Cat man and the rage disorder.

"A new study suggests that people prone to explosive bouts of rage might be under the influence of toxoplasmosis, an illness caused by a parasite found in cat feces and undercooked meat."

“If you’ve got someone with aggression problems, you might check them for toxoplasmosis,” said Coccaro, chair of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago. “People who blow up have a real problem. It’s not just a character problem or bad behavior. There’s something underneath that’s driving it.”

This story made me think: People always talk about "cat ladies": What about cat men? Know any? I'd suggest Marc Maron, for example, get himself tested for toxoplasmosis. And maybe everyone ought to steer clear of cats. They could ruin your life, and you'll think it's you. Something horribly wrong with your character, deep down inside... so it seems... but no: It's the cat!

Here's an article in the UK Telegraph by the delightfully named Chas Newkey-Burden: "Can a man who owns a cat ever be trusted?/You can generally assume that any man with a pet cat is sneaky and afraid of commitment":

There are, I suppose, some excuses for owning a cat. The stereotypical owner is a spinster, and given their plight, one can forgive them the error of allowing the clawing fleabags through their front door. But beyond that, cat-ownership seems a bizarre lifestyle choice. Certainly among males, there is no excuse for it once adolescence has passed.

Cats are sinister, self-centred little madams with an unjustified, Herculean superiority complex. They are crashing bores, the animal world equivalent of the mute dinner-party guest from hell.

The photo illustration is of President Obama trying to work his charisma on David Cameron's cat. The caption: "David Cameron's cat Larry ignores the leader of the free world."

For balance: "10 Reasons To Date A Man Who Owns A Cat, Because It Actually Makes Him 10 Times More Dateable" by Christine Schoenwald in Bustle:

This theory that women needed to stay the hell away from men who owned cats was just stupid, and offensive to cat men.... Date a cat man and you won’t be sorry. Cat owners, like their cats are never boring, and are an excellent addition to your life.

The 10 reasons include that cat men are not squeamish. They clean litter boxes so they'll put up with your shit. I'm paraphrasing. Ms. Schoenwald said "They’re not going to have a problem taking care of you when you’ve had too much to drink or have the flu." Oh, really? I thought the most important thing about a cat as a pet is that you don't have to take care of them. Yes, you have to clean the litter box when you see fit — at your level of housecleaning — but you can stay out all night and all the next day and the cat doesn't even consider feeling bad about it. But — to be fair to Ms. Schoenwald — she's just cranking out an article for cat ladies to purr over. There's no real cat man in the picture.

And if there were: Watch out for the explosive rage.

"Calling the Islamic State an 'evil terrorist death cult,' Mr. Cameron defended the decision to target Mr. Emwazi..."

"'... who was born in Kuwait and is a naturalized British citizen, as 'an act of self-defense' and 'the right thing to do.' We have been working, with the United States, literally around the clock to track him down... This was a combined effort, and the contribution of both our countries was essential. Emwazi is a barbaric murderer.... He was ISIL’s lead executioner, and let us never forget that he killed many, many Muslims, too."

Mr. Cameron = British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Mr. Emwazi = Mohammed Emwazi, AKA Jihadi John.

A Reaper drone armed with Hellfire missiles attacked a car and, as an anonymous U.S. military official put it: "We think we got him."

AND: "Kurdish and Yazidi fighters retook Sinjar on Friday morning, on the second day of a major offensive to reclaim this city in northern Iraq, which has been under the brutal domination of the Islamic State for more than 15 months.... Members of the Yazidi religious minority, which faced rape, enslavement and death in large numbers after the Islamic State overran Sinjar in August 2014, took part in the fight."

"More than three million people have taken part in unity marches across France after 17 people died during three days of deadly attacks in Paris."

"Up to 1.6m are estimated to have taken to the streets of the French capital. More than 40 world leaders joined the start of the Paris march, linking arms in an act of solidarity."

World leaders, including British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, EU President Donald Tusk, and Jordan's King Abdullah II joined the beginning of the Paris march.

"Paris is the capital of the world today," French leader Francois Hollande said.

No leaders from the United States? That's weird.

ADDED: Drudge, linking to the Daily News (which points out that Eric Holder was in Paris):



AND: I suspect that Holder (and other American politicians) don't want to seem to be supporting what might be perceived as hate speech.

Why won't the Queen say: Please, Scotland, stay with us. We love you, Scotland. And by "we," I mean "I."?

 She chooses to remain mum.

AND: Mother holds her tongue, but dad speaks, and says if you walk out that door, you are never coming back.

"My Tumblr was once a collection of evidence, convincing the world that something very strange actually existed, but now everyone believes..."

"... and everyone has seen, and Thorning-Schmidt has the evidence on her phone. So it was time to do the only sensible thing: It was time to declare victory, to revel in drawing a line from the bottom to the top."

The creator of the blog Selfies at Funerals declares victory and ends the project after Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt gets British Prime Minister David Cameron and U.S. President Barack Obama to pose alongside her in the selfie she made at the Nelson Mandela memorial service.

AND: There's a strange amount of talk about Michelle Obama's look of seeming disapproval (caught not in the selfie but in the photograph of the selfie getting taken). At Salon, Roxane Gay collects and reacts to the reactions to the First Lady's reaction.

More than anything, the response to these latest images of Michelle Obama speaks volumes about the expectations placed on black women in the public eye and how a black women’s default emotional state is perceived as angry. The black woman is ever at the ready to aggressively defend her territory. She is making her disapproval known. She never gets to simply be...

But none of the responses Gay quotes refer to race or talk about Michelle Obama as anything other than one individual reacting to one particular thing on one occasion. But Gay seems so sure that it's those other people who are failing to perceive Michelle Obama as an individual: "On and on the punditry goes, ascribing very specific, historically racialized narratives to what Michelle Obama is thinking and feeling in one candid moment."

Now, it's not just the selfie. At The Daily News, there's a whole string of photos showing Michelle looking grouchy while Obama seems to be enjoying his interactions with the pretty Danish Prime Minister. But still, there is no reference to race. The closest reference to race is at the rather scurrilous website Gawker:

[T]here is a new sexy spy prime minister in town... and she is maybe kind of pretty if you are into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty.” You know who does not seem to be that into “tall” and “blonde” and “pretty”? Michelle Obama, that is who! That is some side-eye not seen since the one time John Boehner grabbed her ass at lunch and slurred something about shayna tushies before falling face-first into his organic grassfed triple martini lobster bisque.

I had to go to the "that one time" link to see what that John Boehner incident was and was highly amused to see that Michelle Obama reacted to John Boehner with exactly the look look I described in the previous post as the best response to someone who makes a sexist remark in a social situation.

On the occasion of the accusations of plagiarism against Rand Paul...

Let's go to the blog archives. It's nice to have a "plagiarism" tag that lets me pull out so many old conversations about plagiarism that were prompted by various things over the years. (The links are on the numbers.)

1. "The internet is changing the way students think about plagiarism... or — I would add — they way they lie about it."

2. "Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength; if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information."

3. "The real fault is not making it a point always to write sharp, distinctive prose. Prose like the stuff [Maureen] Dowd lifted called out for rewriting. She might not have known to think I can't use that because I didn't write it. But she should at least have thought I can't use that because it's dull."

4. "'[T]here is a big difference between being a plagiarist — at bottom, lazy or sloppy — and being a fabulist.' It's tougher to make things up than to copy, and yet it's Lehrer who's screwed himself more deeply."

5. "'To coin a phrase, in the spirit of the vice president-elect, you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need,' Alito said, an imperfect rendering of a Rolling Stones lyric. Then, he added, 'Did someone say that before?'"

6."My dear, it's called an allusion. The error isn't stealing, it's assuming people get it."

7. "Jerry Seinfeld's late-night rant about his wife's cookbook rival was no joke to the author's family."

8. "When you are discovered, I want you to claim — really sincerely — that you actually mistakenly believed that you remembered the incident as if it had happened to you. You can be all: 'I am chagrined and astonished that my mind could play such a trick on me.'"

9. "How is it possible for someone in [Fareed Zakaria's] position to make a mistake of that kind? The risk far outweighs any convenience in copying material like this. It can't be deliberate."

10. "Once you’ve been busted for making stuff up, you need to be sure that what you publish is reasonably accurate... though I suppose that passing on other people’s fabrications is arguably a modest improvement over creating his own."

11. "Should Coldplay be able to force Hoepfner to take down his accusatory video and apologize, or do we think it's a nice resolution of the controversy for Coldplay to escape unsued and for Hoepfner to have his viral video to leverage his band to whatever degree of fame it can get out of this amusing little artistic squabble?"

12. "'I think that’s the way Bob Dylan has always written songs.... It’s part of the folk process, even if you look from his first album until now.' Well, theft itself is a traditional 'process,' but it would still piss me off if someone robbed me, either with a six gun or a fountain pen. At least Dylan called an album 'Love and Theft,' and he's repeatedly presented himself as a thief in various lyrics. To have Bob Dylan steal some of your phrases and the Dylan fanatics ferret out the connection he declined to tell us about is to get publicity you never would have gotten otherwise."

13. "When you accuse a 6-year-old of plagiarism in an art contest, you'd better be ready to make a decision to disqualify her and stick to it. You've besmirched her, and you can't unbesmirch her. Oh, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service! You idiots!"

14. Rush Limbaugh appropriates my question, without attribution.

15. "And if our good opinion of him is based mainly on his speeches, then we have reason to examine why we're supporting him. But politics is full of stock phrases, contagious memes, and brainstormed messages."

16. "Obama defends his use of a couple lines given him by his associate Duval Patrick. 'This is where we start getting into the silly season in politics.'"

17. Ch-ch-ch-changes:

"It’s not like you can look up David Cameron in the phone book and then ring to say, ‘You’ve left your daughter behind.'"

“It’s frightening the Prime Minister of Britain can forget something so important as his own daughter.”

UK Prime Minister David Cameron: "This is not about poverty, it's about culture."

"A culture that glorifies violence, shows disrespect to authority, and says everything about rights but nothing about responsibilities."

ADDED: The link goes to a WSJ article that requires a subscription to get far into. Here's a transcript of Cameron's entire statement.

"Rebekah Brooks has been arrested..."

"... by police investigating allegations of phone hacking by the News of the World and allegations that police officers were bribed to leak sensitive information."

... Brooks, 43, resigned on Friday as News International's chief executive. She is a former News of the World editor and was close to Rupert Murdoch and the prime minister, David Cameron.

Being Prime Minister was Tony's idea first!

A hilarious use of YouTube (found via Drudge). I'm jumping over the first minute or so to make it funnier, but feel free to drag the slider back to the beginning if you're the leisurely sort: