The Bathrooms of Loudoun County

I had a strange sense of deja vu as I read this the other day:

Loudoun County Public Schools has opened a Title IX investigation into three high school boys who said they were uncomfortable with a female student using the boys’ locker room.
The Loudon County School Board policy allows students to use school bathrooms and locker rooms according to their gender identification, rather than biological sex.

Back in 2021, a trans-identifying boy had raped a girl in a Loudoun school girls bathroom. The school district covered up the crime and transferred the boy to another school where he proceeded to sexually assault a second girl.

The episode helped juice the 2021 Loudoun County school protests and lead to the Republicans generating an 11-point swing and propelling Glenn Youngkin to the Virginia governor’s mansion later that year. To top it off the school superintendent faced criminal charges for covering up the matter.

Usually when a scandal like this breaks, the organization involved is a bit chastened and becomes purer than Caesar’s wife. Yet less than four years later, here’s Loudoun not only playing bathroom games but crushing students who complain.

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The Death of South Africa

A note on Trump granting refugee status to Afrikaner farmers:

There is the normal media churn about making this about Trump, that while he is deporting the proverbial “people of color” he is at the same time allowing white people in.

Well, once again we’re the missing the big picture, and that is this controversy is a public acknowledgment that the South Africa of Nelson Mandela is gone for good.

That South Africa was held as a shining example to the world. Of a country that could reconcile itself to a nasty part of its past and move jointly into a brighter future. All of this symbolized by a man, Mandela, who had spent decades in prison but was willing to be a figure of national unity.

Even the new South African rainbow flag presented that unity.

This was the idea that was sold at the End of History, and Mandela became a man of legend.

South Africa has made moral bank on this interpretation. Last year it brought charges of genocide against Israel in the ICC. South Africa claimed that its past in dealing with Apartheid gave it special moral standing. South Africa was greeted with applause by the usual suspects in the West.

With that standing and the economy it inherited, South Africa claimed to be a leader in the Global South and became a founding member of BRICS.

People in this country ate it up.

The cracks started to show soon after 1994. The African National Congress has held national power since 1994, and as with all dominant-party states corruption began to skyrocket. The economy started to stagnate, and the infrastructure began to crumble.

In January of this year Cyril Ramaphosa signed into law a policy of land expropriation without compensation. The terror war against the Afrikaner farmers began to grow in intensity with murders and the burning of homes.

We could play the usual game of “Mad Libs,” replacing the color of oppressor and victim, and wondering how that would play differently in the usual Establishment circles. We could also point to the very real prospect that South Africa is well on its way to following the same path as Zimbabwe of being a failed state.

This is in fact ethnic cleansing. The Afrikaners have lived in South Africa since the 17th Century. I wonder how many of them will still be there 20 years from now. It probably won’t be mass expulsions, but just enough pressure and violence that the Afrikaners will pick up and move out on their own.

The debate in this country is the usual racial angle, that for many of our supposed social “betters” there is something illegitimate about whites running from black oppression; there is even the dash of talk about settler-colonialism with CNN commentators saying that all Afrikaners should “move back to Germany.” There is the deeper, implied neo-Marxist angle supplied by the Episcopalian Church when it ended future refugee resettlement contracts with the federal government because whites can only be oppressors and never the victims in race wars.

Trump, with the simple action of admitting 59 refugees, has not only exposed all of this hypocrisy but has shone a bring light on the hellhole that South Africa is becoming.

Maybe if AfD gets power in Germany, Weidel could seek indictments in the ICC.

Interesting Finds

Someone mentioned the inventor & entrepreneur Joesph Gerber as being the developer of numerically-controlled machines for fabric cutting, as well as a lot of other things. I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen Gerber plotting machines in the past, but had never thought about the man behind the company name. He sounded interesting enough that I bought a copy of his biography, written by his son David Gerber: The Inventor’s Dilemma.  And it’s an interesting story indeed.

Joseph Gerber escaped Nazi Austria in 1940, coming to the United States where he completed high school in just two years while learning English and holding down full-time and part-time jobs. While a junior at RPI, he developed his first commercially-successful invention: the Gerber Variable Scale, which assists in multiplying graphical data by constants.  He later invented and marketed the Gerber Derivimeter, used to find the derivative at points on a curve and the Gerber Equameter, used to determine the equation of a curve based on a mathematical series such as Fourier series and polynomial expansions.  His company went on the pioneer the development of digital plotters and digitizers to convert graphical data into digital form.  Overall, he and the company he founded were granted more than 600 patents. Probably Gerber’s most significant work was in the development of numerically-controlled fabric cutters and numerically-controlled sewing machines–the trade magazine Bobbin Journal referred to him as Apparel’s Thomas Edison.

Researching Gerber and his accomplishments also led me to a remarkable trove of radio-program audio recordings from 1935 to 1953, the DuPont-sponsored series Cavalcade of America. This link contains 745 episodes of the program–the Gerber episode is #613, titled Young Man in a Hurry. It was broadcast in 1950, following Gerber’s invention of the Variable Scale but quite early in his career. More about the series and the Gerber episode here.

The Cavalcade of America series continued on television from 1952-1957, and quite a few episodes can be found on YouTube.

The idea that substantial parts of the apparel and shoe industries might return to the US has been derogated in some quarters, but one or two creative and entrepreneurial individuals of the Joe Gerber class might well make it possible.

Fone Fakery And Other Follies

This may just be a curious coincidence, but during the recent brief period in which India and Pakistan appeared on the verge of all total thermonuclear war, my daughter and I noticed that the number of spam phone calls and messages received on our cellphones fell off precipitously. It also just may be a coincidence that when we answer somewhat questionable phone calls, which we must for business reasons – quite often we wind up having a brief conversation with a person speaking English, often very bad English, with a marked Indian/South Asian accent. Neither of us can limit ourselves to answering calls only from a contact list as is often recommended, since the spam organizations have begun spoofing local numbers, and we can’t totally ignore local calls. My cellphone is the main conduit for potential clients to connect with the Teeny Publishing Bidness, and my daughter’s cellphone is similarly the main method of communicating with new and existing real estate clients and realtors.

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Random Thoughts

Compared to what/whom?

Everything is temporary.

If you have a problem and you can solve it with money, you don’t have a problem.

A decision made under exigent circumstances on the best available information does not become a bad decision if it later turns out that the information on which it was based was incomplete or false.

If someone who owes you money offers to pay you early, or offers goods in lieu of cash, you should probably accept the offer.

Always look for free or inexpensive options, especially options that have unbounded upside potential.

No matter what you set out to do, or how promising an opportunity appeared to be at the start of a venture, the only thing that matters is how the opportunities and risks look now.

Don’t tell your friends what you wouldn’t tell your enemies.

A surprisingly large proportion of adults is unable to make timely decisions or get things done. In many situations decisiveness trumps almost every other personal quality.

Not to decide is to decide. On the other hand, every decision is an opportunity to step in something that you may not even know is out there.

If you don’t want to look into something because you’re apprehensive about what you might find, you should look ASAP.

Consider that the golden age of [ ] may be now.

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Previous thoughts here.