Wellesley was traditionally the most non-neurotic of the women’s colleges. Not anymore evidently. PC piety is apparently in full bloom at poor old Wellesley. (College Fix story)

Some students at the venerable, all-female Wellesley College are calling for an end to use of the term … women.

A staff editorial in the Wellesley News bemoans the popular on-campus catchphrases such as “Wellesley sisters,” “Women Who Will,” and “Wellesley women,” and asks that instead there be a more concerted effort to use gender-neutral language all around.

In particular, three suggestions put forth by the campus journalists are:

When discussing the student body, say “Wellesley students” rather than “Wellesley women.”

Avoid making statements like “We’re all women here…”

Use gender-neutral language whenever possible in syllabi and other general written communication.

The editorial also criticized Wellesley’s transgender policy, which accepts students who were born male but identify as female, but not students who were born female but identify as male.

It described the five-year-old policy as complacent and neglectful of the transgender and nonbinary community, and called on administration to revise it, as well as “usher in a more inclusive language standard for official communications. Additionally, we ask students to reflect these changes in their everyday lives in order to foster a more kind, empathetic environment.”

“… Our sentiments should not be misconstrued as a blanket demand to censor campus dialogue or dictate everyday behavior,” the editorial added. “We are merely advocating for a kind environment for all marginalized identities that may step foot on Wellesley’s campus which can be implemented through policy and cultural shifts within the community and beyond.”

RTWT

Protest against Roman Polanski, Paris, France — 28 Feb 2020.

86-year-old Roman Polanski’s latest film, “An Officer and a Spy” (2019) (a historical film about the Dreyfus Affair), received nominations for 12 awards at the annual French César Awards (the French equivalent of the Oscar), and Polanski won the César for best directing and a few other awards, which led to international outrage. Polanski was targeted by aggrieved demonstrators, and the director and star of another prominent film, “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” (2019), Céline Sciamma and Adèle Haenel, led a walk out from the awards ceremony.

Roman Polanski is not only a great director. He is a favored target of left-wing hysteria and right-wing cant.

43 years ago, Roman Polanski was charged with Statutory Rape after a liaison with an under-age young lady in California. He was slated to receive a modest penalty via a plea bargain, but a media firestorm erupted, and the judge decided to cancel the deal. Polanski thereupon fled the United States.

Every decade or so, it seems, this ancient scandal gets raked upon again. The left-wing commentariat howls for Polanski’s blood on behalf of Feminism, and the right-wing commentariat denounces him as a decadent European degenerate pedophile. When both sides agree, I guess you can count on them both being crazy and dead wrong.

Hot Air’s Jazz Shaw unloaded on Polanski thusly:

[N]ow the Ceasar Awards have come and gone. And true to form for this crowd, they gave the Best Picture nod to Polanski, along with other awards. As you will recall, Polanski has been on the run from American law enforcement for decades after being convicted of drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13-year-old child. Efforts to extradite him back to the United States have continually failed. …

The Europeans, and particularly the French, can’t seem to shake this attitude of considering child rape as no big deal if it’s done by one of the “special people.” Of course, that’s not a strictly European attitude. It’s long pervaded Hollywood as well. You may recall that time when Whoopi Goldberg declared that what Polanski had done “wasn’t rape rape.”

For his part, Polanski continues to blame all of this on the media, claiming that they’re trying to make him out to be a monster. Trust us, Mr. Douchebag… nobody had to make you a monster. You did that yourself.

————-

I discussed the Polanski case in detail eleven years ago, and put the whole thing, I would contend, into rational perspective.

Leftwing or rightwing, you’d think the typical member of the American commentariat just fell off the turnip truck and came stumbling down the highway pulling hayseeds out of his ears for all the weeping and wailing over the generation-ago naughtiness of Roman Polanski.

Both sides of the political spectrum are making the elementary error of confusing rape in the statutory sense resulting from the female being too young lawfully to provide consent with the kind of rape which is a grave crime of violence and a terrible violation of a person’s will and sovereignty of person.

Read the Grand Jury testimony (Part 1 — Part 2) of the young lady (whose current privacy I propose to respect by referring to her as Dolores Haze) and one can easily perceive that it is a version of events particularly uncomplimentary to Mr. Polanski, collaboratively achieved by the prosecuting attorney and the sullen and inarticulate young woman who is bringing a complaint against him, while trying to put the best possible light upon her own conduct.

It requires only reading a little between the lines and paying attention to details to note that Miss Haze and her mother obviously sought out Mr. Polanski’s acquaintance with the young lady’s career advancement in mind. Her mother readily gave permission for her daughter to meet and to pose in private for Mr. Polanski.

Gosh, when an attractive young woman harboring entertainment industry ambitions agrees to “pose” alone and in private for a famous Hollywood director, is it possible to imagine that anyone involved would suppose for a minute that such a meeting could lead to hanky panky?

The famous director and the nymphette met twice for photography sessions featuring the young lady disrobing. When Miss Haze went with Mr. Polanski to Jack Nicholson’s house for the second photo session, even the simple people back where I grew up would have observed that they were not getting together to say the rosary.

Ex post facto protestations of reluctance aside, the philosopher is obliged to note that Miss Haze seems far from innocent and her overall behavior the opposite of unwilling. She was not a virgin at the time of her sexual encounter with Mr. Polanski. She had disrobed in front of him in private on two occasions. She implicitly recognized the social and convivial aspects of that private meeting at Jack Nicholson’s house by willingly drinking champagne with Mr. Polanski, and by sharing a Quaalude with him (which she identified for the uncertain director, who even consulted her about its likely effects on him).

After which festivities, Miss Haze willingly took off all her clothes, and hopped naked into a jacuzzi. Sexual activity ensued.

In her Grand Jury testimony, Miss Haze makes some effort to portray herself as startled and frightened by Mr. Polanski’s completely unexpected advances. To believe her testimony to be literally true requires supposing that the social connection between these two people was unrelated to the well-known Hollywood casting couch and to believe that anyone might meet an older man alone, drink and do drugs with him, disrobe for him, and hop naked into a jacuzzi while having no intentions of granting greater intimacies. If any particular editorialist actually believes that, I can only say, in the Irish manner: May God preserve your innocence!

The more cynical among us tend to suspect that, had some substantive career assistance (or even an appropriate gift) been forthcoming, no statutory rape complaint would ever have been lodged. Consequently, I tend to view the Polanski affair, not as an authentic case of rape, but as a payment dispute in which one side is able to whistle up the assistance of the criminal law.

Polanski, of course, was behaving unethically, using his fame and worldly position to obtain the sexual services of an indecently young girl, whom he evidently couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be able to repay with his patronage.

There is no doubt that the relations between Roman Polanski and Dolores Haze were against the law.

But, the “he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl” narrative is wildly inaccurate and inflammatory. In reality, Polanski cynically had exploitative sex with a much younger girl when she made herself available, with dubious intentions of repaying her in the manner she expected. They drank and did drugs together. You can hardly accuse a man of drugging a victim into submission by sharing a drug with her.

The plea bargain arrangement made (Polanski would plead guilty unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor, and be let off with the 42 days he served under psychiatric evaluation) indicates pretty clearly that the prosecutor took the same view of the Polanski case at the time that I do now. Polanski broke the law, doing something fairly shameful he ought not to have done, but it was not really rape at all. He deserved some legal penalty, but he did not deserve the gravest possible punishment.

What happened back in the 1970s is exactly the same thing which has happened again 30 years later. America’s psycho-sexual insanity was provoked by the Polanski affair the way a bull is provoked by a red flag. All the Christers and the wowsers began howling for Polanski’s blood, writing misleading hysterical jeremiads about drugging and raping poor little 13 year old maidens, and the next thing you knew, Judge Rittenband, who was sensitive to public opinion, expressed the intention of throwing out Polanski’s plea bargain, while keeping his guilty plea. Facing an exemplary penalty, Polanski wisely fled into exile.

The only things that seem to have changed in 30 years are: Roman Polanski has become a very old man and the middle-aged Dolores Haze says she has forgiven him. The American obsession with striking poses of self-righteousness has not changed, nor our intelligentsia’s penchant for inflaming mob opinion with misleading narratives.

————–

Grow up, everybody. There has always been a Hollywood casting couch, and there’s always going to be a Hollywood casting couch. Attractive young girls will always be found trading sexual favors for access to money, fame, and careers. And, when the young lady is dissatisfied, or merely regrets her own conduct later, given the opportunity, she will come tattling and complaining, seeking revenge on the bad, wicked older man who took advantage of her. All this is a very, very old story.

The gravamen of Polanski scandal took place 43 long years ago. Roman Polanski is a talented director, who has made some important contributions to the cinema. The young lady in the case in question is now an old lady, and she long since forgave Polanski, and has said publicly that she desired his persecution to cease. Polanski is 86 years old. Personally, I think being 86 is all by itself a pretty decent punishment for any previous sins. Do everyone a favor: drop the opportunistic exploitation of this ancient matter for partisan points and stop whipping up mob emotion.

The Brits are typically taking a dim view of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s decision to separate themselves from the Royal Family in order to pursue a more personal agenda of Woke Self-Aggrandizement. The Spectator is especially scathing.

This is clearly a highly influential publication. Only a couple of weeks after I pleaded in these pages for the repatriation to America of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, it was accomplished. In a magnificently self-regarding and self-pitying statement to the world, Prince Harry and his recalcitrant wife announced that they would be ‘stepping back’ from royal duties and spending much more time in ‘Canada’, or, as it is more familiarly known, Los Angeles.

In this statement, released without the Queen’s knowledge, Harry and Meghan expressed a vague wish that they might at some point in time become ‘financially independent’ from the British taxpayer, seemingly possessed of the interesting belief that after resigning from a post one shouldn’t necessarily stop receiving remuneration for it, perhaps in perpetuity.

The Queen quickly put a stop to that malarkey and so, within a matter of months, you lucky Yanks may be able to hire the pair to serve drinks at bar mitzvahs, weddings and divorce parties, or maybe just to clean the pool or do some light dusting indoors. They are said to be developing their own brand in order to sell stuff to the world — a brand which right now has connotations only of whining narcissism and petulance. Yes, yes, it might do really well, then.

Don’t let the ‘Canada’ business delude you. You’ve got her, make no mistake. There is not the slightest prospect of Meghan cooling her heels in Ballsack, Saskatchewan — or even Vancouver. ‘Canada’ was mentioned as a sop to Harry, in that it is part of the Commonwealth, a kind of halfway house to freedom, like they use for criminal drug addicts who have just been released.

Nor did the Canucks explode with joy at the news. An opinion poll suggested that three-quarters of the population would rather gnaw off their own legs than pay a single cent in order to keep the pair in the manner to which they are accustomed — with retinues of flunkies, heavies to beat up press photographers, private jets, new house, quinoa smoothies, therapists and a nonbinary vegan nursery for their blameless offspring, Archie.

RTWT

Seymour Tower: the researchers get to live there.

Atlas Obscura:

When the water laps up on the granite rocks and sandy embankments off the coast of Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, ancient artifacts get wet. It isn’t a disaster. It’s been happening for thousands of years, in fact, in a daily rhythm—the water rushing in rivulets that turn into torrents along the beachy landscape, sweeping across the miles of exposed seabed and rising above it.

This May, alongside the gulls and crustaceans that skitter about, archaeologists will scamper away from the rising sea as their fieldwork is submerged. They’ll retreat.

With its pockmarked and inundated topography, the intertidal reef known as the Violet Bank is awash with history. Yet despite its name, the bank is a changing gradient of blues, grays, greens, and browns—a cryptic mix of rocky earth and transient sea. Now a preferred spot for low-water fishing—or pêche à pied‚ where locals chat in Jèrriais and probe the ebb tide for shellfish—the evanescent landscape remains treacherous, catching unsuspecting visitors with its rapid tidal shifts.

When an archaeological team from University College London visits the deceptive, disappearing bank in May, they’ll hardly be unsuspecting. They’ll know the tidal drill well, as they try to learn more about the origins of lithic (stone) artifacts and mammoth remains that have emerged from the crevices and ravines that are revealed by the surf with each tide.

RTWT

A Facebook friend forwarded this email from James Robb, MD UC San Diego:

Dear Colleagues, as some of you may recall, when I was a professor of pathology at the University of California San Diego, I was one of the first molecular virologists in the world to work on coronaviruses (the 1970s). I was the first to demonstrate the number of genes the virus contained. Since then, I have kept up with the coronavirus field and its multiple clinical transfers into the human population (e.g., SARS, MERS), from different animal sources.

The current projections for its expansion in the US are only probable, due to continued insufficient worldwide data, but it is most likely to be widespread in the US by mid to late March and April.

Here is what I have done and the precautions that I take and will take. These are the same precautions I currently use during our influenza seasons, except for the mask and gloves.:

1) NO HANDSHAKING! Use a fist bump, slight bow, elbow bump, etc.

2) Use ONLY your knuckle to touch light switches. elevator buttons, etc.. Lift the gasoline dispenser with a paper towel or use a disposable glove.

3) Open doors with your closed fist or hip – do not grasp the handle with your hand, unless there is no other way to open the door. Especially important on bathroom and post office/commercial doors.

4) Use disinfectant wipes at the stores when they are available, including wiping the handle and child seat in grocery carts.

5) Wash your hands with soap for 10-20 seconds and/or use a greater than 60% alcohol-based hand sanitizer whenever you return home from ANY activity that involves locations where other people have been.

6) Keep a bottle of sanitizer available at each of your home’s entrances. AND in your car for use after getting gas or touching other contaminated objects when you can’t immediately wash your hands.

7) If possible, cough or sneeze into a disposable tissue and discard. Use your elbow only if you have to. The clothing on your elbow will contain infectious virus that can be passed on for up to a week or more!

What I have stocked in preparation for the pandemic spread to the US:

1) Latex or nitrile latex disposable gloves for use when going shopping, using the gasoline pump, and all other outside activity when you come in contact with contaminated areas.

Note: This virus is spread in large droplets by coughing and sneezing. This means that the air will not infect you! BUT all the surfaces where these droplets land are infectious for about a week on average – everything that is associated with infected people will be contaminated and potentially infectious. The virus is on surfaces and you will not be infected unless your unprotected face is directly coughed or sneezed upon. This virus only has cell receptors for lung cells (it only infects your lungs) The only way for the virus to infect you is through your nose or mouth via your hands or an infected cough or sneeze onto or into your nose or mouth.

2) Stock up now with disposable surgical masks and use them to prevent you from touching your nose and/or mouth (We touch our nose/mouth 90X/day without knowing it!). This is the only way this virus can infect you – it is lung-specific. The mask will not prevent the virus in a direct sneeze from getting into your nose or mouth – it is only to keep you from touching your nose or mouth.

3) Stock up now with hand sanitizers and latex/nitrile gloves (get the appropriate sizes for your family). The hand sanitizers must be alcohol-based and greater than 60% alcohol to be effective.

4) Stock up now with zinc lozenges. These lozenges have been proven to be effective in blocking coronavirus (and most other viruses) from multiplying in your throat and nasopharynx. Use as directed several times each day when you begin to feel ANY “cold-like” symptoms beginning. It is best to lie down and let the lozenge dissolve in the back of your throat and nasopharynx. Cold-Eeze lozenges is one brand available, but there are other brands available.

I, as many others do, hope that this pandemic will be reasonably contained, BUT I personally do not think it will be. Humans have never seen this snake-associated virus before and have no internal defense against it. Tremendous worldwide efforts are being made to understand the molecular and clinical virology of this virus. Unbelievable molecular knowledge about the genomics, structure, and virulence of this virus has already been achieved. BUT, there will be NO drugs or vaccines available this year to protect us or limit the infection within us. Only symptomatic support is available.

Good luck to all of us! Jim

James Robb, MD FCAP