Here’s something a little fun. Going through the “Science” folder I found this BBC Where Do You Fall On The Male-Female Brain Continuum self test I’d taken back in 2006. It used test questions that it purported to relate to sex differences in the brain, but also in our physiology. That ratio between ring and index fingers for example (mine are equal).

So I bit and took the test. Here’s my score.

Unsurprised…

Also…this:

Totally unsurprised.

I’m going through a bunch of old files…newspaper and magazine clippings from a time when paper was the default means of communicating news and information…and running across some oddities and memories of a past life. Let me bore the rest of you with some of it today.

This was in my “Rightwing Mindset” folder. I remember driving past this on my way to Walt Disney World. Basically all you could see from the Interstate was the large faux Roman Colosseum, where I assume they held daily reenactments of Christians being thrown to the lions, or some such. Not sure how they would have enacted the lion’s part of the show.

I never went, not even out of curiosity. Too late now. 2001 – 2020. They couldn’t make it work and the COVID epidemic apparently finished it off. And now it’s gone to its heavenly reward. Here’s the thing…’Christian’ is big word that compasses a Lot of belief, any random quarter of which is probably not completely on board with the other three.

There’s an old Dutch joke about how one Dutchman is a theologian, two Dutchmen are a church, and three Dutchmen are a schism. And of course, the best God joke ever by Emo Phillips. The point being you are not going to bring in the crowds you think you are, just by branding your attraction as a Christian thing.

Especially if it’s Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.

This news article came across my feed today…

Top Trump officials Miller, Noem and Rubio adopt bunker mentality with housing reserved for military officers: report

Top members of Donald Trump’s White House are reportedly living in homes typically reserved for top military brass in Washington, D.C. as they pull back from neighborhoods where their presences were often targeted for protests by the many Democrats who make the Capital region their homes.

Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently joined a growing list of Trump Cabinet secretaries and advisers who’ve chosen to live in reserved military housing, with Rubio moving onto “Generals Row” in Fort McNair and Miller also living in the area after abandoning his digs in Arlington, The Atlantic reported.

They join Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who moved into military housing earlier this year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is alone among his compatriots in finding some precedent for his decision to move onto Generals Row alongside Rubio.

This had me remembering this recent post on BluSky by Mrs. Betty Bowers (The World’s Best Christian):

People claiming that the Epstein Ballroom™ is really just a cover for a bunker has me fondly recalling what Hitler did in his.

Heh.

Listen…I’m not about to downplay the peril my country is facing now, but for all the warnings about how it was in Germany in the 1930s, it is well to remember that this is not Germany, it is not Italy, it is not Spain, it is not Chile. There’s a reason it is a nation of many sovereign states (and a few Commonwealths) plus Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, gathered under the umbrella of an overall federal union.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

It was the only way. The diversity of the states and the people within them made no other form of self government possible. The British King tried to impose one and could not. By that time we had become Americans. Diverse, and a bit unruly. Civil War historian Shelby Foote famously said, “Before the war it was always the United States are; after the war it was the United States is… it made us an is.” But either we are or we is, it was the only way to make a thing out of that patchwork quilt.

Listen to an American you MAGA fascists…Fascism demands total control and conformity. You failed to get it from Germany, close as your kind did come, and even then you needed the help of the Treaty of Versailles and the hyperinflation of the great depression. You failed to get it from France…they kept killing your soldiers all the way to the end of the war and maybe you don’t want to recall what they did to the collaborators afterward. And those were small, pretty homogenous nations which America is not. You are not getting servitude out of all 46 states, the 7 commonwealths, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. Maybe you get a significant fraction of those…for a little while…but you are not putting a collar around all of it, yanking its chain and demanding obedience. It’s just not happening in the country a Russian general once spoke of, saying that the reason Americans are so good at war is because war is chaos and Americans live in chaos.

It is the way…

I think the bunkers you want to be in are somewhere in Putin’s Russia…not here…

Clickbait article this evening, about a youngish straight guy browsing Tinder, getting matched with this beautiful young lady who turns out to be an aspiring singer/actress/model with thousands of Instagram followers, and the meeting she arranges with him turns out to be an outdoor pop up concert that several dozen other men also show up to, who she’d also invited via Tinder, and she gets up on stage and announces they’re all there to compete in a contest for the prize of dating her.

Poor guy is angry for some reason. Says he’ll never trust anyone ever again. Let me tell you about having trust issues: I’m reading this and wondering if this guy is another one of her scams and his sad clickbait story is only another way she’s trying to get her name out there.

Mind you, I’m 72 and still remember everything from Nixon’s The One, the Pentagon Papers, the 18 and a half minute gap, and Expletive Deleted, to Donald Trump.

Hey guy…if you’re real then I apologise, but listen, those dating apps won’t do anything for you except make you feel even more unworthy and unmatchable. I have some experience here. Think about it. If they get you matched up then you leave and then they get no more money from you and what kind of business model is that?

What you want is a business situation that involves getting you close to a lot of people with the same sexual interests as you, but isn’t actually interested in matching you up with any of them. I speak from experience. In the 90s I spent thousands on gay dating memberships and I am still single, but people I know who spent thousands on ex-gay therapy when they were younger (or were forced into it) are now in happy, loving, same sex relationships that have lasted decades. Some of these are even married now!

Not sure if there’s anything like that for heterosexuals… apply to a religious college that emphasises sexual purity maybe… but look into it.

From the Facebook feed this morning (and I wonder how long ZuckerTrump is going to allow people like him to post…)

Remember during oral argument on the presidential immunity case when conservative justices scoffed and mocked at the hypothetical that a president with immunity could just start killing whoever he wanted and there was nothing that could be done if he has immunity?

I submit they weren’t mocking the idea a (republican) president could kill whoever he wants, they were mocking anyone who might object.