Wait, What? I'm Really Glad I Went to Princeton.

Yale women demand admission to fraternities that sexually harassed them

Another Proud Moment in Connecticut Baseball

You're out! Peanuts, Cracker Jack banned from minor league ballpark

It was much better when they played at that great little field in New Britain.

The Post-Religious Society

In the absence of a national religion, Americans have frequently adopted a variety of civic codes that mimic the inviolable tenets of a faith. Some of them are healthier than others. With each passing day, the dogma of the green revolution looks less like a healthy expression of political agency and more like a cult.

"A Working-Class Hero is Something to Be...."

She Should Have Her Own Date on the Church Calendar

Archive shows medieval nun faked her own death to escape convent

A team of medieval historians working in the archives at the University of York has found evidence that a nun in the 14th century faked her own death and crafted a dummy “in the likeness of her body” in order to escape her convent and pursue – in the words of the archbishop of the time – “the way of carnal lust”.

Title IX Complaints Will Fix This

Higher education has a gender problem: With a surplus of women and a shortage of male students, colleges are becoming more and more gender unbalanced. The more farsighted among university administrators are starting to worry that this will turn universities into a pink-collar ghetto, places that the public thinks of as finishing schools for girls rather than gateways to middle-class stability.

Part of the problem, of course, is that our K-12 system, staffed overwhelmingly by women whom research shows tend to favor girls, leaves a lot of boys demoralized and uninterested in further education. But another big part of the problem is that college has become and anti-male space.

At today’s universities, masculinity is almost never discussed except in negative terms, usually with the word “toxic” attached. When girls and women are discussed, the question is always about how to help them do better. When boys and men are mentioned, it’s almost always as some sort of a problem.

It's Always Healthy When the "We Must All Have the Same Thoughts; We Must All Use the Same Words" Narrative Gets Cracked

Nancy Mace, R-Daniel Island, is no stranger to breaking gender barriers.

“We don’t need to dress alike. We don’t need to think alike. We don’t need to act alike. We simply need to be present and be working for ALL of the people who elected us,” she wrote.

I appreciate that she's just trying to raise her national profile for future elections, but it's still nice to hear some original, or at least individual, thinking from time to time.

Meanwhile, in News That Matters to the Rest of the World

Since it's neither about Trump nor the preferred politicians of the media class, you may not know that this is going on.  But it is and it will eventually have some form of impact on us.  One hopes for the better, but one hopes for a lot of things these days.

French yellow vest anti-govt protests turn violent in Paris

and

Protesters jump on "gilets jaunes" bandwagon in Latvia

Censorship and Suppressed Expression are Now Liberal Values

It's weird, isn't it?  I guess "free-thinking" does eventually devolve into a kind of moral fascism.  Certainly, that's the case in mainstream Protestantism these days. 

“Mark Twain was racist!”

“Robert Heinlein was sexist!”

 “Jane Austin supported the patriarchy!”

“Dickens was a … he’s just boring.”

If all you read of Dickens is Bleak House or Ye Old Curiosity Shop then I’ll grant the last one. But otherwise, demands that people not read certain books because they do not meet the standards of the last five minutes serves as an example of the painful presentism of the modern censors and regulators of moral purity.

Sooner or Later, There Will Be a Reckoning

Young Adult Fiction’s Online Commissars

This is Something Learned from Clergy, Without Question

A fool makes a mistake [or, in British English, a "thick boy does something thick"] and decides it's a call for him to morally educate the rest of us.

Ralph Northam Has Nobody to Blame but Himself

Wayback

This version of The Coracle is eleven years and one month old; it inherited the mantle from my original weblog that had begun in 2002.  Good Lord, that's a lot of written nonsense, isn't it?

Anyway, I was curious what I was doing on this date ten years ago.  What I found was this photo of where I was spending my days.  For those curious, it's Cozumel.

If This Follows the Historical Pattern, Then Eventually I'll Be the One Determining Who Goes to the Guillotine

Yeah, I can live with that.

One hallmark of the radical French revolutionaries was a poorly disguised but predictable dislike of religion. Today it’s an aversion in particular to Catholicism and Judaism — at least if one collates the various statements of Senators Dianne Feinstein, Kamala Harris, and Mazie Hirono, and Representatives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Hank Johnson, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. The mainstreaming of anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan, television commentary by the likes of Marc Lamont Hill, and the growing anti-Israeli foreign policy of the Democratic party only add to the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian hostility. 

Revolutionary “scientific” socialism is historically agnostic if not atheist. Anywhere it has taken root in its multifarious forms — China, Cuba, North Korea, Russia, Venezuela — it seeks to destroy or corrupt religion. We have already seen attacks on Israel supporters within the Democratic party, attacks that are only thinly disguised anti-Semitic rants from the likes of Omar, Tlaib, and Linda Sarsour. One wonders how the anti-Catholicism of the Democratic Jacobins will connect with millions of new first- and second-generation Hispanic Catholic voters. Perhaps one of our young Robespierres can slightly modify the new atheist religion to “The Cult of the Supreme Being” and enjoin us all to worship an anthropomorphic Logos.

Yes, We're Back to Daily Postings

Ladies and Gentlemen, Our Ruling Class

Cory Booker invents language in awkward interview: 'Swiss! Yeah, I do not speak Swiss'

The Merchants of Fear and Division

And so we have the grand game of make-believe and moral dress-up, in which Field Marshal Sandy rallies her troops on Twitter in the service of a half-organized bouquet of slogans and prejudices that no mentally normal adult — and there are still a few of those around — takes quite seriously. The purported goal of the great national deployment isn’t the point — the deployment itself is. It is an excuse for a great deal of noise and running in circles and excitation and displays of Very High Moral Seriousness that is its own reason for being. Sandy’s war is not a struggle over the future of Earth — it is only a struggle over the future of Sandy, and all the other Sandys out there in the great vast wilds of America, waiting tables at TGI Friday’s or grinding away in the obscurity of some master’s program in women’s studies, sure that however things were supposed to turn out, they weren’t supposed to turn out like this, a mess of loneliness and pointlessness, all dressed up for battle with nowhere to go and no comfort but Netflix and Facebook and Twitter, little fixes of dopamine just strong enough and frequent enough to keep the addicts upright and sedated enough that they do not begin asking the really difficult questions and demanding answers.

The Development of the Modern Dog

Companion and Commodity: The Victorian Dog

All of the Uniparty Loudmouths are Frothy about This Guy, and That Makes Him Interesting

Howard Schultz unifies the parties — against him

I'm Shocked...Shocked!..to Discover There's Gambling Going On in Here

Amnesty International has toxic working culture, report finds: Bullying, public humiliation and discrimination threaten rights group’s credibility

From media, entertainment, The Church of Rome, and higher education, it seems the more often a person or group imagines themselves on a moral highground, the more often it's shown to be a mere mask for the sins they decry.

The headline reference may be found here.

It's as If Politicians are [Gasp!] Complete Hypocrites

As evidenced by the "For the 99.8% Act" unveiled today by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), as well as the "tippy-top" tax envisioned by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), soaking—and insulting—the rich is all the left-of-center rage this cycle. "Democrats should do the pragmatic thing in 2020," New York magazine's Eric Levitz advised this week, "and wage a vicious class war."

If so, snipers are going to first have to take out some of the party's own 2020 presidential candidates. The estimated worth of Michael Bloomberg, for example, is $47.6 billion, good for 14th place on the planet. Former Rep. John Delaney, whose 2020 bid touts campaign finance reform, was estimated as the sixth wealthiest member of the previous Congress, with a net worth of $92.6 million. Tech entrepreneur and robotophobe Andrew Yang, who likes to warn against the wealth gap, is firmly on the other side of it. Self-help guru and Oprah Winfrey spiritual adviser Marianne Williamson—what, you didn't realize she was running?—is so salt-of-the-earthy that she announced her candidacy this week at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills. Join the evolution, indeed.

The party of the Kennedy's is the party that's now against wealth and its privilege.  Yes, I see....