Think Scar and the hyenas. Or think Redmask and the K’Chain Che’Malle, if you’re that way inclined.

While their glorious leader is being assailed, they will fight and die in his name, definitely. How dare the weak attack the strong?

But once his plot-armour falls off and the punches actually land? The plot-armour is what they worship in the first place. That’s their whole MO, their entire paradigm. They need a bigger, more-invulnerable bully above them to give them cover, and an underclass of vulnerable-therefore-contemptible victims beneath them to make them feel both powerful and vindicated every time they oppress them.

If you upset that whole structure, and show their leader to be vulnerable… where does that leave them? How do they regain their honour?

The best part is how his followers will turn on him once he starts to fail.

The key to their worship is untouchability. In their eyes, getting away with shit is the holy fire, the pure essence of status. Poor losers get in trouble, rich winners are teflon, and deserve to be, as befits their power.

All the gotcha moments and demonstrations of sociopathy and hypocrisy the media clung onto only boosted his popularity, because what his followers saw was an invulnerable superman that trouble just wouldn’t stick to. Look, he can strangle underage russian prostitutes and doesn’t even get arrested, see how he rises above the common man!

But oh, once the glow fades. Once trouble actually finds him, and they’re left with a big doddering pile of failure in diapers - failure is the one crime they will not forgive. Embarrassment, humiliation, betrayal, disgust, anger, hate. It will be absolutely glorious to watch.

Martyrdom won’t work. He’s going to try for it, but “see how they attack me!” doesn’t work with a broken nose.

Universities aren’t there to teach marketable skills, and they never have been.

In fact they get quite snotty about the distinction; they’re not some trade school, ugh.

They go and market themselves as employment-enablers, because that drives enrolments which drives funding, but a large percentage of adademics see undergrads as a vexing and demeaning distraction from their real work of writing grant proposals. Which to be fair is what their whole career (and the existence of their employer) depends and is judged on, so…

The other thing is that there’s two skillsets involved here: learning to use a specific set of tools and techniques to produce a desired outcome (the trade part), and learning to wrestle large, unwieldly and interconnected tasks in general, while picking up the required specific knowledge along the way (the adademic part).

Teaching just the trade part gets you people who are competent in narrowly-defined roles for now, but it doesn’t necessarily get you adaptable, resilient, bigger-picture people with common sense and a strategic outlook. Teaching just the academic part gets you people who aren’t necessarily productive right now, but have a lot of potential wherever you put them.

Employers would like to hire people who are both. They’re also lazy and cheap, and will use anything they can get their hands on as a resume-filter because they aren’t willing to put time and money into usefully evaluating someone’s potential usefulness as an employee. If they can farm that off to the universities to do (and the students to pay for), they’re happy to let a degree stand in as a not-chaff marker they can require of all their candidates. It’s like bad video game designers using bullet sponges to ‘increase the difficulty’.

Teaching CS is important and useful, but the benefits only really pay off longterm - apart from the bullet-sponge factor.

Teaching programming is important and useful, but the benefits can be short-term and dead-end.

If you only pick one… depends on whether you can afford to eat while those nebulous long-term benefits slowly kick in.

Universities should communicate these things better, and employers should be incentivised to stop using junk degree-requirements to offset their laziness and incompetence. Make it so for every position they require a degree for, they’re taxed the tuition fees for that degree every year.

• How has the Lorenz curve shifted over the past 30 years?

• What percentage of people’s income is going on housing?

• What percentage of people :

• are living with food insecurity, or are reliant on food banks and other charities?

• are living with their parents as adults?

• need second jobs in order to afford basic necessities?

• are in casual, gig or otherwise insecure employment?

• cannot afford adequate healthcare?

• will never own their own home?

All broken down by percentile, please. And how have those numbers shifted over the last 30 years?

You used it yourself.

I mean I was thinking more https://youtu.be/SYkbqzWVHZI

You know we can see this, right?

They don’t care, mission accomplished. People have already starved, and mud sticks enough that they can starve some more.

He says, on the internet.

This is pretty much the textbook definition of moral panic.

TL;DR: whisper ‘queue’

Whistling isn’t blowing air out a hole in your lips; it comes out there, but it’s not what you do.

Instead, you blow downwards across the hole, like blowing acrosss the neck of a coke bottle, albeit from the inside.

There’s two ways to explain this - different people do better with each.

The first way is with speech sounds

First, a raspy cat-hiss consonant somewhere between kkhhhkhkhkhkh and hhshshshshh with the back of your tongue, to aim a stream of air at your lower incisors.

Second, the tip of your tongue not all the way forwards as you would for yyyyyyy, nor all the way back as for awwwww, just neutral as for uuhhhhh. This sets the pitch: forwards for high notes (making the ‘bottle’ smaller), and back for low ones (making it bigger).

Third and least important, the lips. Don’t purse them tight for wwwww like you’re going to kiss your grandmother; go with a super-casual oooo, like you’re muttering ‘cool’ sarcastically under your breath.

Put them all together without using your vocal cords, and whisper hhkkhhkhkhkheeeeeeuuuuuooooo, or something like a raspy guttural version of ‘queue’.

You’ll want to mess with that consonant to get the airstream angle right; just keep practising and you should get a lick of tone in there. It’ll be breathy and you won’t be able to hit high notes - but we fix that in part two.

The second way starts off with shushing, like you’re soothing a newborn, or making steam-train noises.

Just shh-shh-shh up and down a scale.

No vocal cords, just shaping your mouth to filter the white noise into something lighter as you go up, heavier as you go down.

Do the shh-shh equivalent of do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do and back down again.

Keep doing that as you slowly bring your lips together.

As you do, you’ll find the filtering gets more effective, and your notes get notier.

Don’t purse your lips tight, just bring them together enough to blow crumbs off your phone screen (or something idk)

Practice a bit, and you will be able to make a breathy tone that’s more note than hiss. It won’t be great, but we fix that next.

Once you can reliably get a breathy tone straight off, then you can clean it up. Now you purse your lips tighter like you’re kissing your grandmother or saying wwwww, and the breathiness will go away, and you’ll be able to reach high notes without it falling apart.

It’s harder to find the tone in the first place this way, which is why you started out on easy mode - but once you can find it, it’s easy to fix up.

Beyond that, it’s just a matter of practice.

Remember that if you’re straining with any of it, you’re doing it wrong. Keep it super relaxed, and until you get to the cleaning-up part, quiet. There’s no strain, no pressure.

I’ve saved a few dozen kids from genital mutilation, that I know of.

That’s probably my proudest achievement to date.

I’ve also taught a good 50 people to whistle that never could before, and while that’s pretty low impact, it still makes me happy.

Female as an adjective is perfectly fine.

A female patient, a female politician, a female customer, etc. That’s the best way to refer to those.

What’s bad is using ‘female’ as a noun: "A female. "

In general, you just don’t use adjectives-as-nouns to refer to people. You don’t call someone “a gay”, “a black”, or “a Chinese”. That is offensive, and “a female” has the same kind of feel.

(there are exceptions to the above: you can call someone ‘an American’ or 'A German", but not “A French”. I don’t understand why - if you can’t feel your way, best just avoid it)

Now, you could get around it by calling someone “a female person” - except that we already have a word for “female person”, and that’s “woman”. And to go out of your way to avoid saying “woman” makes you sound like some kind of incel weirdo, and you don’t want that.

Looks like the US is going to get some tough love.

Turns out you can’t just fund, supply and cast UN vetoes in support of the genocide of an entire people and still get unconditional support at the ballot box, whoda thunkit.

And yes, the consequences are going to be hideous.

I guess you should have thought of that, what with everyone telling you over and over and over.

Cabin in the Woods moment, and you brought it on yourselves.