she absorbed the pabulum she was spoonfed.

Thus, in one apparent self-parody, her revealing PBS interview with Margaret Hoover, O-Cortez condemned Israel — one of the Five Basic Food Groups of American College Education (along with condemning Trump as Nazi, berating America as World Persecutor, praising Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib as Misunderstood, and recognizing that Gender Is Fluid). Ms. Hoover probed gently beyond the college slogans, asking O-Cortez to explain her “thoughts.” Dead silence. Crickets. Deer in the headlights. And then The Hyphen found the words that a college professor had pre-programmed in her years earlier: Y’know, uh, the Settlements, whatever. Watch her here for the minute and a half that she demonstrated the point.

She did it again recently when she told a packed room of clapping seals at an MSNBC Forum that the 22nd Amendment had been passed by right-wingers trying to prevent Franklin Roosevelt from seeking reelection: “They had to amend the Constitution of the United States to make sure that Roosevelt did not get reelected.” Go ahead — treat yourself here to these 22 seconds. FDR already had won four terms, and O-Cortez saw a right-wing conspiracy to stop him from more. She was not stating an opinion but a fact. An opinion entails thought; a fact is teachable. Rather than see her at that forum as “stupid,” she really was more the Laboratory Rat with Makeup and Lipstick proving what happens when a higher education aims at deconstructing facts, obfuscating reality, and granting unbridled authority to spout “Your Truth” no matter how absurd. As older Americans who went to school in prior decades know, FDR died April 12, 1945 while in office. The 22nd Amendment was proposed March 21, 1947. It was ratified February 27, 1951.

Thus, another John F. Lopez Fellow, majoring in international relations and economics, now replicating itself by the dozens as a room of nodding, assenting clapping seals drink in her ragweed.

Thus, there is something going on with O-Cortez that transcends “stupid.” Rather, she is so very much like so many tens of thousands of your and your friends’ sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, who now receive an education that costs $40,000-$60,000 per year and fails to teach:

–  How to think logically

–  The imperative of checking facts before pronouncing them to audiences

–  The skill of thinking critically and incisively, transcending the surrounding Groupthink and Mass Media Hysteria

–  The courage to disagree with Common Wisdom and to challenge Totalitarian Indoctrination

If college professors can spout any foolish, false narrative they wish, safe in the knowledge that their life tenure grants them a safe harbor to mislead, to lie, and to brainwash their defenseless minions who must get good grades in their courses, it is not surprising that O-Cortez emerged as she did. She can string sentences together coherently when she speaks. She can communicate in 140 characters. Her problem is not that she is “stupid” per se but, rather, that she is emblematic of too many peers among a generation that spouts nonsense as “My Truth,” peers who do not know what they are talking about, and — much worse — lack the humility to recognize that they do not know that they do not know what they are talking about…”

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: Progressives didn’t dumb-down America’s public education system…

…by accident.

Meanwhile, as this report from FOX News suggests, Jeff Bezos is trying hard to get back at least some of the $500B that skanky L.A. cue card reader cost him:

Amazon, Pentagon accused of swampy dealings over $10B contract

“Amazon is poised to receive a lucrative government contract with the Pentagon, but a competitor is arguing it’s nothing more than a prime example of D.C. swamp politics.

A legal battle waged by Oracle centers on the Defense Department’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), which aims to award a $10 billion contract for cloud computing. Oracle alleges in a complaint filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims that it is unwise for the government to use only one cloud service, and that the process was rigged from the beginning due to connections between Amazon and DoD officials.

…“In a fair and lawful competition, Oracle would have a substantial chance for a JEDI contract award,” the company said in its filing.

Oracle, in its complaint, points to the involvement of former DoD employee Deap Ubhi, who worked at Amazon before joining the DoD in August 2016. Ubhi is now at Amazon once again, with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) — the entity that handles cloud computing.

Oracle claims that Ubhi was a project manager for JEDI and pushed for the Pentagon to use a single vendor for cloud computing, despite the Intelligence Community and the Department of Homeland Security each determining that multiple cloud vendors are preferable...”

Nothing to see here, folks…please move along.

Next up, like a busload of lawyers driving off a cliff, though this headline forwarded by Jeff Foutch doesn’t mean much in isolation…

Second Dem staffer charged for scheme to leak private info of GOP senators during Kavanaugh hearing

…it’s a start!

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:

Then there’s these memes forwarded from Balls Cotton…

…this keeper from Mark Foster…

…and this beauty from Fielding Cocke:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with yet another sordid story straight from the pages of The Crime Blotter, and this just in from Heart of Dixie:

Alabama college student athletes allegedly beat duck, left it to die in woods

“…Thomas “Landon” Grant and Jacob Frye, both 19, were charged after the May 5 incident in which a group of student baseball players who attended Central Alabama Community College in Alexander City allegedly snatched a duck after attending a party.

The students allegedly went to a pond, located on campus, and stole a white Muscovy duck, AL.com reported. Officials say they hit the duck with the bat, brought it to a nearby apartment, and placed it in a bag. At that point, one of the students reportedly wanted to “put it outs of its misery,” and allegedly beat the duck further, before throwing it away in a wooded area.

A coach was made aware of the incident shortly afterward and found the duck still alive in the woods. It was later euthanized, officials said…”

We’re with the Police Captain from Christmas Vacation on this one:

And then, for an extended…interminable…period of time.

Oh,…and for even thinking about running again, we’d give that idiot Roy Moore 40 additional whacks…with Lizzie Borden’s ax.

Magoo

P.S. We’ll be heading back to our hometown of Henrietta, NY on Saturday for our dear, departed dad’s memorial golf tournament on Sunday afternoon, so we’ll be radio silent on Monday.  So until Wednesday…