🍃eating leaf🌿

They're seeking to get rid of Title IX, which prevents sex-based discrimination in federally funded schools. Their logic goes that this would allow boy's sports to be funded more if they're not kept to the same level as girls' sports. If they're not hindered by equality, then boy's sports will have the chance to become bigger and help more young men. At the cost of women, of course.

This push of girls from sports is good to them as they believe it will "increase fertility" and "encourage feminine values". As the Heritage Foundation puts it:

"Moderate exercise supports fertility and mental well-being far more reliably than does the high-intensity, elite model of sports, which, as science shows, produces Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S) and elevated rates of menstrual disruption in many top-notch female athletes....... High-intensity exercise increases infertility; moderate exercise assists fertility more than any other approach to exercise assists it. Many women are drawn to activities that emphasize rhythm, coordination, community, and graceful exertion. A small but significant number thrive in highly competitive environments, and we are a better country for making those opportunities available (which might well have happened even without Title IX). Our goal, however, should be virtue and health grounded in reality and freedom, not the imposition of a male-oriented competitive ideal.".

As always, this isn't about helping boys, it's about controlling girls. But let's see what they say about boy's sports:

"Nor should we forget what happens when we ignore the effects of Title IX on men. Competition is much more central to male identity and sports are a main avenue for the safe but real expression of male competitive drive. Sports are also central to male friendships, which generally are more about doing things in common and less about saying things. Of course, men still compete and still form friendships, but both competitive drive and male friendship have suffered under the weaponized application of Title IX—and limiting the growth of male sports cannot be irrelevant to such inimical developments."

While girls are encouraged to do gentle ladylike activities, boys should not worry about "saying things" and have friendships based around only common activities. We don't live in a world where boys' sports are constantly sacrificed like they claim Title IX does. Looking at the top sports teams in the US, you can see it's not the case immediately.

There's a lot of things I skimmed over/neglected, so I implore you to please read this article by Transitics covering this. It's infinitely more tolerable than reading what the Heritage Foundation wrote, though I advise you read that too.

August 4, 2026 - The Football Association of Ireland (FAI) has revealed Irish fans won’t be permitted to attend the Republic of Ireland’s Nations League games against Israel in September and October.

The Israeli FA has said “a small allocation” of Israeli supporters will be accommodated at their ‘home’ leg game in Debrecen, Hungary on Sunday, September 27th.

A statement from the FAI on Tuesday read: “The Football Association of Ireland confirms that it will not facilitate in-stadium access to Ireland supporters for either of its Uefa Nations League fixtures with Israel."

Ireland’s ‘home’ tie will be played behind closed doors in Bačka Topola, Serbia on Sunday, October 4th, with security concerns cited as the reason for moving the game outside of Ireland. Uefa has yet to confirm whether Irish media will be allowed to cover the fixture in the stadium.

The "Stop The Game" Palestine solidarity group has called for the FAI to boycott the games against Israel. Last month, the FAI said forfeiting the matches against Israel would cost the association around €5.5 million. [article]

teddy bear manufactured 1906 in germany.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was: