Thursday, August 18, 2022




The 20 questions every woman should ask on a first date: Do you have a dog (bad)? Do you like quinoa (good)? After years of dating, Julie, 54, swears she's found the perfect formula

What a nut! No wonder she is still single at age 54. Has it occurred to her that she may not be getting good offers because she is flat-chested and has hair like a barbed-wire entanglement?



You may imagine the perfect first date should include flowers, candles and perhaps some sultry background music to set the mood.

My first date must-have, however, is something rather different: a list of 20 questions for any potential suitor, enabling me efficiently to weed out any dating duds, and easily identify those precious ‘keepers’.

Among other things, my dating questionnaire allows me to discover whether my potential Mr Right likes quinoa or chips, is in bed by 9.30pm, like myself, and, vitally, whether he speaks kindly of his mother.

On a deeper level, it helps me quickly establish a picture of the heart and soul of the man, whether he is trustworthy and if we might be compatible. Time is of the essence when you get to 54 and are still single, after all!

Clearly, I am very fussy when it comes to dating. But why shouldn’t we women of a certain age be fussy? After all, I’ve been dating for nearly half my life, now, and simply haven’t the time or patience to leave much to chance any more. That’s why I wholly agree with TV presenter Trisha Goddard who — with two divorces, and 64 years on the clock — said last month that she gave a questionnaire to the man who is now her fiance in order to ‘cut the c***’. She said her questionnaire meant she didn’t waste time dating someone who would ultimately not be the right fit for her.

Some might think this approach is unromantic, or impatient — but to me, it just sounds like good sense.

Because there are some definite romantic red lines for me that instantly rule out potential Romeos. For example, as a nutrition and wellness consultant, it’s important any partner of mine doesn’t mistreat their body or drink too much. I also prefer to sleep with my head on an incline — raised higher than my feet — as studies have shown it can be good for your health. So if a man couldn’t get comfy in my specially adapted bed, that would be something of a deal-breaker for me.

Aside from this, I’d love someone with whom I can enjoy day trips and holidays. Someone to laugh with. Looks? I admit I prefer dark features, but they must have a friendly, smiley disposition. And if a man remembered my favourite flowers are freesias, then that would mean the world to me.

In my 20s, I told my father about the kind of qualities I wanted in a man and he replied, ‘Julie, enjoy spinsterhood!’ But the reality is, like so many middle-aged women, I’m at the stage of life when looks just aren’t enough of a pull any more.

While I once tried a dating website, I prefer to be matched by friends who know me. I’ve always assumed this is the best approach to find someone like-minded to share my life with. I wouldn’t mind a divorcé; I’ve been married too, once, in my 20s, but it was over before I turned 30. We just weren’t on the same wavelength any more.

Since then, I’ve had several short-term relationships, and a few dates, but have yet to find someone long-term who meets my needs. People so often comment ‘Why can’t you find a keeper, Julie?’ After all, I’m slim, attractive, own my home and am financially independent. But the men I have dated! Oh dear. They’ve generally been one of two extremes: either very demanding of my time and controlling, or terrible at maintaining regular contact and a bit lazy.

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Atlantic op-ed claims Catholic rosary has become ‘an extremist symbol’

Has he forgotten that it is just a string of beads?

Atlantic contributor Daniel Panneton declared that the Catholic rosary has become a "symbol" of religious radicalism.

The rosary is a string of beads or knots used by Catholics as they pray a sequence of prayers, but one writer warned they have taken on a far darker meaning in modern times. "Just as the AR-15 rifle has become a sacred object for Christian nationalists in general, the rosary has acquired a militaristic meaning for radical-traditional (or ‘rad trad’) Catholics," Panneton claimed in the Sunday piece titled, "How the Rosary Became an Extremist Symbol."

He added, "On this extremist fringe, rosary beads have been woven into a conspiratorial politics and absolutist gun culture. These armed radical traditionalists have taken up a spiritual notion that the rosary can be a weapon in the fight against evil and turned it into something dangerously literal."

Panneton slammed an entire online ecosystem for disseminating imagery featuring Christian warriors both historical and modern, suggesting that "social-media pages are saturated with images of rosaries draped over firearms, warriors in prayer, Deus Vult (‘God wills it’) crusader memes, and exhortations for men to rise up and become Church Militants."

He observed that rosary beads "provide an aide-mémoire for a sequence of devotional prayers, are a widely recognized symbol of Catholicism and a source of strength. And many take genuine sustenance from Catholic theology’s concept of the Church Militant and the tradition of regarding the rosary as a weapon against Satan."

The Atlantic contributor gave a wide variety of examples of how the modern association between rosaries and fighting men has become marketable to a niche audience, noting that "radical-traditional Catholics sustain their own cottage industry of goods and services," such as one store that "sells replicas of the rosaries issued to American soldiers during the First World War as 'combat rosaries.'"

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Biden Executive Order on Abortion Access Is Misleading and Full of Misinformation

After the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, President Joe Biden directed his administration to find ways to provide increased access to abortions. That includes potentially funneling taxpayer dollars to transport women and girls who live in states with stricter abortion laws across state lines into states with more lenient ones.

Biden’s Aug. 3, 2022, executive order “Securing Access to Reproductive and Other Healthcare Services” “directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to consider action to advance access to reproductive healthcare services, including through Medicaid for patients who travel out of state for reproductive healthcare services.”

While this order will create some drama and headlines, it will not change the underlying prohibition on using federal funds for abortions.

For over 45 years, the Hyde Amendment rider to the Department of Labor-Department of Health and Human Services Appropriations Act prohibiting federal funding of abortions has applied to all programs funded by the Department of Health and Human Services, including Medicaid. And if the federal government is prohibited from paying for the service, it cannot pay for transportation costs to get to the service either.

Despite this clear prohibition, under the executive order, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will likely be pressed to see how far the secretary of health and human services can use his authority under Section 1115 demonstrations to waive certain provisions of the law to achieve the order’s goals.

Using Medicaid to pay for traveling to medical care is not new. For example, a Medicaid enrollee that lives in a rural county in State A may already cross over state lines to a larger city in State B to receive medical care.

Medicaid also requires the federal government and states share in the cost of providing “nonemergency transportation” to medically necessary services covered under a state’s Medicaid plan. This can mean Medicaid may, under individual circumstances, pay for fuel, lodging, and meals for enrollees, including for family members’ overnight stays.

However, coverage for out-of-state travel is not automatic. The Medicaid agency typically requires documentation that the service cannot be rendered by a provider enrolled in the patient’s home state. Moreover, the out-of-state provider must become enrolled in the originating state’s Medicaid program.

The first avenue—and obstacle—the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will likely be pressed to consider with this new executive order is who would cover the costs.

As previously noted, under Medicaid, the federal government and the state share in the costs. Does the administration envision the federal government assuming the full cost of providing transportation services? The secretary’s waiver authority has never been found to permit the federal government to assume 100% of funding.

Hitting a dead end on full federal funding, the agency might consider ways to split the costs with the states. Under this scenario, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would have to consider which state would share in the cost—the state of origin or the state to which an individual traveled?

Does the administration envision states like California spending state taxpayer money to fund abortions and related services for out-of-state residents?

During Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services used its authority to waive certain requirements as thousands of Medicaid enrollees left Louisiana and spread to more than 30 states. In those instances, the agency held Louisiana responsible for the nonfederal share of the costs.

Keeping with this standard, would states like Mississippi be willing to spend state taxpayer money to assist in the transportation for out-of-state abortions? Highly unlikely.

The second avenue—and obstacle—the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services might be pressed to consider are ways to circumvent the limitations by detaching funding from the individual Medicaid enrollee and instead directing the payments to the service provider, such as a transportation service.

Here too, however, even in those states that have received waivers to use Medicaid funding for activities that are not attached to an individual Medicaid enrollee, such as providing funding directly to hospitals, the Hyde Amendment applies to those federal funds as well, prohibiting their use for abortion-related services.

Thus, despite the anticipation of the executive order, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services will likely report back that states wanting to expand access to abortion for women enrolled in Medicaid outside of their state can only do so by using their own state dollars with no federal match.

States like Oregon, California, and Washington already appear willing to divert state taxpayer dollars away from critical state priorities to fund abortions for out-of-state residents.

When the Biden administration refers to “reproductive health care,” it means abortion. Period. The public should not be confused that it means anything else. It hopes the executive order will miraculously present a new pathway to fund abortions. Yet, under any of the scenarios, such action would be incredible. For policymakers, this only further underscores the importance of protecting—and strengthening—the Hyde Amendment.

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The Cult of Hereditary Victimhood ignores history

Alan Bickley

Though I will avoid mentioning him by name, one of my friends has a fine aristocratic title, if nowadays a somewhat less splendid estate. Many years ago, having nothing better to discuss, we took opposite sides in the class war. “Oh, it’s all right for some,” I said in my bitterest man-of-the-people voice. “While your people were living it up in those castles, mine were scratching in the dirt. Do you feel no shame at twenty generations of shiny leather boots, all polished with the sweat of my ancestors?” His reply was that twenty generation of experience had shown beeswax to give a better shine to boots than the sweat of smelly peasants. He had a point. But, had I taken the trouble to bore him with the facts of my own ancestry, he might have had a better point.

In or about 1909, one of my great grandmothers was a parlour maid in a big house in Donegal. She seems to have been a pretty girl – or at least an available girl. The young man of the house took a fancy to her, and things took their usual Catherine Cookson course. As soon as her belly grew too big to be disguised, the young man’s father kicked her out. What happened next is one among many blank entries in my family tree. But the mists clear in the early 1930s, when her son took a job as a coal miner in Kent. He was something of a trouble-maker there, and was soon in search of new employment. He found this as a sailor on one of the Channel ferries, where his own fancy settled on the daughter of the manager of the rope-making factory in Chatham Dockyard. Their romance proceeded through a drink-sodden party somewhere between Ramsgate and Dieppe, where the captain presided over a grossly invalid marriage ceremony, followed, just under nine months later, by a hurried shuffle through the Chatham Registry Office. From this emerged my mother, followed in due course by me.

Now, when she explained all this to me, my grandmother took an aggrieved view of her late husband’s origins. Never trust the upper classes, she assured me – they were all wicked people. If she may have been right, I have no reasonable choice but to take a more balanced view of the matter. It was my great grandmother who was got into trouble, and, for all I can tell, was kicked out into the winter snow. All the same, it was my great grandfather who got her into trouble, and my great-great grandfather who kicked her into the snow. I have no more reason to feel bitter about how that girl was treated than I have to exult in the pleasure that young man of the house took in her, or to join in the self-righteous curses his father heaped on her. For all the lawyers and priests may disagree, blood is indifferent to what side of the blanket it flows.

I can go further. That young servant girl may have been the pure-bred descendant of blameless victims going back all the way to when they first tried standing on two legs. But I strongly doubt that. Given full knowledge, I am sure I could point to generation after generation of fruitful couplings with landlords and priests and army officers. My friend can show a complete family tree going back to the Conquest and beyond, and can plausibly deny that any of his female ancestors so much as looked at a serf. Outside his exalted order, the bloodlines are more complex.

For the past three centuries, first in England, then elsewhere, we have grown used to the idea that social mobility is on the whole upwards. Those of us who take the trouble to dig through the records can find ancestors in much humbler circumstances than our own. From this, the idea has emerged that social mobility has always been upwards, and therefore, that, unless our own immediate ancestors did well enough to rise into the higher classes, those of us in the humbler classes can look back with masochistic resentment on centuries and millennia of oppression by their ancestors of our ancestors. The conversation with which I began this piece was not serious on either side. Add in the element of race, however, and it is now the source of much social and economic bitterness – a source both false and dangerous to the improvement that mankind has enjoyed for the past three centuries.

Rather than upward, most social mobility in the past was downward. Obviously, if you see a mediaeval king who had five surviving sons, only one of them could ordinarily become the next king. The other four would join the senior nobility. But, in those countries where titles and property descended to the eldest son, these would often have more sons than could inherit their fathers’ status. These in turn would move down a rank. The surplus children of the nobility would fall into the gentry. Their surplus would join the professions. So it would continue downwards. Looking at the bottom of society, the workers on the land might be more fecund than their betters, but had the least salubrious lives, and the least means of getting through the periodic crises of pre-modern societies. Therefore, the less fortunate descendants of those at the top would eventually find themselves at the bottom. That is without the irregular unions I have mentioned that could short-circuit the downward genetic drift. Therefore, the poorest he that ever was in England has always, and often in a significant sense, been the progeny of the greatest he.

This is the case too for the Mediterranean world, where I also have ancestry. I will not deny that some of my ancestors must have been slaves or the more or less unfree lower classes of the Roman Empire. But slaves notoriously did not reproduce, which is one of the causes of those endless wars of conquest that filled the slave markets of the Empire. The free poor were the first and heaviest victims of the plagues and famines that swept the Empire from the second century onward. If I were able to trace that side of my blood back far enough, it would terminate more than anywhere else in the senatorial or equestrian classes, whose own families had always been at or near the top of their societies. I suppose that justifies, for anyone who wants a justification, my obsession with the Ancient World. When I read Livy and Herodotus, I am not reading the equivalent of some modern court circular, about the doings of the betters and therefore the oppressors of those who actually begot me: I am reading about my own most probable ancestors. And if I or you were to go back far enough, we would all find ourselves descended from those horrid raiders on horseback, usually with slanted eyes and scars carved on their faces – Indo-European raiders, Huns, Avars, Mongols – who were the continual parasites on every ancient settlement – men who, having murdered their competitors, filled the genepool with their own seed.

This much is plain for England and for the Eurasian landmass in general. But, making such changes as may be obvious – but that, in a country as unfree as England now is, it may not be convenient to spell out in detail – the same has been true in other parts of the world. Therefore, every age has had a class of oppressors and of oppressed. But these have never been separate bloodlines. The oppressed have always been the less fortunate cousins of the oppressors.

The cult of hereditary victimhood in which our society now wallows is a sham. All of us – my noble friend excepted, or excepted so far back as he can trace – can point to ancestors who suffered ill-treatment. But it is a selective tracing of family trees if we choose to focus on those and not on the other ancestors who themselves treated others badly. Let there be full knowledge of our family trees, and we are all the progeny of rapists, of slave-owners, and of mass-murderers. We owe each other nothing today – not financial compensation, nor so much as an apology. The most we owe is a resolution to ourselves and each other not to behave in the future as our ancestors behaved in the past.

I suffer from a condition called Dupuytren’s contracture. You can look this up for yourself – it is more a nuisance than a danger. It is most likely that I take this from the Vikings who invaded and made trouble in England between the eighth and the eleventh centuries. At least one of my ancestors on that side must have gone about murdering monks and burning churches and raping and impregnating nuns. That and the intervening thousand years are somewhat more than another blank entry in my family tree. But the generality of descent is probable enough. One of those wicked ancestors may even have assisted in a “blood eagle execution.” He would have taken a prisoner from one of his raids – a young man like himself – and hacked his ribs away from the spine, and pulled out the bones and skin and guts to form a semblance of wings. He would then have danced to the sound of dying screams and got drunk afterwards – assuming he was sober at the time. Do I look at the palm of my left hand and feel bad about that? If you want to hold your breath while waiting for an answer, I hope you have powerful lungs.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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